hearing takes a late but often sudden start to independence. Perhaps
this holds of every ability. To Bryan this suggests as a hierarchy of
habits, the plateau of little or no improvement, meaning that lower
order habits are approaching their maximum but are not yet automatic
enough to leave the attention free to attack higher order habits. The
second ascent from drudgery to freedom, which comes through
automatism, is often as sudden as the first ascent. One stroke of
attention comes to do what once took many. To attain such effective
speed is not dependent on reaction time. This shooting together of
units distinguishes the master from the man, the genius from the hack.
In many, if not all, skills where expertness is sought, there is a
long discouraging level, and then for the best a sudden ascent, as if
here, too, as we have reason to think in the growth of both the body
as a whole and in that of its parts, nature does make leaps and
attains her ends by alternate rests and rushes. Youth lives along on a
low level of interest and accomplishment and then starts onward, is
transformed, converted; the hard becomes easy; the old life sinks to a
lower stratum; and a new and higher order, perhaps a higher brain
level and functions, is evolved. The practical implication here of the
necessity of hard concentrative effort as a condition of advancement
is re-enforced by a quotation from Senator Stanford on the effect of
early and rather intensive work at not too long periods in training
colts for racing. Let-ups are especially dangerous. He says, "It is
the supreme effort that develops." This, I may add, suggests what is
developed elsewhere, that truly spontaneous attention is conditioned
by spontaneous muscle tension, which is a function of growth, and that
muscles are thus organs of the mind; and also that even voluntary
attention is motivated by the same nisus of development even in its
most adult form, and that the products of science, invention,
discovery, as well as the association plexus of all that was