initial commit of ebook 16287HEADmain

11 files changed, 20279 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6833f05
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.gitattributes
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+* text=auto
+*.txt text
+*.md text
diff --git a/16287-8.txt b/16287-8.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..71e8fb5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/16287-8.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,6486 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To
+Students On Some Of Life's Ideals, by William James
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals
+
+Author: William James
+
+Release Date: July 13, 2005 [EBook #16287]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TALKS TO TEACHERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Newman, Dave Macfarlane and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+#TALKS TO TEACHERS#
+
+ON PSYCHOLOGY: AND TO
+STUDENTS ON SOME OF LIFE'S
+IDEALS, By WILLIAM JAMES
+
+#NEW YORK
+HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY#
+#1925#
+
+
+#COPYRIGHT, 1899, 1900#
+#BY WILLIAM JAMES#
+
+#PRESS OF GEO. H. ELLIS CO. (INC.) BOSTON#
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+In 1892 I was asked by the Harvard Corporation to give a few public
+lectures on psychology to the Cambridge teachers. The talks now printed
+form the substance of that course, which has since then been delivered
+at various places to various teacher-audiences. I have found by
+experience that what my hearers seem least to relish is analytical
+technicality, and what they most care for is concrete practical
+application. So I have gradually weeded out the former, and left the
+latter unreduced; and now, that I have at last written out the lectures,
+they contain a minimum of what is deemed 'scientific' in psychology, and
+are practical and popular in the extreme.
+
+Some of my colleagues may possibly shake their heads at this; but in
+taking my cue from what has seemed to me to be the feeling of the
+audiences I believe that I am shaping my book so as to satisfy the more
+genuine public need.
+
+Teachers, of course, will miss the minute divisions, subdivisions, and
+definitions, the lettered and numbered headings, the variations of type,
+and all the other mechanical artifices on which they are accustomed to
+prop their minds. But my main desire has been to make them conceive,
+and, if possible, reproduce sympathetically in their imagination, the
+mental life of their pupil as the sort of active unity which he himself
+feels it to be. _He_ doesn't chop himself into distinct processes and
+compartments; and it would have frustrated this deeper purpose of my
+book to make it look, when printed, like a Baedeker's handbook of travel
+or a text-book of arithmetic. So far as books printed like this book
+force the fluidity of the facts upon the young teacher's attention, so
+far I am sure they tend to do his intellect a service, even though they
+may leave unsatisfied a craving (not altogether without its legitimate
+grounds) for more nomenclature, head-lines, and subdivisions.
+
+Readers acquainted with my larger books on Psychology will meet much
+familiar phraseology. In the chapters on habit and memory I have even
+copied several pages verbatim, but I do not know that apology is needed
+for such plagiarism as this.
+
+The talks to students, which conclude the volume, were written in
+response to invitations to deliver 'addresses' to students at women's
+colleges. The first one was to the graduating class of the Boston Normal
+School of Gymnastics. Properly, it continues the series of talks to
+teachers. The second and the third address belong together, and continue
+another line of thought.
+
+I wish I were able to make the second, 'On a Certain Blindness in Human
+Beings,' more impressive. It is more than the mere piece of
+sentimentalism which it may seem to some readers. It connects itself
+with a definite view of the world and of our moral relations to the
+same. Those who have done me the honor of reading my volume of
+philosophic essays will recognize that I mean the pluralistic or
+individualistic philosophy. According to that philosophy, the truth is
+too great for any one actual mind, even though that mind be dubbed 'the
+Absolute,' to know the whole of it. The facts and worths of life need
+many cognizers to take them in. There is no point of view absolutely
+public and universal. Private and uncommunicable perceptions always
+remain over, and the worst of it is that those who look for them from
+the outside never know _where_.
+
+The practical consequence of such a philosophy is the well-known
+democratic respect for the sacredness of individuality,--is, at any
+rate, the outward tolerance of whatever is not itself intolerant. These
+phrases are so familiar that they sound now rather dead in our ears.
+Once they had a passionate inner meaning. Such a passionate inner
+meaning they may easily acquire again if the pretension of our nation
+to inflict its own inner ideals and institutions _vi et armis_ upon
+Orientals should meet with a resistance as obdurate as so far it has
+been gallant and spirited. Religiously and philosophically, our ancient
+national doctrine of live and let live may prove to have a far deeper
+meaning than our people now seem to imagine it to possess.
+
+CAMBRIDGE, MASS., March, 1899.
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+TALKS TO TEACHERS.
+
+I. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE TEACHING ART
+
+The American educational organization,--What teachers may expect from
+psychology,--Teaching methods must agree with psychology, but cannot
+be immediately deduced therefrom,--The science of teaching and the
+science of war,--The educational uses of psychology defined,--The
+teacher's duty toward child-study.
+
+II. THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
+
+Our mental life is a succession of conscious 'fields,'--They have a
+focus and a margin,--This description contrasted with the theory of
+'ideas,'--Wundt's conclusions, note.
+
+III. THE CHILD AS A BEHAVING ORGANISM
+
+Mind as pure reason and mind as practical guide,--The latter view the
+more fashionable one to-day,--It will be adopted in this work,--Why
+so?--The teacher's function is to train pupils to behavior.
+
+IV. EDUCATION AND BEHAVIOR
+
+Education defined,--Conduct is always its outcome,--Different
+national ideals: Germany and England.
+
+V. THE NECESSITY OF REACTIONS
+
+No impression without expression,--Verbal reproduction,--Manual
+training,--Pupils should know their 'marks'.
+
+VI. NATIVE AND ACQUIRED REACTIONS
+
+The acquired reactions must be preceded by native ones,--Illustration:
+teaching child to ask instead of snatching,--Man has more instincts than
+other mammals.
+
+VII. WHAT THE NATIVE REACTIONS ARE
+
+Fear and love,--Curiosity,--Imitation,--Emulation,--Forbidden by
+Rousseau,--His error,--Ambition, pugnacity, and pride. Soft
+pedagogics and the fighting impulse,--Ownership,--Its educational
+uses,--Constructiveness,--Manual teaching,--Transitoriness in
+instincts,--Their order of succession.
+
+VIII. THE LAWS OF HABIT
+
+Good and bad habits,--Habit due to plasticity of organic tissues,--The
+aim of education is to make useful habits automatic,--Maxims relative to
+habit-forming: 1. Strong initiative,--2. No exception,--3. Seize first
+opportunity to act,--4. Don't preach,--Darwin and poetry: without
+exercise our capacities decay,--The habit of mental and muscular
+relaxation,--Fifth maxim, keep the faculty of effort trained,--Sudden
+conversions compatible with laws of habit,--Momentous influence of
+habits on character.
+
+IX. THE ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS
+
+A case of habit,--The two laws, contiguity and similarity,--The teacher
+has to build up useful systems of association,--Habitual associations
+determine character,--Indeterminateness of our trains of
+association,--We can trace them backward, but not foretell
+them,--Interest deflects,--Prepotent parts of the field,--In teaching,
+multiply cues.
+
+X. INTEREST
+
+The child's native interests,--How uninteresting things acquire an
+interest,--Rules for the teacher,--'Preparation' of the mind for the
+lesson: the pupil must have something to attend with,--All later
+interests are borrowed from original ones.
+
+XI. ATTENTION
+
+Interest and attention are two aspects of one fact,--Voluntary attention
+comes in beats,--Genius and attention,--The subject must change to win
+attention,--Mechanical aids,--The physiological process,--The new in
+the old is what excites interest,--Interest and effort are
+compatible,--Mind-wandering,--Not fatal to mental efficiency.
+
+XII. MEMORY
+
+Due to association,--No recall without a cue,--Memory is due to
+brain-plasticity,--Native retentiveness,--Number of associations may
+practically be its equivalent,--Retentiveness is a fixed property of the
+individual,--Memory _versus_ memories,--Scientific system as help to
+memory,--Technical memories,--Cramming,--Elementary memory
+unimprovable,--Utility of verbal memorizing,--Measurements of immediate
+memory,--They throw little light,--Passion is the important factor in
+human efficiency,--Eye-memory, ear-memory, etc.,--The rate of
+forgetting, Ebbinghaus's results,--Influence of the unreproducible,--To
+remember, one must think and connect.
+
+XIII. THE ACQUISITION OF IDEAS
+
+Education gives a stock of conceptions,--The order of their
+acquisition,--Value of verbal material,--Abstractions of different
+orders: when are they assimilable,--False conceptions of children.
+
+XIV. APPERCEPTION
+
+Often a mystifying idea,--The process defined,--The law of
+economy,--Old-fogyism,--How many types of apperception?--New
+heads of classification must continually be invented,--Alteration of
+the apperceiving mass,--Class names are what we work by,--Few
+new fundamental conceptions acquired after twenty-five.
+
+XV. THE WILL
+
+The word defined,--All consciousness tends to action,--Ideo-motor
+action,--Inhibition,--The process of deliberation,--Why so few of our
+ideas result in acts,--The associationist account of the will,--A
+balance of impulses and inhibitions,--The over-impulsive and the
+over-obstructed type,--The perfect type,--The balky will,--What
+character building consists in,--Right action depends on right
+apperception of the case,--Effort of will is effort of attention: the
+drunkard's dilemma,--Vital importance of voluntary attention,--Its
+amount may be indeterminate,--Affirmation of free-will,--Two types of
+inhibition,--Spinoza on inhibition by a higher good,--Conclusion.
+
+
+TALKS TO STUDENTS.
+
+I. THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION
+
+II. ON A CERTAIN BLINDNESS IN HUMAN BEINGS
+
+III. WHAT MAKES A LIFE SIGNIFICANT?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+TALKS TO TEACHERS
+
+
+
+
+I. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE TEACHING ART
+
+
+In the general activity and uprising of ideal interests which every one
+with an eye for fact can discern all about us in American life, there is
+perhaps no more promising feature than the fermentation which for a
+dozen years or more has been going on among the teachers. In whatever
+sphere of education their functions may lie, there is to be seen among
+them a really inspiring amount of searching of the heart about the
+highest concerns of their profession. The renovation of nations begins
+always at the top, among the reflective members of the State, and
+spreads slowly outward and downward. The teachers of this country, one
+may say, have its future in their hands. The earnestness which they at
+present show in striving to enlighten and strengthen themselves is an
+index of the nation's probabilities of advance in all ideal directions.
+The outward organization of education which we have in our United States
+is perhaps, on the whole, the best organization that exists in any
+country. The State school systems give a diversity and flexibility, an
+opportunity for experiment and keenness of competition, nowhere else to
+be found on such an important scale. The independence of so many of the
+colleges and universities; the give and take of students and instructors
+between them all; their emulation, and their happy organic relations to
+the lower schools; the traditions of instruction in them, evolved from
+the older American recitation-method (and so avoiding on the one hand
+the pure lecture-system prevalent in Germany and Scotland, which
+considers too little the individual student, and yet not involving the
+sacrifice of the instructor to the individual student, which the English
+tutorial system would seem too often to entail),--all these things (to
+say nothing of that coeducation of the sexes in whose benefits so many
+of us heartily believe), all these things, I say, are most happy
+features of our scholastic life, and from them the most sanguine
+auguries may be drawn.
+
+Having so favorable an organization, all we need is to impregnate it
+with geniuses, to get superior men and women working more and more
+abundantly in it and for it and at it, and in a generation or two
+America may well lead the education of the world. I must say that I look
+forward with no little confidence to the day when that shall be an
+accomplished fact.
+
+No one has profited more by the fermentation of which I speak, in
+pedagogical circles, than we psychologists. The desire of the
+schoolteachers for a completer professional training, and their
+aspiration toward the 'professional' spirit in their work, have led them
+more and more to turn to us for light on fundamental principles. And in
+these few hours which we are to spend together you look to me, I am
+sure, for information concerning the mind's operations, which may enable
+you to labor more easily and effectively in the several schoolrooms over
+which you preside.
+
+Far be it from me to disclaim for psychology all title to such hopes.
+Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help. And yet I
+confess that, acquainted as I am with the height of some of your
+expectations, I feel a little anxious lest, at the end of these simple
+talks of mine, not a few of you may experience some disappointment at
+the net results. In other words, I am not sure that you may not be
+indulging fancies that are just a shade exaggerated. That would not be
+altogether astonishing, for we have been having something like a 'boom'
+in psychology in this country. Laboratories and professorships have been
+founded, and reviews established. The air has been full of rumors. The
+editors of educational journals and the arrangers of conventions have
+had to show themselves enterprising and on a level with the novelties of
+the day. Some of the professors have not been unwilling to co-operate,
+and I am not sure even that the publishers have been entirely inert.
+'The new psychology' has thus become a term to conjure up portentous
+ideas withal; and you teachers, docile and receptive and aspiring as
+many of you are, have been plunged in an atmosphere of vague talk about
+our science, which to a great extent has been more mystifying than
+enlightening. Altogether it does seem as if there were a certain
+fatality of mystification laid upon the teachers of our day. The matter
+of their profession, compact enough in itself, has to be frothed up for
+them in journals and institutes, till its outlines often threaten to be
+lost in a kind of vast uncertainty. Where the disciples are not
+independent and critical-minded enough (and I think that, if you
+teachers in the earlier grades have any defect--the slightest touch of a
+defect in the world--it is that you are a mite too docile), we are
+pretty sure to miss accuracy and balance and measure in those who get a
+license to lay down the law to them from above.
+
+As regards this subject of psychology, now, I wish at the very threshold
+to do what I can to dispel the mystification. So I say at once that in
+my humble opinion there _is_ no 'new psychology' worthy of the name.
+There is nothing but the old psychology which began in Locke's time,
+plus a little physiology of the brain and senses and theory of
+evolution, and a few refinements of introspective detail, for the most
+part without adaptation to the teacher's use. It is only the fundamental
+conceptions of psychology which are of real value to the teacher; and
+they, apart from the aforesaid theory of evolution, are very far from
+being new.--I trust that you will see better what I mean by this at the
+end of all these talks.
+
+I say moreover that you make a great, a very great mistake, if you think
+that psychology, being the science of the mind's laws, is something from
+which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of
+instruction for immediate schoolroom use. Psychology is a science, and
+teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of
+themselves. An intermediary inventive mind must make the application, by
+using its originality.
+
+The science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of
+ethics (if there be such a thing) never made a man behave rightly. The
+most such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and check
+ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly; and to criticise
+ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes. A science only
+lays down lines within which the rules of the art must fall, laws which
+the follower of the art must not transgress; but what particular thing
+he shall positively do within those lines is left exclusively to his own
+genius. One genius will do his work well and succeed in one way, while
+another succeeds as well quite differently; yet neither will transgress
+the lines.
+
+The art of teaching grew up in the schoolroom, out of inventiveness and
+sympathetic concrete observation. Even where (as in the case of Herbart)
+the advancer of the art was also a psychologist, the pedagogics and the
+psychology ran side by side, and the former was not derived in any sense
+from the latter. The two were congruent, but neither was subordinate.
+And so everywhere the teaching must _agree_ with the psychology, but
+need not necessarily be the only kind of teaching that would so agree;
+for many diverse methods of teaching may equally well agree with
+psychological laws.
+
+To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall
+be good teachers. To advance to that result, we must have an additional
+endowment altogether, a happy tact and ingenuity to tell us what
+definite things to say and do when the pupil is before us. That
+ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete
+situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are
+things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.
+
+The science of psychology, and whatever science of general pedagogics
+may be based on it, are in fact much like the science of war. Nothing is
+simpler or more definite than the principles of either. In war, all you
+have to do is to work your enemy into a position from which the natural
+obstacles prevent him from escaping if he tries to; then to fall on him
+in numbers superior to his own, at a moment when you have led him to
+think you far away; and so, with a minimum of exposure of your own
+troops, to hack his force to pieces, and take the remainder prisoners.
+Just so, in teaching, you must simply work your pupil into such a state
+of interest in what you are going to teach him that every other object
+of attention is banished from his mind; then reveal it to him so
+impressively that he will remember the occasion to his dying day; and
+finally fill him with devouring curiosity to know what the next steps in
+connection with the subject are. The principles being so plain, there
+would be nothing but victories for the masters of the science, either on
+the battlefield or in the schoolroom, if they did not both have to make
+their application to an incalculable quantity in the shape of the mind
+of their opponent. The mind of your own enemy, the pupil, is working
+away from you as keenly and eagerly as is the mind of the commander on
+the other side from the scientific general. Just what the respective
+enemies want and think, and what they know and do not know, are as hard
+things for the teacher as for the general to find out. Divination and
+perception, not psychological pedagogics or theoretic strategy, are the
+only helpers here.
+
+But, if the use of psychological principles thus be negative rather than
+positive, it does not follow that it may not be a great use, all the
+same. It certainly narrows the path for experiments and trials. We know
+in advance, if we are psychologists, that certain methods will be wrong,
+so our psychology saves us from mistakes. It makes us, moreover, more
+clear as to what we are about. We gain confidence in respect to any
+method which we are using as soon as we believe that it has theory as
+well as practice at its back. Most of all, it fructifies our
+independence, and it reanimates our interest, to see our subject at two
+different angles,--to get a stereoscopic view, so to speak, of the
+youthful organism who is our enemy, and, while handling him with all our
+concrete tact and divination, to be able, at the same time, to represent
+to ourselves the curious inner elements of his mental machine. Such a
+complete knowledge as this of the pupil, at once intuitive and analytic,
+is surely the knowledge at which every teacher ought to aim.
+
+Fortunately for you teachers, the elements of the mental machine can be
+clearly apprehended, and their workings easily grasped. And, as the most
+general elements and workings are just those parts of psychology which
+the teacher finds most directly useful, it follows that the amount of
+this science which is necessary to all teachers need not be very great.
+Those who find themselves loving the subject may go as far as they
+please, and become possibly none the worse teachers for the fact, even
+though in some of them one might apprehend a little loss of balance from
+the tendency observable in all of us to overemphasize certain special
+parts of a subject when we are studying it intensely and abstractly. But
+for the great majority of you a general view is enough, provided it be a
+true one; and such a general view, one may say, might almost be written
+on the palm of one's hand.
+
+Least of all need you, merely _as teachers_, deem it part of your duty
+to become contributors to psychological science or to make psychological
+observations in a methodical or responsible manner. I fear that some of
+the enthusiasts for child-study have thrown a certain burden on you in
+this way. By all means let child-study go on,--it is refreshing all our
+sense of the child's life. There are teachers who take a spontaneous
+delight in filling syllabuses, inscribing observations, compiling
+statistics, and computing the per cent. Child-study will certainly
+enrich their lives. And, if its results, as treated statistically, would
+seem on the whole to have but trifling value, yet the anecdotes and
+observations of which it in part consist do certainly acquaint us more
+intimately with our pupils. Our eyes and ears grow quickened to discern
+in the child before us processes similar to those we have read of as
+noted in the children,--processes of which we might otherwise have
+remained inobservant. But, for Heaven's sake, let the rank and file of
+teachers be passive readers if they so prefer, and feel free not to
+contribute to the accumulation. Let not the prosecution of it be
+preached as an imperative duty or imposed by regulation on those to whom
+it proves an exterminating bore, or who in any way whatever miss in
+themselves the appropriate vocation for it. I cannot too strongly agree
+with my colleague, Professor Münsterberg, when he says that the
+teacher's attitude toward the child, being concrete and ethical, is
+positively opposed to the psychological observer's, which is abstract
+and analytic. Although some of us may conjoin the attitudes
+successfully, in most of us they must conflict.
+
+The worst thing that can happen to a good teacher is to get a bad
+conscience about her profession because she feels herself hopeless as a
+psychologist. Our teachers are overworked already. Every one who adds a
+jot or tittle of unnecessary weight to their burden is a foe of
+education. A bad conscience increases the weight of every other burden;
+yet I know that child-study, and other pieces of psychology as well,
+have been productive of bad conscience in many a really innocent
+pedagogic breast. I should indeed be glad if this passing word from me
+might tend to dispel such a bad conscience, if any of you have it; for
+it is certainly one of those fruits of more or less systematic
+mystification of which I have already complained. The best teacher may
+be the poorest contributor of child-study material, and the best
+contributor may be the poorest teacher. No fact is more palpable than
+this.
+
+So much for what seems the most reasonable general attitude of the
+teacher toward the subject which is to occupy our attention.
+
+
+
+
+II. THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
+
+
+I said a few minutes ago that the most general elements and workings of
+the mind are all that the teacher absolutely needs to be acquainted with
+for his purposes.
+
+Now the _immediate_ fact which psychology, the science of mind, has to
+study is also the most general fact. It is the fact that in each of us,
+when awake (and often when asleep), _some kind of consciousness is
+always going on_. There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves,
+or fields (or of whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of
+feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and
+repass, and that constitute our inner life. The existence of this stream
+is the primal fact, the nature and origin of it form the essential
+problem, of our science. So far as we class the states or fields of
+consciousness, write down their several natures, analyze their contents
+into elements, or trace their habits of succession, we are on the
+descriptive or analytic level. So far as we ask where they come from or
+why they are just what they are, we are on the explanatory level.
+
+In these talks with you, I shall entirely neglect the questions that
+come up on the explanatory level. It must be frankly confessed that in
+no fundamental sense do we know where our successive fields of
+consciousness come from, or why they have the precise inner constitution
+which they do have. They certainly follow or accompany our brain states,
+and of course their special forms are determined by our past experiences
+and education. But, if we ask just _how_ the brain conditions them, we
+have not the remotest inkling of an answer to give; and, if we ask just
+how the education moulds the brain, we can speak but in the most
+abstract, general, and conjectural terms. On the other hand, if we
+should say that they are due to a spiritual being called our Soul, which
+reacts on our brain states by these peculiar forms of spiritual energy,
+our words would be familiar enough, it is true; but I think you will
+agree that they would offer little genuine explanatory meaning. The
+truth is that we really _do not know_ the answers to the problems on the
+explanatory level, even though in some directions of inquiry there may
+be promising speculations to be found. For our present purposes I shall
+therefore dismiss them entirely, and turn to mere description. This
+state of things was what I had in mind when, a moment ago, I said there
+was no 'new psychology' worthy of the name.
+
+_We have thus fields of consciousness_,--that is the first general fact;
+and the second general fact is that the concrete fields are always
+complex. They contain sensations of our bodies and of the objects around
+us, memories of past experiences and thoughts of distant things,
+feelings of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, desires and aversions, and
+other emotional conditions, together with determinations of the will, in
+every variety of permutation and combination.
+
+In most of our concrete states of consciousness all these different
+classes of ingredients are found simultaneously present to some degree,
+though the relative proportion they bear to one another is very
+shifting. One state will seem to be composed of hardly anything but
+sensations, another of hardly anything but memories, etc. But around the
+sensation, if one consider carefully, there will always be some fringe
+of thought or will, and around the memory some margin or penumbra of
+emotion or sensation.
+
+In most of our fields of consciousness there is a core of sensation that
+is very pronounced. You, for example, now, although you are also
+thinking and feeling, are getting through your eyes sensations of my
+face and figure, and through your ears sensations of my voice. The
+sensations are the _centre_ or _focus_, the thoughts and feelings the
+_margin_, of your actually present conscious field.
+
+On the other hand, some object of thought, some distant image, may have
+become the focus of your mental attention even while I am
+speaking,--your mind, in short, may have wandered from the lecture; and,
+in that case, the sensations of my face and voice, although not
+absolutely vanishing from your conscious field, may have taken up there
+a very faint and marginal place.
+
+Again, to take another sort of variation, some feeling connected with
+your own body may have passed from a marginal to a focal place, even
+while I speak.
+
+The expressions 'focal object' and 'marginal object,' which we owe to
+Mr. Lloyd Morgan, require, I think, no further explanation. The
+distinction they embody is a very important one, and they are the first
+technical terms which I shall ask you to remember.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the successive mutations of our fields of consciousness, the process
+by which one dissolves into another is often very gradual, and all sorts
+of inner rearrangements of contents occur. Sometimes the focus remains
+but little changed, while the margin alters rapidly. Sometimes the focus
+alters, and the margin stays. Sometimes focus and margin change places.
+Sometimes, again, abrupt alterations of the whole field occur. There can
+seldom be a sharp description. All we know is that, for the most part,
+each field has a sort of practical unity for its possessor, and that
+from this practical point of view we can class a field with other fields
+similar to it, by calling it a state of emotion, of perplexity, of
+sensation, of abstract thought, of volition, and the like.
+
+Vague and hazy as such an account of our stream of consciousness may be,
+it is at least secure from positive error and free from admixture of
+conjecture or hypothesis. An influential school of psychology, seeking
+to avoid haziness of outline, has tried to make things appear more exact
+and scientific by making the analysis more sharp.
+
+The various fields of consciousness, according to this school, result
+from a definite number of perfectly definite elementary mental states,
+mechanically associated into a mosaic or chemically combined. According
+to some thinkers,--Spencer, for example, or Taine,--these resolve
+themselves at last into little elementary psychic particles or atoms of
+'mind-stuff,' out of which all the more immediately known mental states
+are said to be built up. Locke introduced this theory in a somewhat
+vague form. Simple 'ideas' of sensation and reflection, as he called
+them, were for him the bricks of which our mental architecture is built
+up. If I ever have to refer to this theory again, I shall refer to it as
+the theory of 'ideas.' But I shall try to steer clear of it altogether.
+Whether it be true or false, it is at any rate only conjectural; and,
+for your practical purposes as teachers, the more unpretending
+conception of the stream of consciousness, with its total waves or
+fields incessantly changing, will amply suffice.[A]
+
+     [A] In the light of some of the expectations that are abroad
+     concerning the 'new psychology,' it is instructive to read
+     the unusually candid confession of its founder Wundt, after
+     his thirty years of laboratory-experience:
+
+     "The service which it [the experimental method] can yield
+     consists essentially in perfecting our inner observation, or
+     rather, as I believe, in making this really possible, in any
+     exact sense. Well, has our experimental self-observation, so
+     understood, already accomplished aught of importance? No
+     general answer to this question can be given, because in the
+     unfinished state of our science, there is, even inside of the
+     experimental lines of inquiry, no universally accepted body
+     of psychologic doctrine....
+
+     "In such a discord of opinions (comprehensible enough at a
+     time of uncertain and groping development), the individual
+     inquirer can only tell for what views and insights he himself
+     has to thank the newer methods. And if I were asked in what
+     for me the worth of experimental observation in psychology
+     has consisted, and still consists, I should say that it has
+     given me an entirely new idea of the nature and connection of
+     our inner processes. I learned in the achievements of the
+     sense of sight to apprehend the fact of creative mental
+     synthesis.... From my inquiry into time-relations, etc.,... I
+     attained an insight into the close union of all those psychic
+     functions usually separated by artificial abstractions and
+     names, such as ideation, feeling, will; and I saw the
+     indivisibility and inner homogeneity, in all its phases, of
+     the mental life. The chronometric study of
+     association-processes finally showed me that the notion of
+     distinct mental 'images' [_reproducirten Vorstellungen_] was
+     one of those numerous self-deceptions which are no sooner
+     stamped in a verbal term than they forthwith thrust
+     non-existent fictions into the place of the reality. I
+     learned to understand an 'idea' as a process no less melting
+     and fleeting than an act of feeling or of will, and I
+     comprehended the older doctrine of association of 'ideas' to
+     be no longer tenable.... Besides all this, experimental
+     observation yielded much other information about the span of
+     consciousness, the rapidity of certain processes, the exact
+     numerical value of certain psychophysical data, and the like.
+     But I hold all these more special results to be relatively
+     insignificant by-products, and by no means the important
+     thing."--_Philosophische Studien_, x. 121-124. The whole
+     passage should be read. As I interpret it, it amounts to a
+     complete espousal of the vaguer conception of the stream of
+     thought, and a complete renunciation of the whole business,
+     still so industriously carried on in text-books, of chopping
+     up 'the mind' into distinct units of composition or function,
+     numbering these off, and labelling them by technical names.
+
+
+
+
+III. THE CHILD AS A BEHAVING ORGANISM
+
+
+I wish now to continue the description of the peculiarities of the
+stream of consciousness by asking whether we can in any intelligible way
+assign its _functions_.
+
+It has two functions that are obvious: it leads to knowledge, and it
+leads to action.
+
+Can we say which of these functions is the more essential?
+
+An old historic divergence of opinion comes in here. Popular belief has
+always tended to estimate the worth of a man's mental processes by their
+effects upon his practical life. But philosophers have usually cherished
+a different view. "Man's supreme glory," they have said, "is to be a
+_rational_ being, to know absolute and eternal and universal truth. The
+uses of his intellect for practical affairs are therefore subordinate
+matters. 'The theoretic life' is his soul's genuine concern." Nothing
+can be more different in its results for our personal attitude than to
+take sides with one or the other of these views, and emphasize the
+practical or the theoretical ideal. In the latter case, abstraction from
+the emotions and passions and withdrawal from the strife of human
+affairs would be not only pardonable, but praiseworthy; and all that
+makes for quiet and contemplation should be regarded as conducive to the
+highest human perfection. In the former, the man of contemplation would
+be treated as only half a human being, passion and practical resource
+would become once more glories of our race, a concrete victory over this
+earth's outward powers of darkness would appear an equivalent for any
+amount of passive spiritual culture, and conduct would remain as the
+test of every education worthy of the name.
+
+It is impossible to disguise the fact that in the psychology of our own
+day the emphasis is transferred from the mind's purely rational
+function, where Plato and Aristotle, and what one may call the whole
+classic tradition in philosophy had placed it, to the so long neglected
+practical side. The theory of evolution is mainly responsible for this.
+Man, we now have reason to believe, has been evolved from infra-human
+ancestors, in whom pure reason hardly existed, if at all, and whose
+mind, so far as it can have had any function, would appear to have been
+an organ for adapting their movements to the impressions received from
+the environment, so as to escape the better from destruction.
+Consciousness would thus seem in the first instance to be nothing but a
+sort of super-added biological perfection,--useless unless it prompted
+to useful conduct, and inexplicable apart from that consideration.
+
+Deep in our own nature the biological foundations of our consciousness
+persist, undisguised and undiminished. Our sensations are here to
+attract us or to deter us, our memories to warn or encourage us, our
+feelings to impel, and our thoughts to restrain our behavior, so that on
+the whole we may prosper and our days be long in the land. Whatever of
+transmundane metaphysical insight or of practically inapplicable
+ęsthetic perception or ethical sentiment we may carry in our interiors
+might at this rate be regarded as only part of the incidental excess of
+function that necessarily accompanies the working of every complex
+machine.
+
+I shall ask you now--not meaning at all thereby to close the theoretic
+question, but merely because it seems to me the point of view likely to
+be of greatest practical use to you as teachers--to adopt with me, in
+this course of lectures, the biological conception, as thus expressed,
+and to lay your own emphasis on the fact that man, whatever else he may
+be, is primarily a practical being, whose mind is given him to aid in
+adapting him to this world's life.
+
+In the learning of all matters, we have to start with some one deep
+aspect of the question, abstracting it as if it were the only aspect;
+and then we gradually correct ourselves by adding those neglected other
+features which complete the case. No one believes more strongly than I
+do that what our senses know as 'this world' is only one portion of our
+mind's total environment and object. Yet, because it is the primal
+portion, it is the _sine qua non_ of all the rest. If you grasp the facts
+about it firmly, you may proceed to higher regions undisturbed. As our
+time must be so short together, I prefer being elementary and
+fundamental to being complete, so I propose to you to hold fast to the
+ultra-simple point of view.
+
+The reasons why I call it so fundamental can be easily told.
+
+First, human and animal psychology thereby become less discontinuous. I
+know that to some of you this will hardly seem an attractive reason,
+but there are others whom it will affect.
+
+Second, mental action is conditioned by brain action, and runs parallel
+therewith. But the brain, so far as we understand it, is given us for
+practical behavior. Every current that runs into it from skin or eye or
+ear runs out again into muscles, glands, or viscera, and helps to adapt
+the animal to the environment from which the current came. It therefore
+generalizes and simplifies our view to treat the brain life and the
+mental life as having one fundamental kind of purpose.
+
+Third, those very functions of the mind that do not refer directly to
+this world's environment, the ethical utopias, ęsthetic visions,
+insights into eternal truth, and fanciful logical combinations, could
+never be carried on at all by a human individual, unless the mind that
+produced them in him were also able to produce more practically useful
+products. The latter are thus the more essential, or at least the more
+primordial results.
+
+Fourth, the inessential 'unpractical' activities are themselves far more
+connected with our behavior and our adaptation to the environment than
+at first sight might appear. No truth, however abstract, is ever
+perceived, that will not probably at some time influence our earthly
+action. You must remember that, when I talk of action here, I mean
+action in the widest sense. I mean speech, I mean writing, I mean yeses
+and noes, and tendencies 'from' things and tendencies 'toward' things,
+and emotional determinations; and I mean them in the future as well as
+in the immediate present. As I talk here, and you listen, it might seem
+as if no action followed. You might call it a purely theoretic process,
+with no practical result. But it _must_ have a practical result. It
+cannot take place at all and leave your conduct unaffected. If not
+to-day, then on some far future day, you will answer some question
+differently by reason of what you are thinking now. Some of you will be
+led by my words into new veins of inquiry, into reading special books.
+These will develop your opinion, whether for or against. That opinion
+will in turn be expressed, will receive criticism from others in your
+environment, and will affect your standing in their eyes. We cannot
+escape our destiny, which is practical; and even our most theoretic
+faculties contribute to its working out.
+
+These few reasons will perhaps smooth the way for you to acquiescence
+in my proposal. As teachers, I sincerely think it will be a sufficient
+conception for you to adopt of the youthful psychological phenomena
+handed over to your inspection if you consider them from the point of
+view of their relation to the future conduct of their possessor.
+Sufficient at any rate as a first conception and as a main conception.
+You should regard your professional task as if it consisted chiefly and
+essentially in _training the pupil to behavior_; taking behavior, not in
+the narrow sense of his manners, but in the very widest possible sense,
+as including every possible sort of fit reaction on the circumstances
+into which he may find himself brought by the vicissitudes of life.
+
+The reaction may, indeed, often be a negative reaction. _Not_ to speak,
+_not_ to move, is one of the most important of our duties, in certain
+practical emergencies. "Thou shalt refrain, renounce, abstain"! This
+often requires a great effort of will power, and, physiologically
+considered, is just as positive a nerve function as is motor discharge.
+
+
+
+
+IV. EDUCATION AND BEHAVIOR
+
+
+In our foregoing talk we were led to frame a very simple conception of
+what an education means. In the last analysis it consists in the
+organizing of _resources_ in the human being, of powers of conduct which
+shall fit him to his social and physical world. An 'uneducated' person
+is one who is nonplussed by all but the most habitual situations. On the
+contrary, one who is educated is able practically to extricate himself,
+by means of the examples with which his memory is stored and of the
+abstract conceptions which he has acquired, from circumstances in which
+he never was placed before. Education, in short, cannot be better
+described than by calling it _the organization of acquired habits of
+conduct and tendencies to behavior_.
+
+To illustrate. You and I are each and all of us educated, in our several
+ways; and we show our education at this present moment by different
+conduct. It would be quite impossible for me, with my mind technically
+and professionally organized as it is, and with the optical stimulus
+which your presence affords, to remain sitting here entirely silent and
+inactive. Something tells me that I am expected to speak, and must
+speak; something forces me to keep on speaking. My organs of
+articulation are continuously innervated by outgoing currents, which the
+currents passing inward at my eyes and through my educated brain have
+set in motion; and the particular movements which they make have their
+form and order determined altogether by the training of all my past
+years of lecturing and reading. Your conduct, on the other hand, might
+seem at first sight purely receptive and inactive,--leaving out those
+among you who happen to be taking notes. But the very listening which
+you are carrying on is itself a determinate kind of conduct. All the
+muscular tensions of your body are distributed in a peculiar way as you
+listen. Your head, your eyes, are fixed characteristically. And, when
+the lecture is over, it will inevitably eventuate in some stroke of
+behavior, as I said on the previous occasion: you may be guided
+differently in some special emergency in the schoolroom by words
+which I now let fall.--So it is with the impressions you will make
+there on your pupil. You should get into the habit of regarding them
+all as leading to the acquisition by him of capacities for
+behavior,--emotional, social, bodily, vocal, technical, or what not.
+And, this being the case, you ought to feel willing, in a general way,
+and without hair-splitting or farther ado, to take up for the purposes
+of these lectures with the biological conception of the mind, as of
+something given us for practical use. That conception will certainly
+cover the greater part of your own educational work.
+
+If we reflect upon the various ideals of education that are prevalent in
+the different countries, we see that what they all aim at is to organize
+capacities for conduct. This is most immediately obvious in Germany,
+where the explicitly avowed aim of the higher education is to turn the
+student into an instrument for advancing scientific discovery. The
+German universities are proud of the number of young specialists whom
+they turn out every year,--not necessarily men of any original force of
+intellect, but men so trained to research that when their professor
+gives them an historical or philological thesis to prepare, or a bit of
+laboratory work to do, with a general indication as to the best method,
+they can go off by themselves and use apparatus and consult sources in
+such a way as to grind out in the requisite number of months some little
+pepper-corn of new truth worthy of being added to the store of extant
+human information on that subject. Little else is recognized in Germany
+as a man's title to academic advancement than his ability thus to show
+himself an efficient instrument of research.
+
+In England, it might seem at first sight as if the higher education of
+the universities aimed at the production of certain static types of
+character rather than at the development of what one may call this
+dynamic scientific efficiency. Professor Jowett, when asked what Oxford
+could do for its students, is said to have replied, "Oxford can teach an
+English gentleman how to _be_ an English gentleman." But, if you ask
+what it means to 'be' an English gentleman, the only reply is in terms
+of conduct and behavior. An English gentleman is a bundle of
+specifically qualified reactions, a creature who for all the emergencies
+of life has his line of behavior distinctly marked out for him in
+advance. Here, as elsewhere, England expects every man to do his duty.
+
+
+
+
+V. THE NECESSITY OF REACTIONS
+
+
+If all this be true, then immediately one general aphorism emerges which
+ought by logical right to dominate the entire conduct of the teacher in
+the classroom.
+
+_No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative
+expression_,--this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to
+forget.
+
+An impression which simply flows in at the pupil's eyes or ears, and in
+no way modifies his active life, is an impression gone to waste. It is
+physiologically incomplete. It leaves no fruits behind it in the way of
+capacity acquired. Even as mere impression, it fails to produce its
+proper effect upon the memory; for, to remain fully among the
+acquisitions of this latter faculty, it must be wrought into the whole
+cycle of our operations. Its _motor consequences_ are what clinch it.
+Some effect due to it in the way of an activity must return to the mind
+in the form of the _sensation of having acted_, and connect itself with
+the impression. The most durable impressions are those on account of
+which we speak or act, or else are inwardly convulsed.
+
+The older pedagogic method of learning things by rote, and reciting them
+parrot-like in the schoolroom, rested on the truth that a thing merely
+read or heard, and never verbally reproduced, contracts the weakest
+possible adhesion in the mind. Verbal recitation or reproduction is thus
+a highly important kind of reactive behavior on our impressions; and it
+is to be feared that, in the reaction against the old parrot-recitations
+as the beginning and end of instruction, the extreme value of verbal
+recitation as an element of complete training may nowadays be too much
+forgotten.
+
+When we turn to modern pedagogics, we see how enormously the field of
+reactive conduct has been extended by the introduction of all those
+methods of concrete object teaching which are the glory of our
+contemporary schools. Verbal reactions, useful as they are, are
+insufficient. The pupil's words may be right, but the conceptions
+corresponding to them are often direfully wrong. In a modern school,
+therefore, they form only a small part of what the pupil is required to
+do. He must keep notebooks, make drawings, plans, and maps, take
+measurements, enter the laboratory and perform experiments, consult
+authorities, and write essays. He must do in his fashion what is often
+laughed at by outsiders when it appears in prospectuses under the title
+of 'original work,' but what is really the only possible training for
+the doing of original work thereafter. The most colossal improvement
+which recent years have seen in secondary education lies in the
+introduction of the manual training schools; not because they will give
+us a people more handy and practical for domestic life and better
+skilled in trades, but because they will give us citizens with an
+entirely different intellectual fibre. Laboratory work and shop work
+engender a habit of observation, a knowledge of the difference between
+accuracy and vagueness, and an insight into nature's complexity and into
+the inadequacy of all abstract verbal accounts of real phenomena, which
+once wrought into the mind, remain there as lifelong possessions. They
+confer precision; because, if you are _doing_ a thing, you must do it
+definitely right or definitely wrong. They give honesty; for, when you
+express yourself by making things, and not by using words, it becomes
+impossible to dissimulate your vagueness or ignorance by ambiguity.
+They beget a habit of self-reliance; they keep the interest and
+attention always cheerfully engaged, and reduce the teacher's
+disciplinary functions to a minimum.
+
+Of the various systems of manual training, so far as woodwork is
+concerned, the Swedish Sloyd system, if I may have an opinion on such
+matters, seems to me by far the best, psychologically considered. Manual
+training methods, fortunately, are being slowly but surely introduced
+into all our large cities. But there is still an immense distance to
+traverse before they shall have gained the extension which they are
+destined ultimately to possess.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+No impression without expression, then,--that is the first pedagogic
+fruit of our evolutionary conception of the mind as something
+instrumental to adaptive behavior. But a word may be said in
+continuation. The expression itself comes back to us, as I intimated a
+moment ago, in the form of a still farther impression,--the impression,
+namely, of what we have done. We thus receive sensible news of our
+behavior and its results. We hear the words we have spoken, feel our own
+blow as we give it, or read in the bystander's eyes the success or
+failure of our conduct. Now this return wave of impression pertains to
+the completeness of the whole experience, and a word about its
+importance in the schoolroom may not be out of place.
+
+It would seem only natural to say that, since after acting we normally
+get some return impression of result, it must be well to let the pupil
+get such a return impression in every possible case. Nevertheless, in
+schools where examination marks and 'standing' and other returns of
+result are concealed, the pupil is frustrated of this natural
+termination of the cycle of his activities, and often suffers from the
+sense of incompleteness and uncertainty; and there are persons who
+defend this system as encouraging the pupil to work for the work's sake,
+and not for extraneous reward. Of course, here as elsewhere, concrete
+experience must prevail over psychological deduction. But, so far as our
+psychological deduction goes, it would suggest that the pupil's
+eagerness to know how well he does is in the line of his normal
+completeness of function, and should never be balked except for very
+definite reasons indeed.
+
+Acquaint them, therefore, with their marks and standing and prospects,
+unless in the individual case you have some special practical reason for
+not so doing.
+
+
+
+
+VI. NATIVE REACTIONS AND ACQUIRED REACTIONS
+
+
+We are by this time fully launched upon the biological conception. Man
+is an organism for reacting on impressions: his mind is there to help
+determine his reactions, and the purpose of his education is to make
+them numerous and perfect. _Our education means, in short, little more
+than a mass of possibilities of reaction,_ acquired at home, at school,
+or in the training of affairs. The teacher's task is that of supervising
+the acquiring process.
+
+This being the case, I will immediately state a principle which
+underlies the whole process of acquisition and governs the entire
+activity of the teacher. It is this:--
+
+_Every acquired reaction is, as a rule, either a complication grafted on
+a native reaction, or a substitute for a native reaction, which the same
+object originally tended to provoke._
+
+_The teacher's art consists in bringing about the substitution or
+complication, and success in the art presupposes a sympathetic
+acquaintance with the reactive tendencies natively there_.
+
+Without an equipment of native reactions on the child's part, the
+teacher would have no hold whatever upon the child's attention or
+conduct. You may take a horse to the water, but you cannot make him
+drink; and so you may take a child to the schoolroom, but you cannot
+make him learn the new things you wish to impart, except by soliciting
+him in the first instance by something which natively makes him react.
+He must take the first step himself. He must _do_ something before you
+can get your purchase on him. That something may be something good or
+something bad. A bad reaction is better than no reaction at all; for, if
+bad, you can couple it with consequences which awake him to its badness.
+But imagine a child so lifeless as to react in _no_ way to the teacher's
+first appeals, and how can you possibly take the first step in his
+education?
+
+To make this abstract conception more concrete, assume the case of a
+young child's training in good manners. The child has a native tendency
+to snatch with his hands at anything that attracts his curiosity; also
+to draw back his hands when slapped, to cry under these latter
+conditions, to smile when gently spoken to, and to imitate one's
+gestures.
+
+Suppose now you appear before the child with a new toy intended as a
+present for him. No sooner does he see the toy than he seeks to snatch
+it. You slap the hand; it is withdrawn, and the child cries. You then
+hold up the toy, smiling and saying, "Beg for it nicely,--so!" The child
+stops crying, imitates you, receives the toy, and crows with pleasure;
+and that little cycle of training is complete. You have substituted the
+new reaction of 'begging' for the native reaction of snatching, when
+that kind of impression comes.
+
+Now, if the child had no memory, the process would not be educative. No
+matter how often you came in with a toy, the same series of reactions
+would fatally occur, each called forth by its own impression: see,
+snatch; slap, cry; hear, ask; receive, smile. But, with memory there,
+the child, at the very instant of snatching, recalls the rest of the
+earlier experience, thinks of the slap and the frustration, recollects
+the begging and the reward, inhibits the snatching impulse, substitutes
+the 'nice' reaction for it, and gets the toy immediately, by eliminating
+all the intermediary steps. If a child's first snatching impulse be
+excessive or his memory poor, many repetitions of the discipline may be
+needed before the acquired reaction comes to be an ingrained habit; but
+in an eminently educable child a single experience will suffice.
+
+One can easily represent the whole process by a brain-diagram. Such a
+diagram can be little more than a symbolic translation of the immediate
+experience into spatial terms; yet it may be useful, so I subjoin it.
+
+[Illustration: FIGURE 1. THE BRAIN-PROCESSES BEFORE EDUCATION.]
+
+Figure 1 shows the paths of the four successive reflexes executed by the
+lower or instinctive centres. The dotted lines that lead from them to
+the higher centres and connect the latter together, represent the
+processes of memory and association which the reactions impress upon the
+higher centres as they take place.
+
+[Illustration: FIGURE 2. THE BRAIN-PROCESS AFTER EDUCATION.]
+
+In Figure 2 we have the final result. The impression _see_ awakens the
+chain of memories, and the only reactions that take place are the _beg_
+and _smile_. The thought of the _slap_, connected with the activity of
+Centre 2, inhibits the _snatch_, and makes it abortive, so it is
+represented only by a dotted line of discharge not reaching the
+terminus. Ditto of the _cry_ reaction. These are, as it were,
+short-circuited by the current sweeping through the higher centres from
+_see_ to _smile_. _Beg_ and _smile_, thus substituted for the original
+reaction _snatch_, become at last the immediate responses when the
+child sees a snatchable object in some one's hands.
+
+The first thing, then, for the teacher to understand is the native
+reactive tendencies,--the impulses and instincts of childhood,--so as to
+be able to substitute one for another, and turn them on to artificial
+objects.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is often said that man is distinguished from the lower animals by
+having a much smaller assortment of native instincts and impulses than
+they, but this is a great mistake. Man, of course, has not the
+marvellous egg-laying instincts which some articulates have; but, if we
+compare him with the mammalia, we are forced to confess that he is
+appealed to by a much larger array of objects than any other mammal,
+that his reactions on these objects are characteristic and determinate
+in a very high degree. The monkeys, and especially the anthropoids, are
+the only beings that approach him in their analytic curiosity and width
+of imitativeness. His instinctive impulses, it is true, get overlaid by
+the secondary reactions due to his superior reasoning power; but thus
+man loses the _simply_ instinctive demeanor. But the life of instinct
+is only disguised in him, not lost; and when the higher brain-functions
+are in abeyance, as happens in imbecility or dementia, his instincts
+sometimes show their presence in truly brutish ways.
+
+I will therefore say a few words about those instinctive tendencies
+which are the most important from the teacher's point of view.
+
+
+
+
+VII. WHAT THE NATIVE REACTIONS ARE
+
+
+First of all, _Fear_. Fear of punishment has always been the great
+weapon of the teacher, and will always, of course, retain some place in
+the conditions of the schoolroom. The subject is so familiar that
+nothing more need be said about it.
+
+The same is true of _Love_, and the instinctive desire to please those
+whom we love. The teacher who succeeds in getting herself loved by the
+pupils will obtain results which one of a more forbidding temperament
+finds it impossible to secure.
+
+Next, a word might be said about _Curiosity_. This is perhaps a rather
+poor term by which to designate the _impulse toward better cognition_ in
+its full extent; but you will readily understand what I mean. Novelties
+in the way of sensible objects, especially if their sensational quality
+is bright, vivid, startling, invariably arrest the attention of the
+young and hold it until the desire to know more about the object is
+assuaged. In its higher, more intellectual form, the impulse toward
+completer knowledge takes the character of scientific or philosophic
+curiosity. In both its sensational and its intellectual form the
+instinct is more vivacious during childhood and youth than in after
+life. Young children are possessed by curiosity about every new
+impression that assails them. It would be quite impossible for a young
+child to listen to a lecture for more than a few minutes, as you are now
+listening to me. The outside sights and sounds would inevitably carry
+his attention off. And, for most people in middle life, the sort of
+intellectual effort required of the average schoolboy in mastering his
+Greek or Latin lesson, his algebra or physics, would be out of the
+question. The middle-aged citizen attends exclusively to the routine
+details of his business; and new truths, especially when they require
+involved trains of close reasoning, are no longer within the scope of
+his capacity.
+
+The sensational curiosity of childhood is appealed to more particularly
+by certain determinate kinds of objects. Material things, things that
+move, living things, human actions and accounts of human action, will
+win the attention better than anything that is more abstract. Here again
+comes in the advantage of the object-teaching and manual training
+methods. The pupil's attention is spontaneously held by any problem that
+involves the presentation of a new material object or of an activity on
+any one's part. The teacher's earliest appeals, therefore, must be
+through objects shown or acts performed or described. Theoretic
+curiosity, curiosity about the rational relations between things, can
+hardly be said to awake at all until adolescence is reached. The
+sporadic metaphysical inquiries of children as to who made God, and why
+they have five fingers, need hardly be counted here. But, when the
+theoretic instinct is once alive in the pupil, an entirely new order of
+pedagogic relations begins for him. Reasons, causes, abstract
+conceptions, suddenly grow full of zest, a fact with which all teachers
+are familiar. And, both in its sensible and in its rational
+developments, disinterested curiosity may be successfully appealed to in
+the child with much more certainty than in the adult, in whom this
+intellectual instinct has grown so torpid as usually never to awake
+unless it enters into association with some selfish personal interest.
+Of this latter point I will say more anon.
+
+_Imitation_. Man has always been recognized as the imitative animal
+_par excellence_. And there is hardly a book on psychology, however old,
+which has not devoted at least one paragraph to this fact. It is
+strange, however, that the full scope and pregnancy of the imitative
+impulse in man has had to wait till the last dozen years to become
+adequately recognized. M. Tarde led the way in his admirably original
+work, "Les Lois de l'Imitation"; and in our own country Professors Royce
+and Baldwin have kept the ball rolling with all the energy that could be
+desired. Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue
+of his imitativeness. We become conscious of what we ourselves are by
+imitating others--the consciousness of what the others are precedes--the
+sense of self grows by the sense of pattern. The entire accumulated
+wealth of mankind--languages, arts, institutions, and sciences--is
+passed on from one generation to another by what Baldwin has called
+social heredity, each generation simply imitating the last. Into the
+particulars of this most fascinating chapter of psychology I have no
+time to go. The moment one hears Tarde's proposition uttered, however,
+one feels how supremely true it is. Invention, using the term most
+broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the
+human race historically has walked.
+
+Imitation shades imperceptibly into _Emulation_. Emulation is the
+impulse to imitate what you see another doing, in order not to appear
+inferior; and it is hard to draw a sharp line between the manifestations
+of the two impulses, so inextricably do they mix their effects.
+Emulation is the very nerve of human society. Why are you, my hearers,
+sitting here before me? If no one whom you ever heard of had attended a
+'summer school' or teachers' institute, would it have occurred to any
+one of you to break out independently and do a thing so unprescribed by
+fashion? Probably not. Nor would your pupils come to you unless the
+children of their parents' neighbors were all simultaneously being sent
+to school. We wish not to be lonely or eccentric, and we wish not to be
+cut off from our share in things which to our neighbors seem desirable
+privileges.
+
+In the schoolroom, imitation and emulation play absolutely vital parts.
+Every teacher knows the advantage of having certain things performed by
+whole bands of children at a time. The teacher who meets with most
+success is the teacher whose own ways are the most imitable. A teacher
+should never try to make the pupils do a thing which she cannot do
+herself. "Come and let me show you how" is an incomparably better
+stimulus than "Go and do it as the book directs." Children admire a
+teacher who has skill. What he does seems easy, and they wish to emulate
+it. It is useless for a dull and devitalized teacher to exhort her
+pupils to wake up and take an interest. She must first take one herself;
+then her example is effective, as no exhortation can possibly be.
+
+Every school has its tone, moral and intellectual. And this tone is a
+mere tradition kept up by imitation, due in the first instance to the
+example set by teachers and by previous pupils of an aggressive and
+dominating type, copied by the others, and passed on from year to year,
+so that the new pupils take the cue almost immediately. Such a tone
+changes very slowly, if at all; and then always under the modifying
+influence of new personalities aggressive enough in character to set new
+patterns and not merely to copy the old. The classic example of this
+sort of tone is the often quoted case of Rugby under Dr. Arnold's
+administration. He impressed his own character as a model on the
+imagination of the oldest boys, who in turn were expected and required
+to impress theirs upon the younger set. The contagiousness of Arnold's
+genius was such that a Rugby man was said to be recognizable all through
+life by a peculiar turn of character which he acquired at school. It is
+obvious that psychology as such can give in this field no precepts of
+detail. As in so many other fields of teaching, success depends mainly
+on the native genius of the teacher, the sympathy, tact, and perception
+which enable him to seize the right moment and to set the right example.
+
+Among the recent modern reforms of teaching methods, a certain
+disparagement of emulation, as a laudable spring of action in the
+schoolroom, has often made itself heard. More than a century ago,
+Rousseau, in his 'Émile,' branded rivalry between one pupil and another
+as too base a passion to play a part in an ideal education. "Let Émile,"
+he said, "never be led to compare himself to other children. No
+rivalries, not even in running, as soon as he begins to have the power
+of reason. It were a hundred times better that he should not learn at
+all what he could only learn through jealousy or vanity. But I would
+mark out every year the progress he may have made, and I would compare
+it with the progress of the following years. I would say to him: 'You
+are now grown so many inches taller; there is the ditch which you jumped
+over, there is the burden which you raised. There is the distance to
+which you could throw a pebble, there the distance you could run over
+without losing breath. See how much more you can do now!' Thus I should
+excite him without making him jealous of any one. He would wish to
+surpass himself. I can see no inconvenience in this emulation with his
+former self."
+
+Unquestionably, emulation with one's former self is a noble form of the
+passion of rivalry, and has a wide scope in the training of the young.
+But to veto and taboo all possible rivalry of one youth with another,
+because such rivalry may degenerate into greedy and selfish excess, does
+seem to savor somewhat of sentimentality, or even of fanaticism. The
+feeling of rivalry lies at the very basis of our being, all social
+improvement being largely due to it. There is a noble and generous kind
+of rivalry, as well as a spiteful and greedy kind; and the noble and
+generous form is particularly common in childhood. All games owe the
+zest which they bring with them to the fact that they are rooted in the
+emulous passion, yet they are the chief means of training in fairness
+and magnanimity. Can the teacher afford to throw such an ally away?
+Ought we seriously to hope that marks, distinctions, prizes, and other
+goals of effort, based on the pursuit of recognized superiority, should
+be forever banished from our schools? As a psychologist, obliged to
+notice the deep and pervasive character of the emulous passion, I must
+confess my doubts.
+
+The wise teacher will use this instinct as he uses others, reaping its
+advantages, and appealing to it in such a way as to reap a maximum of
+benefit with a minimum of harm; for, after all, we must confess, with a
+French critic of Rousseau's doctrine, that the deepest spring of action
+in us is the sight of action in another. The spectacle of effort is what
+awakens and sustains our own effort. No runner running all alone on a
+race-track will find in his own will the power of stimulation which his
+rivalry with other runners incites, when he feels them at his heels,
+about to pass. When a trotting horse is 'speeded,' a running horse must
+go beside him to keep him to the pace.
+
+As imitation slides into emulation, so emulation slides into
+_Ambition_; and ambition connects itself closely with _Pugnacity_ and
+_Pride_. Consequently, these five instinctive tendencies form an
+interconnected group of factors, hard to separate in the determination
+of a great deal of our conduct. The _Ambitious Impulses_ would perhaps
+be the best name for the whole group.
+
+Pride and pugnacity have often been considered unworthy passions to
+appeal to in the young. But in their more refined and noble forms they
+play a great part in the schoolroom and in education generally, being in
+some characters most potent spurs to effort. Pugnacity need not be
+thought of merely in the form of physical combativeness. It can be taken
+in the sense of a general unwillingness to be beaten by any kind of
+difficulty. It is what makes us feel 'stumped' and challenged by arduous
+achievements, and is essential to a spirited and enterprising character.
+We have of late been hearing much of the philosophy of tenderness in
+education; 'interest' must be assiduously awakened in everything,
+difficulties must be smoothed away. _Soft_ pedagogics have taken the
+place of the old steep and rocky path to learning. But from this
+lukewarm air the bracing oxygen of effort is left out. It is nonsense
+to suppose that every step in education _can_ be interesting. The
+fighting impulse must often be appealed to. Make the pupil feel ashamed
+of being scared at fractions, of being 'downed' by the law of falling
+bodies; rouse his pugnacity and pride, and he will rush at the difficult
+places with a sort of inner wrath at himself that is one of his best
+moral faculties. A victory scored under such conditions becomes a
+turning-point and crisis of his character. It represents the high-water
+mark of his powers, and serves thereafter as an ideal pattern for his
+self-imitation. The teacher who never rouses this sort of pugnacious
+excitement in his pupils falls short of one of his best forms of
+usefulness.
+
+The next instinct which I shall mention is that of _Ownership_, also one
+of the radical endowments of the race. It often is the antagonist of
+imitation. Whether social progress is due more to the passion for
+keeping old things and habits or to the passion of imitating and
+acquiring new ones may in some cases be a difficult thing to decide. The
+sense of ownership begins in the second year of life. Among the first
+words which an infant learns to utter are the words 'my' and 'mine,'
+and woe to the parents of twins who fail to provide their gifts in
+duplicate. The depth and primitiveness of this instinct would seem to
+cast a sort of psychological discredit in advance upon all radical forms
+of communistic utopia. Private proprietorship cannot be practically
+abolished until human nature is changed. It seems essential to mental
+health that the individual should have something beyond the bare clothes
+on his back to which he can assert exclusive possession, and which he
+may defend adversely against the world. Even those religious orders who
+make the most stringent vows of poverty have found it necessary to relax
+the rule a little in favor of the human heart made unhappy by reduction
+to too disinterested terms. The monk must have his books: the nun must
+have her little garden, and the images and pictures in her room.
+
+In education, the instinct of ownership is fundamental, and can be
+appealed to in many ways. In the house, training in order and neatness
+begins with the arrangement of the child's own personal possessions. In
+the school, ownership is particularly important in connection with one
+of its special forms of activity, the collecting impulse. An object
+possibly not very interesting in itself, like a shell, a postage stamp,
+or a single map or drawing, will acquire an interest if it fills a gap
+in a collection or helps to complete a series. Much of the scholarly
+work of the world, so far as it is mere bibliography, memory, and
+erudition (and this lies at the basis of all our human scholarship),
+would seem to owe its interest rather to the way in which it gratifies
+the accumulating and collecting instinct than to any special appeal
+which it makes to our cravings after rationality. A man wishes a
+complete collection of information, wishes to know more about a subject
+than anybody else, much as another may wish to own more dollars or more
+early editions or more engravings before the letter than anybody else.
+
+The teacher who can work this impulse into the school tasks is
+fortunate. Almost all children collect something. A tactful teacher may
+get them to take pleasure in collecting books; in keeping a neat and
+orderly collection of notes; in starting, when they are mature enough, a
+card catalogue; in preserving every drawing or map which they may make.
+Neatness, order, and method are thus instinctively gained, along with
+the other benefits which the possession of the collection entails. Even
+such a noisome thing as a collection of postage stamps may be used by
+the teacher as an inciter of interest in the geographical and historical
+information which she desires to impart. Sloyd successfully avails
+itself of this instinct in causing the pupil to make a collection of
+wooden implements fit for his own private use at home. Collecting is, of
+course, the basis of all natural history study; and probably nobody ever
+became a good naturalist who was not an unusually active collector when
+a boy.
+
+_Constructiveness_ is another great instinctive tendency with which the
+schoolroom has to contract an alliance. Up to the eighth or ninth year
+of childhood one may say that the child does hardly anything else than
+handle objects, explore things with his hands, doing and undoing,
+setting up and knocking down, putting together and pulling apart; for,
+from the psychological point of view, construction and destruction are
+two names for the same manual activity. Both signify the production of
+change, and the working of effects, in outward things. The result of all
+this is that intimate familiarity with the physical environment, that
+acquaintance with the properties of material things, which is really
+the foundation of human _consciousness_. To the very last, in most of
+us, the conceptions of objects and their properties are limited to the
+notion of what we can _do with them_. A 'stick' means something we can
+lean upon or strike with; 'fire,' something to cook, or warm ourselves,
+or burn things up withal; 'string,' something with which to tie things
+together. For most people these objects have no other meaning. In
+geometry, the cylinder, circle, sphere, are defined as what you get by
+going through certain processes of construction, revolving a
+parallelogram upon one of its sides, etc. The more different kinds of
+things a child thus gets to know by treating and handling them, the more
+confident grows his sense of kinship with the world in which he lives.
+An unsympathetic adult will wonder at the fascinated hours which a child
+will spend in putting his blocks together and rearranging them. But the
+wise education takes the tide at the flood, and from the kindergarten
+upward devotes the first years of education to training in construction
+and to object-teaching. I need not recapitulate here what I said awhile
+back about the superiority of the objective and experimental methods.
+They occupy the pupil in a way most congruous with the spontaneous
+interests of his age. They absorb him, and leave impressions durable and
+profound. Compared with the youth taught by these methods, one brought
+up exclusively by books carries through life a certain remoteness from
+reality: he stands, as it were, out of the pale, and feels that he
+stands so; and often suffers a kind of melancholy from which he might
+have been rescued by a more real education.
+
+There are other impulses, such as love of approbation or vanity, shyness
+and secretiveness, of which a word might be said; but they are too
+familiar to need it. You can easily pursue the subject by your own
+reflection. There is one general law, however, that relates to many of
+our instinctive tendencies, and that has no little importance in
+education; and I must refer to it briefly before I leave the subject. It
+has been called the law of transitoriness in instincts. Many of our
+impulsive tendencies ripen at a certain period; and, if the appropriate
+objects be then and there provided, habits of conduct toward them are
+acquired which last. But, if the objects be not forthcoming then, the
+impulse may die out before a habit is formed; and later it may be hard
+to teach the creature to react appropriately in those directions. The
+sucking instincts in mammals, the following instinct in certain birds
+and quadrupeds, are examples of this: they fade away shortly after
+birth.
+
+In children we observe a ripening of impulses and interests in a certain
+determinate order. Creeping, walking, climbing, imitating vocal sounds,
+constructing, drawing, calculating, possess the child in succession; and
+in some children the possession, while it lasts, may be of a
+semi-frantic and exclusive sort. Later, the interest in any one of these
+things may wholly fade away. Of course, the proper pedagogic moment to
+work skill in, and to clench the useful habit, is when the native
+impulse is most acutely present. Crowd on the athletic opportunities,
+the mental arithmetic, the verse-learning, the drawing, the botany, or
+what not, the moment you have reason to think the hour is ripe. The hour
+may not last long, and while it continues you may safely let all the
+child's other occupations take a second place. In this way you economize
+time and deepen skill; for many an infant prodigy, artistic or
+mathematical, has a flowering epoch of but a few months.
+
+One can draw no specific rules for all this. It depends on close
+observation in the particular case, and parents here have a great
+advantage over teachers. In fact, the law of transitoriness has little
+chance of individualized application in the schools.
+
+Such is the little interested and impulsive psychophysical organism
+whose springs of action the teacher must divine, and to whose ways he
+must become accustomed. He must start with the native tendencies, and
+enlarge the pupil's entire passive and active experience. He must ply
+him with new objects and stimuli, and make him taste the fruits of his
+behavior, so that now that whole context of remembered experience is
+what shall determine his conduct when he gets the stimulus, and not the
+bare immediate impression. As the pupil's life thus enlarges, it gets
+fuller and fuller of all sorts of memories and associations and
+substitutions; but the eye accustomed to psychological analysis will
+discern, underneath it all, the outlines of our simple psychophysical
+scheme.
+
+Respect then, I beg you, always the original reactions, even when you
+are seeking to overcome their connection with certain objects, and to
+supplant them with others that you wish to make the rule. Bad behavior,
+from the point of view of the teacher's art, is as good a starting-point
+as good behavior. In fact, paradoxical as it may sound to say so, it is
+often a better starting-point than good behavior would be.
+
+The acquired reactions must be made habitual whenever they are
+appropriate. Therefore Habit is the next subject to which your attention
+is invited.
+
+
+
+
+VIII. THE LAWS OF HABIT
+
+
+It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of
+habit, and psychology helps us greatly at this point. We speak, it is
+true, of good habits and of bad habits; but, when people use the word
+'habit,' in the majority of instances it is a bad habit which they
+have in mind. They talk of the smoking-habit and the swearing-habit
+and the drinking-habit, but not of the abstention-habit or the
+moderation-habit or the courage-habit. But the fact is that our
+virtues are habits as much as our vices. All our life, so far as it
+has definite form, is but a mass of habits,--practical, emotional, and
+intellectual,--systematically organized for our weal or woe, and
+bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be.
+
+Since pupils can understand this at a comparatively early age, and since
+to understand it contributes in no small measure to their feeling of
+responsibility, it would be well if the teacher were able himself to
+talk to them of the philosophy of habit in some such abstract terms as I
+am now about to talk of it to you.
+
+I believe that we are subject to the law of habit in consequence of the
+fact that we have bodies. The plasticity of the living matter of our
+nervous system, in short, is the reason why we do a thing with
+difficulty the first time, but soon do it more and more easily, and
+finally, with sufficient practice, do it semi-mechanically, or with
+hardly any consciousness at all. Our nervous systems have (in Dr.
+Carpenter's words) _grown_ to the way in which they have been exercised,
+just as a sheet of paper or a coat, once creased or folded, tends to
+fall forever afterward into the same identical folds.
+
+Habit is thus a second nature, or rather, as the Duke of Wellington
+said, it is 'ten times nature,'--at any rate as regards its importance
+in adult life; for the acquired habits of our training have by that time
+inhibited or strangled most of the natural impulsive tendencies which
+were originally there. Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred
+and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and
+habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night.
+Our dressing and undressing, our eating and drinking, our greetings and
+partings, our hat-raisings and giving way for ladies to precede, nay,
+even most of the forms of our common speech, are things of a type so
+fixed by repetition as almost to be classed as reflex actions. To each
+sort of impression we have an automatic, ready-made response. My very
+words to you now are an example of what I mean; for having already
+lectured upon habit and printed a chapter about it in a book, and read
+the latter when in print, I find my tongue inevitably falling into its
+old phrases and repeating almost literally what I said before.
+
+So far as we are thus mere bundles of habit, we are stereotyped
+creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves. And since this,
+under any circumstances, is what we always tend to become, it follows
+first of all that the teacher's prime concern should be to ingrain into
+the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him
+throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of
+which behavior consists.
+
+To quote my earlier book directly, the great thing in all education is
+to _make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy_. It is to
+fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the
+interest of the fund. _For this we must make automatic and habitual, as
+early as possible, as many useful actions as we can_, and as carefully
+guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be
+disadvantageous. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand
+over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers
+of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more
+miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but
+indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of
+every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the
+beginning of every bit of work are subjects of express volitional
+deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding or
+regretting of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as
+practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. If there be such
+daily duties not yet ingrained in any one of my hearers, let him begin
+this very hour to set the matter right.
+
+In Professor Bain's chapter on 'The Moral Habits' there are some
+admirable practical remarks laid down. Two great maxims emerge from the
+treatment. The first is that in the acquisition of a new habit, or the
+leaving off of an old one, we must take care to _launch ourselves with
+as strong and decided an initiative as possible_. Accumulate all the
+possible circumstances which shall reinforce the right motives; put
+yourself assiduously in conditions that encourage the new way; make
+engagements incompatible with the old; take a public pledge, if the case
+allows; in short, envelope your resolution with every aid you know. This
+will give your new beginning such a momentum that the temptation to
+break down will not occur as soon as it otherwise might; and every day
+during which a breakdown is postponed adds to the chances of its not
+occurring at all.
+
+I remember long ago reading in an Austrian paper the advertisement of a
+certain Rudolph Somebody, who promised fifty gulden reward to any one
+who after that date should find him at the wine-shop of Ambrosius
+So-and-so. 'This I do,' the advertisement continued, 'in consequence of
+a promise which I have made my wife.' With such a wife, and such an
+understanding of the way in which to start new habits, it would be safe
+to stake one's money on Rudolph's ultimate success.
+
+The second maxim is, _Never suffer an exception to occur till the new
+habit is securely rooted in your life_. Each lapse is like the letting
+fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up: a single
+slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. Continuity of
+training is the great means of making the nervous system act infallibly
+right. As Professor Bain says:--
+
+"The peculiarity of the moral habits, contradistinguishing them from the
+intellectual acquisitions, is the presence of two hostile powers, one to
+be gradually raised into the ascendant over the other. It is necessary
+above all things, in such a situation, never to lose a battle. Every
+gain on the wrong side undoes the effect of many conquests on the right.
+The essential precaution, therefore, is so to regulate the two opposing
+powers that the one may have a series of uninterrupted successes, until
+repetition has fortified it to such a degree as to enable it to cope
+with the opposition, under any circumstances. This is the theoretically
+best career of mental progress."
+
+A third maxim may be added to the preceding pair: _Seize the very first
+possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every
+emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits
+you aspire to gain._ It is not in the moment of their forming, but in
+the moment of their producing motor effects, that resolves and
+aspirations communicate the new 'set' to the brain.
+
+No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter
+how good one's sentiments may be, if one have not taken advantage of
+every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely
+unaffected for the better. With good intentions, hell proverbially is
+paved. This is an obvious consequence of the principles I have laid
+down. A 'character,' as J.S. Mill says, 'is a completely fashioned
+will'; and a will, in the sense in which he means it, is an aggregate of
+tendencies to act in a firm and prompt and definite way upon all the
+principal emergencies of life. A tendency to act only becomes
+effectively ingrained in us in proportion to the uninterrupted frequency
+with which the actions actually occur, and the brain 'grows' to their
+use. When a resolve or a fine glow of feeling is allowed to evaporate
+without bearing practical fruit, it is worse than a chance lost: it
+works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from
+taking the normal path of discharge. There is no more contemptible type
+of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and
+dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility, but
+never does a concrete manly deed.
+
+This leads to a fourth maxim. _Don't preach too much to your pupils or
+abound in good talk in the abstract_. Lie in wait rather for the
+practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus
+at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do. The
+strokes of _behavior_ are what give the new set to the character, and
+work the good habits into its organic tissue. Preaching and talking too
+soon become an ineffectual bore.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is a passage in Darwin's short autobiography which has been often
+quoted, and which, for the sake of its bearing on our subject of habit,
+I must now quote again. Darwin says: "Up to the age of thirty or beyond
+it, poetry of many kinds gave me great pleasure; and even as a schoolboy
+I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical
+plays. I have also said that pictures formerly gave me considerable, and
+music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read
+a line of poetry. I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it
+so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my
+taste for pictures or music.... My mind seems to have become a kind of
+machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts; but
+why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone,
+on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.... If I had to
+live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and
+listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of
+my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept alive through use. The
+loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be
+injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by
+enfeebling the emotional part of our nature."
+
+We all intend when young to be all that may become a man, before the
+destroyer cuts us down. We wish and expect to enjoy poetry always, to
+grow more and more intelligent about pictures and music, to keep in
+touch with spiritual and religious ideas, and even not to let the
+greater philosophic thoughts of our time develop quite beyond our view.
+We mean all this in youth, I say; and yet in how many middle-aged men
+and women is such an honest and sanguine expectation fulfilled? Surely,
+in comparatively few; and the laws of habit show us why. Some interest
+in each of these things arises in everybody at the proper age; but, if
+not persistently fed with the appropriate matter, instead of growing
+into a powerful and necessary habit, it atrophies and dies, choked by
+the rival interests to which the daily food is given. We make ourselves
+into Darwins in this negative respect by persistently ignoring the
+essential practical conditions of our case. We say abstractly: "I mean
+to enjoy poetry, and to absorb a lot of it, of course. I fully intend to
+keep up my love of music, to read the books that shall give new turns to
+the thought of my time, to keep my higher spiritual side alive, etc."
+But we do not attack these things concretely, and we do not begin
+_to-day. _We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be
+paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone, until
+those smiling possibilities are dead. Whereas ten minutes a day of
+poetry, of spiritual reading or meditation, and an hour or two a week at
+music, pictures, or philosophy, provided we began _now_ and suffered no
+remission, would infallibly give us in due time the fulness of all we
+desire. By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing
+ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of
+our higher possibilities. This is a point concerning which you teachers
+might well give a little timely information to your older and more
+aspiring pupils.
+
+According as a function receives daily exercise or not, the man becomes
+a different kind of being in later life. We have lately had a number of
+accomplished Hindoo visitors at Cambridge, who talked freely of life and
+philosophy. More than one of them has confided to me that the sight of
+our faces, all contracted as they are with the habitual American
+over-intensity and anxiety of expression, and our ungraceful and
+distorted attitudes when sitting, made on him a very painful impression.
