over others, and partly upon a knowledge of the ways and tempers of men. Without such knowledge in considerable measure, the master of workmen, the teacher, the legislator, and many other professions besides, can hardly be said to be skilled in their craft. It requires a kind of observation rendered difficult by the very causes that make man interesting to man; for those passionate feelings that arrest our gaze upon our fellows, sway the mind from cool judgments. It is not so easy to read accurately a man or woman, as it is to read a mineral. A person engaged in any work should naturally be alive. to the end, for this it is that guides his hand. The builder sees that his wall is rising plumb and square. But in acting upon men in the various capacities of teaching, ruling, persuading, pleasing, serving, we are not so sensitive to the exact result of our attempts as in dealing with the material world, nor so ready to adapt our movements to suit the end. in view. ACQUISITIONS IN THE FINE ARTS. 74. In the Fine Arts, there are produced combinations, aggregates, groupings, rhapsodic successions, such as to yield the species of effect termed beautiful, sublime, picturesque, harmonious, &c.; and the perception of those effects is Taste. The artist in any department has to attain the power of producing these combinations. This power is, in the first instance, a result of creative spontaneity, guided by the sense of the effect produced; it is a mode of the natural forthputting of the energies of the voice, or the hand, as in the commencement of every kind of active faculty. The first musician gave scope to his vocal powers at random, and gradually corrected the action according to his ear. When this natural outburst took some definite and agreeable shape, it became a song, a melody, caught up by imitation and handed down to future ages. A large part of every artist's power necessarily comes by CONDITIONS OF ARTISTIC ACQUIREMENT. 447 acquisition, or by the operation of the force of Contiguity. He stores up the combinations produced by previous artists, and fixes in his mind those that he produces in himself, and gradually rises to his highest efforts of execution. In this acquisitive process, the conditions appear to be the following, of which, however, the enunciation is not altogether new to the reader. (1.) A keen sensibility and adhesiveness for the element or the material that the artist works in. The musician's ear must be sensitive to sounds and successions of sound, by which circumstance he is able to acquire a large stock of melodies. The sculptor must have a keen sense of contour and form; the painter, of form and colour; the actor, of dramatic movements; the poet, of language and the usual subjects of poetry. (2.) In addition to this sensitiveness to the material of the art, we must note the special sensibility to the proper effects of the art; the sense of melody and harmony in music, of beautiful curves and proportions in sculpture and architecture, of these last with coloured effects in painting, and so forth. I take for granted that beauty is not arbitrary, that there are effects that please mankind generally. For these the artist has a marked preference, and, by virtue of such preference, he acquires a stronger hold of what causes them, than of what does not. The poet needs a large disinterested adhesiveness for the concretes of nature and the incidents of humanity, but with this alone he would be indistinguishable from a born naturalist: the disinterested adhesiveness must be qualified by a special fascination for things that have a poet's interest, so as to alter the proportions of his impressibility, and give the preponderance to one special class of appearances. Not all trees, and all mountains, and all vegetation, and all displays of human feeling, should impress alike either a painter or a poet. (3.) An artist is to a greater or less extent a mechanical workman, and improves in his art according as he attains to the requisite mechanical operative skill. The singer, the 1 orator, the actor, must cultivate the voice. The painter and the sculptor are persons that would soon learn any handicraft operation of the artisan's workshop. The poet, however, like the abstract thinker, may dispense with this muscular element of character. HISTORY AND NARRATIVE. 75. The successions of events and transactions in human life, remembered and related, make History. A considerable portion of each one's stock of recollections is made up of such materials. The transactions and events wherein we have been ourselves present, impress themselves on the mind as pictures of living men and women, their various manifestations, and the appearances and situations of things about them. It is thus that we retain the impression of a public assembly, a military spectacle, a pageant, a play, or any of the daily ongoings of private society or of ordinary business. The pictorial mind is fully alive and susceptible to such things, and is tested by retaining them. The retentiveness is heightened by the general interest in human beings, and by the specific r personal interest that belongs to the transactions. The soldierly feeling fixes the mind upon battles, reviews, and military movements; the trader is arrested by markets and commercial enterprise; the politician wakens up to diplomatic congresses and debates; the sporting mind is alive on the race-course; the family interest excites the attention upon the incidents of the domestic circle. A single transaction deliberately witnessed is often able to stamp itself in the memory for life. There seems to be, in the case of human events, an exception to the law of Repetition, or to the usual necessity for passing a thing before. the mind many times in order to make it coherent. But we are able to account for the seeming anomaly. For, in the first place, such transactions are usually slow; that is, they keep the attention awake for a length of time before they are completed; a single horse race, if we include the MEMORY OF HISTORICAL TRANSACTIONS. 449 preparations, will engage the mind for an hour together; while some transactions occupy days and months, being the subject of frequent attention all through. But, what is more, many past events are frequently brought to mind; and every such occasion is a mental repetition. After being present at an exciting spectacle, our thoughts keep themselves engaged upon its details; and, in the retrospect, we expand our attention upon things that were but hurriedly glanced at, as they passed before the actual view. Such rehearsal in the nind after the reality has passed, is a great means of impressing the events of our personal experience. The degree of emotional interest attaching to them displays its efficacy in bringing about their more or less frequent recall. What is indifferent passes away, and is never dwelt upon afterwards; what has excited us at the time excites us in the remembrance, and secures a large space in our ideal meditations. Provision is thus made for consolidating in the memory a train of circumstances that do not admit of being repeated in the actuality. We are enabled to recall, in after years, all the leading transactions that are now going on around us; we can describe the incidents connected with our family, our village, our city, our school, our places of business, recreation, or worship; we can live over again in minute detail, the scenes that had an intense pleasurable or painful interest at the time. 76. The transactions that we know by hearsay, or the narrative of others, impress themselves somewhat differently. We have no longer the actual scenes presented to our vision. They are represented by words, and the recollection is modified by the circumstances affecting verbal adhesion. If we make the extreme supposition, that the hearer of a narrative has his mind carried at once to the scenes and events themselves, and is able to realize them with an almost living force, the case is not different from the foregoing; the words are made use of to hoist the scenes, and then drop away. But there are few people that have this vivid power of conceiving the realities of narrated transactions. In general, the verbal succession of the narrative is itself a medium of holding together the events contained in it, and the recollection is a mixture of adhesions, pictorial and verbal. Written history may, therefore, be retained by a good verbal memory. Where the thread of pictured events has snapped, the thread of verbal succession in the printed page may suffice; the power of recollection on the whole is irregularly divided between the two. OUR PAST LIFE. 77. The train of our Past Existence, as a whole, is made coherent in the mind through contiguity, and can be recalled with more or less minuteness according to the strength of the adhesion. In any subject that is complicated with details, only a few prominent features usually cohere; as, for example, the striking parts of a landscape, or incidents of a history; and such is the case with the great complex currents of each one's individual existence. This current is made up of the elements contained in the foregoing heads of this chapter. It embraces all our actions, all our sensations, emotions, volitions, in the order of their occurrence. It is the track described by each individual through the world during his sojourn therein; it comprises all that he has done and all that he has been impressed with. Under the previous head, I have spoken of the stream of history, or the current of events passing before the eyes of a spectator supposed to be passive. But spectatorship of what is going on about us, does not express the whole current of our remembered existence; there is wanting the series of our own doings and transactions. When what we have done is added to what we have seen and felt, the history of self is complete. The distinguishing feature of the present case, therefore, is the remembrance of our own actions according as they happened. What is the nature of the bond that cements things done by us, and not simply witnessed? 78. In the first place, many of our movements consist in |