Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/575

horse's back and let him find his way home. You have been guiding the horse into one path and into another, and following this and that path, and you find that it does not lead you in the right direction; just let the horse go by himself, and he will find his way better than you can. In the same manner, I believe that our minds, under the circumstances I have mentioned, really do the work better than our wills can direct. The will gives the impulse in the first instance, just as when you start on your walk; and not only this, but the will keeps before the mind all the thoughts which it can immediately lay hold of, or which association suggests, that bear upon the subject. But then these thoughts do not conduct immediately to an issue, they require to work themselves out; and I believe that they work themselves out very often a great deal better by being left to themselves. But then we must recollect that such results as these are only produced in the mind which has been trained and disciplined; and that training and discipline are the result of the control of the Will over the mental processes, just as in the early part of the lecture I spoke to you of the act of speech as made possible by the control which the will has over the muscles of breathing. We cannot stop these movements—we must breathe—but we can regulate them, and modify them, and intensify them, or we can check them for a moment, in accordance with the necessities of speech. Well, so it is, I think, with regard to the action of our will upon our mental processes. I believe that this control, this discipline of the will, should be learned very early; and I will give to the mothers among you, especially, one hint in regard to a most valuable mode of training it even in early childhood. I learned this, I may say, from a nurse whom I was fortunate enough to have, and whose training of my own sons in early childhood I regard as one of the most valuable parts of their education. She was a sensible country girl, who could not have told her reasons, but whose instincts guided her in the right direction. I studied her mode of dealing: with the children, and learned from that the principle. Now, the principle is this: A child falls down and hurts itself. (I take the most common of nursery incidents. You know that Sir Robert Peel used to say that there were three ways of looking at this question; and there are three modes of dealing with this commonest of nursery incidents.) One nurse will scold the child for crying. The child feels the injustice of this; it feels the hurt, and it feels the injustice of being scolded. I believe that is the most pernicious of all the modes of dealing with it. Another coddles the child, takes it up and rubs its head, and says, "O naughty chair, for hurting my dear child!" I remember learning that one of the royal children fell against a table in the queen's presence, and the nurse said, "O naughty table," when the queen very sensibly said: "I will not have that expression used; it was not the table that was naughty; it was the child's fault that he fell against the table." I believe that this method is extremely injurious; the result of it being