+"I do not see," said one, "how it is possible for you to live as you do,
+without a single minute in your day deliberately given to tranquillity
+and meditation. It is an invariable part of our Hindoo life to retire
+for at least half an hour daily into silence, to relax our muscles,
+govern our breathing, and meditate on eternal things. Every Hindoo child
+is trained to this from a very early age." The good fruits of such a
+discipline were obvious in the physical repose and lack of tension, and
+the wonderful smoothness and calmness of facial expression, and
+imperturbability of manner of these Orientals. I felt that my countrymen
+were depriving themselves of an essential grace of character. How many
+American children ever hear it said by parent or teacher, that they
+should moderate their piercing voices, that they should relax their
+unused muscles, and as far as possible, when sitting, sit quite still?
+Not one in a thousand, not one in five thousand! Yet, from its reflex
+influence on the inner mental states, this ceaseless over-tension,
+over-motion, and over-expression are working on us grievous national
+harm.
+
+I beg you teachers to think a little seriously of this matter. Perhaps
+you can help our rising generation of Americans toward the beginning of
+a better set of personal ideals.[B]
+
+     [B] See the Address on the Gospel of Relaxation, later in
+     this volume.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To go back now to our general maxims, I may at last, as a fifth and
+final practical maxim about habits, offer something like this: _Keep the
+faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every
+day._ That is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do
+every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so
+that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not
+unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is
+like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does
+him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But,
+if the fire _does_ come, his having paid it will be his salvation from
+ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of
+concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in
+unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks
+around him, and his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the
+blast.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have been accused, when talking of the subject of habit, of making old
+habits appear so strong that the acquiring of new ones, and particularly
+anything like a sudden reform or conversion, would be made impossible by
+my doctrine. Of course, this would suffice to condemn the latter; for
+sudden conversions, however infrequent they may be, unquestionably do
+occur. But there is no incompatibility between the general laws I have
+laid down and the most startling sudden alterations in the way of
+character. New habits _can_ be launched, I have expressly said, on
+condition of there being new stimuli and new excitements. Now life
+abounds in these, and sometimes they are such critical and revolutionary
+experiences that they change a man's whole scale of values and system of
+ideas. In such cases, the old order of his habits will be ruptured; and,
+if the new motives are lasting, new habits will be formed, and build up
+in him a new or regenerate 'nature.'
+
+All this kind of fact I fully allow. But the general laws of habit are
+no wise altered thereby, and the physiological study of mental
+conditions still remains on the whole the most powerful ally of
+hortatory ethics. The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology
+tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by
+habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could the young
+but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits,
+they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.
+We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone.
+Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little
+scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself
+for every fresh dereliction by saying, "I won't count this time!" Well,
+he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being
+counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the
+molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used
+against him when the next temptation comes. Nothing we ever do is, in
+strict scientific literalness, wiped out.
+
+Of course, this has its good side as well as its bad one. As we become
+permanent drunkards by so many separate drinks, so we become saints in
+the moral, and authorities and experts in the practical and scientific
+spheres, by so many separate acts and hours of work. Let no youth have
+any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it
+may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working day, he may
+safely leave the final result to itself. He can with perfect certainty
+count on waking up some fine morning to find himself one of the
+competent ones of his generation, in whatever pursuit he may have
+singled out. Silently, between all the details of his business, the
+_power of judging_ in all that class of matter will have built itself up
+within him as a possession that will never pass away. Young people
+should know this truth in advance. The ignorance of it has probably
+engendered more discouragement and faint-heartedness in youths embarking
+on arduous careers than all other causes put together.
+
+
+
+
+IX. THE ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS
+
+
+In my last talk, in treating of Habit, I chiefly had in mind our _motor_
+habits,--habits of external conduct. But our thinking and feeling
+processes are also largely subject to the law of habit, and one result
+of this is a phenomenon which you all know under the name of 'the
+association of ideas.' To that phenomenon I ask you now to turn.
+
+You remember that consciousness is an ever-flowing stream of objects,
+feelings, and impulsive tendencies. We saw already that its phases or
+pulses are like so many fields or waves, each field or wave having
+usually its central point of liveliest attention, in the shape of the
+most prominent object in our thought, while all around this lies a
+margin of other objects more dimly realized, together with the margin of
+emotional and active tendencies which the whole entails. Describing the
+mind thus in fluid terms, we cling as close as possible to nature. At
+first sight, it might seem as if, in the fluidity of these successive
+waves, everything is indeterminate. But inspection shows that each wave
+has a constitution which can be to some degree explained by the
+constitution of the waves just passed away. And this relation of the
+wave to its predecessors is expressed by the two fundamental 'laws of
+association,' so-called, of which the first is named the Law of
+Contiguity, the second that of Similarity.
+
+The _Law of Contiguity_ tells us that objects thought of in the coming
+wave are such as in some previous experience were _next_ to the objects
+represented in the wave that is passing away. The vanishing objects were
+once formerly their neighbors in the mind. When you recite the alphabet
+or your prayers, or when the sight of an object reminds you of its name,
+or the name reminds you of the object, it is through the law of
+contiguity that the terms are suggested to the mind.
+
+The _Law of Similarity_ says that, when contiguity fails to describe
+what happens, the coming objects will prove to _resemble_ the going
+objects, even though the two were never experienced together before. In
+our 'flights of fancy,' this is frequently the case.
+
+If, arresting ourselves in the flow of reverie, we ask the question,
+"How came we to be thinking of just this object now?" we can almost
+always trace its presence to some previous object which has introduced
+it to the mind, according to one or the other of these laws. The entire
+routine of our memorized acquisitions, for example, is a consequence of
+nothing but the Law of Contiguity. The words of a poem, the formulas of
+trigonometry, the facts of history, the properties of material things,
+are all known to us as definite systems or groups of objects which
+cohere in an order fixed by innumerable iterations, and of which any one
+part reminds us of the others. In dry and prosaic minds, almost all the
+mental sequences flow along these lines of habitual routine repetition
+and suggestion.
+
+In witty, imaginative minds, on the other hand, the routine is broken
+through with ease at any moment; and one field of mental objects will
+suggest another with which perhaps in the whole history of human
+thinking it had never once before been coupled. The link here is usually
+some _analogy_ between the objects successively thought of,--an analogy
+often so subtle that, although we feel it, we can with difficulty
+analyze its ground; as where, for example, we find something masculine
+in the color red and something feminine in the color pale blue, or
+where, of three human beings' characters, one will remind us of a cat,
+another of a dog, the third perhaps of a cow.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Psychologists have of course gone very deeply into the question of what
+the causes of association may be; and some of them have tried to show
+that contiguity and similarity are not two radically diverse laws, but
+that either presupposes the presence of the other. I myself am disposed
+to think that the phenomena of association depend on our cerebral
+constitution, and are not immediate consequences of our being rational
+beings. In other words, when we shall have become disembodied spirits,
+it may be that our trains of consciousness will follow different laws.
+These questions are discussed in the books on psychology, and I hope
+that some of you will be interested in following them there. But I will,
+on the present occasion, ignore them entirely; for, as teachers, it is
+the _fact_ of association that practically concerns you, let its grounds
+be spiritual or cerebral, or what they may, and let its laws be
+reducible, or non-reducible, to one. Your pupils, whatever else they
+are, are at any rate little pieces of associating machinery. Their
+education consists in the organizing within them of determinate
+tendencies to associate one thing with another,--impressions with
+consequences, these with reactions, those with results, and so on
+indefinitely. The more copious the associative systems, the completer
+the individual's adaptations to the world.
+
+The teacher can formulate his function to himself therefore in terms of
+'association' as well as in terms of 'native and acquired reaction.' It
+is mainly that of _building up useful systems of association_ in the
+pupil's mind. This description sounds wider than the one I began by
+giving. But, when one thinks that our trains of association, whatever
+they may be, normally issue in acquired reactions or behavior, one sees
+that in a general way the same mass of facts is covered by both
+formulas.
+
+It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have
+once grasped the principles of association. The great problem which
+association undertakes to solve is, _Why does just this particular field
+of consciousness, constituted in this particular way, now appear before
+my mind?_ It may be a field of objects imagined; it may be of objects
+remembered or of objects perceived; it may include an action resolved
+on. In either case, when the field is analyzed into its parts, those
+parts can be shown to have proceeded from parts of fields previously
+before consciousness, in consequence of one or other of the laws of
+association just laid down. Those laws _run_ the mind: interest,
+shifting hither and thither, deflects it; and attention, as we shall
+later see, steers it and keeps it from too zigzag a course.
+
+To grasp these factors clearly gives one a solid and simple
+understanding of the psychological machinery. The 'nature,' the
+'character,' of an individual means really nothing but the habitual form
+of his associations. To break up bad associations or wrong ones, to
+build others in, to guide the associative tendencies into the most
+fruitful channels, is the educator's principal task. But here, as with
+all other simple principles, the difficulty lies in the application.
+Psychology can state the laws: concrete tact and talent alone can work
+them to useful results.
+
+Meanwhile it is a matter of the commonest experience that our minds may
+pass from one object to another by various intermediary fields of
+consciousness. The indeterminateness of our paths of association _in
+concreto_ is thus almost as striking a feature of them as the uniformity
+of their abstract form. Start from any idea whatever, and the entire
+range of your ideas is potentially at your disposal. If we take as the
+associative starting-point, or cue, some simple word which I pronounce
+before you, there is no limit to the possible diversity of suggestions
+which it may set up in your minds. Suppose I say 'blue,' for example:
+some of you may think of the blue sky and hot weather from which we now
+are suffering, then go off on thoughts of summer clothing, or possibly
+of meteorology at large; others may think of the spectrum and the
+physiology of color-vision, and glide into X-rays and recent physical
+speculations; others may think of blue ribbons, or of the blue flowers
+on a friend's hat, and proceed on lines of personal reminiscence. To
+others, again, etymology and linguistic thoughts may be suggested; or
+blue may be 'apperceived' as a synonym for melancholy, and a train of
+associates connected with morbid psychology may proceed to unroll
+themselves.
+
+In the same person, the same word heard at different times will provoke,
+in consequence of the varying marginal preoccupations, either one of a
+number of diverse possible associative sequences. Professor Münsterberg
+performed this experiment methodically, using the same words four times
+over, at three-month intervals, as 'cues' for four different persons who
+were the subjects of observation. He found almost no constancy in their
+associations taken at these different times. In short, the entire
+potential content of one's consciousness is accessible from any one of
+its points. This is why we can never work the laws of association
+forward: starting from the present field as a cue, we can never cipher
+out in advance just what the person will be thinking of five minutes
+later. The elements which may become prepotent in the process, the parts
+of each successive field round which the associations shall chiefly
+turn, the possible bifurcations of suggestion, are so numerous and
+ambiguous as to be indeterminable before the fact. But, although we
+cannot work the laws of association forward, we can always work them
+backwards. We cannot say now what we shall find ourselves thinking of
+five minutes hence; but, whatever it may be, we shall then be able to
+trace it through intermediary links of contiguity or similarity to what
+we are thinking now. What so baffles our prevision is the shifting part
+played by the margin and focus--in fact, by each element by itself of
+the margin or focus--in calling up the next ideas.
+
+For example, I am reciting 'Locksley Hall,' in order to divert my mind
+from a state of suspense that I am in concerning the will of a relative
+that is dead. The will still remains in the mental background as an
+extremely marginal or ultra-marginal portion of my field of
+consciousness; but the poem fairly keeps my attention from it, until I
+come to the line, "I, the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of
+time." The words 'I, the heir,' immediately make an electric connection
+with the marginal thought of the will; that, in turn, makes my heart
+beat with anticipation of my possible legacy, so that I throw down the
+book and pace the floor excitedly with visions of my future fortune
+pouring through my mind. Any portion of the field of consciousness that
+has more potentialities of emotional excitement than another may thus be
+roused to predominant activity; and the shifting play of interest now in
+one portion, now in another, deflects the currents in all sorts of
+zigzag ways, the mental activity running hither and thither as the
+sparks run in burnt-up paper.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One more point, and I shall have said as much to you as seems necessary
+about the process of association.
+
+You just saw how a single exciting word may call up its own associates
+prepotently, and deflect our whole train of thinking from the previous
+track. The fact is that every portion of the field _tends_ to call up
+its own associates; but, if these associates be severally different,
+there is rivalry, and as soon as one or a few begin to be effective the
+others seem to get siphoned out, as it were, and left behind. Seldom,
+however, as in our example, does the process seem to turn round a single
+item in the mental field, or even round the entire field that is
+immediately in the act of passing. It is a matter of _constellation_,
+into which portions of fields that are already past especially seem to
+enter and have their say. Thus, to go back to 'Locksley Hall,' each word
+as I recite it in its due order is suggested not solely by the previous
+word now expiring on my lips, but it is rather the effect of all the
+previous words, taken together, of the verse. "Ages," for example, calls
+up "in the foremost files of time," when preceded by "I, the heir of all
+the"--; but, when preceded by "for I doubt not through the,"--it calls
+up "one increasing purpose runs." Similarly, if I write on the
+blackboard the letters A B C D E F,... they probably suggest to you G H
+I.... But, if I write A B A D D E F, if they suggest anything, they
+suggest as their complement E C T or E F I C I E N C Y. The result
+depending on the total constellation, even though most of the single
+items be the same.
+
+My practical reason for mentioning this law is this, that it follows
+from it that, in working associations into your pupils' minds, you must
+not rely on single cues, but multiply the cues as much as possible.
+Couple the desired reaction with numerous constellations of
+antecedents,--don't always ask the question, for example, in the same
+way; don't use the same kind of data in numerical problems; vary your
+illustrations, etc., as much as you can. When we come to the subject of
+memory, we shall learn still more about this.
+
+So much, then, for the general subject of association. In leaving it for
+other topics (in which, however, we shall abundantly find it involved
+again), I cannot too strongly urge you to acquire a habit of thinking of
+your pupils in associative terms. All governors of mankind, from doctors
+and jail-wardens to demagogues and statesmen, instinctively come so to
+conceive their charges. If you do the same, thinking of them (however
+else you may think of them besides) as so many little systems of
+associating machinery, you will be astonished at the intimacy of insight
+into their operations and at the practicality of the results which you
+will gain. We think of our acquaintances, for example, as characterized
+by certain 'tendencies.' These tendencies will in almost every instance
+prove to be tendencies to association. Certain ideas in them are always
+followed by certain other ideas, these by certain feelings and impulses
+to approve or disapprove, assent or decline. If the topic arouse one of
+those first ideas, the practical outcome can be pretty well foreseen.
+'Types of character' in short are largely types of association.
+
+
+
+
+X. INTEREST
+
+
+At our last meeting I treated of the native tendencies of the pupil to
+react in characteristically definite ways upon different stimuli or
+exciting circumstances. In fact, I treated of the pupil's instincts. Now
+some situations appeal to special instincts from the very outset, and
+others fail to do so until the proper connections have been organized in
+the course of the person's training. We say of the former set of objects
+or situations that they are _interesting_ in themselves and originally.
+Of the latter we say that they are natively uninteresting, and that
+interest in them has first to be acquired.
+
+No topic has received more attention from pedagogical writers than that
+of interest. It is the natural sequel to the instincts we so lately
+discussed, and it is therefore well fitted to be the next subject which
+we take up.
+
+Since some objects are natively interesting and in others interest is
+artificially acquired, the teacher must know which the natively
+interesting ones are; for, as we shall see immediately, other objects
+can artificially acquire an interest only through first becoming
+associated with some of these natively interesting things.
+
+The native interests of children lie altogether in the sphere of
+sensation. Novel things to look at or novel sounds to hear, especially
+when they involve the spectacle of action of a violent sort, will always
+divert the attention from abstract conceptions of objects verbally taken
+in. The grimace that Johnny is making, the spitballs that Tommy is ready
+to throw, the dog-fight in the street, or the distant firebells
+ringing,--these are the rivals with which the teacher's powers of being
+interesting have incessantly to cope. The child will always attend more
+to what a teacher does than to what the same teacher says. During the
+performance of experiments or while the teacher is drawing on the
+blackboard, the children are tranquil and absorbed. I have seen a
+roomful of college students suddenly become perfectly still, to look at
+their professor of physics tie a piece of string around a stick which he
+was going to use in an experiment, but immediately grow restless when he
+began to explain the experiment. A lady told me that one day, during a
+lesson, she was delighted at having captured so completely the attention
+of one of her young charges. He did not remove his eyes from her face;
+but he said to her after the lesson was over, "I looked at you all the
+time, and your upper jaw did not move once!" That was the only fact that
+he had taken in.
+
+Living things, then, moving things, or things that savor of danger or of
+blood, that have a dramatic quality,--these are the objects natively
+interesting to childhood, to the exclusion of almost everything else;
+and the teacher of young children, until more artificial interests have
+grown up, will keep in touch with her pupils by constant appeal to such
+matters as these. Instruction must be carried on objectively,
+experimentally, anecdotally. The blackboard-drawing and story-telling
+must constantly come in. But of course these methods cover only the
+first steps, and carry one but a little way.
+
+Can we now formulate any general principle by which the later and more
+artificial interests connect themselves with these early ones that the
+child brings with him to the school?
+
+Fortunately, we can: there is a very simple law that relates the
+acquired and the native interests with each other.
+
+_Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through
+becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists.
+The two associated objects grow, as it were, together: the interesting
+portion sheds its quality over the whole; and thus things not
+interesting in their own right borrow an interest which becomes as real
+and as strong as that of any natively interesting thing._ The odd
+circumstance is that the borrowing does not impoverish the source, the
+objects taken together being more interesting, perhaps, than the
+originally interesting portion was by itself.
+
+This is one of the most striking proofs of the range of application of
+the principle of association of ideas in psychology. An idea will infect
+another with its own emotional interest when they have become both
+associated together into any sort of a mental total. As there is no
+limit to the various associations into which an interesting idea may
+enter, one sees in how many ways an interest may be derived.
+
+You will understand this abstract statement easily if I take the most
+frequent of concrete examples,--the interest which things borrow from
+their connection with our own personal welfare. The most natively
+interesting object to a man is his own personal self and its fortunes.
+We accordingly see that the moment a thing becomes connected with the
+fortunes of the self, it forthwith becomes an interesting thing. Lend
+the child his books, pencils, and other apparatus: then give them to
+him, make them his own, and notice the new light with which they
+instantly shine in his eyes. He takes a new kind of care of them
+altogether. In mature life, all the drudgery of a man's business or
+profession, intolerable in itself, is shot through with engrossing
+significance because he knows it to be associated with his personal
+fortunes. What more deadly uninteresting object can there be than a
+railroad time-table? Yet where will you find a more interesting object
+if you are going on a journey, and by its means can find your train? At
+such times the time-table will absorb a man's entire attention, its
+interest being borrowed solely from its relation to his personal life.
+_From all these facts there emerges a very simple abstract programme for
+the teacher to follow in keeping the attention of the child: Begin with
+the line of his native interests, and offer him objects that have some
+immediate connection with these_. The kindergarten methods, the
+object-teaching routine, the blackboard and manual-training work,--all
+recognize this feature. Schools in which these methods preponderate are
+schools where discipline is easy, and where the voice of the master
+claiming order and attention in threatening tones need never be heard.
+
+_Next, step by step, connect with these first objects and experiences
+the later objects and ideas which you wish to instill. Associate the new
+with the old in some natural and telling way, so that the interest,
+being shed along from point to point, finally suffuses the entire system
+of objects of thought._
+
+This is the abstract statement; and, abstractly, nothing can be easier
+to understand. It is in the fulfilment of the rule that the difficulty
+lies; for the difference between an interesting and a tedious teacher
+consists in little more than the inventiveness by which the one is able
+to mediate these associations and connections, and in the dulness in
+discovering such transitions which the other shows. One teacher's mind
+will fairly coruscate with points of connection between the new lesson
+and the circumstances of the children's other experience. Anecdotes and
+reminiscences will abound in her talk; and the shuttle of interest will
+shoot backward and forward, weaving the new and the old together in a
+lively and entertaining way. Another teacher has no such inventive
+fertility, and his lesson will always be a dead and heavy thing. This is
+the psychological meaning of the Herbartian principle of 'preparation'
+for each lesson, and of correlating the new with the old. It is the
+psychological meaning of that whole method of concentration in studies
+of which you have been recently hearing so much. When the geography and
+English and history and arithmetic simultaneously make cross-references
+to one another, you get an interesting set of processes all along the
+line.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If, then, you wish to insure the interest of your pupils, there is only
+one way to do it; and that is to make certain that they have something
+in their minds _to attend with_, when you begin to talk. That something
+can consist in nothing but a previous lot of ideas already interesting
+in themselves, and of such a nature that the incoming novel objects
+which you present can dovetail into them and form with them some kind of
+a logically associated or systematic whole. Fortunately, almost any kind
+of a connection is sufficient to carry the interest along. What a help
+is our Philippine war at present in teaching geography! But before the
+war you could ask the children if they ate pepper with their eggs, and
+where they supposed the pepper came from. Or ask them if glass is a
+stone, and, if not, why not; and then let them know how stones are
+formed and glass manufactured. External links will serve as well as
+those that are deeper and more logical. But interest, once shed upon a
+subject, is liable to remain always with that subject. Our acquisitions
+become in a measure portions of our personal self; and little by little,
+as cross-associations multiply and habits of familiarity and practice
+grow, the entire system of our objects of thought consolidates, most of
+it becoming interesting for some purposes and in some degree.
+
+An adult man's interests are almost every one of them intensely
+artificial: they have slowly been built up. The objects of professional
+interest are most of them, in their original nature, repulsive; but by
+their connection with such natively exciting objects as one's personal
+fortune, one's social responsibilities, and especially by the force of
+inveterate habit, they grow to be the only things for which in middle
+life a man profoundly cares.
+
+But in all these the spread and consolidation have followed nothing but
+the principles first laid down. If we could recall for a moment our
+whole individual history, we should see that our professional ideals and
+the zeal they inspire are due to nothing but the slow accretion of one
+mental object to another, traceable backward from point to point till we
+reach the moment when, in the nursery or in the schoolroom, some little
+story told, some little object shown, some little operation witnessed,
+brought the first new object and new interest within our ken by
+associating it with some one of those primitively there. The interest
+now suffusing the whole system took its rise in that little event, so
+insignificant to us now as to be entirely forgotten. As the bees in
+swarming cling to one another in layers till the few are reached whose
+feet grapple the bough from which the swarm depends; so with the objects
+of our thinking,--they hang to each other by associated links, but the
+_original_ source of interest in all of them is the native interest
+which the earliest one once possessed.
+
+
+
+
+XI. ATTENTION
+
+
+Whoever treats of interest inevitably treats of attention, for to say
+that an object is interesting is only another way of saying that it
+excites attention. But in addition to the attention which any object
+already interesting or just becoming interesting claims--passive
+attention or spontaneous attention, we may call it--there is a more
+deliberate attention,--voluntary attention or attention with effort, as
+it is called,--which we can give to objects less interesting or
+uninteresting in themselves. The distinction between active and passive
+attention is made in all books on psychology, and connects itself with
+the deeper aspects of the topic. From our present purely practical point
+of view, however, it is not necessary to be intricate; and passive
+attention to natively interesting material requires no further
+elucidation on this occasion. All that we need explicitly to note is
+that, the more the passive attention is relied on, by keeping the
+material interesting; and the less the kind of attention requiring
+effort is appealed to; the more smoothly and pleasantly the classroom
+work goes on. I must say a few more words, however, about this latter
+process of voluntary and deliberate attention.
+
+One often hears it said that genius is nothing but a power of sustained
+attention, and the popular impression probably prevails that men of
+genius are remarkable for their voluntary powers in this direction. _But
+a little introspective observation will show any one that voluntary
+attention cannot be continuously sustained,--that it comes in beats._
+When we are studying an uninteresting subject, if our mind tends to
+wander, we have to bring back our attention every now and then by using
+distinct pulses of effort, which revivify the topic for a moment, the
+mind then running on for a certain number of seconds or minutes with
+spontaneous interest, until again some intercurrent idea captures it and
+takes it off. Then the processes of volitional recall must be repeated
+once more. Voluntary attention, in short, is only a momentary affair.
+The process, whatever it is, exhausts itself in the single act; and,
+unless the matter is then taken in hand by some trace of interest
+inherent in the subject, the mind fails to follow it at all. The
+sustained attention of the genius, sticking to his subject for hours
+together, is for the most part of the passive sort. The minds of
+geniuses are full of copious and original associations. The subject of
+thought, once started, develops all sorts of fascinating consequences.
+The attention is led along one of these to another in the most
+interesting manner, and the attention never once tends to stray away.
+
+In a commonplace mind, on the other hand, a subject develops much less
+numerous associates: it dies out then quickly; and, if the man is to
+keep up thinking of it at all, he must bring his attention back to it by
+a violent wrench. In him, therefore, the faculty of voluntary attention
+receives abundant opportunity for cultivation in daily life. It is your
+despised business man, your common man of affairs, (so looked down on by
+the literary awarders of fame) whose virtue in this regard is likely to
+be most developed; for he has to listen to the concerns of so many
+uninteresting people, and to transact so much drudging detail, that the
+faculty in question is always kept in training. A genius, on the
+contrary, is the man in whom you are least likely to find the power of
+attending to anything insipid or distasteful in itself. He breaks his
+engagements, leaves his letters unanswered, neglects his family duties
+incorrigibly, because he is powerless to turn his attention down and
+back from those more interesting trains of imagery with which his genius
+constantly occupies his mind.
+
+Voluntary attention is thus an essentially instantaneous affair. You can
+claim it, for your purposes in the schoolroom, by commanding it in loud,
+imperious tones; and you can easily get it in this way. But, unless the
+subject to which you thus recall their attention has inherent power to
+interest the pupils, you will have got it for only a brief moment; and
+their minds will soon be wandering again. To keep them where you have
+called them, you must make the subject too interesting for them to
+wander again. And for that there is one prescription; but the
+prescription, like all our prescriptions, is abstract, and, to get
+practical results from it, you must couple it with mother-wit.
+
+The prescription is that _the subject must be made to show new aspects
+of itself; to prompt new questions; in a word, to change_. From an
+unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away. You can test
+this by the simplest possible case of sensorial attention. Try to
+attend steadfastly to a dot on the paper or on the wall. You presently
+find that one or the other of two things has happened: either your field
+of vision has become blurred, so that you now see nothing distinct at
+all, or else you have involuntarily ceased to look at the dot in
+question, and are looking at something else. But, if you ask yourself
+successive questions about the dot,--how big it is, how far, of what
+shape, what shade of color, etc.; in other words, if you turn it over,
+if you think of it in various ways, and along with various kinds of
+associates,--you can keep your mind on it for a comparatively long time.
+This is what the genius does, in whose hands a given topic coruscates
+and grows. And this is what the teacher must do for every topic if he
+wishes to avoid too frequent appeals to voluntary attention of the
+coerced sort. In all respects, reliance upon such attention as this is a
+wasteful method, bringing bad temper and nervous wear and tear as well
+as imperfect results. The teacher who can get along by keeping
+spontaneous interest excited must be regarded as the teacher with the
+greatest skill.
+
+There is, however, in all schoolroom work a large mass of material that
+must be dull and unexciting, and to which it is impossible in any
+continuous way to contribute an interest associatively derived. There
+are, therefore, certain external methods, which every teacher knows, of
+voluntarily arousing the attention from time to time and keeping it upon
+the subject. Mr. Fitch has a lecture on the art of securing attention,
+and he briefly passes these methods in review; the posture must be
+changed; places can be changed. Questions, after being answered singly,
+may occasionally be answered in concert. Elliptical questions may be
+asked, the pupil supplying the missing word. The teacher must pounce
+upon the most listless child and wake him up. The habit of prompt and
+ready response must be kept up. Recapitulations, illustrations,
+examples, novelty of order, and ruptures of routine,--all these are
+means for keeping the attention alive and contributing a little interest
+to a dull subject. Above all, the teacher must himself be alive and
+ready, and must use the contagion of his own example.
+
+But, when all is said and done, the fact remains that some teachers have
+a naturally inspiring presence, and can make their exercises
+interesting, while others simply cannot. And psychology and general
+pedagogy here confess their failure, and hand things over to the deeper
+springs of human personality to conduct the task.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A brief reference to the physiological theory of the attentive process
+may serve still further to elucidate these practical remarks, and
+confirm them by showing them from a slightly different point of view.
+
+What is the attentive process, psychologically considered? Attention to
+an object is what takes place whenever that object most completely
+occupies the mind. For simplicity's sake suppose the object be an object
+of sensation,--a figure approaching us at a distance on the road. It is
+far off, barely perceptible, and hardly moving: we do not know with
+certainty whether it is a man or not. Such an object as this, if
+carelessly looked at, may hardly catch our attention at all. The optical
+impression may affect solely the marginal consciousness, while the
+mental focus keeps engaged with rival things. We may indeed not 'see' it
+till some one points it out. But, if so, how does he point it out? By
+his finger, and by describing its appearance,--by creating a premonitory
+image of _where_ to look and of _what_ to expect to see. This
+premonitory image is already an excitement of the same nerve-centres
+that are to be concerned with the impression. The impression comes, and
+excites them still further; and now the object enters the focus of the
+field, consciousness being sustained both by impression and by
+preliminary idea. But the maximum of attention to it is not yet reached.
+Although we see it, we may not care for it; it may suggest nothing
+important to us; and a rival stream of objects or of thoughts may
+quickly take our mind away. If, however, our companion defines it in a
+significant way, arouses in the mind a set of experiences to be
+apprehended from it,--names it an enemy or as a messenger of important
+tidings,--the residual and marginal ideas now aroused, so far from being
+its rivals, become its associates and allies. They shoot together into
+one system with it; they converge upon it; they keep it steadily in
+focus; the mind attends to it with maximum power.
+
+The attentive process, therefore, at its maximum may be physiologically
+symbolized by a brain-cell played on in two ways, from without and from
+within. Incoming currents from the periphery arouse it, and collateral
+currents from the centres of memory and imagination re-enforce these.
+
+In this process the incoming impression is the newer element; the ideas
+which re-enforce and sustain it are among the older possessions of the
+mind. And the maximum of attention may then be said to be found whenever
+we have a systematic harmony or unification between the novel and the
+old. It is an odd circumstance that neither the old nor the new, by
+itself, is interesting: the absolutely old is insipid; the absolutely
+new makes no appeal at all. The old _in_ the new is what claims the
+attention,--the old with a slightly new turn. No one wants to hear a
+lecture on a subject completely disconnected with his previous
+knowledge, but we all like lectures on subjects of which we know a
+little already, just as, in the fashions, every year must bring its
+slight modification of last year's suit, but an abrupt jump from the
+fashion of one decade into another would be distasteful to the eye.
+
+The genius of the interesting teacher consists in sympathetic divination
+of the sort of material with which the pupil's mind is likely to be
+already spontaneously engaged, and in the ingenuity which discovers
+paths of connection from that material to the matters to be newly
+learned. The principle is easy to grasp, but the accomplishment is
+difficult in the extreme. And a knowledge of such psychology as this
+which I am recalling can no more make a good teacher than a knowledge of
+the laws of perspective can make a landscape painter of effective skill.
+
+A certain doubt may now occur to some of you. A while ago, apropos of
+the pugnacious instinct, I spoke of our modern pedagogy as being
+possibly too 'soft.' You may perhaps here face me with my own words, and
+ask whether the exclusive effort on the teacher's part to keep the
+pupil's spontaneous interest going, and to avoid the more strenuous path
+of voluntary attention to repulsive work, does not savor also of
+sentimentalism. The greater part of schoolroom work, you say, must, in
+the nature of things, always be repulsive. To face uninteresting
+drudgery is a good part of life's work. Why seek to eliminate it from
+the schoolroom or minimize the sterner law?
+
+A word or two will obviate what might perhaps become a serious
+misunderstanding here.
+
+It is certain that most schoolroom work, till it has become habitual and
+automatic, is repulsive, and cannot be done without voluntarily jerking
+back the attention to it every now and then. This is inevitable, let the
+teacher do what he will.
+
+It flows from the inherent nature of the subjects and of the learning
+mind. The repulsive processes of verbal memorizing, of discovering steps
+of mathematical identity, and the like, must borrow their interest at
+first from purely external sources, mainly from the personal interests
+with which success in mastering them is associated, such as gaining of
+rank, avoiding punishment, not being beaten by a difficulty and the
+like. Without such borrowed interest, the child could not attend to them
+at all. But in these processes what becomes interesting enough to be
+attended to is not thereby attended to _without effort_. Effort always
+has to go on, derived interest, for the most part, not awakening
+attention that is _easy_, however spontaneous it may now have to be
+called. The interest which the teacher, by his utmost skill, can lend to
+the subject, proves over and over again to be only an interest
+sufficient _to let loose the effort_. The teacher, therefore, need never
+concern himself about _inventing_ occasions where effort must be called
+into play. Let him still awaken whatever sources of interest in the
+subject he can by stirring up connections between it and the pupil's
+nature, whether in the line of theoretic curiosity, of personal
+interest, or of pugnacious impulse. The laws of mind will then bring
+enough pulses of effort into play to keep the pupil exercised in the
+direction of the subject. There is, in fact, no greater school of effort
+than the steady struggle to attend to immediately repulsive or difficult
+objects of thought which have grown to interest us through their
+association as means, with some remote ideal end.
+
+The Herbartian doctrine of interest ought not, therefore, in principle
+to be reproached with making pedagogy soft. If it do so, it is because
+it is unintelligently carried on. Do not, then, for the mere sake of
+discipline, command attention from your pupils in thundering tones. Do
+not too often beg it from them as a favor, nor claim it as a right, nor
+try habitually to excite it by preaching the importance of the subject.
+Sometimes, indeed, you must do these things; but, the more you have to
+do them, the less skilful teacher you will show yourself to be. Elicit
+interest from within, by the warmth with which you care for the topic
+yourself, and by following the laws I have laid down.
+
+If the topic be highly abstract, show its nature by concrete examples.
+If it be unfamiliar, trace some point of analogy in it with the known.
+If it be inhuman, make it figure as part of a story. If it be
+difficult, couple its acquisition with some prospect of personal gain.
+Above all things, make sure that it shall run through certain inner
+changes, since no unvarying object can possibly hold the mental field
+for long. Let your pupil wander from one aspect to another of your
+subject, if you do not wish him to wander from it altogether to
+something else, variety in unity being the secret of all interesting
+talk and thought. The relation of all these things to the native genius
+of the instructor is too obvious to need comment again.
+
+One more point, and I am done with the subject of attention. There is
+unquestionably a great native variety among individuals in the type of
+their attention. Some of us are naturally scatterbrained, and others
+follow easily a train of connected thoughts without temptation to swerve
+aside to other subjects. This seems to depend on a difference between
+individuals in the type of their field of consciousness. In some persons
+this is highly focalized and concentrated, and the focal ideas
+predominate in determining association. In others we must suppose the
+margin to be brighter, and to be filled with something like meteoric
+showers of images, which strike into it at random, displacing the focal
+ideas, and carrying association in their own direction. Persons of the
+latter type find their attention wandering every minute, and must bring
+it back by a voluntary pull. The others sink into a subject of
+meditation deeply, and, when interrupted, are 'lost' for a moment before
+they come back to the outer world.
+
+The possession of such a steady faculty of attention is unquestionably a
+great boon. Those who have it can work more rapidly, and with less
+nervous wear and tear. I am inclined to think that no one who is without
+it naturally can by any amount of drill or discipline attain it in a
+very high degree. Its amount is probably a fixed characteristic of the
+individual. But I wish to make a remark here which I shall have occasion
+to make again in other connections. It is that no one need deplore
+unduly the inferiority in himself of any one elementary faculty. This
+concentrated type of attention is an elementary faculty: it is one of
+the things that might be ascertained and measured by exercises in the
+laboratory. But, having ascertained it in a number of persons, we could
+never rank them in a scale of actual and practical mental efficiency
+based on its degrees. The total mental efficiency of a man is the
+resultant of the working together of all his faculties. He is too
+complex a being for any one of them to have the casting vote. If any
+one of them do have the casting vote, it is more likely to be the
+strength of his desire and passion, the strength of the interest he
+takes in what is proposed. Concentration, memory, reasoning power,
+inventiveness, excellence of the senses,--all are subsidiary to this.
+No matter how scatter-brained the type of a man's successive fields
+of consciousness may be, if he really _care_ for a subject, he will
+return to it incessantly from his incessant wanderings, and first and
+last do more with it, and get more results from it, than another
+person whose attention may be more continuous during a given interval,
+but whose passion for the subject is of a more languid and less
+permanent sort. Some of the most efficient workers I know are of the
+ultra-scatterbrained type. One friend, who does a prodigious quantity of
+work, has in fact confessed to me that, if he wants to get ideas on any
+subject, he sits down to work at something else, his best results coming
+through his mind-wanderings. This is perhaps an epigrammatic
+exaggeration on his part; but I seriously think that no one of us need
+be too much distressed at his own shortcomings in this regard. Our mind
+may enjoy but little comfort, may be restless and feel confused; but it
+may be extremely efficient all the same.
+
+
+
+
+XII. MEMORY
+
+
+We are following a somewhat arbitrary order. Since each and every
+faculty we possess is either in whole or in part a resultant of the play
+of our associations, it would have been as natural, after treating of
+association, to treat of memory as to treat of interest and attention
+next. But, since we did take the latter operations first, we must take
+memory now without farther delay; for the phenomena of memory are among
+the simplest and most immediate consequences of the fact that our mind
+is essentially an associating machine. There is no more pre-eminent
+example for exhibiting the fertility of the laws of association as
+principles of psychological analysis. Memory, moreover, is so important
+a faculty in the schoolroom that you are probably waiting with some
+eagerness to know what psychology has to say about it for your help.
+
+In old times, if you asked a person to explain why he came to be
+remembering at that moment some particular incident in his previous
+life, the only reply he could make was that his soul is endowed with a
+faculty called memory; that it is the inalienable function of this
+faculty to recollect; and that, therefore, he necessarily at that moment
+must have a cognition of that portion of the past. This explanation by a
+'faculty' is one thing which explanation by association has superseded
+altogether. If, by saying we have a faculty of memory, you mean nothing
+more than the fact that we can remember, nothing more than an abstract
+name for our power inwardly to recall the past, there is no harm done:
+we do have the faculty; for we unquestionably have such a power. But if,
+by faculty, you mean a principle of _explanation of our general power to
+recall_, your psychology is empty. The associationist psychology, on the
+other hand, gives an explanation of each particular fact of
+recollection; and, in so doing, it also gives an explanation of the
+general faculty. The 'faculty' of memory is thus no real or ultimate
+explanation; for it is itself explained as a result of the association
+of ideas.
+
+Nothing is easier than to show you just what I mean by this. Suppose I
+am silent for a moment, and then say in commanding accents: "Remember!
+Recollect!" Does your faculty of memory obey the order, and reproduce
+any definite image from your past? Certainly not. It stands staring into
+vacancy, and asking, "What kind of a thing do you wish me to remember?"
+It needs in short, a _cue_. But, if I say, remember the date of your
+birth, or remember what you had for breakfast, or remember the
+succession of notes in the musical scale; then your faculty of memory
+immediately produces the required result: the _'cue'_ determines its
+vast set of potentialities toward a particular point. And if you now
+look to see how this happens, you immediately perceive that the cue is
+something _contiguously associated_ with the thing recalled. The words,
+'date of my birth,' have an ingrained association with a particular
+number, month, and year; the words, 'breakfast this morning,' cut off
+all other lines of recall except those which lead to coffee and bacon
+and eggs; the words, 'musical scale,' are inveterate mental neighbors of
+do, ré, mi, fa, sol, la, etc. The laws of association govern, in fact,
+all the trains of our thinking which are not interrupted by sensations
+breaking on us from without. Whatever appears in the mind must be
+_introduced_; and, when introduced, it is as the associate of something
+already there. This is as true of what you are recollecting as it is of
+everything else you think of.
+
+Reflection will show you that there are peculiarities in your memory
+which would be quite whimsical and unaccountable if we were forced to
+regard them as the product of a purely spiritual faculty. Were memory
+such a faculty, granted to us solely for its practical use, we ought to
+remember easiest whatever we most _needed_ to remember; and frequency of
+repetition, recency, and the like, would play no part in the matter.
+That we should best remember frequent things and recent things, and
+forget things that are ancient or were experienced only once, could only
+be regarded as an incomprehensible anomaly on such a view. But if we
+remember because of our associations, and if these are (as the
+physiological psychologists believe) due to our organized brain-paths,
+we easily see how the law of recency and repetition should prevail.
+Paths frequently and recently ploughed are those that lie most open,
+those which may be expected most easily to lead to results. The laws of
+our memory, as we find them, therefore are incidents of our
+associational constitution; and, when we are emancipated from the
+flesh, it is conceivable that they may no longer continue to obtain.
+
+We may assume, then, that recollection is a resultant of our associative
+processes, these themselves in the last analysis being most probably due
+to the workings of our brain.
+
+Descending more particularly into the faculty of memory, we have to
+distinguish between its potential aspect as a magazine or storehouse and
+its actual aspect as recollection now of a particular event. Our memory
+contains all sorts of items which we do not now recall, but which we may
+recall, provided a sufficient cue be offered. Both the general retention
+and the special recall are explained by association. An educated memory
+depends on an organized system of associations; and its goodness depends
+on two of their peculiarities: first, on the persistency of the
+associations; and, second, on their number.
+
+Let us consider each of these points in turn.
+
+First, the persistency of the associations. This gives what may be
+called the _quality of native retentiveness_ to the individual. If, as I
+think we are forced to, we consider the brain to be the organic
+condition by which the vestiges of our experience are associated with
+each other, we may suppose that some brains are 'wax to receive and
+marble to retain.' The slightest impressions made on them abide. Names,
+dates, prices, anecdotes, quotations, are indelibly retained, their
+several elements fixedly cohering together, so that the individual soon
+becomes a walking cyclopędia of information. All this may occur with no
+philosophic tendency in the mind, no impulse to weave the materials
+acquired into anything like a logical system. In the books of anecdotes,
+and, more recently, in the psychology-books, we find recorded instances
+of monstrosities, as we may call them, of this desultory memory; and
+they are often otherwise very stupid men. It is, of course, by no means
+incompatible with a philosophic mind; for mental characteristics have
+infinite capacities for permutation. And, when both memory and
+philosophy combine together in one person, then indeed we have the
+highest sort of intellectual efficiency. Your Walter Scotts, your
+Leibnitzes, your Gladstones, and your Goethes, all your folio copies of
+mankind, belong to this type. Efficiency on a colossal scale would
+indeed seem to require it. For, although your philosophic or systematic
+mind without good desultory memory may know how to work out results and
+recollect where in the books to find them, the time lost in the
+searching process handicaps the thinker, and gives to the more ready
+type of individual the economical advantage.
+
+The extreme of the contrasted type, the type with associations of small
+persistency, is found in those who have almost no desultory memory at
+all. If they are also deficient in logical and systematizing power, we
+call them simply feeble intellects; and no more need to be said about
+them here. Their brain-matter, we may imagine, is like a fluid jelly, in
+which impressions may be easily made, but are soon closed over again, so
+that the brain reverts to its original indifferent state.
+
+But it may occur here, just as in other gelatinous substances, that an
+impression will vibrate throughout the brain, and send waves into other
+parts of it. In cases of this sort, although the immediate impression
+may fade out quickly, it does modify the cerebral mass; for the paths it
+makes there may remain, and become so many avenues through which the
+impression may be reproduced if they ever get excited again. And its
+liability to reproduction will depend of course upon the variety of
+these paths and upon the frequency with which they are used. Each path
+is in fact an associated process, the number of these associates
+becoming thus to a great degree a substitute for the independent
+tenacity of the original impression. As I have elsewhere written: Each
+of the associates is a hook to which it hangs, a means to fish it up
+when sunk below the surface. Together they form a network of attachments
+by which it is woven into the entire tissue of our thought. The 'secret
+of a good memory' is thus the secret of forming diverse and multiple
+associations with every fact we care to retain. But this forming of
+associations with a fact,--what is it but thinking _about_ the fact as
+much as possible? Briefly, then, of two men with the same outward
+experiences, _the one who thinks over his experiences most_, and weaves
+them into the most systematic relations with each other, will be the one
+with the best memory.
+
+But, if our ability to recollect a thing be so largely a matter of its
+associations with other things which thus becomes its cues, an important
+pędagogic consequence follows. _There can be no improvement of the
+general or elementary faculty of memory: there can only be improvement
+of our memory for special systems of associated things_; and this
+latter improvement is due to the way in which the things in question are
+woven into association with each other in the mind. Intricately or
+profoundly woven, they are held: disconnected, they tend to drop out
+just in proportion as the native brain retentiveness is poor. And no
+amount of training, drilling, repeating, and reciting employed upon the
+matter of one system of objects, the history-system, for example, will
+in the least improve either the facility or the durability with which
+objects belonging to a wholly disparate system--the system of facts of
+chemistry, for instance--tend to be retained. That system must be
+separately worked into the mind by itself,--a chemical fact which is
+thought about in connection with the other chemical facts, tending then
+to stay, but otherwise easily dropping out.
+
+We have, then, not so much a faculty of memory as many faculties of
+memory. We have as many as we have systems of objects habitually thought
+of in connection with each other. A given object is held in the memory
+by the associates it has acquired within its own system exclusively.
+Learning the facts of another system will in no wise help it to stay in
+the mind, for the simple reason that it has no 'cues' within that other
+system.
+
+We see examples of this on every hand. Most men have a good memory for
+facts connected with their own pursuits. A college athlete, who remains
+a dunce at his books, may amaze you by his knowledge of the 'records' at
+various feats and games, and prove himself a walking dictionary of
+sporting statistics. The reason is that he is constantly going over
+these things in his mind, and comparing and making series of them. They
+form for him, not so many odd facts, but a concept-system, so they
+stick. So the merchant remembers prices, the politician other
+politicians' speeches and votes, with a copiousness which astonishes
+outsiders, but which the amount of thinking they bestow on these
+subjects easily explains.
+
+The great memory for facts which a Darwin or a Spencer reveal in their
+books is not incompatible with the possession on their part of a mind
+with only a middling degree of physiological retentiveness. Let a man
+early in life set himself the task of verifying such a theory as that of
+evolution, and facts will soon cluster and cling to him like grapes to
+their stem. Their relations to the theory will hold them fast; and, the
+more of these the mind is able to discern, the greater the erudition
+will become. Meanwhile the theorist may have little, if any, desultory
+memory. Unutilizable facts may be unnoted by him, and forgotten as soon
+as heard. An ignorance almost as encyclopedic as his erudition may
+coexist with the latter, and hide, as it were, within the interstices of
+its web. Those of you who have had much to do with scholars and
+_savants_ will readily think of examples of the class of mind I mean.
+
+The best possible sort of system into which to weave an object,
+mentally, is a _rational_ system, or what is called a 'science.' Place
+the thing in its pigeon-hole in a classificatory series; explain it
+logically by its causes, and deduce from it its necessary effects; find
+out of what natural law it is an instance,--and you then know it in the
+best of all possible ways. A 'science' is thus the greatest of
+labor-saving contrivances. It relieves the memory of an immense number
+of details, replacing, as it does, merely contiguous associations by the
+logical ones of identity, similarity, or analogy. If you know a 'law,'
+you may discharge your memory of masses of particular instances, for the
+law will reproduce them for you whenever you require them. The law of
+refraction, for example: If you know that, you can with a pencil and a
+bit of paper immediately discern how a convex lens, a concave lens, or a
+prism, must severally alter the appearance of an object. But, if you
+don't know the general law, you must charge your memory separately with
+each of the three kinds of effect.
+
+A 'philosophic' system, in which all things found their rational
+explanation and were connected together as causes and effects, would be
+the perfect mnemonic system, in which the greatest economy of means
+would bring about the greatest richness of results. So that, if we have
+poor desultory memories, we can save ourselves by cultivating the
+philosophic turn of mind.
+
+There are many artificial systems of mnemonics, some public, some sold
+as secrets. They are all so many devices for training us into certain
+methodical and stereotyped _ways of thinking_ about the facts we seek to
+retain. Even were I competent, I could not here go into these systems in
+any detail. But a single example, from a popular system, will show what
+I mean. I take the number-alphabet, the great mnemonic device for
+recollecting numbers and dates. In this system each digit is
+represented by a consonant, thus: 1 is _t_ or _d_; 2, _n_; 3, _m_; 4,
+_r_; 5, _l_; 6, _sh, j, ch_, or _g_; 7, _c, k, g_, or _qu_; 8, _f_ or
+_v_; 9, _b_ or _p_; 0, _s, c_, or _z_. Suppose, now, you wish to
+remember the velocity of sound, 1,142 feet a second: _t, t, r, n_, are
+the letters you must use. They make the consonants of _tight run_, and
+it would be a 'tight run' for you to keep up such a speed. So 1649, the
+date of the execution of Charles I., may be remembered by the word
+_sharp_, which recalls the headsman's axe.
+
+Apart from the extreme difficulty of finding words that are appropriate
+in this exercise, it is clearly an excessively poor, trivial, and silly
+way of 'thinking' about dates; and the way of the historian is much
+better. He has a lot of landmark-dates already in his mind. He knows the
+historic concatenation of events, and can usually place an event at its
+right date in the chronology-table, by thinking of it in a rational way,
+referring it to its antecedents, tracing its concomitants and
+consequences, and thus ciphering out its date by connecting it with
+theirs. The artificial memory-systems, recommending, as they do, such
+irrational methods of thinking, are only to be recommended for the first
+landmarks in a system, or for such purely detached facts as enjoy no
+rational connection with the rest of our ideas. Thus the student of
+physics may remember the order of the spectral colours by the word
+_vibgyor_ which their initial letters make. The student of anatomy may
+remember the position of the Mitral valve on the Left side of the heart
+by thinking that L.M. stands also for 'long meter' in the hymn-books.
+
+You now see why 'cramming' must be so poor a mode of study. Cramming
+seeks to stamp things in by intense application immediately before the
+ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form but few associations. On the
+other hand, the same thing recurring on different days, in different
+contexts, read, recited on, referred to again and again, related to
+other things and reviewed, gets well wrought into the mental structure.
+This is the reason why you should enforce on your pupils habits of
+continuous application. There is no moral turpitude in cramming. It
+would be the best, because the most economical, mode of study if it led
+to the results desired. But it does not, and your older pupils can
+readily be made to see the reason why.
+
+It follows also, from what has been said, that _the popular idea that
+'the Memory,' in the sense of a general elementary faculty, can be
+improved by training, is a great mistake_. Your memory for facts of a
+certain class can be improved very much by training in that class of
+facts, because the incoming new fact will then find all sorts of
+analogues and associates already there, and these will keep it liable to
+recall. But other kinds of fact will reap none of that benefit, and,
+unless one have been also trained and versed in _their_ class, will be
+at the mercy of the mere crude retentiveness of the individual, which,
+as we have seen, is practically a fixed quantity. Nevertheless, one
+often hears people say: "A great sin was committed against me in my
+youth: my teachers entirely failed to exercise my memory. If they had
+only made me learn a lot of things by heart at school, I should not be,
+as I am now, forgetful of everything I read and hear." This is a great
+mistake: learning poetry by heart will make it easier to learn and
+remember other poetry, but nothing else; and so of dates; and so of
+chemistry and geography.
+
+But, after what I have said, I am sure you will need no farther argument
+on this point; and I therefore pass it by.
+
+But, since it has brought me to speak of learning things by heart, I
+think that a general practical remark about verbal memorizing may now
+not be out of place. The excesses of old-fashioned verbal memorizing,
+and the immense advantages of object-teaching in the earlier stages of
+culture, have perhaps led those who philosophize about teaching to an
+unduly strong reaction; and learning things by heart is now probably
+somewhat too much despised. For, when all is said and done, the fact
+remains that verbal material is, on the whole, the handiest and most
+useful material in which thinking can be carried on. Abstract
+conceptions are far and away the most economical instruments of thought,
+and abstract conceptions are fixed and incarnated for us in words.
+Statistical inquiry would seem to show that, as men advance in life,
+they tend to make less and less use of visual images, and more and more
+use of words. One of the first things that Mr. Galton discovered was
+that this appeared to be the case with the members of the Royal Society
+whom he questioned as to their mental images. I should say, therefore,
+that constant exercise in verbal memorizing must still be an
+indispensable feature in all sound education. Nothing is more
+deplorable than that inarticulate and helpless sort of mind that is
+reminded by everything of some quotation, case, or anecdote, which it
+cannot now exactly recollect. Nothing, on the other hand, is more
+convenient to its possessor, or more delightful to his comrades, than a
+mind able, in telling a story, to give the exact words of the dialogue
+or to furnish a quotation accurate and complete. In every branch of
+study there are happily turned, concise, and handy formulas which in an
+incomparable way sum up results. The mind that can retain such formulas
+is in so far a superior mind, and the communication of them to the pupil
+ought always to be one of the teacher's favorite tasks.
+
+In learning 'by heart,' there are, however, efficient and inefficient
+methods; and, by making the pupil skilful in the best method, the
+teacher can both interest him and abridge the task. The best method is
+of course not to 'hammer in' the sentences, by mere reiteration, but to
+analyze them, and think. For example, if the pupil should have to learn
+this last sentence, let him first strip out its grammatical core, and
+learn, "The best method is not to hammer in, but to analyze," and then
+add the amplificative and restrictive clauses, bit by bit, thus: "The
+best method is of course not to hammer in _the sentences_, but to
+analyze _them and think_." Then finally insert the words '_by mere
+reiteration_,' and the sentence is complete, and both better understood
+and quicker remembered than by a more purely mechanical method.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In conclusion, I must say a word about the contributions to
+our knowledge of memory which have recently come from the
+laboratory-psychologists. Many of the enthusiasts for scientific or
+brass-instrument child-study are taking accurate measurements of
+children's elementary faculties, and among these what we may call
+_immediate memory_ admits of easy measurement. All we need do is to
+exhibit to the child a series of letters, syllables, figures, pictures,
+or what-not, at intervals of one, two, three, or more seconds, or to
+sound a similar series of names at the same intervals, within his
+hearing, and then see how completely he can reproduce the list, either
+directly, or after an interval of ten, twenty, or sixty seconds, or some
+longer space of time. According to the results of this exercise, the
+pupils may be rated in a memory-scale; and some persons go so far as to
+think that the teacher should modify her treatment of the child
+according to the strength or feebleness of its faculty as thus made
+known.
+
+Now I can only repeat here what I said to you when treating of
+attention: man is too complex a being for light to be thrown on his real
+efficiency by measuring any one mental faculty taken apart from its
+consensus in the working whole. Such an exercise as this, dealing with
+incoherent and insipid objects, with no logical connection with each
+other, or practical significance outside of the 'test,' is an exercise
+the like of which in real life we are hardly ever called upon to
+perform. In real life, our memory is always used in the service of some
+interest: we remember things which we care for or which are associated
+with things we care for; and the child who stands at the bottom of the
+scale thus experimentally established might, by dint of the strength of
+his passion for a subject, and in consequence of the logical association
+into which he weaves the actual materials of his experience, be a very
+effective memorizer indeed, and do his school-tasks on the whole much
+better than an immediate parrot who might stand at the top of the
+'scientifically accurate' list.
+
+This preponderance of interest, of passion, in determining the results
+of a human being's working life, obtains throughout. No elementary
+measurement, capable of being performed in a laboratory, can throw any
+light on the actual efficiency of the subject; for the vital thing about
+him, his emotional and moral energy and doggedness, can be measured by
+no single experiment, and becomes known only by the total results in the
+long run. A blind man like Huber, with his passion for bees and ants,
+can observe them through other people's eyes better than these can
+through their own. A man born with neither arms nor legs, like the late
+Kavanagh, M.P.--and what an icy heart his mother must have had about him
+in his babyhood, and how 'negative' would the laboratory-measurements of
+his motor-functions have been!--can be an adventurous traveller, an
+equestrian and sportsman, and lead an athletic outdoor life. Mr. Romanes
+studied the elementary rate of apperception in a large number of persons
+by making them read a paragraph as fast as they could take it in, and
+then immediately write down all they could reproduce of its contents. He
+found astonishing differences in the rapidity, some taking four times as
+long as others to absorb the paragraph, and the swiftest readers being,
+as a rule, the best immediate recollectors, too. But not,--and this is
+my point,--_not_ the most _intellectually capable subjects_, as tested
+by the results of what Mr. Romanes rightly names 'genuine' intellectual
+work; for he tried the experiment with several highly distinguished men
+in science and literature, and most of them turned out to be slow
+readers.
+
+In the light of all such facts one may well believe that the total
+impression which a perceptive teacher will get of the pupil's condition,
+as indicated by his general temper and manner, by the listlessness or
+alertness, by the ease or painfulness with which his school work is
+done, will be of much more value than those unreal experimental tests,
+those pedantic elementary measurements of fatigue, memory, association,
+and attention, etc., which are urged upon us as the only basis of a
+genuinely scientific pedagogy. Such measurements can give us useful
+information only when we combine them with observations made without
+brass instruments, upon the total demeanor of the measured individual,
+by teachers with eyes in their heads and common sense, and some feeling
+for the concrete facts of human nature in their hearts.
+
+Depend upon it, no one need be too much cast down by the discovery of
+his deficiency in any elementary faculty of the mind. What tells in life
+is the whole mind working together, and the deficiencies of any one
+faculty can be compensated by the efforts of the rest. You can be an
+artist without visual images, a reader without eyes, a mass of erudition
+with a bad elementary memory. In almost any subject your passion for the
+subject will save you. If you only care enough for a result, you will
+almost certainly attain it. If you wish to be rich, you will be rich; if
+you wish to be learned, you will be learned; if you wish to be good, you
+will be good. Only you must, then, _really_ wish these things, and wish
+them with exclusiveness, and not wish at the same time a hundred other
+incompatible things just as strongly.
+
+One of the most important discoveries of the 'scientific' sort that have
+recently been made in psychology is that of Mr. Galton and others
+concerning the great variations among individuals in the type of their
+imagination. Every one is now familiar with the fact that human beings
+vary enormously in the brilliancy, completeness, definiteness, and
+extent of their visual images. These are singularly perfect in a large
+number of individuals, and in a few are so rudimentary as hardly to
+exist. The same is true of the auditory and motor images, and probably
+of those of every kind; and the recent discovery of distinct brain-areas
+for the various orders of sensation would seem to provide a physical
+basis for such variations and discrepancies. The facts, as I said, are
+nowadays so popularly known that I need only remind you of their
+existence. They might seem at first sight of practical importance to the
+teacher; and, indeed, teachers have been recommended to sort their
+pupils in this way, and treat them as the result falls out. You should
+interrogate them as to their imagery, it is said, or exhibit lists of
+written words to their eyes, and then sound similar lists in their ears,
+and see by which channel a child retains most words. Then, in dealing
+with that child, make your appeals predominantly through that channel.
+If the class were very small, results of some distinctness might
+doubtless thus be obtained by a painstaking teacher. But it is obvious
+that in the usual schoolroom no such differentiation of appeal is
+possible; and the only really useful practical lesson that emerges from
+this analytic psychology in the conduct of large schools is the lesson
+already reached in a purely empirical way, that the teacher ought
+always to impress the class through as many sensible channels as he can.
+Talk and write and draw on blackboard, permit the pupils to talk, and
+make them write and draw, exhibit pictures, plans, and curves, have your
+diagrams colored differently in their different parts, etc.; and out of
+the whole variety of impressions the individual child will find the most
+lasting ones for himself. In all primary school work this principle of
+multiple impressions is well recognized, so I need say no more about it
+here.
+
+This principle of multiplying channels and varying associations and
+appeals is important, not only for teaching pupils to remember, but for
+teaching them to understand. It runs, in fact, through the whole
+teaching art.
+
+One word about the unconscious and unreproducible part of our
+acquisitions, and I shall have done with the topic of memory.
+
+Professor Ebbinghaus, in a heroic little investigation into the laws of
+memory which he performed a dozen or more years ago by the method of
+learning lists of nonsense syllables, devised a method of measuring the
+rate of our forgetfulness, which lays bare an important law of the mind.
+
+His method was to read over his list until he could repeat it once by
+heart unhesitatingly. The number of repetitions required for this was a
+measure of the difficulty of the learning in each particular case. Now,
+after having once learned a piece in this way, if we wait five minutes,
+we find it impossible to repeat it again in the same unhesitating
+manner. We must read it over again to revive some of the syllables,
+which have already dropped out or got transposed. Ebbinghaus now
+systematically studied the number of readings-over which were necessary
+to revive the unhesitating recollection of the piece after five minutes,
+half an hour, an hour, a day, a week, a month, had elapsed. The number
+of rereadings required he took to be a measure of the _amount of
+forgetting_ that had occurred in the elapsed interval. And he found some
+remarkable facts. The process of forgetting, namely, is vastly more
+rapid at first than later on. Thus full half of the piece seems to be
+forgotten within the first half-hour, two-thirds of it are forgotten at
+the end of eight hours, but only four-fifths at the end of a month. He
+made no trials beyond one month of interval; but, if we ourselves
+prolong ideally the curve of remembrance, whose beginning his
+experiments thus obtain, it is natural to suppose that, no matter how
+long a time might elapse, the curve would never descend quite so low as
+to touch the zero-line. In other words, no matter how long ago we may
+have learned a poem, and no matter how complete our inability to
+reproduce it now may be, yet the first learning will still show its
+lingering effects in the abridgment of the time required for learning it
+again. In short, Professor Ebbinghaus's experiments show that things
+which we are quite unable definitely to recall have nevertheless
+impressed themselves, in some way, upon the structure of the mind. We
+are different for having once learned them. The resistances in our
+systems of brain-paths are altered. Our apprehensions are quickened. Our
+conclusions from certain premises are probably not just what they would
+be if those modifications were not there. The latter influence the whole
+margin of our consciousness, even though their products, not being
+distinctly reproducible, do not directly figure at the focus of the
+field.
+
+The teacher should draw a lesson from these facts. We are all too apt to
+measure the gains of our pupils by their proficiency in directly
+reproducing in a recitation or an examination such matters as they may
+have learned, and inarticulate power in them is something of which we
+always underestimate the value. The boy who tells us, "I know the
+answer, but I can't say what it is," we treat as practically identical
+with him who knows absolutely nothing about the answer at all. But this
+is a great mistake. It is but a small part of our experience in life
+that we are ever able articulately to recall. And yet the whole of it
+has had its influence in shaping our character and defining our
+tendencies to judge and act. Although the ready memory is a great
+blessing to its possessor, the vaguer memory of a subject, of having
+once had to do with it, of its neighborhood, and of where we may go to
+recover it again, constitutes in most men and women the chief fruit of
+their education. This is true even in professional education. The
+doctor, the lawyer, are seldom able to decide upon a case off-hand. They
+differ from other men only through the fact that they know how to get at
+the materials for decision in five minutes or half an hour: whereas the
+layman is unable to get at the materials at all, not knowing in what
+books and indexes to look or not understanding the technical terms.
+
+Be patient, then, and sympathetic with the type of mind that cuts a
+poor figure in examinations. It may, in the long examination which life
+sets us, come out in the end in better shape than the glib and ready
+reproducer, its passions being deeper, its purposes more worthy, its
+combining power less commonplace, and its total mental output
+consequently more important.
+
+Such are the chief points which it has seemed worth while for me to call
+to your notice under the head of memory. We can sum them up for
+practical purposes by saying that the art of remembering is the art of
+_thinking_; and by adding, with Dr. Pick, that, when we wish to fix a
+new thing in either our own mind or a pupil's, our conscious effort
+should not be so much to _impress_ and _retain_ it as to _connect_ it
+with something else already there. The connecting _is_ the thinking;
+and, if we attend clearly to the connection, the connected thing will
+certainly be likely to remain within recall.
+
+I shall next ask you to consider the process by which we acquire new
+knowledge,--the process of 'Apperception,' as it is called, by which we
+receive and deal with new experiences, and revise our stock of ideas so
+as to form new or improved conceptions.
+
+
+
+
+XIII. THE ACQUISITION OF IDEAS
+
+
+The images of our past experiences, of whatever nature they may be,
+visual or verbal, blurred and dim, vivid and distinct, abstract or
+concrete, need not be memory images, in the strict sense of the word.
+That is, they need not rise before the mind in a marginal fringe or
+context of concomitant circumstances, which mean for us their _date_.
+They may be mere conceptions, floating pictures of an object, or of its
+type or class. In this undated condition, we call them products of
+'imagination' or 'conception.' Imagination is the term commonly used
+where the object represented is thought of as an individual thing.
+Conception is the term where we think of it as a type or class. For our
+present purpose the distinction is not important; and I will permit
+myself to use either the word 'conception,' or the still vaguer word
+'idea,' to designate the inner objects of contemplation, whether these
+be individual things, like 'the sun' or 'Julius Cęsar,' or classes of
+things, like 'animal kingdom,' or, finally, entirely abstract
+attributes, like 'rationality' or 'rectitude.'
+
+The result of our education is to fill the mind little by little, as
+experiences accrete, with a stock of such ideas. In the illustration I
+used at our first meeting, of the child snatching the toy and getting
+slapped, the vestiges left by the first experience answered to so many
+ideas which he acquired thereby,--ideas that remained with him
+associated in a certain order, and from the last one of which the child
+eventually proceeded to act. The sciences of grammar and of logic are
+little more than attempts methodically to classify all such acquired
+ideas and to trace certain laws of relationship among them. The forms of
+relation between them, becoming themselves in turn noticed by the mind,
+are treated as conceptions of a higher and more abstract order, as when
+we speak of a syllogistic relation' between propositions, or of four
+quantities making a 'proportion,' or of the 'inconsistency' of two
+conceptions, or the 'implication' of one in the other.
+
+So you see that the process of education, taken in a large way, may be
+described as nothing but the process of acquiring ideas or conceptions,
+the best educated mind being the mind which has the largest stock of
+them, ready to meet the largest possible variety of the emergencies of
+life. The lack of education means only the failure to have acquired
+them, and the consequent liability to be 'floored' and 'rattled' in the
+vicissitudes of experience.
+
+In all this process of acquiring conceptions, a certain instinctive
+order is followed. There is a native tendency to assimilate certain
+kinds of conception at one age, and other kinds of conception at a later
+age. During the first seven or eight years of childhood the mind is most
+interested in the sensible properties of material things.
+_Constructiveness_ is the instinct most active; and by the incessant
+hammering and sawing, and dressing and undressing dolls, putting of
+things together and taking them apart, the child not only trains the
+muscles to co-ordinate action, but accumulates a store of physical
+conceptions which are the basis of his knowledge of the material world
+through life. Object-teaching and manual training wisely extend the
+sphere of this order of acquisition. Clay, wood, metals, and the various
+kinds of tools are made to contribute to the store. A youth brought up
+with a sufficiently broad basis of this kind is always at home in the
+world. He stands within the pale. He is acquainted with Nature, and
+Nature in a certain sense is acquainted with him. Whereas the youth
+brought up alone at home, with no acquaintance with anything but the
+printed page, is always afflicted with a certain remoteness from the
+material facts of life, and a correlative insecurity of consciousness
+which make of him a kind of alien on the earth in which he ought to feel
+himself perfectly at home.
+
+I already said something of this in speaking of the constructive
+impulse, and I must not repeat myself. Moreover, you fully realize, I am
+sure, how important for life,--for the moral tone of life, quite apart
+from definite practical pursuits,--is this sense of readiness for
+emergencies which a man gains through early familiarity and acquaintance
+with the world of material things. To have grown up on a farm, to have
+haunted a carpenter's and blacksmith's shop, to have handled horses and
+cows and boats and guns, and to have ideas and abilities connected with
+such objects are an inestimable part of youthful acquisition. After
+adolescence it is rare to be able to get into familiar touch with any of
+these primitive things. The instinctive propensions have faded, and the
+habits are hard to acquire.
+
+Accordingly, one of the best fruits of the 'child-study' movement has
+been to reinstate all these activities to their proper place in a sound
+system of education. _Feed_ the growing human being, feed him with the
+sort of experience for which from year to year he shows a natural
+craving, and he will develop in adult life a sounder sort of mental
+tissue, even though he may seem to be 'wasting' a great deal of his
+growing time, in the eyes of those for whom the only channels of
+learning are books and verbally communicated information.
+
+It is not till adolescence is reached that the mind grows able to take
+in the more abstract aspects of experience, the hidden similarities and
+distinctions between things, and especially their causal sequences.
+Rational knowledge of such things as mathematics, mechanics, chemistry,
+and biology, is now possible; and the acquisition of conceptions of this
+order form the next phase of education. Later still, not till
+adolescence is well advanced, does the mind awaken to a systematic
+interest in abstract human relations--moral relations, properly so
+called,--to sociological ideas and to metaphysical abstractions.
+
+This general order of sequence is followed traditionally of course in
+the schoolroom. It is foreign to my purpose to do more than indicate
+that general psychological principle of the successive order of
+awakening of the faculties on which the whole thing rests. I have spoken
+of it already, apropos of the transitoriness of instincts. Just as many
+a youth has to go permanently without an adequate stock of conceptions
+of a certain order, because experiences of that order were not yielded
+at the time when new curiosity was most acute, so it will conversely
+happen that many another youth is spoiled for a certain subject of study
+(although he would have enjoyed it well if led into it at a later age)
+through having had it thrust upon him so prematurely that disgust was
+created, and the bloom quite taken off from future trials. I think I
+have seen college students unfitted forever for 'philosophy' from having
+taken that study up a year too soon.
+
+In all these later studies, verbal material is the vehicle by which the
+mind thinks. The abstract conceptions of physics and sociology may, it
+is true, be embodied in visual or other images of phenomena, but they
+need not be so; and the truth remains that, after adolescence has begun,
+"words, words, words," must constitute a large part, and an always
+larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn. This
+is so even in the natural sciences, so far as these are causal and
+rational, and not merely confined to description. So I go back to what I
+said awhile ago apropos of verbal memorizing. The more accurately words
+are learned, the better, if only the teacher make sure that what they
+signify is also understood. It is the failure of this latter condition,
+in so much of the old-fashioned recitation, that has caused that
+reaction against 'parrot-like reproduction' that we are so familiar with
+to-day. A friend of mine, visiting a school, was asked to examine a
+young class in geography. Glancing, at the book, she said: "Suppose you
+should dig a hole in the ground, hundreds of feet deep, how should you
+find it at the bottom,--warmer or colder than on top?" None of the class
+replying, the teacher said: "I'm sure they know, but I think you don't
+ask the question quite rightly. Let me try." So, taking the book, she
+asked: "In what condition is the interior of the globe?" and received
+the immediate answer from half the class at once: "The interior of the
+globe is in a condition of _igneous fusion_." Better exclusive
+object-teaching than such verbal recitations as that; and yet verbal
+reproduction, intelligently connected with more objective work, must
+always play a leading, and surely _the_ leading, part in education. Our
+modern reformers, in their books, write too exclusively of the earliest
+years of the pupil. These lend themselves better to explicit treatment;
+and I myself, in dwelling so much upon the native impulses, and
+object-teaching, and anecdotes, and all that, have paid my tribute to
+the line of least resistance in describing. Yet away back in childhood
+we find the beginnings of purely intellectual curiosity, and the
+intelligence of abstract terms. The object-teaching is mainly to
+_launch_ the pupils, with some concrete conceptions of the facts
+concerned, upon the more abstract ideas.
+
+To hear some authorities on teaching, however, you would suppose that
+geography not only began, but ended with the school-yard and neighboring
+hill, that physics was one endless round of repeating the same sort of
+tedious weighing and measuring operation: whereas a very few examples
+are usually sufficient to set the imagination free on genuine lines, and
+then what the mind craves is more rapid, general, and abstract
+treatment. I heard a lady say that she had taken her child to the
+kindergarten, "but he is so bright that he saw through it immediately."
+Too many school children 'see' as immediately 'through' the namby-pamby
+attempts of the softer pedagogy to lubricate things for them, and make
+them interesting. Even they can enjoy abstractions, provided they be of
+the proper order; and it is a poor compliment to their rational appetite
+to think that anecdotes about little Tommies and little Jennies are the
+only kind of things their minds can digest.
+
+But here, as elsewhere, it is a matter of more or less; and, in the last
+resort, the teacher's own tact is the only thing that can bring out the
+right effect. The great difficulty with abstractions is that of knowing
+just what meaning the pupil attaches to the terms he uses. The words may
+sound all right, but the meaning remains the child's own secret. So
+varied forms of words must be insisted on, to bring the secret out. And
+a strange secret does it often prove. A relative of mine was trying to
+explain to a little girl what was meant by 'the passive voice': "Suppose
+that you kill me: you who do the killing are in the active voice, and I,
+who am killed, am in the passive voice." "But how can you speak if
+you're killed?" said the child. "Oh, well, you may suppose that I am
+not yet quite dead!" The next day the child was asked, in class, to
+explain the passive voice, and said, "It's the kind of voice you speak
+with when you ain't quite dead."
+
+In such a case as this the illustration ought to have been more varied.
+Every one's memory will probably furnish examples of the fantastic
+meaning which their childhood attached to certain verbal statements (in
+poetry often), and which their elders, not having any reason to suspect,
+never corrected. I remember being greatly moved emotionally at the age
+of eight by the ballad of Lord Ullin's Daughter. Yet I thought that the
+staining of the heather by the blood was the evil chiefly dreaded, and
+that, when the boatman said,
+
+  "I'll row you o'er the ferry.
+  It is not for your silver bright,
+  But for your winsome lady,"
+
+he was to receive the lady for his pay. Similarly, I recently found that
+one of my own children was reading (and accepting) a verse of Tennyson's
+In Memoriam as
+
+  "Ring out the _food_ of rich and poor,
+     Ring in _redness_ to all mankind,"
+
+and finding no inward difficulty.
+
+The only safeguard against this sort of misconceiving is to insist on
+varied statement, and to bring the child's conceptions, wherever it be
+possible, to some sort of practical test.
+
+Let us next pass to the subject of Apperception.
+
+
+
+
+XIV. APPERCEPTION
+
+
+'Apperception' is a word which cuts a great figure in the pedagogics of
+the present day. Read, for example, this advertisement of a certain
+text-book, which I take from an educational journal:--
+
+     #WHAT IS APPERCEPTION?#
+
+     For an explanation of Apperception see Blank's PSYCHOLOGY,
+     Vol. ---- of the ---- Education Series, just published.
+
+     The difference between Perception and Apperception is
+     explained for the teacher in the preface to Blank's
+     PSYCHOLOGY.
