Thoughts on Man

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ESSAY II.
OF THE DISTRIBUTION OF TALENTS.

{Greek - omitted} Thucydides, Lib.I, cap. 84.

SECTION I.

PRESUMED DEARTH OF INTELLECTUAL POWER.--SCHOOLS FOR THE EDUCATION
OF YOUTH CONSIDERED.--THE BOY AND THE MAN COMPARED.

One of the earliest judgments that is usually made by those whose
attention is turned to the characters of men in the social state,
is of the great inequality with which the gifts of the
understanding are distributed among us.

Go into a miscellaneous society; sit down at table with ten or
twelve men; repair to a club where as many are assembled in an
evening to relax from the toils of the day--it is almost
proverbial, that one or two of these persons will perhaps be
brilliant, and the rest "weary, stale, flat and unprofitable."

Go into a numerous school--the case will be still more striking.
I have been present where two men of superior endowments
endeavoured to enter into a calculation on the subject; and they
agreed that there was not above one boy in a hundred, who would
be found to possess a penetrating understanding, and to be able
to strike into a path of intellect that was truly his own. How
common is it to hear the master of such a school say, "Aye, I am
proud of that lad; I have been a schoolmaster these thirty years,
and have never had such another!"

The society above referred to, the dinner-party, or the club, was
to a considerable degree select, brought together by a certain
supposed congeniality between the individuals thus assembled.
Were they taken indiscriminately, as boys are when consigned to
the care of a schoolmaster, the proportion of the brilliant would
not be a whit greater than in the latter case.

A main criterion of the superiority of the schoolboy will be
found in his mode of answering a casual question proposed by the
master. The majority will be wholly at fault, will shew that
they do not understand the question, and will return an answer
altogether from the purpose. One in a hundred perhaps, perhaps
in a still less proportion, will reply in a laudable manner, and
convey his ideas in perspicuous and spirited language.

It does not certainly go altogether so ill, with men grown up to
years of maturity. They do not for the most part answer a plain
question in a manner to make you wonder at their fatuity.

A main cause of the disadvantageous appearance exhibited by the
ordinary schoolboy, lies in what we denominate sheepishness. He
is at a loss, and in the first place stares at you, instead of
giving an answer. He does not make by many degrees so poor a
figure among his equals, as when he is addressed by his seniors.

One of the reasons of the latter phenomenon consists in the
torpedo effect of what we may call, under the circumstances, the
difference of ranks. The schoolmaster is a despot to his
scholar; for every man is a despot, who delivers his judgment
from the single impulse of his own will. The boy answers his
questioner, as Dolon answers Ulysses in the Iliad, at the point
of the sword. It is to a certain degree the same thing, when the
boy is questioned merely by his senior. He fears he knows not
what,--a reprimand, a look of lofty contempt, a gesture of
summary disdain. He does not think it worth his while under
these circumstances, to "gird up the loins of his mind." He
cannot return a free and intrepid answer but to the person whom
he regards as his equal. There is nothing that has so
disqualifying an effect upon him who is to answer, as the
consideration that he who questions is universally acknowledged
to be a being of a higher sphere, or, as between the boy and the
man, that he is the superior in conventional and corporal
strength.

Nor is it simple terror that restrains the boy from answering his
senior with the same freedom and spirit, as he would answer his
equal. He does not think it worth his while to enter the lists.
He despairs of doing the thing in the way that shall gain
approbation, and therefore will not try. He is like a boxer,
who, though skilful, will not fight with one hand tied behind
him. He would return you the answer, if it occurred without his
giving himself trouble; but he will not rouse his soul, and task
his strength to give it. He is careless; and prefers trusting to
whatever construction you may put upon him, and whatever
treatment you may think proper to bestow upon him. It is the
most difficult thing in the world, for the schoolmaster to
inspire into his pupil the desire to do his best.

