Practical Essays, Alexander Bain [reading e books .txt] 📗

unassimilable facts. As it is, matter, in its commoner aspects and properties, is perfectly intelligible; in the great number and variety of its endowments or properties, it is revealed to us slowly and with much difficulty, and these subtle properties--the deep affinities and molecular arrangements--- are the mysteries rightly so called. Mind in itself is also intelligible; a pleasure is as intelligible as would be any transmutation of it into the inscrutable essence that people often desiderate. It is one of the facts of our sensibility, and has a great many facts of its own kindred, which makes it all the more intelligible.

The varieties of pleasure, pain, and emotion are very numerous; and to know, remember, and classify them, is a work of labour, a _legitimate_ mystery. The subtle links of thought are also very various, although probably all reducible to a small number; and the ascertaining and following out of these has been a work of labour and time; they have, therefore, been mysterious; mystery and intellectual toil being the real correlatives. The _complications_ of matter and the _complications_ of mind are genuine mysteries; the reducing or simplifying of these complications, by the exertions of thinking men, is the way, and the only way out of the darkness into light.

[UNION OF MIND AND BODY.]

But what now of the mysterious _union_ of the two great ultimate facts of human experience? What should the followers of Newton and Locke say to this crowning instance of deep and awful mystery? Only one answer can be given. Accept the union, and generalise it. Find out the fewest number of simple laws, such as will express all the phenomena of this conjoint life. Resolve into the highest possible generalities the connections of pleasure and pain, with all the physical stimulants of the senses--food, tastes, odours, sounds, lights--with all the play of feature and of gesture, and all the resulting movements and bodily changes; and when you have done that, you have so far truly, fully, finally explained the union of body and mind. Extend your generalities to the course of the thoughts; determine what physical changes accompany the memory, the reason, the imagination, and express those changes in the most general, comprehensive laws, and you have explained the how and the why brain causes thought, and thought works in brain. There is no other explanation needful, no other competent, no other that would be explanation. Instead of our being "unfortunate," as is sometimes said, in not being able to know the essence of either matter or mind--in not comprehending their union; our misfortune would be to have to know anything different from what we do or may know. If there be still much mystery attaching to this linking of the two extreme facts of our experience, it is simply this: that we have made so little way in ascertaining what in one goes with what in the other. We know a good deal about the feelings and their alliances, some of which are open and palpable to all mankind; and we have obtained some important generalities in these alliances. Of the connections of thought with physical changes we know very little: these connections, therefore, are truly and properly mysterious; but they are not intrinsically or hopelessly so. The advancing study of the physical organs, on the one hand, and of the mental functions, on the other, may gradually abate this mystery. And if a day arrive when the links that unite our intellectual workings with the workings of the nervous system and the other bodily organs shall be fully ascertained and adequately generalised, no one thoroughly educated in the scientific spirit of the last two centuries will call the union of mind and body any longer inscrutable or mysterious.


FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 4: _Fortnightly Review_, October, 1868.]

[Footnote 5: We may here recall an incident highly characteristic of the late Earl of Carlisle. Being elected on one occasion to the office of Lord Rector of Marischal College, Aberdeen, he had to deliver an address to the students on the usual topics of diligence and hopefulness in their studious career. Referring for a model to the addresses of former rectors, he found, in that of his immediate predecessor, Lord Eglinton, the Homeric sentiment above alluded to. It grated harshly on his mind, and he avowed the fact to the students, he could not reconcile himself to the elevating of one man upon the humiliation of all the rest. In a strain more befitting a civilized age, he urged upon his hearers the pursuit of excellence as such, without involving as a necessary accompaniment the supplanting or throwing down of other men. He probably did not sufficiently guard himself against a fallacy of Relativity; for excellence is purely comparative; it subsists upon inferior grades of attainment: still, there are many modes of it shared in by a great number, and not confined to one or a few.]

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III.

