The first-sight phenomena of historic time, and the ocular mechanism of historic memory : developing organic principles for the most rapid possible acquisition and affixment of historical knowledge, and forming an elucidatory and illustrative companion to the fifth edition, coloured, of Major Bell's twenty-five royal folio synchrono-historic and biographic tables / by Major James Bell.

  • Bell, James, Major.
Date:
1853
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The first-sight phenomena of historic time, and the ocular mechanism of historic memory : developing organic principles for the most rapid possible acquisition and affixment of historical knowledge, and forming an elucidatory and illustrative companion to the fifth edition, coloured, of Major Bell's twenty-five royal folio synchrono-historic and biographic tables / by Major James Bell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    thoughts and practical experiments to the advance- ment of scientific historical teaching. These ex- periments, I believe, are admitted to have succeeded beyond all expectation. And, indeed, it hardly needed the confirming testimony of actual experience, to prove that a systematic principle of historic reading and teach- ing must triumph over a no [-system principle . . . a no !-system principle, to which, wondrously enough, we have, for century after century, been so tenaciously adhering. In the frequent repetition of my experiments, I have become variously and daily more and more confirmed in the twofold conviction—1st, of the per- fect practicability of conveying a considerable body of valuable historical instruction to young persons at a very early period of life ; and 2ndly, that the main secret, or tact, of communicating such instruc- tion, lies in securing the co-operation of the eye and the mind; or, in other words, in making the eye and the mind work together. The philosophic Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam (1560-1626), recommends, as the surest division of human learning/' that which is derived from the three faculties of the soul, viz. reason, imagination, and memory : Philosophy being relative to Keason ; poetry „ to Imagination; and HISTORY „ to MEMORY. MEMORY, therefore, being the great faculty which, in the teaching and the acquirement of history, we