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The occasion has tuned us to a certain key of sentiment, and deprived us of the power to respond to other stimuli. If things of moment are before us, we cannot stop to play with symbols and figures of speech. We cannot attend to them with pleasure, and therefore they lose the beauty they might elsewhere have had.
As higher centers in the brain are developed, the ingoing currents, aroused by all sense stimuli, find other connections, and ideas, images, trains of thoughts, are aroused, and so the energy is consumed; but at first all that these currents can do is to arouse physical activity. The strength of this instinct is but little diminished by the time the child comes to school.
The two categories the emulative habit of life and the habit of devout observances are therefore to be taken as complementary elements of the barbarian type of human nature and of its modern barbarian variants. They are expressions of much the same range of aptitudes, made in response to different sets of stimuli.
The difference, however, seems to be a real one, if we translate it to mean that, as we have seen reason to believe in previous volumes of these Studies, there are in women preferential sensory paths of sexual stimuli, such as, apparently, a predominence of tactile and auditory paths as compared with men; a more massive, complex, and delicately poised sexual mechanism; and, as a result of this, eventually a greater amount of nervous and cerebral sexual irradiation.
Those persons, who are said to walk in their sleep, are affected with reverie to so great a degree, that it becomes a formidable disease; the essence of which consists in the inaptitude of the mind to attend to external stimuli. Many histories of this disease have been published by medical writers; of which there is a very curious one in the Lausanne Transactions.
The nature of these reactions depends upon the quality of the external stimuli. If we provide the right sort of stimuli the reactions will be right. If, today, the spirit reacts to a beautiful picture, tomorrow, to the tree in bloom, the next day to an alluring landscape, and the next to the glory of a sunrise, in time its reactions to beauty in every form will become habitual.
This is termed reverie or studium. In some constitutions these reveries continue a considerable time, and are not to be removed without greater difficulty, but are experienced in a less degree by us all; when we attend earnestly to the ideas excited by volition or sensation, with their associated connexions, but are at the same time conscious at intervals of the stimuli of surrounding bodies.
To casual thinking it may seem a far cry from reactions and external stimuli to loyalty, but not so by any means. The man or woman who has been led to react to the Madonna of the Chair, the Plow Oxen, or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel will experience a revival and recurrence of the reaction at every sight of the masterpiece, whether the original or a reproduction.
Equal additions to the weights are not enough to produce a sensation of pressure whose intensity shall render it capable of being distinguished with certainty, but the greater the original weights the larger the increments must be; while the intensities of the sensations form an arithmetical, those of the stimuli form a geometrical, series; the change in sensation is proportional to the relative change of the stimulus.
The same fundamental phenomenon of absorbed and prolonged attention which leads to repetition of the acts, guides us in determining the stimuli suitable to the age of the child.
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