+
+     Many teachers are inquiring, "What is the meaning of
+     Apperception in educational psychology?" Just the book for
+     them is Blank's PSYCHOLOGY in which the idea was first
+     expounded.
+
+     The most important idea in educational psychology is
+     Apperception. The teacher may find this expounded in Blank's
+     PSYCHOLOGY. The idea of Apperception is making a revolution
+     in educational methods in Germany. It is explained in Blank's
+     PSYCHOLOGY, Vol. ---- of the ---- Education Series, just
+     published.
+
+     Blank's PSYCHOLOGY will be mailed prepaid to any address on
+     receipt of $1.00.
+
+
+Such an advertisement is in sober earnest a disgrace to all concerned;
+and such talk as it indulges in is the sort of thing I had in view when
+I said at our first meeting that the teachers were suffering at the
+present day from a certain industrious mystification on the part of
+editors and publishers. Perhaps the word 'apperception' flourished in
+their eyes and ears as it nowadays often is, embodies as much of this
+mystification as any other single thing. The conscientious young teacher
+is led to believe that it contains a recondite and portentous secret, by
+losing the true inwardness of which her whole career may be shattered.
+And yet, when she turns to the books and reads about it, it seems so
+trivial and commonplace a matter,--meaning nothing more than the manner
+in which we receive a thing into our minds,--that she fears she must
+have missed the point through the shallowness of her intelligence, and
+goes about thereafter afflicted with a sense either of uncertainty or of
+stupidity, and in each case remaining mortified at being so inadequate
+to her mission.
+
+Now apperception is an extremely useful word in pedagogics, and offers a
+convenient name for a process to which every teacher must frequently
+refer. But it verily means nothing more than the act of taking a thing
+into the mind. It corresponds to nothing peculiar or elementary in
+psychology, being only one of the innumerable results of the
+psychological process of association of ideas; and psychology itself can
+easily dispense with the word, useful as it may be in pedagogics.
+
+The gist of the matter is this: Every impression that comes in from
+without, be it a sentence which we hear, an object of vision, or an
+effluvium which assails our nose, no sooner enters our consciousness
+than it is drafted off in some determinate direction or other, making
+connection with the other materials already there, and finally producing
+what we call our reaction. The particular connections it strikes into
+are determined by our past experiences and the 'associations' of the
+present sort of impression with them. If, for instance, you hear me call
+out A, B, C, it is ten to one that you will react on the impression by
+inwardly or outwardly articulating D, E, F. The impression arouses its
+old associates: they go out to meet it; it is received by them,
+recognized by the mind as 'the beginning of the alphabet.' It is the
+fate of every impression thus to fall into a mind preoccupied with
+memories, ideas, and interests, and by these it is taken in. Educated as
+we already are, we never get an experience that remains for us
+completely nondescript: it always _reminds_ of something similar in
+quality, or of some context that might have surrounded it before, and
+which it now in some way suggests. This mental escort which the mind
+supplies is drawn, of course, from the mind's ready-made stock. We
+_conceive_ the impression in some definite way. We dispose of it
+according to our acquired possibilities, be they few or many, in the way
+of 'ideas.' This way of taking in the object is the process of
+apperception. The conceptions which meet and assimilate it are called by
+Herbart the 'apperceiving mass.' The apperceived impression is engulfed
+in this, and the result is a new field of consciousness, of which one
+part (and often a very small part) comes from the outer world, and
+another part (sometimes by far the largest) comes from the previous
+contents of the mind.
+
+I think that you see plainly enough now that the process of apperception
+is what I called it a moment ago, a resultant of the association of
+ideas. The product is a sort of fusion of the new with the old, in which
+it is often impossible to distinguish the share of the two factors. For
+example, when we listen to a person speaking or read a page of print,
+much of what we think we see or hear is supplied from our memory. We
+overlook misprints, imagining the right letters, though we see the wrong
+ones; and how little we actually hear, when we listen to speech, we
+realize when we go to a foreign theatre; for there what troubles us is
+not so much that we cannot understand what the actors say as that we
+cannot hear their words. The fact is that we hear quite as little under
+similar conditions at home, only our mind, being fuller of English
+verbal associations, supplies the requisite material for comprehension
+upon a much slighter auditory hint.
+
+In all the apperceptive operations of the mind, a certain general law
+makes itself felt,--the law of economy. In admitting a new body of
+experience, we instinctively seek to disturb as little as possible our
+pre-existing stock of ideas. We always try to name a new experience in
+some way which will assimilate it to what we already know. We hate
+anything _absolutely_ new, anything without any name, and for which a
+new name must be forged. So we take the nearest name, even though it be
+inappropriate. A child will call snow, when he sees it for the first
+time, sugar or white butterflies. The sail of a boat he calls a curtain;
+an egg in its shell, seen for the first time, he calls a pretty potato;
+an orange, a ball; a folding corkscrew, a pair of bad scissors. Caspar
+Hauser called the first geese he saw horses, and the Polynesians called
+Captain Cook's horses pigs. Mr. Rooper has written a little book on
+apperception, to which he gives the title of "A Pot of Green Feathers,"
+that being the name applied to a pot of ferns by a child who had never
+seen ferns before.
+
+In later life this economical tendency to leave the old undisturbed
+leads to what we know as 'old fogyism.' A new idea or a fact which would
+entail extensive rearrangement of the previous system of beliefs is
+always ignored or extruded from the mind in case it cannot be
+sophistically reinterpreted so as to tally harmoniously with the system.
+We have all conducted discussions with middle-aged people, overpowered
+them with our reasons, forced them to admit our contention, and a week
+later found them back as secure and constant in their old opinion as if
+they had never conversed with us at all. We call them old fogies; but
+there are young fogies, too. Old fogyism begins at a younger age than
+we think. I am almost afraid to say so, but I believe that in the
+majority of human beings it begins at about twenty-five.
+
+In some of the books we find the various forms of apperception codified,
+and their subdivisions numbered and ticketed in tabular form in the way
+so delightful to the pedagogic eye. In one book which I remember reading
+there were sixteen different types of apperception discriminated from
+each other. There was associative apperception, subsumptive
+apperception, assimilative apperception, and others up to sixteen. It is
+needless to say that this is nothing but an exhibition of the crass
+artificiality which has always haunted psychology, and which perpetuates
+itself by lingering along, especially in these works which are
+advertised as 'written for the use of teachers.' The flowing life of the
+mind is sorted into parcels suitable for presentation in the
+recitation-room, and chopped up into supposed 'processes' with long
+Greek and Latin names, which in real life have no distinct existence.
+
+There is no reason, if we are classing the different types of
+apperception, why we should stop at sixteen rather than sixteen hundred.
+There are as many types of apperception as there are possible ways in
+which an incoming experience may be reacted on by an individual mind. A
+little while ago, at Buffalo, I was the guest of a lady who, a fortnight
+before, had taken her seven-year-old boy for the first time to Niagara
+Falls. The child silently glared at the phenomenon until his mother,
+supposing him struck speechless by its sublimity, said, "Well, my boy,
+what do you think of it?" to which, "Is that the kind of spray I spray
+my nose with?" was the boy's only reply. That was his mode of
+apperceiving the spectacle. You may claim this as a particular type, and
+call it by the Greek name of rhinotherapeutical apperception, if you
+like; and, if you do, you will hardly be more trivial or artificial than
+are some of the authors of the books.
+
+M. Perez, in one of his books on childhood, gives a good example of the
+different modes of apperception of the same phenomenon which are
+possible at different stages of individual experience. A dwelling-house
+took fire, and an infant in the family, witnessing the conflagration
+from the arms of his nurse, standing outside, expressed nothing but the
+liveliest delight at its brilliancy. But, when the bell of the fire
+engine was heard approaching, the child was thrown by the sound into a
+paroxysm of fear, strange sounds being, as you know, very alarming to
+young children. In what opposite ways must the child's parents have
+apperceived the burning house and the engine respectively!
+
+The self-same person, according to the line of thought he may be in, or
+to his emotional mood, will apperceive the same impression quite
+differently on different occasions. A medical or engineering expert
+retained on one side of a case will not apperceive the facts in the same
+way as if the other side had retained him. When people are at
+loggerheads about the interpretation of a fact, it usually shows that
+they have too few heads of classification to apperceive by; for, as a
+general thing, the fact of such a dispute is enough to show that neither
+one of their rival interpretations is a perfect fit. Both sides deal
+with the matter by approximation, squeezing it under the handiest or
+least disturbing conception: whereas it would, nine times out of ten, be
+better to enlarge their stock of ideas or invent some altogether new
+title for the phenomenon.
+
+Thus, in biology, we used to have interminable discussion as to whether
+certain single-celled organisms were animals or vegetables, until
+Haeckel introduced the new apperceptive name of Protista, which ended
+the disputes. In law courts no _tertium quid_ is recognized between
+insanity and sanity. If sane, a man is punished: if insane, acquitted;
+and it is seldom hard to find two experts who will take opposite views
+of his case. All the while, nature is more subtle than our doctors. Just
+as a room is neither dark nor light absolutely, but might be dark for a
+watchmaker's uses, and yet light enough to eat in or play in, so a man
+may be sane for some purposes and insane for others,--sane enough to be
+left at large, yet not sane enough to take care of his financial
+affairs. The word 'crank,' which became familiar at the time of
+Guiteau's trial, fulfilled the need of a _tertium quid_. The foreign
+terms 'déséquilibré,' 'hereditary degenerate,' and 'psychopathic'
+subject, have arisen in response to the same need.
+
+The whole progress of our sciences goes on by the invention of newly
+forged technical names whereby to designate the newly remarked aspects
+of phenomena,--phenomena which could only be squeezed with violence into
+the pigeonholes of the earlier stock of conceptions. As time goes on,
+our vocabulary becomes thus ever more and more voluminous, having to
+keep up with the ever-growing multitude of our stock of apperceiving
+ideas.
+
+In this gradual process of interaction between the new and the old, not
+only is the new modified and determined by the particular sort of old
+which apperceives it, but the apperceiving mass, the old itself, is
+modified by the particular kind of new which it assimilates. Thus, to
+take the stock German example of the child brought up in a house where
+there are no tables but square ones, 'table' means for him a thing in
+which square corners are essential. But, if he goes to a house where
+there are round tables and still calls them tables, his apperceiving
+notion 'table' acquires immediately a wider inward content. In this way,
+our conceptions are constantly dropping characters once supposed
+essential, and including others once supposed inadmissible. The
+extension of the notion 'beast' to porpoises and whales, of the notion
+'organism' to society, are familiar examples of what I mean.
+
+But be our conceptions adequate or inadequate, and be our stock of them
+large or small, they are all we have to work with. If an educated man
+is, as I said, a group of organized tendencies to conduct, what prompts
+the conduct is in every case the man's conception of the way in which to
+name and classify the actual emergency. The more adequate the stock of
+ideas, the more 'able' is the man, the more uniformly appropriate is his
+behavior likely to be. When later we take up the subject of the will, we
+shall see that the essential preliminary to every decision is the
+finding of the right _names_ under which to class the proposed
+alternatives of conduct. He who has few names is in so far forth an
+incompetent deliberator. The names--and each name stands for a
+conception or idea--are our instruments for handling our problems and
+solving our dilemmas. Now, when we think of this, we are too apt to
+forget an important fact, which is that in most human beings the stock
+of names and concepts is mostly acquired during the years of adolescence
+and the earliest years of adult life. I probably shocked you a moment
+ago by saying that most men begin to be old fogies at the age of
+twenty-five. It is true that a grown-up adult keeps gaining well into
+middle age a great knowledge of details, and a great acquaintance with
+individual cases connected with his profession or business life. In
+this sense, his conceptions increase during a very long period; for his
+knowledge grows more extensive and minute. But the larger categories of
+conception, the sorts of thing, and wider classes of relation between
+things, of which we take cognizance, are all got into the mind at a
+comparatively youthful date. Few men ever do acquaint themselves with
+the principles of a new science after even twenty-five. If you do not
+study political economy in college, it is a thousand to one that its
+main conceptions will remain unknown to you through life. Similarly with
+biology, similarly with electricity. What percentage of persons now
+fifty years old have any definite conception whatever of a dynamo, or
+how the trolley-cars are made to run? Surely, a small fraction of one
+per cent. But the boys in colleges are all acquiring these conceptions.
+
+There is a sense of infinite potentiality in us all, when young, which
+makes some of us draw up lists of books we intend to read hereafter, and
+makes most of us think that we can easily acquaint ourselves with all
+sorts of things which we are now neglecting by studying them out
+hereafter in the intervals of leisure of our business lives. Such good
+intentions are hardly ever carried out. The conceptions acquired before
+thirty remain usually the only ones we ever gain. Such exceptional cases
+of perpetually self-renovating youth as Mr. Gladstone's only prove, by
+the admiration they awaken, the universality of the rule. And it may
+well solemnize a teacher, and confirm in him a healthy sense of the
+importance of his mission, to feel how exclusively dependent upon his
+present ministrations in the way of imparting conceptions the pupil's
+future life is probably bound to be.
+
+
+
+
+XV. THE WILL
+
+
+Since mentality terminates naturally in outward conduct, the final
+chapter in psychology has to be the chapter on the will. But the word
+'will' can be used in a broader and in a narrower sense. In the broader
+sense, it designates our entire capacity for impulsive and active life,
+including our instinctive reactions and those forms of behavior that
+have become secondarily automatic and semi-unconscious through frequent
+repetition. In the narrower sense, acts of will are such acts only as
+cannot be inattentively performed. A distinct idea of what they are, and
+a deliberate _fiat_ on the mind's part, must precede their execution.
+
+Such acts are often characterized by hesitation, and accompanied by a
+feeling, altogether peculiar, of resolve, a feeling which may or may not
+carry with it a further feeling of effort. In my earlier talks, I said
+so much of our impulsive tendencies that I will restrict myself in what
+follows to volition in this narrower sense of the term.
+
+All our deeds were considered by the early psychologists to be due to a
+peculiar faculty called the will, without whose fiat action could not
+occur. Thoughts and impressions, being intrinsically inactive, were
+supposed to produce conduct only through the intermediation of this
+superior agent. Until they twitched its coat-tails, so to speak, no
+outward behavior could occur. This doctrine was long ago exploded by the
+discovery of the phenomena of reflex action, in which sensible
+impressions, as you know, produce movement immediately and of
+themselves. The doctrine may also be considered exploded as far as ideas
+go.
+
+The fact is that there is no sort of consciousness whatever, be it
+sensation, feeling, or idea, which does not directly and of itself tend
+to discharge into some motor effect. The motor effect need not always be
+an outward stroke of behavior. It may be only an alteration of the
+heart-beats or breathing, or a modification in the distribution of
+blood, such as blushing or turning pale; or else a secretion of tears,
+or what not. But, in any case, it is there in some shape when any
+consciousness is there; and a belief as fundamental as any in modern
+psychology is the belief at last attained that conscious processes of
+any sort, conscious processes merely as such, _must_ pass over into
+motion, open or concealed.
+
+The least complicated case of this tendency is the case of a mind
+possessed by only a single idea. If that idea be of an object connected
+with a native impulse, the impulse will immediately proceed to
+discharge. If it be the idea of a movement, the movement will occur.
+Such a case of action from a single idea has been distinguished from
+more complex cases by the name of 'ideo-motor' action, meaning action
+without express decision or effort. Most of the habitual actions to
+which we are trained are of this ideo-motor sort. We perceive, for
+instance, that the door is open, and we rise and shut it; we perceive
+some raisins in a dish before us, and extend our hand and carry one of
+them to our mouth without interrupting the conversation; or, when lying
+in bed, we suddenly think that we shall be late for breakfast, and
+instantly we get up with no particular exertion or resolve. All the
+ingrained procedures by which life is carried on--the manners and
+customs, dressing and undressing, acts of salutation, etc.--are executed
+in this semi-automatic way unhesitatingly and efficiently, the very
+outermost margin of consciousness seeming to be concerned in them,
+while the focus may be occupied with widely different things.
+
+But now turn to a more complicated case. Suppose two thoughts to be in
+the mind together, of which one, A, taken alone, would discharge itself
+in a certain action, but of which the other, B, suggests an action of a
+different sort, or a consequence of the first action calculated to make
+us shrink. The psychologists now say that the second idea, B, will
+probably arrest or _inhibit_ the motor effects of the first idea, A. One
+word, then, about 'inhibition' in general, to make this particular case
+more clear.
+
+One of the most interesting discoveries of physiology was the discovery,
+made simultaneously in France and Germany fifty years ago, that nerve
+currents do not only start muscles into action, but may check action
+already going on or keep it from occurring as it otherwise might.
+_Nerves of arrest_ were thus distinguished alongside of motor nerves.
+The pneumogastric nerve, for example, if stimulated, arrests the
+movements of the heart: the splanchnic nerve arrests those of the
+intestines, if already begun. But it soon appeared that this was too
+narrow a way of looking at the matter, and that arrest is not so much
+the specific function of certain nerves as a general function which any
+part of the nervous system may exert upon other parts under the
+appropriate conditions. The higher centres, for example, seem to exert a
+constant inhibitive influence on the excitability of those below. The
+reflexes of an animal with its hemispheres wholly or in part removed
+become exaggerated. You all know that common reflex in dogs, whereby, if
+you scratch the animal's side, the corresponding hind leg will begin to
+make scratching movements, usually in the air. Now in dogs with
+mutilated hemispheres this scratching reflex is so incessant that, as
+Goltz first described them, the hair gets all worn off their sides. In
+idiots, the functions of the hemispheres being largely in abeyance, the
+lower impulses, not inhibited, as they would be in normal human beings,
+often express themselves in most odious ways. You know also how any
+higher emotional tendency will quench a lower one. Fear arrests
+appetite, maternal love annuls fear, respect checks sensuality, and the
+like; and in the more subtile manifestations of the moral life, whenever
+an ideal stirring is suddenly quickened into intensity, it is as if the
+whole scale of values of our motives changed its equilibrium. The force
+of old temptations vanishes, and what a moment ago was impossible is now
+not only possible, but easy, because of their inhibition. This has been
+well called the 'expulsive power of the higher emotion.'
+
+It is easy to apply this notion of inhibition to the case of our
+ideational processes. I am lying in bed, for example, and think it is
+time to get up; but alongside of this thought there is present to my
+mind a realization of the extreme coldness of the morning and the
+pleasantness of the warm bed. In such a situation the motor consequences
+of the first idea are blocked; and I may remain for half an hour or more
+with the two ideas oscillating before me in a kind of deadlock, which is
+what we call the state of hesitation or deliberation. In a case like
+this the deliberation can be resolved and the decision reached in either
+of two ways:--
+
+(1) I may forget for a moment the thermometric conditions, and then the
+idea of getting up will immediately discharge into act: I shall suddenly
+find that I have got up--or
+
+(2) Still mindful of the freezing temperature, the thought of the duty
+of rising may become so pungent that it determines action in spite of
+inhibition. In the latter case, I have a sense of energetic moral
+effort, and consider that I have done a virtuous act.
+
+All cases of wilful action properly so called, of choice after
+hesitation and deliberation, may be conceived after one of these latter
+patterns. So you see that volition, in the narrower sense, takes place
+only when there are a number of conflicting systems of ideas, and
+depends on our having a complex field of consciousness. The interesting
+thing to note is the extreme delicacy of the inhibitive machinery. A
+strong and urgent motor idea in the focus may be neutralized and made
+inoperative by the presence of the very faintest contradictory idea in
+the margin. For instance, I hold out my forefinger, and with closed eyes
+try to realize as vividly as possible that I hold a revolver in my hand
+and am pulling the trigger. I can even now fairly feel my finger
+quivering with the tendency to contract; and, if it were hitched to a
+recording apparatus, it would certainly betray its state of tension by
+registering incipient movements. Yet it does not actually crook, and the
+movement of pulling the trigger is not performed. Why not?
+
+Simply because, all concentrated though I am upon the idea of the
+movement, I nevertheless also realize the total conditions of the
+experiment, and in the back of my mind, so to speak, or in its fringe
+and margin, have the simultaneous idea that the movement is not to take
+place. The mere presence of that marginal intention, without effort,
+urgency, or emphasis, or any special reinforcement from my attention,
+suffices to the inhibitive effect.
+
+And this is why so few of the ideas that flit through our minds do, in
+point of fact, produce their motor consequences. Life would be a curse
+and a care for us if every fleeting fancy were to do so. Abstractly, the
+law of ideo-motor action is true; but in the concrete our fields of
+consciousness are always so complex that the inhibiting margin keeps the
+centre inoperative most of the time. In all this, you see, I speak as if
+ideas by their mere presence or absence determined behavior, and as if
+between the ideas themselves on the one hand and the conduct on the
+other there were no room for any third intermediate principle of
+activity, like that called 'the will.'
+
+If you are struck by the materialistic or fatalistic doctrines which
+seem to follow this conception, I beg you to suspend your judgment for a
+moment, as I shall soon have something more to say about the matter.
+But, meanwhile yielding one's self to the mechanical conception of the
+psychophysical organism, nothing is easier than to indulge in a picture
+of the fatalistic character of human life. Man's conduct appears as the
+mere resultant of all his various impulsions and inhibitions. One
+object, by its presence, makes us act: another object checks our action.
+Feelings aroused and ideas suggested by objects sway us one way and
+another: emotions complicate the game by their mutual inhibitive
+effects, the higher abolishing the lower or perhaps being itself swept
+away. The life in all this becomes prudential and moral; but the
+psychologic agents in the drama may be described, you see, as nothing
+but the 'ideas' themselves,--ideas for the whole system of which what we
+call the 'soul' or character' or 'will' of the person is nothing but a
+collective name. As Hume said, the ideas are themselves the actors, the
+stage, the theatre, the spectators, and the play. This is the so-called
+'associationist' psychology, brought down to its radical expression: it
+is useless to ignore its power as a conception. Like all conceptions,
+when they become clear and lively enough, this conception has a strong
+tendency to impose itself upon belief; and psychologists trained on
+biological lines usually adopt it as the last word of science on the
+subject. No one can have an adequate notion of modern psychological
+theory unless he has at some time apprehended this view in the full
+force of its simplicity.
+
+Let us humor it for a while, for it has advantages in the way of
+exposition.
+
+_Voluntary action, then, is at all times a resultant of the compounding
+of our impulsions with our inhibitions._
+
+From this it immediately follows that there will be two types of will,
+in one of which impulsions will predominate, in the other inhibitions.
+We may speak of them, if you like, as the precipitate and the obstructed
+will, respectively. When fully pronounced, they are familiar to
+everybody. The extreme example of the precipitate will is the maniac:
+his ideas discharge into action so rapidly, his associative processes
+are so extravagantly lively, that inhibitions have no time to arrive,
+and he says and does whatever pops into his head without a moment of
+hesitation.
+
+Certain melancholiacs furnish the extreme example of the over-inhibited
+type. Their minds are cramped in a fixed emotion of fear or
+helplessness, their ideas confined to the one thought that for them life
+is impossible. So they show a condition of perfect 'abulia,' or
+inability to will or act. They cannot change their posture or speech or
+execute the simplest command.
+
+The different races of men show different temperaments in this regard.
+The Southern races are commonly accounted the more impulsive and
+precipitate: the English race, especially our New England branch of it,
+is supposed to be all sicklied over with repressive forms of
+self-consciousness, and condemned to express itself through a jungle of
+scruples and checks.
+
+The highest form of character, however, abstractly considered, must be
+full of scruples and inhibitions. But action, in such a character, far
+from being paralyzed, will succeed in energetically keeping on its way,
+sometimes overpowering the resistances, sometimes steering along the
+line where they lie thinnest.
+
+Just as our extensor muscles act most truly when a simultaneous
+contraction of the flexors guides and steadies them; so the mind of him
+whose fields of consciousness are complex, and who, with the reasons for
+the action, sees the reasons against it, and yet, instead of being
+palsied, acts in the way that takes the whole field into
+consideration,--so, I say, is such a mind the ideal sort of mind that we
+should seek to reproduce in our pupils. Purely impulsive action, or
+action that proceeds to extremities regardless of consequences, on the
+other hand, is the easiest action in the world, and the lowest in type.
+Any one can show energy, when made quite reckless. An Oriental despot
+requires but little ability: as long as he lives, he succeeds, for he
+has absolutely his own way; and, when the world can no longer endure the
+horror of him, he is assassinated. But not to proceed immediately to
+extremities, to be still able to act energetically under an array of
+inhibitions,--that indeed is rare and difficult. Cavour, when urged to
+proclaim martial law in 1859, refused to do so, saying: "Any one can
+govern in that way. I will be constitutional." Your parliamentary
+rulers, your Lincoln, your Gladstone, are the strongest type of man,
+because they accomplish results under the most intricate possible
+conditions. We think of Napoleon Bonaparte as a colossal monster of
+will-power, and truly enough he was so. But, from the point of view of
+the psychological machinery, it would be hard to say whether he or
+Gladstone was the larger volitional quantity; for Napoleon disregarded
+all the usual inhibitions, and Gladstone, passionate as he was,
+scrupulously considered them in his statesmanship.
+
+A familiar example of the paralyzing power of scruples is the inhibitive
+effect of conscientiousness upon conversation. Nowhere does conversation
+seem to have flourished as brilliantly as in France during the last
+century. But, if we read old French memoirs, we see how many brakes of
+scrupulosity which tie our tongues to-day were then removed. Where
+mendacity, treachery, obscenity, and malignity find unhampered
+expression, talk can be brilliant indeed. But its flame waxes dim where
+the mind is stitched all over with conscientious fear of violating the
+moral and social proprieties.
+
+The teacher often is confronted in the schoolroom with an abnormal type
+of will, which we may call the 'balky will.' Certain children, if they
+do not succeed in doing a thing immediately, remain completely
+inhibited in regard to it: it becomes literally impossible for them to
+understand it if it be an intellectual problem, or to do it if it be an
+outward operation, as long as this particular inhibited condition lasts.
+Such children are usually treated as sinful, and are punished; or else
+the teacher pits his or her will against the child's will, considering
+that the latter must be 'broken.' "Break your child's will, in order
+that it may not perish," wrote John Wesley. "Break its will as soon as
+it can speak plainly--or even before it can speak at all. It should be
+forced to do as it is told, even if you have to whip it ten times
+running. Break its will, in order that its soul may live." Such
+will-breaking is always a scene with a great deal of nervous wear and
+tear on both sides, a bad state of feeling left behind it, and the
+victory not always with the would-be will-breaker.
+
+When a situation of the kind is once fairly developed, and the child is
+all tense and excited inwardly, nineteen times out of twenty it is best
+for the teacher to apperceive the case as one of neural pathology rather
+than as one of moral culpability. So long as the inhibiting sense of
+impossibility remains in the child's mind, he will continue unable to
+get beyond the obstacle. The aim of the teacher should then be to make
+him simply forget. Drop the subject for the time, divert the mind to
+something else: then, leading the pupil back by some circuitous line of
+association, spring it on him again before he has time to recognize it,
+and as likely as not he will go over it now without any difficulty. It
+is in no other way that we overcome balkiness in a horse: we divert his
+attention, do something to his nose or ear, lead him round in a circle,
+and thus get him over a place where flogging would only have made him
+more invincible. A tactful teacher will never let these strained
+situations come up at all.
+
+You perceive now, my friends, what your general or abstract duty is as
+teachers. Although you have to generate in your pupils a large stock of
+ideas, any one of which may be inhibitory, yet you must also see to it
+that no habitual hesitancy or paralysis of the will ensues, and that the
+pupil still retains his power of vigorous action. Psychology can state
+your problem in these terms, but you see how impotent she is to furnish
+the elements of its practical solution. When all is said and done, and
+your best efforts are made, it will probably remain true that the
+result will depend more on a certain native tone or temper in the
+pupil's psychological constitution than on anything else. Some persons
+appear to have a naturally poor focalization of the field of
+consciousness; and in such persons actions hang slack, and inhibitions
+seem to exert peculiarly easy sway.
+
+But let us now close in a little more closely on this matter of the
+education of the will. Your task is to build up a _character_ in your
+pupils; and a character, as I have so often said, consists in an
+organized set of habits of reaction. Now of what do such habits of
+reaction themselves consist? They consist of tendencies to act
+characteristically when certain ideas possess us, and to refrain
+characteristically when possessed by other ideas.
+
+Our volitional habits depend, then, first, on what the stock of ideas is
+which we have; and, second, on the habitual coupling of the several
+ideas with action or inaction respectively. How is it when an
+alternative is presented to you for choice, and you are uncertain what
+you ought to do? You first hesitate, and then you deliberate. And in
+what does your deliberation consist? It consists in trying to
+apperceive the ease successively by a number of different ideas, which
+seem to fit it more or less, until at last you hit on one which seems to
+fit it exactly. If that be an idea which is a customary forerunner of
+action in you, which enters into one of your maxims of positive
+behavior, your hesitation ceases, and you act immediately. If, on the
+other hand, it be an idea which carries inaction as its habitual result,
+if it ally itself with _prohibition_, then you unhesitatingly refrain.
+The problem is, you see, to find the right idea or conception for the
+case. This search for the right conception may take days or weeks.
+
+I spoke as if the action were easy when the conception once is found.
+Often it is so, but it may be otherwise; and, when it is otherwise, we
+find ourselves at the very centre of a moral situation, into which I
+should now like you to look with me a little nearer.
+
+The proper conception, the true head of classification, may be hard to
+attain; or it may be one with which we have contracted no settled habits
+of action. Or, again, the action to which it would prompt may be
+dangerous and difficult; or else inaction may appear deadly cold and
+negative when our impulsive feeling is hot. In either of these latter
+cases it is hard to hold the right idea steadily enough before the
+attention to let it exert its adequate effects. Whether it be
+stimulative or inhibitive, it is _too reasonable_ for us; and the more
+instinctive passional propensity then tends to extrude it from our
+consideration. We shy away from the thought of it. It twinkles and goes
+out the moment it appears in the margin of our consciousness; and we
+need a resolute effort of voluntary attention to drag it into the focus
+of the field, and to keep it there long enough for its associative and
+motor effects to be exerted. Every one knows only too well how the mind
+flinches from looking at considerations hostile to the reigning mood of
+feeling.
+
+Once brought, however, in this way to the centre of the field of
+consciousness, and held there, the reasonable idea will exert these
+effects inevitably; for the laws of connection between our consciousness
+and our nervous system provide for the action then taking place. Our
+moral effort, properly so called, terminates in our holding fast to the
+appropriate idea.
+
+If, then, you are asked, "_In what does a moral act consist_ when
+reduced to its simplest and most elementary form?" you can make only
+one reply. You can say that _it consists in the effort of attention by
+which we hold fast to an idea_ which but for that effort of attention
+would be driven out of the mind by the other psychological tendencies
+that are there. _To think_, in short, is the secret of will, just as it
+is the secret of memory.
+
+This comes out very clearly in the kind of excuse which we most
+frequently hear from persons who find themselves confronted by the
+sinfulness or harmfulness of some part of their behavior. "I never
+_thought_," they say. "I never _thought_ how mean the action was, I
+never _thought_ of these abominable consequences." And what do we retort
+when they say this? We say: "Why _didn't_ you think? What were you there
+for but to think?" And we read them a moral lecture on their
+irreflectiveness.
+
+The hackneyed example of moral deliberation is the case of an habitual
+drunkard under temptation. He has made a resolve to reform, but he is
+now solicited again by the bottle. His moral triumph or failure
+literally consists in his finding the right _name_ for the case. If he
+says that it is a case of not wasting good liquor already poured out, or
+a case of not being churlish and unsociable when in the midst of
+friends, or a case of learning something at last about a brand of
+whiskey which he never met before, or a case of celebrating a public
+holiday, or a case of stimulating himself to a more energetic resolve in
+favor of abstinence than any he has ever yet made, then he is lost. His
+choice of the wrong name seals his doom. But if, in spite of all the
+plausible good names with which his thirsty fancy so copiously furnishes
+him, he unwaveringly clings to the truer bad name, and apperceives the
+case as that of "being a drunkard, being a drunkard, being a drunkard,"
+his feet are planted on the road to salvation. He saves himself by
+thinking rightly.
+
+Thus are your pupils to be saved: first, by the stock of ideas with
+which you furnish them; second, by the amount of voluntary attention
+that they can exert in holding to the right ones, however unpalatable;
+and, third, by the several habits of acting definitely on these latter
+to which they have been successfully trained.
+
+In all this the power of voluntarily attending is the point of the whole
+procedure. Just as a balance turns on its knife-edges, so on it our
+moral destiny turns. You remember that, when we were talking of the
+subject of attention, we discovered how much more intermittent and
+brief our acts of voluntary attention are than is commonly supposed. If
+they were all summed together, the time that they occupy would cover an
+almost incredibly small portion of our lives. But I also said, you will
+remember, that their brevity was not in proportion to their
+significance, and that I should return to the subject again. So I return
+to it now. It is not the mere size of a thing which, constitutes its
+importance: it is its position in the organism to which it belongs. Our
+acts of voluntary attention, brief and fitful as they are, are
+nevertheless momentous and critical, determining us, as they do, to
+higher or lower destinies. The exercise of voluntary attention in the
+schoolroom must therefore be counted one of the most important points of
+training that take place there; and the first-rate teacher, by the
+keenness of the remoter interests which he is able to awaken, will
+provide abundant opportunities for its occurrence. I hope that you
+appreciate this now without any further explanation.
+
+I have been accused of holding up before you, in the course of these
+talks, a mechanical and even a materialistic view of the mind. I have
+called it an organism and a machine. I have spoken of its reaction on
+the environment as the essential thing about it; and I have referred
+this, either openly or implicitly, to the construction of the nervous
+system. I have, in consequence, received notes from some of you, begging
+me to be more explicit on this point; and to let you know frankly
+whether I am a complete materialist, or not.
+
+Now in these lectures I wish to be strictly practical and useful, and to
+keep free from all speculative complications. Nevertheless, I do not
+wish to leave any ambiguity about my own position; and I will therefore
+say, in order to avoid all misunderstanding, that in no sense do I count
+myself a materialist. I cannot see how such a thing as our consciousness
+can possibly be _produced_ by a nervous machinery, though I can
+perfectly well see how, if 'ideas' do accompany the workings of the
+machinery, the _order_ of the ideas might very well follow exactly the
+_order_ of the machine's operations. Our habitual associations of ideas,
+trains of thought, and sequences of action, might thus be consequences
+of the succession of currents in our nervous systems. And the possible
+stock of ideas which a man's free spirit would have to choose from
+might depend exclusively on the native and acquired powers of his brain.
+If this were all, we might indeed adopt the fatalist conception which I
+sketched for you but a short while ago. Our ideas would be determined by
+brain currents, and these by purely mechanical laws.
+
+But, after what we have just seen,--namely, the part played by voluntary
+attention in volition,--a belief in free will and purely spiritual
+causation is still open to us. The duration and amount of this attention
+_seem_ within certain limits indeterminate. We _feel_ as if we could
+make it really more or less, and as if our free action in this regard
+were a genuine critical point in nature,--a point on which our destiny
+and that of others might hinge. The whole question of free will
+concentrates itself, then, at this same small point: "Is or is not the
+appearance of indetermination at this point an illusion?"
+
+It is plain that such a question can be decided only by general
+analogies, and not by accurate observations. The free-willist believes
+the appearance to be a reality: the determinist believes that it is an
+illusion. I myself hold with the free-willists,--not because I cannot
+conceive the fatalist theory clearly, or because I fail to understand
+its plausibility, but simply because, if free will _were_ true, it would
+be absurd to have the belief in it fatally forced on our acceptance.
+Considering the inner fitness of things, one would rather think that the
+very first act of a will endowed with freedom should be to sustain the
+belief in the freedom itself. I accordingly believe freely in my
+freedom; I do so with the best of scientific consciences, knowing that
+the predetermination of the amount of my effort of attention can never
+receive objective proof, and hoping that, whether you follow my example
+in this respect or not, it will at least make you see that such
+psychological and psychophysical theories as I hold do not necessarily
+force a man to become a fatalist or a materialist.
+
+Let me say one more final word now about the will, and therewith
+conclude both that important subject and these lectures.
+
+There are two types of will. There are also two types of inhibition. We
+may call them inhibition by repression or by negation, and inhibition by
+substitution, respectively. The difference between them is that, in the
+case of inhibition by repression, both the inhibited idea and the
+inhibiting idea, the impulsive idea and the idea that negates it, remain
+along with each other in consciousness, producing a certain inward
+strain or tension there: whereas, in inhibition by substitution, the
+inhibiting idea supersedes altogether the idea which it inhibits, and
+the latter quickly vanishes from the field.
+
+For instance, your pupils are wandering in mind, are listening to a
+sound outside the window, which presently grows interesting enough to
+claim all their attention. You can call the latter back again by
+bellowing at them not to listen to those sounds, but to keep their minds
+on their books or on what you are saying. And, by thus keeping them
+conscious that your eye is sternly on them, you may produce a good
+effect. But it will be a wasteful effect and an inferior effect; for the
+moment you relax your supervision the attractive disturbance, always
+there soliciting their curiosity, will overpower them, and they will be
+just as they were before: whereas, if, without saying anything about the
+street disturbances, you open a counter-attraction by starting some very
+interesting talk or demonstration yourself, they will altogether forget
+the distracting incident, and without any effort follow you along.
+There are many interests that can never be inhibited by the way of
+negation. To a man in love, for example, it is literally impossible, by
+any effort of will, to annul his passion. But let 'some new planet swim
+into his ken,' and the former idol will immediately cease to engross his
+mind.
+
+It is clear that in general we ought, whenever we can, to employ the
+method of inhibition by substitution. He whose life is based upon the
+word 'no,' who tells the truth because a lie is wicked, and who has
+constantly to grapple with his envious and cowardly and mean
+propensities, is in an inferior situation in every respect to what he
+would be if the love of truth and magnanimity positively possessed him
+from the outset, and he felt no inferior temptations. Your born
+gentleman is certainly, for this world's purposes, a more valuable being
+than your "Crump, with his grunting resistance to his native devils,"
+even though in God's sight the latter may, as the Catholic theologians
+say, be rolling up great stores of 'merit.'
+
+Spinoza long ago wrote in his Ethics that anything that a man can avoid
+under the notion that it is bad he may also avoid under the notion that
+something else is good. He who habitually acts _sub specie mali_, under
+the negative notion, the notion of the bad, is called a slave by
+Spinoza. To him who acts habitually under the notion of good he gives
+the name of freeman. See to it now, I beg you, that you make freemen of
+your pupils by habituating them to act, whenever possible, under the
+notion of a good. Get them habitually to tell the truth, not so much
+through showing them the wickedness of lying as by arousing their
+enthusiasm for honor and veracity. Wean them from their native cruelty
+by imparting to them some of your own positive sympathy with an animal's
+inner springs of joy. And, in the lessons which you may be legally
+obliged to conduct upon the bad effects of alcohol, lay less stress than
+the books do on the drunkard's stomach, kidneys, nerves, and social
+miseries, and more on the blessings of having an organism kept in
+lifelong possession of its full youthful elasticity by a sweet, sound
+blood, to which stimulants and narcotics are unknown, and to which the
+morning sun and air and dew will daily come as sufficiently powerful
+intoxicants.
+
+I have now ended these talks. If to some of you the things I have said
+seem obvious or trivial, it is possible that they may appear less so
+when, in the course of a year or two, you find yourselves noticing and
+apperceiving events in the schoolroom a little differently, in
+consequence of some of the conceptions I have tried to make more clear.
+I cannot but think that to apperceive your pupil as a little sensitive,
+impulsive, associative, and reactive organism, partly fated and partly
+free, will lead to a better intelligence of all his ways. Understand
+him, then, as such a subtle little piece of machinery. And if, in
+addition, you can also see him _sub specie boni_, and love him as well,
+you will be in the best possible position for becoming perfect teachers.
+
+
+
+
+#TALKS TO STUDENTS#
+
+
+
+
+I. THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION
+
+
+I wish in the following hour to take certain psychological doctrines and
+show their practical applications to mental hygiene,--to the hygiene of
+our American life more particularly. Our people, especially in academic
+circles, are turning towards psychology nowadays with great
+expectations; and, if psychology is to justify them, it must be by
+showing fruits in the pedagogic and therapeutic lines.
+
+The reader may possibly have heard of a peculiar theory of the emotions,
+commonly referred to in psychological literature as the Lange-James
+theory. According to this theory, our emotions are mainly due to those
+organic stirrings that are aroused in us in a reflex way by the stimulus
+of the exciting object or situation. An emotion of fear, for example, or
+surprise, is not a direct effect of the object's presence on the mind,
+but an effect of that still earlier effect, the bodily commotion which
+the object suddenly excites; so that, were this bodily commotion
+suppressed, we should not so much _feel_ fear as call the situation
+fearful; we should not feel surprise, but coldly recognize that the
+object was indeed astonishing. One enthusiast has even gone so far as to
+say that when we feel sorry it is because we weep, when we feel afraid
+it is because we run away, and not conversely. Some of you may perhaps
+be acquainted with the paradoxical formula. Now, whatever exaggeration
+may possibly lurk in this account of our emotions (and I doubt myself
+whether the exaggeration be very great), it is certain that the main
+core of it is true, and that the mere giving way to tears, for example,
+or to the outward expression of an anger-fit, will result for the moment
+in making the inner grief or anger more acutely felt. There is,
+accordingly, no better known or more generally useful precept in the
+moral training of youth, or in one's personal self-discipline, than that
+which bids us pay primary attention to what we do and express, and not
+to care too much for what we feel. If we only check a cowardly impulse
+in time, for example, or if we only _don't_ strike the blow or rip out
+with the complaining or insulting word that we shall regret as long as
+we live, our feelings themselves will presently be the calmer and
+better, with no particular guidance from us on their own account. Action
+seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and
+by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the
+will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.
+
+Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous
+cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully,
+and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such
+conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that
+occasion can. So to feel brave, act as if we _were_ brave, use all our
+will to that end, and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of
+fear. Again, in order to feel kindly toward a person to whom we have
+been inimical, the only way is more or less deliberately to smile, to
+make sympathetic inquiries, and to force ourselves to say genial things.
+One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of
+heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental
+demon of uncharitable feeling. To wrestle with a bad feeling only pins
+our attention on it, and keeps it still fastened in the mind: whereas,
+if we act as if from some better feeling, the old bad feeling soon
+folds its tent like an Arab, and silently steals away.
+
+The best manuals of religious devotion accordingly reiterate the maxim
+that we must let our feelings go, and pay no regard to them whatever. In
+an admirable and widely successful little book called 'The Christian's
+Secret of a Happy Life,' by Mrs. Hannah Whitall Smith, I find this
+lesson on almost every page. _Act_ faithfully, and you really have
+faith, no matter how cold and even how dubious you may feel. "It is your
+purpose God looks at," writes Mrs. Smith, "not your feelings about that
+purpose; and your purpose, or will, is therefore the only thing you need
+attend to.... Let your emotions come or let them go, just as God
+pleases, and make no account of them either way.... They really have
+nothing to do with the matter. They are not the indicators of your
+spiritual state, but are merely the indicators of your temperament or of
+your present physical condition."
+
+But you all know these facts already, so I need no longer press them on
+your attention. From our acts and from our attitudes ceaseless inpouring
+currents of sensation come, which help to determine from moment to
+moment what our inner states shall be: that is a fundamental law of
+psychology which I will therefore proceed to assume.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A Viennese neurologist of considerable reputation has recently written
+about the _Binnenleben_, as he terms it, or buried life of human beings.
+No doctor, this writer says, can get into really profitable relations
+with a nervous patient until he gets some sense of what the patient's
+_Binnenleben_ is, of the sort of unuttered inner atmosphere in which his
+consciousness dwells alone with the secrets of its prison-house. This
+inner personal tone is what we can't communicate or describe
+articulately to others; but the wraith and ghost of it, so to speak, are
+often what our friends and intimates feel as our most characteristic
+quality. In the unhealthy-minded, apart from all sorts of old regrets,
+ambitions checked by shames and aspirations obstructed by timidities, it
+consists mainly of bodily discomforts not distinctly localized by the
+sufferer, but breeding a general self-mistrust and sense that things are
+not as they should be with him. Half the thirst for alcohol that exists
+in the world exists simply because alcohol acts as a temporary
+anęsthetic and effacer to all these morbid feelings that never ought to
+be in a human being at all. In the healthy-minded, on the contrary,
+there are no fears or shames to discover; and the sensations that pour
+in from the organism only help to swell the general vital sense of
+security and readiness for anything that may turn up.
+
+Consider, for example, the effects of a well-toned _motor-apparatus_,
+nervous and muscular, on our general personal self-consciousness, the
+sense of elasticity and efficiency that results. They tell us that in
+Norway the life of the women has lately been entirely revolutionized by
+the new order of muscular feelings with which the use of the _ski_, or
+long snow-shoes, as a sport for both sexes, has made the women
+acquainted. Fifteen years ago the Norwegian women were even more than
+the women of other lands votaries of the old-fashioned ideal of
+femininity, 'the domestic angel,' the 'gentle and refining influence'
+sort of thing. Now these sedentary fireside tabby-cats of Norway have
+been trained, they say, by the snow-shoes into lithe and audacious
+creatures, for whom no night is too dark or height too giddy, and who
+are not only saying good-bye to the traditional feminine pallor and
+delicacy of constitution, but actually taking the lead in every
+educational and social reform. I cannot but think that the tennis and
+tramping and skating habits and the bicycle-craze which are so rapidly
+extending among our dear sisters and daughters in this country are going
+also to lead to a sounder and heartier moral tone, which will send its
+tonic breath through all our American life.
+
+I hope that here in America more and more the ideal of the well-trained
+and vigorous body will be maintained neck by neck with that of the
+well-trained and vigorous mind as the two coequal halves of the higher
+education for men and women alike. The strength of the British Empire
+lies in the strength of character of the individual Englishman, taken
+all alone by himself. And that strength, I am persuaded, is perennially
+nourished and kept up by nothing so much as by the national worship, in
+which all classes meet, of athletic outdoor life and sport.
+
+I recollect, years ago, reading a certain work by an American doctor on
+hygiene and the laws of life and the type of future humanity. I have
+forgotten its author's name and its title, but I remember well an awful
+prophecy that it contained about the future of our muscular system.
+Human perfection, the writer said, means ability to cope with the
+environment; but the environment will more and more require mental power
+from us, and less and less will ask for bare brute strength. Wars will
+cease, machines will do all our heavy work, man will become more and
+more a mere director of nature's energies, and less and less an exerter
+of energy on his own account. So that, if the _homo sapiens_ of the
+future can only digest his food and think, what need will he have of
+well-developed muscles at all? And why, pursued this writer, should we
+not even now be satisfied with a more delicate and intellectual type of
+beauty than that which pleased our ancestors? Nay, I have heard a
+fanciful friend make a still further advance in this 'new-man'
+direction. With our future food, he says, itself prepared in liquid form
+from the chemical elements of the atmosphere, pepsinated or
+half-digested in advance, and sucked up through a glass tube from a tin
+can, what need shall we have of teeth, or stomachs even? They may go,
+along with our muscles and our physical courage, while, challenging ever
+more and more our proper admiration, will grow the gigantic domes of our
+crania, arching over our spectacled eyes, and animating our flexible
+little lips to those floods of learned and ingenious talk which will
+constitute our most congenial occupation.
+
+I am sure that your flesh creeps at this apocalyptic vision. Mine
+certainly did so; and I cannot believe that our muscular vigor will ever
+be a superfluity. Even if the day ever dawns in which it will not be
+needed for fighting the old heavy battles against Nature, it will still
+always be needed to furnish the background of sanity, serenity, and
+cheerfulness to life, to give moral elasticity to our disposition, to
+round off the wiry edge of our fretfulness, and make us good-humored and
+easy of approach. Weakness is too apt to be what the doctors call
+irritable weakness. And that blessed internal peace and confidence, that
+_acquiescentia in seipso_, as Spinoza used to call it, that wells up
+from every part of the body of a muscularly well-trained human being,
+and soaks the indwelling soul of him with satisfaction, is, quite apart
+from every consideration of its mechanical utility, an element of
+spiritual hygiene of supreme significance.
+
+And now let me go a step deeper into mental hygiene, and try to enlist
+your insight and sympathy in a cause which I believe is one of paramount
+patriotic importance to us Yankees. Many years ago a Scottish medical
+man, Dr. Clouston, a mad-doctor as they call him there, or what we
+should call an asylum physician (the most eminent one in Scotland),
+visited this country, and said something that has remained in my memory
+ever since. "You Americans," he said, "wear too much expression on your
+faces. You are living like an army with all its reserves engaged in
+action. The duller countenances of the British population betoken a
+better scheme of life. They suggest stores of reserved nervous force to
+fall back upon, if any occasion should arise that requires it. This
+inexcitability, this presence at all times of power not used, I regard,"
+continued Dr. Clouston, "as the great safeguard of our British people.
+The other thing in you gives me a sense of insecurity, and you ought
+somehow to tone yourselves down. You really do carry too much
+expression, you take too intensely the trivial moments of life."
+
+Now Dr. Clouston is a trained reader of the secrets of the soul as
+expressed upon the countenance, and the observation of his which I quote
+seems to me to mean a great deal. And all Americans who stay in Europe
+long enough to get accustomed to the spirit that reigns and expresses
+itself there, so unexcitable as compared with ours, make a similar
+observation when they return to their native shores. They find a
+wild-eyed look upon their compatriots' faces, either of too desperate
+eagerness and anxiety or of too intense responsiveness and good-will. It
+is hard to say whether the men or the women show it most. It is true
+that we do not all feel about it as Dr. Clouston felt. Many of us, far
+from deploring it, admire it. We say: "What intelligence it shows! How
+different from the stolid cheeks, the codfish eyes, the slow, inanimate
+demeanor we have been seeing in the British Isles!" Intensity, rapidity,
+vivacity of appearance, are indeed with us something of a nationally
+accepted ideal; and the medical notion of 'irritable weakness' is not
+the first thing suggested by them to our mind, as it was to Dr.
+Clouston's. In a weekly paper not very long ago I remember reading a
+story in which, after describing the beauty and interest of the
+heroine's personality, the author summed up her charms by saying that to
+all who looked upon her an impression as of 'bottled lightning' was
+irresistibly conveyed.
+
+Bottled lightning, in truth, is one of our American ideals, even of a
+young girl's character! Now it is most ungracious, and it may seem to
+some persons unpatriotic, to criticise in public the physical
+peculiarities of one's own people, of one's own family, so to speak.
+Besides, it may be said, and said with justice, that there are plenty of
+bottled-lightning temperaments in other countries, and plenty of
+phlegmatic temperaments here; and that, when all is said and done, the
+more or less of tension about which I am making such a fuss is a very
+small item in the sum total of a nation's life, and not worth solemn
+treatment at a time when agreeable rather than disagreeable things
+should be talked about. Well, in one sense the more or less of tension
+in our faces and in our unused muscles is a small thing: not much
+mechanical work is done by these contractions. But it is not always the
+material size of a thing that measures its importance: often it is its
+place and function. One of the most philosophical remarks I ever heard
+made was by an unlettered workman who was doing some repairs at my house
+many years ago. "There is very little difference between one man and
+another," he said, "when you go to the bottom of it. But what little
+there is, is very important." And the remark certainly applies to this
+case. The general over-contraction may be small when estimated in
+foot-pounds, but its importance is immense on account of its _effects on
+the over-contracted person's spiritual life_. This follows as a
+necessary consequence from the theory of our emotions to which I made
+reference at the beginning of this article. For by the sensations that
+so incessantly pour in from the over-tense excited body the over-tense
+and excited habit of mind is kept up; and the sultry, threatening,
+exhausting, thunderous inner atmosphere never quite clears away. If you
+never wholly give yourself up to the chair you sit in, but always keep
+your leg- and body-muscles half contracted for a rise; if you breathe
+eighteen or nineteen instead of sixteen times a minute, and never quite
+breathe out at that,--what mental mood _can_ you be in but one of inner
+panting and expectancy, and how can the future and its worries possibly
+forsake your mind? On the other hand, how can they gain admission to
+your mind if your brow be unruffled, your respiration calm and complete,
+and your muscles all relaxed?
+
+Now what is the cause of this absence of repose, this bottled-lightning
+quality in us Americans? The explanation of it that is usually given is
+that it comes from the extreme dryness of our climate and the acrobatic
+performances of our thermometer, coupled with the extraordinary
+progressiveness of our life, the hard work, the railroad speed, the
+rapid success, and all the other things we know so well by heart. Well,
+our climate is certainly exciting, but hardly more so than that of many
+parts of Europe, where nevertheless no bottled-lightning girls are
+found. And the work done and the pace of life are as extreme an every
+great capital of Europe as they are here. To me both of these pretended
+causes are utterly insufficient to explain the facts.
+
+To explain them, we must go not to physical geography, but to psychology
+and sociology. The latest chapter both in sociology and in psychology to
+be developed in a manner that approaches adequacy is the chapter on the
+imitative impulse. First Bagehot, then Tarde, then Royce and Baldwin
+here, have shown that invention and imitation, taken together, form, one
+may say, the entire warp and woof of human life, in so far as it is
+social. The American over-tension and jerkiness and breathlessness and
+intensity and agony of expression are primarily social, and only
+secondarily physiological, phenomena. They are _bad habits_, nothing
+more or less, bred of custom and example, born of the imitation of bad
+models and the cultivation of false personal ideals. How are idioms
+acquired, how do local peculiarities of phrase and accent come about?
+Through an accidental example set by some one, which struck the ears of
+others, and was quoted and copied till at last every one in the locality
+chimed in. Just so it is with national tricks of vocalization or
+intonation, with national manners, fashions of movement and gesture, and
+habitual expressions of face. We, here in America, through following a
+succession of pattern-setters whom it is now impossible to trace, and
+through influencing each other in a bad direction, have at last settled
+down collectively into what, for better or worse, is our own
+characteristic national type,--a type with the production of which, so
+far as these habits go, the climate and conditions have had practically
+nothing at all to do.
+
+This type, which we have thus reached by our imitativeness, we now have
+fixed upon us, for better or worse. Now no type can be _wholly_
+disadvantageous; but, so far as our type follows the bottled-lightning
+fashion, it cannot be wholly good. Dr. Clouston was certainly right in
+thinking that eagerness, breathlessness, and anxiety are not signs of
+strength: they are signs of weakness and of bad co-ordination. The even
+forehead, the slab-like cheek, the codfish eye, may be less interesting
+for the moment; but they are more promising signs than intense
+expression is of what we may expect of their possessor in the long run.
+Your dull, unhurried worker gets over a great deal of ground, because he
+never goes backward or breaks down. Your intense, convulsive worker
+breaks down and has bad moods so often that you never know where he may
+be when you most need his help,--he may be having one of his 'bad days.'
+We say that so many of our fellow-countrymen collapse, and have to be
+sent abroad to rest their nerves, because they work so hard. I suspect
+that this is an immense mistake. I suspect that neither the nature nor
+the amount of our work is accountable for the frequency and severity of
+our breakdowns, but that their cause lies rather in those absurd
+feelings of hurry and having no time, in that breathlessness and
+tension, that anxiety of feature and that solicitude for results, that
+lack of inner harmony and ease, in short, by which with us the work is
+so apt to be accompanied, and from which a European who should do the
+same work would nine times out of ten be free. These perfectly wanton
+and unnecessary tricks of inner attitude and outer manner in us, caught
+from the social atmosphere, kept up by tradition, and idealized by many
+as the admirable way of life, are the last straws that break the
+American camel's back, the final overflowers of our measure of wear and
+tear and fatigue.
+
+The voice, for example, in a surprisingly large number of us has a tired
+and plaintive sound. Some of us are really tired (for I do not mean
+absolutely to deny that our climate has a tiring quality); but far more
+of us are not tired at all, or would not be tired at all unless we had
+got into a wretched trick of feeling tired, by following the prevalent
+habits of vocalization and expression. And if talking high and tired,
+and living excitedly and hurriedly, would only enable us to _do_ more by
+the way, even while breaking us down in the end, it would be different.
+There would be some compensation, some excuse, for going on so. But the
+exact reverse is the case. It is your relaxed and easy worker, who is in
+no hurry, and quite thoughtless most of the while of consequences, who
+is your efficient worker; and tension and anxiety, and present and
+future, all mixed up together in our mind at once, are the surest drags
+upon steady progress and hindrances to our success. My colleague,
+Professor Münsterberg, an excellent observer, who came here recently,
+has written some notes on America to German papers. He says in substance
+that the appearance of unusual energy in America is superficial and
+illusory, being really due to nothing but the habits of jerkiness and
+bad co-ordination for which we have to thank the defective training of
+our people. I think myself that it is high time for old legends and
+traditional opinions to be changed; and that, if any one should begin to
+write about Yankee inefficiency and feebleness, and inability to do
+anything with time except to waste it, he would have a very pretty
+paradoxical little thesis to sustain, with a great many facts to quote,
+and a great deal of experience to appeal to in its proof.
+
+Well, my friends, if our dear American character is weakened by all this
+over-tension,--and I think, whatever reserves you may make, that you
+will agree as to the main facts,--where does the remedy lie? It lies, of
+course, where lay the origins of the disease. If a vicious fashion and
+taste are to blame for the thing, the fashion and taste must be changed.
+And, though it is no small thing to inoculate seventy millions of people
+with new standards, yet, if there is to be any relief, that will have
+to be done. We must change ourselves from a race that admires jerk and
+snap for their own sakes, and looks down upon low voices and quiet ways
+as dull, to one that, on the contrary, has calm for its ideal, and for
+their own sakes loves harmony, dignity, and ease.
+
+So we go back to the psychology of imitation again. There is only one
+way to improve ourselves, and that is by some of us setting an example
+which the others may pick up and imitate till the new fashion spreads
+from east to west. Some of us are in more favorable positions than
+others to set new fashions. Some are much more striking personally and
+imitable, so to speak. But no living person is sunk so low as not to be
+imitated by somebody. Thackeray somewhere says of the Irish nation that
+there never was an Irishman so poor that he didn't have a still poorer
+Irishman living at his expense; and, surely, there is no human being
+whose example doesn't work contagiously in _some_ particular. The very
+idiots at our public institutions imitate each other's peculiarities.
+And, if you should individually achieve calmness and harmony in your own
+person, you may depend upon it that a wave of imitation will spread
+from you, as surely as the circles spread outward when a stone is
+dropped into a lake.
+
+Fortunately, we shall not have to be absolute pioneers. Even now in New
+York they have formed a society for the improvement of our national
+vocalization, and one perceives its machinations already in the shape of
+various newspaper paragraphs intended to stir up dissatisfaction with
+the awful thing that it is. And, better still than that, because more
+radical and general, is the gospel of relaxation, as one may call it,
+preached by Miss Annie Payson Call, of Boston, in her admirable little
+volume called 'Power through Repose,' a book that ought to be in the
+hands of every teacher and student in America of either sex. You need
+only be followers, then, on a path already opened up by others. But of
+one thing be confident: others still will follow you.
+
+And this brings me to one more application of psychology to practical
+life, to which I will call attention briefly, and then close. If one's
+example of easy and calm ways is to be effectively contagious, one feels
+by instinct that the less voluntarily one aims at getting imitated, the
+more unconscious one keeps in the matter, the more likely one is to
+succeed. _Become the imitable thing_, and you may then discharge your
+minds of all responsibility for the imitation. The laws of social nature
+will take care of that result. Now the psychological principle on which
+this precept reposes is a law of very deep and wide-spread importance in
+the conduct of our lives, and at the same time a law which we Americans
+most grievously neglect. Stated technically, the law is this: that
+_strong feeling about one's self tends to arrest the free association of
+one's objective ideas and motor processes_. We get the extreme example
+of this in the mental disease called melancholia.
+
+A melancholic patient is filled through and through with intensely
+painful emotion about himself. He is threatened, he is guilty, he is
+doomed, he is annihilated, he is lost. His mind is fixed as if in a
+cramp on these feelings of his own situation, and in all the books on
+insanity you may read that the usual varied flow of his thoughts has
+ceased. His associative processes, to use the technical phrase, are
+inhibited; and his ideas stand stock-still, shut up to their one
+monotonous function of reiterating inwardly the fact of the man's
+desperate estate. And this inhibitive influence is not due to the mere
+fact that his emotion is _painful_. Joyous emotions about the self also
+stop the association of our ideas. A saint in ecstasy is as motionless
+and irresponsive and one-idea'd as a melancholiac. And, without going as
+far as ecstatic saints, we know how in every one a great or sudden
+pleasure may paralyze the flow of thought. Ask young people returning
+from a party or a spectacle, and all excited about it, what it was. "Oh,
+it was _fine_! it was _fine_! it was _fine_!" is all the information you
+are likely to receive until the excitement has calmed down. Probably
+every one of my hearers has been made temporarily half-idiotic by some
+great success or piece of good fortune. "_Good_! GOOD! GOOD!" is all we
+can at such times say to ourselves until we smile at our own very
+foolishness.
+
+Now from all this we can draw an extremely practical conclusion. If,
+namely, we wish our trains of ideation and volition to be copious and
+varied and effective, we must form the habit of freeing them from the
+inhibitive influence of reflection upon them, of egoistic preoccupation
+about their results. Such a habit, like other habits, can be formed.
+Prudence and duty and self-regard, emotions of ambition and emotions of
+anxiety, have, of course, a needful part to play in our lives.
+
+But confine them as far as possible to the occasions when you are
+making your general resolutions and deciding on your plans of campaign,
+and keep them out of the details. When once a decision is reached and
+execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility
+and care about the outcome. _Unclamp_, in a word, your intellectual and
+practical machinery, and let it run free; and the service it will do you
+will be twice as good. Who are the scholars who get 'rattled' in the
+recitation-room? Those who think of the possibilities of failure and
+feel the great importance of the act. Who are those who do recite well?
+Often those who are most indifferent. _Their_ ideas reel themselves out
+of their memory of their own accord. Why do we hear the complaint so
+often that social life in New England is either less rich and expressive
+or more fatiguing than it is in some other parts of the world? To what
+is the fact, if fact it be, due unless to the over-active conscience of
+the people, afraid of either saying something too trivial and obvious,
+or something insincere, or something unworthy of one's interlocutor, or
+something in some way or other not adequate to the occasion? How can
+conversation possibly steer itself through such a sea of
+responsibilities and inhibitions as this? On the other hand,
+conversation does flourish and society is refreshing, and neither dull
+on the one hand nor exhausting from its effort on the other, wherever
+people forget their scruples and take the brakes off their hearts, and
+let their tongues wag as automatically and irresponsibly as they will.
+
+They talk much in pedagogic circles to-day about the duty of the teacher
+to prepare for every lesson in advance. To some extent this is useful.
+But we Yankees are assuredly not those to whom such a general doctrine
+should be preached. We are only too careful as it is. The advice I
+should give to most teachers would be in the words of one who is herself
+an admirable teacher. Prepare yourself in the _subject so well that it
+shall be always on tap_: then in the classroom trust your spontaneity
+and fling away all further care.
+
+My advice to students, especially to girl-students, would be somewhat
+similar. Just as a bicycle-chain may be too tight, so may one's
+carefulness and conscientiousness be so tense as to hinder the running
+of one's mind. Take, for example, periods when there are many successive
+days of examination impending. One ounce of good nervous tone in an
+examination is worth many pounds of anxious study for it in advance. If
+you want really to do your best in an examination, fling away the book
+the day before, say to yourself, "I won't waste another minute on this
+miserable thing, and I don't care an iota whether I succeed or not." Say
+this sincerely, and feel it; and go out and play, or go to bed and
+sleep, and I am sure the results next day will encourage you to use the
+method permanently. I have heard this advice given to a student by Miss
+Call, whose book on muscular relaxation I quoted a moment ago. In her
+later book, entitled 'As a Matter of Course,' the gospel of moral
+relaxation, of dropping things from the mind, and not 'caring,' is
+preached with equal success. Not only our preachers, but our friends the
+theosophists and mind-curers of various religious sects are also harping
+on this string. And with the doctors, the Delsarteans, the various
+mind-curing sects, and such writers as Mr. Dresser, Prentice Mulford,
+Mr. Horace Fletcher, and Mr. Trine to help, and the whole band of
+schoolteachers and magazine-readers chiming in, it really looks as if a
+good start might be made in the direction of changing our American
+mental habit into something more indifferent and strong.
+
+Worry means always and invariably inhibition of associations and loss
+of effective power. Of course, the sovereign cure for worry is religious
+faith; and this, of course, you also know. The turbulent billows of the
+fretful surface leave the deep parts of the ocean undisturbed, and to
+him who has a hold on vaster and more permanent realities the hourly
+vicissitudes of his personal destiny seem relatively insignificant
+things. The really religious person is accordingly unshakable and full
+of equanimity, and calmly ready for any duty that the day may bring
+forth. This is charmingly illustrated by a little work with which I
+recently became acquainted, "The Practice of the Presence of God, the
+Best Ruler of a Holy Life, by Brother Lawrence, being Conversations and
+Letters of Nicholas Herman of Lorraine, Translated from the French."[C]
+I extract a few passages, the conversations being given in indirect
+discourse. Brother Lawrence was a Carmelite friar, converted at Paris in
+1666. "He said that he had been footman to M. Fieubert, the Treasurer,
+and that he was a great awkward fellow, who broke everything. That he
+had desired to be received into a monastery, thinking that he would
+there be made to smart for his awkwardness and the faults he should
+commit, and so he should sacrifice to God his life, with its pleasures;
+but that God had disappointed him, he having met with nothing but
+satisfaction in that state...."
+
+     [C] Fleming H. Revell Company, New York.
+
+"That he had long been troubled in mind from a certain belief that he
+should be damned; that all the men in the world could not have persuaded
+him to the contrary; but that he had thus reasoned with himself about
+it: _I engaged in a religious life only for the love of God, and I have
+endeavored to act only for Him; whatever becomes of me, whether I be
+lost or saved, I will always continue to act purely for the love of God.
+I shall have this good at least, that till death I shall have done all
+that is in me to love Him_.... That since then he had passed his life in
+perfect liberty and continual joy."
+
+"That when an occasion of practising some virtue offered, he addressed
+himself to God, saying, 'Lord, I cannot do this unless thou enablest
+me'; and that then he received strength more than sufficient. That, when
+he had failed in his duty, he only confessed his fault, saying to God,
+'I shall never do otherwise, if You leave me to myself; it is You who
+must hinder my failing, and mend what is amiss.' That after this he gave
+himself no further uneasiness about it."
+
+"That he had been lately sent into Burgundy to buy the provision of wine
+for the society, which was a very unwelcome task for him, because he had
+no turn for business, and because he was lame, and could not go about
+the boat but by rolling himself over the casks. That, however, he gave
+himself no uneasiness about it, nor about the purchase of the wine. That
+he said to God, 'It was his business he was about,' and that he
+afterward found it well performed. That he had been sent into Auvergne,
+the year before, upon the same account; that he could not tell how the
+matter passed, but that it proved very well."
+
+"So, likewise, in his business in the kitchen (to which he had naturally
+a great aversion), having accustomed himself to do everything there for
+the love of God, and with prayer upon all occasions, for his grace to do
+his work well, he had found everything easy during fifteen years that he
+had been employed there."
+
+"That he was very well pleased with the post he was now in, but that he
+was as ready to quit that as the former, since he was always pleasing
+himself in every condition, by doing little things for the love of God."
+
+"That the goodness of God assured him he would not forsake him utterly,
+and that he would give him strength to bear whatever evil he permitted
+to happen to him; and, therefore, that he feared nothing, and had no
+occasion to consult with anybody about his state. That, when he had
+attempted to do it, he had always come away more perplexed."
+
+The simple-heartedness of the good Brother Lawrence, and the relaxation
+of all unnecessary solicitudes and anxieties in him, is a refreshing
+spectacle.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The need of feeling responsible all the livelong day has been preached
+long enough in our New England. Long enough exclusively, at any
+rate,--and long enough to the female sex. What our girl-students and
+woman-teachers most need nowadays is not the exacerbation, but rather
+the toning-down of their moral tensions. Even now I fear that some one
+of my fair hearers may be making an undying resolve to become
+strenuously relaxed, cost what it will, for the remainder of her life.
+It is needless to say that that is not the way to do it. The way to do
+it, paradoxical as it may seem, is genuinely not to care whether you are
+doing it or not. Then, possibly, by the grace of God, you may all at
+once find that you _are_ doing it, and, having learned what the trick
+feels like, you may (again by the grace of God) be enabled to go on.
+
+And that something like this may be the happy experience of all my
+hearers is, in closing, my most earnest wish.
+
+
+
+
+II. ON A CERTAIN BLINDNESS IN HUMAN BEINGS
+
+
+Our judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little, depend on
+the _feelings_ the things arouse in us. Where we judge a thing to be
+precious in consequence of the _idea_ we frame of it, this is only
+because the idea is itself associated already with a feeling. If we were
+radically feelingless, and if ideas were the only things our mind could
+entertain, we should lose all our likes and dislikes at a stroke, and be
+unable to point to any one situation or experience in life more valuable
+or significant than any other.
+
+Now the blindness in human beings, of which this discourse will treat,
+is the blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the
+feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves.
+
+We are practical beings, each of us with limited functions and duties to
+perform. Each is bound to feel intensely the importance of his own
+duties and the significance of the situations that call these forth.
+But this feeling is in each of us a vital secret, for sympathy with
+which we vainly look to others. The others are too much absorbed in
+their own vital secrets to take an interest in ours. Hence the stupidity
+and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the significance
+of alien lives. Hence the falsity of our judgments, so far as they
+presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other persons'
+conditions or ideals.
+
+Take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we are by a tie more intimate
+than most ties in this world; and yet, outside of that tie of friendly
+fondness, how insensible, each of us, to all that makes life significant
+for the other!--we to the rapture of bones under hedges, or smells of
+trees and lamp-posts, they to the delights of literature and art. As you
+sit reading the most moving romance you ever fell upon, what sort of a
+judge is your fox-terrier of your behavior? With all his good will
+toward you, the nature of your conduct is absolutely excluded from his
+comprehension. To sit there like a senseless statue, when you might be
+taking him to walk and throwing sticks for him to catch! What queer
+disease is this that comes over you every day, of holding things and
+staring at them like that for hours together, paralyzed of motion and
+vacant of all conscious life? The African savages came nearer the truth;
+but they, too, missed it, when they gathered wonderingly round one of
+our American travellers who, in the interior, had just come into
+possession of a stray copy of the New York _Commercial Advertiser_, and
+was devouring it column by column. When he got through, they offered him
+a high price for the mysterious object; and, being asked for what they
+wanted it, they said: "For an eye medicine,"--that being the only reason
+they could conceive of for the protracted bath which he had given his
+eyes upon its surface.
+
+The spectator's judgment is sure to miss the root of the matter, and to
+possess no truth. The subject judged knows a part of the world of
+reality which the judging spectator fails to see, knows more while the
+spectator knows less; and, wherever there is conflict of opinion and
+difference of vision, we are bound to believe that the truer side is the
+side that feels the more, and not the side that feels the less.
+
+Let me take a personal example of the kind that befalls each one of us
+daily:--
+
+Some years ago, while journeying in the mountains of North Carolina, I
+passed by a large number of 'coves,' as they call them there, or heads
+of small valleys between the hills, which had been newly cleared and
+planted. The impression on my mind was one of unmitigated squalor. The
+settler had in every case cut down the more manageable trees, and left
+their charred stumps standing. The larger trees he had girdled and
+killed, in order that their foliage should not cast a shade. He had then
+built a log cabin, plastering its chinks with clay, and had set up a
+tall zigzag rail fence around the scene of his havoc, to keep the pigs
+and cattle out. Finally, he had irregularly planted the intervals
+between the stumps and trees with Indian corn, which grew among the
+chips; and there he dwelt with his wife and babes--an axe, a gun, a few
+utensils, and some pigs and chickens feeding in the woods, being the sum
+total of his possessions.
+
+The forest had been destroyed; and what had 'improved' it out of
+existence was hideous, a sort of ulcer, without a single element of
+artificial grace to make up for the loss of Nature's beauty. Ugly,
+indeed, seemed the life of the squatter, scudding, as the sailors say,
+under bare poles, beginning again away back where our first ancestors
+started, and by hardly a single item the better off for all the
+achievements of the intervening generations.
+
+Talk about going back to nature! I said to myself, oppressed by the
+dreariness, as I drove by. Talk of a country life for one's old age and
+for one's children! Never thus, with nothing but the bare ground and
+one's bare hands to fight the battle! Never, without the best spoils of
+culture woven in! The beauties and commodities gained by the centuries
+are sacred. They are our heritage and birthright. No modern person ought
+to be willing to live a day in such a state of rudimentariness and
+denudation.
+
+Then I said to the mountaineer who was driving me, "What sort of people
+are they who have to make these new clearings?" "All of us," he replied.
+"Why, we ain't happy here, unless we are getting one of these coves
+under cultivation." I instantly felt that I had been losing the whole
+inward significance of the situation. Because to me the clearings spoke
+of naught but denudation, I thought that to those whose sturdy arms and
+obedient axes had made them they could tell no other story. But, when
+_they_ looked on the hideous stumps, what they thought of was personal
+victory. The chips, the girdled trees, and the vile split rails spoke
+of honest sweat, persistent toil and final reward. The cabin was a
+warrant of safety for self and wife and babes. In short, the clearing,
+which to me was a mere ugly picture on the retina, was to them a symbol
+redolent with moral memories and sang a very pęan of duty, struggle, and
+success.
+
+I had been as blind to the peculiar ideality of their conditions as they
+certainly would also have been to the ideality of mine, had they had a
+peep at my strange indoor academic ways of life at Cambridge.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives
+it, there the life becomes genuinely significant. Sometimes the
+eagerness is more knit up with the motor activities, sometimes with the
+perceptions, sometimes with the imagination, sometimes with reflective
+thought. But, wherever it is found, there is the zest, the tingle, the
+excitement of reality; and there _is_ 'importance' in the only real and
+positive sense in which importance ever anywhere can be.
+
+Robert Louis Stevenson has illustrated this by a case, drawn from the
+sphere of the imagination, in an essay which I really think deserves to
+become immortal, both for the truth of its matter and the excellence of
+its form.
