Jump to content

Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/582

From Wikisource
This page has been validated.
564
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

being trained to obey them any better, except in a few directions of conduct, where the least resistance of opposing appetites and passions is encountered. But still it must be true that all culture tends, first, to develop the moral intelligence which forms right notions of conduct, and, finally, to perfect the moral discipline which makes conduct obedient to them.

It is upon that discipline chiefly that those qualities which I have called the moral qualities of the personal order, and which have their root in truthfulness and courage, depend for their evolution. I had intended to recur to these for some discussion at tins point, but my article is already too long. Perhaps it is enough to note the fact that, being incident as they are to intrinsic relations, self-existing in man, which undergo no complication and no change, the moral notions that define them may easily have been quite as distinct at some earlier stages of human culture as they are now. If they manifest themselves no more potently in conduct than they did twenty centuries ago—which seems doubtful, upon the whole—the fact must show us how little our modern civilization has yet advanced the race in moral discipline, whatever gains in moral knowledge it may have brought.

DOES IT TAKE TIME TO THINK?

SOME MEASUREMENTS OF THE PERSONAL EQUATION.

By T. F. BROWNELL.

MASKELYNE, the Royal Astronomer of England, in August, 1795, had his attention called to the fact that his assistant, Mr. Kinnebrook, was making errors in recording observations. He noticed that Mr. Kinnebrook had fallen into the habit of making his records half a second later than they should be. In the following year this fault was found to have increased. All of Mr, Kinnebrook's observations were recorded as about four-fifths of a second too late. The assistant was a trained and skilled observer of long experience, but, although the fault was pointed out to him, and realized by him, it appeared impossible for him to overcome it. The same error still appeared in all his work. The two astronomers, it must be remarked, were working together observing and noting the same events, such as the transits of the same stars across hair-lines placed in the fields of vision of their telescopes or transit-instruments. After observing side by side a large number of events, and recording the times as accurately as they could to the second and fraction of a second in each case, it was found by a comparison of results that the events were almost invariably recorded by Mr. Kin-