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and the concrete or real. As regards the modes of human interest or fascination, a greater number of classes could be made out: pure mathematics, as in Algebra and Geometry, would have a different set of votaries from mathematics applied in Mechanics, Astronomy, Optics, &c.; and the natural history group would be both separated from experimental Physics and Chemistry, and broken up into its component members, Mineralogy, Geology, Botany, and Zoology.

72. The sciences of Logic, Grammar, Mind, Political Economy, &c., are noted for being pre-eminently verbal sciences; the artificial element used for expressing their generalities is Language, or general terms. These verbal forms are of the nature of symbolic forms in this, that they are thoroughly uninteresting in themselves, that they express the general, and not the particular or concrete, and must be held. intensely by the mind under the stimulus of the end they serve. The subject matter of each is different, and unequally held by different minds, but on the whole their retention is remarkably of a piece with the other abstract sciences.

BUSINESS, OR PRACTICAL LIFE.

73. In the higher departments of industry, or business— handicraft labour being the inferior department, the forces of the intelligence have a wide scope, the widest next to pure science. In the formalities and machinery of business,book-keeping, calculation, money reckoning, banking, contracts, deeds, acts of parliament, &c.-we have a number of dry artificial elements, not unlike the machinery of the abstract sciences, but touching more closely and frequently upon things of real interest, and therefore a less severe stretch of intellect than the other. In fact, the superior branches of industry, in trade, manufactures, government, &c.—seem well adapted for the great majority of the cleverest minds. The interest arising from the human wants and the love of gain is powerful by nature, and independently of deep reflection or any refining process, and is well calculated to stimulate the

mass of mankind, of whom very few can ever be strongly possessed with the interest belonging to science, that is, the desire of getting at truth.

74. The management of human beings, which is a large department of practical life, proceeds upon certain active qualities that give a natural influence and ascendency over others, and upon a knowledge of the ways and tempers of men. This last accomplishment I have already touched upon (see p. 424). 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 effect he is producing, for this it is that guides his hand. The builder sees that his wall is rising plumb and square. But it happens somehow or other, in acting upon men in the various capacities of teaching, ruling, persuading, pleasing, serving, we are not so sensitive to the exact operation of our attempts as in dealing with the material world, nor so easily made to modify the hand so as to suit the end in view.

ACQUISITIONS IN FINE ART.

75. In the Fine Arts there are formed combinations, aggregates, groupings, rhapsodic successions, such as to produce the species of effect termed beautiful, sublime, picturesque, harmonious, &c.; and the perception of those effects. is what we call 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 forth-putting of the energies of the voice, or the hand, as in the commence

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ment 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 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 points of character that come to his aid appear to be the following, of which, however, the enunciation is not 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, and that in the manner best adapted for fixing and retaining them: 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 in general, we must add 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 and of coloured effects in painting, and so forth. I take for granted that beauty is not arbitrary,— that there are effects that please the generality of mankind when once produced. For these the Artist has a strong preference, and by virtue of this preference he acquires a stronger hold of what exemplifies them than of what does not. It is not every mass of colouring that impresses itself on the painter's recollection. He ought to remember coloured masses in general better than other people, but being specially fascinated by a certain class which he calls harmonious, he is most ready to recal these at after times. So a 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: their character is specially made for their preferences.

(3) An artist in any art is to a great extent a mechanical workman, and progresses in his art according as mechanical operative skill fixes itself in his framework. The singer, the orator, the actor, owe their improvement to the retentiveness of the voice under vocal practice. The painter and sculptor must be persons that would soon learn any handicraft operation of the artisan's workshop. This muscular adhesiveness belongs to the structure of the muscular system with its nerve centres, and is a very material fact of character; it is the higher quality of the muscular development, mere brute force being the lower. It may be often observed, I think, that both qualities go together, the plasticity and the physical force,— and with them, as a matter of course, an enjoyment and preference for muscular activity. An abstract thinker may dispense with this muscular element of character, except as a counterpoise to the tendency to keep up a whirl and isolation. of the circles of the brain; but to the artist, in common with the artisan, the high physical development of the active organs I should consider an almost indispensable endowment. Its importance fades away only in such a case as the Poet, in whom the artist approaches to the man of pure thought and mere ideal activity.

HISTORY AND NARRATIVE,

76. 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 this kind of matter.

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The transactions and events wherein we have been our selves present impress themselves on our 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 events of private society or ordinary business. The pictorial mind is fully alive and susceptible to such things, and proves itself by retaining them. The retentiveness is influenced by the natural adhesiveness to surrounding appearances as they succeed one another, by the general interest in human beings, and by the specific or personal interest that belongs to the individual transactions. Of this last influence on the attention, it is easy to fall upon any amount of illustration. The soldierly feeling fixes the mind upon battles, reviews, and military movements; the trader is arrested by markets and trading enterprise; the politician by 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 impress itself minutely on 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 it is not difficult to account for this 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 race, if we include the preparations, will engage the mind for an hour together; while many transactions occupy days and months, being the subject of frequent attention all through. But what is more; an event past is repeatedly brought up in the recollection, and every such occasion is a mental repetition, and ends in fixing the different parts in the mind. After being present at an exciting spectacle, our thoughts keep themselves engaged upon its details, and in this retrospect we expand our attention upon things that were but hurriedly glanced at as