+
+"Toward the end of September," Stevenson writes, "when school-time was
+drawing near, and the nights were already black, we would begin to sally
+from our respective villas, each equipped with a tin bull's-eye lantern.
+The thing was so well known that it had worn a rut in the commerce of
+Great Britain; and the grocers, about the due time, began to garnish
+their windows with our particular brand of luminary. We wore them
+buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was the
+rigor of the game, a buttoned top-coat. They smelled noisomely of
+blistered tin. They never burned aright, though they would always burn
+our fingers. Their use was naught, the pleasure of them merely fanciful,
+and yet a boy with a bull's-eye under his top-coat asked for nothing
+more. The fishermen used lanterns about their boats, and it was from
+them, I suppose, that we had got the hint; but theirs were not
+bull's-eyes, nor did we ever play at being fishermen. The police carried
+them at their belts, and we had plainly copied them in that; yet we did
+not pretend to be policemen. Burglars, indeed, we may have had some
+haunting thought of; and we had certainly an eye to past ages when
+lanterns were more common, and to certain story-books in which we had
+found them to figure very largely. But take it for all in all, the
+pleasure of the thing was substantive; and to be a boy with a bull's-eye
+under his top-coat was good enough for us.
+
+"When two of these asses met, there would be an anxious 'Have you got
+your lantern?' and a gratified 'Yes!' That was the shibboleth, and very
+needful, too; for, as it was the rule to keep our glory contained, none
+could recognize a lantern-bearer unless (like the polecat) by the smell.
+Four or five would sometimes climb into the belly of a ten-man lugger,
+with nothing but the thwarts above them,--for the cabin was usually
+locked,--or chose out some hollow of the links where the wind might
+whistle overhead. Then the coats would be unbuttoned, and the
+bull's-eyes discovered; and in the chequering glimmer, under the huge,
+windy hall of the night, and cheered by a rich steam of toasting
+tinware, these fortunate young gentlemen would crouch together in the
+cold sand of the links, or on the scaly bilges of the fishing-boat, and
+delight them with inappropriate talk. Woe is me that I cannot give some
+specimens!... But the talk was but a condiment, and these gatherings
+themselves only accidents in the career of the lantern-bearer. The
+essence of this bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night, the
+slide shut, the top-coat buttoned, not a ray escaping, whether to
+conduct your footsteps or to make your glory public,--a mere pillar of
+darkness in the dark; and all the while, deep down in the privacy of
+your fool's heart, to know you had a bull's-eye at your belt, and to
+exult and sing over the knowledge.
+
+"It is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the most stolid.
+It may be contended rather that a (somewhat minor) bard in almost every
+case survives, and is the spice of life to his possessor. Justice is not
+done to the versatility and the unplumbed childishness of man's
+imagination. His life from without may seem but a rude mound of mud:
+there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells
+delighted; and for as dark as his pathway seems to the observer, he will
+have some kind of bull's-eye at his belt."
+
+... "There is one fable that touches very near the quick of life,--the
+fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard a bird break into
+song, hearkened for a trill or two, and found himself at his return a
+stranger at his convent gates; for he had been absent fifty years, and
+of all his comrades there survived but one to recognize him. It is not
+only in the woods that this enchanter carols, though perhaps he is
+native there. He sings in the most doleful places. The miser hears him
+and chuckles, and his days are moments. With no more apparatus than an
+evil-smelling lantern, I have evoked him on the naked links. All life
+that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two strands,--seeking for
+that bird and hearing him. And it is just this that makes life so hard
+to value, and the delight of each so incommunicable. And it is just a
+knowledge of this, and a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which
+the bird _has_ sung to _us_, that fills us with such wonder when we turn
+to the pages of the realist. There, to be sure, we find a picture of
+life in so far as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap desires and
+cheap fears, that which we are ashamed to remember and that which we are
+careless whether we forget; but of the note of that time-devouring
+nightingale we hear no news."
+
+... "Say that we came [in such a realistic romance] on some such business
+as that of my lantern-bearers on the links, and described the boys as
+very cold, spat upon by flurries of rain, and drearily surrounded, all
+of which they were; and their talk as silly and indecent, which it
+certainly was. To the eye of the observer they _are_ wet and cold and
+drearily surrounded; but ask themselves, and they are in the heaven of a
+recondite pleasure, the ground of which is an ill-smelling lantern."
+
+"For, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is often hard to hit. It may
+hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like the lantern; it may reside in
+the mysterious inwards of psychology.... It has so little bond with
+externals ... that it may even touch them not, and the man's true life,
+for which he consents to live, lie together in the field of fancy.... In
+such a case the poetry runs underground. The observer (poor soul, with
+his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court
+deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment;
+but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed
+through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realism
+were that of the poets, to climb after him like a squirrel, and catch
+some glimpse of the heaven in which he lives. And the true realism,
+always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy
+resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing."
+
+"For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the
+sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse. To one
+who has not the secret of the lanterns the scene upon the links is
+meaningless. And hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of
+realistic books.... In each we miss the personal poetry, the enchanted
+atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked and
+seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life falls dead like dough,
+instead of soaring away like a balloon into the colors of the sunset;
+each is true, each inconceivable; for no man lives in the external truth
+among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his
+brain, with the painted windows and the storied wall."[D]
+
+     [D] 'The Lantern-bearers,' in the volume entitled 'Across the
+     Plains.' Abridged in the quotation.
+
+These paragraphs are the best thing I know in all Stevenson. "To miss
+the joy is to miss all." Indeed, it is. Yet we are but finite, and each
+one of us has some single specialized vocation of his own. And it seems
+as if energy in the service of its particular duties might be got only
+by hardening the heart toward everything unlike them. Our deadness
+toward all but one particular kind of joy would thus be the price we
+inevitably have to pay for being practical creatures. Only in some
+pitiful dreamer, some philosopher, poet, or romancer, or when the common
+practical man becomes a lover, does the hard externality give way, and a
+gleam of insight into the ejective world, as Clifford called it, the
+vast world of inner life beyond us, so different from that of outer
+seeming, illuminate our mind. Then the whole scheme of our customary
+values gets confounded, then our self is riven and its narrow interests
+fly to pieces, then a new centre and a new perspective must be found.
+
+The change is well described by my colleague, Josiah Royce:--
+
+"What, then, is our neighbor? Thou hast regarded his thought, his
+feeling, as somehow different from thine. Thou hast said, 'A pain in him
+is not like a pain in me, but something far easier to bear.' He seems to
+thee a little less living than thou; his life is dim, it is cold, it is
+a pale fire beside thy own burning desires.... So, dimly and by instinct
+hast thou lived with thy neighbor, and hast known him not, being blind.
+Thou hast made [of him] a thing, no Self at all. Have done with this
+illusion, and simply try to learn the truth. Pain is pain, joy is joy,
+everywhere, even as in thee. In all the songs of the forest birds; in
+all the cries of the wounded and dying, struggling in the captor's
+power; in the boundless sea where the myriads of water-creatures strive
+and die; amid all the countless hordes of savage men; in all sickness
+and sorrow; in all exultation and hope, everywhere, from the lowest to
+the noblest, the same conscious, burning, wilful life is found,
+endlessly manifold as the forms of the living creatures, unquenchable as
+the fires of the sun, real as these impulses that even now throb in
+thine own little selfish heart. Lift up thy eyes, behold that life, and
+then turn away, and forget it as thou canst; but, if thou hast _known_
+that, thou hast begun to know thy duty."[E]
+
+     [E] The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, pp. 157-162
+     (abridged).
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This higher vision of an inner significance in what, until then, we had
+realized only in the dead external way, often comes over a person
+suddenly; and, when it does so, it makes an epoch in his history. As
+Emerson says, there is a depth in those moments that constrains us to
+ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences. The passion
+of love will shake one like an explosion, or some act will awaken a
+remorseful compunction that hangs like a cloud over all one's later day.
+
+This mystic sense of hidden meaning starts upon us often from non-human
+natural things. I take this passage from 'Obermann,' a French novel that
+had some vogue in its day: "Paris, March 7.--It was dark and rather
+cold. I was gloomy, and walked because I had nothing to do. I passed by
+some flowers placed breast-high upon a wall. A jonquil in bloom was
+there. It is the strongest expression of desire: it was the first
+perfume of the year. I felt all the happiness destined for man. This
+unutterable harmony of souls, the phantom of the ideal world, arose in
+me complete. I never felt anything so great or so instantaneous. I know
+not what shape, what analogy, what secret of relation it was that made
+me see in this flower a limitless beauty.... I shall never enclose in a
+conception this power, this immensity that nothing will express; this
+form that nothing will contain; this ideal of a better world which one
+feels, but which it would seem that nature has not made."[F]
+
+    [F] De Sénancour: Obermann, Lettre XXX.
+
+Wordsworth and Shelley are similarly full of this sense of a limitless
+significance in natural things. In Wordsworth it was a somewhat austere
+and moral significance,--a 'lonely cheer.'
+
+ "To every natural form, rock, fruit, or flower,
+  Even the loose stones that cover the highway,
+  I gave a moral life: I saw them feel
+  Or linked them to some feeling: the great mass
+  Lay bedded in some quickening soul, and all
+  That I beheld respired with inward meaning."[G]
+
+    [G] The Prelude, Book III.
+
+"Authentic tidings of invisible things!" Just what this hidden presence
+in nature was, which Wordsworth so rapturously felt, and in the light of
+which he lived, tramping the hills for days together, the poet never
+could explain logically or in articulate conceptions. Yet to the reader
+who may himself have had gleaming moments of a similar sort the verses
+in which Wordsworth simply proclaims the fact of them come with a
+heart-satisfying authority:--
+
+                                "Magnificent
+  The morning rose, in memorable pomp,
+  Glorious as ere I had beheld. In front
+  The sea lay laughing at a distance; near
+  The solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds,
+  Grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light;
+  And in the meadows and the lower grounds
+  Was all the sweetness of a common dawn,--
+  Dews, vapors, and the melody of birds,
+  And laborers going forth to till the fields."
+
+ "Ah! need I say, dear Friend, that to the brim
+  My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
+  Were then made for me; bond unknown to me
+  Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly,
+  A dedicated Spirit. On I walked,
+  In thankful blessedness, which yet survives."[H]
+
+    [H] The Prelude, Book IV.
+
+As Wordsworth walked, filled with his strange inner joy, responsive thus
+to the secret life of nature round about him, his rural neighbors,
+tightly and narrowly intent upon their own affairs, their crops and
+lambs and fences, must have thought him a very insignificant and foolish
+personage. It surely never occurred to any one of them to wonder what
+was going on inside of _him_ or what it might be worth. And yet that
+inner life of his carried the burden of a significance that has fed the
+souls of others, and fills them to this day with inner joy.
+
+Richard Jefferies has written a remarkable autobiographic document
+entitled The Story of my Heart. It tells, in many pages, of the rapture
+with which in youth the sense of the life of nature filled him. On a
+certain hill-top he says:--
+
+"I was utterly alone with the sun and the earth. Lying down on the
+grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the
+distant sea, far beyond sight.... With all the intensity of feeling
+which exalted me, all the intense communion I held with the earth, the
+sun and sky, the stars hidden by the light, with the ocean,--in no
+manner can the thrilling depth of these feelings be written,--with these
+I prayed as if they were the keys of an instrument.... The great sun,
+burning with light, the strong earth,--dear earth,--the warm sky, the
+pure air, the thought of ocean, the inexpressible beauty of all filled
+me with a rapture, an ecstasy, an inflatus. With this inflatus, too, I
+prayed.... The prayer, this soul-emotion, was in itself, not for an
+object: it was a passion. I hid my face in the grass. I was wholly
+prostrated, I lost myself in the wrestle, I was rapt and carried
+away.... Had any shepherd accidentally seen me lying on the turf, he
+would only have thought I was resting a few minutes. I made no outward
+show. Who could have imagined the whirlwind of passion that was going
+on in me as I reclined there!"[I]
+
+    [I] _Op. cit._, Boston, Roberts, 1883, pp. 5, 6.
+
+Surely, a worthless hour of life, when measured by the usual standards
+of commercial value. Yet in what other _kind_ of value can the
+preciousness of any hour, made precious by any standard, consist, if it
+consist not in feelings of excited significance like these, engendered
+in some one, by what the hour contains?
+
+Yet so blind and dead does the clamor of our own practical interests
+make us to all other things, that it seems almost as if it were
+necessary to become worthless as a practical being, if one is to hope to
+attain to any breadth of insight into the impersonal world of worths as
+such, to have any perception of life's meaning on a large objective
+scale. Only your mystic, your dreamer, or your insolvent tramp or
+loafer, can afford so sympathetic an occupation, an occupation which
+will change the usual standards of human value in the twinkling of an
+eye, giving to foolishness a place ahead of power, and laying low in a
+minute the distinctions which it takes a hard-working conventional man a
+lifetime to build up. You may be a prophet, at this rate; but you cannot
+be a worldly success.
+
+Walt Whitman, for instance, is accounted by many of us a contemporary
+prophet. He abolishes the usual human distinctions, brings all
+conventionalisms into solution, and loves and celebrates hardly any
+human attributes save those elementary ones common to all members of the
+race. For this he becomes a sort of ideal tramp, a rider on omnibus-tops
+and ferry-boats, and, considered either practically or academically, a
+worthless, unproductive being. His verses are but ejaculations--things
+mostly without subject or verb, a succession of interjections on an
+immense scale. He felt the human crowd as rapturously as Wordsworth felt
+the mountains, felt it as an overpoweringly significant presence, simply
+to absorb one's mind in which should be business sufficient and worthy
+to fill the days of a serious man. As he crosses Brooklyn ferry, this is
+what he feels:--
+
+  Flood-tide below me! I watch you, face to face;
+  Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see
+    you also face to face.
+  Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes!
+    how curious you are to me!
+  On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross,
+    returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose;
+  And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence,
+    are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you
+    might suppose.
+  Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from
+    shore to shore;
+  Others will watch the run of the flood-tide;
+  Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west,
+    and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east;
+  Others will see the islands large and small;
+  Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the
+    sun half an hour high.
+  A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years
+    hence, others will see them,
+  Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the flood-tide, the
+    falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide.
+  It avails not, neither time or place--distance avails not.
+  Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I
+    felt;
+  Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a
+    crowd;
+  Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and
+    the bright flow, I was refresh'd;
+  Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the
+    swift current, I stood, yet was hurried;
+  Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the
+    thick-stemmed pipes of steamboats, I looked.
+  I too many and many a time cross'd the river, the sun half
+    an hour high;
+  I watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls--I saw them high in
+    the air, with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies,
+  I saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies,
+    and left the rest in strong shadow,
+  I saw the slow-wheeling circles, and the gradual edging
+    toward the south.
+  Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops, saw the ships
+    at anchor,
+  The sailors at work in the rigging, or out astride the spars;
+  The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups,
+    the frolicsome crests and glistening;
+  The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray
+    walls of the granite store-houses by the docks;
+  On the neighboring shores, the fires from the foundry chimneys
+    burning high ... into the night,
+  Casting their flicker of black ... into the clefts of streets.
+  These, and all else, were to me the same as they are to you.[J]
+
+    [J] 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry' (abridged).
+
+And so on, through the rest of a divinely beautiful poem. And, if you
+wish to see what this hoary loafer considered the most worthy way of
+profiting by life's heaven-sent opportunities, read the delicious volume
+of his letters to a young car-conductor who had become his friend:--
+
+     "NEW YORK, Oct. 9, 1868.
+
+     "_Dear Pete_,--It is splendid here this forenoon--bright and
+     cool. I was out early taking a short walk by the river only
+     two squares from where I live.... Shall I tell you about [my
+     life] just to fill up? I generally spend the forenoon in my
+     room writing, etc., then take a bath fix up and go out about
+     twelve and loafe somewhere or call on someone down town or on
+     business, or perhaps if it is very pleasant and I feel like
+     it ride a trip with some driver friend on Broadway from 23rd
+     Street to Bowling Green, three miles each way. (Every day I
+     find I have plenty to do, every hour is occupied with
+     something.) You know it is a never ending amusement and study
+     and recreation for me to ride a couple of hours on a pleasant
+     afternoon on a Broadway stage in this way. You see everything
+     as you pass, a sort of living, endless panorama--shops and
+     splendid buildings and great windows: on the broad sidewalks
+     crowds of women richly dressed continually passing,
+     altogether different, superior in style and looks from any to
+     be seen anywhere else--in fact a perfect stream of
+     people--men too dressed in high style, and plenty of
+     foreigners--and then in the streets the thick crowd of
+     carriages, stages, carts, hotel and private coaches, and in
+     fact all sorts of vehicles and many first class teams, mile
+     after mile, and the splendor of such a great street and so
+     many tall, ornamental, noble buildings many of them of white
+     marble, and the gayety and motion on every side: you will not
+     wonder how much attraction all this is on a fine day, to a
+     great loafer like me, who enjoys so much seeing the busy
+     world move by him, and exhibiting itself for his amusement,
+     while he takes it easy and just looks on and observes."[K]
+
+    [K] Calamus, Boston, 1897, pp. 41, 42.
+
+Truly a futile way of passing the time, some of you may say, and not
+altogether creditable to a grown-up man. And yet, from the deepest point
+of view, who knows the more of truth, and who knows the less,--Whitman
+on his omnibus-top, full of the inner joy with which the spectacle
+inspires him, or you, full of the disdain which the futility of his
+occupation excites?
+
+When your ordinary Brooklynite or New Yorker, leading a life replete
+with too much luxury, or tired and careworn about his personal affairs,
+crosses the ferry or goes up Broadway, _his_ fancy does not thus 'soar
+away into the colors of the sunset' as did Whitman's, nor does he
+inwardly realize at all the indisputable fact that this world never did
+anywhere or at any time contain more of essential divinity, or of
+eternal meaning, than is embodied in the fields of vision over which
+his eyes so carelessly pass. There is life; and there, a step away, is
+death. There is the only kind of beauty there ever was. There is the old
+human struggle and its fruits together. There is the text and the
+sermon, the real and the ideal in one. But to the jaded and unquickened
+eye it is all dead and common, pure vulgarism, flatness, and disgust.
+"Hech! it is a sad sight!" says Carlyle, walking at night with some one
+who appeals to him to note the splendor of the stars. And that very
+repetition of the scene to new generations of men in _secula seculorum_,
+that eternal recurrence of the common order, which so fills a Whitman
+with mystic satisfaction, is to a Schopenhauer, with the emotional
+anęsthesia, the feeling of 'awful inner emptiness' from out of which he
+views it all, the chief ingredient of the tedium it instils. What is
+life on the largest scale, he asks, but the same recurrent inanities,
+the same dog barking, the same fly buzzing, forevermore? Yet of the kind
+of fibre of which such inanities consist is the material woven of all
+the excitements, joys, and meanings that ever were, or ever shall be, in
+this world.
+
+To be rapt with satisfied attention, like Whitman, to the mere
+spectacle of the world's presence, is one way, and the most fundamental
+way, of confessing one's sense of its unfathomable significance and
+importance. But how can one attain to the feeling of the vital
+significance of an experience, if one have it not to begin with? There
+is no receipt which one can follow. Being a secret and a mystery, it
+often comes in mysteriously unexpected ways. It blossoms sometimes from
+out of the very grave wherein we imagined that our happiness was buried.
+Benvenuto Cellini, after a life all in the outer sunshine, made of
+adventures and artistic excitements, suddenly finds himself cast into a
+dungeon in the Castle of San Angelo. The place is horrible. Rats and wet
+and mould possess it. His leg is broken and his teeth fall out,
+apparently with scurvy. But his thoughts turn to God as they have never
+turned before. He gets a Bible, which he reads during the one hour in
+the twenty-four in which a wandering ray of daylight penetrates his
+cavern. He has religious visions. He sings psalms to himself, and
+composes hymns. And thinking, on the last day of July, of the
+festivities customary on the morrow in Rome, he says to himself: "All
+these past years I celebrated this holiday with the vanities of the
+world: from this year henceforward I will do it with the divinity of
+God. And then I said to myself, 'Oh, how much more happy I am for this
+present life of mine than for all those things remembered!'"[L]
+
+    [L] Vita, lib. 2, chap. iv.
+
+But the great understander of these mysterious ebbs and flows is
+Tolstoļ. They throb all through his novels. In his 'War and Peace,' the
+hero, Peter, is supposed to be the richest man in the Russian empire.
+During the French invasion he is taken prisoner, and dragged through
+much of the retreat. Cold, vermin, hunger, and every form of misery
+assail him, the result being a revelation to him of the real scale of
+life's values. "Here only, and for the first time, he appreciated,
+because he was deprived of it, the happiness of eating when he was
+hungry, of drinking when he was thirsty, of sleeping when he was sleepy,
+and of talking when he felt the desire to exchange some words.... Later
+in life he always recurred with joy to this month of captivity, and
+never failed to speak with enthusiasm of the powerful and ineffaceable
+sensations, and especially of the moral calm which he had experienced at
+this epoch. When at daybreak, on the morrow of his imprisonment, he saw
+[I abridge here Tolstoļ's description] the mountains with their wooded
+slopes disappearing in the grayish mist; when he felt the cool breeze
+caress him; when he saw the light drive away the vapors, and the sun
+rise majestically behind the clouds and cupolas, and the crosses, the
+dew, the distance, the river, sparkle in the splendid, cheerful
+rays,--his heart overflowed with emotion. This emotion kept continually
+with him, and increased a hundred-fold as the difficulties of his
+situation grew graver.... He learnt that man is meant for happiness, and
+that this happiness is in him, in the satisfaction of the daily needs of
+existence, and that unhappiness is the fatal result, not of our need,
+but of our abundance.... When calm reigned in the camp, and the embers
+paled, and little by little went out, the full moon had reached the
+zenith. The woods and the fields roundabout lay clearly visible; and,
+beyond the inundation of light which filled them, the view plunged into
+the limitless horizon. Then Peter cast his eyes upon the firmament,
+filled at that hour with myriads of stars. 'All that is mine,' he
+thought. 'All that is in me, is me! And that is what they think they
+have taken prisoner! That is what they have shut up in a cabin!' So he
+smiled, and turned in to sleep among his comrades."[M]
+
+    [M] La Guerre et la Paix, Paris, 1884, vol. iii. pp. 268, 275, 316.
+
+The occasion and the experience, then, are nothing. It all depends on
+the capacity of the soul to be grasped, to have its life-currents
+absorbed by what is given. "Crossing a bare common," says Emerson, "in
+snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my
+thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a
+perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear."
+
+Life is always worth living, if one have such responsive sensibilities.
+But we of the highly educated classes (so called) have most of us got
+far, far away from Nature. We are trained to seek the choice, the rare,
+the exquisite exclusively, and to overlook the common. We are stuffed
+with abstract conceptions, and glib with verbalities and verbosities;
+and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy
+connected with our simpler functions often dry up, and we grow
+stone-blind and insensible to life's more elementary and general goods
+and joys.
+
+The remedy under such conditions is to descend to a more profound and
+primitive level. To be imprisoned or shipwrecked or forced into the
+army would permanently show the good of life to many an over-educated
+pessimist. Living in the open air and on the ground, the lop-sided
+beam of the balance slowly rises to the level line; and the
+over-sensibilities and insensibilities even themselves out. The good
+of all the artificial schemes and fevers fades and pales; and that of
+seeing, smelling, tasting, sleeping, and daring and doing with one's
+body, grows and grows. The savages and children of nature, to whom we
+deem ourselves so much superior, certainly are alive where we are often
+dead, along these lines; and, could they write as glibly as we do, they
+would read us impressive lectures on our impatience for improvement and
+on our blindness to the fundamental static goods of life. "Ah! my
+brother," said a chieftain to his white guest, "thou wilt never know the
+happiness of both thinking of nothing and doing nothing. This, next to
+sleep, is the most enchanting of all things. Thus we were before our
+birth, and thus we shall be after death. Thy people,... when they have
+finished reaping one field, they begin to plough another; and, if the
+day were not enough, I have seen them plough by moonlight. What is their
+life to ours,--the life that is as naught to them? Blind that they are,
+they lose it all! But we live in the present."[N]
+
+    [N] Quoted by Lotze, Microcosmus, English translation, vol. ii.
+    p. 240.
+
+The intense interest that life can assume when brought down to the
+non-thinking level, the level of pure sensorial perception, has been
+beautifully described by a man who _can_ write,--Mr. W.H. Hudson, in his
+volume, "Idle Days in Patagonia."
+
+"I spent the greater part of one winter," says this admirable author,
+"at a point on the Rio Negro, seventy or eighty miles from the sea."
+
+... "It was my custom to go out every morning on horseback with my gun,
+and, followed by one dog, to ride away from the valley; and no sooner
+would I climb the terrace, and plunge into the gray, universal thicket,
+than I would find myself as completely alone as if five hundred instead
+of only five miles separated me from the valley and river. So wild and
+solitary and remote seemed that gray waste, stretching away into
+infinitude, a waste untrodden by man, and where the wild animals are so
+few that they have made no discoverable path in the wilderness of
+thorns.... Not once nor twice nor thrice, but day after day I returned
+to this solitude, going to it in the morning as if to attend a festival,
+and leaving it only when hunger and thirst and the westering sun
+compelled me. And yet I had no object in going,--no motive which could
+be put into words; for, although I carried a gun, there was nothing to
+shoot,--the shooting was all left behind in the valley.... Sometimes I
+would pass a whole day without seeing one mammal, and perhaps not more
+than a dozen birds of any size. The weather at that time was cheerless,
+generally with a gray film of cloud spread over the sky, and a bleak
+wind, often cold enough to make my bridle-hand quite numb.... At a slow
+pace, which would have seemed intolerable under other circumstances, I
+would ride about for hours together at a stretch. On arriving at a hill,
+I would slowly ride to its summit, and stand there to survey the
+prospect. On every side it stretched away in great undulations, wild and
+irregular. How gray it all was! Hardly less so near at hand than on the
+haze-wrapped horizon where the hills were dim and the outline obscured
+by distance. Descending from my outlook, I would take up my aimless
+wanderings again, and visit other elevations to gaze on the same
+landscape from another point; and so on for hours. And at noon I would
+dismount, and sit or lie on my folded poncho for an hour or longer. One
+day in these rambles I discovered a small grove composed of twenty or
+thirty trees, growing at a convenient distance apart, that had evidently
+been resorted to by a herd of deer or other wild animals. This grove was
+on a hill differing in shape from other hills in its neighborhood; and,
+after a time, I made a point of finding and using it as a resting-place
+every day at noon. I did not ask myself why I made choice of that one
+spot, sometimes going out of my way to sit there, instead of sitting
+down under any one of the millions of trees and bushes on any other
+hillside. I thought nothing about it, but acted unconsciously. Only
+afterward it seemed to me that, after having rested there once, each
+time I wished to rest again, the wish came associated with the image of
+that particular clump of trees, with polished stems and clean bed of
+sand beneath; and in a short time I formed a habit of returning, animal
+like, to repose at that same spot."
+
+"It was, perhaps, a mistake to say that I would sit down and rest,
+since I was never tired; and yet, without being tired, that noon-day
+pause, during which I sat for an hour without moving, was strangely
+grateful. All day there would be no sound, not even the rustling of a
+leaf. One day, while _listening_ to the silence, it occurred to my mind
+to wonder what the effect would be if I were to shout aloud. This seemed
+at the time a horrible suggestion, which almost made me shudder. But
+during those solitary days it was a rare thing for any thought to cross
+my mind. In the state of mind I was in, thought had become impossible.
+My state was one of _suspense_ and _watchfulness_; yet I had no
+expectation of meeting an adventure, and felt as free from apprehension
+as I feel now while sitting in a room in London. The state seemed
+familiar rather than strange, and accompanied by a strong feeling of
+elation; and I did not know that something had come between me and my
+intellect until I returned to my former self,--to thinking, and the old
+insipid existence [again]."
+
+"I had undoubtedly _gone back_; and that state of intense watchfulness
+or alertness, rather, with suspension of the higher intellectual
+faculties, represented the mental state of the pure savage. He thinks
+little, reasons little, having a surer guide in his [mere sensory
+perceptions]. He is in perfect harmony with nature, and is nearly on a
+level, mentally, with the wild animals he preys on, and which in their
+turn sometimes prey on him."[O]
+
+    [O] _Op. cit._, pp. 210-222 (abridged).
+
+For the spectator, such hours as Mr. Hudson writes of form a mere tale
+of emptiness, in which nothing happens, nothing is gained, and there is
+nothing to describe. They are meaningless and vacant tracts of time. To
+him who feels their inner secret, they tingle with an importance that
+unutterably vouches for itself. I am sorry for the boy or girl, or man
+or woman, who has never been touched by the spell of this mysterious
+sensorial life, with its irrationality, if so you like to call it, but
+its vigilance and its supreme felicity. The holidays of life are its
+most vitally significant portions, because they are, or at least should
+be, covered with just this kind of magically irresponsible spell.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now what is the result of all these considerations and quotations?
+It is negative in one sense, but positive in another. It absolutely
+forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms
+of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate,
+respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy
+in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off:
+neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any
+single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of
+insight from the peculiar position in which he stands. Even prisons and
+sick-rooms have their special revelations. It is enough to ask of each
+of us that he should be faithful to his own opportunities and make the
+most of his own blessings, without presuming to regulate the rest of the
+vast field.
+
+
+
+
+III. WHAT MAKES A LIFE SIGNIFICANT
+
+
+In my previous talk, 'On a Certain Blindness,' I tried to make you feel
+how soaked and shot-through life is with values and meanings which we
+fail to realize because of our external and insensible point of view.
+The meanings are there for the others, but they are not there for us.
+There lies more than a mere interest of curious speculation in
+understanding this. It has the most tremendous practical importance. I
+wish that I could convince you of it as I feel it myself. It is the
+basis of all our tolerance, social, religious, and political. The
+forgetting of it lies at the root of every stupid and sanguinary mistake
+that rulers over subject-peoples make. The first thing to learn in
+intercourse with others is non-interference with their own peculiar ways
+of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by
+violence with ours. No one has insight into all the ideals. No one
+should presume to judge them off-hand. The pretension to dogmatize about
+them in each other is the root of most human injustices and cruelties,
+and the trait in human character most likely to make the angels weep.
+
+Every Jack sees in his own particular Jill charms and perfections to the
+enchantment of which we stolid onlookers are stone-cold. And which has
+the superior view of the absolute truth, he or we? Which has the more
+vital insight into the nature of Jill's existence, as a fact? Is he in
+excess, being in this matter a maniac? or are we in defect, being
+victims of a pathological anęsthesia as regards Jill's magical
+importance? Surely the latter; surely to Jack are the profounder truths
+revealed; surely poor Jill's palpitating little life-throbs _are_ among
+the wonders of creation, _are_ worthy of this sympathetic interest; and
+it is to our shame that the rest of us cannot feel like Jack. For Jack
+realizes Jill concretely, and we do not. He struggles toward a union
+with her inner life, divining her feelings, anticipating her desires,
+understanding her limits as manfully as he can, and yet inadequately,
+too; for he is also afflicted with some blindness, even here. Whilst
+we, dead clods that we are, do not even seek after these things, but are
+contented that that portion of eternal fact named Jill should be for us
+as if it were not. Jill, who knows her inner life, knows that Jack's way
+of taking it--so importantly--is the true and serious way; and she
+responds to the truth in him by taking him truly and seriously, too. May
+the ancient blindness never wrap its clouds about either of them again!
+Where would any of _us_ be, were there no one willing to know us as we
+really are or ready to repay us for _our_ insight by making recognizant
+return? We ought, all of us, to realize each other in this intense,
+pathetic, and important way.
+
+If you say that this is absurd, and that we cannot be in love with
+everyone at once, I merely point out to you that, as a matter of fact,
+certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and
+for taking delight in other people's lives; and that such persons know
+more of truth than if their hearts were not so big. The vice of ordinary
+Jack and Jill affection is not its intensity, but its exclusions and its
+jealousies. Leave those out, and you see that the ideal I am holding up
+before you, however impracticable to-day, yet contains nothing
+intrinsically absurd.
+
+We have unquestionably a great cloud-bank of ancestral blindness
+weighing down upon us, only transiently riven here and there by fitful
+revelations of the truth. It is vain to hope for this state of things to
+alter much. Our inner secrets must remain for the most part impenetrable
+by others, for beings as essentially practical as we are are necessarily
+short of sight. But, if we cannot gain much positive insight into one
+another, cannot we at least use our sense of our own blindness to make
+us more cautious in going over the dark places? Cannot we escape some of
+those hideous ancestral intolerances and cruelties, and positive
+reversals of the truth?
+
+For the remainder of this hour I invite you to seek with me some
+principle to make our tolerance less chaotic. And, as I began my
+previous lecture by a personal reminiscence, I am going to ask your
+indulgence for a similar bit of egotism now.
+
+A few summers ago I spent a happy week at the famous Assembly Grounds on
+the borders of Chautauqua Lake. The moment one treads that sacred
+enclosure, one feels one's self in an atmosphere of success. Sobriety
+and industry, intelligence and goodness, orderliness and ideality,
+prosperity and cheerfulness, pervade the air. It is a serious and
+studious picnic on a gigantic scale. Here you have a town of many
+thousands of inhabitants, beautifully laid out in the forest and
+drained, and equipped with means for satisfying all the necessary lower
+and most of the superfluous higher wants of man. You have a first-class
+college in full blast. You have magnificent music--a chorus of seven
+hundred voices, with possibly the most perfect open-air auditorium in
+the world. You have every sort of athletic exercise from sailing,
+rowing, swimming, bicycling, to the ball-field and the more artificial
+doings which the gymnasium affords. You have kindergartens and model
+secondary schools. You have general religious services and special
+club-houses for the several sects. You have perpetually running
+soda-water fountains, and daily popular lectures by distinguished men.
+You have the best of company, and yet no effort. You have no zymotic
+diseases, no poverty, no drunkenness, no crime, no police. You have
+culture, you have kindness, you have cheapness, you have equality, you
+have the best fruits of what mankind has fought and bled and striven
+for tinder the name of civilization for centuries. You have, in short, a
+foretaste of what human society might be, were it all in the light, with
+no suffering and no dark corners.
+
+I went in curiosity for a day. I stayed for a week, held spell-bound by
+the charm and ease of everything, by the middle-class paradise, without
+a sin, without a victim, without a blot, without a tear.
+
+And yet what was my own astonishment, on emerging into the dark and
+wicked world again, to catch myself quite unexpectedly and involuntarily
+saying: "Ouf! what a relief! Now for something primordial and savage,
+even though it were as bad as an Armenian massacre, to set the balance
+straight again. This order is too tame, this culture too second-rate,
+this goodness too uninspiring. This human drama without a villain or a
+pang; this community so refined that ice-cream soda-water is the utmost
+offering it can make to the brute animal in man; this city simmering in
+the tepid lakeside sun; this atrocious harmlessness of all things,--I
+cannot abide with them. Let me take my chances again in the big outside
+worldly wilderness with all its sins and sufferings. There are the
+heights and depths, the precipices and the steep ideals, the gleams of
+the awful and the infinite; and there is more hope and help a thousand
+times than in this dead level and quintessence of every mediocrity."
+
+Such was the sudden right-about-face performed for me by my lawless
+fancy! There had been spread before me the realization--on a small,
+sample scale of course--of all the ideals for which our civilization has
+been striving: security, intelligence, humanity, and order; and here was
+the instinctive hostile reaction, not of the natural man, but of a
+so-called cultivated man upon such a Utopia. There seemed thus to be a
+self-contradiction and paradox somewhere, which I, as a professor
+drawing a full salary, was in duty bound to unravel and explain, if I
+could.
+
+So I meditated. And, first of all, I asked myself what the thing was
+that was so lacking in this Sabbatical city, and the lack of which kept
+one forever falling short of the higher sort of contentment. And I soon
+recognized that it was the element that gives to the wicked outer world
+all its moral style, expressiveness and picturesqueness,--the element of
+precipitousness, so to call it, of strength and strenuousness, intensity
+and danger.
+
+What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and
+the statues celebrate and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the
+everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with
+heroism, reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory
+from the jaws of death. But in this unspeakable Chautauqua there was no
+potentiality of death in sight anywhere, and no point of the compass
+visible from which danger might possibly appear. The ideal was so
+completely victorious already that no sign of any previous battle
+remained, the place just resting on its oars. But what our human
+emotions seem to require is the sight of the struggle going on. The
+moment the fruits are being merely eaten, things become ignoble. Sweat
+and effort, human nature strained to its uttermost and on the rack, yet
+getting through alive, and then turning its back on its success to
+pursue another more rare and arduous still--this is the sort of thing
+the presence of which inspires us, and the reality of which it seems to
+be the function of all the higher forms of literature and fine art to
+bring home to us and suggest. At Chautauqua there were no racks, even in
+the place's historical museum; and no sweat, except possibly the gentle
+moisture on the brow of some lecturer, or on the sides of some player in
+the ball-field.
+
+Such absence of human nature _in extremis_ anywhere seemed, then, a
+sufficient explanation for Chautauqua's flatness and lack of zest.
+
+But was not this a paradox well calculated to fill one with dismay? It
+looks indeed, thought I, as if the romantic idealists with their
+pessimism about our civilization were, after all, quite right. An
+irremediable flatness is coming over the world. Bourgeoisie and
+mediocrity, church sociables and teachers' conventions, are taking the
+place of the old heights and depths and romantic chiaroscuro. And, to
+get human life in its wild intensity, we must in future turn more and
+more away from the actual, and forget it, if we can, in the romancer's
+or the poet's pages. The whole world, delightful and sinful as it may
+still appear for a moment to one just escaped from the Chautauquan
+enclosure, is nevertheless obeying more and more just those ideals that
+are sure to make of it in the end a mere Chautauqua Assembly on an
+enormous scale. _Was im Gesang soll leben muss im Leben untergehn_. Even
+now, in our own country, correctness, fairness, and compromise for every
+small advantage are crowding out all other qualities. The higher
+heroisms and the old rare flavors are passing out of life.[P]
+
+     [P] This address was composed before the Cuban and Philippine
+     wars. Such outbursts of the passion of mastery are, however,
+     only episodes in a social process which in the long run seems
+     everywhere tending toward the Chautauquan ideals.
+
+With these thoughts in my mind, I was speeding with the train toward
+Buffalo, when, near that city, the sight of a workman doing something on
+the dizzy edge of a sky-scaling iron construction brought me to my
+senses very suddenly. And now I perceived, by a flash of insight, that I
+had been steeping myself in pure ancestral blindness, and looking at
+life with the eyes of a remote spectator. Wishing for heroism and the
+spectacle of human nature on the rack, I had never noticed the great
+fields of heroism lying round about me, I had failed to see it present
+and alive. I could only think of it as dead and embalmed, labelled and
+costumed, as it is in the pages of romance. And yet there it was before
+me in the daily lives of the laboring classes. Not in clanging fights
+and desperate marches only is heroism to be looked for, but on every
+railway bridge and fire-proof building that is going up to-day. On
+freight-trains, on the decks of vessels, in cattle-yards and mines, on
+lumber-rafts, among the firemen and the policemen, the demand for
+courage is incessant; and the supply never fails. There, every day of
+the year somewhere, is human nature _in extremis_ for you. And wherever
+a scythe, an axe, a pick, or a shovel is wielded, you have it sweating
+and aching and with its powers of patient endurance racked to the utmost
+under the length of hours of the strain.
+
+As I awoke to all this unidealized heroic life around me, the scales
+seemed to fall from my eyes; and a wave of sympathy greater than
+anything I had ever before felt with the common life of common men began
+to fill my soul. It began to seem as if virtue with horny hands and
+dirty skin were the only virtue genuine and vital enough to take account
+of. Every other virtue poses; none is absolutely unconscious and simple,
+and unexpectant of decoration or recognition, like this. These are our
+soldiers, thought I, these our sustainers, these the very parents of our
+life.
+
+Many years ago, when in Vienna, I had had a similar feeling of awe and
+reverence in looking at the peasant-women, in from the country on their
+business at the market for the day. Old hags many of them were, dried
+and brown and wrinkled, kerchiefed and short-petticoated, with thick
+wool stockings on their bony shanks, stumping through the glittering
+thoroughfares, looking neither to the right nor the left, bent on duty,
+envying nothing, humble-hearted, remote;--and yet at bottom, when you
+came to think of it, bearing the whole fabric of the splendors and
+corruptions of that city on their laborious backs. For where would any
+of it have been without their unremitting, unrewarded labor in the
+fields? And so with us: not to our generals and poets, I thought, but to
+the Italian and Hungarian laborers in the Subway, rather, ought the
+monuments of gratitude and reverence of a city like Boston to be reared.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If any of you have been readers of Tolstoļ, you will see that I passed
+into a vein of feeling similar to his, with its abhorrence of all that
+conventionally passes for distinguished, and its exclusive deification
+of the bravery, patience, kindliness, and dumbness of the unconscious
+natural man.
+
+Where now is _our_ Tolstoļ, I said, to bring the truth of all this home
+to our American bosoms, fill us with a better insight, and wean us away
+from that spurious literary romanticism on which our wretched
+culture--as it calls itself--is fed? Divinity lies all about us, and
+culture is too hidebound to even suspect the fact. Could a Howells or a
+Kipling be enlisted in this mission? or are they still too deep in the
+ancestral blindness, and not humane enough for the inner joy and meaning
+of the laborer's existence to be really revealed? Must we wait for some
+one born and bred and living as a laborer himself, but who, by grace of
+Heaven, shall also find a literary voice?
+
+And there I rested on that day, with a sense of widening of vision, and
+with what it is surely fair to call an increase of religious insight
+into life. In God's eyes the differences of social position, of
+intellect, of culture, of cleanliness, of dress, which different men
+exhibit, and all the other rarities and exceptions on which they so
+fantastically pin their pride, must be so small as practically quite to
+vanish; and all that should remain is the common fact that here we are,
+a countless multitude of vessels of life, each of us pent in to peculiar
+difficulties, with which we must severally struggle by using whatever of
+fortitude and goodness we can summon up. The exercise of the courage,
+patience, and kindness, must be the significant portion of the whole
+business; and the distinctions of position can only be a manner of
+diversifying the phenomenal surface upon which these underground virtues
+may manifest their effects. At this rate, the deepest human life is
+everywhere, is eternal. And, if any human attributes exist only in
+particular individuals, they must belong to the mere trapping and
+decoration of the surface-show.
+
+Thus are men's lives levelled up as well as levelled down,--levelled up
+in their common inner meaning, levelled down in their outer gloriousness
+and show. Yet always, we must confess, this levelling insight tends to
+be obscured again; and always the ancestral blindness returns and wraps
+us up, so that we end once more by thinking that creation can be for no
+other purpose than to develop remarkable situations and conventional
+distinctions and merits. And then always some new leveller in the shape
+of a religious prophet has to arise--the Buddha, the Christ, or some
+Saint Francis, some Rousseau or Tolstoļ--to redispel our blindness. Yet,
+little by little, there comes some stable gain; for the world does get
+more humane, and the religion of democracy tends toward permanent
+increase.
+
+This, as I said, became for a time my conviction, and gave me great
+content. I have put the matter into the form of a personal reminiscence,
+so that I might lead you into it more directly and completely, and so
+save time. But now I am going to discuss the rest of it with you in a
+more impersonal way.
+
+Tolstoļ's levelling philosophy began long before he had the crisis of
+melancholy commemorated in that wonderful document of his entitled 'My
+Confession,' which led the way to his more specifically religious works.
+In his masterpiece 'War and Peace,'--assuredly the greatest of human
+novels,--the rōle of the spiritual hero is given to a poor little
+soldier named Karataļeff, so helpful, so cheerful, and so devout that,
+in spite of his ignorance and filthiness, the sight of him opens the
+heavens, which have been closed, to the mind of the principal character
+of the book; and his example evidently is meant by Tolstoļ to let God
+into the world again for the reader. Poor little Karataļeff is taken
+prisoner by the French; and, when too exhausted by hardship and fever to
+march, is shot as other prisoners were in the famous retreat from
+Moscow. The last view one gets of him is his little figure leaning
+against a white birch-tree, and uncomplainingly awaiting the end.
+
+"The more," writes Tolstoļ in the work 'My Confession,' "the more I
+examined the life of these laboring folks, the more persuaded I became
+that they veritably have faith, and get from it alone the sense and the
+possibility of life.... Contrariwise to those of our own class, who
+protest against destiny and grow indignant at its rigor, these people
+receive maladies and misfortunes without revolt, without opposition, and
+with a firm and tranquil confidence that all had to be like that, could
+not be otherwise, and that it is all right so.... The more we live by
+our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life. We see only a
+cruel jest in suffering and death, whereas these people live, suffer,
+and draw near to death with tranquillity, and oftener than not with
+joy.... There are enormous multitudes of them happy with the most
+perfect happiness, although deprived of what for us is the sole good of
+life. Those who understand life's meaning, and know how to live and die
+thus, are to be counted not by twos, threes, tens, but by hundreds,
+thousands, millions. They labor quietly, endure privations and pains,
+live and die, and throughout everything see the good without seeing the
+vanity. I had to love these people. The more I entered into their life,
+the more I loved them; and the more it became possible for me to live,
+too. It came about not only that the life of our society, of the learned
+and of the rich, disgusted me--more than that, it lost all semblance of
+meaning in my eyes. All our actions, our deliberations, our sciences,
+our arts, all appeared to me with a new significance. I understood that
+these things might be charming pastimes, but that one need seek in them
+no depth, whereas the life of the hard-working populace, of that
+multitude of human beings who really contribute to existence, appeared
+to me in its true light. I understood that there veritably is life, that
+the meaning which life there receives is the truth; and I accepted
+it."[Q]
+
+    [Q] My Confession, X. (condensed).
+
+In a similar way does Stevenson appeal to our piety toward the elemental
+virtue of mankind.
+
+"What a wonderful thing," he writes,[R] "is this Man! How surprising are
+his attributes! Poor soul, here for so little, cast among so many
+hardships, savagely surrounded, savagely descended, irremediably
+condemned to prey upon his fellow-lives,--who should have blamed him,
+had he been of a piece with his destiny and a being merely barbarous?
+... [Yet] it matters not where we look, under what climate we observe
+him, in what stage of society, in what depth of ignorance, burdened with
+what erroneous morality; in ships at sea, a man inured to hardship and
+vile pleasures, his brightest hope a fiddle in a tavern, and a bedizened
+trull who sells herself to rob him, and he, for all that, simple,
+innocent, cheerful, kindly like a child, constant to toil, brave to
+drown, for others;... in the slums of cities, moving among indifferent
+millions to mechanical employments, without hope of change in the
+future, with scarce a pleasure in the present, and yet true to his
+virtues, honest up to his lights, kind to his neighbors, tempted perhaps
+in vain by the bright gin-palace,... often repaying the world's scorn
+with service, often standing firm upon a scruple;... everywhere some
+virtue cherished or affected, everywhere some decency of thought and
+courage, everywhere the ensign of man's ineffectual goodness,--ah! if I
+could show you this! If I could show you these men and women all the
+world over, in every stage of history, under every abuse of error, under
+every circumstance of failure, without hope, without help, without
+thanks, still obscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still
+clinging to some rag of honor, the poor jewel of their souls."
+
+    [R] Across the Plains: "Pulvis et Umbra" (abridged).
+
+All this is as true as it is splendid, and terribly do we need our
+Tolstoļs and Stevensons to keep our sense for it alive. Yet you remember
+the Irishman who, when asked, "Is not one man as good as another?"
+replied, "Yes; and a great deal better, too!" Similarly (it seems to me)
+does Tolstoļ overcorrect our social prejudices, when he makes his love
+of the peasant so exclusive, and hardens his heart toward the educated
+man as absolutely as he does. Grant that at Chautauqua there was little
+moral effort, little sweat or muscular strain in view. Still, deep down
+in the souls of the participants we may be sure that something of the
+sort was hid, some inner stress, some vital virtue not found wanting
+when required. And, after all, the question recurs, and forces itself
+upon us, Is it so certain that the surroundings and circumstances of the
+virtue do make so little difference in the importance of the result? Is
+the functional utility, the worth to the universe of a certain definite
+amount of courage, kindliness, and patience, no greater if the
+possessor of these virtues is in an educated situation, working out
+far-reaching tasks, than if he be an illiterate nobody, hewing wood and
+drawing water, just to keep himself alive? Tolstoļ's philosophy, deeply
+enlightening though it certainly is, remains a false abstraction. It
+savors too much of that Oriental pessimism and nihilism of his, which
+declares the whole phenomenal world and its facts and their distinctions
+to be a cunning fraud.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A mere bare fraud is just what our Western common sense will never
+believe the phenomenal world to be. It admits fully that the inner joys
+and virtues are the _essential_ part of life's business, but it is sure
+that _some_ positive part is also played by the adjuncts of the show. If
+it is idiotic in romanticism to recognize the heroic only when it sees
+it labelled and dressed-up in books, it is really just as idiotic to see
+it only in the dirty boots and sweaty shirt of some one in the fields.
+It is with us really under every disguise: at Chautauqua; here in your
+college; in the stock-yards and on the freight-trains; and in the czar
+of Russia's court. But, instinctively, we make a combination of two
+things in judging the total significance of a human being. We feel it
+to be some sort of a product (if such a product only could be
+calculated) of his inner virtue _and_ his outer place,--neither singly
+taken, but both conjoined. If the outer differences had no meaning for
+life, why indeed should all this immense variety of them exist? They
+_must_ be significant elements of the world as well.
+
+Just test Tolstoļ's deification of the mere manual laborer by the facts.
+This is what Mr. Walter Wyckoff, after working as an unskilled laborer
+in the demolition of some buildings at West Point, writes of the
+spiritual condition of the class of men to which he temporarily chose to
+belong:--
+
+"The salient features of our condition are plain enough. We are grown
+men, and are without a trade. In the labor-market we stand ready to sell
+to the highest bidder our mere muscular strength for so many hours each
+day. We are thus in the lowest grade of labor. And, selling our muscular
+strength in the open market for what it will bring, we sell it under
+peculiar conditions. It is all the capital that we have. We have no
+reserve means of subsistence, and cannot, therefore, stand off for a
+'reserve price.' We sell under the necessity of satisfying imminent
+hunger. Broadly speaking, we must sell our labor or starve; and, as
+hunger is a matter of a few hours, and we have no other way of meeting
+this need, we must sell at once for what the market offers for our
+labor.
+
+"Our employer is buying labor in a dear market, and he will certainly
+get from us as much work as he can at the price. The gang-boss is
+secured for this purpose, and thoroughly does he know his business. He
+has sole command of us. He never saw us before, and he will discharge us
+all when the débris is cleared away. In the mean time he must get from
+us, if he can, the utmost of physical labor which we, individually and
+collectively, are capable of. If he should drive some of us to
+exhaustion, and we should not be able to continue at work, he would not
+be the loser; for the market would soon supply him with others to take
+our places.
+
+"We are ignorant men, but so much we clearly see,--that we have sold our
+labor where we could sell it dearest, and our employer has bought it
+where he could buy it cheapest. He has paid high, and he must get all
+the labor that he can; and, by a strong instinct which possesses us, we
+shall part with as little as we can. From work like ours there seems to
+us to have been eliminated every element which constitutes the nobility
+of labor. We feel no personal pride in its progress, and no community of
+interest with our employer. There is none of the joy of responsibility,
+none of the sense of achievement, only the dull monotony of grinding
+toil, with the longing for the signal to quit work, and for our wages at
+the end.
+
+"And being what we are, the dregs of the labor-market, and having no
+certainty of permanent employment, and no organization among ourselves,
+we must expect to work under the watchful eye of a gang-boss, and be
+driven, like the wage-slaves that we are, through our tasks.
+
+"All this is to tell us, in effect, that our lives are hard, barren,
+hopeless lives."
+
+And such hard, barren, hopeless lives, surely, are not lives in which
+one ought to be willing permanently to remain. And why is this so? Is it
+because they are so dirty? Well, Nansen grew a great deal dirtier on his
+polar expedition; and we think none the worse of his life for that. Is
+it the insensibility? Our soldiers have to grow vastly more insensible,
+and we extol them to the skies. Is it the poverty? Poverty has been
+reckoned the crowning beauty of many a heroic career. Is it the slavery
+to a task, the loss of finer pleasures?
+
+Such slavery and loss are of the very essence of the higher fortitude,
+and are always counted to its credit,--read the records of missionary
+devotion all over the world. It is not any one of these things, then,
+taken by itself,--no, nor all of them together,--that make such a life
+undesirable. A man might in truth live like an unskilled laborer, and do
+the work of one, and yet count as one of the noblest of God's creatures.
+Quite possibly there were some such persons in the gang that our author
+describes; but the current of their souls ran underground; and he was
+too steeped in the ancestral blindness to discern it.
+
+If there _were_ any such morally exceptional individuals, however, what
+made them different from the rest? It can only have been this,--that
+their souls worked and endured in obedience to some inner _ideal_, while
+their comrades were not actuated by anything worthy of that name. These
+ideals of other lives are among those secrets that we can almost never
+penetrate, although something about the man may often tell us when they
+are there. In Mr. Wyckoff's own case we know exactly what the
+self-imposed ideal was. Partly he had stumped himself, as the boys say,
+to carry through a strenuous achievement; but mainly he wished to
+enlarge his sympathetic insight into fellow-lives. For this his sweat
+and toil acquire a certain heroic significance, and make us accord to
+him exceptional esteem. But it is easy to imagine his fellows with
+various other ideals. To say nothing of wives and babies, one may have
+been a convert of the Salvation Army, and had a nightingale singing of
+expiation and forgiveness in his heart all the while he labored. Or
+there might have been an apostle like Tolstoļ himself, or his compatriot
+Bondareff, in the gang, voluntarily embracing labor as their religious
+mission. Class-loyalty was undoubtedly an ideal with many. And who knows
+how much of that higher manliness of poverty, of which Phillips Brooks
+has spoken so penetratingly, was or was not present in that gang?
+
+"A rugged, barren land," says Phillips Brooks, "is poverty to live
+in,--a land where I am thankful very often if I can get a berry or a
+root to eat. But living in it really, letting it bear witness to me of
+itself, not dishonoring it all the time by judging it after the standard
+of the other lands, gradually there come out its qualities. Behold! no
+land like this barren and naked land of poverty could show the moral
+geology of the world. See how the hard ribs ... stand out strong and
+solid. No life like poverty could so get one to the heart of things and
+make men know their meaning, could so let us feel life and the world
+with all the soft cushions stripped off and thrown away.... Poverty
+makes men come very near each other, and recognize each other's human
+hearts; and poverty, highest and best of all, demands and cries out for
+faith in God.... I know how superficial and unfeeling, how like mere
+mockery, words in praise of poverty may seem.... But I am sure that the
+poor man's dignity and freedom, his self-respect and energy, depend upon
+his cordial knowledge that his poverty is a true region and kind of
+life, with its own chances of character, its own springs of happiness
+and revelations of God. Let him resist the characterlessness which often
+goes with being poor. Let him insist on respecting the condition where
+he lives. Let him learn to love it, so that by and by, [if] he grows
+rich, he shall go out of the low door of the old familiar poverty with a
+true pang of regret, and with a true honor for the narrow home in which
+he has lived so long."[S]
+
+    [S] Sermons. 5th Series, New York, 1893, pp. 166, 167.
+
+The barrenness and ignobleness of the more usual laborer's life consist
+in the fact that it is moved by no such ideal inner springs. The
+backache, the long hours, the danger, are patiently endured--for what?
+To gain a quid of tobacco, a glass of beer, a cup of coffee, a meal, and
+a bed, and to begin again the next day and shirk as much as one can.
+This really is why we raise no monument to the laborers in the Subway,
+even though they be our conscripts, and even though after a fashion our
+city is indeed based upon their patient hearts and enduring backs and
+shoulders. And this is why we do raise monuments to our soldiers, whose
+outward conditions were even brutaller still. The soldiers are supposed
+to have followed an ideal, and the laborers are supposed to have
+followed none.
+
+You see, my friends, how the plot now thickens; and how strangely the
+complexities of this wonderful human nature of ours begin to develop
+under our hands. We have seen the blindness and deadness to each other
+which are our natural inheritance; and, in spite of them, we have been
+led to acknowledge an inner meaning which passeth show, and which may be
+present in the lives of others where we least descry it. And now we are
+led to say that such inner meaning can be _complete_ and _valid for us
+also_, only when the inner joy, courage, and endurance are joined with
+an ideal.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But what, exactly, do we mean by an ideal? Can we give no definite
+account of such a word?
+
+To a certain extent we can. An ideal, for instance, must be something
+intellectually conceived, something of which we are not unconscious, if
+we have it; and it must carry with it that sort of outlook, uplift, and
+brightness that go with all intellectual facts. Secondly, there must be
+_novelty_ in an ideal,--novelty at least for him whom the ideal grasps.
+Sodden routine is incompatible with ideality, although what is sodden
+routine for one person may be ideal novelty for another. This shows that
+there is nothing absolutely ideal: ideals are relative to the lives that
+entertain them. To keep out of the gutter is for us here no part of
+consciousness at all, yet for many of our brethren it is the most
+legitimately engrossing of ideals.
+
+Now, taken nakedly, abstractly, and immediately, you see that mere
+ideals are the cheapest things in life. Everybody has them in some shape
+or other, personal or general, sound or mistaken, low or high; and the
+most worthless sentimentalists and dreamers, drunkards, shirks and
+verse-makers, who never show a grain of effort, courage, or endurance,
+possibly have them on the most copious scale. Education, enlarging as it
+does our horizon and perspective, is a means of multiplying our ideals,
+of bringing new ones into view. And your college professor, with a
+starched shirt and spectacles, would, if a stock of ideals were all
+alone by itself enough to render a life significant, be the most
+absolutely and deeply significant of men. Tolstoļ would be completely
+blind in despising him for a prig, a pedant and a parody; and all our
+new insight into the divinity of muscular labor would be altogether off
+the track of truth.
+
+But such consequences as this, you instinctively feel, are erroneous.
+The more ideals a man has, the more contemptible, on the whole, do you
+continue to deem him, if the matter ends there for him, and if none of
+the laboring man's virtues are called into action on his part,--no
+courage shown, no privations undergone, no dirt or scars contracted in
+the attempt to get them realized. It is quite obvious that something
+more than the mere possession of ideals is required to make a life
+significant in any sense that claims the spectator's admiration. Inner
+joy, to be sure, it may _have_, with its ideals; but that is its own
+private sentimental matter. To extort from us, outsiders as we are, with
+our own ideals to look after, the tribute of our grudging recognition,
+it must back its ideal visions with what the laborers have, the sterner
+stuff of manly virtue; it must multiply their sentimental surface by the
+dimension of the active will, if we are to have _depth_, if we are to
+have anything cubical and solid in the way of character.
+
+The significance of a human life for communicable and publicly
+recognizable purposes is thus the offspring of a marriage of two
+different parents, either of whom alone is barren. The ideals taken by
+themselves give no reality, the virtues by themselves no novelty. And
+let the orientalists and pessimists say what they will, the thing of
+deepest--or, at any rate, of comparatively deepest--significance in life
+does seem to be its character of _progress_, or that strange union of
+reality with ideal novelty which it continues from one moment to another
+to present. To recognize ideal novelty is the task of what we call
+intelligence. Not every one's intelligence can tell which novelties are
+ideal. For many the ideal thing will always seem to cling still to the
+older more familiar good. In this case character, though not
+significant totally, may be still significant pathetically. So, if we
+are to choose which is the more essential factor of human character, the
+fighting virtue or the intellectual breadth, we must side with Tolstoļ,
+and choose that simple faithfulness to his light or darkness which any
+common unintellectual man can show.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But, with all this beating and tacking on my part, I fear you take me to
+be reaching a confused result. I seem to be just taking things up and
+dropping them again. First I took up Chautauqua, and dropped that; then
+Tolstoļ and the heroism of common toil, and dropped them; finally, I
+took up ideals, and seem now almost dropping those. But please observe
+in what sense it is that I drop them. It is when they pretend _singly_
+to redeem life from insignificance. Culture and refinement all alone are
+not enough to do so. Ideal aspirations are not enough, when uncombined
+with pluck and will. But neither are pluck and will, dogged endurance
+and insensibility to danger enough, when taken all alone. There must be
+some sort of fusion, some chemical combination among these principles,
+for a life objectively and thoroughly significant to result.
+
+Of course, this is a somewhat vague conclusion. But in a question of
+significance, of worth, like this, conclusions can never be precise. The
+answer of appreciation, of sentiment, is always a more or a less, a
+balance struck by sympathy, insight, and good will. But it is an answer,
+all the same, a real conclusion. And, in the course of getting it, it
+seems to me that our eyes have been opened to many important things.
+Some of you are, perhaps, more livingly aware than you were an hour ago
+of the depths of worth that lie around you, hid in alien lives. And,
+when you ask how much sympathy you ought to bestow, although the amount
+is, truly enough, a matter of ideal on your own part, yet in this notion
+of the combination of ideals with active virtues you have a rough
+standard for shaping your decision. In any case, your imagination is
+extended. You divine in the world about you matter for a little more
+humility on your own part, and tolerance, reverence, and love for
+others; and you gain a certain inner joyfulness at the increased
+importance of our common life. Such joyfulness is a religious
+inspiration and an element of spiritual health, and worth more than
+large amounts of that sort of technical and accurate information which
+we professors are supposed to be able to impart.
+
+To show the sort of thing I mean by these words, I will just make one
+brief practical illustration and then close.
+
+We are suffering to-day in America from what is called the
+labor-question; and, when you go out into the world, you will each and
+all of you be caught up in its perplexities. I use the brief term
+labor-question to cover all sorts of anarchistic discontents and
+socialistic projects, and the conservative resistances which they
+provoke. So far as this conflict is unhealthy and regrettable,--and I
+think it is so only to a limited extent,--the unhealthiness consists
+solely in the fact that one-half of our fellow-countrymen remain
+entirely blind to the internal significance of the lives of the other
+half. They miss the joys and sorrows, they fail to feel the moral
+virtue, and they do not guess the presence of the intellectual ideals.
+They are at cross-purposes all along the line, regarding each other as
+they might regard a set of dangerously gesticulating automata, or, if
+they seek to get at the inner motivation, making the most horrible
+mistakes. Often all that the poor man can think of in the rich man is a
+cowardly greediness for safety, luxury, and effeminacy, and a boundless
+affectation. What he is, is not a human being, but a pocket-book, a
+bank-account. And a similar greediness, turned by disappointment into
+envy, is all that many rich men can see in the state of mind of the
+dissatisfied poor. And, if the rich man begins to do the sentimental act
+over the poor man, what senseless blunders does he make, pitying him for
+just those very duties and those very immunities which, rightly taken,
+are the condition of his most abiding and characteristic joys! Each, in
+short, ignores the fact that happiness and unhappiness and significance
+are a vital mystery; each pins them absolutely on some ridiculous
+feature of the external situation; and everybody remains outside of
+everybody else's sight.
+
+Society has, with all this, undoubtedly got to pass toward some newer
+and better equilibrium, and the distribution of wealth has doubtless
+slowly got to change: such changes have always happened, and will happen
+to the end of time. But if, after all that I have said, any of you
+expect that they will make any _genuine vital difference_ on a large
+scale, to the lives of our descendants, you will have missed the
+significance of my entire lecture. The solid meaning of life is always
+the same eternal thing,--the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal,
+however special, with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some
+man's or woman's pains.--And, whatever or wherever life may be, there
+will always be the chance for that marriage to take place.
+
+Fitz-James Stephen wrote many years ago words to this effect more
+eloquent than any I can speak: "The 'Great Eastern,' or some of her
+successors," he said, "will perhaps defy the roll of the Atlantic, and
+cross the seas without allowing their passengers to feel that they have
+left the firm land. The voyage from the cradle to the grave may come to
+be performed with similar facility. Progress and science may perhaps
+enable untold millions to live and die without a care, without a pang,
+without an anxiety. They will have a pleasant passage and plenty of
+brilliant conversation. They will wonder that men ever believed at all
+in clanging fights and blazing towns and sinking ships and praying
+hands; and, when they come to the end of their course, they will go
+their way, and the place thereof will know them no more. But it seems
+unlikely that they will have such a knowledge of the great ocean on
+which they sail, with its storms and wrecks, its currents and icebergs,
+its huge waves and mighty winds, as those who battled with it for years
+together in the little craft, which, if they had few other merits,
+brought those who navigated them full into the presence of time and
+eternity, their maker and themselves, and forced them to have some
+definite view of their relations to them and to each other."[T]
+
+    [T] Essays by a Barrister, London, 1862, p. 318.
+
+In this solid and tridimensional sense, so to call it, those
+philosophers are right who contend that the world is a standing thing,
+with no progress, no real history. The changing conditions of history
+touch only the surface of the show. The altered equilibriums and
+redistributions only diversify our opportunities and open chances to us
+for new ideals. But, with each new ideal that comes into life, the
+chance for a life based on some old ideal will vanish; and he would
+needs be a presumptuous calculator who should with confidence say that
+the total sum of significances is positively and absolutely greater at
+any one epoch than at any other of the world.
+
+I am speaking broadly, I know, and omitting to consider certain
+qualifications in which I myself believe. But one can only make one
+point in one lecture, and I shall be well content if I have brought my
+point home to you this evening in even a slight degree. _There are
+compensations_: and no outward changes of condition in life can keep the
+nightingale of its eternal meaning from singing in all sorts of
+different men's hearts. That is the main fact to remember. If we could
+not only admit it with our lips, but really and truly believe it, how
+our convulsive insistencies, how our antipathies and dreads of each
+other, would soften down! If the poor and the rich could look at each
+other in this way, _sub specie ęternatis_, how gentle would grow their
+disputes! what tolerance and good humor, what willingness to live and
+let live, would come into the world!
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And
+To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals, by William James
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TALKS TO TEACHERS ***
+
+***** This file should be named 16287-8.txt or 16287-8.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/1/6/2/8/16287/
+
+Produced by David Newman, Dave Macfarlane and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/16287-8.zip b/16287-8.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..c7ab43c
--- /dev/null
+++ b/16287-8.zip
diff --git a/16287-h.zip b/16287-h.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..70eabc3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/16287-h.zip
diff --git a/16287-h/16287-h.htm b/16287-h/16287-h.htm
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4a73e17
--- /dev/null
+++ b/16287-h/16287-h.htm
@@ -0,0 +1,7291 @@
+<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
+    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
+<head>
+<meta name="generator" content="HTML Tidy, see www.w3.org" />
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
+content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Talks To Teachers, by William
+James.</title>
+<style type="text/css">
+/*<![CDATA[  XML blockout */
+<!--
+    p {  margin-top: .75em;
+         text-align: justify;
+         margin-bottom: .75em;
+         }
+    h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 {
+         text-align: center; /* all headings centered */
+         clear: both;
+         }
+    hr { width: 33%;
+     margin-top: 2em;
+     margin-bottom: 2em;
+         margin-left: auto;
+         margin-right: auto;
+         clear: both;
+       }
+
+    table {margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;}
+
+    body{margin-left: 10%;
+         margin-right: 10%;
+        }
+
+    .linenum  {position: absolute; top: auto; left: 4%;} /* poetry number */
+    .blockquot{margin-left: 5%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .pagenum  {position: absolute; left: 92%; font-size: smaller; text-align: right;} /* page numbers */
+
+    .center   {text-align: center;}
+    .smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
+
+    .figcenter   {margin: auto; text-align: center;}
+
+    .figleft     {float: left; clear: left; margin-left: 0; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-top:
+                 1em; margin-right: 1em; padding: 0; text-align: center;}
+
+    .figright    {float: right; clear: right; margin-left: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em;
+                 margin-top: 1em; margin-right: 0; padding: 0; text-align: center;}
+
+    .footnotes        {border: dashed 1px;}
+    .footnote         {margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-size: 0.9em;}
+    .footnote .label  {position: absolute; right: 84%; text-align: right;}
+    .fnanchor         {vertical-align: super; font-size: .8em; text-decoration: none;}
+
+    .poem             {margin-left:10%; margin-right:10%; text-align: left;}
+    .poem br          {display: none;}
+    .poem .stanza     {margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;}
+    .poem span        {display: block; margin: 0; padding-left: 3em; text-indent: -3em;}
+    .poem span.i2     {display: block; margin-left: 2em;}
+    .poem span.i4     {display: block; margin-left: 4em;}
+    // -->
+    /* XML end  ]]>*/
+
+</style>
+</head>
+<body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To
+Students On Some Of Life's Ideals, by William James
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals
+
+Author: William James
+
+Release Date: July 13, 2005 [EBook #16287]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TALKS TO TEACHERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Newman, Dave Macfarlane and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+<h1>TALKS TO TEACHERS</h1>
+
+<h2>ON PSYCHOLOGY:</h2>
+
+<h2>AND TO STUDENTS ON SOME OF LIFE'S IDEALS,</h2>
+
+<h2>By WILLIAM JAMES</h2>
+
+<h4>NEW YORK<br />
+HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY<br />
+1925</h4>
+
+<h5>COPYRIGHT, 1899, 1900</h5>
+
+<h5>BY WILLIAM JAMES</h5>
+
+<h5>PRESS OF GEO. H. ELLIS CO. (INC.) BOSTON</h5>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+
+
+<h2>PREFACE.</h2>
+
+<p>In 1892 I was asked by the Harvard Corporation to give a few
+public lectures on psychology to the Cambridge teachers. The talks
+now printed form the substance of that course, which has since then
+been delivered at various places to various teacher-audiences. I
+have found by experience that what my hearers seem least to relish
+is analytical technicality, and what they most care for is concrete
+practical application. So I have gradually weeded out the former,
+and left the latter unreduced; and now, that I have at last written
+out the lectures, they contain a minimum of what is deemed
+'scientific' in psychology, and are practical and popular in the
+extreme.</p>
+
+<p>Some of my colleagues may possibly shake their heads at this;
+but in taking my cue from what has seemed to me to be the feeling
+of the audiences I believe that I am shaping my book so as to
+satisfy the more genuine public need.</p>
+
+<p>Teachers, of course, will miss the minute divisions,
+subdivisions, and definitions, the lettered and numbered headings,
+the variations of type, and all the other mechanical artifices on
+which they are accustomed to prop their minds. But my main desire
+has been to make them conceive, and, if possible, reproduce
+sympathetically in their imagination, the mental life of their
+pupil as the sort of active unity which he himself feels it to be.
+<i>He</i> doesn't chop himself into distinct processes and
+compartments; and it would have frustrated this deeper purpose of
+my book to make it look, when printed, like a Baedeker's handbook
+of travel or a text-book of arithmetic. So far as books printed
+like this book force the fluidity of the facts upon the young
+teacher's attention, so far I am sure they tend to do his intellect
+a service, even though they may leave unsatisfied a craving (not
+altogether without its legitimate grounds) for more nomenclature,
+head-lines, and subdivisions.</p>
+
+<p>Readers acquainted with my larger books on Psychology will meet
+much familiar phraseology. In the chapters on habit and memory I
+have even copied several pages verbatim, but I do not know that
+apology is needed for such plagiarism as this.</p>
+
+<p>The talks to students, which conclude the volume, were written
+in response to invitations to deliver 'addresses' to students at
+women's colleges. The first one was to the graduating class of the
+Boston Normal School of Gymnastics. Properly, it continues the
+series of talks to teachers. The second and the third address
+belong together, and continue another line of thought.</p>
+
+<p>I wish I were able to make the second, 'On a Certain Blindness
+in Human Beings,' more impressive. It is more than the mere piece
+of sentimentalism which it may seem to some readers. It connects
+itself with a definite view of the world and of our moral relations
+to the same. Those who have done me the honor of reading my volume
+of philosophic essays will recognize that I mean the pluralistic or
+individualistic philosophy. According to that philosophy, the truth
+is too great for any one actual mind, even though that mind be
+dubbed 'the Absolute,' to know the whole of it. The facts and
+worths of life need many cognizers to take them in. There is no
+point of view absolutely public and universal. Private and
+uncommunicable perceptions always remain over, and the worst of it
+is that those who look for them from the outside never know
+<i>where</i>.</p>
+
+<p>The practical consequence of such a philosophy is the well-known
+democratic respect for the sacredness of individuality,&mdash;is,
+at any rate, the outward tolerance of whatever is not itself
+intolerant. These phrases are so familiar that they sound now
+rather dead in our ears. Once they had a passionate inner meaning.
+Such a passionate inner meaning they may easily acquire again if
+the pretension of our nation to inflict its own inner ideals and
+institutions <i>vi et armis</i> upon Orientals should meet with a
+resistance as obdurate as so far it has been gallant and spirited.
+Religiously and philosophically, our ancient national doctrine of
+live and let live may prove to have a far deeper meaning than our
+people now seem to imagine it to possess.</p>
+
+<small>CAMBRIDGE, MASS., March, 1899.</small> <br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<hr style='width: 65%;' />
+<h2>CONTENTS.</h2>
+
+<hr style='width: 65%;' />
+<a href="#TALKS_TO_TEACHERS"><b>TALKS TO TEACHERS.</b></a> <br />
+<br />
+ <a href="#I__PSYCHOLOGY_AND_THE_TEACHING_ART"><b>I. PSYCHOLOGY AND
+THE TEACHING ART</b></a><br />
+
+
+<p>The American educational organization,&mdash;What teachers may
+expect from psychology,&mdash;Teaching methods must agree with
+psychology, but cannot be immediately deduced therefrom,&mdash;The
+science of teaching and the science of war,&mdash;The educational
+uses of psychology defined,&mdash;The teacher's duty toward
+child-study.</p>
+
+<a href="#II__THE_STREAM_OF_CONSCIOUSNESS"><b>II. THE STREAM OF
+CONSCIOUSNESS</b></a><br />
+
+
+<p>Our mental life is a succession of conscious
+'fields,'&mdash;They have a focus and a margin,&mdash;This
+description contrasted with the theory of 'ideas,'&mdash;Wundt's
+conclusions, note.</p>
+
+<a href="#III__THE_CHILD_AS_A_BEHAVING_ORGANISM"><b>III. THE CHILD
+AS A BEHAVING ORGANISM</b></a><br />
+
+
+<p>Mind as pure reason and mind as practical guide,&mdash;The
+latter view the more fashionable one to-day,&mdash;It will be
+adopted in this work,&mdash;Why so?&mdash;The teacher's function is
+to train pupils to behavior.</p>
+
+<a href="#IV__EDUCATION_AND_BEHAVIOR"><b>IV. EDUCATION AND
+BEHAVIOR</b></a><br />
+
+
+<p>Education defined,&mdash;Conduct is always its
+outcome,&mdash;Different national ideals: Germany and England.</p>
+
+<a href="#V__THE_NECESSITY_OF_REACTIONS"><b>V. THE NECESSITY OF
+REACTIONS</b></a><br />
+
+
+<p>No impression without expression,&mdash;Verbal
+reproduction,&mdash;Manual training,&mdash;Pupils should know their
+'marks'.</p>
+
+<a href="#VI__NATIVE_REACTIONS_AND_ACQUIRED_REACTIONS"><b>VI.