Among full-grown men the case is different. The schoolboy,
whether under his domestic roof, or in the gymnasium, is in a
situation similar to that of the Christian slaves in Algiers, as
described by Cervantes in his History of the Captive. "They were
shut up together in a species of bagnio, from whence they were
brought out from time to time to perform certain tasks in common:

they might also engage in pranks, and get into scrapes, as they
pleased; but the master would hang up one, impale another, and
cut off the ears of a third, for little occasion, or even wholly
without it." Such indeed is the condition of the child almost
from the hour of birth. The severities practised upon him are
not so great as those resorted to by the proprietor of slaves in
Algiers; but they are equally arbitrary and without appeal. He
is free to a certain extent, even as the captives described by
Cervantes; but his freedom is upon sufferance, and is brought to
an end at any time at the pleasure of his seniors. The child
therefore feels his way, and ascertains by repeated experiments
how far he may proceed with impunity. He is like the slaves of
the Romans on the days of the Saturnalia. He may do what he
pleases, and command tasks to his masters, but with this
difference--the Roman slave knew when the days of his licence
would be over, and comported himself accordingly; but the child
cannot foresee at any moment when the bell will be struck, and
the scene reversed. It is commonly enough incident to this
situation, that the being who is at the mercy of another, will
practise, what Tacitus calls, a "vernacular urbanity," make his
bold jests, and give utterance to his saucy innuendoes, with as
much freedom as the best; but he will do it with a wary eye, not
knowing how soon he may feel his chain plucked! and himself
compulsorily reduced into the established order. His more usual
refuge therefore is, to do nothing, and to wrap himself up in
that neutrality towards his seniors, that may best protect him
from their reprimand and their despotism.

The condition of the full-grown man is different from that of the
child, and he conducts himself accordingly. He is always to a
certain degree under the control of the political society of
which he is a member. He is also exposed to the chance of
personal insult and injury from those who are stronger than he,
or who may render their strength more considerable by combination
and numbers. The political institutions which control him in
certain respects, protect him also to a given degree from the
robber and assassin, or from the man who, were it not for
penalties and statutes, would perpetrate against him all the
mischiefs which malignity might suggest. Civil policy however
subjects him to a variety of evils, which wealth or corruption
are accustomed to inflict under the forms of justice; at the same
time that it can never wholly defend him from those violences to
which he would be every moment exposed in what is called the
state of nature.

The full-grown man in the mean time is well pleased when he
escapes from the ergastulum where he had previously dwelt, and in
which he had experienced corporal infliction and corporal
restraint. At first, in the newness of his freedom, he breaks
out into idle sallies and escapes, and is like the full-fed steed
that manifests his wantonness in a thousand antics and ruades.
But this is a temporary extravagance. He presently becomes as
wise and calculating, as the schoolboy was before him.

The human being then, that has attained a certain stature,
watches and poises his situation, and considers what he may do
with impunity. He ventures at first with no small diffidence,
and pretends to be twice as assured as he really is. He
accumulates experiment after experiment, till they amount to a
considerable volume. It is not till he has passed successive
lustres, that he attains that firm step, and temperate and
settled accent, which characterise the man complete. He then no
longer doubts, but is ranged on the full level of the ripened
members of the community.

There is therefore little room for wonder, if we find the same
individual, whom we once knew a sheepish and irresolute
schoolboy, that hung his head, that replied with inarticulated
monotony, and stammered out his meaning, metamorphosed into a
thoroughly manly character, who may take his place on the bench
with senators, and deliver a grave and matured opinion as well as
the best. It appears then that the trial and review of
full-grown men is not altogether so disadvantageous to the
reckoning of our common nature, as that of boys at school.

It is not however, that the full-grown man is not liable to be
checked, reprimanded and rebuked, even as the schoolboy is. He
has his wife to read him lectures, and rap his knuckles; he has
his master, his landlord, or the mayor of his village, to tell
him of his duty in an imperious style, and in measured sentences;
if he is a member of a legislature, even there he receives his
lessons, and is told, either in phrases of well-conceived irony,
or by the exhibition of facts and reasonings which take him by
surprise, that he is not altogether the person he deemed himself
to be. But he does not mind it. Like Iago in the play, he
"knows his price, and, by the faith of man, that he is worth no
worse a place" than that which he occupies. He finds out the
value of the check he receives, and lets it "pass by him like the
idle wind"--a mastery, which the schoolboy, however he may affect
it, never thoroughly attains to.

