ΑΓΧΙΝΟΙΑ: NEARNESS OF THE Νοῦς.

DR. CHALMERS used to say that in the dyna

mics of human affairs, two qualities were essential to greatness - Power and Promptitude. One man might have both, another power without promptitude, another promptitude without power. We must all feel the common sense of this, and can readily see how it applies to a general in the field, to a pilot in a storm, to a sportsman, to a fencer, to a debater. It is the same with an operating surgeon at all times, and may be at any time with the practitioner of the art of healing. He must be ready for what are called emergencies-cases which rise up at your feet, and must be dealt with on the instant,—he must have power and promptitude.

It is a curious condition of mind that this requires: it is like sleeping with your pistol under your pillow, and it on full cock; a moment lost and all may be lost. There is the very nick of time. This is what we mean by presence of mind; by a man having such

a subject at his finger-ends; that part of the mind lying nearest the outer world, and having to act on it through the bodily organs, through the will-the outposts must be always awake. It is of course, so to speak, only a portion of the mind that is thus needed and thus available; if the whole mind were for ever at the advanced post, it would soon lose itself in this endeavour to keep it. Now, though the thing needed to be done may be simple enough, what goes to the doing of it, and to the being at once ready and able to do it, involves much; the wedge would not be a wedge, or do a wedge's work, without the width behind as well as the edge in front. Your men of promptitude without genius or power, including knowledge and will, are those who present the wedge the wrong way. Thus your extremely prompt people are often doing the wrong thing, which is almost always worse than nothing. Our vague friend who bit 'Yarrow's' tail instead of 'the Chicken's,' was full of promptitude; as was also that other man, probably a relative, who barred the door with a boiled carrot: each knew what was needed-the biting the tail, the barring the door; both erred as to the means-the one by want of presence of mind, the other by lack of mind itself. We must have just enough of the right knowledge and no more; we must have the habit of using this; we must have self-reliance, and the consentaneousness

of the entire mind; and whatsoever our hand finds to do, we must do it with our might. Therefore it is that this master act of the man, under some sudden and great unexpected crisis, is in a great measure performed unconsciously as to its mental means. The man is so totus in illo, that there is no bit of the mind left to watch and record the acts of the rest; therefore men, when they have done some signal feat of presence of mind, if asked how they did it, generally don't very well know-they just did it: it was, in fact, done and then thought of, not thought of and then done, in which case it would likely never have been done. Not that the act was uncaused by mind; it is one of the highest powers of mind thus to act; but it is done, if I may use the phrase, by an acquired instinct. You will find all this in that wonderful old Greek who was Alexander the Great's and the old world's schoolmaster, and ours if we were wise, whose truthfulness and clear insight one wonders at the longer he lives. He seems to have seen the human mind as a bird or an engineer does the earth -he knew the plan of it. We now-a-days see it as one sees a country, athwart and in perspective, and from the side; he saw it from above and from below. There are therefore no shadows, no foreshortenings, no clear-obscure, indeed no disturbing inedium; it is as if he examined everything in vacuo.

I refer my readers to what he says on 'Ayxívola and Εὐστοχία, 1

My object in what I have now written and am going to write, is to impress upon medical students the value of power and promptitude in combination, for their professional purposes; the uses to them of nearness of the Noûs, and of happy guessing; and how you may see the sense, and neatness, and pith

1 As I am now, to my sorrow and shame, too much of a mediate Grecian, I give a Balliol friend's note on these two words: —'What you have 'called "presence of mind” and "happy guessing " may, I think, be identified respectively with Aristotle's ἀγχίνοια and εὐστοχία. The latter of these, εὐστοχία, Aristotle mentions incidentally when treating of εὐβουλία, or good deliberation. Eth. Nic. bk. VI. ch. 9. Good deliberation, he says, is not evσroxía, for the former is a slow process, whereas the latter is not guided by reason, and is rapid. In the same passage he tells us that ἀγχίνοια is a sort of εὐστοχία. But he speaks of ȧyxívoca more fully in Ana. Post. I. 34:"Ayxívola is a sort of happy guessing at the intermediate, when there is not time for consideration: as when a man, seeing that the bright side of the moon is always turned towards the sun, comprehends that her light is borrowed from the sun; or concludes, from seeing one conversing with a capitalist that he wants to borrow money; or infers that people are friends from the fact of their having common enemies." And then he goes on to make these simple observations confused and perplexing by reducing them to his logical formula.

'The derivation of the words will confirm this view. Εὐστοxla is a hitting the mark successfully, a reaching to the end, the rapid, and, as it were, intuitive perception of the truth. This is what Whewell means by saying, "all induction is a happy conjecture." But when Aristotle says that this faculty is not guided by reason (avev тe yàp Xóyov), he does not mean

of that excellent thinker, as well as best of all storytellers, Miss Austen, when she says in Emma, ‘De pend upon it, a lucky guess is never merely luck, there is always some talent in it,'-talent here denoting intelligence and will in action. In all sciences except those called exact, this happy guessing plays a large part, and in none more than in medicine, which is truly a tentative art, founded upon likelihood, and

to imply that it grows up altogether independent of reason, any more than Whewell means to say that all the discoveries in the inductive sciences have been made by men taking "shots" at them, as boys at school do at hard passages in their Latin lessons. On the contrary, no faculty is so absolutely the child of reason as this faculty of happy guessing. It only attains to perfection after, the reason has been long and painfully trained in the sphere in which the guesses are to be made. What Aristotle does mean is, that when it has attained perfection, we are not conscious of the share which reason has in its operation—it is so rapid that by no analysis can we detect the presence of reason in its action. Sir Isaac Newton seeing the apple fall, and thence “guessing" at the law of gravitation, is a good instance οἱ εὐστοχία.

"Ayxivola, on the other hand, is a nearness of mind; not a reaching to the end, but an apprehension of the best means; not a perception of the truth, but a perception of how the truth is to be supported. It is sometimes translated "sagacity," but readiness or presence of mind is better, as sagacity rather involves the idea of consideration. In matters purely intellectual it is ready wit. It is a sort of shorter or more limited evσroxía. It is more of a natural gift than evσroxía, because the latter is a far higher and nobler faculty, and therefore more dependent for its perfection on cultivation, as all our highest faculties are. Εὐστοχία is more akin to genius, ἀγχίνοια to practical common

sense.