+NATIVE REACTIONS AND ACQUIRED REACTIONS</b></a><br />
+
+
+<p>The acquired reactions must be preceded by native
+ones,&mdash;Illustration: teaching child to ask instead of
+snatching,&mdash;Man has more instincts than other mammals.</p>
+
+<a href="#VII__WHAT_THE_NATIVE_REACTIONS_ARE"><b>VII. WHAT THE
+NATIVE REACTIONS ARE</b></a><br />
+
+
+<p>Fear and
+love,&mdash;Curiosity,&mdash;Imitation,&mdash;Emulation,&mdash;Forbidden
+by Rousseau,&mdash;His error,&mdash;Ambition, pugnacity, and pride.
+Soft pedagogics and the fighting
+impulse,&mdash;Ownership,&mdash;Its educational
+uses,&mdash;Constructiveness,&mdash;Manual
+teaching,&mdash;Transitoriness in instincts,&mdash;Their order of
+succession.</p>
+
+<a href="#VIII__THE_LAWS_OF_HABIT"><b>VIII. THE LAWS OF
+HABIT</b></a><br />
+
+
+<p>Good and bad habits,&mdash;Habit due to plasticity of organic
+tissues,&mdash;The aim of education is to make useful habits
+automatic,&mdash;Maxims relative to habit-forming: 1. Strong
+initiative,&mdash;2. No exception,&mdash;3. Seize first opportunity
+to act,&mdash;4. Don't preach,&mdash;Darwin and poetry: without
+exercise our capacities decay,&mdash;The habit of mental and
+muscular relaxation,&mdash;Fifth maxim, keep the faculty of effort
+trained,&mdash;Sudden conversions compatible with laws of
+habit,&mdash;Momentous influence of habits on character.</p>
+
+<a href="#IX__THE_ASSOCIATION_OF_IDEAS"><b>IX. THE ASSOCIATION OF
+IDEAS</b></a><br />
+
+
+<p>A case of habit,&mdash;The two laws, contiguity and
+similarity,&mdash;The teacher has to build up useful systems of
+association,&mdash;Habitual associations determine
+character,&mdash;Indeterminateness of our trains of
+association,&mdash;We can trace them backward, but not foretell
+them,&mdash;Interest deflects,&mdash;Prepotent parts of the
+field,&mdash;In teaching, multiply cues.</p>
+
+<a href="#X__INTEREST"><b>X. INTEREST</b></a><br />
+
+
+<p>The child's native interests,&mdash;How uninteresting things
+acquire an interest,&mdash;Rules for the
+teacher,&mdash;'Preparation' of the mind for the lesson: the pupil
+must have something to attend with,&mdash;All later interests are
+borrowed from original ones.</p>
+
+<a href="#XI__ATTENTION"><b>XI. ATTENTION</b></a><br />
+
+
+<p>Interest and attention are two aspects of one
+fact,&mdash;Voluntary attention comes in beats,&mdash;Genius and
+attention,&mdash;The subject must change to win
+attention,&mdash;Mechanical aids,&mdash;The physiological
+process,&mdash;The new in the old is what excites
+interest,&mdash;Interest and effort are
+compatible,&mdash;Mind-wandering,&mdash;Not fatal to mental
+efficiency.</p>
+
+<a href="#XII__MEMORY"><b>XII. MEMORY</b></a><br />
+
+
+<p>Due to association,&mdash;No recall without a cue,&mdash;Memory
+is due to brain-plasticity,&mdash;Native
+retentiveness,&mdash;Number of associations may practically be its
+equivalent,&mdash;Retentiveness is a fixed property of the
+individual,&mdash;Memory <i>versus</i> memories,&mdash;Scientific
+system as help to memory,&mdash;Technical
+memories,&mdash;Cramming,&mdash;Elementary memory
+unimprovable,&mdash;Utility of verbal
+memorizing,&mdash;Measurements of immediate memory,&mdash;They
+throw little light,&mdash;Passion is the important factor in human
+efficiency,&mdash;Eye-memory, ear-memory, etc.,&mdash;The rate of
+forgetting, Ebbinghaus's results,&mdash;Influence of the
+unreproducible,&mdash;To remember, one must think and connect.</p>
+
+<a href="#XIII__THE_ACQUISITION_OF_IDEAS"><b>XIII. THE ACQUISITION
+OF IDEAS</b></a><br />
+
+
+<p>Education gives a stock of conceptions,&mdash;The order of their
+acquisition,&mdash;Value of verbal material,&mdash;Abstractions of
+different orders: when are they assimilable,&mdash;False
+conceptions of children.</p>
+
+<a href="#XIV__APPERCEPTION"><b>XIV. APPERCEPTION</b></a><br />
+
+
+<p>Often a mystifying idea,&mdash;The process defined,&mdash;The
+law of economy,&mdash;Old-fogyism,&mdash;How many types of
+apperception?&mdash;New heads of classification must continually be
+invented,&mdash;Alteration of the apperceiving mass,&mdash;Class
+names are what we work by,&mdash;Few new fundamental conceptions
+acquired after twenty-five.</p>
+
+<a href="#XV__THE_WILL"><b>XV. THE WILL</b></a><br />
+
+
+<p>The word defined,&mdash;All consciousness tends to
+action,&mdash;Ideo-motor action,&mdash;Inhibition,&mdash;The
+process of deliberation,&mdash;Why so few of our ideas result in
+acts,&mdash;The associationist account of the will,&mdash;A balance
+of impulses and inhibitions,&mdash;The over-impulsive and the
+over-obstructed type,&mdash;The perfect type,&mdash;The balky
+will,&mdash;What character building consists in,&mdash;Right action
+depends on right apperception of the case,&mdash;Effort of will is
+effort of attention: the drunkard's dilemma,&mdash;Vital importance
+of voluntary attention,&mdash;Its amount may be
+indeterminate,&mdash;Affirmation of free-will,&mdash;Two types of
+inhibition,&mdash;Spinoza on inhibition by a higher
+good,&mdash;Conclusion.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+ <a href="#TALKS_TO_STUDENTS"><b>TALKS TO STUDENTS</b></a><br />
+<br />
+ <a href="#I__THE_GOSPEL_OF_RELAXATION"><b>I. THE GOSPEL OF
+RELAXATION</b></a><br />
+ <a href="#II__ON_A_CERTAIN_BLINDNESS_IN_HUMAN_BEINGS"><b>II. ON A
+CERTAIN BLINDNESS IN HUMAN BEINGS</b></a><br />
+ <a href="#III__WHAT_MAKES_A_LIFE_SIGNIFICANT"><b>III. WHAT MAKES A
+LIFE SIGNIFICANT</b></a><br />
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="TALKS_TO_TEACHERS" id="TALKS_TO_TEACHERS">TALKS TO
+TEACHERS</a></h2>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="I__PSYCHOLOGY_AND_THE_TEACHING_ART"
+id="I__PSYCHOLOGY_AND_THE_TEACHING_ART" />I. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE
+TEACHING ART</h2>
+
+<p>In the general activity and uprising of ideal interests which
+every one with an eye for fact can discern all about us in American
+life, there is perhaps no more promising feature than the
+fermentation which for a dozen years or more has been going on
+among the teachers. In whatever sphere of education their functions
+may lie, there is to be seen among them a really inspiring amount
+of searching of the heart about the highest concerns of their
+profession. The renovation of nations begins always at the top,
+among the reflective members of the State, and spreads slowly
+outward and downward. The teachers of this country, one may say,
+have its future in their hands. The earnestness which they at
+present show in striving to enlighten and strengthen themselves is
+an index of the nation's probabilities of advance in all ideal
+directions. The outward organization of education which we have in
+our United States is perhaps, on the whole, the best organization
+that exists in any country. The State school systems give a
+diversity and flexibility, an opportunity for experiment and
+keenness of competition, nowhere else to be found on such an
+important scale. The independence of so many of the colleges and
+universities; the give and take of students and instructors between
+them all; their emulation, and their happy organic relations to the
+lower schools; the traditions of instruction in them, evolved from
+the older American recitation-method (and so avoiding on the one
+hand the pure lecture-system prevalent in Germany and Scotland,
+which considers too little the individual student, and yet not
+involving the sacrifice of the instructor to the individual
+student, which the English tutorial system would seem too often to
+entail),&mdash;all these things (to say nothing of that coeducation
+of the sexes in whose benefits so many of us heartily believe), all
+these things, I say, are most happy features of our scholastic
+life, and from them the most sanguine auguries may be drawn.</p>
+
+<p>Having so favorable an organization, all we need is to
+impregnate it with geniuses, to get superior men and women working
+more and more abundantly in it and for it and at it, and in a
+generation or two America may well lead the education of the world.
+I must say that I look forward with no little confidence to the day
+when that shall be an accomplished fact.</p>
+
+<p>No one has profited more by the fermentation of which I speak,
+in pedagogical circles, than we psychologists. The desire of the
+schoolteachers for a completer professional training, and their
+aspiration toward the 'professional' spirit in their work, have led
+them more and more to turn to us for light on fundamental
+principles. And in these few hours which we are to spend together
+you look to me, I am sure, for information concerning the mind's
+operations, which may enable you to labor more easily and
+effectively in the several schoolrooms over which you preside.</p>
+
+<p>Far be it from me to disclaim for psychology all title to such
+hopes. Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help.
+And yet I confess that, acquainted as I am with the height of some
+of your expectations, I feel a little anxious lest, at the end of
+these simple talks of mine, not a few of you may experience some
+disappointment at the net results. In other words, I am not sure
+that you may not be indulging fancies that are just a shade
+exaggerated. That would not be altogether astonishing, for we have
+been having something like a 'boom' in psychology in this country.
+Laboratories and professorships have been founded, and reviews
+established. The air has been full of rumors. The editors of
+educational journals and the arrangers of conventions have had to
+show themselves enterprising and on a level with the novelties of
+the day. Some of the professors have not been unwilling to
+co-operate, and I am not sure even that the publishers have been
+entirely inert. 'The new psychology' has thus become a term to
+conjure up portentous ideas withal; and you teachers, docile and
+receptive and aspiring as many of you are, have been plunged in an
+atmosphere of vague talk about our science, which to a great extent
+has been more mystifying than enlightening. Altogether it does seem
+as if there were a certain fatality of mystification laid upon the
+teachers of our day. The matter of their profession, compact enough
+in itself, has to be frothed up for them in journals and
+institutes, till its outlines often threaten to be lost in a kind
+of vast uncertainty. Where the disciples are not independent and
+critical-minded enough (and I think that, if you teachers in the
+earlier grades have any defect&mdash;the slightest touch of a
+defect in the world&mdash;it is that you are a mite too docile), we
+are pretty sure to miss accuracy and balance and measure in those
+who get a license to lay down the law to them from above.</p>
+
+<p>As regards this subject of psychology, now, I wish at the very
+threshold to do what I can to dispel the mystification. So I say at
+once that in my humble opinion there <i>is</i> no 'new psychology'
+worthy of the name. There is nothing but the old psychology which
+began in Locke's time, plus a little physiology of the brain and
+senses and theory of evolution, and a few refinements of
+introspective detail, for the most part without adaptation to the
+teacher's use. It is only the fundamental conceptions of psychology
+which are of real value to the teacher; and they, apart from the
+aforesaid theory of evolution, are very far from being new.&mdash;I
+trust that you will see better what I mean by this at the end of
+all these talks.</p>
+
+<p>I say moreover that you make a great, a very great mistake, if
+you think that psychology, being the science of the mind's laws, is
+something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes
+and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use. Psychology
+is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate
+arts directly out of themselves. An intermediary inventive mind
+must make the application, by using its originality.</p>
+
+<p>The science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the
+science of ethics (if there be such a thing) never made a man
+behave rightly. The most such sciences can do is to help us to
+catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to
+behave wrongly; and to criticise ourselves more articulately after
+we have made mistakes. A science only lays down lines within which
+the rules of the art must fall, laws which the follower of the art
+must not transgress; but what particular thing he shall positively
+do within those lines is left exclusively to his own genius. One
+genius will do his work well and succeed in one way, while another
+succeeds as well quite differently; yet neither will transgress the
+lines.</p>
+
+<p>The art of teaching grew up in the schoolroom, out of
+inventiveness and sympathetic concrete observation. Even where (as
+in the case of Herbart) the advancer of the art was also a
+psychologist, the pedagogics and the psychology ran side by side,
+and the former was not derived in any sense from the latter. The
+two were congruent, but neither was subordinate. And so everywhere
+the teaching must <i>agree</i> with the psychology, but need not
+necessarily be the only kind of teaching that would so agree; for
+many diverse methods of teaching may equally well agree with
+psychological laws.</p>
+
+<p>To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that
+we shall be good teachers. To advance to that result, we must have
+an additional endowment altogether, a happy tact and ingenuity to
+tell us what definite things to say and do when the pupil is before
+us. That ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for
+the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the
+teacher's art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the
+least.</p>
+
+<p>The science of psychology, and whatever science of general
+pedagogics may be based on it, are in fact much like the science of
+war. Nothing is simpler or more definite than the principles of
+either. In war, all you have to do is to work your enemy into a
+position from which the natural obstacles prevent him from escaping
+if he tries to; then to fall on him in numbers superior to his own,
+at a moment when you have led him to think you far away; and so,
+with a minimum of exposure of your own troops, to hack his force to
+pieces, and take the remainder prisoners. Just so, in teaching, you
+must simply work your pupil into such a state of interest in what
+you are going to teach him that every other object of attention is
+banished from his mind; then reveal it to him so impressively that
+he will remember the occasion to his dying day; and finally fill
+him with devouring curiosity to know what the next steps in
+connection with the subject are. The principles being so plain,
+there would be nothing but victories for the masters of the
+science, either on the battlefield or in the schoolroom, if they
+did not both have to make their application to an incalculable
+quantity in the shape of the mind of their opponent. The mind of
+your own enemy, the pupil, is working away from you as keenly and
+eagerly as is the mind of the commander on the other side from the
+scientific general. Just what the respective enemies want and
+think, and what they know and do not know, are as hard things for
+the teacher as for the general to find out. Divination and
+perception, not psychological pedagogics or theoretic strategy, are
+the only helpers here.</p>
+
+<p>But, if the use of psychological principles thus be negative
+rather than positive, it does not follow that it may not be a great
+use, all the same. It certainly narrows the path for experiments
+and trials. We know in advance, if we are psychologists, that
+certain methods will be wrong, so our psychology saves us from
+mistakes. It makes us, moreover, more clear as to what we are
+about. We gain confidence in respect to any method which we are
+using as soon as we believe that it has theory as well as practice
+at its back. Most of all, it fructifies our independence, and it
+reanimates our interest, to see our subject at two different
+angles,&mdash;to get a stereoscopic view, so to speak, of the
+youthful organism who is our enemy, and, while handling him with
+all our concrete tact and divination, to be able, at the same time,
+to represent to ourselves the curious inner elements of his mental
+machine. Such a complete knowledge as this of the pupil, at once
+intuitive and analytic, is surely the knowledge at which every
+teacher ought to aim.</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately for you teachers, the elements of the mental machine
+can be clearly apprehended, and their workings easily grasped. And,
+as the most general elements and workings are just those parts of
+psychology which the teacher finds most directly useful, it follows
+that the amount of this science which is necessary to all teachers
+need not be very great. Those who find themselves loving the
+subject may go as far as they please, and become possibly none the
+worse teachers for the fact, even though in some of them one might
+apprehend a little loss of balance from the tendency observable in
+all of us to overemphasize certain special parts of a subject when
+we are studying it intensely and abstractly. But for the great
+majority of you a general view is enough, provided it be a true
+one; and such a general view, one may say, might almost be written
+on the palm of one's hand.</p>
+
+<p>Least of all need you, merely <i>as teachers</i>, deem it part
+of your duty to become contributors to psychological science or to
+make psychological observations in a methodical or responsible
+manner. I fear that some of the enthusiasts for child-study have
+thrown a certain burden on you in this way. By all means let
+child-study go on,&mdash;it is refreshing all our sense of the
+child's life. There are teachers who take a spontaneous delight in
+filling syllabuses, inscribing observations, compiling statistics,
+and computing the per cent. Child-study will certainly enrich their
+lives. And, if its results, as treated statistically, would seem on
+the whole to have but trifling value, yet the anecdotes and
+observations of which it in part consist do certainly acquaint us
+more intimately with our pupils. Our eyes and ears grow quickened
+to discern in the child before us processes similar to those we
+have read of as noted in the children,&mdash;processes of which we
+might otherwise have remained inobservant. But, for Heaven's sake,
+let the rank and file of teachers be passive readers if they so
+prefer, and feel free not to contribute to the accumulation. Let
+not the prosecution of it be preached as an imperative duty or
+imposed by regulation on those to whom it proves an exterminating
+bore, or who in any way whatever miss in themselves the appropriate
+vocation for it. I cannot too strongly agree with my colleague,
+Professor M&uuml;nsterberg, when he says that the teacher's
+attitude toward the child, being concrete and ethical, is
+positively opposed to the psychological observer's, which is
+abstract and analytic. Although some of us may conjoin the
+attitudes successfully, in most of us they must conflict.</p>
+
+<p>The worst thing that can happen to a good teacher is to get a
+bad conscience about her profession because she feels herself
+hopeless as a psychologist. Our teachers are overworked already.
+Every one who adds a jot or tittle of unnecessary weight to their
+burden is a foe of education. A bad conscience increases the weight
+of every other burden; yet I know that child-study, and other
+pieces of psychology as well, have been productive of bad
+conscience in many a really innocent pedagogic breast. I should
+indeed be glad if this passing word from me might tend to dispel
+such a bad conscience, if any of you have it; for it is certainly
+one of those fruits of more or less systematic mystification of
+which I have already complained. The best teacher may be the
+poorest contributor of child-study material, and the best
+contributor may be the poorest teacher. No fact is more palpable
+than this.</p>
+
+<p>So much for what seems the most reasonable general attitude of
+the teacher toward the subject which is to occupy our
+attention.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="II__THE_STREAM_OF_CONSCIOUSNESS"
+id="II__THE_STREAM_OF_CONSCIOUSNESS" />II. THE STREAM OF
+CONSCIOUSNESS</h2>
+
+<p>I said a few minutes ago that the most general elements and
+workings of the mind are all that the teacher absolutely needs to
+be acquainted with for his purposes.</p>
+
+<p>Now the <i>immediate</i> fact which psychology, the science of
+mind, has to study is also the most general fact. It is the fact
+that in each of us, when awake (and often when asleep), <i>some
+kind of consciousness is always going on</i>. There is a stream, a
+succession of states, or waves, or fields (or of whatever you
+please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of
+deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that
+constitute our inner life. The existence of this stream is the
+primal fact, the nature and origin of it form the essential
+problem, of our science. So far as we class the states or fields of
+consciousness, write down their several natures, analyze their
+contents into elements, or trace their habits of succession, we are
+on the descriptive or analytic level. So far as we ask where they
+come from or why they are just what they are, we are on the
+explanatory level.</p>
+
+<p>In these talks with you, I shall entirely neglect the questions
+that come up on the explanatory level. It must be frankly confessed
+that in no fundamental sense do we know where our successive fields
+of consciousness come from, or why they have the precise inner
+constitution which they do have. They certainly follow or accompany
+our brain states, and of course their special forms are determined
+by our past experiences and education. But, if we ask just
+<i>how</i> the brain conditions them, we have not the remotest
+inkling of an answer to give; and, if we ask just how the education
+moulds the brain, we can speak but in the most abstract, general,
+and conjectural terms. On the other hand, if we should say that
+they are due to a spiritual being called our Soul, which reacts on
+our brain states by these peculiar forms of spiritual energy, our
+words would be familiar enough, it is true; but I think you will
+agree that they would offer little genuine explanatory meaning. The
+truth is that we really <i>do not know</i> the answers to the
+problems on the explanatory level, even though in some directions
+of inquiry there may be promising speculations to be found. For our
+present purposes I shall therefore dismiss them entirely, and turn
+to mere description. This state of things was what I had in mind
+when, a moment ago, I said there was no 'new psychology' worthy of
+the name.</p>
+
+<p><i>We have thus fields of consciousness</i>,&mdash;that is the
+first general fact; and the second general fact is that the
+concrete fields are always complex. They contain sensations of our
+bodies and of the objects around us, memories of past experiences
+and thoughts of distant things, feelings of satisfaction and
+dissatisfaction, desires and aversions, and other emotional
+conditions, together with determinations of the will, in every
+variety of permutation and combination.</p>
+
+<p>In most of our concrete states of consciousness all these
+different classes of ingredients are found simultaneously present
+to some degree, though the relative proportion they bear to one
+another is very shifting. One state will seem to be composed of
+hardly anything but sensations, another of hardly anything but
+memories, etc. But around the sensation, if one consider carefully,
+there will always be some fringe of thought or will, and around the
+memory some margin or penumbra of emotion or sensation.</p>
+
+<p>In most of our fields of consciousness there is a core of
+sensation that is very pronounced. You, for example, now, although
+you are also thinking and feeling, are getting through your eyes
+sensations of my face and figure, and through your ears sensations
+of my voice. The sensations are the <i>centre</i> or <i>focus</i>,
+the thoughts and feelings the <i>margin</i>, of your actually
+present conscious field.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand, some object of thought, some distant image,
+may have become the focus of your mental attention even while I am
+speaking,&mdash;your mind, in short, may have wandered from the
+lecture; and, in that case, the sensations of my face and voice,
+although not absolutely vanishing from your conscious field, may
+have taken up there a very faint and marginal place.</p>
+
+<p>Again, to take another sort of variation, some feeling connected
+with your own body may have passed from a marginal to a focal
+place, even while I speak.</p>
+
+<p>The expressions 'focal object' and 'marginal object,' which we
+owe to Mr. Lloyd Morgan, require, I think, no further explanation.
+The distinction they embody is a very important one, and they are
+the first technical terms which I shall ask you to remember.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+
+
+<p>In the successive mutations of our fields of consciousness, the
+process by which one dissolves into another is often very gradual,
+and all sorts of inner rearrangements of contents occur. Sometimes
+the focus remains but little changed, while the margin alters
+rapidly. Sometimes the focus alters, and the margin stays.
+Sometimes focus and margin change places. Sometimes, again, abrupt
+alterations of the whole field occur. There can seldom be a sharp
+description. All we know is that, for the most part, each field has
+a sort of practical unity for its possessor, and that from this
+practical point of view we can class a field with other fields
+similar to it, by calling it a state of emotion, of perplexity, of
+sensation, of abstract thought, of volition, and the like.</p>
+
+<p>Vague and hazy as such an account of our stream of consciousness
+may be, it is at least secure from positive error and free from
+admixture of conjecture or hypothesis. An influential school of
+psychology, seeking to avoid haziness of outline, has tried to make
+things appear more exact and scientific by making the analysis more
+sharp.</p>
+
+<p>The various fields of consciousness, according to this school,
+result from a definite number of perfectly definite elementary
+mental states, mechanically associated into a mosaic or chemically
+combined. According to some thinkers,&mdash;Spencer, for example,
+or Taine,&mdash;these resolve themselves at last into little
+elementary psychic particles or atoms of 'mind-stuff,' out of which
+all the more immediately known mental states are said to be built
+up. Locke introduced this theory in a somewhat vague form. Simple
+'ideas' of sensation and reflection, as he called them, were for
+him the bricks of which our mental architecture is built up. If I
+ever have to refer to this theory again, I shall refer to it as the
+theory of 'ideas.' But I shall try to steer clear of it altogether.
+Whether it be true or false, it is at any rate only conjectural;
+and, for your practical purposes as teachers, the more unpretending
+conception of the stream of consciousness, with its total waves or
+fields incessantly changing, will amply suffice.<a
+name="FNanchor_A_1" id="FNanchor_A_1" /><a href="#Footnote_A_1"
+class="fnanchor">[A]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+<p><a name="Footnote_A_1" id="Footnote_A_1" /><a
+href="#FNanchor_A_1"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> In the
+light of some of the expectations that are abroad concerning the
+'new psychology,' it is instructive to read the unusually candid
+confession of its founder Wundt, after his thirty years of
+laboratory-experience:</p>
+
+<p>"The service which it [the experimental method] can yield
+consists essentially in perfecting our inner observation, or
+rather, as I believe, in making this really possible, in any exact
+sense. Well, has our experimental self-observation, so understood,
+already accomplished aught of importance? No general answer to this
+question can be given, because in the unfinished state of our
+science, there is, even inside of the experimental lines of
+inquiry, no universally accepted body of psychologic
+doctrine....</p>
+
+<p>"In such a discord of opinions (comprehensible enough at a time
+of uncertain and groping development), the individual inquirer can
+only tell for what views and insights he himself has to thank the
+newer methods. And if I were asked in what for me the worth of
+experimental observation in psychology has consisted, and still
+consists, I should say that it has given me an entirely new idea of
+the nature and connection of our inner processes. I learned in the
+achievements of the sense of sight to apprehend the fact of
+creative mental synthesis.... From my inquiry into time-relations,
+etc.,... I attained an insight into the close union of all those
+psychic functions usually separated by artificial abstractions and
+names, such as ideation, feeling, will; and I saw the
+indivisibility and inner homogeneity, in all its phases, of the
+mental life. The chronometric study of association-processes
+finally showed me that the notion of distinct mental 'images'
+[<i>reproducirten Vorstellungen</i>] was one of those numerous
+self-deceptions which are no sooner stamped in a verbal term than
+they forthwith thrust non-existent fictions into the place of the
+reality. I learned to understand an 'idea' as a process no less
+melting and fleeting than an act of feeling or of will, and I
+comprehended the older doctrine of association of 'ideas' to be no
+longer tenable.... Besides all this, experimental observation
+yielded much other information about the span of consciousness, the
+rapidity of certain processes, the exact numerical value of certain
+psychophysical data, and the like. But I hold all these more
+special results to be relatively insignificant by-products, and by
+no means the important thing."&mdash;<i>Philosophische Studien</i>,
+x. 121-124. The whole passage should be read. As I interpret it, it
+amounts to a complete espousal of the vaguer conception of the
+stream of thought, and a complete renunciation of the whole
+business, still so industriously carried on in text-books, of
+chopping up 'the mind' into distinct units of composition or
+function, numbering these off, and labelling them by technical
+names.</p>
+</div>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="III__THE_CHILD_AS_A_BEHAVING_ORGANISM"
+id="III__THE_CHILD_AS_A_BEHAVING_ORGANISM" />III. THE CHILD AS A
+BEHAVING ORGANISM</h2>
+
+<p>I wish now to continue the description of the peculiarities of
+the stream of consciousness by asking whether we can in any
+intelligible way assign its <i>functions</i>.</p>
+
+<p>It has two functions that are obvious: it leads to knowledge,
+and it leads to action.</p>
+
+<p>Can we say which of these functions is the more essential?</p>
+
+<p>An old historic divergence of opinion comes in here. Popular
+belief has always tended to estimate the worth of a man's mental
+processes by their effects upon his practical life. But
+philosophers have usually cherished a different view. "Man's
+supreme glory," they have said, "is to be a <i>rational</i> being,
+to know absolute and eternal and universal truth. The uses of his
+intellect for practical affairs are therefore subordinate matters.
+'The theoretic life' is his soul's genuine concern." Nothing can be
+more different in its results for our personal attitude than to
+take sides with one or the other of these views, and emphasize the
+practical or the theoretical ideal. In the latter case, abstraction
+from the emotions and passions and withdrawal from the strife of
+human affairs would be not only pardonable, but praiseworthy; and
+all that makes for quiet and contemplation should be regarded as
+conducive to the highest human perfection. In the former, the man
+of contemplation would be treated as only half a human being,
+passion and practical resource would become once more glories of
+our race, a concrete victory over this earth's outward powers of
+darkness would appear an equivalent for any amount of passive
+spiritual culture, and conduct would remain as the test of every
+education worthy of the name.</p>
+
+<p>It is impossible to disguise the fact that in the psychology of
+our own day the emphasis is transferred from the mind's purely
+rational function, where Plato and Aristotle, and what one may call
+the whole classic tradition in philosophy had placed it, to the so
+long neglected practical side. The theory of evolution is mainly
+responsible for this. Man, we now have reason to believe, has been
+evolved from infra-human ancestors, in whom pure reason hardly
+existed, if at all, and whose mind, so far as it can have had any
+function, would appear to have been an organ for adapting their
+movements to the impressions received from the environment, so as
+to escape the better from destruction. Consciousness would thus
+seem in the first instance to be nothing but a sort of super-added
+biological perfection,&mdash;useless unless it prompted to useful
+conduct, and inexplicable apart from that consideration.</p>
+
+<p>Deep in our own nature the biological foundations of our
+consciousness persist, undisguised and undiminished. Our sensations
+are here to attract us or to deter us, our memories to warn or
+encourage us, our feelings to impel, and our thoughts to restrain
+our behavior, so that on the whole we may prosper and our days be
+long in the land. Whatever of transmundane metaphysical insight or
+of practically inapplicable &aelig;sthetic perception or ethical
+sentiment we may carry in our interiors might at this rate be
+regarded as only part of the incidental excess of function that
+necessarily accompanies the working of every complex machine.</p>
+
+<p>I shall ask you now&mdash;not meaning at all thereby to close
+the theoretic question, but merely because it seems to me the point
+of view likely to be of greatest practical use to you as
+teachers&mdash;to adopt with me, in this course of lectures, the
+biological conception, as thus expressed, and to lay your own
+emphasis on the fact that man, whatever else he may be, is
+primarily a practical being, whose mind is given him to aid in
+adapting him to this world's life.</p>
+
+<p>In the learning of all matters, we have to start with some one
+deep aspect of the question, abstracting it as if it were the only
+aspect; and then we gradually correct ourselves by adding those
+neglected other features which complete the case. No one believes
+more strongly than I do that what our senses know as 'this world'
+is only one portion of our mind's total environment and object.
+Yet, because it is the primal portion, it is the <i>sine qua
+non</i>of all the rest. If you grasp the facts about it firmly, you
+may proceed to higher regions undisturbed. As our time must be so
+short together, I prefer being elementary and fundamental to being
+complete, so I propose to you to hold fast to the ultra-simple
+point of view.</p>
+
+<p>The reasons why I call it so fundamental can be easily told.</p>
+
+<p>First, human and animal psychology thereby become less
+discontinuous. I know that to some of you this will hardly seem an
+attractive reason, but there are others whom it will affect.</p>
+
+<p>Second, mental action is conditioned by brain action, and runs
+parallel therewith. But the brain, so far as we understand it, is
+given us for practical behavior. Every current that runs into it
+from skin or eye or ear runs out again into muscles, glands, or
+viscera, and helps to adapt the animal to the environment from
+which the current came. It therefore generalizes and simplifies our
+view to treat the brain life and the mental life as having one
+fundamental kind of purpose.</p>
+
+<p>Third, those very functions of the mind that do not refer
+directly to this world's environment, the ethical utopias,
+&aelig;sthetic visions, insights into eternal truth, and fanciful
+logical combinations, could never be carried on at all by a human
+individual, unless the mind that produced them in him were also
+able to produce more practically useful products. The latter are
+thus the more essential, or at least the more primordial
+results.</p>
+
+<p>Fourth, the inessential 'unpractical' activities are themselves
+far more connected with our behavior and our adaptation to the
+environment than at first sight might appear. No truth, however
+abstract, is ever perceived, that will not probably at some time
+influence our earthly action. You must remember that, when I talk
+of action here, I mean action in the widest sense. I mean speech, I
+mean writing, I mean yeses and noes, and tendencies 'from' things
+and tendencies 'toward' things, and emotional determinations; and I
+mean them in the future as well as in the immediate present. As I
+talk here, and you listen, it might seem as if no action followed.
+You might call it a purely theoretic process, with no practical
+result. But it <i>must</i> have a practical result. It cannot take
+place at all and leave your conduct unaffected. If not to-day, then
+on some far future day, you will answer some question differently
+by reason of what you are thinking now. Some of you will be led by
+my words into new veins of inquiry, into reading special books.
+These will develop your opinion, whether for or against. That
+opinion will in turn be expressed, will receive criticism from
+others in your environment, and will affect your standing in their
+eyes. We cannot escape our destiny, which is practical; and even
+our most theoretic faculties contribute to its working out.</p>
+
+<p>These few reasons will perhaps smooth the way for you to
+acquiescence in my proposal. As teachers, I sincerely think it will
+be a sufficient conception for you to adopt of the youthful
+psychological phenomena handed over to your inspection if you
+consider them from the point of view of their relation to the
+future conduct of their possessor. Sufficient at any rate as a
+first conception and as a main conception. You should regard your
+professional task as if it consisted chiefly and essentially in
+<i>training the pupil to behavior</i>; taking behavior, not in the
+narrow sense of his manners, but in the very widest possible sense,
+as including every possible sort of fit reaction on the
+circumstances into which he may find himself brought by the
+vicissitudes of life.</p>
+
+<p>The reaction may, indeed, often be a negative reaction.
+<i>Not</i> to speak, <i>not</i> to move, is one of the most
+important of our duties, in certain practical emergencies. "Thou
+shalt refrain, renounce, abstain"! This often requires a great
+effort of will power, and, physiologically considered, is just as
+positive a nerve function as is motor discharge.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IV__EDUCATION_AND_BEHAVIOR"
+id="IV__EDUCATION_AND_BEHAVIOR" />IV. EDUCATION AND BEHAVIOR</h2>
+
+<p>In our foregoing talk we were led to frame a very simple
+conception of what an education means. In the last analysis it
+consists in the organizing of <i>resources</i> in the human being,
+of powers of conduct which shall fit him to his social and physical
+world. An 'uneducated' person is one who is nonplussed by all but
+the most habitual situations. On the contrary, one who is educated
+is able practically to extricate himself, by means of the examples
+with which his memory is stored and of the abstract conceptions
+which he has acquired, from circumstances in which he never was
+placed before. Education, in short, cannot be better described than
+by calling it <i>the organization of acquired habits of conduct and
+tendencies to behavior</i>.</p>
+
+<p>To illustrate. You and I are each and all of us educated, in our
+several ways; and we show our education at this present moment by
+different conduct. It would be quite impossible for me, with my
+mind technically and professionally organized as it is, and with
+the optical stimulus which your presence affords, to remain sitting
+here entirely silent and inactive. Something tells me that I am
+expected to speak, and must speak; something forces me to keep on
+speaking. My organs of articulation are continuously innervated by
+outgoing currents, which the currents passing inward at my eyes and
+through my educated brain have set in motion; and the particular
+movements which they make have their form and order determined
+altogether by the training of all my past years of lecturing and
+reading. Your conduct, on the other hand, might seem at first sight
+purely receptive and inactive,&mdash;leaving out those among you
+who happen to be taking notes. But the very listening which you are
+carrying on is itself a determinate kind of conduct. All the
+muscular tensions of your body are distributed in a peculiar way as
+you listen. Your head, your eyes, are fixed characteristically.
+And, when the lecture is over, it will inevitably eventuate in some
+stroke of behavior, as I said on the previous occasion: you may be
+guided differently in some special emergency in the schoolroom by
+words which I now let fall.&mdash;So it is with the impressions you
+will make there on your pupil. You should get into the habit of
+regarding them all as leading to the acquisition by him of
+capacities for behavior,&mdash;emotional, social, bodily, vocal,
+technical, or what not. And, this being the case, you ought to feel
+willing, in a general way, and without hair-splitting or farther
+ado, to take up for the purposes of these lectures with the
+biological conception of the mind, as of something given us for
+practical use. That conception will certainly cover the greater
+part of your own educational work.</p>
+
+<p>If we reflect upon the various ideals of education that are
+prevalent in the different countries, we see that what they all aim
+at is to organize capacities for conduct. This is most immediately
+obvious in Germany, where the explicitly avowed aim of the higher
+education is to turn the student into an instrument for advancing
+scientific discovery. The German universities are proud of the
+number of young specialists whom they turn out every
+year,&mdash;not necessarily men of any original force of intellect,
+but men so trained to research that when their professor gives them
+an historical or philological thesis to prepare, or a bit of
+laboratory work to do, with a general indication as to the best
+method, they can go off by themselves and use apparatus and consult
+sources in such a way as to grind out in the requisite number of
+months some little pepper-corn of new truth worthy of being added
+to the store of extant human information on that subject. Little
+else is recognized in Germany as a man's title to academic
+advancement than his ability thus to show himself an efficient
+instrument of research.</p>
+
+<p>In England, it might seem at first sight as if the higher
+education of the universities aimed at the production of certain
+static types of character rather than at the development of what
+one may call this dynamic scientific efficiency. Professor Jowett,
+when asked what Oxford could do for its students, is said to have
+replied, "Oxford can teach an English gentleman how to <i>be</i> an
+English gentleman." But, if you ask what it means to 'be' an
+English gentleman, the only reply is in terms of conduct and
+behavior. An English gentleman is a bundle of specifically
+qualified reactions, a creature who for all the emergencies of life
+has his line of behavior distinctly marked out for him in advance.
+Here, as elsewhere, England expects every man to do his duty.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="V__THE_NECESSITY_OF_REACTIONS"
+id="V__THE_NECESSITY_OF_REACTIONS" />V. THE NECESSITY OF
+REACTIONS</h2>
+
+<p>If all this be true, then immediately one general aphorism
+emerges which ought by logical right to dominate the entire conduct
+of the teacher in the classroom.</p>
+
+<p><i>No reception without reaction, no impression without
+correlative expression</i>,&mdash;this is the great maxim which the
+teacher ought never to forget.</p>
+
+<p>An impression which simply flows in at the pupil's eyes or ears,
+and in no way modifies his active life, is an impression gone to
+waste. It is physiologically incomplete. It leaves no fruits behind
+it in the way of capacity acquired. Even as mere impression, it
+fails to produce its proper effect upon the memory; for, to remain
+fully among the acquisitions of this latter faculty, it must be
+wrought into the whole cycle of our operations. Its <i>motor
+consequences</i> are what clinch it. Some effect due to it in the
+way of an activity must return to the mind in the form of the
+<i>sensation of having acted</i>, and connect itself with the
+impression. The most durable impressions are those on account of
+which we speak or act, or else are inwardly convulsed.</p>
+
+<p>The older pedagogic method of learning things by rote, and
+reciting them parrot-like in the schoolroom, rested on the truth
+that a thing merely read or heard, and never verbally reproduced,
+contracts the weakest possible adhesion in the mind. Verbal
+recitation or reproduction is thus a highly important kind of
+reactive behavior on our impressions; and it is to be feared that,
+in the reaction against the old parrot-recitations as the beginning
+and end of instruction, the extreme value of verbal recitation as
+an element of complete training may nowadays be too much
+forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>When we turn to modern pedagogics, we see how enormously the
+field of reactive conduct has been extended by the introduction of
+all those methods of concrete object teaching which are the glory
+of our contemporary schools. Verbal reactions, useful as they are,
+are insufficient. The pupil's words may be right, but the
+conceptions corresponding to them are often direfully wrong. In a
+modern school, therefore, they form only a small part of what the
+pupil is required to do. He must keep notebooks, make drawings,
+plans, and maps, take measurements, enter the laboratory and
+perform experiments, consult authorities, and write essays. He must
+do in his fashion what is often laughed at by outsiders when it
+appears in prospectuses under the title of 'original work,' but
+what is really the only possible training for the doing of original
+work thereafter. The most colossal improvement which recent years
+have seen in secondary education lies in the introduction of the
+manual training schools; not because they will give us a people
+more handy and practical for domestic life and better skilled in
+trades, but because they will give us citizens with an entirely
+different intellectual fibre. Laboratory work and shop work
+engender a habit of observation, a knowledge of the difference
+between accuracy and vagueness, and an insight into nature's
+complexity and into the inadequacy of all abstract verbal accounts
+of real phenomena, which once wrought into the mind, remain there
+as lifelong possessions. They confer precision; because, if you are
+<i>doing</i> a thing, you must do it definitely right or definitely
+wrong. They give honesty; for, when you express yourself by making
+things, and not by using words, it becomes impossible to
+dissimulate your vagueness or ignorance by ambiguity. They beget a
+habit of self-reliance; they keep the interest and attention always
+cheerfully engaged, and reduce the teacher's disciplinary functions
+to a minimum.</p>
+
+<p>Of the various systems of manual training, so far as woodwork is
+concerned, the Swedish Sloyd system, if I may have an opinion on
+such matters, seems to me by far the best, psychologically
+considered. Manual training methods, fortunately, are being slowly
+but surely introduced into all our large cities. But there is still
+an immense distance to traverse before they shall have gained the
+extension which they are destined ultimately to possess.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+
+
+<p>No impression without expression, then,&mdash;that is the first
+pedagogic fruit of our evolutionary conception of the mind as
+something instrumental to adaptive behavior. But a word may be said
+in continuation. The expression itself comes back to us, as I
+intimated a moment ago, in the form of a still farther
+impression,&mdash;the impression, namely, of what we have done. We
+thus receive sensible news of our behavior and its results. We hear
+the words we have spoken, feel our own blow as we give it, or read
+in the bystander's eyes the success or failure of our conduct. Now
+this return wave of impression pertains to the completeness of the
+whole experience, and a word about its importance in the schoolroom
+may not be out of place.</p>
+
+<p>It would seem only natural to say that, since after acting we
+normally get some return impression of result, it must be well to
+let the pupil get such a return impression in every possible case.
+Nevertheless, in schools where examination marks and 'standing' and
+other returns of result are concealed, the pupil is frustrated of
+this natural termination of the cycle of his activities, and often
+suffers from the sense of incompleteness and uncertainty; and there
+are persons who defend this system as encouraging the pupil to work
+for the work's sake, and not for extraneous reward. Of course, here
+as elsewhere, concrete experience must prevail over psychological
+deduction. But, so far as our psychological deduction goes, it
+would suggest that the pupil's eagerness to know how well he does
+is in the line of his normal completeness of function, and should
+never be balked except for very definite reasons indeed.</p>
+
+<p>Acquaint them, therefore, with their marks and standing and
+prospects, unless in the individual case you have some special
+practical reason for not so doing.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VI__NATIVE_REACTIONS_AND_ACQUIRED_REACTIONS"
+id="VI__NATIVE_REACTIONS_AND_ACQUIRED_REACTIONS" />VI. NATIVE
+REACTIONS AND ACQUIRED REACTIONS</h2>
+
+<p>We are by this time fully launched upon the biological
+conception. Man is an organism for reacting on impressions: his
+mind is there to help determine his reactions, and the purpose of
+his education is to make them numerous and perfect. <i>Our
+education means, in short, little more than a mass of possibilities
+of reaction,</i> acquired at home, at school, or in the training of
+affairs. The teacher's task is that of supervising the acquiring
+process.</p>
+
+<p>This being the case, I will immediately state a principle which
+underlies the whole process of acquisition and governs the entire
+activity of the teacher. It is this:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><i>Every acquired reaction is, as a rule, either a complication
+grafted on a native reaction, or a substitute for a native
+reaction, which the same object originally tended to
+provoke.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>The teacher's art consists in bringing about the substitution
+or complication, and success in the art presupposes a sympathetic
+acquaintance with the reactive tendencies natively there</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Without an equipment of native reactions on the child's part,
+the teacher would have no hold whatever upon the child's attention
+or conduct. You may take a horse to the water, but you cannot make
+him drink; and so you may take a child to the schoolroom, but you
+cannot make him learn the new things you wish to impart, except by
+soliciting him in the first instance by something which natively
+makes him react. He must take the first step himself. He must
+<i>do</i> something before you can get your purchase on him. That
+something may be something good or something bad. A bad reaction is
+better than no reaction at all; for, if bad, you can couple it with
+consequences which awake him to its badness. But imagine a child so
+lifeless as to react in <i>no</i> way to the teacher's first
+appeals, and how can you possibly take the first step in his
+education?</p>
+
+<p>To make this abstract conception more concrete, assume the case
+of a young child's training in good manners. The child has a native
+tendency to snatch with his hands at anything that attracts his
+curiosity; also to draw back his hands when slapped, to cry under
+these latter conditions, to smile when gently spoken to, and to
+imitate one's gestures.</p>
+
+<p>Suppose now you appear before the child with a new toy intended
+as a present for him. No sooner does he see the toy than he seeks
+to snatch it. You slap the hand; it is withdrawn, and the child
+cries. You then hold up the toy, smiling and saying, "Beg for it
+nicely,&mdash;so!" The child stops crying, imitates you, receives
+the toy, and crows with pleasure; and that little cycle of training
+is complete. You have substituted the new reaction of 'begging' for
+the native reaction of snatching, when that kind of impression
+comes.</p>
+
+<p>Now, if the child had no memory, the process would not be
+educative. No matter how often you came in with a toy, the same
+series of reactions would fatally occur, each called forth by its
+own impression: see, snatch; slap, cry; hear, ask; receive, smile.
+But, with memory there, the child, at the very instant of
+snatching, recalls the rest of the earlier experience, thinks of
+the slap and the frustration, recollects the begging and the
+reward, inhibits the snatching impulse, substitutes the 'nice'
+reaction for it, and gets the toy immediately, by eliminating all
+the intermediary steps. If a child's first snatching impulse be
+excessive or his memory poor, many repetitions of the discipline
+may be needed before the acquired reaction comes to be an ingrained
+habit; but in an eminently educable child a single experience will
+suffice.</p>
+
+<p>One can easily represent the whole process by a brain-diagram.
+Such a diagram can be little more than a symbolic translation of
+the immediate experience into spatial terms; yet it may be useful,
+so I subjoin it.</p>
+
+<div class='ctr'><img src="images/illus051.gif" width="798"
+height="452"
+alt="FIGURE 1. THE BRAIN-PROCESSES BEFORE EDUCATION."
+ title="FIGURE 1. THE BRAIN-PROCESSES BEFORE EDUCATION." /></div>
+
+<p>Figure 1 shows the paths of the four successive reflexes
+executed by the lower or instinctive centres. The dotted lines that
+lead from them to the higher centres and connect the latter
+together, represent the processes of memory and association which
+the reactions impress upon the higher centres as they take
+place.</p>
+
+<div class='ctr'><img src="images/illus052.gif" width="791"
+height="439"
+alt="FIGURE 2. THE BRAIN-PROCESS AFTER EDUCATION."
+title="FIGURE 2. THE BRAIN-PROCESS AFTER EDUCATION." /></div>
+
+<p>In Figure 2 we have the final result. The impression <i>see</i>
+awakens the chain of memories, and the only reactions that take
+place are the <i>beg</i> and <i>smile</i>. The thought of the
+<i>slap</i>, connected with the activity of Centre 2, inhibits the
+<i>snatch</i>, and makes it abortive, so it is represented only by
+a dotted line of discharge not reaching the terminus. Ditto of the
+<i>cry</i> reaction. These are, as it were, short-circuited by the
+current sweeping through the higher centres from <i>see</i> to
+<i>smile</i>. <i>Beg</i> and <i>smile</i>, thus substituted for the
+original reaction <i>snatch</i>, become at last the immediate
+responses when the child sees a snatchable object in some one's
+hands.</p>
+
+<p>The first thing, then, for the teacher to understand is the
+native reactive tendencies,&mdash;the impulses and instincts of
+childhood,&mdash;so as to be able to substitute one for another,
+and turn them on to artificial objects.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+
+
+<p>It is often said that man is distinguished from the lower
+animals by having a much smaller assortment of native instincts and
+impulses than they, but this is a great mistake. Man, of course,
+has not the marvellous egg-laying instincts which some articulates
+have; but, if we compare him with the mammalia, we are forced to
+confess that he is appealed to by a much larger array of objects
+than any other mammal, that his reactions on these objects are
+characteristic and determinate in a very high degree. The monkeys,
+and especially the anthropoids, are the only beings that approach
+him in their analytic curiosity and width of imitativeness. His
+instinctive impulses, it is true, get overlaid by the secondary
+reactions due to his superior reasoning power; but thus man loses
+the <i>simply</i> instinctive demeanor. But the life of instinct is
+only disguised in him, not lost; and when the higher
+brain-functions are in abeyance, as happens in imbecility or
+dementia, his instincts sometimes show their presence in truly
+brutish ways.</p>
+
+<p>I will therefore say a few words about those instinctive
+tendencies which are the most important from the teacher's point of
+view.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VII__WHAT_THE_NATIVE_REACTIONS_ARE"
+id="VII__WHAT_THE_NATIVE_REACTIONS_ARE" />VII. WHAT THE NATIVE
+REACTIONS ARE</h2>
+
+<p>First of all, <i>Fear</i>. Fear of punishment has always been
+the great weapon of the teacher, and will always, of course, retain
+some place in the conditions of the schoolroom. The subject is so
+familiar that nothing more need be said about it.</p>
+
+<p>The same is true of <i>Love</i>, and the instinctive desire to
+please those whom we love. The teacher who succeeds in getting
+herself loved by the pupils will obtain results which one of a more
+forbidding temperament finds it impossible to secure.</p>
+
+<p>Next, a word might be said about <i>Curiosity</i>. This is
+perhaps a rather poor term by which to designate the <i>impulse
+toward better cognition</i> in its full extent; but you will
+readily understand what I mean. Novelties in the way of sensible
+objects, especially if their sensational quality is bright, vivid,
+startling, invariably arrest the attention of the young and hold it
+until the desire to know more about the object is assuaged. In its
+higher, more intellectual form, the impulse toward completer
+knowledge takes the character of scientific or philosophic
+curiosity. In both its sensational and its intellectual form the
+instinct is more vivacious during childhood and youth than in after
+life. Young children are possessed by curiosity about every new
+impression that assails them. It would be quite impossible for a
+young child to listen to a lecture for more than a few minutes, as
+you are now listening to me. The outside sights and sounds would
+inevitably carry his attention off. And, for most people in middle
+life, the sort of intellectual effort required of the average
+schoolboy in mastering his Greek or Latin lesson, his algebra or
+physics, would be out of the question. The middle-aged citizen
+attends exclusively to the routine details of his business; and new
+truths, especially when they require involved trains of close
+reasoning, are no longer within the scope of his capacity.</p>
+
+<p>The sensational curiosity of childhood is appealed to more
+particularly by certain determinate kinds of objects. Material
+things, things that move, living things, human actions and accounts
+of human action, will win the attention better than anything that
+is more abstract. Here again comes in the advantage of the
+object-teaching and manual training methods. The pupil's attention
+is spontaneously held by any problem that involves the presentation
+of a new material object or of an activity on any one's part. The
+teacher's earliest appeals, therefore, must be through objects
+shown or acts performed or described. Theoretic curiosity,
+curiosity about the rational relations between things, can hardly
+be said to awake at all until adolescence is reached. The sporadic
+metaphysical inquiries of children as to who made God, and why they
+have five fingers, need hardly be counted here. But, when the
+theoretic instinct is once alive in the pupil, an entirely new
+order of pedagogic relations begins for him. Reasons, causes,
+abstract conceptions, suddenly grow full of zest, a fact with which
+all teachers are familiar. And, both in its sensible and in its
+rational developments, disinterested curiosity may be successfully
+appealed to in the child with much more certainty than in the
+adult, in whom this intellectual instinct has grown so torpid as
+usually never to awake unless it enters into association with some
+selfish personal interest. Of this latter point I will say more
+anon.</p>
+
+<p><i>Imitation</i>. Man has always been recognized as the
+imitative animal <i>par excellence</i>. And there is hardly a book
+on psychology, however old, which has not devoted at least one
+paragraph to this fact. It is strange, however, that the full scope
+and pregnancy of the imitative impulse in man has had to wait till
+the last dozen years to become adequately recognized. M. Tarde led
+the way in his admirably original work, "Les Lois de l'Imitation";
+and in our own country Professors Royce and Baldwin have kept the
+ball rolling with all the energy that could be desired. Each of us
+is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his
+imitativeness. We become conscious of what we ourselves are by
+imitating others&mdash;the consciousness of what the others are
+precedes&mdash;the sense of self grows by the sense of pattern. The
+entire accumulated wealth of mankind&mdash;languages, arts,
+institutions, and sciences&mdash;is passed on from one generation
+to another by what Baldwin has called social heredity, each
+generation simply imitating the last. Into the particulars of this
+most fascinating chapter of psychology I have no time to go. The
+moment one hears Tarde's proposition uttered, however, one feels
+how supremely true it is. Invention, using the term most broadly,
+and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the
+human race historically has walked.</p>
+
+<p>Imitation shades imperceptibly into <i>Emulation</i>. Emulation
+is the impulse to imitate what you see another doing, in order not
+to appear inferior; and it is hard to draw a sharp line between the
+manifestations of the two impulses, so inextricably do they mix
+their effects. Emulation is the very nerve of human society. Why
+are you, my hearers, sitting here before me? If no one whom you
+ever heard of had attended a 'summer school' or teachers'
+institute, would it have occurred to any one of you to break out
+independently and do a thing so unprescribed by fashion? Probably
+not. Nor would your pupils come to you unless the children of their
+parents' neighbors were all simultaneously being sent to school. We
+wish not to be lonely or eccentric, and we wish not to be cut off
+from our share in things which to our neighbors seem desirable
+privileges.</p>
+
+<p>In the schoolroom, imitation and emulation play absolutely vital
+parts. Every teacher knows the advantage of having certain things
+performed by whole bands of children at a time. The teacher who
+meets with most success is the teacher whose own ways are the most
+imitable. A teacher should never try to make the pupils do a thing
+which she cannot do herself. "Come and let me show you how" is an
+incomparably better stimulus than "Go and do it as the book
+directs." Children admire a teacher who has skill. What he does
+seems easy, and they wish to emulate it. It is useless for a dull
+and devitalized teacher to exhort her pupils to wake up and take an
+interest. She must first take one herself; then her example is
+effective, as no exhortation can possibly be.</p>
+
+<p>Every school has its tone, moral and intellectual. And this tone
+is a mere tradition kept up by imitation, due in the first instance
+to the example set by teachers and by previous pupils of an
+aggressive and dominating type, copied by the others, and passed on
+from year to year, so that the new pupils take the cue almost
+immediately. Such a tone changes very slowly, if at all; and then
+always under the modifying influence of new personalities
+aggressive enough in character to set new patterns and not merely
+to copy the old. The classic example of this sort of tone is the
+often quoted case of Rugby under Dr. Arnold's administration. He
+impressed his own character as a model on the imagination of the
+oldest boys, who in turn were expected and required to impress
+theirs upon the younger set. The contagiousness of Arnold's genius
+was such that a Rugby man was said to be recognizable all through
+life by a peculiar turn of character which he acquired at school.
+It is obvious that psychology as such can give in this field no
+precepts of detail. As in so many other fields of teaching, success
+depends mainly on the native genius of the teacher, the sympathy,
+tact, and perception which enable him to seize the right moment and
+to set the right example.</p>
+
+<p>Among the recent modern reforms of teaching methods, a certain
+disparagement of emulation, as a laudable spring of action in the
+schoolroom, has often made itself heard. More than a century ago,
+Rousseau, in his '&Eacute;mile,' branded rivalry between one pupil
+and another as too base a passion to play a part in an ideal
+education. "Let &Eacute;mile," he said, "never be led to compare
+himself to other children. No rivalries, not even in running, as
+soon as he begins to have the power of reason. It were a hundred
+times better that he should not learn at all what he could only
+learn through jealousy or vanity. But I would mark out every year
+the progress he may have made, and I would compare it with the
+progress of the following years. I would say to him: 'You are now
+grown so many inches taller; there is the ditch which you jumped
+over, there is the burden which you raised. There is the distance
+to which you could throw a pebble, there the distance you could run
+over without losing breath. See how much more you can do now!' Thus
+I should excite him without making him jealous of any one. He would
+wish to surpass himself. I can see no inconvenience in this
+emulation with his former self."</p>
+
+<p>Unquestionably, emulation with one's former self is a noble form
+of the passion of rivalry, and has a wide scope in the training of
+the young. But to veto and taboo all possible rivalry of one youth
+with another, because such rivalry may degenerate into greedy and
+selfish excess, does seem to savor somewhat of sentimentality, or
+even of fanaticism. The feeling of rivalry lies at the very basis
+of our being, all social improvement being largely due to it. There
+is a noble and generous kind of rivalry, as well as a spiteful and
+greedy kind; and the noble and generous form is particularly common
+in childhood. All games owe the zest which they bring with them to
+the fact that they are rooted in the emulous passion, yet they are
+the chief means of training in fairness and magnanimity. Can the
+teacher afford to throw such an ally away? Ought we seriously to
+hope that marks, distinctions, prizes, and other goals of effort,
+based on the pursuit of recognized superiority, should be forever
+banished from our schools? As a psychologist, obliged to notice the
+deep and pervasive character of the emulous passion, I must confess
+my doubts.</p>
+
+<p>The wise teacher will use this instinct as he uses others,
+reaping its advantages, and appealing to it in such a way as to
+reap a maximum of benefit with a minimum of harm; for, after all,
+we must confess, with a French critic of Rousseau's doctrine, that
+the deepest spring of action in us is the sight of action in
+another. The spectacle of effort is what awakens and sustains our
+own effort. No runner running all alone on a race-track will find
+in his own will the power of stimulation which his rivalry with
+other runners incites, when he feels them at his heels, about to
+pass. When a trotting horse is 'speeded,' a running horse must go
+beside him to keep him to the pace.</p>
+
+<p>As imitation slides into emulation, so emulation slides into
+<i>Ambition</i>; and ambition connects itself closely with
+<i>Pugnacity</i> and <i>Pride</i>. Consequently, these five
+instinctive tendencies form an interconnected group of factors,
+hard to separate in the determination of a great deal of our
+conduct. The <i>Ambitious Impulses</i> would perhaps be the best
+name for the whole group.</p>
+
+<p>Pride and pugnacity have often been considered unworthy passions
+to appeal to in the young. But in their more refined and noble
+forms they play a great part in the schoolroom and in education
+generally, being in some characters most potent spurs to effort.
+Pugnacity need not be thought of merely in the form of physical
+combativeness. It can be taken in the sense of a general
+unwillingness to be beaten by any kind of difficulty. It is what
+makes us feel 'stumped' and challenged by arduous achievements, and
+is essential to a spirited and enterprising character. We have of
+late been hearing much of the philosophy of tenderness in
+education; 'interest' must be assiduously awakened in everything,
+difficulties must be smoothed away. <i>Soft</i> pedagogics have
+taken the place of the old steep and rocky path to learning. But
+from this lukewarm air the bracing oxygen of effort is left out. It
+is nonsense to suppose that every step in education <i>can</i> be
+interesting. The fighting impulse must often be appealed to. Make
+the pupil feel ashamed of being scared at fractions, of being
+'downed' by the law of falling bodies; rouse his pugnacity and
+pride, and he will rush at the difficult places with a sort of
+inner wrath at himself that is one of his best moral faculties. A
+victory scored under such conditions becomes a turning-point and
+crisis of his character. It represents the high-water mark of his
+powers, and serves thereafter as an ideal pattern for his
+self-imitation. The teacher who never rouses this sort of
+pugnacious excitement in his pupils falls short of one of his best
+forms of usefulness.</p>
+
+<p>The next instinct which I shall mention is that of
+<i>Ownership</i>, also one of the radical endowments of the race.
+It often is the antagonist of imitation. Whether social progress is
+due more to the passion for keeping old things and habits or to the
+passion of imitating and acquiring new ones may in some cases be a
+difficult thing to decide. The sense of ownership begins in the
+second year of life. Among the first words which an infant learns
+to utter are the words 'my' and 'mine,' and woe to the parents of
+twins who fail to provide their gifts in duplicate. The depth and
+primitiveness of this instinct would seem to cast a sort of
+psychological discredit in advance upon all radical forms of
+communistic utopia. Private proprietorship cannot be practically
+abolished until human nature is changed. It seems essential to
+mental health that the individual should have something beyond the
+bare clothes on his back to which he can assert exclusive
+possession, and which he may defend adversely against the world.
+Even those religious orders who make the most stringent vows of
+poverty have found it necessary to relax the rule a little in favor
+of the human heart made unhappy by reduction to too disinterested
+terms. The monk must have his books: the nun must have her little
+garden, and the images and pictures in her room.</p>
+
+<p>In education, the instinct of ownership is fundamental, and can
+be appealed to in many ways. In the house, training in order and
+neatness begins with the arrangement of the child's own personal
+possessions. In the school, ownership is particularly important in
+connection with one of its special forms of activity, the
+collecting impulse. An object possibly not very interesting in
+itself, like a shell, a postage stamp, or a single map or drawing,
+will acquire an interest if it fills a gap in a collection or helps
+to complete a series. Much of the scholarly work of the world, so
+far as it is mere bibliography, memory, and erudition (and this
+lies at the basis of all our human scholarship), would seem to owe
+its interest rather to the way in which it gratifies the
+accumulating and collecting instinct than to any special appeal
+which it makes to our cravings after rationality. A man wishes a
+complete collection of information, wishes to know more about a
+subject than anybody else, much as another may wish to own more
+dollars or more early editions or more engravings before the letter
+than anybody else.</p>
+
+<p>The teacher who can work this impulse into the school tasks is
+fortunate. Almost all children collect something. A tactful teacher
+may get them to take pleasure in collecting books; in keeping a
+neat and orderly collection of notes; in starting, when they are
+mature enough, a card catalogue; in preserving every drawing or map
+which they may make. Neatness, order, and method are thus
+instinctively gained, along with the other benefits which the
+possession of the collection entails. Even such a noisome thing as
+a collection of postage stamps may be used by the teacher as an
+inciter of interest in the geographical and historical information
+which she desires to impart. Sloyd successfully avails itself of
+this instinct in causing the pupil to make a collection of wooden
+implements fit for his own private use at home. Collecting is, of
+course, the basis of all natural history study; and probably nobody
+ever became a good naturalist who was not an unusually active
+collector when a boy.</p>
+
+<p><i>Constructiveness</i> is another great instinctive tendency
+with which the schoolroom has to contract an alliance. Up to the
+eighth or ninth year of childhood one may say that the child does
+hardly anything else than handle objects, explore things with his
+hands, doing and undoing, setting up and knocking down, putting
+together and pulling apart; for, from the psychological point of
+view, construction and destruction are two names for the same
+manual activity. Both signify the production of change, and the
+working of effects, in outward things. The result of all this is
+that intimate familiarity with the physical environment, that
+acquaintance with the properties of material things, which is
+really the foundation of human <i>consciousness</i>. To the very
+last, in most of us, the conceptions of objects and their
+properties are limited to the notion of what we can <i>do with
+them</i>. A 'stick' means something we can lean upon or strike
+with; 'fire,' something to cook, or warm ourselves, or burn things
+up withal; 'string,' something with which to tie things together.
+For most people these objects have no other meaning. In geometry,
+the cylinder, circle, sphere, are defined as what you get by going
+through certain processes of construction, revolving a
+parallelogram upon one of its sides, etc. The more different kinds
+of things a child thus gets to know by treating and handling them,
+the more confident grows his sense of kinship with the world in
+which he lives. An unsympathetic adult will wonder at the
+fascinated hours which a child will spend in putting his blocks
+together and rearranging them. But the wise education takes the
+tide at the flood, and from the kindergarten upward devotes the
+first years of education to training in construction and to
+object-teaching. I need not recapitulate here what I said awhile
+back about the superiority of the objective and experimental
+methods. They occupy the pupil in a way most congruous with the
+spontaneous interests of his age. They absorb him, and leave
+impressions durable and profound. Compared with the youth taught by
+these methods, one brought up exclusively by books carries through
+life a certain remoteness from reality: he stands, as it were, out
+of the pale, and feels that he stands so; and often suffers a kind
+of melancholy from which he might have been rescued by a more real
+education.</p>
+
+<p>There are other impulses, such as love of approbation or vanity,
+shyness and secretiveness, of which a word might be said; but they
+are too familiar to need it. You can easily pursue the subject by
+your own reflection. There is one general law, however, that
+relates to many of our instinctive tendencies, and that has no
+little importance in education; and I must refer to it briefly
+before I leave the subject. It has been called the law of
+transitoriness in instincts. Many of our impulsive tendencies ripen
+at a certain period; and, if the appropriate objects be then and
+there provided, habits of conduct toward them are acquired which
+last. But, if the objects be not forthcoming then, the impulse may
+die out before a habit is formed; and later it may be hard to teach
+the creature to react appropriately in those directions. The
+sucking instincts in mammals, the following instinct in certain
+birds and quadrupeds, are examples of this: they fade away shortly
+after birth.</p>
+
+<p>In children we observe a ripening of impulses and interests in a
+certain determinate order. Creeping, walking, climbing, imitating
+vocal sounds, constructing, drawing, calculating, possess the child
+in succession; and in some children the possession, while it lasts,
+may be of a semi-frantic and exclusive sort. Later, the interest in
+any one of these things may wholly fade away. Of course, the proper
+pedagogic moment to work skill in, and to clench the useful habit,
+is when the native impulse is most acutely present. Crowd on the
+athletic opportunities, the mental arithmetic, the verse-learning,
+the drawing, the botany, or what not, the moment you have reason to
+think the hour is ripe. The hour may not last long, and while it
+continues you may safely let all the child's other occupations take
+a second place. In this way you economize time and deepen skill;
+for many an infant prodigy, artistic or mathematical, has a
+flowering epoch of but a few months.</p>
+
+<p>One can draw no specific rules for all this. It depends on close
+observation in the particular case, and parents here have a great
+advantage over teachers. In fact, the law of transitoriness has
+little chance of individualized application in the schools.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the little interested and impulsive psychophysical
+organism whose springs of action the teacher must divine, and to
+whose ways he must become accustomed. He must start with the native
+tendencies, and enlarge the pupil's entire passive and active
+experience. He must ply him with new objects and stimuli, and make
+him taste the fruits of his behavior, so that now that whole
+context of remembered experience is what shall determine his
+conduct when he gets the stimulus, and not the bare immediate
+impression. As the pupil's life thus enlarges, it gets fuller and
+fuller of all sorts of memories and associations and substitutions;
+but the eye accustomed to psychological analysis will discern,
+underneath it all, the outlines of our simple psychophysical
+scheme.</p>
+
+<p>Respect then, I beg you, always the original reactions, even
+when you are seeking to overcome their connection with certain
+objects, and to supplant them with others that you wish to make the
+rule. Bad behavior, from the point of view of the teacher's art, is
+as good a starting-point as good behavior. In fact, paradoxical as
+it may sound to say so, it is often a better starting-point than
+good behavior would be.</p>
+
+<p>The acquired reactions must be made habitual whenever they are
+appropriate. Therefore Habit is the next subject to which your
+attention is invited.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="VIII__THE_LAWS_OF_HABIT"
+id="VIII__THE_LAWS_OF_HABIT" />VIII. THE LAWS OF HABIT</h2>
+
+<p>It is very important that teachers should realize the importance
+of habit, and psychology helps us greatly at this point. We speak,
+it is true, of good habits and of bad habits; but, when people use
+the word 'habit,' in the majority of instances it is a bad habit
+which they have in mind. They talk of the smoking-habit and the
+swearing-habit and the drinking-habit, but not of the
+abstention-habit or the moderation-habit or the courage-habit. But
+the fact is that our virtues are habits as much as our vices. All
+our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of
+habits,&mdash;practical, emotional, and
+intellectual,&mdash;systematically organized for our weal or woe,
+and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter
+may be.</p>
+
+<p>Since pupils can understand this at a comparatively early age,
+and since to understand it contributes in no small measure to their
+feeling of responsibility, it would be well if the teacher were
+able himself to talk to them of the philosophy of habit in some
+such abstract terms as I am now about to talk of it to you.</p>
+
+<p>I believe that we are subject to the law of habit in consequence
+of the fact that we have bodies. The plasticity of the living
+matter of our nervous system, in short, is the reason why we do a
+thing with difficulty the first time, but soon do it more and more
+easily, and finally, with sufficient practice, do it
+semi-mechanically, or with hardly any consciousness at all. Our
+nervous systems have (in Dr. Carpenter's words) <i>grown</i> to the
+way in which they have been exercised, just as a sheet of paper or
+a coat, once creased or folded, tends to fall forever afterward
+into the same identical folds.</p>
+
+<p>Habit is thus a second nature, or rather, as the Duke of
+Wellington said, it is 'ten times nature,'&mdash;at any rate as
+regards its importance in adult life; for the acquired habits of
+our training have by that time inhibited or strangled most of the
+natural impulsive tendencies which were originally there.
+Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine
+thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from
+our rising in the morning to our lying down each night. Our
+dressing and undressing, our eating and drinking, our greetings and
+partings, our hat-raisings and giving way for ladies to precede,
+nay, even most of the forms of our common speech, are things of a
+type so fixed by repetition as almost to be classed as reflex
+actions. To each sort of impression we have an automatic,
+ready-made response. My very words to you now are an example of
+what I mean; for having already lectured upon habit and printed a
+chapter about it in a book, and read the latter when in print, I
+find my tongue inevitably falling into its old phrases and
+repeating almost literally what I said before.</p>
+
+<p>So far as we are thus mere bundles of habit, we are stereotyped
+creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves. And since
+this, under any circumstances, is what we always tend to become, it
+follows first of all that the teacher's prime concern should be to
+ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most
+useful to him throughout life. Education is for behavior, and
+habits are the stuff of which behavior consists.</p>
+
+<p>To quote my earlier book directly, the great thing in all
+education is to <i>make our nervous system our ally instead of our
+enemy</i>. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live
+at ease upon the interest of the fund. <i>For this we must make
+automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful
+actions as we can</i>, and as carefully guard against the growing
+into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous. The more of the
+details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless
+custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be
+set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable
+human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision,
+and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every
+cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the
+beginning of every bit of work are subjects of express volitional
+deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding
+or regretting of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as
+practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. If there be
+such daily duties not yet ingrained in any one of my hearers, let
+him begin this very hour to set the matter right.</p>
+
+<p>In Professor Bain's chapter on 'The Moral Habits' there are some
+admirable practical remarks laid down. Two great maxims emerge from
+the treatment. The first is that in the acquisition of a new habit,
+or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to <i>launch
+ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible</i>.
+Accumulate all the possible circumstances which shall reinforce the
+right motives; put yourself assiduously in conditions that
+encourage the new way; make engagements incompatible with the old;
+take a public pledge, if the case allows; in short, envelope your
+resolution with every aid you know. This will give your new
+beginning such a momentum that the temptation to break down will
+not occur as soon as it otherwise might; and every day during which
+a breakdown is postponed adds to the chances of its not occurring
+at all.</p>
+
+<p>I remember long ago reading in an Austrian paper the
+advertisement of a certain Rudolph Somebody, who promised fifty
+gulden reward to any one who after that date should find him at the
+wine-shop of Ambrosius So-and-so. 'This I do,' the advertisement
+continued, 'in consequence of a promise which I have made my wife.'
+With such a wife, and such an understanding of the way in which to
+start new habits, it would be safe to stake one's money on
+Rudolph's ultimate success.</p>
+
+<p>The second maxim is, <i>Never suffer an exception to occur till
+the new habit is securely rooted in your life</i>. Each lapse is
+like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully
+winding up: a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will
+wind again. Continuity of training is the great means of making the
+nervous system act infallibly right. As Professor Bain
+says:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"The peculiarity of the moral habits, contradistinguishing them
+from the intellectual acquisitions, is the presence of two hostile
+powers, one to be gradually raised into the ascendant over the
+other. It is necessary above all things, in such a situation, never
+to lose a battle. Every gain on the wrong side undoes the effect of
+many conquests on the right. The essential precaution, therefore,
+is so to regulate the two opposing powers that the one may have a
+series of uninterrupted successes, until repetition has fortified
+it to such a degree as to enable it to cope with the opposition,
+under any circumstances. This is the theoretically best career of
+mental progress."</p>
+
+<p>A third maxim may be added to the preceding pair: <i>Seize the
+very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you
+make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the
+direction of the habits you aspire to gain.</i> It is not in the
+moment of their forming, but in the moment of their producing motor
+effects, that resolves and aspirations communicate the new 'set' to
+the brain.</p>
+
+<p>No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no
+matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one have not taken
+advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may
+remain entirely unaffected for the better. With good intentions,
+hell proverbially is paved. This is an obvious consequence of the
+principles I have laid down. A 'character,' as J.S. Mill says, 'is
+a completely fashioned will'; and a will, in the sense in which he
+means it, is an aggregate of tendencies to act in a firm and prompt
+and definite way upon all the principal emergencies of life. A
+tendency to act only becomes effectively ingrained in us in
+proportion to the uninterrupted frequency with which the actions
+actually occur, and the brain 'grows' to their use. When a resolve
+or a fine glow of feeling is allowed to evaporate without bearing
+practical fruit, it is worse than a chance lost: it works so as
+positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking
+the normal path of discharge. There is no more contemptible type of
+human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and
+dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility, but
+never does a concrete manly deed.</p>
+
+<p>This leads to a fourth maxim. <i>Don't preach too much to your
+pupils or abound in good talk in the abstract</i>. Lie in wait
+rather for the practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as
+they pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils both to think,
+to feel, and to do. The strokes of <i>behavior</i> are what give
+the new set to the character, and work the good habits into its
+organic tissue. Preaching and talking too soon become an
+ineffectual bore.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+
+
+<p>There is a passage in Darwin's short autobiography which has
+been often quoted, and which, for the sake of its bearing on our
+subject of habit, I must now quote again. Darwin says: "Up to the
+age of thirty or beyond it, poetry of many kinds gave me great
+pleasure; and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in
+Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said
+that pictures formerly gave me considerable, and music very great
+delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of
+poetry. I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so
+intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my
+taste for pictures or music.... My mind seems to have become a kind
+of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of
+facts; but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of
+the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot
+conceive.... If I had to live my life again, I would have made a
+rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once
+every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would
+thus have been kept alive through use. The loss of these tastes is
+a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the
+intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling
+the emotional part of our nature."</p>
+
+<p>We all intend when young to be all that may become a man, before
+the destroyer cuts us down. We wish and expect to enjoy poetry
+always, to grow more and more intelligent about pictures and music,
+to keep in touch with spiritual and religious ideas, and even not
+to let the greater philosophic thoughts of our time develop quite
+beyond our view. We mean all this in youth, I say; and yet in how
+many middle-aged men and women is such an honest and sanguine
+expectation fulfilled? Surely, in comparatively few; and the laws
+of habit show us why. Some interest in each of these things arises
+in everybody at the proper age; but, if not persistently fed with
+the appropriate matter, instead of growing into a powerful and
+necessary habit, it atrophies and dies, choked by the rival
+interests to which the daily food is given. We make ourselves into
+Darwins in this negative respect by persistently ignoring the
+essential practical conditions of our case. We say abstractly: "I
+mean to enjoy poetry, and to absorb a lot of it, of course. I fully
+intend to keep up my love of music, to read the books that shall
+give new turns to the thought of my time, to keep my higher
+spiritual side alive, etc." But we do not attack these things
+concretely, and we do not begin <i>to-day.</i> We forget that every
+good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily
+effort. We postpone and postpone, until those smiling possibilities
+are dead. Whereas ten minutes a day of poetry, of spiritual reading
+or meditation, and an hour or two a week at music, pictures, or
+philosophy, provided we began <i>now</i> and suffered no remission,
+would infallibly give us in due time the fulness of all we desire.
