I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random - I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully taxed by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess. It follows that the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood. A chess-player, for example, does the one without effort at the other. Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyse. The faculty in question is possibly much invigorated by mathematical study, and especially by that highest branch of it which, unjustly, and merely on account of its retrograde operations, has been called, as if par excellence, analysis. His results, brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have, in truth, the whole air of intuition. He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics - exhibiting in his solutions of each and all a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension præternatural. He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his talent into play. As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles. We know of them, among other things, that they are always to their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a source of the liveliest enjoyment.
We appreciate them only in their effects. It cannot be doubted that the mental features discoursed of as the analytical are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis.
But, although thus opposed to received opinion, the idea will not appear ill-founded when we observe that the processes of invention or creation are strictly akin with the processes of resolution - the former being nearly, if not absolutely, the latter conversed. That it may be a constituent of ideality is here suggested in opposition to the vulgar dictum (founded, however, upon the assumptions of grave authority,) that the calculating and discriminating powers (causality and comparison) are at variance with the imaginative - that the three, in short, can hardly coexist. If this power (which may be described, although not defined, as the capacity for resolving thought into its elements) be not, in fact, an essential portion of what late philosophers term ideality, then there are indeed many good reasons for supposing it a primitive faculty. It is not improbable that a few farther steps in phrenological science will lead to a belief in the existence, if not to the actual discovery and location of an organ of analysis.
0 kommentar(er)
