LACK OF OBSERVATION.

Waikato Times, Volume 96, Issue 15866, 12 December 1923, Page 4

LACK OF OBSERVATION.

K is permissible to wonder how many people who would dislike being called unobservant have been stimulated by the recent letters in our columns (remarks the London Times) to examine closely for the first time the design of the Treasury notes which slip so incessantly and so easily through their lingers. It is probable that lew had previously noticed what one correspondent styles the G 3 physique of St George on the £1 note, the hero's scanty and unbusinesslike! equipment, or his unsporting thrust at a dragon already in full flight. This general failure of observation is a striking instance of human blindness to the ordinary and the habitual. The instance docs not stand alone. A well known system of mind and memory training sought to bring home to its studonts the all but universal lack of observation of familiar things by requiring them, as one of their exercises, to name the colour of the eyes and hair of intimate friends, and to say from memory how the pictures were placed on the walls of their homes. The common frame of mind in these simple matters is not unlike the heedlessness of the Oxford or Cambridge undergraduate who finds that he barely knows one college from another, and certainly knows nothing about the interior of most of them, when ho makes the rounds with eager relatives crammed with the lore of guide books; or the limited curiosity of the Londoner who is shown his own sights by a country cousin. Though the symptoms are many, the malady is one. Familiarity broods nothing so active and vital as contempt, but the dull void of anaesthesia. The little happenings of everyday life come to be taken entirely for granted. By their very multiplicity and repetition they blunt our mental vision until we can no more sec distinctive features in them than in a flock of sheep or a dish ot peas. They lose their interest for us. Wc retaliate by becoming blind to them. There is, indeed, no cloak cf invisibility to compare with that of the familiar and the commonplace. But since Ihc lives of men arc largely compact of the little ordinary things, this failure of observation and appreciation has serious results. It means a blank and dreary life, without stimulus or colour. Hope lies in the reversing of the picture. For the fault is not in things, but in man himself. If they arc uninteresting it is because he is unseeing. Assiduous practice and stern self-compulsion may teacn him the lesson that the most trivial detail holds excitement and inspiration if he bestirs himself to give it due effort and attention. He finds that, while he has been asking petulantly that a sign should be given him, he has had his eyes light shut to the wonders of his door. The new vision works a miracle in his outlook on men and things. Nothing and no one is henceforth too mean or common for his attention. He linds everything interesting because he is interested in everything. To a faculty of observation so directed and developed the trivia] becomes the foreteller and forerunner for the great.