+By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing ourselves
+the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our
+higher possibilities. This is a point concerning which you teachers
+might well give a little timely information to your older and more
+aspiring pupils.</p>
+
+<p>According as a function receives daily exercise or not, the man
+becomes a different kind of being in later life. We have lately had
+a number of accomplished Hindoo visitors at Cambridge, who talked
+freely of life and philosophy. More than one of them has confided
+to me that the sight of our faces, all contracted as they are with
+the habitual American over-intensity and anxiety of expression, and
+our ungraceful and distorted attitudes when sitting, made on him a
+very painful impression. "I do not see," said one, "how it is
+possible for you to live as you do, without a single minute in your
+day deliberately given to tranquillity and meditation. It is an
+invariable part of our Hindoo life to retire for at least half an
+hour daily into silence, to relax our muscles, govern our
+breathing, and meditate on eternal things. Every Hindoo child is
+trained to this from a very early age." The good fruits of such a
+discipline were obvious in the physical repose and lack of tension,
+and the wonderful smoothness and calmness of facial expression, and
+imperturbability of manner of these Orientals. I felt that my
+countrymen were depriving themselves of an essential grace of
+character. How many American children ever hear it said by parent
+or teacher, that they should moderate their piercing voices, that
+they should relax their unused muscles, and as far as possible,
+when sitting, sit quite still? Not one in a thousand, not one in
+five thousand! Yet, from its reflex influence on the inner mental
+states, this ceaseless over-tension, over-motion, and
+over-expression are working on us grievous national harm.</p>
+
+<p>I beg you teachers to think a little seriously of this matter.
+Perhaps you can help our rising generation of Americans toward the
+beginning of a better set of personal ideals.<a name="FNanchor_A_2"
+id="FNanchor_A_2" /><a href="#Footnote_A_2"
+class="fnanchor">[A]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+<p><a name="Footnote_A_2" id="Footnote_A_2" /><a
+href="#FNanchor_A_2"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> See the
+Address on the Gospel of Relaxation, later in this volume.</p>
+</div>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+
+
+<p>To go back now to our general maxims, I may at last, as a fifth
+and final practical maxim about habits, offer something like this:
+<i>Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous
+exercise every day.</i> That is, be systematically heroic in little
+unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other
+reason than its difficulty, so that, when the hour of dire need
+draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the
+test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man
+pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time,
+and possibly may never bring him a return. But, if the fire
+<i>does</i> come, his having paid it will be his salvation from
+ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of
+concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in
+unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything
+rocks around him, and his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like
+chaff in the blast.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+
+
+<p>I have been accused, when talking of the subject of habit, of
+making old habits appear so strong that the acquiring of new ones,
+and particularly anything like a sudden reform or conversion, would
+be made impossible by my doctrine. Of course, this would suffice to
+condemn the latter; for sudden conversions, however infrequent they
+may be, unquestionably do occur. But there is no incompatibility
+between the general laws I have laid down and the most startling
+sudden alterations in the way of character. New habits <i>can</i>
+be launched, I have expressly said, on condition of there being new
+stimuli and new excitements. Now life abounds in these, and
+sometimes they are such critical and revolutionary experiences that
+they change a man's whole scale of values and system of ideas. In
+such cases, the old order of his habits will be ruptured; and, if
+the new motives are lasting, new habits will be formed, and build
+up in him a new or regenerate 'nature.'</p>
+
+<p>All this kind of fact I fully allow. But the general laws of
+habit are no wise altered thereby, and the physiological study of
+mental conditions still remains on the whole the most powerful ally
+of hortatory ethics. The hell to be endured hereafter, of which
+theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in
+this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong
+way. Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere
+walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their
+conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates,
+good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of
+virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar. The drunken Rip
+Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh
+dereliction by saying, "I won't count this time!" Well, he may not
+count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being
+counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the
+molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used
+against him when the next temptation comes. Nothing we ever do is,
+in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, this has its good side as well as its bad one. As we
+become permanent drunkards by so many separate drinks, so we become
+saints in the moral, and authorities and experts in the practical
+and scientific spheres, by so many separate acts and hours of work.
+Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education,
+whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each
+hour of the working day, he may safely leave the final result to
+itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine
+morning to find himself one of the competent ones of his
+generation, in whatever pursuit he may have singled out. Silently,
+between all the details of his business, the <i>power of
+judging</i> in all that class of matter will have built itself up
+within him as a possession that will never pass away. Young people
+should know this truth in advance. The ignorance of it has probably
+engendered more discouragement and faint-heartedness in youths
+embarking on arduous careers than all other causes put
+together.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="IX__THE_ASSOCIATION_OF_IDEAS"
+id="IX__THE_ASSOCIATION_OF_IDEAS" />IX. THE ASSOCIATION OF
+IDEAS</h2>
+
+<p>In my last talk, in treating of Habit, I chiefly had in mind our
+<i>motor</i> habits,&mdash;habits of external conduct. But our
+thinking and feeling processes are also largely subject to the law
+of habit, and one result of this is a phenomenon which you all know
+under the name of 'the association of ideas.' To that phenomenon I
+ask you now to turn.</p>
+
+<p>You remember that consciousness is an ever-flowing stream of
+objects, feelings, and impulsive tendencies. We saw already that
+its phases or pulses are like so many fields or waves, each field
+or wave having usually its central point of liveliest attention, in
+the shape of the most prominent object in our thought, while all
+around this lies a margin of other objects more dimly realized,
+together with the margin of emotional and active tendencies which
+the whole entails. Describing the mind thus in fluid terms, we
+cling as close as possible to nature. At first sight, it might seem
+as if, in the fluidity of these successive waves, everything is
+indeterminate. But inspection shows that each wave has a
+constitution which can be to some degree explained by the
+constitution of the waves just passed away. And this relation of
+the wave to its predecessors is expressed by the two fundamental
+'laws of association,' so-called, of which the first is named the
+Law of Contiguity, the second that of Similarity.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Law of Contiguity</i> tells us that objects thought of in
+the coming wave are such as in some previous experience were
+<i>next</i> to the objects represented in the wave that is passing
+away. The vanishing objects were once formerly their neighbors in
+the mind. When you recite the alphabet or your prayers, or when the
+sight of an object reminds you of its name, or the name reminds you
+of the object, it is through the law of contiguity that the terms
+are suggested to the mind.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Law of Similarity</i> says that, when contiguity fails to
+describe what happens, the coming objects will prove to
+<i>resemble</i> the going objects, even though the two were never
+experienced together before. In our 'flights of fancy,' this is
+frequently the case.</p>
+
+<p>If, arresting ourselves in the flow of reverie, we ask the
+question, "How came we to be thinking of just this object now?" we
+can almost always trace its presence to some previous object which
+has introduced it to the mind, according to one or the other of
+these laws. The entire routine of our memorized acquisitions, for
+example, is a consequence of nothing but the Law of Contiguity. The
+words of a poem, the formulas of trigonometry, the facts of
+history, the properties of material things, are all known to us as
+definite systems or groups of objects which cohere in an order
+fixed by innumerable iterations, and of which any one part reminds
+us of the others. In dry and prosaic minds, almost all the mental
+sequences flow along these lines of habitual routine repetition and
+suggestion.</p>
+
+<p>In witty, imaginative minds, on the other hand, the routine is
+broken through with ease at any moment; and one field of mental
+objects will suggest another with which perhaps in the whole
+history of human thinking it had never once before been coupled.
+The link here is usually some <i>analogy</i> between the objects
+successively thought of,&mdash;an analogy often so subtle that,
+although we feel it, we can with difficulty analyze its ground; as
+where, for example, we find something masculine in the color red
+and something feminine in the color pale blue, or where, of three
+human beings' characters, one will remind us of a cat, another of a
+dog, the third perhaps of a cow.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+
+
+<p>Psychologists have of course gone very deeply into the question
+of what the causes of association may be; and some of them have
+tried to show that contiguity and similarity are not two radically
+diverse laws, but that either presupposes the presence of the
+other. I myself am disposed to think that the phenomena of
+association depend on our cerebral constitution, and are not
+immediate consequences of our being rational beings. In other
+words, when we shall have become disembodied spirits, it may be
+that our trains of consciousness will follow different laws. These
+questions are discussed in the books on psychology, and I hope that
+some of you will be interested in following them there. But I will,
+on the present occasion, ignore them entirely; for, as teachers, it
+is the <i>fact</i> of association that practically concerns you,
+let its grounds be spiritual or cerebral, or what they may, and let
+its laws be reducible, or non-reducible, to one. Your pupils,
+whatever else they are, are at any rate little pieces of
+associating machinery. Their education consists in the organizing
+within them of determinate tendencies to associate one thing with
+another,&mdash;impressions with consequences, these with reactions,
+those with results, and so on indefinitely. The more copious the
+associative systems, the completer the individual's adaptations to
+the world.</p>
+
+<p>The teacher can formulate his function to himself therefore in
+terms of 'association' as well as in terms of 'native and acquired
+reaction.' It is mainly that of <i>building up useful systems of
+association</i> in the pupil's mind. This description sounds wider
+than the one I began by giving. But, when one thinks that our
+trains of association, whatever they may be, normally issue in
+acquired reactions or behavior, one sees that in a general way the
+same mass of facts is covered by both formulas.</p>
+
+<p>It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when
+we have once grasped the principles of association. The great
+problem which association undertakes to solve is, <i>Why does just
+this particular field of consciousness, constituted in this
+particular way, now appear before my mind?</i> It may be a field of
+objects imagined; it may be of objects remembered or of objects
+perceived; it may include an action resolved on. In either case,
+when the field is analyzed into its parts, those parts can be shown
+to have proceeded from parts of fields previously before
+consciousness, in consequence of one or other of the laws of
+association just laid down. Those laws <i>run</i> the mind:
+interest, shifting hither and thither, deflects it; and attention,
+as we shall later see, steers it and keeps it from too zigzag a
+course.</p>
+
+<p>To grasp these factors clearly gives one a solid and simple
+understanding of the psychological machinery. The 'nature,' the
+'character,' of an individual means really nothing but the habitual
+form of his associations. To break up bad associations or wrong
+ones, to build others in, to guide the associative tendencies into
+the most fruitful channels, is the educator's principal task. But
+here, as with all other simple principles, the difficulty lies in
+the application. Psychology can state the laws: concrete tact and
+talent alone can work them to useful results.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile it is a matter of the commonest experience that our
+minds may pass from one object to another by various intermediary
+fields of consciousness. The indeterminateness of our paths of
+association <i>in concreto</i> is thus almost as striking a feature
+of them as the uniformity of their abstract form. Start from any
+idea whatever, and the entire range of your ideas is potentially at
+your disposal. If we take as the associative starting-point, or
+cue, some simple word which I pronounce before you, there is no
+limit to the possible diversity of suggestions which it may set up
+in your minds. Suppose I say 'blue,' for example: some of you may
+think of the blue sky and hot weather from which we now are
+suffering, then go off on thoughts of summer clothing, or possibly
+of meteorology at large; others may think of the spectrum and the
+physiology of color-vision, and glide into X-rays and recent
+physical speculations; others may think of blue ribbons, or of the
+blue flowers on a friend's hat, and proceed on lines of personal
+reminiscence. To others, again, etymology and linguistic thoughts
+may be suggested; or blue may be 'apperceived' as a synonym for
+melancholy, and a train of associates connected with morbid
+psychology may proceed to unroll themselves.</p>
+
+<p>In the same person, the same word heard at different times will
+provoke, in consequence of the varying marginal preoccupations,
+either one of a number of diverse possible associative sequences.
+Professor M&uuml;nsterberg performed this experiment methodically,
+using the same words four times over, at three-month intervals, as
+'cues' for four different persons who were the subjects of
+observation. He found almost no constancy in their associations
+taken at these different times. In short, the entire potential
+content of one's consciousness is accessible from any one of its
+points. This is why we can never work the laws of association
+forward: starting from the present field as a cue, we can never
+cipher out in advance just what the person will be thinking of five
+minutes later. The elements which may become prepotent in the
+process, the parts of each successive field round which the
+associations shall chiefly turn, the possible bifurcations of
+suggestion, are so numerous and ambiguous as to be indeterminable
+before the fact. But, although we cannot work the laws of
+association forward, we can always work them backwards. We cannot
+say now what we shall find ourselves thinking of five minutes
+hence; but, whatever it may be, we shall then be able to trace it
+through intermediary links of contiguity or similarity to what we
+are thinking now. What so baffles our prevision is the shifting
+part played by the margin and focus&mdash;in fact, by each element
+by itself of the margin or focus&mdash;in calling up the next
+ideas.</p>
+
+<p>For example, I am reciting 'Locksley Hall,' in order to divert
+my mind from a state of suspense that I am in concerning the will
+of a relative that is dead. The will still remains in the mental
+background as an extremely marginal or ultra-marginal portion of my
+field of consciousness; but the poem fairly keeps my attention from
+it, until I come to the line, "I, the heir of all the ages, in the
+foremost files of time." The words 'I, the heir,' immediately make
+an electric connection with the marginal thought of the will; that,
+in turn, makes my heart beat with anticipation of my possible
+legacy, so that I throw down the book and pace the floor excitedly
+with visions of my future fortune pouring through my mind. Any
+portion of the field of consciousness that has more potentialities
+of emotional excitement than another may thus be roused to
+predominant activity; and the shifting play of interest now in one
+portion, now in another, deflects the currents in all sorts of
+zigzag ways, the mental activity running hither and thither as the
+sparks run in burnt-up paper.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+
+
+<p>One more point, and I shall have said as much to you as seems
+necessary about the process of association.</p>
+
+<p>You just saw how a single exciting word may call up its own
+associates prepotently, and deflect our whole train of thinking
+from the previous track. The fact is that every portion of the
+field <i>tends</i> to call up its own associates; but, if these
+associates be severally different, there is rivalry, and as soon as
+one or a few begin to be effective the others seem to get siphoned
+out, as it were, and left behind. Seldom, however, as in our
+example, does the process seem to turn round a single item in the
+mental field, or even round the entire field that is immediately in
+the act of passing. It is a matter of <i>constellation</i>, into
+which portions of fields that are already past especially seem to
+enter and have their say. Thus, to go back to 'Locksley Hall,' each
+word as I recite it in its due order is suggested not solely by the
+previous word now expiring on my lips, but it is rather the effect
+of all the previous words, taken together, of the verse. "Ages,"
+for example, calls up "in the foremost files of time," when
+preceded by "I, the heir of all the"&mdash;; but, when preceded by
+"for I doubt not through the,"&mdash;it calls up "one increasing
+purpose runs." Similarly, if I write on the blackboard the letters
+A B C D E F,... they probably suggest to you G H I.... But, if I
+write A B A D D E F, if they suggest anything, they suggest as
+their complement E C T or E F I C I E N C Y. The result depending
+on the total constellation, even though most of the single items be
+the same.</p>
+
+<p>My practical reason for mentioning this law is this, that it
+follows from it that, in working associations into your pupils'
+minds, you must not rely on single cues, but multiply the cues as
+much as possible. Couple the desired reaction with numerous
+constellations of antecedents,&mdash;don't always ask the question,
+for example, in the same way; don't use the same kind of data in
+numerical problems; vary your illustrations, etc., as much as you
+can. When we come to the subject of memory, we shall learn still
+more about this.</p>
+
+<p>So much, then, for the general subject of association. In
+leaving it for other topics (in which, however, we shall abundantly
+find it involved again), I cannot too strongly urge you to acquire
+a habit of thinking of your pupils in associative terms. All
+governors of mankind, from doctors and jail-wardens to demagogues
+and statesmen, instinctively come so to conceive their charges. If
+you do the same, thinking of them (however else you may think of
+them besides) as so many little systems of associating machinery,
+you will be astonished at the intimacy of insight into their
+operations and at the practicality of the results which you will
+gain. We think of our acquaintances, for example, as characterized
+by certain 'tendencies.' These tendencies will in almost every
+instance prove to be tendencies to association. Certain ideas in
+them are always followed by certain other ideas, these by certain
+feelings and impulses to approve or disapprove, assent or decline.
+If the topic arouse one of those first ideas, the practical outcome
+can be pretty well foreseen. 'Types of character' in short are
+largely types of association.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="X__INTEREST" id="X__INTEREST" />X. INTEREST</h2>
+
+<p>At our last meeting I treated of the native tendencies of the
+pupil to react in characteristically definite ways upon different
+stimuli or exciting circumstances. In fact, I treated of the
+pupil's instincts. Now some situations appeal to special instincts
+from the very outset, and others fail to do so until the proper
+connections have been organized in the course of the person's
+training. We say of the former set of objects or situations that
+they are <i>interesting</i> in themselves and originally. Of the
+latter we say that they are natively uninteresting, and that
+interest in them has first to be acquired.</p>
+
+<p>No topic has received more attention from pedagogical writers
+than that of interest. It is the natural sequel to the instincts we
+so lately discussed, and it is therefore well fitted to be the next
+subject which we take up.</p>
+
+<p>Since some objects are natively interesting and in others
+interest is artificially acquired, the teacher must know which the
+natively interesting ones are; for, as we shall see immediately,
+other objects can artificially acquire an interest only through
+first becoming associated with some of these natively interesting
+things.</p>
+
+<p>The native interests of children lie altogether in the sphere of
+sensation. Novel things to look at or novel sounds to hear,
+especially when they involve the spectacle of action of a violent
+sort, will always divert the attention from abstract conceptions of
+objects verbally taken in. The grimace that Johnny is making, the
+spitballs that Tommy is ready to throw, the dog-fight in the
+street, or the distant firebells ringing,&mdash;these are the
+rivals with which the teacher's powers of being interesting have
+incessantly to cope. The child will always attend more to what a
+teacher does than to what the same teacher says. During the
+performance of experiments or while the teacher is drawing on the
+blackboard, the children are tranquil and absorbed. I have seen a
+roomful of college students suddenly become perfectly still, to
+look at their professor of physics tie a piece of string around a
+stick which he was going to use in an experiment, but immediately
+grow restless when he began to explain the experiment. A lady told
+me that one day, during a lesson, she was delighted at having
+captured so completely the attention of one of her young charges.
+He did not remove his eyes from her face; but he said to her after
+the lesson was over, "I looked at you all the time, and your upper
+jaw did not move once!" That was the only fact that he had taken
+in.</p>
+
+<p>Living things, then, moving things, or things that savor of
+danger or of blood, that have a dramatic quality,&mdash;these are
+the objects natively interesting to childhood, to the exclusion of
+almost everything else; and the teacher of young children, until
+more artificial interests have grown up, will keep in touch with
+her pupils by constant appeal to such matters as these. Instruction
+must be carried on objectively, experimentally, anecdotally. The
+blackboard-drawing and story-telling must constantly come in. But
+of course these methods cover only the first steps, and carry one
+but a little way.</p>
+
+<p>Can we now formulate any general principle by which the later
+and more artificial interests connect themselves with these early
+ones that the child brings with him to the school?</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately, we can: there is a very simple law that relates the
+acquired and the native interests with each other.</p>
+
+<p><i>Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting
+through becoming associated with an object in which an interest
+already exists. The two associated objects grow, as it were,
+together: the interesting portion sheds its quality over the whole;
+and thus things not interesting in their own right borrow an
+interest which becomes as real and as strong as that of any
+natively interesting thing.</i> The odd circumstance is that the
+borrowing does not impoverish the source, the objects taken
+together being more interesting, perhaps, than the originally
+interesting portion was by itself.</p>
+
+<p>This is one of the most striking proofs of the range of
+application of the principle of association of ideas in psychology.
+An idea will infect another with its own emotional interest when
+they have become both associated together into any sort of a mental
+total. As there is no limit to the various associations into which
+an interesting idea may enter, one sees in how many ways an
+interest may be derived.</p>
+
+<p>You will understand this abstract statement easily if I take the
+most frequent of concrete examples,&mdash;the interest which things
+borrow from their connection with our own personal welfare. The
+most natively interesting object to a man is his own personal self
+and its fortunes. We accordingly see that the moment a thing
+becomes connected with the fortunes of the self, it forthwith
+becomes an interesting thing. Lend the child his books, pencils,
+and other apparatus: then give them to him, make them his own, and
+notice the new light with which they instantly shine in his eyes.
+He takes a new kind of care of them altogether. In mature life, all
+the drudgery of a man's business or profession, intolerable in
+itself, is shot through with engrossing significance because he
+knows it to be associated with his personal fortunes. What more
+deadly uninteresting object can there be than a railroad
+time-table? Yet where will you find a more interesting object if
+you are going on a journey, and by its means can find your train?
+At such times the time-table will absorb a man's entire attention,
+its interest being borrowed solely from its relation to his
+personal life. <i>From all these facts there emerges a very simple
+abstract programme for the teacher to follow in keeping the
+attention of the child: Begin with the line of his native
+interests, and offer him objects that have some immediate
+connection with these</i>. The kindergarten methods, the
+object-teaching routine, the blackboard and manual-training
+work,&mdash;all recognize this feature. Schools in which these
+methods preponderate are schools where discipline is easy, and
+where the voice of the master claiming order and attention in
+threatening tones need never be heard.</p>
+
+<p><i>Next, step by step, connect with these first objects and
+experiences the later objects and ideas which you wish to instill.
+Associate the new with the old in some natural and telling way, so
+that the interest, being shed along from point to point, finally
+suffuses the entire system of objects of thought.</i></p>
+
+<p>This is the abstract statement; and, abstractly, nothing can be
+easier to understand. It is in the fulfilment of the rule that the
+difficulty lies; for the difference between an interesting and a
+tedious teacher consists in little more than the inventiveness by
+which the one is able to mediate these associations and
+connections, and in the dulness in discovering such transitions
+which the other shows. One teacher's mind will fairly coruscate
+with points of connection between the new lesson and the
+circumstances of the children's other experience. Anecdotes and
+reminiscences will abound in her talk; and the shuttle of interest
+will shoot backward and forward, weaving the new and the old
+together in a lively and entertaining way. Another teacher has no
+such inventive fertility, and his lesson will always be a dead and
+heavy thing. This is the psychological meaning of the Herbartian
+principle of 'preparation' for each lesson, and of correlating the
+new with the old. It is the psychological meaning of that whole
+method of concentration in studies of which you have been recently
+hearing so much. When the geography and English and history and
+arithmetic simultaneously make cross-references to one another, you
+get an interesting set of processes all along the line.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+
+
+<p>If, then, you wish to insure the interest of your pupils, there
+is only one way to do it; and that is to make certain that they
+have something in their minds <i>to attend with</i>, when you begin
+to talk. That something can consist in nothing but a previous lot
+of ideas already interesting in themselves, and of such a nature
+that the incoming novel objects which you present can dovetail into
+them and form with them some kind of a logically associated or
+systematic whole. Fortunately, almost any kind of a connection is
+sufficient to carry the interest along. What a help is our
+Philippine war at present in teaching geography! But before the war
+you could ask the children if they ate pepper with their eggs, and
+where they supposed the pepper came from. Or ask them if glass is a
+stone, and, if not, why not; and then let them know how stones are
+formed and glass manufactured. External links will serve as well as
+those that are deeper and more logical. But interest, once shed
+upon a subject, is liable to remain always with that subject. Our
+acquisitions become in a measure portions of our personal self; and
+little by little, as cross-associations multiply and habits of
+familiarity and practice grow, the entire system of our objects of
+thought consolidates, most of it becoming interesting for some
+purposes and in some degree.</p>
+
+<p>An adult man's interests are almost every one of them intensely
+artificial: they have slowly been built up. The objects of
+professional interest are most of them, in their original nature,
+repulsive; but by their connection with such natively exciting
+objects as one's personal fortune, one's social responsibilities,
+and especially by the force of inveterate habit, they grow to be
+the only things for which in middle life a man profoundly
+cares.</p>
+
+<p>But in all these the spread and consolidation have followed
+nothing but the principles first laid down. If we could recall for
+a moment our whole individual history, we should see that our
+professional ideals and the zeal they inspire are due to nothing
+but the slow accretion of one mental object to another, traceable
+backward from point to point till we reach the moment when, in the
+nursery or in the schoolroom, some little story told, some little
+object shown, some little operation witnessed, brought the first
+new object and new interest within our ken by associating it with
+some one of those primitively there. The interest now suffusing the
+whole system took its rise in that little event, so insignificant
+to us now as to be entirely forgotten. As the bees in swarming
+cling to one another in layers till the few are reached whose feet
+grapple the bough from which the swarm depends; so with the objects
+of our thinking,&mdash;they hang to each other by associated links,
+but the <i>original</i> source of interest in all of them is the
+native interest which the earliest one once possessed.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XI__ATTENTION" id="XI__ATTENTION" />XI. ATTENTION</h2>
+
+<p>Whoever treats of interest inevitably treats of attention, for
+to say that an object is interesting is only another way of saying
+that it excites attention. But in addition to the attention which
+any object already interesting or just becoming interesting
+claims&mdash;passive attention or spontaneous attention, we may
+call it&mdash;there is a more deliberate attention,&mdash;voluntary
+attention or attention with effort, as it is called,&mdash;which we
+can give to objects less interesting or uninteresting in
+themselves. The distinction between active and passive attention is
+made in all books on psychology, and connects itself with the
+deeper aspects of the topic. From our present purely practical
+point of view, however, it is not necessary to be intricate; and
+passive attention to natively interesting material requires no
+further elucidation on this occasion. All that we need explicitly
+to note is that, the more the passive attention is relied on, by
+keeping the material interesting; and the less the kind of
+attention requiring effort is appealed to; the more smoothly and
+pleasantly the classroom work goes on. I must say a few more
+words, however, about this latter process of voluntary and
+deliberate attention.</p>
+
+<p>One often hears it said that genius is nothing but a power of
+sustained attention, and the popular impression probably prevails
+that men of genius are remarkable for their voluntary powers in
+this direction. <i>But a little introspective observation will show
+any one that voluntary attention cannot be continuously
+sustained,&mdash;that it comes in beats.</i> When we are studying
+an uninteresting subject, if our mind tends to wander, we have to
+bring back our attention every now and then by using distinct
+pulses of effort, which revivify the topic for a moment, the mind
+then running on for a certain number of seconds or minutes with
+spontaneous interest, until again some intercurrent idea captures
+it and takes it off. Then the processes of volitional recall must
+be repeated once more. Voluntary attention, in short, is only a
+momentary affair. The process, whatever it is, exhausts itself in
+the single act; and, unless the matter is then taken in hand by
+some trace of interest inherent in the subject, the mind fails to
+follow it at all. The sustained attention of the genius, sticking
+to his subject for hours together, is for the most part of the
+passive sort. The minds of geniuses are full of copious and
+original associations. The subject of thought, once started,
+develops all sorts of fascinating consequences. The attention is
+led along one of these to another in the most interesting manner,
+and the attention never once tends to stray away.</p>
+
+<p>In a commonplace mind, on the other hand, a subject develops
+much less numerous associates: it dies out then quickly; and, if
+the man is to keep up thinking of it at all, he must bring his
+attention back to it by a violent wrench. In him, therefore, the
+faculty of voluntary attention receives abundant opportunity for
+cultivation in daily life. It is your despised business man, your
+common man of affairs, (so looked down on by the literary awarders
+of fame) whose virtue in this regard is likely to be most
+developed; for he has to listen to the concerns of so many
+uninteresting people, and to transact so much drudging detail, that
+the faculty in question is always kept in training. A genius, on
+the contrary, is the man in whom you are least likely to find the
+power of attending to anything insipid or distasteful in itself. He
+breaks his engagements, leaves his letters unanswered, neglects his
+family duties incorrigibly, because he is powerless to turn his
+attention down and back from those more interesting trains of
+imagery with which his genius constantly occupies his mind.</p>
+
+<p>Voluntary attention is thus an essentially instantaneous affair.
+You can claim it, for your purposes in the schoolroom, by
+commanding it in loud, imperious tones; and you can easily get it
+in this way. But, unless the subject to which you thus recall their
+attention has inherent power to interest the pupils, you will have
+got it for only a brief moment; and their minds will soon be
+wandering again. To keep them where you have called them, you must
+make the subject too interesting for them to wander again. And for
+that there is one prescription; but the prescription, like all our
+prescriptions, is abstract, and, to get practical results from it,
+you must couple it with mother-wit.</p>
+
+<p>The prescription is that <i>the subject must be made to show new
+aspects of itself; to prompt new questions; in a word, to
+change</i>. From an unchanging subject the attention inevitably
+wanders away. You can test this by the simplest possible case of
+sensorial attention. Try to attend steadfastly to a dot on the
+paper or on the wall. You presently find that one or the other of
+two things has happened: either your field of vision has become
+blurred, so that you now see nothing distinct at all, or else you
+have involuntarily ceased to look at the dot in question, and are
+looking at something else. But, if you ask yourself successive
+questions about the dot,&mdash;how big it is, how far, of what
+shape, what shade of color, etc.; in other words, if you turn it
+over, if you think of it in various ways, and along with various
+kinds of associates,&mdash;you can keep your mind on it for a
+comparatively long time. This is what the genius does, in whose
+hands a given topic coruscates and grows. And this is what the
+teacher must do for every topic if he wishes to avoid too frequent
+appeals to voluntary attention of the coerced sort. In all
+respects, reliance upon such attention as this is a wasteful
+method, bringing bad temper and nervous wear and tear as well as
+imperfect results. The teacher who can get along by keeping
+spontaneous interest excited must be regarded as the teacher with
+the greatest skill.</p>
+
+<p>There is, however, in all schoolroom work a large mass of
+material that must be dull and unexciting, and to which it is
+impossible in any continuous way to contribute an interest
+associatively derived. There are, therefore, certain external
+methods, which every teacher knows, of voluntarily arousing the
+attention from time to time and keeping it upon the subject. Mr.
+Fitch has a lecture on the art of securing attention, and he
+briefly passes these methods in review; the posture must be
+changed; places can be changed. Questions, after being answered
+singly, may occasionally be answered in concert. Elliptical
+questions may be asked, the pupil supplying the missing word. The
+teacher must pounce upon the most listless child and wake him up.
+The habit of prompt and ready response must be kept up.
+Recapitulations, illustrations, examples, novelty of order, and
+ruptures of routine,&mdash;all these are means for keeping the
+attention alive and contributing a little interest to a dull
+subject. Above all, the teacher must himself be alive and ready,
+and must use the contagion of his own example.</p>
+
+<p>But, when all is said and done, the fact remains that some
+teachers have a naturally inspiring presence, and can make their
+exercises interesting, while others simply cannot. And psychology
+and general pedagogy here confess their failure, and hand things
+over to the deeper springs of human personality to conduct the
+task.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+
+
+<p>A brief reference to the physiological theory of the attentive
+process may serve still further to elucidate these practical
+remarks, and confirm them by showing them from a slightly different
+point of view.</p>
+
+<p>What is the attentive process, psychologically considered?
+Attention to an object is what takes place whenever that object
+most completely occupies the mind. For simplicity's sake suppose
+the object be an object of sensation,&mdash;a figure approaching us
+at a distance on the road. It is far off, barely perceptible, and
+hardly moving: we do not know with certainty whether it is a man or
+not. Such an object as this, if carelessly looked at, may hardly
+catch our attention at all. The optical impression may affect
+solely the marginal consciousness, while the mental focus keeps
+engaged with rival things. We may indeed not 'see' it till some one
+points it out. But, if so, how does he point it out? By his finger,
+and by describing its appearance,&mdash;by creating a premonitory
+image of <i>where</i> to look and of <i>what</i> to expect to see.
+This premonitory image is already an excitement of the same
+nerve-centres that are to be concerned with the impression. The
+impression comes, and excites them still further; and now the
+object enters the focus of the field, consciousness being sustained
+both by impression and by preliminary idea. But the maximum of
+attention to it is not yet reached. Although we see it, we may not
+care for it; it may suggest nothing important to us; and a rival
+stream of objects or of thoughts may quickly take our mind away.
+If, however, our companion defines it in a significant way, arouses
+in the mind a set of experiences to be apprehended from
+it,&mdash;names it an enemy or as a messenger of important
+tidings,&mdash;the residual and marginal ideas now aroused, so far
+from being its rivals, become its associates and allies. They shoot
+together into one system with it; they converge upon it; they keep
+it steadily in focus; the mind attends to it with maximum
+power.</p>
+
+<p>The attentive process, therefore, at its maximum may be
+physiologically symbolized by a brain-cell played on in two ways,
+from without and from within. Incoming currents from the periphery
+arouse it, and collateral currents from the centres of memory and
+imagination re-enforce these.</p>
+
+<p>In this process the incoming impression is the newer element;
+the ideas which re-enforce and sustain it are among the older
+possessions of the mind. And the maximum of attention may then be
+said to be found whenever we have a systematic harmony or
+unification between the novel and the old. It is an odd
+circumstance that neither the old nor the new, by itself, is
+interesting: the absolutely old is insipid; the absolutely new
+makes no appeal at all. The old <i>in</i> the new is what claims
+the attention,&mdash;the old with a slightly new turn. No one wants
+to hear a lecture on a subject completely disconnected with his
+previous knowledge, but we all like lectures on subjects of which
+we know a little already, just as, in the fashions, every year must
+bring its slight modification of last year's suit, but an abrupt
+jump from the fashion of one decade into another would be
+distasteful to the eye.</p>
+
+<p>The genius of the interesting teacher consists in sympathetic
+divination of the sort of material with which the pupil's mind is
+likely to be already spontaneously engaged, and in the ingenuity
+which discovers paths of connection from that material to the
+matters to be newly learned. The principle is easy to grasp, but
+the accomplishment is difficult in the extreme. And a knowledge of
+such psychology as this which I am recalling can no more make a
+good teacher than a knowledge of the laws of perspective can make a
+landscape painter of effective skill.</p>
+
+<p>A certain doubt may now occur to some of you. A while ago,
+apropos of the pugnacious instinct, I spoke of our modern pedagogy
+as being possibly too 'soft.' You may perhaps here face me with my
+own words, and ask whether the exclusive effort on the teacher's
+part to keep the pupil's spontaneous interest going, and to avoid
+the more strenuous path of voluntary attention to repulsive work,
+does not savor also of sentimentalism. The greater part of
+schoolroom work, you say, must, in the nature of things, always be
+repulsive. To face uninteresting drudgery is a good part of life's
+work. Why seek to eliminate it from the schoolroom or minimize the
+sterner law?</p>
+
+<p>A word or two will obviate what might perhaps become a serious
+misunderstanding here.</p>
+
+<p>It is certain that most schoolroom work, till it has become
+habitual and automatic, is repulsive, and cannot be done without
+voluntarily jerking back the attention to it every now and then.
+This is inevitable, let the teacher do what he will.</p>
+
+<p>It flows from the inherent nature of the subjects and of the
+learning mind. The repulsive processes of verbal memorizing, of
+discovering steps of mathematical identity, and the like, must
+borrow their interest at first from purely external sources, mainly
+from the personal interests with which success in mastering them is
+associated, such as gaining of rank, avoiding punishment, not being
+beaten by a difficulty and the like. Without such borrowed
+interest, the child could not attend to them at all. But in these
+processes what becomes interesting enough to be attended to is not
+thereby attended to <i>without effort</i>. Effort always has to go
+on* derived interest, for the most part, not awakening attention
+that is <i>easy</i>, however spontaneous it may now have to be
+called. The interest which the teacher, by his utmost skill, can
+lend to the subject, proves over and over again to be only an
+interest sufficient <i>to let loose the effort</i>. The teacher,
+therefore, need never concern himself about <i>inventing</i>
+occasions where effort must be called into play. Let him still
+awaken whatever sources of interest in the subject he can by
+stirring up connections between it and the pupil's nature, whether
+in the line of theoretic curiosity, of personal interest, or of
+pugnacious impulse. The laws of mind will then bring enough pulses
+of effort into play to keep the pupil exercised in the direction of
+the subject. There is, in fact, no greater school of effort than
+the steady struggle to attend to immediately repulsive or difficult
+objects of thought which have grown to interest us through their
+association as means, with some remote ideal end.</p>
+
+<p>The Herbartian doctrine of interest ought not, therefore, in
+principle to be reproached with making pedagogy soft. If it do so,
+it is because it is unintelligently carried on. Do not, then, for
+the mere sake of discipline, command attention from your pupils in
+thundering tones. Do not too often beg it from them as a favor, nor
+claim it as a right, nor try habitually to excite it by preaching
+the importance of the subject. Sometimes, indeed, you must do these
+things; but, the more you have to do them, the less skilful teacher
+you will show yourself to be. Elicit interest from within, by the
+warmth with which you care for the topic yourself, and by following
+the laws I have laid down.</p>
+
+<p>If the topic be highly abstract, show its nature by concrete
+examples. If it be unfamiliar, trace some point of analogy in it
+with the known. If it be inhuman, make it figure as part of a
+story. If it be difficult, couple its acquisition with some
+prospect of personal gain. Above all things, make sure that it
+shall run through certain inner changes, since no unvarying object
+can possibly hold the mental field for long. Let your pupil wander
+from one aspect to another of your subject, if you do not wish him
+to wander from it altogether to something else, variety in unity
+being the secret of all interesting talk and thought. The relation
+of all these things to the native genius of the instructor is too
+obvious to need comment again.</p>
+
+<p>One more point, and I am done with the subject of attention.
+There is unquestionably a great native variety among individuals in
+the type of their attention. Some of us are naturally
+scatterbrained, and others follow easily a train of connected
+thoughts without temptation to swerve aside to other subjects. This
+seems to depend on a difference between individuals in the type of
+their field of consciousness. In some persons this is highly
+focalized and concentrated, and the focal ideas predominate in
+determining association. In others we must suppose the margin to be
+brighter, and to be filled with something like meteoric showers of
+images, which strike into it at random, displacing the focal ideas,
+and carrying association in their own direction. Persons of the
+latter type find their attention wandering every minute, and must
+bring it back by a voluntary pull. The others sink into a subject
+of meditation deeply, and, when interrupted, are 'lost' for a
+moment before they come back to the outer world.</p>
+
+<p>The possession of such a steady faculty of attention is
+unquestionably a great boon. Those who have it can work more
+rapidly, and with less nervous wear and tear. I am inclined to
+think that no one who is without it naturally can by any amount of
+drill or discipline attain it in a very high degree. Its amount is
+probably a fixed characteristic of the individual. But I wish to
+make a remark here which I shall have occasion to make again in
+other connections. It is that no one need deplore unduly the
+inferiority in himself of any one elementary faculty. This
+concentrated type of attention is an elementary faculty: it is one
+of the things that might be ascertained and measured by exercises
+in the laboratory. But, having ascertained it in a number of
+persons, we could never rank them in a scale of actual and
+practical mental efficiency based on its degrees. The total mental
+efficiency of a man is the resultant of the working together of all
+his faculties. He is too complex a being for any one of them to
+have the casting vote. If any one of them do have the casting vote,
+it is more likely to be the strength of his desire and passion, the
+strength of the interest he takes in what is proposed.
+Concentration, memory, reasoning power, inventiveness, excellence
+of the senses,&mdash;all are subsidiary to this. No matter how
+scatter-brained the type of a man's successive fields of
+consciousness may be, if he really <i>care</i> for a subject, he
+will return to it incessantly from his incessant wanderings, and
+first and last do more with it, and get more results from it, than
+another person whose attention may be more continuous during a
+given interval, but whose passion for the subject is of a more
+languid and less permanent sort. Some of the most efficient workers
+I know are of the ultra-scatterbrained type. One friend, who does a
+prodigious quantity of work, has in fact confessed to me that, if
+he wants to get ideas on any subject, he sits down to work at
+something else, his best results coming through his
+mind-wanderings. This is perhaps an epigrammatic exaggeration on
+his part; but I seriously think that no one of us need be too much
+distressed at his own shortcomings in this regard. Our mind may
+enjoy but little comfort, may be restless and feel confused; but it
+may be extremely efficient all the same.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XII__MEMORY" id="XII__MEMORY" />XII. MEMORY</h2>
+
+<p>We are following a somewhat arbitrary order. Since each and
+every faculty we possess is either in whole or in part a resultant
+of the play of our associations, it would have been as natural,
+after treating of association, to treat of memory as to treat of
+interest and attention next. But, since we did take the latter
+operations first, we must take memory now without farther delay;
+for the phenomena of memory are among the simplest and most
+immediate consequences of the fact that our mind is essentially an
+associating machine. There is no more pre-eminent example for
+exhibiting the fertility of the laws of association as principles
+of psychological analysis. Memory, moreover, is so important a
+faculty in the schoolroom that you are probably waiting with some
+eagerness to know what psychology has to say about it for your
+help.</p>
+
+<p>In old times, if you asked a person to explain why he came to be
+remembering at that moment some particular incident in his previous
+life, the only reply he could make was that his soul is endowed
+with a faculty called memory; that it is the inalienable function
+of this faculty to recollect; and that, therefore, he necessarily
+at that moment must have a cognition of that portion of the past.
+This explanation by a 'faculty' is one thing which explanation by
+association has superseded altogether. If, by saying we have a
+faculty of memory, you mean nothing more than the fact that we can
+remember, nothing more than an abstract name for our power inwardly
+to recall the past, there is no harm done: we do have the faculty;
+for we unquestionably have such a power. But if, by faculty, you
+mean a principle of <i>explanation of our general power to
+recall</i>, your psychology is empty. The associationist
+psychology, on the other hand, gives an explanation of each
+particular fact of recollection; and, in so doing, it also gives an
+explanation of the general faculty. The 'faculty' of memory is thus
+no real or ultimate explanation; for it is itself explained as a
+result of the association of ideas.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing is easier than to show you just what I mean by this.
+Suppose I am silent for a moment, and then say in commanding
+accents: "Remember! Recollect!" Does your faculty of memory obey
+the order, and reproduce any definite image from your past?
+Certainly not. It stands staring into vacancy, and asking, "What
+kind of a thing do you wish me to remember?" It needs in short, a
+<i>cue</i>. But, if I say, remember the date of your birth, or
+remember what you had for breakfast, or remember the succession of
+notes in the musical scale; then your faculty of memory immediately
+produces the required result: the <i>'cue'</i> determines its vast
+set of potentialities toward a particular point. And if you now
+look to see how this happens, you immediately perceive that the cue
+is something <i>contiguously associated</i> with the thing
+recalled. The words, 'date of my birth,' have an ingrained
+association with a particular number, month, and year; the words,
+'breakfast this morning,' cut off all other lines of recall except
+those which lead to coffee and bacon and eggs; the words, 'musical
+scale,' are inveterate mental neighbors of do, r&eacute;, mi, fa,
+sol, la, etc. The laws of association govern, in fact, all the
+trains of our thinking which are not interrupted by sensations
+breaking on us from without. Whatever appears in the mind must be
+<i>introduced</i>; and, when introduced, it is as the associate of
+something already there. This is as true of what you are
+recollecting as it is of everything else you think of.</p>
+
+<p>Reflection will show you that there are peculiarities in your
+memory which would be quite whimsical and unaccountable if we were
+forced to regard them as the product of a purely spiritual faculty.
+Were memory such a faculty, granted to us solely for its practical
+use, we ought to remember easiest whatever we most <i>needed</i> to
+remember; and frequency of repetition, recency, and the like, would
+play no part in the matter. That we should best remember frequent
+things and recent things, and forget things that are ancient or
+were experienced only once, could only be regarded as an
+incomprehensible anomaly on such a view. But if we remember because
+of our associations, and if these are (as the physiological
+psychologists believe) due to our organized brain-paths, we easily
+see how the law of recency and repetition should prevail. Paths
+frequently and recently ploughed are those that lie most open,
+those which may be expected most easily to lead to results. The
+laws of our memory, as we find them, therefore are incidents of our
+associational constitution; and, when we are emancipated from the
+flesh, it is conceivable that they may no longer continue to
+obtain.</p>
+
+<p>We may assume, then, that recollection is a resultant of our
+associative processes, these themselves in the last analysis being
+most probably due to the workings of our brain.</p>
+
+<p>Descending more particularly into the faculty of memory, we have
+to distinguish between its potential aspect as a magazine or
+storehouse and its actual aspect as recollection now of a
+particular event. Our memory contains all sorts of items which we
+do not now recall, but which we may recall, provided a sufficient
+cue be offered. Both the general retention and the special recall
+are explained by association. An educated memory depends on an
+organized system of associations; and its goodness depends on two
+of their peculiarities: first, on the persistency of the
+associations; and, second, on their number.</p>
+
+<p>Let us consider each of these points in turn.</p>
+
+<p>First, the persistency of the associations. This gives what may
+be called the <i>quality of native retentiveness</i> to the
+individual. If, as I think we are forced to, we consider the brain
+to be the organic condition by which the vestiges of our experience
+are associated with each other, we may suppose that some brains are
+'wax to receive and marble to retain.' The slightest impressions
+made on them abide. Names, dates, prices, anecdotes, quotations,
+are indelibly retained, their several elements fixedly cohering
+together, so that the individual soon becomes a walking
+cyclop&aelig;dia of information. All this may occur with no
+philosophic tendency in the mind, no impulse to weave the materials
+acquired into anything like a logical system. In the books of
+anecdotes, and, more recently, in the psychology-books, we find
+recorded instances of monstrosities, as we may call them, of this
+desultory memory; and they are often otherwise very stupid men. It
+is, of course, by no means incompatible with a philosophic mind;
+for mental characteristics have infinite capacities for
+permutation. And, when both memory and philosophy combine together
+in one person, then indeed we have the highest sort of intellectual
+efficiency. Your Walter Scotts, your Leibnitzes, your Gladstones,
+and your Goethes, all your folio copies of mankind, belong to this
+type. Efficiency on a colossal scale would indeed seem to require
+it. For, although your philosophic or systematic mind without good
+desultory memory may know how to work out results and recollect
+where in the books to find them, the time lost in the searching
+process handicaps the thinker, and gives to the more ready type of
+individual the economical advantage.</p>
+
+<p>The extreme of the contrasted type, the type with associations
+of small persistency, is found in those who have almost no
+desultory memory at all. If they are also deficient in logical and
+systematizing power, we call them simply feeble intellects; and no
+more need to be said about them here. Their brain-matter, we may
+imagine, is like a fluid jelly, in which impressions may be easily
+made, but are soon closed over again, so that the brain reverts to
+its original indifferent state.</p>
+
+<p>But it may occur here, just as in other gelatinous substances,
+that an impression will vibrate throughout the brain, and send
+waves into other parts of it. In cases of this sort, although the
+immediate impression may fade out quickly, it does modify the
+cerebral mass; for the paths it makes there may remain, and become
+so many avenues through which the impression may be reproduced if
+they ever get excited again. And its liability to reproduction will
+depend of course upon the variety of these paths and upon the
+frequency with which they are used. Each path is in fact an
+associated process, the number of these associates becoming thus to
+a great degree a substitute for the independent tenacity of the
+original impression. As I have elsewhere written: Each of the
+associates is a hook to which it hangs, a means to fish it up when
+sunk below the surface. Together they form a network of attachments
+by which it is woven into the entire tissue of our thought. The
+'secret of a good memory' is thus the secret of forming diverse and
+multiple associations with every fact we care to retain. But this
+forming of associations with a fact,&mdash;what is it but thinking
+<i>about</i> the fact as much as possible? Briefly, then, of two
+men with the same outward experiences, <i>the one who thinks over
+his experiences most</i>, and weaves them into the most systematic
+relations with each other, will be the one with the best
+memory.</p>
+
+<p>But, if our ability to recollect a thing be so largely a matter
+of its associations with other things which thus becomes its cues,
+an important p&aelig;dagogic consequence follows. <i>There can be
+no improvement of the general or elementary faculty of memory:
+there can only be improvement of our memory for special systems of
+associated things</i>; and this latter improvement is due to the
+way in which the things in question are woven into association with
+each other in the mind. Intricately or profoundly woven, they are
+held: disconnected, they tend to drop out just in proportion as the
+native brain retentiveness is poor. And no amount of training,
+drilling, repeating, and reciting employed upon the matter of one
+system of objects, the history-system, for example, will in the
+least improve either the facility or the durability with which
+objects belonging to a wholly disparate system&mdash;the system of
+facts of chemistry, for instance&mdash;tend to be retained. That
+system must be separately worked into the mind by itself,&mdash;a
+chemical fact which is thought about in connection with the other
+chemical facts, tending then to stay, but otherwise easily dropping
+out.</p>
+
+<p>We have, then, not so much a faculty of memory as many faculties
+of memory. We have as many as we have systems of objects habitually
+thought of in connection with each other. A given object is held in
+the memory by the associates it has acquired within its own system
+exclusively. Learning the facts of another system will in no wise
+help it to stay in the mind, for the simple reason that it has no
+'cues' within that other system.</p>
+
+<p>We see examples of this on every hand. Most men have a good
+memory for facts connected with their own pursuits. A college
+athlete, who remains a dunce at his books, may amaze you by his
+knowledge of the 'records' at various feats and games, and prove
+himself a walking dictionary of sporting statistics. The reason is
+that he is constantly going over these things in his mind, and
+comparing and making series of them. They form for him, not so many
+odd facts, but a concept-system, so they stick. So the merchant
+remembers prices, the politician other politicians' speeches and
+votes, with a copiousness which astonishes outsiders, but which the
+amount of thinking they bestow on these subjects easily
+explains.</p>
+
+<p>The great memory for facts which a Darwin or a Spencer reveal in
+their books is not incompatible with the possession on their part
+of a mind with only a middling degree of physiological
+retentiveness. Let a man early in life set himself the task of
+verifying such a theory as that of evolution, and facts will soon
+cluster and cling to him like grapes to their stem. Their relations
+to the theory will hold them fast; and, the more of these the mind
+is able to discern, the greater the erudition will become.
+Meanwhile the theorist may have little, if any, desultory memory.
+Unutilizable facts may be unnoted by him, and forgotten as soon as
+heard. An ignorance almost as encyclopedic as his erudition may
+coexist with the latter, and hide, as it were, within the
+interstices of its web. Those of you who have had much to do with
+scholars and <i>savants</i> will readily think of examples of the
+class of mind I mean.</p>
+
+<p>The best possible sort of system into which to weave an object,
+mentally, is a <i>rational</i> system, or what is called a
+'science.' Place the thing in its pigeon-hole in a classificatory
+series; explain it logically by its causes, and deduce from it its
+necessary effects; find out of what natural law it is an
+instance,&mdash;and you then know it in the best of all possible
+ways. A 'science' is thus the greatest of labor-saving
+contrivances. It relieves the memory of an immense number of
+details, replacing, as it does, merely contiguous associations by
+the logical ones of identity, similarity, or analogy. If you know a
+'law,' you may discharge your memory of masses of particular
+instances, for the law will reproduce them for you whenever you
+require them. The law of refraction, for example: If you know that,
+you can with a pencil and a bit of paper immediately discern how a
+convex lens, a concave lens, or a prism, must severally alter the
+appearance of an object. But, if you don't know the general law,
+you must charge your memory separately with each of the three kinds
+of effect.</p>
+
+<p>A 'philosophic' system, in which all things found their rational
+explanation and were connected together as causes and effects,
+would be the perfect mnemonic system, in which the greatest economy
+of means would bring about the greatest richness of results. So
+that, if we have poor desultory memories, we can save ourselves by
+cultivating the philosophic turn of mind.</p>
+
+<p>There are many artificial systems of mnemonics, some public,
+some sold as secrets. They are all so many devices for training us
+into certain methodical and stereotyped <i>ways of thinking</i>
+about the facts we seek to retain. Even were I competent, I could
+not here go into these systems in any detail. But a single example,
+from a popular system, will show what I mean. I take the
+number-alphabet, the great mnemonic device for recollecting numbers
+and dates. In this system each digit is represented by a consonant,
+thus: 1 is <i>t</i> or <i>d</i>; 2, <i>n</i>; 3, <i>m</i>; 4,
+<i>r</i>; 5, <i>l</i>; 6, <i>sh, j, ch</i>, or <i>g</i>; 7, <i>c,
+k, g</i>, or <i>qu</i>; 8, <i>f</i> or <i>v</i>; 9, <i>b</i> or
+<i>p</i>; 0, <i>s, c</i>, or <i>z</i>. Suppose, now, you wish to
+remember the velocity of sound, 1,142 feet a second: <i>t, t, r,
+n</i>, are the letters you must use. They make the consonants of
+<i>tight run</i>, and it would be a 'tight run' for you to keep up
+such a speed. So 1649, the date of the execution of Charles I., may
+be remembered by the word <i>sharp</i>, which recalls the
+headsman's axe.</p>
+
+<p>Apart from the extreme difficulty of finding words that are
+appropriate in this exercise, it is clearly an excessively poor,
+trivial, and silly way of 'thinking' about dates; and the way of
+the historian is much better. He has a lot of landmark-dates
+already in his mind. He knows the historic concatenation of events,
+and can usually place an event at its right date in the
+chronology-table, by thinking of it in a rational way, referring it
+to its antecedents, tracing its concomitants and consequences, and
+thus ciphering out its date by connecting it with theirs. The
+artificial memory-systems, recommending, as they do, such
+irrational methods of thinking, are only to be recommended for the
+first landmarks in a system, or for such purely detached facts as
+enjoy no rational connection with the rest of our ideas. Thus the
+student of physics may remember the order of the spectral colours
+by the word <i>vibgyor</i> which their initial letters make. The
+student of anatomy may remember the position of the Mitral valve on
+the Left side of the heart by thinking that L.M. stands also for
+'long meter' in the hymn-books.</p>
+
+<p>You now see why 'cramming' must be so poor a mode of study.
+Cramming seeks to stamp things in by intense application
+immediately before the ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form
+but few associations. On the other hand, the same thing recurring
+on different days, in different contexts, read, recited on,
+referred to again and again, related to other things and reviewed,
+gets well wrought into the mental structure. This is the reason why
+you should enforce on your pupils habits of continuous application.
+There is no moral turpitude in cramming. It would be the best,
+because the most economical, mode of study if it led to the results
+desired. But it does not, and your older pupils can readily be made
+to see the reason why.</p>
+
+<p>It follows also, from what has been said, that <i>the popular
+idea that 'the Memory,' in the sense of a general elementary
+faculty, can be improved by training, is a great mistake</i>. Your
+memory for facts of a certain class can be improved very much by
+training in that class of facts, because the incoming new fact will
+then find all sorts of analogues and associates already there, and
+these will keep it liable to recall. But other kinds of fact will
+reap none of that benefit, and, unless one have been also trained
+and versed in <i>their</i> class, will be at the mercy of the mere
+crude retentiveness of the individual, which, as we have seen, is
+practically a fixed quantity. Nevertheless, one often hears people
+say: "A great sin was committed against me in my youth: my teachers
+entirely failed to exercise my memory. If they had only made me
+learn a lot of things by heart at school, I should not be, as I am
+now, forgetful of everything I read and hear." This is a great
+mistake: learning poetry by heart will make it easier to learn and
+remember other poetry, but nothing else; and so of dates; and so of
+chemistry and geography.</p>
+
+<p>But, after what I have said, I am sure you will need no farther
+argument on this point; and I therefore pass it by.</p>
+
+<p>But, since it has brought me to speak of learning things by
+heart, I think that a general practical remark about verbal
+memorizing may now not be out of place. The excesses of
+old-fashioned verbal memorizing, and the immense advantages of
+object-teaching in the earlier stages of culture, have perhaps led
+those who philosophize about teaching to an unduly strong reaction;
+and learning things by heart is now probably somewhat too much
+despised. For, when all is said and done, the fact remains that
+verbal material is, on the whole, the handiest and most useful
+material in which thinking can be carried on. Abstract conceptions
+are far and away the most economical instruments of thought, and
+abstract conceptions are fixed and incarnated for us in words.
+Statistical inquiry would seem to show that, as men advance in
+life, they tend to make less and less use of visual images, and
+more and more use of words. One of the first things that Mr. Galton
+discovered was that this appeared to be the case with the members
+of the Royal Society whom he questioned as to their mental images.
+I should say, therefore, that constant exercise in verbal
+memorizing must still be an indispensable feature in all sound
+education. Nothing is more deplorable than that inarticulate and
+helpless sort of mind that is reminded by everything of some
+quotation, case, or anecdote, which it cannot now exactly
+recollect. Nothing, on the other hand, is more convenient to its
+possessor, or more delightful to his comrades, than a mind able, in
+telling a story, to give the exact words of the dialogue or to
+furnish a quotation accurate and complete. In every branch of study
+there are happily turned, concise, and handy formulas which in an
+incomparable way sum up results. The mind that can retain such
+formulas is in so far a superior mind, and the communication of
+them to the pupil ought always to be one of the teacher's favorite
+tasks.</p>
+
+<p>In learning 'by heart,' there are, however, efficient and
+inefficient methods; and, by making the pupil skilful in the best
+method, the teacher can both interest him and abridge the task. The
+best method is of course not to 'hammer in' the sentences, by mere
+reiteration, but to analyze them, and think. For example, if the
+pupil should have to learn this last sentence, let him first strip
+out its grammatical core, and learn, "The best method is not to
+hammer in, but to analyze," and then add the amplificative and
+restrictive clauses, bit by bit, thus: "The best method is of
+course not to hammer in <i>the sentences</i>, but to analyze
+<i>them and think</i>." Then finally insert the words '<i>by mere
+reiteration</i>,' and the sentence is complete, and both better
+understood and quicker remembered than by a more purely mechanical
+method.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+
+
+<p>In conclusion, I must say a word about the contributions to our
+knowledge of memory which have recently come from the
+laboratory-psychologists. Many of the enthusiasts for scientific or
+brass-instrument child-study are taking accurate measurements of
+children's elementary faculties, and among these what we may call
+<i>immediate memory</i> admits of easy measurement. All we need do
+is to exhibit to the child a series of letters, syllables, figures,
+pictures, or what-not, at intervals of one, two, three, or more
+seconds, or to sound a similar series of names at the same
+intervals, within his hearing, and then see how completely he can
+reproduce the list, either directly, or after an interval of ten,
+twenty, or sixty seconds, or some longer space of time. According
+to the results of this exercise, the pupils may be rated in a
+memory-scale; and some persons go so far as to think that the
+teacher should modify her treatment of the child according to the
+strength or feebleness of its faculty as thus made known.</p>
+
+<p>Now I can only repeat here what I said to you when treating of
+attention: man is too complex a being for light to be thrown on his
+real efficiency by measuring any one mental faculty taken apart
+from its consensus in the working whole. Such an exercise as this,
+dealing with incoherent and insipid objects, with no logical
+connection with each other, or practical significance outside of
+the 'test,' is an exercise the like of which in real life we are
+hardly ever called upon to perform. In real life, our memory is
+always used in the service of some interest: we remember things
+which we care for or which are associated with things we care for;
+and the child who stands at the bottom of the scale thus
+experimentally established might, by dint of the strength of his
+passion for a subject, and in consequence of the logical
+association into which he weaves the actual materials of his
+experience, be a very effective memorizer indeed, and do his
+school-tasks on the whole much better than an immediate parrot who
+might stand at the top of the 'scientifically accurate' list.</p>
+
+<p>This preponderance of interest, of passion, in determining the
+results of a human being's working life, obtains throughout. No
+elementary measurement, capable of being performed in a laboratory,
+can throw any light on the actual efficiency of the subject; for
+the vital thing about him, his emotional and moral energy and
+doggedness, can be measured by no single experiment, and becomes
+known only by the total results in the long run. A blind man like
+Huber, with his passion for bees and ants, can observe them through
+other people's eyes better than these can through their own. A man
+born with neither arms nor legs, like the late Kavanagh,
+M.P.&mdash;and what an icy heart his mother must have had about him
+in his babyhood, and how 'negative' would the
+laboratory-measurements of his motor-functions have been!&mdash;can
+be an adventurous traveller, an equestrian and sportsman, and lead
+an athletic outdoor life. Mr. Romanes studied the elementary rate
+of apperception in a large number of persons by making them read a
+paragraph as fast as they could take it in, and then immediately
+write down all they could reproduce of its contents. He found
+astonishing differences in the rapidity, some taking four times as
+long as others to absorb the paragraph, and the swiftest readers
+being, as a rule, the best immediate recollectors, too. But
+not,&mdash;and this is my point,&mdash;<i>not</i> the most
+<i>intellectually capable subjects</i>, as tested by the results of
+what Mr. Romanes rightly names 'genuine' intellectual work; for he
+tried the experiment with several highly distinguished men in
+science and literature, and most of them turned out to be slow
+readers.</p>
+
+<p>In the light of all such facts one may well believe that the
+total impression which a perceptive teacher will get of the pupil's
+condition, as indicated by his general temper and manner, by the
+listlessness or alertness, by the ease or painfulness with which
+his school work is done, will be of much more value than those
+unreal experimental tests, those pedantic elementary measurements
+of fatigue, memory, association, and attention, etc., which are
+urged upon us as the only basis of a genuinely scientific pedagogy.
+Such measurements can give us useful information only when we
+combine them with observations made without brass instruments, upon
+the total demeanor of the measured individual, by teachers with
+eyes in their heads and common sense, and some feeling for the
+concrete facts of human nature in their hearts.</p>
+
+<p>Depend upon it, no one need be too much cast down by the
+discovery of his deficiency in any elementary faculty of the mind.
+What tells in life is the whole mind working together, and the
+deficiencies of any one faculty can be compensated by the efforts
+of the rest. You can be an artist without visual images, a reader
+without eyes, a mass of erudition with a bad elementary memory. In
+almost any subject your passion for the subject will save you. If
+you only care enough for a result, you will almost certainly attain
+it. If you wish to be rich, you will be rich; if you wish to be
+learned, you will be learned; if you wish to be good, you will be
+good. Only you must, then, <i>really</i> wish these things, and
+wish them with exclusiveness, and not wish at the same time a
+hundred other incompatible things just as strongly.</p>
+
+<p>One of the most important discoveries of the 'scientific' sort
+that have recently been made in psychology is that of Mr. Galton
+and others concerning the great variations among individuals in the
+type of their imagination. Every one is now familiar with the fact
+that human beings vary enormously in the brilliancy, completeness,
+definiteness, and extent of their visual images. These are
+singularly perfect in a large number of individuals, and in a few
+are so rudimentary as hardly to exist. The same is true of the
+auditory and motor images, and probably of those of every kind; and
+the recent discovery of distinct brain-areas for the various orders
+of sensation would seem to provide a physical basis for such
+variations and discrepancies. The facts, as I said, are nowadays so
+popularly known that I need only remind you of their existence.
+They might seem at first sight of practical importance to the
+teacher; and, indeed, teachers have been recommended to sort their
+pupils in this way, and treat them as the result falls out. You
+should interrogate them as to their imagery, it is said, or exhibit
+lists of written words to their eyes, and then sound similar lists
+in their ears, and see by which channel a child retains most words.
+Then, in dealing with that child, make your appeals predominantly
+through that channel. If the class were very small, results of some
+distinctness might doubtless thus be obtained by a painstaking
+teacher. But it is obvious that in the usual schoolroom no such
+differentiation of appeal is possible; and the only really useful
+practical lesson that emerges from this analytic psychology in the
+conduct of large schools is the lesson already reached in a purely
+empirical way, that the teacher ought always to impress the class
+through as many sensible channels as he can. Talk and write and
+draw on blackboard, permit the pupils to talk, and make them write
+and draw, exhibit pictures, plans, and curves, have your diagrams
+colored differently in their different parts, etc.; and out of the
+whole variety of impressions the individual child will find the
+most lasting ones for himself. In all primary school work this
+principle of multiple impressions is well recognized, so I need say
+no more about it here.</p>
+
+<p>This principle of multiplying channels and varying associations
+and appeals is important, not only for teaching pupils to remember,
+but for teaching them to understand. It runs, in fact, through the
+whole teaching art.</p>
+
+<p>One word about the unconscious and unreproducible part of our
+acquisitions, and I shall have done with the topic of memory.</p>
+
+<p>Professor Ebbinghaus, in a heroic little investigation into the
+laws of memory which he performed a dozen or more years ago by the
+method of learning lists of nonsense syllables, devised a method of
+measuring the rate of our forgetfulness, which lays bare an
+important law of the mind.</p>
+
+<p>His method was to read over his list until he could repeat it
+once by heart unhesitatingly. The number of repetitions required
+for this was a measure of the difficulty of the learning in each
+particular case. Now, after having once learned a piece in this
+way, if we wait five minutes, we find it impossible to repeat it
+again in the same unhesitating manner. We must read it over again
+to revive some of the syllables, which have already dropped out or
+got transposed. Ebbinghaus now systematically studied the number of
+readings-over which were necessary to revive the unhesitating
+recollection of the piece after five minutes, half an hour, an
+hour, a day, a week, a month, had elapsed. The number of rereadings
+required he took to be a measure of the <i>amount of forgetting</i>
+that had occurred in the elapsed interval. And he found some
+remarkable facts. The process of forgetting, namely, is vastly more
+rapid at first than later on. Thus full half of the piece seems to
+be forgotten within the first half-hour, two-thirds of it are
+forgotten at the end of eight hours, but only four-fifths at the
+end of a month. He made no trials beyond one month of interval;
+but, if we ourselves prolong ideally the curve of remembrance,
+whose beginning his experiments thus obtain, it is natural to
+suppose that, no matter how long a time might elapse, the curve
+would never descend quite so low as to touch the zero-line. In
+other words, no matter how long ago we may have learned a poem, and
+no matter how complete our inability to reproduce it now may be,
+yet the first learning will still show its lingering effects in the
+abridgment of the time required for learning it again. In short,
+Professor Ebbinghaus's experiments show that things which we are
+quite unable definitely to recall have nevertheless impressed
+themselves, in some way, upon the structure of the mind. We are
+different for having once learned them. The resistances in our
+systems of brain-paths are altered. Our apprehensions are
+quickened. Our conclusions from certain premises are probably not
+just what they would be if those modifications were not there. The
+latter influence the whole margin of our consciousness, even though
+their products, not being distinctly reproducible, do not directly
+figure at the focus of the field.</p>
+
+<p>The teacher should draw a lesson from these facts. We are all
+too apt to measure the gains of our pupils by their proficiency in
+directly reproducing in a recitation or an examination such matters
+as they may have learned, and inarticulate power in them is
+something of which we always underestimate the value. The boy who
+tells us, "I know the answer, but I can't say what it is," we treat
+as practically identical with him who knows absolutely nothing
+about the answer at all. But this is a great mistake. It is but a
+small part of our experience in life that we are ever able
+articulately to recall. And yet the whole of it has had its
+influence in shaping our character and defining our tendencies to
+judge and act. Although the ready memory is a great blessing to its
+possessor, the vaguer memory of a subject, of having once had to do
+with it, of its neighborhood, and of where we may go to recover it
+again, constitutes in most men and women the chief fruit of their
+education. This is true even in professional education. The doctor,
+the lawyer, are seldom able to decide upon a case off-hand. They
+differ from other men only through the fact that they know how to
+get at the materials for decision in five minutes or half an hour:
+whereas the layman is unable to get at the materials at all, not
+knowing in what books and indexes to look or not understanding the
+technical terms.</p>
+
+<p>Be patient, then, and sympathetic with the type of mind that
+cuts a poor figure in examinations. It may, in the long examination
+which life sets us, come out in the end in better shape than the
+glib and ready reproducer, its passions being deeper, its purposes
+more worthy, its combining power less commonplace, and its total
+mental output consequently more important.</p>
+
+<p>Such are the chief points which it has seemed worth while for me
+to call to your notice under the head of memory. We can sum them up
+for practical purposes by saying that the art of remembering is the
+art of <i>thinking</i>; and by adding, with Dr. Pick, that, when we
+wish to fix a new thing in either our own mind or a pupil's, our
+conscious effort should not be so much to <i>impress</i> and
+<i>retain</i> it as to <i>connect</i> it with something else
+already there. The connecting <i>is</i> the thinking; and, if we
+attend clearly to the connection, the connected thing will
+certainly be likely to remain within recall.</p>
+
+<p>I shall next ask you to consider the process by which we acquire
+new knowledge,&mdash;the process of 'Apperception,' as it is
+called, by which we receive and deal with new experiences, and
+revise our stock of ideas so as to form new or improved
+conceptions.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XIII__THE_ACQUISITION_OF_IDEAS"
+id="XIII__THE_ACQUISITION_OF_IDEAS" />XIII. THE ACQUISITION OF
+IDEAS</h2>
+
+<p>The images of our past experiences, of whatever nature they may
+be, visual or verbal, blurred and dim, vivid and distinct, abstract
+or concrete, need not be memory images, in the strict sense of the
+word. That is, they need not rise before the mind in a marginal
+fringe or context of concomitant circumstances, which mean for us
+their <i>date</i>. They may be mere conceptions, floating pictures
+of an object, or of its type or class. In this undated condition,
+we call them products of 'imagination' or 'conception.' Imagination
+is the term commonly used where the object represented is thought
+of as an individual thing. Conception is the term where we think of
+it as a type or class. For our present purpose the distinction is
+not important; and I will permit myself to use either the word
+'conception,' or the still vaguer word 'idea,' to designate the
+inner objects of contemplation, whether these be individual things,
+like 'the sun' or 'Julius C&aelig;sar,' or classes of things, like
+'animal kingdom,' or, finally, entirely abstract attributes, like
+'rationality' or 'rectitude.'</p>
+
+<p>The result of our education is to fill the mind little by
+little, as experiences accrete, with a stock of such ideas. In the
+illustration I used at our first meeting, of the child snatching
+the toy and getting slapped, the vestiges left by the first
+experience answered to so many ideas which he acquired
+thereby,&mdash;ideas that remained with him associated in a certain
+order, and from the last one of which the child eventually
+proceeded to act. The sciences of grammar and of logic are little
+more than attempts methodically to classify all such acquired ideas
+and to trace certain laws of relationship among them. The forms of
+relation between them, becoming themselves in turn noticed by the
+mind, are treated as conceptions of a higher and more abstract
+order, as when we speak of a syllogistic relation' between
+propositions, or of four quantities making a 'proportion,' or of
+the 'inconsistency' of two conceptions, or the 'implication' of one
+in the other.</p>
+
+<p>So you see that the process of education, taken in a large way,
+may be described as nothing but the process of acquiring ideas or
+conceptions, the best educated mind being the mind which has the
+largest stock of them, ready to meet the largest possible variety
+of the emergencies of life. The lack of education means only the
+failure to have acquired them, and the consequent liability to be
+'floored' and 'rattled' in the vicissitudes of experience.</p>
+
+<p>In all this process of acquiring conceptions, a certain
+instinctive order is followed. There is a native tendency to
+assimilate certain kinds of conception at one age, and other kinds
+of conception at a later age. During the first seven or eight years
+of childhood the mind is most interested in the sensible properties
+of material things. <i>Constructiveness</i> is the instinct most
+active; and by the incessant hammering and sawing, and dressing and
+undressing dolls, putting of things together and taking them apart,
+the child not only trains the muscles to co-ordinate action, but
+accumulates a store of physical conceptions which are the basis of
+his knowledge of the material world through life. Object-teaching
+and manual training wisely extend the sphere of this order of
+acquisition. Clay, wood, metals, and the various kinds of tools are
+made to contribute to the store. A youth brought up with a
+sufficiently broad basis of this kind is always at home in the
+world. He stands within the pale. He is acquainted with Nature, and
+Nature in a certain sense is acquainted with him. Whereas the youth
+brought up alone at home, with no acquaintance with anything but
+the printed page, is always afflicted with a certain remoteness
+from the material facts of life, and a correlative insecurity of
+consciousness which make of him a kind of alien on the earth in
+which he ought to feel himself perfectly at home.</p>
+
+<p>I already said something of this in speaking of the constructive
+impulse, and I must not repeat myself. Moreover, you fully realize,
+I am sure, how important for life,&mdash;for the moral tone of
+life, quite apart from definite practical pursuits,&mdash;is this
+sense of readiness for emergencies which a man gains through early
+familiarity and acquaintance with the world of material things. To
+have grown up on a farm, to have haunted a carpenter's and
+blacksmith's shop, to have handled horses and cows and boats and
+guns, and to have ideas and abilities connected with such objects
+are an inestimable part of youthful acquisition. After adolescence
+it is rare to be able to get into familiar touch with any of these
+primitive things. The instinctive propensions have faded, and the
+habits are hard to acquire.</p>
+
+<p>Accordingly, one of the best fruits of the 'child-study'
+movement has been to reinstate all these activities to their proper
+place in a sound system of education. <i>Feed</i> the growing human
+being, feed him with the sort of experience for which from year to
+year he shows a natural craving, and he will develop in adult life
+a sounder sort of mental tissue, even though he may seem to be
+'wasting' a great deal of his growing time, in the eyes of those
+for whom the only channels of learning are books and verbally
+communicated information.</p>
+
+<p>It is not till adolescence is reached that the mind grows able
+to take in the more abstract aspects of experience, the hidden
+similarities and distinctions between things, and especially their
+causal sequences. Rational knowledge of such things as mathematics,
+mechanics, chemistry, and biology, is now possible; and the
+acquisition of conceptions of this order form the next phase of
+education. Later still, not till adolescence is well advanced, does
+the mind awaken to a systematic interest in abstract human
+relations&mdash;moral relations, properly so called,&mdash;to
+sociological ideas and to metaphysical abstractions.</p>
+
+<p>This general order of sequence is followed traditionally of
+course in the schoolroom. It is foreign to my purpose to do more
+than indicate that general psychological principle of the
+successive order of awakening of the faculties on which the whole
+thing rests. I have spoken of it already, apropos of the
+transitoriness of instincts. Just as many a youth has to go
+permanently without an adequate stock of conceptions of a certain
+order, because experiences of that order were not yielded at the
+time when new curiosity was most acute, so it will conversely
+happen that many another youth is spoiled for a certain subject of
+study (although he would have enjoyed it well if led into it at a
+later age) through having had it thrust upon him so prematurely
+that disgust was created, and the bloom quite taken off from future
+trials. I think I have seen college students unfitted forever for
+'philosophy' from having taken that study up a year too soon.</p>
+
+<p>In all these later studies, verbal material is the vehicle by
+which the mind thinks. The abstract conceptions of physics and
+sociology may, it is true, be embodied in visual or other images of
+phenomena, but they need not be so; and the truth remains that,
+after adolescence has begun, "words, words, words," must constitute
+a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what
+the human being has to learn. This is so even in the natural
+sciences, so far as these are causal and rational, and not merely
+confined to description. So I go back to what I said awhile ago
+apropos of verbal memorizing. The more accurately words are
+learned, the better, if only the teacher make sure that what they
+signify is also understood. It is the failure of this latter
+condition, in so much of the old-fashioned recitation, that has
+caused that reaction against 'parrot-like reproduction' that we are
+so familiar with to-day. A friend of mine, visiting a school, was
+asked to examine a young class in geography. Glancing, at the book,
+she said: "Suppose you should dig a hole in the ground, hundreds of
+feet deep, how should you find it at the bottom,&mdash;warmer or
+colder than on top?" None of the class replying, the teacher said:
+"I'm sure they know, but I think you don't ask the question quite
+rightly. Let me try." So, taking the book, she asked: "In what
+condition is the interior of the globe?" and received the immediate
+answer from half the class at once: "The interior of the globe is
+in a condition of <i>igneous fusion</i>." Better exclusive
+object-teaching than such verbal recitations as that; and yet
+verbal reproduction, intelligently connected with more objective
+work, must always play a leading, and surely <i>the</i> leading,
+part in education. Our modern reformers, in their books, write too
+exclusively of the earliest years of the pupil. These lend
+themselves better to explicit treatment; and I myself, in dwelling
+so much upon the native impulses, and object-teaching, and
+anecdotes, and all that, have paid my tribute to the line of least
+resistance in describing. Yet away back in childhood we find the
+beginnings of purely intellectual curiosity, and the intelligence
+of abstract terms. The object-teaching is mainly to <i>launch</i>
+the pupils, with some concrete conceptions of the facts concerned,
+upon the more abstract ideas.</p>
+
+<p>To hear some authorities on teaching, however, you would suppose
+that geography not only began, but ended with the school-yard and
+neighboring hill, that physics was one endless round of repeating
+the same sort of tedious weighing and measuring operation: whereas
+a very few examples are usually sufficient to set the imagination
+free on genuine lines, and then what the mind craves is more rapid,
+general, and abstract treatment. I heard a lady say that she had
+taken her child to the kindergarten, "but he is so bright that he
+saw through it immediately." Too many school children 'see' as
+immediately 'through' the namby-pamby attempts of the softer
+pedagogy to lubricate things for them, and make them interesting.