But it unfortunately happens, that, before he has arrived at that
degree of independence, the fate of the individual is too often
decided for ever. How are the majority of men trampled in the
mire, made "hewers of wood, and drawers of water," long, very
long, before there was an opportunity of ascertaining what it was
of which they were capable! Thus almost every one is put in the
place which by nature he was least fit for: and, while perhaps a
sufficient quantity of talent is extant in each successive
generation, yet, for want of each man's being duly estimated, and
assigned his appropriate duty, the very reverse may appear to be
the case. By the time that they have attained to that sober
self-confidence that might enable them to assert themselves, they
are already chained to a fate, or thrust down to a condition,
from which no internal energies they possess can ever empower
them to escape.

SECTION II.

EQUALITY OF MAN WITH MAN.--TALENTS EXTENSIVELY DISTRIBUTED.--WAY
IN WHICH THIS DISTRIBUTION IS COUNTERACTED.--THE APTITUDE OF
CHILDREN FOR DIFFERENT PURSUITS SHOULD BE EARLY SOUGHT OUT.--
HINTS FOR A BETTER SYSTEM OF EDUCATION.--AMBITION AN UNIVERSAL
PRINCIPLE.

The reflections thus put down, may assist us in answering the
question as to the way in which talents are distributed among men
by the hand of nature.

All things upon the earth and under the earth, and especially all
organised bodies of the animal or vegetable kingdom, fall into
classes. It is by this means, that the child no sooner learns
the terms, man, horse, tree, flower, than, if an object of any of
these kinds which he has never seen before, is exhibited to him,
he pronounces without hesitation, This is a man, a horse, a tree,
a flower.

All organised bodies of the animal or vegetable kingdom are cast
in a mould of given dimension and feature belonging to a certain
number of individuals, though distinguished by inexhaustible
varieties. It is by means of those features that the class of
each individual is determined.

To confine ourselves to man.

All men, the monster and the lusus naturae excepted, have a
certain form, a certain complement of limbs, a certain internal
structure, and organs of sense--may we not add further, certain
powers of intellect?

Hence it seems to follow, that man is more like and more equal to
man, deformities of body and abortions of intellect excepted,
than the disdainful and fastidious censors of our common nature
are willing to admit.

I am inclined to believe, that, putting idiots and extraordinary
cases out of the question, every human creature is endowed with
talents, which, if rightly directed, would shew him to be apt,
adroit, intelligent and acute, in the walk for which his
organisation especially fitted him.

But the practices and modes of civilised life prompt us to take
the inexhaustible varieties of man, as he is given into our
guardianship by the bountiful hand of nature, and train him in
one uniform exercise, as the raw recruit is treated when he is
brought under the direction of his drill-serjeant.

The son of the nobleman, of the country-gentleman, and of those
parents who from vanity or whatever other motive are desirous
that their offspring should be devoted to some liberal
profession, is in nearly all instances sent to the
grammar-school. It is in this scene principally, that the
judgment is formed that not above one boy in a hundred possesses
an acute understanding, or will be able to strike into a path of
intellect that shall be truly his own.

I do not object to this destination, if temperately pursued. It
is fit that as many children as possible should have their chance
of figuring in future life in what are called the higher
departments of intellect. A certain familiar acquaintance with
language and the shades of language as a lesson, will be
beneficial to all. The youth who has expended only six months in
acquiring the rudiments of the Latin tongue, will probably be
more or less the better for it in all his future life.

But seven years are usually spent at the grammar-school by those
who are sent to it. I do not in many cases object to this. The
learned languages are assuredly of slow acquisition. In the
education of those who are destined to what are called the higher
departments of intellect, a long period may advantageously be
spent in the study of words, while the progress they make in
theory and dogmatical knowledge is too generally a store of
learning laid up, to be unlearned again when they reach the
period of real investigation and independent judgment. There is
small danger of this in the acquisition of words.

