le; and some persons go so far as to
think that the teacher should modify her treatment of the child
according to the strength or feebleness of its faculty as thus made
known.

Now I can only repeat here what I said to you when treating of
attention: man is too complex a being for light to be thrown on his real
efficiency by measuring any one mental faculty taken apart from its
consensus in the working whole. Such an exercise as this, dealing with
incoherent and insipid objects, with no logical connection with each
other, or practical significance outside of the 'test,' is an exercise
the like of which in real life we are hardly ever called upon to
perform. In real life, our memory is always used in the service of some
interest: we remember things which we care for or which are associated
with things we care for; and the child who stands at the bottom of the
scale thus experimentally established might, by dint of the strength of
his passion for a subject, and in consequence of the logical association
into which he weaves the actual materials of his experience, be a very
effective memorizer indeed, and do his school-tasks on the whole much
better than an immediate parrot who might stand at the top of the
'scientifically accurate' list.

This preponderance of interest, of passion, in determining the results
of a human being's working life, obtains throughout. No elementary
measurement, capable of being performed in a laboratory, can throw any
light on the actual efficiency of the subject; for the vital thing about
him, his emotional and moral energy and doggedness, can be measured by
no single experiment, and becomes known only by the total results in the
long run. A blind man like Huber, with his passion for bees and ants,
can observe them through other people's eyes better than these can
through their own. A man born with neither arms nor legs, like the late
Kavanagh, M.P.--and what an icy heart his mother must have had about him
in his babyhood, and how 'negative' would the laboratory-measurements of
his motor-functions have been!--can be an adventurous traveller, an
equestrian and sportsman, and lead an athletic outdoor life. Mr. Romanes
studied the elementary rate of apperception in a large number of persons
by making them read a paragraph as fast as they could take it in, and
then immediately write down all they could reproduce of its contents. He
found astonishing differences in the rapidity, some taking four time