+Even they can enjoy abstractions, provided they be of the proper
+order; and it is a poor compliment to their rational appetite to
+think that anecdotes about little Tommies and little Jennies are
+the only kind of things their minds can digest.</p>
+
+<p>But here, as elsewhere, it is a matter of more or less; and, in
+the last resort, the teacher's own tact is the only thing that can
+bring out the right effect. The great difficulty with abstractions
+is that of knowing just what meaning the pupil attaches to the
+terms he uses. The words may sound all right, but the meaning
+remains the child's own secret. So varied forms of words must be
+insisted on, to bring the secret out. And a strange secret does it
+often prove. A relative of mine was trying to explain to a little
+girl what was meant by 'the passive voice': "Suppose that you kill
+me: you who do the killing are in the active voice, and I, who am
+killed, am in the passive voice." "But how can you speak if you're
+killed?" said the child. "Oh, well, you may suppose that I am not
+yet quite dead!" The next day the child was asked, in class, to
+explain the passive voice, and said, "It's the kind of voice you
+speak with when you ain't quite dead."</p>
+
+<p>In such a case as this the illustration ought to have been more
+varied. Every one's memory will probably furnish examples of the
+fantastic meaning which their childhood attached to certain verbal
+statements (in poetry often), and which their elders, not having
+any reason to suspect, never corrected. I remember being greatly
+moved emotionally at the age of eight by the ballad of Lord Ullin's
+Daughter. Yet I thought that the staining of the heather by the
+blood was the evil chiefly dreaded, and that, when the boatman
+said,</p>
+
+<center>"I'll row you o'er the ferry.<br />
+It is not for your silver bright,<br />
+But for your winsome lady,"</center>
+
+<p>he was to receive the lady for his pay. Similarly, I recently
+found that one of my own children was reading (and accepting) a
+verse of Tennyson's In Memoriam as</p>
+
+<center>"Ring out the <i>food</i> of rich and poor,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1.5em;">Ring in <i>redness</i> to all
+mankind,"</span><br />
+</center>
+
+<p>and finding no inward difficulty.</p>
+
+<p>The only safeguard against this sort of misconceiving is to
+insist on varied statement, and to bring the child's conceptions,
+wherever it be possible, to some sort of practical test.</p>
+
+<p>Let us next pass to the subject of Apperception.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XIV__APPERCEPTION" id="XIV__APPERCEPTION" />XIV.
+APPERCEPTION</h2>
+
+<p>'Apperception' is a word which cuts a great figure in the
+pedagogics of the present day. Read, for example, this
+advertisement of a certain text-book, which I take from an
+educational journal:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<div style="margin-left: 7em; margin-right: 7em;">
+<center><b>WHAT IS APPERCEPTION?</b></center>
+
+<br />
+
+
+<p>For an explanation of Apperception see Blank's PSYCHOLOGY,
+Vol. &mdash;&mdash; of the &mdash;&mdash; Education Series, just
+published.</p>
+
+<p>The difference between Perception and Apperception is explained
+for the teacher in the preface to Blank's PSYCHOLOGY.</p>
+
+<p>Many teachers are inquiring, "What is the meaning of
+Apperception in educational psychology?" Just the book for them is
+Blank's PSYCHOLOGY in which the idea was first expounded.</p>
+
+<p>The most important idea in educational psychology is
+Apperception. The teacher may find this expounded in Blank's
+PSYCHOLOGY. The idea of Apperception is making a revolution in
+educational methods in Germany. It is explained in Blank's
+PSYCHOLOGY, Vol. &mdash;&mdash; of the &mdash;&mdash; Education
+Series, just published.</p>
+
+<p>Blank's PSYCHOLOGY will be mailed prepaid to any address on
+receipt of $1.00.</p>
+</div>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Such an advertisement is in sober earnest a disgrace to all
+concerned; and such talk as it indulges in is the sort of thing I
+had in view when I said at our first meeting that the teachers were
+suffering at the present day from a certain industrious
+mystification on the part of editors and publishers. Perhaps the
+word 'apperception' flourished in their eyes and ears as it
+nowadays often is, embodies as much of this mystification as any
+other single thing. The conscientious young teacher is led to
+believe that it contains a recondite and portentous secret, by
+losing the true inwardness of which her whole career may be
+shattered. And yet, when she turns to the books and reads about it,
+it seems so trivial and commonplace a matter,&mdash;meaning nothing
+more than the manner in which we receive a thing into our
+minds,&mdash;that she fears she must have missed the point through
+the shallowness of her intelligence, and goes about thereafter
+afflicted with a sense either of uncertainty or of stupidity, and
+in each case remaining mortified at being so inadequate to her
+mission.</p>
+
+<p>Now apperception is an extremely useful word in pedagogics, and
+offers a convenient name for a process to which every teacher must
+frequently refer. But it verily means nothing more than the act of
+taking a thing into the mind. It corresponds to nothing peculiar or
+elementary in psychology, being only one of the innumerable results
+of the psychological process of association of ideas; and
+psychology itself can easily dispense with the word, useful as it
+may be in pedagogics.</p>
+
+<p>The gist of the matter is this: Every impression that comes in
+from without, be it a sentence which we hear, an object of vision,
+or an effluvium which assails our nose, no sooner enters our
+consciousness than it is drafted off in some determinate direction
+or other, making connection with the other materials already there,
+and finally producing what we call our reaction. The particular
+connections it strikes into are determined by our past experiences
+and the 'associations' of the present sort of impression with them.
+If, for instance, you hear me call out A, B, C, it is ten to one
+that you will react on the impression by inwardly or outwardly
+articulating D, E, F. The impression arouses its old associates:
+they go out to meet it; it is received by them, recognized by the
+mind as 'the beginning of the alphabet.' It is the fate of every
+impression thus to fall into a mind preoccupied with memories,
+ideas, and interests, and by these it is taken in. Educated as we
+already are, we never get an experience that remains for us
+completely nondescript: it always <i>reminds</i> of something
+similar in quality, or of some context that might have surrounded
+it before, and which it now in some way suggests. This mental
+escort which the mind supplies is drawn, of course, from the mind's
+ready-made stock. We <i>conceive</i> the impression in some
+definite way. We dispose of it according to our acquired
+possibilities, be they few or many, in the way of 'ideas.' This way
+of taking in the object is the process of apperception. The
+conceptions which meet and assimilate it are called by Herbart the
+'apperceiving mass.' The apperceived impression is engulfed in
+this, and the result is a new field of consciousness, of which one
+part (and often a very small part) comes from the outer world, and
+another part (sometimes by far the largest) comes from the previous
+contents of the mind.</p>
+
+<p>I think that you see plainly enough now that the process of
+apperception is what I called it a moment ago, a resultant of the
+association of ideas. The product is a sort of fusion of the new
+with the old, in which it is often impossible to distinguish the
+share of the two factors. For example, when we listen to a person
+speaking or read a page of print, much of what we think we see or
+hear is supplied from our memory. We overlook misprints, imagining
+the right letters, though we see the wrong ones; and how little we
+actually hear, when we listen to speech, we realize when we go to a
+foreign theatre; for there what troubles us is not so much that we
+cannot understand what the actors say as that we cannot hear their
+words. The fact is that we hear quite as little under similar
+conditions at home, only our mind, being fuller of English verbal
+associations, supplies the requisite material for comprehension
+upon a much slighter auditory hint.</p>
+
+<p>In all the apperceptive operations of the mind, a certain
+general law makes itself felt,&mdash;the law of economy. In
+admitting a new body of experience, we instinctively seek to
+disturb as little as possible our pre-existing stock of ideas. We
+always try to name a new experience in some way which will
+assimilate it to what we already know. We hate anything
+<i>absolutely</i> new, anything without any name, and for which a
+new name must be forged. So we take the nearest name, even though
+it be inappropriate. A child will call snow, when he sees it for
+the first time, sugar or white butterflies. The sail of a boat he
+calls a curtain; an egg in its shell, seen for the first time, he
+calls a pretty potato; an orange, a ball; a folding corkscrew, a
+pair of bad scissors. Caspar Hauser called the first geese he saw
+horses, and the Polynesians called Captain Cook's horses pigs. Mr.
+Rooper has written a little book on apperception, to which he gives
+the title of "A Pot of Green Feathers," that being the name applied
+to a pot of ferns by a child who had never seen ferns before.</p>
+
+<p>In later life this economical tendency to leave the old
+undisturbed leads to what we know as 'old fogyism.' A new idea or a
+fact which would entail extensive rearrangement of the previous
+system of beliefs is always ignored or extruded from the mind in
+case it cannot be sophistically reinterpreted so as to tally
+harmoniously with the system. We have all conducted discussions
+with middle-aged people, overpowered them with our reasons, forced
+them to admit our contention, and a week later found them back as
+secure and constant in their old opinion as if they had never
+conversed with us at all. We call them old fogies; but there are
+young fogies, too. Old fogyism begins at a younger age than we
+think. I am almost afraid to say so, but I believe that in the
+majority of human beings it begins at about twenty-five.</p>
+
+<p>In some of the books we find the various forms of apperception
+codified, and their subdivisions numbered and ticketed in tabular
+form in the way so delightful to the pedagogic eye. In one book
+which I remember reading there were sixteen different types of
+apperception discriminated from each other. There was associative
+apperception, subsumptive apperception, assimilative apperception,
+and others up to sixteen. It is needless to say that this is
+nothing but an exhibition of the crass artificiality which has
+always haunted psychology, and which perpetuates itself by
+lingering along, especially in these works which are advertised as
+'written for the use of teachers.' The flowing life of the mind is
+sorted into parcels suitable for presentation in the
+recitation-room, and chopped up into supposed 'processes' with long
+Greek and Latin names, which in real life have no distinct
+existence.</p>
+
+<p>There is no reason, if we are classing the different types of
+apperception, why we should stop at sixteen rather than sixteen
+hundred. There are as many types of apperception as there are
+possible ways in which an incoming experience may be reacted on by
+an individual mind. A little while ago, at Buffalo, I was the guest
+of a lady who, a fortnight before, had taken her seven-year-old boy
+for the first time to Niagara Falls. The child silently glared at
+the phenomenon until his mother, supposing him struck speechless by
+its sublimity, said, "Well, my boy, what do you think of it?" to
+which, "Is that the kind of spray I spray my nose with?" was the
+boy's only reply. That was his mode of apperceiving the spectacle.
+You may claim this as a particular type, and call it by the Greek
+name of rhinotherapeutical apperception, if you like; and, if you
+do, you will hardly be more trivial or artificial than are some of
+the authors of the books.</p>
+
+<p>M. Perez, in one of his books on childhood, gives a good example
+of the different modes of apperception of the same phenomenon which
+are possible at different stages of individual experience. A
+dwelling-house took fire, and an infant in the family, witnessing
+the conflagration from the arms of his nurse, standing outside,
+expressed nothing but the liveliest delight at its brilliancy. But,
+when the bell of the fire engine was heard approaching, the child
+was thrown by the sound into a paroxysm of fear, strange sounds
+being, as you know, very alarming to young children. In what
+opposite ways must the child's parents have apperceived the burning
+house and the engine respectively!</p>
+
+<p>The self-same person, according to the line of thought he may be
+in, or to his emotional mood, will apperceive the same impression
+quite differently on different occasions. A medical or engineering
+expert retained on one side of a case will not apperceive the facts
+in the same way as if the other side had retained him. When people
+are at loggerheads about the interpretation of a fact, it usually
+shows that they have too few heads of classification to apperceive
+by; for, as a general thing, the fact of such a dispute is enough
+to show that neither one of their rival interpretations is a
+perfect fit. Both sides deal with the matter by approximation,
+squeezing it under the handiest or least disturbing conception:
+whereas it would, nine times out of ten, be better to enlarge their
+stock of ideas or invent some altogether new title for the
+phenomenon.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, in biology, we used to have interminable discussion as to
+whether certain single-celled organisms were animals or vegetables,
+until Haeckel introduced the new apperceptive name of Protista,
+which ended the disputes. In law courts no <i>tertium quid</i> is
+recognized between insanity and sanity. If sane, a man is punished:
+if insane, acquitted; and it is seldom hard to find two experts who
+will take opposite views of his case. All the while, nature is more
+subtle than our doctors. Just as a room is neither dark nor light
+absolutely, but might be dark for a watchmaker's uses, and yet
+light enough to eat in or play in, so a man may be sane for some
+purposes and insane for others,&mdash;sane enough to be left at
+large, yet not sane enough to take care of his financial affairs.
+The word 'crank,' which became familiar at the time of Guiteau's
+trial, fulfilled the need of a <i>tertium quid</i>. The foreign
+terms 'd&eacute;s&eacute;quilibr&eacute;,' 'hereditary degenerate,'
+and 'psychopathic' subject, have arisen in response to the same
+need.</p>
+
+<p>The whole progress of our sciences goes on by the invention of
+newly forged technical names whereby to designate the newly
+remarked aspects of phenomena,&mdash;phenomena which could only be
+squeezed with violence into the pigeonholes of the earlier stock of
+conceptions. As time goes on, our vocabulary becomes thus ever more
+and more voluminous, having to keep up with the ever-growing
+multitude of our stock of apperceiving ideas.</p>
+
+<p>In this gradual process of interaction between the new and the
+old, not only is the new modified and determined by the particular
+sort of old which apperceives it, but the apperceiving mass, the
+old itself, is modified by the particular kind of new which it
+assimilates. Thus, to take the stock German example of the child
+brought up in a house where there are no tables but square ones,
+'table' means for him a thing in which square corners are
+essential. But, if he goes to a house where there are round tables
+and still calls them tables, his apperceiving notion 'table'
+acquires immediately a wider inward content. In this way, our
+conceptions are constantly dropping characters once supposed
+essential, and including others once supposed inadmissible. The
+extension of the notion 'beast' to porpoises and whales, of the
+notion 'organism' to society, are familiar examples of what I
+mean.</p>
+
+<p>But be our conceptions adequate or inadequate, and be our stock
+of them large or small, they are all we have to work with. If an
+educated man is, as I said, a group of organized tendencies to
+conduct, what prompts the conduct is in every case the man's
+conception of the way in which to name and classify the actual
+emergency. The more adequate the stock of ideas, the more 'able' is
+the man, the more uniformly appropriate is his behavior likely to
+be. When later we take up the subject of the will, we shall see
+that the essential preliminary to every decision is the finding of
+the right <i>names</i> under which to class the proposed
+alternatives of conduct. He who has few names is in so far forth an
+incompetent deliberator. The names&mdash;and each name stands for a
+conception or idea&mdash;are our instruments for handling our
+problems and solving our dilemmas. Now, when we think of this, we
+are too apt to forget an important fact, which is that in most
+human beings the stock of names and concepts is mostly acquired
+during the years of adolescence and the earliest years of adult
+life. I probably shocked you a moment ago by saying that most men
+begin to be old fogies at the age of twenty-five. It is true that a
+grown-up adult keeps gaining well into middle age a great knowledge
+of details, and a great acquaintance with individual cases
+connected with his profession or business life. In this sense, his
+conceptions increase during a very long period; for his knowledge
+grows more extensive and minute. But the larger categories of
+conception, the sorts of thing, and wider classes of relation
+between things, of which we take cognizance, are all got into the
+mind at a comparatively youthful date. Few men ever do acquaint
+themselves with the principles of a new science after even
+twenty-five. If you do not study political economy in college, it
+is a thousand to one that its main conceptions will remain unknown
+to you through life. Similarly with biology, similarly with
+electricity. What percentage of persons now fifty years old have
+any definite conception whatever of a dynamo, or how the
+trolley-cars are made to run? Surely, a small fraction of one per
+cent. But the boys in colleges are all acquiring these
+conceptions.</p>
+
+<p>There is a sense of infinite potentiality in us all, when young,
+which makes some of us draw up lists of books we intend to read
+hereafter, and makes most of us think that we can easily acquaint
+ourselves with all sorts of things which we are now neglecting by
+studying them out hereafter in the intervals of leisure of our
+business lives. Such good intentions are hardly ever carried out.
+The conceptions acquired before thirty remain usually the only ones
+we ever gain. Such exceptional cases of perpetually self-renovating
+youth as Mr. Gladstone's only prove, by the admiration they awaken,
+the universality of the rule. And it may well solemnize a teacher,
+and confirm in him a healthy sense of the importance of his
+mission, to feel how exclusively dependent upon his present
+ministrations in the way of imparting conceptions the pupil's
+future life is probably bound to be.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="XV__THE_WILL" id="XV__THE_WILL" />XV. THE WILL</h2>
+
+<p>Since mentality terminates naturally in outward conduct, the
+final chapter in psychology has to be the chapter on the will. But
+the word 'will' can be used in a broader and in a narrower sense.
+In the broader sense, it designates our entire capacity for
+impulsive and active life, including our instinctive reactions and
+those forms of behavior that have become secondarily automatic and
+semi-unconscious through frequent repetition. In the narrower
+sense, acts of will are such acts only as cannot be inattentively
+performed. A distinct idea of what they are, and a deliberate
+<i>fiat</i> on the mind's part, must precede their execution.</p>
+
+<p>Such acts are often characterized by hesitation, and accompanied
+by a feeling, altogether peculiar, of resolve, a feeling which may
+or may not carry with it a further feeling of effort. In my earlier
+talks, I said so much of our impulsive tendencies that I will
+restrict myself in what follows to volition in this narrower sense
+of the term.</p>
+
+<p>All our deeds were considered by the early psychologists to be
+due to a peculiar faculty called the will, without whose fiat
+action could not occur. Thoughts and impressions, being
+intrinsically inactive, were supposed to produce conduct only
+through the intermediation of this superior agent. Until they
+twitched its coat-tails, so to speak, no outward behavior could
+occur. This doctrine was long ago exploded by the discovery of the
+phenomena of reflex action, in which sensible impressions, as you
+know, produce movement immediately and of themselves. The doctrine
+may also be considered exploded as far as ideas go.</p>
+
+<p>The fact is that there is no sort of consciousness whatever, be
+it sensation, feeling, or idea, which does not directly and of
+itself tend to discharge into some motor effect. The motor effect
+need not always be an outward stroke of behavior. It may be only an
+alteration of the heart-beats or breathing, or a modification in
+the distribution of blood, such as blushing or turning pale; or
+else a secretion of tears, or what not. But, in any case, it is
+there in some shape when any consciousness is there; and a belief
+as fundamental as any in modern psychology is the belief at last
+attained that conscious processes of any sort, conscious processes
+merely as such, <i>must</i> pass over into motion, open or
+concealed.</p>
+
+<p>The least complicated case of this tendency is the case of a
+mind possessed by only a single idea. If that idea be of an object
+connected with a native impulse, the impulse will immediately
+proceed to discharge. If it be the idea of a movement, the movement
+will occur. Such a case of action from a single idea has been
+distinguished from more complex cases by the name of 'ideo-motor'
+action, meaning action without express decision or effort. Most of
+the habitual actions to which we are trained are of this ideo-motor
+sort. We perceive, for instance, that the door is open, and we rise
+and shut it; we perceive some raisins in a dish before us, and
+extend our hand and carry one of them to our mouth without
+interrupting the conversation; or, when lying in bed, we suddenly
+think that we shall be late for breakfast, and instantly we get up
+with no particular exertion or resolve. All the ingrained
+procedures by which life is carried on&mdash;the manners and
+customs, dressing and undressing, acts of salutation,
+etc.&mdash;are executed in this semi-automatic way unhesitatingly
+and efficiently, the very outermost margin of consciousness seeming
+to be concerned in them, while the focus may be occupied with
+widely different things.</p>
+
+<p>But now turn to a more complicated case. Suppose two thoughts to
+be in the mind together, of which one, A, taken alone, would
+discharge itself in a certain action, but of which the other, B,
+suggests an action of a different sort, or a consequence of the
+first action calculated to make us shrink. The psychologists now
+say that the second idea, B, will probably arrest or <i>inhibit</i>
+the motor effects of the first idea, A. One word, then, about
+'inhibition' in general, to make this particular case more
+clear.</p>
+
+<p>One of the most interesting discoveries of physiology was the
+discovery, made simultaneously in France and Germany fifty years
+ago, that nerve currents do not only start muscles into action, but
+may check action already going on or keep it from occurring as it
+otherwise might. <i>Nerves of arrest</i> were thus distinguished
+alongside of motor nerves. The pneumogastric nerve, for example, if
+stimulated, arrests the movements of the heart: the splanchnic
+nerve arrests those of the intestines, if already begun. But it
+soon appeared that this was too narrow a way of looking at the
+matter, and that arrest is not so much the specific function of
+certain nerves as a general function which any part of the nervous
+system may exert upon other parts under the appropriate conditions.
+The higher centres, for example, seem to exert a constant
+inhibitive influence on the excitability of those below. The
+reflexes of an animal with its hemispheres wholly or in part
+removed become exaggerated. You all know that common reflex in
+dogs, whereby, if you scratch the animal's side, the corresponding
+hind leg will begin to make scratching movements, usually in the
+air. Now in dogs with mutilated hemispheres this scratching reflex
+is so incessant that, as Goltz first described them, the hair gets
+all worn off their sides. In idiots, the functions of the
+hemispheres being largely in abeyance, the lower impulses, not
+inhibited, as they would be in normal human beings, often express
+themselves in most odious ways. You know also how any higher
+emotional tendency will quench a lower one. Fear arrests appetite,
+maternal love annuls fear, respect checks sensuality, and the like;
+and in the more subtile manifestations of the moral life, whenever
+an ideal stirring is suddenly quickened into intensity, it is as if
+the whole scale of values of our motives changed its equilibrium.
+The force of old temptations vanishes, and what a moment ago was
+impossible is now not only possible, but easy, because of their
+inhibition. This has been well called the 'expulsive power of the
+higher emotion.'</p>
+
+<p>It is easy to apply this notion of inhibition to the case of our
+ideational processes. I am lying in bed, for example, and think it
+is time to get up; but alongside of this thought there is present
+to my mind a realization of the extreme coldness of the morning and
+the pleasantness of the warm bed. In such a situation the motor
+consequences of the first idea are blocked; and I may remain for
+half an hour or more with the two ideas oscillating before me in a
+kind of deadlock, which is what we call the state of hesitation or
+deliberation. In a case like this the deliberation can be resolved
+and the decision reached in either of two ways:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>(1) I may forget for a moment the thermometric conditions, and
+then the idea of getting up will immediately discharge into act: I
+shall suddenly find that I have got up&mdash;or</p>
+
+<p>(2) Still mindful of the freezing temperature, the thought of
+the duty of rising may become so pungent that it determines action
+in spite of inhibition. In the latter case, I have a sense of
+energetic moral effort, and consider that I have done a virtuous
+act.</p>
+
+<p>All cases of wilful action properly so called, of choice after
+hesitation and deliberation, may be conceived after one of these
+latter patterns. So you see that volition, in the narrower sense,
+takes place only when there are a number of conflicting systems of
+ideas, and depends on our having a complex field of consciousness.
+The interesting thing to note is the extreme delicacy of the
+inhibitive machinery. A strong and urgent motor idea in the focus
+may be neutralized and made inoperative by the presence of the very
+faintest contradictory idea in the margin. For instance, I hold out
+my forefinger, and with closed eyes try to realize as vividly as
+possible that I hold a revolver in my hand and am pulling the
+trigger. I can even now fairly feel my finger quivering with the
+tendency to contract; and, if it were hitched to a recording
+apparatus, it would certainly betray its state of tension by
+registering incipient movements. Yet it does not actually crook,
+and the movement of pulling the trigger is not performed. Why
+not?</p>
+
+<p>Simply because, all concentrated though I am upon the idea of
+the movement, I nevertheless also realize the total conditions of
+the experiment, and in the back of my mind, so to speak, or in its
+fringe and margin, have the simultaneous idea that the movement is
+not to take place. The mere presence of that marginal intention,
+without effort, urgency, or emphasis, or any special reinforcement
+from my attention, suffices to the inhibitive effect.</p>
+
+<p>And this is why so few of the ideas that flit through our minds
+do, in point of fact, produce their motor consequences. Life would
+be a curse and a care for us if every fleeting fancy were to do so.
+Abstractly, the law of ideo-motor action is true; but in the
+concrete our fields of consciousness are always so complex that the
+inhibiting margin keeps the centre inoperative most of the time. In
+all this, you see, I speak as if ideas by their mere presence or
+absence determined behavior, and as if between the ideas themselves
+on the one hand and the conduct on the other there were no room for
+any third intermediate principle of activity, like that called 'the
+will.'</p>
+
+<p>If you are struck by the materialistic or fatalistic doctrines
+which seem to follow this conception, I beg you to suspend your
+judgment for a moment, as I shall soon have something more to say
+about the matter. But, meanwhile yielding one's self to the
+mechanical conception of the psychophysical organism, nothing is
+easier than to indulge in a picture of the fatalistic character of
+human life. Man's conduct appears as the mere resultant of all his
+various impulsions and inhibitions. One object, by its presence,
+makes us act: another object checks our action. Feelings aroused
+and ideas suggested by objects sway us one way and another:
+emotions complicate the game by their mutual inhibitive effects,
+the higher abolishing the lower or perhaps being itself swept away.
+The life in all this becomes prudential and moral; but the
+psychologic agents in the drama may be described, you see, as
+nothing but the 'ideas' themselves,&mdash;ideas for the whole
+system of which what we call the 'soul' or character' or 'will' of
+the person is nothing but a collective name. As Hume said, the
+ideas are themselves the actors, the stage, the theatre, the
+spectators, and the play. This is the so-called 'associationist'
+psychology, brought down to its radical expression: it is useless
+to ignore its power as a conception. Like all conceptions, when
+they become clear and lively enough, this conception has a strong
+tendency to impose itself upon belief; and psychologists trained on
+biological lines usually adopt it as the last word of science on
+the subject. No one can have an adequate notion of modern
+psychological theory unless he has at some time apprehended this
+view in the full force of its simplicity.</p>
+
+<p>Let us humor it for a while, for it has advantages in the way of
+exposition.</p>
+
+<p><i>Voluntary action, then, is at all times a resultant of the
+compounding of our impulsions with our inhibitions.</i></p>
+
+<p>From this it immediately follows that there will be two types of
+will, in one of which impulsions will predominate, in the other
+inhibitions. We may speak of them, if you like, as the precipitate
+and the obstructed will, respectively. When fully pronounced, they
+are familiar to everybody. The extreme example of the precipitate
+will is the maniac: his ideas discharge into action so rapidly, his
+associative processes are so extravagantly lively, that inhibitions
+have no time to arrive, and he says and does whatever pops into his
+head without a moment of hesitation.</p>
+
+<p>Certain melancholiacs furnish the extreme example of the
+over-inhibited type. Their minds are cramped in a fixed emotion of
+fear or helplessness, their ideas confined to the one thought that
+for them life is impossible. So they show a condition of perfect
+'abulia,' or inability to will or act. They cannot change their
+posture or speech or execute the simplest command.</p>
+
+<p>The different races of men show different temperaments in this
+regard. The Southern races are commonly accounted the more
+impulsive and precipitate: the English race, especially our New
+England branch of it, is supposed to be all sicklied over with
+repressive forms of self-consciousness, and condemned to express
+itself through a jungle of scruples and checks.</p>
+
+<p>The highest form of character, however, abstractly considered,
+must be full of scruples and inhibitions. But action, in such a
+character, far from being paralyzed, will succeed in energetically
+keeping on its way, sometimes overpowering the resistances,
+sometimes steering along the line where they lie thinnest.</p>
+
+<p>Just as our extensor muscles act most truly when a simultaneous
+contraction of the flexors guides and steadies them; so the mind of
+him whose fields of consciousness are complex, and who, with the
+reasons for the action, sees the reasons against it, and yet,
+instead of being palsied, acts in the way that takes the whole
+field into consideration,&mdash;so, I say, is such a mind the ideal
+sort of mind that we should seek to reproduce in our pupils. Purely
+impulsive action, or action that proceeds to extremities regardless
+of consequences, on the other hand, is the easiest action in the
+world, and the lowest in type. Any one can show energy, when made
+quite reckless. An Oriental despot requires but little ability: as
+long as he lives, he succeeds, for he has absolutely his own way;
+and, when the world can no longer endure the horror of him, he is
+assassinated. But not to proceed immediately to extremities, to be
+still able to act energetically under an array of
+inhibitions,&mdash;that indeed is rare and difficult. Cavour, when
+urged to proclaim martial law in 1859, refused to do so, saying:
+"Any one can govern in that way. I will be constitutional." Your
+parliamentary rulers, your Lincoln, your Gladstone, are the
+strongest type of man, because they accomplish results under the
+most intricate possible conditions. We think of Napoleon Bonaparte
+as a colossal monster of will-power, and truly enough he was so.
+But, from the point of view of the psychological machinery, it
+would be hard to say whether he or Gladstone was the larger
+volitional quantity; for Napoleon disregarded all the usual
+inhibitions, and Gladstone, passionate as he was, scrupulously
+considered them in his statesmanship.</p>
+
+<p>A familiar example of the paralyzing power of scruples is the
+inhibitive effect of conscientiousness upon conversation. Nowhere
+does conversation seem to have flourished as brilliantly as in
+France during the last century. But, if we read old French memoirs,
+we see how many brakes of scrupulosity which tie our tongues to-day
+were then removed. Where mendacity, treachery, obscenity, and
+malignity find unhampered expression, talk can be brilliant indeed.
+But its flame waxes dim where the mind is stitched all over with
+conscientious fear of violating the moral and social
+proprieties.</p>
+
+<p>The teacher often is confronted in the schoolroom with an
+abnormal type of will, which we may call the 'balky will.' Certain
+children, if they do not succeed in doing a thing immediately,
+remain completely inhibited in regard to it: it becomes literally
+impossible for them to understand it if it be an intellectual
+problem, or to do it if it be an outward operation, as long as this
+particular inhibited condition lasts. Such children are usually
+treated as sinful, and are punished; or else the teacher pits his
+or her will against the child's will, considering that the latter
+must be 'broken.' "Break your child's will, in order that it may
+not perish," wrote John Wesley. "Break its will as soon as it can
+speak plainly&mdash;or even before it can speak at all. It should
+be forced to do as it is told, even if you have to whip it ten
+times running. Break its will, in order that its soul may live."
+Such will-breaking is always a scene with a great deal of nervous
+wear and tear on both sides, a bad state of feeling left behind it,
+and the victory not always with the would-be will-breaker.</p>
+
+<p>When a situation of the kind is once fairly developed, and the
+child is all tense and excited inwardly, nineteen times out of
+twenty it is best for the teacher to apperceive the case as one of
+neural pathology rather than as one of moral culpability. So long
+as the inhibiting sense of impossibility remains in the child's
+mind, he will continue unable to get beyond the obstacle. The aim
+of the teacher should then be to make him simply forget. Drop the
+subject for the time, divert the mind to something else: then,
+leading the pupil back by some circuitous line of association,
+spring it on him again before he has time to recognize it, and as
+likely as not he will go over it now without any difficulty. It is
+in no other way that we overcome balkiness in a horse: we divert
+his attention, do something to his nose or ear, lead him round in a
+circle, and thus get him over a place where flogging would only
+have made him more invincible. A tactful teacher will never let
+these strained situations come up at all.</p>
+
+<p>You perceive now, my friends, what your general or abstract duty
+is as teachers. Although you have to generate in your pupils a
+large stock of ideas, any one of which may be inhibitory, yet you
+must also see to it that no habitual hesitancy or paralysis of the
+will ensues, and that the pupil still retains his power of vigorous
+action. Psychology can state your problem in these terms, but you
+see how impotent she is to furnish the elements of its practical
+solution. When all is said and done, and your best efforts are
+made, it will probably remain true that the result will depend more
+on a certain native tone or temper in the pupil's psychological
+constitution than on anything else. Some persons appear to have a
+naturally poor focalization of the field of consciousness; and in
+such persons actions hang slack, and inhibitions seem to exert
+peculiarly easy sway.</p>
+
+<p>But let us now close in a little more closely on this matter of
+the education of the will. Your task is to build up a
+<i>character</i> in your pupils; and a character, as I have so
+often said, consists in an organized set of habits of reaction. Now
+of what do such habits of reaction themselves consist? They consist
+of tendencies to act characteristically when certain ideas possess
+us, and to refrain characteristically when possessed by other
+ideas.</p>
+
+<p>Our volitional habits depend, then, first, on what the stock of
+ideas is which we have; and, second, on the habitual coupling of
+the several ideas with action or inaction respectively. How is it
+when an alternative is presented to you for choice, and you are
+uncertain what you ought to do? You first hesitate, and then you
+deliberate. And in what does your deliberation consist? It consists
+in trying to apperceive the ease successively by a number of
+different ideas, which seem to fit it more or less, until at last
+you hit on one which seems to fit it exactly. If that be an idea
+which is a customary forerunner of action in you, which enters into
+one of your maxims of positive behavior, your hesitation ceases,
+and you act immediately. If, on the other hand, it be an idea which
+carries inaction as its habitual result, if it ally itself with
+<i>prohibition</i>, then you unhesitatingly refrain. The problem
+is, you see, to find the right idea or conception for the case.
+This search for the right conception may take days or weeks.</p>
+
+<p>I spoke as if the action were easy when the conception once is
+found. Often it is so, but it may be otherwise; and, when it is
+otherwise, we find ourselves at the very centre of a moral
+situation, into which I should now like you to look with me a
+little nearer.</p>
+
+<p>The proper conception, the true head of classification, may be
+hard to attain; or it may be one with which we have contracted no
+settled habits of action. Or, again, the action to which it would
+prompt may be dangerous and difficult; or else inaction may appear
+deadly cold and negative when our impulsive feeling is hot. In
+either of these latter cases it is hard to hold the right idea
+steadily enough before the attention to let it exert its adequate
+effects. Whether it be stimulative or inhibitive, it is <i>too
+reasonable</i> for us; and the more instinctive passional
+propensity then tends to extrude it from our consideration. We shy
+away from the thought of it. It twinkles and goes out the moment it
+appears in the margin of our consciousness; and we need a resolute
+effort of voluntary attention to drag it into the focus of the
+field, and to keep it there long enough for its associative and
+motor effects to be exerted. Every one knows only too well how the
+mind flinches from looking at considerations hostile to the
+reigning mood of feeling.</p>
+
+<p>Once brought, however, in this way to the centre of the field of
+consciousness, and held there, the reasonable idea will exert these
+effects inevitably; for the laws of connection between our
+consciousness and our nervous system provide for the action then
+taking place. Our moral effort, properly so called, terminates in
+our holding fast to the appropriate idea.</p>
+
+<p>If, then, you are asked, "<i>In what does a moral act
+consist</i> when reduced to its simplest and most elementary form?"
+you can make only one reply. You can say that <i>it consists in the
+effort of attention by which we hold fast to an idea</i> which but
+for that effort of attention would be driven out of the mind by the
+other psychological tendencies that are there. <i>To think</i>, in
+short, is the secret of will, just as it is the secret of
+memory.</p>
+
+<p>This comes out very clearly in the kind of excuse which we most
+frequently hear from persons who find themselves confronted by the
+sinfulness or harmfulness of some part of their behavior. "I never
+<i>thought</i>," they say. "I never <i>thought</i> how mean the
+action was, I never <i>thought</i> of these abominable
+consequences." And what do we retort when they say this? We say:
+"Why <i>didn't</i> you think? What were you there for but to
+think?" And we read them a moral lecture on their
+irreflectiveness.</p>
+
+<p>The hackneyed example of moral deliberation is the case of an
+habitual drunkard under temptation. He has made a resolve to
+reform, but he is now solicited again by the bottle. His moral
+triumph or failure literally consists in his finding the right
+<i>name</i> for the case. If he says that it is a case of not
+wasting good liquor already poured out, or a case of not being
+churlish and unsociable when in the midst of friends, or a case of
+learning something at last about a brand of whiskey which he never
+met before, or a case of celebrating a public holiday, or a case of
+stimulating himself to a more energetic resolve in favor of
+abstinence than any he has ever yet made, then he is lost. His
+choice of the wrong name seals his doom. But if, in spite of all
+the plausible good names with which his thirsty fancy so copiously
+furnishes him, he unwaveringly clings to the truer bad name, and
+apperceives the case as that of "being a drunkard, being a
+drunkard, being a drunkard," his feet are planted on the road to
+salvation. He saves himself by thinking rightly.</p>
+
+<p>Thus are your pupils to be saved: first, by the stock of ideas
+with which you furnish them; second, by the amount of voluntary
+attention that they can exert in holding to the right ones, however
+unpalatable; and, third, by the several habits of acting definitely
+on these latter to which they have been successfully trained.</p>
+
+<p>In all this the power of voluntarily attending is the point of
+the whole procedure. Just as a balance turns on its knife-edges, so
+on it our moral destiny turns. You remember that, when we were
+talking of the subject of attention, we discovered how much more
+intermittent and brief our acts of voluntary attention are than is
+commonly supposed. If they were all summed together, the time that
+they occupy would cover an almost incredibly small portion of our
+lives. But I also said, you will remember, that their brevity was
+not in proportion to their significance, and that I should return
+to the subject again. So I return to it now. It is not the mere
+size of a thing which, constitutes its importance: it is its
+position in the organism to which it belongs. Our acts of voluntary
+attention, brief and fitful as they are, are nevertheless momentous
+and critical, determining us, as they do, to higher or lower
+destinies. The exercise of voluntary attention in the schoolroom
+must therefore be counted one of the most important points of
+training that take place there; and the first-rate teacher, by the
+keenness of the remoter interests which he is able to awaken, will
+provide abundant opportunities for its occurrence. I hope that you
+appreciate this now without any further explanation.</p>
+
+<p>I have been accused of holding up before you, in the course of
+these talks, a mechanical and even a materialistic view of the
+mind. I have called it an organism and a machine. I have spoken of
+its reaction on the environment as the essential thing about it;
+and I have referred this, either openly or implicitly, to the
+construction of the nervous system. I have, in consequence,
+received notes from some of you, begging me to be more explicit on
+this point; and to let you know frankly whether I am a complete
+materialist, or not.</p>
+
+<p>Now in these lectures I wish to be strictly practical and
+useful, and to keep free from all speculative complications.
+Nevertheless, I do not wish to leave any ambiguity about my own
+position; and I will therefore say, in order to avoid all
+misunderstanding, that in no sense do I count myself a materialist.
+I cannot see how such a thing as our consciousness can possibly be
+<i>produced</i> by a nervous machinery, though I can perfectly well
+see how, if 'ideas' do accompany the workings of the machinery, the
+<i>order</i> of the ideas might very well follow exactly the
+<i>order</i> of the machine's operations. Our habitual associations
+of ideas, trains of thought, and sequences of action, might thus be
+consequences of the succession of currents in our nervous systems.
+And the possible stock of ideas which a man's free spirit would
+have to choose from might depend exclusively on the native and
+acquired powers of his brain. If this were all, we might indeed
+adopt the fatalist conception which I sketched for you but a short
+while ago. Our ideas would be determined by brain currents, and
+these by purely mechanical laws.</p>
+
+<p>But, after what we have just seen,&mdash;namely, the part played
+by voluntary attention in volition,&mdash;a belief in free will and
+purely spiritual causation is still open to us. The duration and
+amount of this attention <i>seem</i> within certain limits
+indeterminate. We <i>feel</i> as if we could make it really more or
+less, and as if our free action in this regard were a genuine
+critical point in nature,&mdash;a point on which our destiny and
+that of others might hinge. The whole question of free will
+concentrates itself, then, at this same small point: "Is or is not
+the appearance of indetermination at this point an illusion?"</p>
+
+<p>It is plain that such a question can be decided only by general
+analogies, and not by accurate observations. The free-willist
+believes the appearance to be a reality: the determinist believes
+that it is an illusion. I myself hold with the
+free-willists,&mdash;not because I cannot conceive the fatalist
+theory clearly, or because I fail to understand its plausibility,
+but simply because, if free will <i>were</i> true, it would be
+absurd to have the belief in it fatally forced on our acceptance.
+Considering the inner fitness of things, one would rather think
+that the very first act of a will endowed with freedom should be to
+sustain the belief in the freedom itself. I accordingly believe
+freely in my freedom; I do so with the best of scientific
+consciences, knowing that the predetermination of the amount of my
+effort of attention can never receive objective proof, and hoping
+that, whether you follow my example in this respect or not, it will
+at least make you see that such psychological and psychophysical
+theories as I hold do not necessarily force a man to become a
+fatalist or a materialist.</p>
+
+<p>Let me say one more final word now about the will, and therewith
+conclude both that important subject and these lectures.</p>
+
+<p>There are two types of will. There are also two types of
+inhibition. We may call them inhibition by repression or by
+negation, and inhibition by substitution, respectively. The
+difference between them is that, in the case of inhibition by
+repression, both the inhibited idea and the inhibiting idea, the
+impulsive idea and the idea that negates it, remain along with each
+other in consciousness, producing a certain inward strain or
+tension there: whereas, in inhibition by substitution, the
+inhibiting idea supersedes altogether the idea which it inhibits,
+and the latter quickly vanishes from the field.</p>
+
+<p>For instance, your pupils are wandering in mind, are listening
+to a sound outside the window, which presently grows interesting
+enough to claim all their attention. You can call the latter back
+again by bellowing at them not to listen to those sounds, but to
+keep their minds on their books or on what you are saying. And, by
+thus keeping them conscious that your eye is sternly on them, you
+may produce a good effect. But it will be a wasteful effect and an
+inferior effect; for the moment you relax your supervision the
+attractive disturbance, always there soliciting their curiosity,
+will overpower them, and they will be just as they were before:
+whereas, if, without saying anything about the street disturbances,
+you open a counter-attraction by starting some very interesting
+talk or demonstration yourself, they will altogether forget the
+distracting incident, and without any effort follow you along.
+There are many interests that can never be inhibited by the way of
+negation. To a man in love, for example, it is literally
+impossible, by any effort of will, to annul his passion. But let
+'some new planet swim into his ken,' and the former idol will
+immediately cease to engross his mind.</p>
+
+<p>It is clear that in general we ought, whenever we can, to employ
+the method of inhibition by substitution. He whose life is based
+upon the word 'no,' who tells the truth because a lie is wicked,
+and who has constantly to grapple with his envious and cowardly and
+mean propensities, is in an inferior situation in every respect to
+what he would be if the love of truth and magnanimity positively
+possessed him from the outset, and he felt no inferior temptations.
+Your born gentleman is certainly, for this world's purposes, a more
+valuable being than your "Crump, with his grunting resistance to
+his native devils," even though in God's sight the latter may, as
+the Catholic theologians say, be rolling up great stores of
+'merit.'</p>
+
+<p>Spinoza long ago wrote in his Ethics that anything that a man
+can avoid under the notion that it is bad he may also avoid under
+the notion that something else is good. He who habitually acts
+<i>sub specie mali</i>, under the negative notion, the notion of
+the bad, is called a slave by Spinoza. To him who acts habitually
+under the notion of good he gives the name of freeman. See to it
+now, I beg you, that you make freemen of your pupils by habituating
+them to act, whenever possible, under the notion of a good. Get
+them habitually to tell the truth, not so much through showing them
+the wickedness of lying as by arousing their enthusiasm for honor
+and veracity. Wean them from their native cruelty by imparting to
+them some of your own positive sympathy with an animal's inner
+springs of joy. And, in the lessons which you may be legally
+obliged to conduct upon the bad effects of alcohol, lay less stress
+than the books do on the drunkard's stomach, kidneys, nerves, and
+social miseries, and more on the blessings of having an organism
+kept in lifelong possession of its full youthful elasticity by a
+sweet, sound blood, to which stimulants and narcotics are unknown,
+and to which the morning sun and air and dew will daily come as
+sufficiently powerful intoxicants.</p>
+
+<p>I have now ended these talks. If to some of you the things I
+have said seem obvious or trivial, it is possible that they may
+appear less so when, in the course of a year or two, you find
+yourselves noticing and apperceiving events in the schoolroom a
+little differently, in consequence of some of the conceptions I
+have tried to make more clear. I cannot but think that to
+apperceive your pupil as a little sensitive, impulsive,
+associative, and reactive organism, partly fated and partly free,
+will lead to a better intelligence of all his ways. Understand him,
+then, as such a subtle little piece of machinery. And if, in
+addition, you can also see him <i>sub specie boni</i>, and love him
+as well, you will be in the best possible position for becoming
+perfect teachers.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="TALKS_TO_STUDENTS" id="TALKS_TO_STUDENTS" /><b>TALKS
+TO STUDENTS</b></h2>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="I__THE_GOSPEL_OF_RELAXATION"
+id="I__THE_GOSPEL_OF_RELAXATION" />I. THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION</h2>
+
+<p>I wish in the following hour to take certain psychological
+doctrines and show their practical applications to mental
+hygiene,&mdash;to the hygiene of our American life more
+particularly. Our people, especially in academic circles, are
+turning towards psychology nowadays with great expectations; and,
+if psychology is to justify them, it must be by showing fruits in
+the pedagogic and therapeutic lines.</p>
+
+<p>The reader may possibly have heard of a peculiar theory of the
+emotions, commonly referred to in psychological literature as the
+Lange-James theory. According to this theory, our emotions are
+mainly due to those organic stirrings that are aroused in us in a
+reflex way by the stimulus of the exciting object or situation. An
+emotion of fear, for example, or surprise, is not a direct effect
+of the object's presence on the mind, but an effect of that still
+earlier effect, the bodily commotion which the object suddenly
+excites; so that, were this bodily commotion suppressed, we should
+not so much <i>feel</i> fear as call the situation fearful; we
+should not feel surprise, but coldly recognize that the object was
+indeed astonishing. One enthusiast has even gone so far as to say
+that when we feel sorry it is because we weep, when we feel afraid
+it is because we run away, and not conversely. Some of you may
+perhaps be acquainted with the paradoxical formula. Now, whatever
+exaggeration may possibly lurk in this account of our emotions (and
+I doubt myself whether the exaggeration be very great), it is
+certain that the main core of it is true, and that the mere giving
+way to tears, for example, or to the outward expression of an
+anger-fit, will result for the moment in making the inner grief or
+anger more acutely felt. There is, accordingly, no better known or
+more generally useful precept in the moral training of youth, or in
+one's personal self-discipline, than that which bids us pay primary
+attention to what we do and express, and not to care too much for
+what we feel. If we only check a cowardly impulse in time, for
+example, or if we only <i>don't</i> strike the blow or rip out with
+the complaining or insulting word that we shall regret as long as
+we live, our feelings themselves will presently be the calmer and
+better, with no particular guidance from us on their own account.
+Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go
+together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more
+direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling,
+which is not.</p>
+
+<p>Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our
+spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look
+round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were
+already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel
+cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can. So to feel brave, act
+as if we <i>were</i> brave, use all our will to that end, and a
+courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear. Again, in
+order to feel kindly toward a person to whom we have been inimical,
+the only way is more or less deliberately to smile, to make
+sympathetic inquiries, and to force ourselves to say genial things.
+One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer
+communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward
+wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling. To wrestle
+with a bad feeling only pins our attention on it, and keeps it
+still fastened in the mind: whereas, if we act as if from some
+better feeling, the old bad feeling soon folds its tent like an
+Arab, and silently steals away.</p>
+
+<p>The best manuals of religious devotion accordingly reiterate the
+maxim that we must let our feelings go, and pay no regard to them
+whatever. In an admirable and widely successful little book called
+'The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life,' by Mrs. Hannah Whitall
+Smith, I find this lesson on almost every page. <i>Act</i>
+faithfully, and you really have faith, no matter how cold and even
+how dubious you may feel. "It is your purpose God looks at," writes
+Mrs. Smith, "not your feelings about that purpose; and your
+purpose, or will, is therefore the only thing you need attend
+to.... Let your emotions come or let them go, just as God pleases,
+and make no account of them either way.... They really have nothing
+to do with the matter. They are not the indicators of your
+spiritual state, but are merely the indicators of your temperament
+or of your present physical condition."</p>
+
+<p>But you all know these facts already, so I need no longer press
+them on your attention. From our acts and from our attitudes
+ceaseless inpouring currents of sensation come, which help to
+determine from moment to moment what our inner states shall be:
+that is a fundamental law of psychology which I will therefore
+proceed to assume.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+
+
+<p>A Viennese neurologist of considerable reputation has recently
+written about the <i>Binnenleben</i>, as he terms it, or buried
+life of human beings. No doctor, this writer says, can get into
+really profitable relations with a nervous patient until he gets
+some sense of what the patient's <i>Binnenleben</i> is, of the sort
+of unuttered inner atmosphere in which his consciousness dwells
+alone with the secrets of its prison-house. This inner personal
+tone is what we can't communicate or describe articulately to
+others; but the wraith and ghost of it, so to speak, are often what
+our friends and intimates feel as our most characteristic quality.
+In the unhealthy-minded, apart from all sorts of old regrets,
+ambitions checked by shames and aspirations obstructed by
+timidities, it consists mainly of bodily discomforts not distinctly
+localized by the sufferer, but breeding a general self-mistrust and
+sense that things are not as they should be with him. Half the
+thirst for alcohol that exists in the world exists simply because
+alcohol acts as a temporary an&aelig;sthetic and effacer to all
+these morbid feelings that never ought to be in a human being at
+all. In the healthy-minded, on the contrary, there are no fears or
+shames to discover; and the sensations that pour in from the
+organism only help to swell the general vital sense of security and
+readiness for anything that may turn up.</p>
+
+<p>Consider, for example, the effects of a well-toned
+<i>motor-apparatus</i>, nervous and muscular, on our general
+personal self-consciousness, the sense of elasticity and efficiency
+that results. They tell us that in Norway the life of the women has
+lately been entirely revolutionized by the new order of muscular
+feelings with which the use of the <i>ski</i>, or long snow-shoes,
+as a sport for both sexes, has made the women acquainted. Fifteen
+years ago the Norwegian women were even more than the women of
+other lands votaries of the old-fashioned ideal of femininity, 'the
+domestic angel,' the 'gentle and refining influence' sort of thing.
+Now these sedentary fireside tabby-cats of Norway have been
+trained, they say, by the snow-shoes into lithe and audacious
+creatures, for whom no night is too dark or height too giddy, and
+who are not only saying good-bye to the traditional feminine pallor
+and delicacy of constitution, but actually taking the lead in every
+educational and social reform. I cannot but think that the tennis
+and tramping and skating habits and the bicycle-craze which are so
+rapidly extending among our dear sisters and daughters in this
+country are going also to lead to a sounder and heartier moral
+tone, which will send its tonic breath through all our American
+life.</p>
+
+<p>I hope that here in America more and more the ideal of the
+well-trained and vigorous body will be maintained neck by neck with
+that of the well-trained and vigorous mind as the two coequal
+halves of the higher education for men and women alike. The
+strength of the British Empire lies in the strength of character of
+the individual Englishman, taken all alone by himself. And that
+strength, I am persuaded, is perennially nourished and kept up by
+nothing so much as by the national worship, in which all classes
+meet, of athletic outdoor life and sport.</p>
+
+<p>I recollect, years ago, reading a certain work by an American
+doctor on hygiene and the laws of life and the type of future
+humanity. I have forgotten its author's name and its title, but I
+remember well an awful prophecy that it contained about the future
+of our muscular system. Human perfection, the writer said, means
+ability to cope with the environment; but the environment will more
+and more require mental power from us, and less and less will ask
+for bare brute strength. Wars will cease, machines will do all our
+heavy work, man will become more and more a mere director of
+nature's energies, and less and less an exerter of energy on his
+own account. So that, if the <i>homo sapiens</i> of the future can
+only digest his food and think, what need will he have of
+well-developed muscles at all? And why, pursued this writer, should
+we not even now be satisfied with a more delicate and intellectual
+type of beauty than that which pleased our ancestors? Nay, I have
+heard a fanciful friend make a still further advance in this
+'new-man' direction. With our future food, he says, itself prepared
+in liquid form from the chemical elements of the atmosphere,
+pepsinated or half-digested in advance, and sucked up through a
+glass tube from a tin can, what need shall we have of teeth, or
+stomachs even? They may go, along with our muscles and our physical
+courage, while, challenging ever more and more our proper
+admiration, will grow the gigantic domes of our crania, arching
+over our spectacled eyes, and animating our flexible little lips to
+those floods of learned and ingenious talk which will constitute
+our most congenial occupation.</p>
+
+<p>I am sure that your flesh creeps at this apocalyptic vision.
+Mine certainly did so; and I cannot believe that our muscular vigor
+will ever be a superfluity. Even if the day ever dawns in which it
+will not be needed for fighting the old heavy battles against
+Nature, it will still always be needed to furnish the background of
+sanity, serenity, and cheerfulness to life, to give moral
+elasticity to our disposition, to round off the wiry edge of our
+fretfulness, and make us good-humored and easy of approach.
+Weakness is too apt to be what the doctors call irritable weakness.
+And that blessed internal peace and confidence, that
+<i>acquiescentia in seipso</i>, as Spinoza used to call it, that
+wells up from every part of the body of a muscularly well-trained
+human being, and soaks the indwelling soul of him with
+satisfaction, is, quite apart from every consideration of its
+mechanical utility, an element of spiritual hygiene of supreme
+significance.</p>
+
+<p>And now let me go a step deeper into mental hygiene, and try to
+enlist your insight and sympathy in a cause which I believe is one
+of paramount patriotic importance to us Yankees. Many years ago a
+Scottish medical man, Dr. Clouston, a mad-doctor as they call him
+there, or what we should call an asylum physician (the most eminent
+one in Scotland), visited this country, and said something that has
+remained in my memory ever since. "You Americans," he said, "wear
+too much expression on your faces. You are living like an army with
+all its reserves engaged in action. The duller countenances of the
+British population betoken a better scheme of life. They suggest
+stores of reserved nervous force to fall back upon, if any occasion
+should arise that requires it. This inexcitability, this presence
+at all times of power not used, I regard," continued Dr. Clouston,
+"as the great safeguard of our British people. The other thing in
+you gives me a sense of insecurity, and you ought somehow to tone
+yourselves down. You really do carry too much expression, you take
+too intensely the trivial moments of life."</p>
+
+<p>Now Dr. Clouston is a trained reader of the secrets of the soul
+as expressed upon the countenance, and the observation of his which
+I quote seems to me to mean a great deal. And all Americans who
+stay in Europe long enough to get accustomed to the spirit that
+reigns and expresses itself there, so unexcitable as compared with
+ours, make a similar observation when they return to their native
+shores. They find a wild-eyed look upon their compatriots' faces,
+either of too desperate eagerness and anxiety or of too intense
+responsiveness and good-will. It is hard to say whether the men or
+the women show it most. It is true that we do not all feel about it
+as Dr. Clouston felt. Many of us, far from deploring it, admire it.
+We say: "What intelligence it shows! How different from the stolid
+cheeks, the codfish eyes, the slow, inanimate demeanor we have been
+seeing in the British Isles!" Intensity, rapidity, vivacity of
+appearance, are indeed with us something of a nationally accepted
+ideal; and the medical notion of 'irritable weakness' is not the
+first thing suggested by them to our mind, as it was to Dr.
+Clouston's. In a weekly paper not very long ago I remember reading
+a story in which, after describing the beauty and interest of the
+heroine's personality, the author summed up her charms by saying
+that to all who looked upon her an impression as of 'bottled
+lightning' was irresistibly conveyed.</p>
+
+<p>Bottled lightning, in truth, is one of our American ideals, even
+of a young girl's character! Now it is most ungracious, and it may
+seem to some persons unpatriotic, to criticise in public the
+physical peculiarities of one's own people, of one's own family, so
+to speak. Besides, it may be said, and said with justice, that
+there are plenty of bottled-lightning temperaments in other
+countries, and plenty of phlegmatic temperaments here; and that,
+when all is said and done, the more or less of tension about which
+I am making such a fuss is a very small item in the sum total of a
+nation's life, and not worth solemn treatment at a time when
+agreeable rather than disagreeable things should be talked about.
+Well, in one sense the more or less of tension in our faces and in
+our unused muscles is a small thing: not much mechanical work is
+done by these contractions. But it is not always the material size
+of a thing that measures its importance: often it is its place and
+function. One of the most philosophical remarks I ever heard made
+was by an unlettered workman who was doing some repairs at my house
+many years ago. "There is very little difference between one man
+and another," he said, "when you go to the bottom of it. But what
+little there is, is very important." And the remark certainly
+applies to this case. The general over-contraction may be small
+when estimated in foot-pounds, but its importance is immense on
+account of its <i>effects on the over-contracted person's spiritual
+life</i>. This follows as a necessary consequence from the theory
+of our emotions to which I made reference at the beginning of this
+article. For by the sensations that so incessantly pour in from the
+over-tense excited body the over-tense and excited habit of mind is
+kept up; and the sultry, threatening, exhausting, thunderous inner
+atmosphere never quite clears away. If you never wholly give
+yourself up to the chair you sit in, but always keep your leg- and
+body-muscles half contracted for a rise; if you breathe eighteen or
+nineteen instead of sixteen times a minute, and never quite breathe
+out at that,&mdash;what mental mood <i>can</i> you be in but one of
+inner panting and expectancy, and how can the future and its
+worries possibly forsake your mind? On the other hand, how can they
+gain admission to your mind if your brow be unruffled, your
+respiration calm and complete, and your muscles all relaxed?</p>
+
+<p>Now what is the cause of this absence of repose, this
+bottled-lightning quality in us Americans? The explanation of it
+that is usually given is that it comes from the extreme dryness of
+our climate and the acrobatic performances of our thermometer,
+coupled with the extraordinary progressiveness of our life, the
+hard work, the railroad speed, the rapid success, and all the other
+things we know so well by heart. Well, our climate is certainly
+exciting, but hardly more so than that of many parts of Europe,
+where nevertheless no bottled-lightning girls are found. And the
+work done and the pace of life are as extreme an every great
+capital of Europe as they are here. To me both of these pretended
+causes are utterly insufficient to explain the facts.</p>
+
+<p>To explain them, we must go not to physical geography, but to
+psychology and sociology. The latest chapter both in sociology and
+in psychology to be developed in a manner that approaches adequacy
+is the chapter on the imitative impulse. First Bagehot, then Tarde,
+then Royce and Baldwin here, have shown that invention and
+imitation, taken together, form, one may say, the entire warp and
+woof of human life, in so far as it is social. The American
+over-tension and jerkiness and breathlessness and intensity and
+agony of expression are primarily social, and only secondarily
+physiological, phenomena. They are <i>bad habits</i>, nothing more
+or less, bred of custom and example, born of the imitation of bad
+models and the cultivation of false personal ideals. How are idioms
+acquired, how do local peculiarities of phrase and accent come
+about? Through an accidental example set by some one, which struck
+the ears of others, and was quoted and copied till at last every
+one in the locality chimed in. Just so it is with national tricks
+of vocalization or intonation, with national manners, fashions of
+movement and gesture, and habitual expressions of face. We, here in
+America, through following a succession of pattern-setters whom it
+is now impossible to trace, and through influencing each other in a
+bad direction, have at last settled down collectively into what,
+for better or worse, is our own characteristic national
+type,&mdash;a type with the production of which, so far as these
+habits go, the climate and conditions have had practically nothing
+at all to do.</p>
+
+<p>This type, which we have thus reached by our imitativeness, we
+now have fixed upon us, for better or worse. Now no type can be
+<i>wholly</i> disadvantageous; but, so far as our type follows the
+bottled-lightning fashion, it cannot be wholly good. Dr. Clouston
+was certainly right in thinking that eagerness, breathlessness, and
+anxiety are not signs of strength: they are signs of weakness and
+of bad co-ordination. The even forehead, the slab-like cheek, the
+codfish eye, may be less interesting for the moment; but they are
+more promising signs than intense expression is of what we may
+expect of their possessor in the long run. Your dull, unhurried
+worker gets over a great deal of ground, because he never goes
+backward or breaks down. Your intense, convulsive worker breaks
+down and has bad moods so often that you never know where he may be
+when you most need his help,&mdash;he may be having one of his 'bad
+days.' We say that so many of our fellow-countrymen collapse, and
+have to be sent abroad to rest their nerves, because they work so
+hard. I suspect that this is an immense mistake. I suspect that
+neither the nature nor the amount of our work is accountable for
+the frequency and severity of our breakdowns, but that their cause
+lies rather in those absurd feelings of hurry and having no time,
+in that breathlessness and tension, that anxiety of feature and
+that solicitude for results, that lack of inner harmony and ease,
+in short, by which with us the work is so apt to be accompanied,
+and from which a European who should do the same work would nine
+times out of ten be free. These perfectly wanton and unnecessary
+tricks of inner attitude and outer manner in us, caught from the
+social atmosphere, kept up by tradition, and idealized by many as
+the admirable way of life, are the last straws that break the
+American camel's back, the final overflowers of our measure of wear
+and tear and fatigue.</p>
+
+<p>The voice, for example, in a surprisingly large number of us has
+a tired and plaintive sound. Some of us are really tired (for I do
+not mean absolutely to deny that our climate has a tiring quality);
+but far more of us are not tired at all, or would not be tired at
+all unless we had got into a wretched trick of feeling tired, by
+following the prevalent habits of vocalization and expression. And
+if talking high and tired, and living excitedly and hurriedly,
+would only enable us to <i>do</i> more by the way, even while
+breaking us down in the end, it would be different. There would be
+some compensation, some excuse, for going on so. But the exact
+reverse is the case. It is your relaxed and easy worker, who is in
+no hurry, and quite thoughtless most of the while of consequences,
+who is your efficient worker; and tension and anxiety, and present
+and future, all mixed up together in our mind at once, are the
+surest drags upon steady progress and hindrances to our success. My
+colleague, Professor M&uuml;nsterberg, an excellent observer, who
+came here recently, has written some notes on America to German
+papers. He says in substance that the appearance of unusual energy
+in America is superficial and illusory, being really due to nothing
+but the habits of jerkiness and bad co-ordination for which we have
+to thank the defective training of our people. I think myself that
+it is high time for old legends and traditional opinions to be
+changed; and that, if any one should begin to write about Yankee
+inefficiency and feebleness, and inability to do anything with time
+except to waste it, he would have a very pretty paradoxical little
+thesis to sustain, with a great many facts to quote, and a great
+deal of experience to appeal to in its proof.</p>
+
+<p>Well, my friends, if our dear American character is weakened by
+all this over-tension,&mdash;and I think, whatever reserves you may
+make, that you will agree as to the main facts,&mdash;where does
+the remedy lie? It lies, of course, where lay the origins of the
+disease. If a vicious fashion and taste are to blame for the thing,
+the fashion and taste must be changed. And, though it is no small
+thing to inoculate seventy millions of people with new standards,
+yet, if there is to be any relief, that will have to be done. We
+must change ourselves from a race that admires jerk and snap for
+their own sakes, and looks down upon low voices and quiet ways as
+dull, to one that, on the contrary, has calm for its ideal, and for
+their own sakes loves harmony, dignity, and ease.</p>
+
+<p>So we go back to the psychology of imitation again. There is
+only one way to improve ourselves, and that is by some of us
+setting an example which the others may pick up and imitate till
+the new fashion spreads from east to west. Some of us are in more
+favorable positions than others to set new fashions. Some are much
+more striking personally and imitable, so to speak. But no living
+person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody. Thackeray
+somewhere says of the Irish nation that there never was an Irishman
+so poor that he didn't have a still poorer Irishman living at his
+expense; and, surely, there is no human being whose example doesn't
+work contagiously in <i>some</i> particular. The very idiots at our
+public institutions imitate each other's peculiarities. And, if you
+should individually achieve calmness and harmony in your own
+person, you may depend upon it that a wave of imitation will spread
+from you, as surely as the circles spread outward when a stone is
+dropped into a lake.</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately, we shall not have to be absolute pioneers. Even now
+in New York they have formed a society for the improvement of our
+national vocalization, and one perceives its machinations already
+in the shape of various newspaper paragraphs intended to stir up
+dissatisfaction with the awful thing that it is. And, better still
+than that, because more radical and general, is the gospel of
+relaxation, as one may call it, preached by Miss Annie Payson Call,
+of Boston, in her admirable little volume called 'Power through
+Repose,' a book that ought to be in the hands of every teacher and
+student in America of either sex. You need only be followers, then,
+on a path already opened up by others. But of one thing be
+confident: others still will follow you.</p>
+
+<p>And this brings me to one more application of psychology to
+practical life, to which I will call attention briefly, and then
+close. If one's example of easy and calm ways is to be effectively
+contagious, one feels by instinct that the less voluntarily one
+aims at getting imitated, the more unconscious one keeps in the
+matter, the more likely one is to succeed. <i>Become the imitable
+thing</i>, and you may then discharge your minds of all
+responsibility for the imitation. The laws of social nature will
+take care of that result. Now the psychological principle on which
+this precept reposes is a law of very deep and wide-spread
+importance in the conduct of our lives, and at the same time a law
+which we Americans most grievously neglect. Stated technically, the
+law is this: that <i>strong feeling about one's self tends to
+arrest the free association of one's objective ideas and motor
+processes</i>. We get the extreme example of this in the mental
+disease called melancholia.</p>
+
+<p>A melancholic patient is filled through and through with
+intensely painful emotion about himself. He is threatened, he is
+guilty, he is doomed, he is annihilated, he is lost. His mind is
+fixed as if in a cramp on these feelings of his own situation, and
+in all the books on insanity you may read that the usual varied
+flow of his thoughts has ceased. His associative processes, to use
+the technical phrase, are inhibited; and his ideas stand
+stock-still, shut up to their one monotonous function of
+reiterating inwardly the fact of the man's desperate estate. And
+this inhibitive influence is not due to the mere fact that his
+emotion is <i>painful</i>. Joyous emotions about the self also stop
+the association of our ideas. A saint in ecstasy is as motionless
+and irresponsive and one-idea'd as a melancholiac. And, without
+going as far as ecstatic saints, we know how in every one a great
+or sudden pleasure may paralyze the flow of thought. Ask young
+people returning from a party or a spectacle, and all excited about
+it, what it was. "Oh, it was <i>fine</i>! it was <i>fine</i>! it
+was <i>fine</i>!" is all the information you are likely to receive
+until the excitement has calmed down. Probably every one of my
+hearers has been made temporarily half-idiotic by some great
+success or piece of good fortune. "<i>Good</i>! GOOD! GOOD!" is all
+we can at such times say to ourselves until we smile at our own
+very foolishness.</p>
+
+<p>Now from all this we can draw an extremely practical conclusion.
+If, namely, we wish our trains of ideation and volition to be
+copious and varied and effective, we must form the habit of freeing
+them from the inhibitive influence of reflection upon them, of
+egoistic preoccupation about their results. Such a habit, like
+other habits, can be formed. Prudence and duty and self-regard,
+emotions of ambition and emotions of anxiety, have, of course, a
+needful part to play in our lives.</p>
+
+<p>But confine them as far as possible to the occasions when you
+are making your general resolutions and deciding on your plans of
+campaign, and keep them out of the details. When once a decision is
+reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely
+all responsibility and care about the outcome. <i>Unclamp</i>, in a
+word, your intellectual and practical machinery, and let it run
+free; and the service it will do you will be twice as good. Who are
+the scholars who get 'rattled' in the recitation-room? Those who
+think of the possibilities of failure and feel the great importance
+of the act. Who are those who do recite well? Often those who are
+most indifferent. <i>Their</i> ideas reel themselves out of their
+memory of their own accord. Why do we hear the complaint so often
+that social life in New England is either less rich and expressive
+or more fatiguing than it is in some other parts of the world? To
+what is the fact, if fact it be, due unless to the over-active
+conscience of the people, afraid of either saying something too
+trivial and obvious, or something insincere, or something unworthy
+of one's interlocutor, or something in some way or other not
+adequate to the occasion? How can conversation possibly steer
+itself through such a sea of responsibilities and inhibitions as
+this? On the other hand, conversation does flourish and society is
+refreshing, and neither dull on the one hand nor exhausting from
+its effort on the other, wherever people forget their scruples and
+take the brakes off their hearts, and let their tongues wag as
+automatically and irresponsibly as they will.</p>
+
+<p>They talk much in pedagogic circles to-day about the duty of the
+teacher to prepare for every lesson in advance. To some extent this
+is useful. But we Yankees are assuredly not those to whom such a
+general doctrine should be preached. We are only too careful as it
+is. The advice I should give to most teachers would be in the words
+of one who is herself an admirable teacher. Prepare yourself in the
+<i>subject so well that it shall be always on tap</i>: then in the
+class-room trust your spontaneity and fling away all further
+care.</p>
+
+<p>My advice to students, especially to girl-students, would be
+somewhat similar. Just as a bicycle-chain may be too tight, so may
+one's carefulness and conscientiousness be so tense as to hinder
+the running of one's mind. Take, for example, periods when there
+are many successive days of examination impending. One ounce of
+good nervous tone in an examination is worth many pounds of anxious
+study for it in advance. If you want really to do your best in an
+examination, fling away the book the day before, say to yourself,
+"I won't waste another minute on this miserable thing, and I don't
+care an iota whether I succeed or not." Say this sincerely, and
+feel it; and go out and play, or go to bed and sleep, and I am sure
+the results next day will encourage you to use the method
+permanently. I have heard this advice given to a student by Miss
+Call, whose book on muscular relaxation I quoted a moment ago. In
+her later book, entitled 'As a Matter of Course,' the gospel of
+moral relaxation, of dropping things from the mind, and not
+'caring,' is preached with equal success. Not only our preachers,
+but our friends the theosophists and mind-curers of various
+religious sects are also harping on this string. And with the
+doctors, the Delsarteans, the various mind-curing sects, and such
+writers as Mr. Dresser, Prentice Mulford, Mr. Horace Fletcher, and
+Mr. Trine to help, and the whole band of schoolteachers and
+magazine-readers chiming in, it really looks as if a good start
+might be made in the direction of changing our American mental
+habit into something more indifferent and strong.</p>
+
+<p>Worry means always and invariably inhibition of associations and
+loss of effective power. Of course, the sovereign cure for worry is
+religious faith; and this, of course, you also know. The turbulent
+billows of the fretful surface leave the deep parts of the ocean
+undisturbed, and to him who has a hold on vaster and more permanent
+realities the hourly vicissitudes of his personal destiny seem
+relatively insignificant things. The really religious person is
+accordingly unshakable and full of equanimity, and calmly ready for
+any duty that the day may bring forth. This is charmingly
+illustrated by a little work with which I recently became
+acquainted, "The Practice of the Presence of God, the Best Ruler of
+a Holy Life, by Brother Lawrence, being Conversations and Letters
+of Nicholas Herman of Lorraine, Translated from the French."<a
+name="FNanchor_A_3" id="FNanchor_A_3" /><a href="#Footnote_A_3"
+class="fnanchor">[A]</a> I extract a few passages, the
+conversations being given in indirect discourse. Brother Lawrence
+was a Carmelite friar, converted at Paris in 1666. "He said that he
+had been footman to M. Fieubert, the Treasurer, and that he was a
+great awkward fellow, who broke everything. That he had desired to
+be received into a monastery, thinking that he would there be made
+to smart for his awkwardness and the faults he should commit, and
+so he should sacrifice to God his life, with its pleasures; but
+that God had disappointed him, he having met with nothing but
+satisfaction in that state....</p>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+<p><a name="Footnote_A_3" id="Footnote_A_3" /><a
+href="#FNanchor_A_3"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> Fleming H.