But this method, indiscriminately pursued as it is now, is
productive of the worst consequences. Very soon a judgment may
be formed by the impartial observer, whether the pupil is at home
in the study of the learned languages, and is likely to make an
adequate progress. But parents are not impartial. There are
also two reasons why the schoolmaster is not the proper person to
pronounce: first, because, if he pronounces in the negative, he
will have reason to fear that the parent will be offended; and
secondly, because he does not like to lose his scholar. But the
very moment that it can be ascertained, that the pupil is not at
home in the study of the learned languages, and is unlikely to
make an adequate progress, at that moment he should be taken from
it.

The most palpable deficiency that is to be found in relation to
the education of children, is a sound judgment to be formed as to
the vocation or employment in which each is most fitted to excel.

As, according to the institutions of Lycurgus, as soon as a boy
was born, he was visited by the elders of the ward, who were to
decide whether he was to be reared, and would be made an
efficient member of the commonwealth, so it were to be desired
that, as early as a clear discrimination on the subject might be
practicable, a competent decision should be given as to the
future occupation and destiny of a child.

But this is a question attended with no common degree of
difficulty. To the resolving such a question with sufficient
evidence, a very considerable series of observations would become
necessary. The child should be introduced into a variety of
scenes, and a magazine, so to speak, of those things about which
human industry and skill may be employed, should be successively
set before him. The censor who is to decide on the result of the
whole, should be a person of great sagacity, and capable of
pronouncing upon a given amount of the most imperfect and
incidental indications. He should be clear-sighted, and vigilant
to observe the involuntary turns of an eye, expressions of a lip,
and demonstrations of a limb.

The declarations of the child himself are often of very small use
in the case. He may be directed by an impulse, which occurs in
the morning, and vanishes in the evening. His preferences change
as rapidly as the shapes we sometimes observe in the evening
clouds, and are governed by whim or fantasy, and not by any of
those indications which are parcel of his individual
constitution. He desires in many instances to be devoted to a
particular occupation, because his playfellow has been assigned
to it before him.

The parent is not qualified to judge in this fundamental
question, because he is under the dominion of partiality, and
wishes that his child may become a lord chancellor, an
archbishop, or any thing else, the possessor of which condition
shall be enabled to make a splendid figure in the world. He is
not qualified, because he is an interested party, and, either
from an exaggerated estimate of his child's merits, or from a
selfish shrinking from the cost it might require to mature them,
is anxious to arrive at a conclusion not founded upon the
intrinsic claims of the case to be considered.

Even supposing it to be sufficiently ascertained in what calling
it is that the child will be most beneficially engaged, a
thousand extrinsical circumstances will often prevent that from
being the calling chosen. Nature distributes her gifts without
any reference to the distinctions of artificial society. The
genius that demanded the most careful and assiduous cultivation,
that it might hereafter form the boast and ornament of the world,
will be reared amidst the chill blasts of poverty; while he who
was best adapted to make an exemplary carpenter or artisan, by
being the son of a nobleman is thrown a thousand fathoms wide of
his true destination.

Human creatures are born into the world with various
dispositions. According to the memorable saying of Themistocles,
One man can play upon a psaltery or harp, and another can by
political skill and ingenuity convert a town of small account,
weak and insignificant, into a city noble, magnificent and great.

It is comparatively a very little way that we can penetrate into
the mysteries of nature.

Music seems to be one of the faculties most clearly defined in
early youth. The child who has received that destination from
the hands of nature, will even in infancy manifest a singular
delight in musical sounds, and will in no long time imitate
snatches of a tune. The present professor of music in the
university of Oxford contrived for himself, I believe at three
years old, a way for playing on an instrument, the piano forte,
unprompted by any of the persons about him. This is called
having an ear.

Instances nearly as precocious are related of persons, who
afterwards distinguished themselves in the art of painting.

These two kinds of original destination appear to be placed
beyond the reach of controversy.

Horace says, The poet is born a poet, and cannot be made so by
the ingenuity of art: and this seems to be true. He sees the
objects about him with an eye peculiarly his own; the sounds that
reach his ear, produce an effect upon him, and leave a memory
behind, different from that which is experienced by his fellows.
His perceptions have a singular vividness.

