It may, then, be stated as a well-established fact that intense interest plus persistent effort is the prime essential to the highest success in any sphere of human activity. Of importance, also, is the fact that, as a general thing, the “set” of a man’s mind, the direction which his interest most readily takes, is indicated more or less clearly in the first years of life. This is proved not only by the early lives of the world’s most eminent men and women, but also by the results of careful statistical investigations into the life histories of “average” people. Especially impressive are the findings of an inquiry carried out not long ago by that well-known American psychologist, Edward L. Thorndike, and reported by him in The Popular Science Monthly, vol. lxxxi (1912).
Professor Thorndike submitted to one hundred third year students in Columbia College, Barnard College, and Teachers’ College, New York, a list of subjects of study, including mathematics, history, literature, science, drawing, and such hand-work as carving, carpentering, gardening, etc. Each student was required to fill in a tabular blank showing the order in which the various subjects were of greatest interest to that particular student: (1) during the last three years of elementary school attendance, (2) during the high school period, and (3) at the time of the investigation. Blanks were also to be filled indicating the student’s judgment as to his or her ability in each of the respective subjects during the period covered by the inquiry.
From the statistics thus gathered two things stood out clearly. No fewer than 60 per cent. of the students made returns showing that the subjects which appealed to them most strongly in their college work were the subjects that had most interested them in early life; and an even closer correspondence (65 per cent.) was shown between intensity of interest and intellectual ability. Professor Thorndike then extended his investigation to include two hundred other individuals, and obtained virtually the same results.
“These facts,” it is not surprising to find him saying in comment, “unanimously witness to the importance of early interests. They are shown to be far from fickle and evanescent.... It would indeed be hard to find any feature of a human being which was a more permanent fact of his nature than his relative degree of interest in different lines of thought and action.”
What this means, unquestionably, is that every parent, in planning the education of his children or in assisting them to choose a vocation, should make a real effort to gain some insight into their special interests. Not only so, but there is reason for adding that he should also endeavour to ascertain and cultivate those interests while his children are still quite young. Otherwise he is likely to find them growing to manhood and womanhood—as, under present conditions, most children do grow—with the strongest of their “worth while” interests so attenuated that really effective mental effort is next to impossible. In these circumstances—unless they chance, as Charles Darwin did, to come under the influence of a personality able to rouse their dormant powers into exceptional activity—the likelihood is that they will achieve only mediocre results, muddling along through life even when they happen to hit on vocations truly suited to them.
Are we to infer that children, at a tender age, should be encouraged to think seriously about serious subjects? Assuredly, provided the subjects be made sufficiently interesting to them. It is not without significance that a large majority of men of genius have been distinguished for their precocity; or, if not precocious in the ordinary sense of the term, they have busied themselves in childhood with mental activities allied to those for which they afterward attained eminence.
Napoleon’s interest in military problems dates from his boyhood. Lord Kelvin, the foremost physicist of the nineteenth century, was making electrical machines when only nine years old, and played with them as other children play with dolls and marbles. Thomas Hobbes translated the “Medea” of Euripides into Latin iambic verse before he was fourteen. Cicero at thirteen is credited with having written a treatise on the art of oratory. Fénelon preached his first sermon when only fifteen years old. Grotius at the age of fourteen was widely known for his learning. Hallam, the famous historian, could read well before he was five, and had turned author four years later. Galileo, like Lord Kelvin, constructed mechanical toys in his childhood.
Not to accumulate instances tediously, it need only be added that, in making a survey of the biographies of a thousand eminent British men and women, the English psychologist, Havelock Ellis, found that only forty-four were specifically mentioned as not having been precocious, while nearly three hundred were mentioned as having been distinctly precocious in one sense or another. Even in the case of the forty-four, Mr. Ellis discovered, several were really as precocious as any of the three hundred, being “already absorbed in their own lines of mental activity.” To this class belong, for example, Landor, Byron, and Wiseman, the last of whom is described as having been in boyhood, “dull and stupid, always reading and thinking.” Nor, according to the results of Mr. Ellis’s investigation, did precocity have any unfavourable effect on the health of these men and women of genius.
All similar investigations, in fact, go to show that intellectual activity makes for longevity—that those who think hardest are likely to live longest. Of one group of nearly eight hundred and fifty men of genius it was found that only two hundred and fifty died before they were sixty years old, while one hundred and thirty-one lived to be eighty or older. For another group of five hundred, an average life-span of nearly sixty-five years was found, as against a life-span of fifty-one years for all classes of people who pass the age of twenty. In the case of still another group, studied by a third investigator, an average of seventy-one years was established.
What gives these figures greater significance is the fact that in many instances the man of genius is exceptionally frail in early life. Mr. Ellis, in his statistical study, found that more than two hundred—or more than 20 per cent. of the eminent men and women included in his survey—were “congenitally of a notably feeble constitution,” yet that among these were some of the longest lived. How is this to be explained? Only on the theory that the joy they felt in doing work congenial to them promoted bodily as well as mental vigour. And, in point of fact, it is to-day a commonplace among psychologists that pleasurable emotions make for increased strength, while disagreeable feelings make for weakness.