THE CIVIL SERVICE EXAMINATIONS[6]

1. HISTORICAL SKETCH.

Up to the year 1853, the appointing of Civil Servants lay wholly in the hands of patrons. In 1853, patronage was severely condemned and competitive examination officially recommended, for the first time, in a Report by Sir Stafford Northcote and Sir Charles Trevelyan; but, while the recommendation was taken up in the following year and immediately acted upon in the Indian Civil Service, it was not till very much later that it was fully adopted in the Home Service. The history, indeed, of this last is somewhat peculiar. After the Report already referred to, came an Order of Council, of date May 21, 1855, in which we find it "ordered that all such young men as may be proposed to be appointed to any junior situation in any department of the Civil Service shall, before they are admitted to probation, be examined by or under the Directors of the said Commissioners, and shall receive from them a Certificate of Qualification for such situation". This order was rigorously carried out by the Commissioners, and, although its absolute requirement was simply that the nominees should pass a certain examination, it, nevertheless, allowed the heads of departments to institute competition if they cared. Accordingly, we find that competition--_but limited_--was immediately set on foot in several of the offices, and the result led to the following remark in the Report of 1856:--

"We do not think it within our province to discuss the expediency of adopting the principle of open competition as contra-distinguished from examination; but we must remark that, both in the competitive examination for clerkships in our own and in other offices, those who have succeeded in attaining the appointments have appeared to us to possess considerably higher attainments than those who have come in upon simple nomination; and, we may add, that we cannot doubt that if it be adopted as a usual course to nominate several candidates to compete for each vacancy, the expectation of this ordeal will act most beneficially on the education and industry of those young persons who are looking forward to public employment."

In 1857, a near approach was made to open competition, in the case of four clerkships awarded by the competing examination in the Commissioners' own establishment. "The fact of the competition was not made public, but was communicated to one or two heads of schools and colleges, and mentioned casually to other persons at various times. The number of competitors who presented themselves was forty-six, of which number, forty-four were actually examined."

[BEGINNING OF OPEN COMPETITION.]

It was reserved for 1858 to see the first absolutely open competition, in the case of eight writerships in the Office of the Secretary of State for India; and in that year, too, a step in advance was made when the Commissioners in their Report "pointed out the advantage which would result from enlarging the field of competition by substituting, for the plan of nominating three persons only to compete for each vacant situation, the system of nominating a proportionate number of candidates to compete for several appointments at one examination".

The year 1860 sounded the death-knell of simple pass examination. It was then recommended by a Select Committee of the House of Commons, and the recommendation was adopted, that the competitive method, in its limited form, should be henceforth _universally_ applied to junior situations. This recommendation was at once acted upon in the case of clerkships under the control of the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury, and others by and by followed; but, as matter of fact, it was never strictly carried out in all its scope and rigour; and as late as 1868 the Commissioners in their Report stated that "the number of situations filled on the competitive method has been comparatively small". Meanwhile, competitive examination was making way in other quarters.

From 1857, the Commissioners had been in the habit of examining competitively, at the request of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, such candidates as might be nominated for cadetships in the Royal Irish Constabulary; and, in 1861, the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty "threw open to public competition" appointments as apprentices in Her Majesty's dockyards, and appointments as "engineer students" in the steam factories connected therewith.

In 1870, the end so long aimed at was attained, and by an Order in Council of June 4, open competition was made the only door of entry to the general Civil Service.

In entire contrast with this, as has been already said, was the action in the case of the Indian Civil Service. Here the principle of open competition was adopted from the first, and the examination took a very elevated start, comprising the highest branches of a learned education. These branches were duly specified in a Report drawn up in November, 1854, by a Committee, of which Lord Macaulay was chairman; and, with the exception of Sanskrit and Arabic, they included simply (as might have been expected) the literary and scientific subjects ordinarily taught at the principal seats of general education in the Kingdom. These were:--

English Language and Literature (Composition, History, and General Literature,--to each of which 500 marks were assigned, making a total of 1,500); Greek and Latin (each with 750 marks); French, German, and Italian (valued at 375 marks, respectively); Mathematics, pure and mixed (marks 1,000); Natural and Moral Sciences (each 500); Sanscrit and Arabic (375 each).

[PRINCIPLE OF SELECTION OF SUBJECTS.]

The principle of selection here is clear and obvious. It did not rest upon any doctrine regarding the utility or value of subjects for mental training, but simply upon this, that those subjects already in the field must be accepted, and that (as Mr. Jowett, in his letter to Sir Charles Trevelyan, of January, 1854, put it) "it will not do to frame our examination on any mere theory of education. We must test a young man's ability by what he knows, not by what we wish him to know." Indeed, this is explicitly avowed in the Report by the author of the Scheme himself. The Natural Sciences are included, because (it is confessed) "of late years they have been introduced as a part of general education into several of our universities and colleges": and, as for the Moral Sciences, "those Sciences are, it is well known, much studied both at Oxford and at the Scottish Universities".

Into the details of Macaulay's interesting Report, I need not here enter. Room, however, must be found for one quotation. It deals with the distribution of marks, and is both characteristic and puts the matter in small compass. "It will be necessary," says the writer, "that a certain number of