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And his imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown,

It is not probable that any trainings of art can give these
endowments to him who has not received them from the gift of
nature.

The subtle network of the brain, or whatever else it is, that
makes a man more fit for, and more qualified to succeed in, one
occupation than another, can scarcely be followed up and detected
either in the living subject or the dead one. But, as in the
infinite variety of human beings no two faces are so alike that
they cannot be distinguished, nor even two leaves plucked from
the same tree[2], so it may reasonably be presumed, that there
are varieties in the senses, the organs, and the internal
structure of the human species, however delicate, and to the
touch of the bystander evanescent, which may give to each
individual a predisposition to rise to a supreme degree of
excellence in some certain art or attainment, over a million of
competitors.

[2] Papers between Clarke and Leibnitz, p. 95.

It has been said that all these distinctions and anticipations
are idle, because man is born without innate ideas. Whatever is
the incomprehensible and inexplicable power, which we call
nature, to which he is indebted for his formation, it is
groundless to suppose, that that power is cognisant of, and
guides itself in its operations by, the infinite divisibleness of
human pursuits in civilised society. A child is not designed by
his original formation to be a manufacturer of shoes, for he may
be born among a people by whom shoes are not worn, and still less
is he destined by his structure to be a metaphysician, an
astronomer, or a lawyer, a rope-dancer, a fortune-teller, or a
juggler.

It is true that we cannot suppose nature to be guided in her
operations by the infinite divisibleness of human pursuits in
civilised society. But it is not the less true that one man is
by his structure best fitted to excel in some one in particular
of these multifarious pursuits, however fortuitously his
individual structure and that pursuit may be brought into
contact. Thus a certain calmness and steadiness of purpose, much
flexibility, and a very accurate proportion of the various limbs
of the body, are of great advantage in rope-dancing; while
lightness of the fingers, and a readiness to direct our thoughts
to the rapid execution of a purpose, joined with a steadiness of
countenance adapted to what is figuratively called throwing dust
in the eyes of the bystander, are of the utmost importance to the
juggler: and so of the rest.

It is as much the temper of the individual, as any particular
subtlety of organ or capacity, that prepares him to excel in one
pursuit rather than a thousand others. And he must have been a
very inattentive observer of the indications of temper in an
infant in the first months of his existence, who does not confess
that there are various peculiarities in that respect which the
child brings into the world with him.

There is excellent sense in the fable of Achilles in the island
of Scyros. He was placed there by his mother in female attire
among the daughters of Lycomedes, that he might not be seduced to
engage in the Trojan war. Ulysses was commissioned to discover
him, and, while he exhibited jewels and various woman's ornaments
to the princesses, contrived to mix with his stores a suit of
armour, the sight of which immediately awakened the spirit of the
hero.

Every one has probably within him a string more susceptible than
the rest, that demands only a kindred impression to be made, to
call forth its latent character. Like the war-horse described in
the Book of Job: "He paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in his
strength; he goeth on to meet the armed men; he smelleth the
battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting."

Nothing can be more unlike than the same man to himself, when he
is touched, and not touched, upon

the master-string
That makes most harmony or discord to him.

It is like the case of Manlius Torquatus in Livy, who by his
father was banished among his hinds for his clownish demeanour
and untractableness to every species of instruction that was
offered him, but who, understanding that his parent was
criminally arraigned for barbarous treatment of him, first
resolutely resorted to the accuser, compelling him upon pain of
death to withdraw his accusation, and subsequently, having
surmounted this first step towards an energetic carriage and
demeanour, proved one of the most illustrious characters that the
Roman republic had to boast.

Those children whose parents have no intention of training them
to the highest departments of intellect, and have therefore no
thought of bestowing on them a classical education, nevertheless
for the most part send them to a school where they are to be
taught arithmetic, and the principles of English grammar. I
should say in this case, as I said before on the subject of
classical education, that a certain initiation in these
departments of knowledge, even if they are pursued a very little
way, will probably be beneficial to all.

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