+Revell Company, New York.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>"That he had long been troubled in mind from a certain belief
+that he should be damned; that all the men in the world could not
+have persuaded him to the contrary; but that he had thus reasoned
+with himself about it: <i>I engaged in a religious life only for
+the love of God, and I have endeavored to act only for Him;
+whatever becomes of me, whether I be lost or saved, I will always
+continue to act purely for the love of God. I shall have this good
+at least, that till death I shall have done all that is in me to
+love Him</i>.... That since then he had passed his life in perfect
+liberty and continual joy.</p>
+
+<p>"That when an occasion of practising some virtue offered, he
+addressed himself to God, saying, 'Lord, I cannot do this unless
+thou enablest me'; and that then he received strength more than
+sufficient. That, when he had failed in his duty, he only confessed
+his fault, saying to God, 'I shall never do otherwise, if You leave
+me to myself; it is You who must hinder my failing, and mend what
+is amiss.' That after this he gave himself no further uneasiness
+about it.</p>
+
+<p>"That he had been lately sent into Burgundy to buy the provision
+of wine for the society, which was a very unwelcome task for him,
+because he had no turn for business, and because he was lame, and
+could not go about the boat but by rolling himself over the casks.
+That, however, he gave himself no uneasiness about it, nor about
+the purchase of the wine. That he said to God, 'It was his business
+he was about,' and that he afterward found it well performed. That
+he had been sent into Auvergne, the year before, upon the same
+account; that he could not tell how the matter passed, but that it
+proved very well.</p>
+
+<p>"So, likewise, in his business in the kitchen (to which he had
+naturally a great aversion), having accustomed himself to do
+everything there for the love of God, and with prayer upon all
+occasions, for his grace to do his work well, he had found
+everything easy during fifteen years that he had been employed
+there.</p>
+
+<p>"That he was very well pleased with the post he was now in, but
+that he was as ready to quit that as the former, since he was
+always pleasing himself in every condition, by doing little things
+for the love of God.</p>
+
+<p>"That the goodness of God assured him he would not forsake him
+utterly, and that he would give him strength to bear whatever evil
+he permitted to happen to him; and, therefore, that he feared
+nothing, and had no occasion to consult with anybody about his
+state. That, when he had attempted to do it, he had always come
+away more perplexed."</p>
+
+<p>The simple-heartedness of the good Brother Lawrence, and the
+relaxation of all unnecessary solicitudes and anxieties in him, is
+a refreshing spectacle.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+
+
+<p>The need of feeling responsible all the livelong day has been
+preached long enough in our New England. Long enough exclusively,
+at any rate,&mdash;and long enough to the female sex. What our
+girl-students and woman-teachers most need nowadays is not the
+exacerbation, but rather the toning-down of their moral tensions.
+Even now I fear that some one of my fair hearers may be making an
+undying resolve to become strenuously relaxed, cost what it will,
+for the remainder of her life. It is needless to say that that is
+not the way to do it. The way to do it, paradoxical as it may seem,
+is genuinely not to care whether you are doing it or not. Then,
+possibly, by the grace of God, you may all at once find that you
+<i>are</i> doing it, and, having learned what the trick feels like,
+you may (again by the grace of God) be enabled to go on.</p>
+
+<p>And that something like this may be the happy experience of all
+my hearers is, in closing, my most earnest wish.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="II__ON_A_CERTAIN_BLINDNESS_IN_HUMAN_BEINGS"
+id="II__ON_A_CERTAIN_BLINDNESS_IN_HUMAN_BEINGS" />II. ON A CERTAIN
+BLINDNESS IN HUMAN BEINGS</h2>
+
+<p>Our judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little,
+depend on the <i>feelings</i> the things arouse in us. Where we
+judge a thing to be precious in consequence of the <i>idea</i> we
+frame of it, this is only because the idea is itself associated
+already with a feeling. If we were radically feelingless, and if
+ideas were the only things our mind could entertain, we should lose
+all our likes and dislikes at a stroke, and be unable to point to
+any one situation or experience in life more valuable or
+significant than any other.</p>
+
+<p>Now the blindness in human beings, of which this discourse will
+treat, is the blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard
+to the feelings of creatures and people different from
+ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>We are practical beings, each of us with limited functions and
+duties to perform. Each is bound to feel intensely the importance
+of his own duties and the significance of the situations that call
+these forth. But this feeling is in each of us a vital secret, for
+sympathy with which we vainly look to others. The others are too
+much absorbed in their own vital secrets to take an interest in
+ours. Hence the stupidity and injustice of our opinions, so far as
+they deal with the significance of alien lives. Hence the falsity
+of our judgments, so far as they presume to decide in an absolute
+way on the value of other persons' conditions or ideals.</p>
+
+<p>Take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we are by a tie more
+intimate than most ties in this world; and yet, outside of that tie
+of friendly fondness, how insensible, each of us, to all that makes
+life significant for the other!&mdash;we to the rapture of bones
+under hedges, or smells of trees and lamp-posts, they to the
+delights of literature and art. As you sit reading the most moving
+romance you ever fell upon, what sort of a judge is your
+fox-terrier of your behavior? With all his good will toward you,
+the nature of your conduct is absolutely excluded from his
+comprehension. To sit there like a senseless statue, when you might
+be taking him to walk and throwing sticks for him to catch! What
+queer disease is this that comes over you every day, of holding
+things and staring at them like that for hours together, paralyzed
+of motion and vacant of all conscious life? The African savages
+came nearer the truth; but they, too, missed it, when they gathered
+wonderingly round one of our American travellers who, in the
+interior, had just come into possession of a stray copy of the New
+York <i>Commercial Advertiser</i>, and was devouring it column by
+column. When he got through, they offered him a high price for the
+mysterious object; and, being asked for what they wanted it, they
+said: "For an eye medicine,"&mdash;that being the only reason they
+could conceive of for the protracted bath which he had given his
+eyes upon its surface.</p>
+
+<p>The spectator's judgment is sure to miss the root of the matter,
+and to possess no truth. The subject judged knows a part of the
+world of reality which the judging spectator fails to see, knows
+more while the spectator knows less; and, wherever there is
+conflict of opinion and difference of vision, we are bound to
+believe that the truer side is the side that feels the more, and
+not the side that feels the less.</p>
+
+<p>Let me take a personal example of the kind that befalls each one
+of us daily:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>Some years ago, while journeying in the mountains of North
+Carolina, I passed by a large number of 'coves,' as they call them
+there, or heads of small valleys between the hills, which had been
+newly cleared and planted. The impression on my mind was one of
+unmitigated squalor. The settler had in every case cut down the
+more manageable trees, and left their charred stumps standing. The
+larger trees he had girdled and killed, in order that their foliage
+should not cast a shade. He had then built a log cabin, plastering
+its chinks with clay, and had set up a tall zigzag rail fence
+around the scene of his havoc, to keep the pigs and cattle out.
+Finally, he had irregularly planted the intervals between the
+stumps and trees with Indian corn, which grew among the chips; and
+there he dwelt with his wife and babes&mdash;an axe, a gun, a few
+utensils, and some pigs and chickens feeding in the woods, being
+the sum total of his possessions.</p>
+
+<p>The forest had been destroyed; and what had 'improved' it out of
+existence was hideous, a sort of ulcer, without a single element of
+artificial grace to make up for the loss of Nature's beauty. Ugly,
+indeed, seemed the life of the squatter, scudding, as the sailors
+say, under bare poles, beginning again away back where our first
+ancestors started, and by hardly a single item the better off for
+all the achievements of the intervening generations.</p>
+
+<p>Talk about going back to nature! I said to myself, oppressed by
+the dreariness, as I drove by. Talk of a country life for one's old
+age and for one's children! Never thus, with nothing but the bare
+ground and one's bare hands to fight the battle! Never, without the
+best spoils of culture woven in! The beauties and commodities
+gained by the centuries are sacred. They are our heritage and
+birthright. No modern person ought to be willing to live a day in
+such a state of rudimentariness and denudation.</p>
+
+<p>Then I said to the mountaineer who was driving me, "What sort of
+people are they who have to make these new clearings?" "All of us,"
+he replied. "Why, we ain't happy here, unless we are getting one of
+these coves under cultivation." I instantly felt that I had been
+losing the whole inward significance of the situation. Because to
+me the clearings spoke of naught but denudation, I thought that to
+those whose sturdy arms and obedient axes had made them they could
+tell no other story. But, when <i>they</i> looked on the hideous
+stumps, what they thought of was personal victory. The chips, the
+girdled trees, and the vile split rails spoke of honest sweat,
+persistent toil and final reward. The cabin was a warrant of safety
+for self and wife and babes. In short, the clearing, which to me
+was a mere ugly picture on the retina, was to them a symbol
+redolent with moral memories and sang a very p&aelig;an of duty,
+struggle, and success.</p>
+
+<p>I had been as blind to the peculiar ideality of their conditions
+as they certainly would also have been to the ideality of mine, had
+they had a peep at my strange indoor academic ways of life at
+Cambridge.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+
+
+<p>Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who
+lives it, there the life becomes genuinely significant. Sometimes
+the eagerness is more knit up with the motor activities, sometimes
+with the perceptions, sometimes with the imagination, sometimes
+with reflective thought. But, wherever it is found, there is the
+zest, the tingle, the excitement of reality; and there <i>is</i>
+'importance' in the only real and positive sense in which
+importance ever anywhere can be.</p>
+
+<p>Robert Louis Stevenson has illustrated this by a case, drawn
+from the sphere of the imagination, in an essay which I really
+think deserves to become immortal, both for the truth of its matter
+and the excellence of its form.</p>
+
+<p>"Toward the end of September," Stevenson writes, "when
+school-time was drawing near, and the nights were already black, we
+would begin to sally from our respective villas, each equipped with
+a tin bull's-eye lantern. The thing was so well known that it had
+worn a rut in the commerce of Great Britain; and the grocers, about
+the due time, began to garnish their windows with our particular
+brand of luminary. We wore them buckled to the waist upon a cricket
+belt, and over them, such was the rigor of the game, a buttoned
+top-coat. They smelled noisomely of blistered tin. They never
+burned aright, though they would always burn our fingers. Their use
+was naught, the pleasure of them merely fanciful, and yet a boy
+with a bull's-eye under his top-coat asked for nothing more. The
+fishermen used lanterns about their boats, and it was from them, I
+suppose, that we had got the hint; but theirs were not bull's-eyes,
+nor did we ever play at being fishermen. The police carried them at
+their belts, and we had plainly copied them in that; yet we did not
+pretend to be policemen. Burglars, indeed, we may have had some
+haunting thought of; and we had certainly an eye to past ages when
+lanterns were more common, and to certain story-books in which we
+had found them to figure very largely. But take it for all in all,
+the pleasure of the thing was substantive; and to be a boy with a
+bull's-eye under his top-coat was good enough for us.</p>
+
+<p>"When two of these asses met, there would be an anxious 'Have
+you got your lantern?' and a gratified 'Yes!' That was the
+shibboleth, and very needful, too; for, as it was the rule to keep
+our glory contained, none could recognize a lantern-bearer unless
+(like the polecat) by the smell. Four or five would sometimes climb
+into the belly of a ten-man lugger, with nothing but the thwarts
+above them,&mdash;for the cabin was usually locked,&mdash;or chose
+out some hollow of the links where the wind might whistle overhead.
+Then the coats would be unbuttoned, and the bull's-eyes discovered;
+and in the chequering glimmer, under the huge, windy hall of the
+night, and cheered by a rich steam of toasting tinware, these
+fortunate young gentlemen would crouch together in the cold sand of
+the links, or on the scaly bilges of the fishing-boat, and delight
+them with inappropriate talk. Woe is me that I cannot give some
+specimens!... But the talk was but a condiment, and these
+gatherings themselves only accidents in the career of the
+lantern-bearer. The essence of this bliss was to walk by yourself
+in the black night, the slide shut, the top-coat buttoned, not a
+ray escaping, whether to conduct your footsteps or to make your
+glory public,&mdash;a mere pillar of darkness in the dark; and all
+the while, deep down in the privacy of your fool's heart, to know
+you had a bull's-eye at your belt, and to exult and sing over the
+knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>"It is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the most
+stolid. It may be contended rather that a (somewhat minor) bard in
+almost every case survives, and is the spice of life to his
+possessor. Justice is not done to the versatility and the unplumbed
+childishness of man's imagination. His life from without may seem
+but a rude mound of mud: there will be some golden chamber at the
+heart of it, in which he dwells delighted; and for as dark as his
+pathway seems to the observer, he will have some kind of bull's-eye
+at his belt.</p>
+
+<p>..."There is one fable that touches very near the quick of
+life,&mdash;the fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard
+a bird break into song, hearkened for a trill or two, and found
+himself at his return a stranger at his convent gates; for he had
+been absent fifty years, and of all his comrades there survived but
+one to recognize him. It is not only in the woods that this
+enchanter carols, though perhaps he is native there. He sings in
+the most doleful places. The miser hears him and chuckles, and his
+days are moments. With no more apparatus than an evil-smelling
+lantern, I have evoked him on the naked links. All life that is not
+merely mechanical is spun out of two strands,&mdash;seeking for
+that bird and hearing him. And it is just this that makes life so
+hard to value, and the delight of each so incommunicable. And it is
+just a knowledge of this, and a remembrance of those fortunate
+hours in which the bird <i>has</i> sung to <i>us</i>, that fills us
+with such wonder when we turn to the pages of the realist. There,
+to be sure, we find a picture of life in so far as it consists of
+mud and of old iron, cheap desires and cheap fears, that which we
+are ashamed to remember and that which we are careless whether we
+forget; but of the note of that time-devouring nightingale we hear
+no news.</p>
+
+<p>..."Say that we came [in such a realistic romance] on some such
+business as that of my lantern-bearers on the links, and described
+the boys as very cold, spat upon by flurries of rain, and drearily
+surrounded, all of which they were; and their talk as silly and
+indecent, which it certainly was. To the eye of the observer they
+<i>are</i> wet and cold and drearily surrounded; but ask
+themselves, and they are in the heaven of a recondite pleasure, the
+ground of which is an ill-smelling lantern.</p>
+
+<p>"For, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is often hard to hit.
+It may hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like the lantern; it
+may reside in the mysterious inwards of psychology.... It has so
+little bond with externals ... that it may even touch them not, and
+the man's true life, for which he consents to live, lie together in
+the field of fancy.... In such a case the poetry runs underground.
+The observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad. For to
+look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk
+from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and
+abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and
+nested in by nightingales. And the true realism were that of the
+poets, to climb after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse
+of the heaven in which he lives. And the true realism, always and
+everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides,
+and give it a voice far beyond singing.</p>
+
+<p>"For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors
+lies the sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the
+excuse. To one who has not the secret of the lanterns the scene
+upon the links is meaningless. And hence the haunting and truly
+spectral unreality of realistic books.... In each we miss the
+personal poetry, the enchanted atmosphere, that rainbow work of
+fancy that clothes what is naked and seems to ennoble what is base;
+in each, life falls dead like dough, instead of soaring away like a
+balloon into the colors of the sunset; each is true, each
+inconceivable; for no man lives in the external truth among salts
+and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain,
+with the painted windows and the storied wall."<a
+name="FNanchor_A_4" id="FNanchor_A_4" /><a href="#Footnote_A_4"
+class="fnanchor">[A]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+<p><a name="Footnote_A_4" id="Footnote_A_4" /><a
+href="#FNanchor_A_4"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> 'The
+Lantern-bearers,' in the volume entitled 'Across the Plains.'
+Abridged in the quotation.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>These paragraphs are the best thing I know in all Stevenson. "To
+miss the joy is to miss all." Indeed, it is. Yet we are but finite,
+and each one of us has some single specialized vocation of his own.
+And it seems as if energy in the service of its particular duties
+might be got only by hardening the heart toward everything unlike
+them. Our deadness toward all but one particular kind of joy would
+thus be the price we inevitably have to pay for being practical
+creatures. Only in some pitiful dreamer, some philosopher, poet, or
+romancer, or when the common practical man becomes a lover, does
+the hard externality give way, and a gleam of insight into the
+ejective world, as Clifford called it, the vast world of inner life
+beyond us, so different from that of outer seeming, illuminate our
+mind. Then the whole scheme of our customary values gets
+confounded, then our self is riven and its narrow interests fly to
+pieces, then a new centre and a new perspective must be found.</p>
+
+<p>The change is well described by my colleague, Josiah
+Royce:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"What, then, is our neighbor? Thou hast regarded his thought,
+his feeling, as somehow different from thine. Thou hast said, 'A
+pain in him is not like a pain in me, but something far easier to
+bear.' He seems to thee a little less living than thou; his life is
+dim, it is cold, it is a pale fire beside thy own burning
+desires.... So, dimly and by instinct hast thou lived with thy
+neighbor, and hast known him not, being blind. Thou hast made [of
+him] a thing, no Self at all. Have done with this illusion, and
+simply try to learn the truth. Pain is pain, joy is joy,
+everywhere, even as in thee. In all the songs of the forest birds;
+in all the cries of the wounded and dying, struggling in the
+captor's power; in the boundless sea where the myriads of
+water-creatures strive and die; amid all the countless hordes of
+savage men; in all sickness and sorrow; in all exultation and hope,
+everywhere, from the lowest to the noblest, the same conscious,
+burning, wilful life is found, endlessly manifold as the forms of
+the living creatures, unquenchable as the fires of the sun, real as
+these impulses that even now throb in thine own little selfish
+heart. Lift up thy eyes, behold that life, and then turn away, and
+forget it as thou canst; but, if thou hast <i>known</i> that, thou
+hast begun to know thy duty."<a name="FNanchor_A_5"
+id="FNanchor_A_5" /><a href="#Footnote_A_5"
+class="fnanchor">[A]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+<p><a name="Footnote_A_5" id="Footnote_A_5" /><a
+href="#FNanchor_A_5"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> The
+Religious Aspect of Philosophy, pp. 157-162 (abridged).</p>
+</div>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+
+
+<p>This higher vision of an inner significance in what, until then,
+we had realized only in the dead external way, often comes over a
+person suddenly; and, when it does so, it makes an epoch in his
+history. As Emerson says, there is a depth in those moments that
+constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other
+experiences. The passion of love will shake one like an explosion,
+or some act will awaken a remorseful compunction that hangs like a
+cloud over all one's later day.</p>
+
+<p>This mystic sense of hidden meaning starts upon us often from
+non-human natural things. I take this passage from 'Obermann,' a
+French novel that had some vogue in its day: "Paris, March
+7.&mdash;It was dark and rather cold. I was gloomy, and walked
+because I had nothing to do. I passed by some flowers placed
+breast-high upon a wall. A jonquil in bloom was there. It is the
+strongest expression of desire: it was the first perfume of the
+year. I felt all the happiness destined for man. This unutterable
+harmony of souls, the phantom of the ideal world, arose in me
+complete. I never felt anything so great or so instantaneous. I
+know not what shape, what analogy, what secret of relation it was
+that made me see in this flower a limitless beauty.... I shall
+never enclose in a conception this power, this immensity that
+nothing will express; this form that nothing will contain; this
+ideal of a better world which one feels, but which it would seem
+that nature has not made."<a name="FNanchor_A_6"
+id="FNanchor_A_6" /><a href="#Footnote_A_6"
+class="fnanchor">[A]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+<p><a name="Footnote_A_6" id="Footnote_A_6" /><a
+href="#FNanchor_A_6"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> De
+S&eacute;nancour: Obermann, Lettre XXX.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Wordsworth and Shelley are similarly full of this sense of a
+limitless significance in natural things. In Wordsworth it was a
+somewhat austere and moral significance,&mdash;a 'lonely
+cheer.'</p>
+
+<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">"To every natural form, rock,
+fruit, or flower,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Even the loose stones that cover
+the highway,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">I gave a moral life: I saw them
+feel</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Or linked them to some feeling: the
+great mass</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Lay bedded in some quickening soul,
+and all</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">That I beheld respired with inward
+meaning."<a name="FNanchor_A_7" id="FNanchor_A_7" /><a
+href="#Footnote_A_7" class="fnanchor">[A]</a></span><br />
+
+
+<div class="footnote">
+<p><a name="Footnote_A_7" id="Footnote_A_7" /><a
+href="#FNanchor_A_7"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> The
+Prelude, Book III.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>"Authentic tidings of invisible things!" Just what this hidden
+presence in nature was, which Wordsworth so rapturously felt, and
+in the light of which he lived, tramping the hills for days
+together, the poet never could explain logically or in articulate
+conceptions. Yet to the reader who may himself have had gleaming
+moments of a similar sort the verses in which Wordsworth simply
+proclaims the fact of them come with a heart-satisfying
+authority:&mdash;</p>
+
+<span style="margin-left: 16em;">"Magnificent</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The morning rose, in memorable
+pomp,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Glorious as ere I had beheld. In
+front</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The sea lay laughing at a distance;
+near</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The solid mountains shone, bright
+as the clouds,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Grain-tinctured, drenched in
+empyrean light;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And in the meadows and the lower
+grounds</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Was all the sweetness of a common
+dawn,&mdash;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Dews, vapors, and the melody of
+birds,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And laborers going forth to till
+the fields."</span><br />
+<br />
+<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 0.5em;">"Ah! need I say, dear Friend,
+that to the brim</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">My heart was full; I made no vows,
+but vows</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Were then made for me; bond unknown
+to me</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Was given, that I should be, else
+sinning greatly,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">A dedicated Spirit. On I
+walked,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">In thankful blessedness, which yet
+survives."<a name="FNanchor_A_8" id="FNanchor_A_8" /><a
+href="#Footnote_A_8" class="fnanchor">[A]</a></span><br />
+
+
+<div class="footnote">
+<p><a name="Footnote_A_8" id="Footnote_A_8" /><a
+href="#FNanchor_A_8"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> The
+Prelude, Book IV.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>As Wordsworth walked, filled with his strange inner joy,
+responsive thus to the secret life of nature round about him, his
+rural neighbors, tightly and narrowly intent upon their own
+affairs, their crops and lambs and fences, must have thought him a
+very insignificant and foolish personage. It surely never occurred
+to any one of them to wonder what was going on inside of <i>him</i>
+or what it might be worth. And yet that inner life of his carried
+the burden of a significance that has fed the souls of others, and
+fills them to this day with inner joy.</p>
+
+<p>Richard Jefferies has written a remarkable autobiographic
+document entitled The Story of my Heart. It tells, in many pages,
+of the rapture with which in youth the sense of the life of nature
+filled him. On a certain hill-top he says:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"I was utterly alone with the sun and the earth. Lying down on
+the grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and
+the distant sea, far beyond sight.... With all the intensity of
+feeling which exalted me, all the intense communion I held with the
+earth, the sun and sky, the stars hidden by the light, with the
+ocean,&mdash;in no manner can the thrilling depth of these feelings
+be written,&mdash;with these I prayed as if they were the keys of
+an instrument.... The great sun, burning with light, the strong
+earth,&mdash;dear earth,&mdash;the warm sky, the pure air, the
+thought of ocean, the inexpressible beauty of all filled me with a
+rapture, an ecstasy, an inflatus. With this inflatus, too, I
+prayed.... The prayer, this soul-emotion, was in itself, not for an
+object: it was a passion. I hid my face in the grass. I was wholly
+prostrated, I lost myself in the wrestle, I was rapt and carried
+away.... Had any shepherd accidentally seen me lying on the turf,
+he would only have thought I was resting a few minutes. I made no
+outward show. Who could have imagined the whirlwind of passion that
+was going on in me as I reclined there!"<a name="FNanchor_A_9"
+id="FNanchor_A_9" /><a href="#Footnote_A_9"
+class="fnanchor">[A]</a></p>
+
+<p>Surely, a worthless hour of life, when measured by the usual
+standards of commercial value. Yet in what other <i>kind</i> of
+value can the preciousness of any hour, made precious by any
+standard, consist, if it consist not in feelings of excited
+significance like these, engendered in some one, by what the hour
+contains?</p>
+
+<p>Yet so blind and dead does the clamor of our own practical
+interests make us to all other things, that it seems almost as if
+it were necessary to become worthless as a practical being, if one
+is to hope to attain to any breadth of insight into the impersonal
+world of worths as such, to have any perception of life's meaning
+on a large objective scale. Only your mystic, your dreamer, or your
+insolvent tramp or loafer, can afford so sympathetic an occupation,
+an occupation which will change the usual standards of human value
+in the twinkling of an eye, giving to foolishness a place ahead of
+power, and laying low in a minute the distinctions which it takes a
+hard-working conventional man a lifetime to build up. You may be a
+prophet, at this rate; but you cannot be a worldly success.</p>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+<p><a name="Footnote_A_9" id="Footnote_A_9" /><a
+href="#FNanchor_A_9"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> <i>Op.
+cit.</i>, Boston, Roberts, 1883, pp. 5, 6.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Walt Whitman, for instance, is accounted by many of us a
+contemporary prophet. He abolishes the usual human distinctions,
+brings all conventionalisms into solution, and loves and celebrates
+hardly any human attributes save those elementary ones common to
+all members of the race. For this he becomes a sort of ideal tramp,
+a rider on omnibus-tops and ferry-boats, and, considered either
+practically or academically, a worthless, unproductive being. His
+verses are but ejaculations&mdash;things mostly without subject or
+verb, a succession of interjections on an immense scale. He felt
+the human crowd as rapturously as Wordsworth felt the mountains,
+felt it as an overpoweringly significant presence, simply to absorb
+one's mind in which should be business sufficient and worthy to
+fill the days of a serious man. As he crosses Brooklyn ferry, this
+is what he feels:&mdash;</p>
+
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Flood-tide below me! I watch you,
+face to face;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Clouds of the west! sun there half
+an hour high! I see</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">you also face to face.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Crowds of men and women attired in
+the usual costumes!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">how curious you are to
+me!</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">On the ferry-boats, the hundreds
+and hundreds that cross,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">returning home, are more curious to
+me than you suppose;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">And you that shall cross from shore
+to shore years hence,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">are more to me, and more in my
+meditations, than you</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">might suppose.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Others will enter the gates of the
+ferry, and cross from</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">shore to shore;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Others will watch the run of the
+flood-tide;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Others will see the shipping of
+Manhattan north and west,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">and the heights of Brooklyn to the
+south and east;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Others will see the islands large
+and small;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Fifty years hence, others will see
+them as they cross, the</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">sun half an hour high.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">A hundred years hence, or ever so
+many hundred years</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">hence, others will see
+them,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring
+in of the flood-tide, the</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">falling back to the sea of the
+ebb-tide.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">It avails not, neither time or
+place&mdash;distance avails not.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Just as you feel when you look on
+the river and sky, so I</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">felt;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Just as any of you is one of a
+living crowd, I was one of a</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">crowd;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Just as you are refresh'd by the
+gladness of the river and</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">the bright flow, I was
+refresh'd;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Just as you stand and lean on the
+rail, yet hurry with the</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">swift current, I stood, yet was
+hurried;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Just as you look on the numberless
+masts of ships, and the</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">thick-stemmed pipes of steamboats,
+I looked.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">I too many and many a time cross'd
+the river, the sun half</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">an hour high;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">I watched the Twelfth-month
+sea-gulls&mdash;I saw them high in</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">the air, with motionless wings,
+oscillating their bodies,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">I saw how the glistening yellow lit
+up parts of their bodies,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">and left the rest in strong
+shadow,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">I saw the slow-wheeling circles,
+and the gradual edging</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">toward the south.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Saw the white sails of schooners
+and sloops, saw the ships</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">at anchor,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The sailors at work in the rigging,
+or out astride the spars;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The scallop-edged waves in the
+twilight, the ladled cups,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">the frolicsome crests and
+glistening;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">The stretch afar growing dimmer and
+dimmer, the gray</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">walls of the granite store-houses
+by the docks;</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">On the neighboring shores, the
+fires from the foundry chimneys</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 2em;">burning high ... into the
+night,</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Casting their flicker of black ...
+into the clefts of streets.</span><br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">These, and all else, were to me the
+same as they are to you.<a name="FNanchor_A_10"
+id="FNanchor_A_10" /><a href="#Footnote_A_10"
+class="fnanchor">[A]</a></span><br />
+
+
+<p>And so on, through the rest of a divinely beautiful poem. And,
+if you wish to see what this hoary loafer considered the most
+worthy way of profiting by life's heaven-sent opportunities, read
+the delicious volume of his letters to a young car-conductor who
+had become his friend:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+<p><a name="Footnote_A_10" id="Footnote_A_10" /><a
+href="#FNanchor_A_10"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> 'Crossing
+Brooklyn Ferry' (abridged).</p>
+</div>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+<p class='blockquot' style="text-align:right">"NEW YORK, Oct. 9,
+1868.</p>
+
+<p class='blockquot' style="text-align:left">"<i>Dear
+Pete</i>,&mdash;It is splendid here this forenoon&mdash;bright and
+cool. I was out early taking a short walk by the river only two
+squares from where I live.... Shall I tell you about [my life] just
+to fill up? I generally spend the forenoon in my room writing,
+etc., then take a bath fix up and go out about twelve and loafe
+somewhere or call on someone down town or on business, or perhaps
+if it is very pleasant and I feel like it ride a trip with some
+driver friend on Broadway from 23rd Street to Bowling Green, three
+miles each way. (Every day I find I have plenty to do, every hour
+is occupied with something.) You know it is a never ending
+amusement and study and recreation for me to ride a couple of hours
+on a pleasant afternoon on a Broadway stage in this way. You see
+everything as you pass, a sort of living, endless
+panorama&mdash;shops and splendid buildings and great windows: on
+the broad sidewalks crowds of women richly dressed continually
+passing, altogether different, superior in style and looks from any
+to be seen anywhere else&mdash;in fact a perfect stream of
+people&mdash;men too dressed in high style, and plenty of
+foreigners&mdash;and then in the streets the thick crowd of
+carriages, stages, carts, hotel and private coaches, and in fact
+all sorts of vehicles and many first class teams, mile after mile,
+and the splendor of such a great street and so many tall,
+ornamental, noble buildings many of them of white marble, and the
+gayety and motion on every side: you will not wonder how much
+attraction all this is on a fine day, to a great loafer like me,
+who enjoys so much seeing the busy world move by him, and
+exhibiting itself for his amusement, while he takes it easy and
+just looks on and observes."<a name="FNanchor_A_11"
+id="FNanchor_A_11" /><a href="#Footnote_A_11"
+class="fnanchor">[A]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+<p><a name="Footnote_A_11" id="Footnote_A_11" /><a
+href="#FNanchor_A_11"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> Calamus,
+Boston, 1897, pp. 41, 42.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Truly a futile way of passing the time, some of you may say, and
+not altogether creditable to a grown-up man. And yet, from the
+deepest point of view, who knows the more of truth, and who knows
+the less,&mdash;Whitman on his omnibus-top, full of the inner joy
+with which the spectacle inspires him, or you, full of the disdain
+which the futility of his occupation excites?</p>
+
+<p>When your ordinary Brooklynite or New Yorker, leading a life
+replete with too much luxury, or tired and careworn about his
+personal affairs, crosses the ferry or goes up Broadway, <i>his</i>
+fancy does not thus 'soar away into the colors of the sunset' as
+did Whitman's, nor does he inwardly realize at all the indisputable
+fact that this world never did anywhere or at any time contain more
+of essential divinity, or of eternal meaning, than is embodied in
+the fields of vision over which his eyes so carelessly pass. There
+is life; and there, a step away, is death. There is the only kind
+of beauty there ever was. There is the old human struggle and its
+fruits together. There is the text and the sermon, the real and the
+ideal in one. But to the jaded and unquickened eye it is all dead
+and common, pure vulgarism, flatness, and disgust. "Hech! it is a
+sad sight!" says Carlyle, walking at night with some one who
+appeals to him to note the splendor of the stars. And that very
+repetition of the scene to new generations of men in <i>secula
+seculorum</i>, that eternal recurrence of the common order, which
+so fills a Whitman with mystic satisfaction, is to a Schopenhauer,
+with the emotional an&aelig;sthesia, the feeling of 'awful inner
+emptiness' from out of which he views it all, the chief ingredient
+of the tedium it instils. What is life on the largest scale, he
+asks, but the same recurrent inanities, the same dog barking, the
+same fly buzzing, forevermore? Yet of the kind of fibre of which
+such inanities consist is the material woven of all the
+excitements, joys, and meanings that ever were, or ever shall be,
+in this world.</p>
+
+<p>To be rapt with satisfied attention, like Whitman, to the mere
+spectacle of the world's presence, is one way, and the most
+fundamental way, of confessing one's sense of its unfathomable
+significance and importance. But how can one attain to the feeling
+of the vital significance of an experience, if one have it not to
+begin with? There is no receipt which one can follow. Being a
+secret and a mystery, it often comes in mysteriously unexpected
+ways. It blossoms sometimes from out of the very grave wherein we
+imagined that our happiness was buried. Benvenuto Cellini, after a
+life all in the outer sunshine, made of adventures and artistic
+excitements, suddenly finds himself cast into a dungeon in the
+Castle of San Angelo. The place is horrible. Rats and wet and mould
+possess it. His leg is broken and his teeth fall out, apparently
+with scurvy. But his thoughts turn to God as they have never turned
+before. He gets a Bible, which he reads during the one hour in the
+twenty-four in which a wandering ray of daylight penetrates his
+cavern. He has religious visions. He sings psalms to himself, and
+composes hymns. And thinking, on the last day of July, of the
+festivities customary on the morrow in Rome, he says to himself:
+"All these past years I celebrated this holiday with the vanities
+of the world: from this year henceforward I will do it with the
+divinity of God. And then I said to myself, 'Oh, how much more
+happy I am for this present life of mine than for all those things
+remembered!'"<a name="FNanchor_A_12" id="FNanchor_A_12" /><a
+href="#Footnote_A_12" class="fnanchor">[A]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+<p><a name="Footnote_A_12" id="Footnote_A_12" /><a
+href="#FNanchor_A_12"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> Vita, lib.
+2, chap. iv.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>But the great understander of these mysterious ebbs and flows is
+Tolsto&iuml;. They throb all through his novels. In his 'War and
+Peace,' the hero, Peter, is supposed to be the richest man in the
+Russian empire. During the French invasion he is taken prisoner,
+and dragged through much of the retreat. Cold, vermin, hunger, and
+every form of misery assail him, the result being a revelation to
+him of the real scale of life's values. "Here only, and for the
+first time, he appreciated, because he was deprived of it, the
+happiness of eating when he was hungry, of drinking when he was
+thirsty, of sleeping when he was sleepy, and of talking when he
+felt the desire to exchange some words.... Later in life he always
+recurred with joy to this month of captivity, and never failed to
+speak with enthusiasm of the powerful and ineffaceable sensations,
+and especially of the moral calm which he had experienced at this
+epoch. When at daybreak, on the morrow of his imprisonment, he saw
+[I abridge here Tolsto&iuml;'s description] the mountains with
+their wooded slopes disappearing in the grayish mist; when he felt
+the cool breeze caress him; when he saw the light drive away the
+vapors, and the sun rise majestically behind the clouds and
+cupolas, and the crosses, the dew, the distance, the river, sparkle
+in the splendid, cheerful rays,&mdash;his heart overflowed with
+emotion. This emotion kept continually with him, and increased a
+hundred-fold as the difficulties of his situation grew graver....
+He learnt that man is meant for happiness, and that this happiness
+is in him, in the satisfaction of the daily needs of existence, and
+that unhappiness is the fatal result, not of our need, but of our
+abundance.... When calm reigned in the camp, and the embers paled,
+and little by little went out, the full moon had reached the
+zenith. The woods and the fields roundabout lay clearly visible;
+and, beyond the inundation of light which filled them, the view
+plunged into the limitless horizon. Then Peter cast his eyes upon
+the firmament, filled at that hour with myriads of stars. 'All that
+is mine,' he thought. 'All that is in me, is me! And that is what
+they think they have taken prisoner! That is what they have shut up
+in a cabin!' So he smiled, and turned in to sleep among his
+comrades."<a name="FNanchor_A_13" id="FNanchor_A_13" /><a
+href="#Footnote_A_13" class="fnanchor">[A]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+<p><a name="Footnote_A_13" id="Footnote_A_13" /><a
+href="#FNanchor_A_13"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> La Guerre
+et la Paix, Paris, 1884, vol. iii. pp. 268, 275, 316.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The occasion and the experience, then, are nothing. It all
+depends on the capacity of the soul to be grasped, to have its
+life-currents absorbed by what is given. "Crossing a bare common,"
+says Emerson, "in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky,
+without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good
+fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the
+brink of fear."</p>
+
+<p>Life is always worth living, if one have such responsive
+sensibilities. But we of the highly educated classes (so called)
+have most of us got far, far away from Nature. We are trained to
+seek the choice, the rare, the exquisite exclusively, and to
+overlook the common. We are stuffed with abstract conceptions, and
+glib with verbalities and verbosities; and in the culture of these
+higher functions the peculiar sources of joy connected with our
+simpler functions often dry up, and we grow stone-blind and
+insensible to life's more elementary and general goods and
+joys.</p>
+
+<p>The remedy under such conditions is to descend to a more
+profound and primitive level. To be imprisoned or shipwrecked or
+forced into the army would permanently show the good of life to
+many an over-educated pessimist. Living in the open air and on the
+ground, the lop-sided beam of the balance slowly rises to the level
+line; and the over-sensibilities and insensibilities even
+themselves out. The good of all the artificial schemes and fevers
+fades and pales; and that of seeing, smelling, tasting, sleeping,
+and daring and doing with one's body, grows and grows. The savages
+and children of nature, to whom we deem ourselves so much superior,
+certainly are alive where we are often dead, along these lines;
+and, could they write as glibly as we do, they would read us
+impressive lectures on our impatience for improvement and on our
+blindness to the fundamental static goods of life. "Ah! my
+brother," said a chieftain to his white guest, "thou wilt never
+know the happiness of both thinking of nothing and doing nothing.
+This, next to sleep, is the most enchanting of all things. Thus we
+were before our birth, and thus we shall be after death. Thy
+people,... when they have finished reaping one field, they begin to
+plough another; and, if the day were not enough, I have seen them
+plough by moonlight. What is their life to ours,&mdash;the life
+that is as naught to them? Blind that they are, they lose it all!
+But we live in the present."<a name="FNanchor_A_14"
+id="FNanchor_A_14" /><a href="#Footnote_A_14"
+class="fnanchor">[A]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+<p><a name="Footnote_A_14" id="Footnote_A_14" /><a
+href="#FNanchor_A_14"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> Quoted by
+Lotze, Microcosmus, English translation, vol. ii. p. 240.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The intense interest that life can assume when brought down to
+the non-thinking level, the level of pure sensorial perception, has
+been beautifully described by a man who <i>can</i> write,&mdash;Mr.
+W.H. Hudson, in his volume, "Idle Days in Patagonia."</p>
+
+<p>"I spent the greater part of one winter," says this admirable
+author, "at a point on the Rio Negro, seventy or eighty miles from
+the sea.</p>
+
+<p>..."It was my custom to go out every morning on horseback with
+my gun, and, followed by one dog, to ride away from the valley; and
+no sooner would I climb the terrace, and plunge into the gray,
+universal thicket, than I would find myself as completely alone as
+if five hundred instead of only five miles separated me from the
+valley and river. So wild and solitary and remote seemed that gray
+waste, stretching away into infinitude, a waste untrodden by man,
+and where the wild animals are so few that they have made no
+discoverable path in the wilderness of thorns.... Not once nor
+twice nor thrice, but day after day I returned to this solitude,
+going to it in the morning as if to attend a festival, and leaving
+it only when hunger and thirst and the westering sun compelled me.
+And yet I had no object in going,&mdash;no motive which could be
+put into words; for, although I carried a gun, there was nothing to
+shoot,&mdash;the shooting was all left behind in the valley....
+Sometimes I would pass a whole day without seeing one mammal, and
+perhaps not more than a dozen birds of any size. The weather at
+that time was cheerless, generally with a gray film of cloud spread
+over the sky, and a bleak wind, often cold enough to make my
+bridle-hand quite numb.... At a slow pace, which would have seemed
+intolerable under other circumstances, I would ride about for hours
+together at a stretch. On arriving at a hill, I would slowly ride
+to its summit, and stand there to survey the prospect. On every
+side it stretched away in great undulations, wild and irregular.
+How gray it all was! Hardly less so near at hand than on the
+haze-wrapped horizon where the hills were dim and the outline
+obscured by distance. Descending from my outlook, I would take up
+my aimless wanderings again, and visit other elevations to gaze on
+the same landscape from another point; and so on for hours. And at
+noon I would dismount, and sit or lie on my folded poncho for an
+hour or longer. One day in these rambles I discovered a small grove
+composed of twenty or thirty trees, growing at a convenient
+distance apart, that had evidently been resorted to by a herd of
+deer or other wild animals. This grove was on a hill differing in
+shape from other hills in its neighborhood; and, after a time, I
+made a point of finding and using it as a resting-place every day
+at noon. I did not ask myself why I made choice of that one spot,
+sometimes going out of my way to sit there, instead of sitting down
+under any one of the millions of trees and bushes on any other
+hillside. I thought nothing about it, but acted unconsciously. Only
+afterward it seemed to me that, after having rested there once,
+each time I wished to rest again, the wish came associated with the
+image of that particular clump of trees, with polished stems and
+clean bed of sand beneath; and in a short time I formed a habit of
+returning, animal like, to repose at that same spot.</p>
+
+<p>"It was, perhaps, a mistake to say that I would sit down and
+rest, since I was never tired; and yet, without being tired, that
+noon-day pause, during which I sat for an hour without moving, was
+strangely grateful. All day there would be no sound, not even the
+rustling of a leaf. One day, while <i>listening</i> to the silence,
+it occurred to my mind to wonder what the effect would be if I were
+to shout aloud. This seemed at the time a horrible suggestion,
+which almost made me shudder. But during those solitary days it was
+a rare thing for any thought to cross my mind. In the state of mind
+I was in, thought had become impossible. My state was one of
+<i>suspense</i> and <i>watchfulness</i>; yet I had no expectation
+of meeting an adventure, and felt as free from apprehension as I
+feel now while sitting in a room in London. The state seemed
+familiar rather than strange, and accompanied by a strong feeling
+of elation; and I did not know that something had come between me
+and my intellect until I returned to my former self,&mdash;to
+thinking, and the old insipid existence [again].</p>
+
+<p>"I had undoubtedly <i>gone back</i>; and that state of intense
+watchfulness or alertness, rather, with suspension of the higher
+intellectual faculties, represented the mental state of the pure
+savage. He thinks little, reasons little, having a surer guide in
+his [mere sensory perceptions]. He is in perfect harmony with
+nature, and is nearly on a level, mentally, with the wild animals
+he preys on, and which in their turn sometimes prey on him."<a
+name="FNanchor_A_15" id="FNanchor_A_15" /><a href="#Footnote_A_15"
+class="fnanchor">[A]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+<p><a name="Footnote_A_15" id="Footnote_A_15" /><a
+href="#FNanchor_A_15"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> <i>Op.
+cit.</i>, pp. 210-222 (abridged).</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>For the spectator, such hours as Mr. Hudson writes of form a
+mere tale of emptiness, in which nothing happens, nothing is
+gained, and there is nothing to describe. They are meaningless and
+vacant tracts of time. To him who feels their inner secret, they
+tingle with an importance that unutterably vouches for itself. I am
+sorry for the boy or girl, or man or woman, who has never been
+touched by the spell of this mysterious sensorial life, with its
+irrationality, if so you like to call it, but its vigilance and its
+supreme felicity. The holidays of life are its most vitally
+significant portions, because they are, or at least should be,
+covered with just this kind of magically irresponsible spell.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+
+
+<p>And now what is the result of all these considerations and
+quotations? It is negative in one sense, but positive in another.
+It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the
+meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it
+commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see
+harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however
+unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off: neither the whole of
+truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer,
+although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from
+the peculiar position in which he stands. Even prisons and
+sick-rooms have their special revelations. It is enough to ask of
+each of us that he should be faithful to his own opportunities and
+make the most of his own blessings, without presuming to regulate
+the rest of the vast field.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="III__WHAT_MAKES_A_LIFE_SIGNIFICANT"
+id="III__WHAT_MAKES_A_LIFE_SIGNIFICANT" />III. WHAT MAKES A LIFE
+SIGNIFICANT</h2>
+
+<p>In my previous talk, 'On a Certain Blindness,' I tried to make
+you feel how soaked and shot-through life is with values and
+meanings which we fail to realize because of our external and
+insensible point of view. The meanings are there for the others,
+but they are not there for us. There lies more than a mere interest
+of curious speculation in understanding this. It has the most
+tremendous practical importance. I wish that I could convince you
+of it as I feel it myself. It is the basis of all our tolerance,
+social, religious, and political. The forgetting of it lies at the
+root of every stupid and sanguinary mistake that rulers over
+subject-peoples make. The first thing to learn in intercourse with
+others is non-interference with their own peculiar ways of being
+happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence
+with ours. No one has insight into all the ideals. No one should
+presume to judge them off-hand. The pretension to dogmatize about
+them in each other is the root of most human injustices and
+cruelties, and the trait in human character most likely to make the
+angels weep.</p>
+
+<p>Every Jack sees in his own particular Jill charms and
+perfections to the enchantment of which we stolid onlookers are
+stone-cold. And which has the superior view of the absolute truth,
+he or we? Which has the more vital insight into the nature of
+Jill's existence, as a fact? Is he in excess, being in this matter
+a maniac? or are we in defect, being victims of a pathological
+an&aelig;sthesia as regards Jill's magical importance? Surely the
+latter; surely to Jack are the profounder truths revealed; surely
+poor Jill's palpitating little life-throbs <i>are</i> among the
+wonders of creation, <i>are</i> worthy of this sympathetic
+interest; and it is to our shame that the rest of us cannot feel
+like Jack. For Jack realizes Jill concretely, and we do not. He
+struggles toward a union with her inner life, divining her
+feelings, anticipating her desires, understanding her limits as
+manfully as he can, and yet inadequately, too; for he is also
+afflicted with some blindness, even here. Whilst we, dead clods
+that we are, do not even seek after these things, but are contented
+that that portion of eternal fact named Jill should be for us as if
+it were not. Jill, who knows her inner life, knows that Jack's way
+of taking it&mdash;so importantly&mdash;is the true and serious
+way; and she responds to the truth in him by taking him truly and
+seriously, too. May the ancient blindness never wrap its clouds
+about either of them again! Where would any of <i>us</i> be, were
+there no one willing to know us as we really are or ready to repay
+us for <i>our</i> insight by making recognizant return? We ought,
+all of us, to realize each other in this intense, pathetic, and
+important way.</p>
+
+<p>If you say that this is absurd, and that we cannot be in love
+with everyone at once, I merely point out to you that, as a matter
+of fact, certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for
+friendship and for taking delight in other people's lives; and that
+such persons know more of truth than if their hearts were not so
+big. The vice of ordinary Jack and Jill affection is not its
+intensity, but its exclusions and its jealousies. Leave those out,
+and you see that the ideal I am holding up before you, however
+impracticable to-day, yet contains nothing intrinsically
+absurd.</p>
+
+<p>We have unquestionably a great cloud-bank of ancestral blindness
+weighing down upon us, only transiently riven here and there by
+fitful revelations of the truth. It is vain to hope for this state
+of things to alter much. Our inner secrets must remain for the most
+part impenetrable by others, for beings as essentially practical as
+we are are necessarily short of sight. But, if we cannot gain much
+positive insight into one another, cannot we at least use our sense
+of our own blindness to make us more cautious in going over the
+dark places? Cannot we escape some of those hideous ancestral
+intolerances and cruelties, and positive reversals of the
+truth?</p>
+
+<p>For the remainder of this hour I invite you to seek with me some
+principle to make our tolerance less chaotic. And, as I began my
+previous lecture by a personal reminiscence, I am going to ask your
+indulgence for a similar bit of egotism now.</p>
+
+<p>A few summers ago I spent a happy week at the famous Assembly
+Grounds on the borders of Chautauqua Lake. The moment one treads
+that sacred enclosure, one feels one's self in an atmosphere of
+success. Sobriety and industry, intelligence and goodness,
+orderliness and ideality, prosperity and cheerfulness, pervade the
+air. It is a serious and studious picnic on a gigantic scale. Here
+you have a town of many thousands of inhabitants, beautifully laid
+out in the forest and drained, and equipped with means for
+satisfying all the necessary lower and most of the superfluous
+higher wants of man. You have a first-class college in full blast.
+You have magnificent music&mdash;a chorus of seven hundred voices,
+with possibly the most perfect open-air auditorium in the world.
+You have every sort of athletic exercise from sailing, rowing,
+swimming, bicycling, to the ball-field and the more artificial
+doings which the gymnasium affords. You have kindergartens and
+model secondary schools. You have general religious services and
+special club-houses for the several sects. You have perpetually
+running soda-water fountains, and daily popular lectures by
+distinguished men. You have the best of company, and yet no effort.
+You have no zymotic diseases, no poverty, no drunkenness, no crime,
+no police. You have culture, you have kindness, you have cheapness,
+you have equality, you have the best fruits of what mankind has
+fought and bled and striven for tinder the name of civilization for
+centuries. You have, in short, a foretaste of what human society
+might be, were it all in the light, with no suffering and no dark
+corners.</p>
+
+<p>I went in curiosity for a day. I stayed for a week, held
+spell-bound by the charm and ease of everything, by the
+middle-class paradise, without a sin, without a victim, without a
+blot, without a tear.</p>
+
+<p>And yet what was my own astonishment, on emerging into the dark
+and wicked world again, to catch myself quite unexpectedly and
+involuntarily saying: "Ouf! what a relief! Now for something
+primordial and savage, even though it were as bad as an Armenian
+massacre, to set the balance straight again. This order is too
+tame, this culture too second-rate, this goodness too uninspiring.
+This human drama without a villain or a pang; this community so
+refined that ice-cream soda-water is the utmost offering it can
+make to the brute animal in man; this city simmering in the tepid
+lakeside sun; this atrocious harmlessness of all things,&mdash;I
+cannot abide with them. Let me take my chances again in the big
+outside worldly wilderness with all its sins and sufferings. There
+are the heights and depths, the precipices and the steep ideals,
+the gleams of the awful and the infinite; and there is more hope
+and help a thousand times than in this dead level and quintessence
+of every mediocrity."</p>
+
+<p>Such was the sudden right-about-face performed for me by my
+lawless fancy! There had been spread before me the
+realization&mdash;on a small, sample scale of course&mdash;of all
+the ideals for which our civilization has been striving: security,
+intelligence, humanity, and order; and here was the instinctive
+hostile reaction, not of the natural man, but of a so-called
+cultivated man upon such a Utopia. There seemed thus to be a
+self-contradiction and paradox somewhere, which I, as a professor
+drawing a full salary, was in duty bound to unravel and explain, if
+I could.</p>
+
+<p>So I meditated. And, first of all, I asked myself what the thing
+was that was so lacking in this Sabbatical city, and the lack of
+which kept one forever falling short of the higher sort of
+contentment. And I soon recognized that it was the element that
+gives to the wicked outer world all its moral style, expressiveness
+and picturesqueness,&mdash;the element of precipitousness, so to
+call it, of strength and strenuousness, intensity and danger.</p>
+
+<p>What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the
+romances and the statues celebrate and the grim civic monuments
+remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with
+those of darkness; with heroism, reduced to its bare chance, yet
+ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death. But in this
+unspeakable Chautauqua there was no potentiality of death in sight
+anywhere, and no point of the compass visible from which danger
+might possibly appear. The ideal was so completely victorious
+already that no sign of any previous battle remained, the place
+just resting on its oars. But what our human emotions seem to
+require is the sight of the struggle going on. The moment the
+fruits are being merely eaten, things become ignoble. Sweat and
+effort, human nature strained to its uttermost and on the rack, yet
+getting through alive, and then turning its back on its success to
+pursue another more rare and arduous still&mdash;this is the sort
+of thing the presence of which inspires us, and the reality of
+which it seems to be the function of all the higher forms of
+literature and fine art to bring home to us and suggest. At
+Chautauqua there were no racks, even in the place's historical
+museum; and no sweat, except possibly the gentle moisture on the
+brow of some lecturer, or on the sides of some player in the
+ball-field.</p>
+
+<p>Such absence of human nature <i>in extremis</i> anywhere seemed,
+then, a sufficient explanation for Chautauqua's flatness and lack
+of zest.</p>
+
+<p>But was not this a paradox well calculated to fill one with
+dismay? It looks indeed, thought I, as if the romantic idealists
+with their pessimism about our civilization were, after all, quite
+right. An irremediable flatness is coming over the world.
+Bourgeoisie and mediocrity, church sociables and teachers'
+conventions, are taking the place of the old heights and depths and
+romantic chiaroscuro. And, to get human life in its wild intensity,
+we must in future turn more and more away from the actual, and
+forget it, if we can, in the romancer's or the poet's pages. The
+whole world, delightful and sinful as it may still appear for a
+moment to one just escaped from the Chautauquan enclosure, is
+nevertheless obeying more and more just those ideals that are sure
+to make of it in the end a mere Chautauqua Assembly on an enormous
+scale. <i>Was im Gesang soll leben muss im Leben untergehn</i>.
+Even now, in our own country, correctness, fairness, and compromise
+for every small advantage are crowding out all other qualities. The
+higher heroisms and the old rare flavors are passing out of life.<a
+name="FNanchor_A_16" id="FNanchor_A_16" /><a href="#Footnote_A_16"
+class="fnanchor">[A]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+<p><a name="Footnote_A_16" id="Footnote_A_16" /><a
+href="#FNanchor_A_16"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> This
+address was composed before the Cuban and Philippine wars. Such
+outbursts of the passion of mastery are, however, only episodes in
+a social process which in the long run seems everywhere tending
+toward the Chautauquan ideals.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>With these thoughts in my mind, I was speeding with the train
+toward Buffalo, when, near that city, the sight of a workman doing
+something on the dizzy edge of a sky-scaling iron construction
+brought me to my senses very suddenly. And now I perceived, by a
+flash of insight, that I had been steeping myself in pure ancestral
+blindness, and looking at life with the eyes of a remote spectator.
+Wishing for heroism and the spectacle of human nature on the rack,
+I had never noticed the great fields of heroism lying round about
+me, I had failed to see it present and alive. I could only think of
+it as dead and embalmed, labelled and costumed, as it is in the
+pages of romance. And yet there it was before me in the daily lives
+of the laboring classes. Not in clanging fights and desperate
+marches only is heroism to be looked for, but on every railway
+bridge and fire-proof building that is going up to-day. On
+freight-trains, on the decks of vessels, in cattle-yards and mines,
+on lumber-rafts, among the firemen and the policemen, the demand
+for courage is incessant; and the supply never fails. There, every
+day of the year somewhere, is human nature <i>in extremis</i> for
+you. And wherever a scythe, an axe, a pick, or a shovel is wielded,
+you have it sweating and aching and with its powers of patient
+endurance racked to the utmost under the length of hours of the
+strain.</p>
+
+<p>As I awoke to all this unidealized heroic life around me, the
+scales seemed to fall from my eyes; and a wave of sympathy greater
+than anything I had ever before felt with the common life of common
+men began to fill my soul. It began to seem as if virtue with horny
+hands and dirty skin were the only virtue genuine and vital enough
+to take account of. Every other virtue poses; none is absolutely
+unconscious and simple, and unexpectant of decoration or
+recognition, like this. These are our soldiers, thought I, these
+our sustainers, these the very parents of our life.</p>
+
+<p>Many years ago, when in Vienna, I had had a similar feeling of
+awe and reverence in looking at the peasant-women, in from the
+country on their business at the market for the day. Old hags many
+of them were, dried and brown and wrinkled, kerchiefed and
+short-petticoated, with thick wool stockings on their bony shanks,
+stumping through the glittering thoroughfares, looking neither to
+the right nor the left, bent on duty, envying nothing,
+humble-hearted, remote;&mdash;and yet at bottom, when you came to
+think of it, bearing the whole fabric of the splendors and
+corruptions of that city on their laborious backs. For where would
+any of it have been without their unremitting, unrewarded labor in
+the fields? And so with us: not to our generals and poets, I
+thought, but to the Italian and Hungarian laborers in the Subway,
+rather, ought the monuments of gratitude and reverence of a city
+like Boston to be reared.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+
+
+<p>If any of you have been readers of Tolsto&iuml;, you will see
+that I passed into a vein of feeling similar to his, with its
+abhorrence of all that conventionally passes for distinguished, and
+its exclusive deification of the bravery, patience, kindliness, and
+dumbness of the unconscious natural man.</p>
+
+<p>Where now is <i>our</i> Tolsto&iuml;, I said, to bring the truth
+of all this home to our American bosoms, fill us with a better
+insight, and wean us away from that spurious literary romanticism
+on which our wretched culture&mdash;as it calls itself&mdash;is
+fed? Divinity lies all about us, and culture is too hidebound to
+even suspect the fact. Could a Howells or a Kipling be enlisted in
+this mission? or are they still too deep in the ancestral
+blindness, and not humane enough for the inner joy and meaning of
+the laborer's existence to be really revealed? Must we wait for
+some one born and bred and living as a laborer himself, but who, by
+grace of Heaven, shall also find a literary voice?</p>
+
+<p>And there I rested on that day, with a sense of widening of
+vision, and with what it is surely fair to call an increase of
+religious insight into life. In God's eyes the differences of
+social position, of intellect, of culture, of cleanliness, of
+dress, which different men exhibit, and all the other rarities and
+exceptions on which they so fantastically pin their pride, must be
+so small as practically quite to vanish; and all that should remain
+is the common fact that here we are, a countless multitude of
+vessels of life, each of us pent in to peculiar difficulties, with
+which we must severally struggle by using whatever of fortitude and
+goodness we can summon up. The exercise of the courage, patience,
+and kindness, must be the significant portion of the whole
+business; and the distinctions of position can only be a manner of
+diversifying the phenomenal surface upon which these underground
+virtues may manifest their effects. At this rate, the deepest human
+life is everywhere, is eternal. And, if any human attributes exist
+only in particular individuals, they must belong to the mere
+trapping and decoration of the surface-show.</p>
+
+<p>Thus are men's lives levelled up as well as levelled
+down,&mdash;levelled up in their common inner meaning, levelled
+down in their outer gloriousness and show. Yet always, we must
+confess, this levelling insight tends to be obscured again; and
+always the ancestral blindness returns and wraps us up, so that we
+end once more by thinking that creation can be for no other purpose
+than to develop remarkable situations and conventional distinctions
+and merits. And then always some new leveller in the shape of a
+religious prophet has to arise&mdash;the Buddha, the Christ, or
+some Saint Francis, some Rousseau or Tolsto&iuml;&mdash;to redispel
+our blindness. Yet, little by little, there comes some stable gain;
+for the world does get more humane, and the religion of democracy
+tends toward permanent increase.</p>
+
+<p>This, as I said, became for a time my conviction, and gave me
+great content. I have put the matter into the form of a personal
+reminiscence, so that I might lead you into it more directly and
+completely, and so save time. But now I am going to discuss the
+rest of it with you in a more impersonal way.</p>
+
+<p>Tolsto&iuml;'s levelling philosophy began long before he had the
+crisis of melancholy commemorated in that wonderful document of his
+entitled 'My Confession,' which led the way to his more
+specifically religious works. In his masterpiece 'War and
+Peace,'&mdash;assuredly the greatest of human novels,&mdash;the
+r&ocirc;le of the spiritual hero is given to a poor little soldier
+named Karata&iuml;eff, so helpful, so cheerful, and so devout that,
+in spite of his ignorance and filthiness, the sight of him opens
+the heavens, which have been closed, to the mind of the principal
+character of the book; and his example evidently is meant by
+Tolsto&iuml; to let God into the world again for the reader. Poor
+little Karata&iuml;eff is taken prisoner by the French; and, when
+too exhausted by hardship and fever to march, is shot as other
+prisoners were in the famous retreat from Moscow. The last view one
+gets of him is his little figure leaning against a white
+birch-tree, and uncomplainingly awaiting the end.</p>
+
+<p>"The more," writes Tolsto&iuml; in the work 'My Confession,'
+"the more I examined the life of these laboring folks, the more
+persuaded I became that they veritably have faith, and get from it
+alone the sense and the possibility of life.... Contrariwise to
+those of our own class, who protest against destiny and grow
+indignant at its rigor, these people receive maladies and
+misfortunes without revolt, without opposition, and with a firm and
+tranquil confidence that all had to be like that, could not be
+otherwise, and that it is all right so.... The more we live by our
+intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life. We see only
+a cruel jest in suffering and death, whereas these people live,
+suffer, and draw near to death with tranquillity, and oftener than
+not with joy.... There are enormous multitudes of them happy with
+the most perfect happiness, although deprived of what for us is the
+sole good of life. Those who understand life's meaning, and know
+how to live and die thus, are to be counted not by twos, threes,
+tens, but by hundreds, thousands, millions. They labor quietly,
+endure privations and pains, live and die, and throughout
+everything see the good without seeing the vanity. I had to love
+these people. The more I entered into their life, the more I loved
+them; and the more it became possible for me to live, too. It came
+about not only that the life of our society, of the learned and of
+the rich, disgusted me&mdash;more than that, it lost all semblance
+of meaning in my eyes. All our actions, our deliberations, our
+sciences, our arts, all appeared to me with a new significance. I
+understood that these things might be charming pastimes, but that
+one need seek in them no depth, whereas the life of the
+hard-working populace, of that multitude of human beings who really
+contribute to existence, appeared to me in its true light. I
+understood that there veritably is life, that the meaning which
+life there receives is the truth; and I accepted it."<a
+name="FNanchor_A_17" id="FNanchor_A_17" /><a href="#Footnote_A_17"
+class="fnanchor">[A]</a></p>
+
+<p>In a similar way does Stevenson appeal to our piety toward the
+elemental virtue of mankind.</p>
+
+<p>"What a wonderful thing," he writes,<a name="FNanchor_B_18"
+id="FNanchor_B_18" /><a href="#Footnote_B_18"
+class="fnanchor">[B]</a> "is this Man! How surprising are his
+attributes! Poor soul, here for so little, cast among so many
+hardships, savagely surrounded, savagely descended, irremediably
+condemned to prey upon his fellow-lives,&mdash;who should have
+blamed him, had he been of a piece with his destiny and a being
+merely barbarous?... [Yet] it matters not where we look, under
+what climate we observe him, in what stage of society, in what
+depth of ignorance, burdened with what erroneous morality; in ships
+at sea, a man inured to hardship and vile pleasures, his brightest
+hope a fiddle in a tavern, and a bedizened trull who sells herself
+to rob him, and he, for all that, simple, innocent, cheerful,
+kindly like a child, constant to toil, brave to drown, for
+others;... in the slums of cities, moving among indifferent
+millions to mechanical employments, without hope of change in the
+future, with scarce a pleasure in the present, and yet true to
+his virtues, honest up to his lights, kind to his neighbors,
+tempted perhaps in vain by the bright gin-palace,... often repaying
+the world's scorn with service, often standing firm upon a
+scruple;... everywhere some virtue cherished or affected, everywhere
+some decency of thought and courage, everywhere the ensign of man's
+ineffectual goodness,&mdash;ah! if I could show you this! If I
+could show you these men and women all the world over, in every
+stage of history, under every abuse of error, under every
+circumstance of failure, without hope, without help, without
+thanks, still obscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still
+clinging to some rag of honor, the poor jewel of their souls."</p>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+<p><a name="Footnote_A_17" id="Footnote_A_17" /><a
+href="#FNanchor_A_17"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> My
+Confession, X. (condensed).</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+<p><a name="Footnote_B_18" id="Footnote_B_18" /><a
+href="#FNanchor_B_18"><span class="label">[B]</span></a> Across the
+Plains: "Pulvis et Umbra" (abridged).</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>All this is as true as it is splendid, and terribly do we need
+our Tolsto&iuml;s and Stevensons to keep our sense for it alive.
+Yet you remember the Irishman who, when asked, "Is not one man as
+good as another?" replied, "Yes; and a great deal better, too!"
+Similarly (it seems to me) does Tolsto&iuml; overcorrect our social
+prejudices, when he makes his love of the peasant so exclusive, and
+hardens his heart toward the educated man as absolutely as he does.
+Grant that at Chautauqua there was little moral effort, little
+sweat or muscular strain in view. Still, deep down in the souls of
+the participants we may be sure that something of the sort was hid,
+some inner stress, some vital virtue not found wanting when
+required. And, after all, the question recurs, and forces itself
+upon us, Is it so certain that the surroundings and circumstances
+of the virtue do make so little difference in the importance of the
+result? Is the functional utility, the worth to the universe of a
+certain definite amount of courage, kindliness, and patience, no
+greater if the possessor of these virtues is in an educated
+situation, working out far-reaching tasks, than if he be an
+illiterate nobody, hewing wood and drawing water, just to keep
+himself alive? Tolsto&iuml;'s philosophy, deeply enlightening
+though it certainly is, remains a false abstraction. It savors too
+much of that Oriental pessimism and nihilism of his, which declares
+the whole phenomenal world and its facts and their distinctions to
+be a cunning fraud.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+
+
+<p>A mere bare fraud is just what our Western common sense will
+never believe the phenomenal world to be. It admits fully that the
+inner joys and virtues are the <i>essential</i> part of life's
+business, but it is sure that <i>some</i> positive part is also
+played by the adjuncts of the show. If it is idiotic in romanticism
+to recognize the heroic only when it sees it labelled and
+dressed-up in books, it is really just as idiotic to see it only in
+the dirty boots and sweaty shirt of some one in the fields. It is
+with us really under every disguise: at Chautauqua; here in your
+college; in the stock-yards and on the freight-trains; and in the
+czar of Russia's court. But, instinctively, we make a combination
+of two things in judging the total significance of a human being.
+We feel it to be some sort of a product (if such a product only
+could be calculated) of his inner virtue <i>and</i> his outer
+place,&mdash;neither singly taken, but both conjoined. If the outer
+differences had no meaning for life, why indeed should all this
+immense variety of them exist? They <i>must</i> be significant
+elements of the world as well.</p>
+
+<p>Just test Tolsto&iuml;'s deification of the mere manual laborer
+by the facts. This is what Mr. Walter Wyckoff, after working as an
+unskilled laborer in the demolition of some buildings at West
+Point, writes of the spiritual condition of the class of men to
+which he temporarily chose to belong:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"The salient features of our condition are plain enough. We are
+grown men, and are without a trade. In the labor-market we stand
+ready to sell to the highest bidder our mere muscular strength for
+so many hours each day. We are thus in the lowest grade of labor.
+And, selling our muscular strength in the open market for what it
+will bring, we sell it under peculiar conditions. It is all the
+capital that we have. We have no reserve means of subsistence, and
+cannot, therefore, stand off for a 'reserve price.' We sell under
+the necessity of satisfying imminent hunger. Broadly speaking, we
+must sell our labor or starve; and, as hunger is a matter of a few
+hours, and we have no other way of meeting this need, we must sell
+at once for what the market offers for our labor.</p>
+
+<p>"Our employer is buying labor in a dear market, and he will
+certainly get from us as much work as he can at the price. The
+gang-boss is secured for this purpose, and thoroughly does he know
+his business. He has sole command of us. He never saw us before,
+and he will discharge us all when the d&eacute;bris is cleared
+away. In the mean time he must get from us, if he can, the utmost
+of physical labor which we, individually and collectively, are
+capable of. If he should drive some of us to exhaustion, and we
+should not be able to continue at work, he would not be the loser;
+for the market would soon supply him with others to take our
+places.</p>
+
+<p>"We are ignorant men, but so much we clearly see,&mdash;that we
+have sold our labor where we could sell it dearest, and our
+employer has bought it where he could buy it cheapest. He has paid
+high, and he must get all the labor that he can; and, by a strong
+instinct which possesses us, we shall part with as little as we
+can. From work like ours there seems to us to have been eliminated
+every element which constitutes the nobility of labor. We feel no
+personal pride in its progress, and no community of interest with
+our employer. There is none of the joy of responsibility, none of
+the sense of achievement, only the dull monotony of grinding toil,
+with the longing for the signal to quit work, and for our wages at
+the end.</p>
+
+<p>"And being what we are, the dregs of the labor-market, and
+having no certainty of permanent employment, and no organization
+among ourselves, we must expect to work under the watchful eye of a
+gang-boss, and be driven, like the wage-slaves that we are, through
+our tasks.</p>
+
+<p>"All this is to tell us, in effect, that our lives are hard,
+barren, hopeless lives."</p>
+
+<p>And such hard, barren, hopeless lives, surely, are not lives in
+which one ought to be willing permanently to remain. And why is
+this so? Is it because they are so dirty? Well, Nansen grew a great
+deal dirtier on his polar expedition; and we think none the worse
+of his life for that. Is it the insensibility? Our soldiers have to
+grow vastly more insensible, and we extol them to the skies. Is it
+the poverty? Poverty has been reckoned the crowning beauty of many
+a heroic career. Is it the slavery to a task, the loss of finer
+pleasures?</p>
+
+<p>Such slavery and loss are of the very essence of the higher
+fortitude, and are always counted to its credit,&mdash;read the
+records of missionary devotion all over the world. It is not any
+one of these things, then, taken by itself,&mdash;no, nor all of
+them together,&mdash;that make such a life undesirable. A man might
+in truth live like an unskilled laborer, and do the work of one,
+and yet count as one of the noblest of God's creatures. Quite
+possibly there were some such persons in the gang that our author
+describes; but the current of their souls ran underground; and he
+was too steeped in the ancestral blindness to discern it.</p>
+
+<p>If there <i>were</i> any such morally exceptional individuals,
+however, what made them different from the rest? It can only have
+been this,&mdash;that their souls worked and endured in obedience
+to some inner <i>ideal</i>, while their comrades were not actuated
+by anything worthy of that name. These ideals of other lives are
+among those secrets that we can almost never penetrate, although
+something about the man may often tell us when they are there. In
+Mr. Wyckoff's own case we know exactly what the self-imposed ideal
+was. Partly he had stumped himself, as the boys say, to carry
+through a strenuous achievement; but mainly he wished to enlarge
+his sympathetic insight into fellow-lives. For this his sweat and
+toil acquire a certain heroic significance, and make us accord to
+him exceptional esteem. But it is easy to imagine his fellows with
+various other ideals. To say nothing of wives and babies, one may
+have been a convert of the Salvation Army, and had a nightingale
+singing of expiation and forgiveness in his heart all the while he
+labored. Or there might have been an apostle like Tolsto&iuml;
+himself, or his compatriot Bondareff, in the gang, voluntarily
+embracing labor as their religious mission. Class-loyalty was
+undoubtedly an ideal with many. And who knows how much of that
+higher manliness of poverty, of which Phillips Brooks has spoken so
+penetratingly, was or was not present in that gang?</p>
+
+<p>"A rugged, barren land," says Phillips Brooks, "is poverty to
+live in,&mdash;a land where I am thankful very often if I can get a
+berry or a root to eat. But living in it really, letting it bear
+witness to me of itself, not dishonoring it all the time by judging
+it after the standard of the other lands, gradually there come out
+its qualities. Behold! no land like this barren and naked land of
+poverty could show the moral geology of the world. See how the hard
+ribs ... stand out strong and solid. No life like poverty could so
+get one to the heart of things and make men know their meaning,
+could so let us feel life and the world with all the soft cushions
+stripped off and thrown away.... Poverty makes men come very near
+each other, and recognize each other's human hearts; and poverty,
+highest and best of all, demands and cries out for faith in God....
+I know how superficial and unfeeling, how like mere mockery, words
+in praise of poverty may seem.... But I am sure that the poor man's
+dignity and freedom, his self-respect and energy, depend upon his
+cordial knowledge that his poverty is a true region and kind of
+life, with its own chances of character, its own springs of
+happiness and revelations of God. Let him resist the
+characterlessness which often goes with being poor. Let him insist
+on respecting the condition where he lives. Let him learn to love
+it, so that by and by, [if] he grows rich, he shall go out of the
+low door of the old familiar poverty with a true pang of regret,
+and with a true honor for the narrow home in which he has lived so
+long."<a name="FNanchor_A_19" id="FNanchor_A_19" /><a
+href="#Footnote_A_19" class="fnanchor">[A]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+<p><a name="Footnote_A_19" id="Footnote_A_19" /><a
+href="#FNanchor_A_19"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> Sermons.
+5th Series, New York, 1893, pp. 166, 167.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The barrenness and ignobleness of the more usual laborer's life
+consist in the fact that it is moved by no such ideal inner
+springs. The backache, the long hours, the danger, are patiently
+endured&mdash;for what? To gain a quid of tobacco, a glass of beer,
+a cup of coffee, a meal, and a bed, and to begin again the next day
+and shirk as much as one can. This really is why we raise no
+monument to the laborers in the Subway, even though they be our
+conscripts, and even though after a fashion our city is indeed
+based upon their patient hearts and enduring backs and shoulders.
+And this is why we do raise monuments to our soldiers, whose
+outward conditions were even brutaller still. The soldiers are
+supposed to have followed an ideal, and the laborers are supposed
+to have followed none.</p>
+
+<p>You see, my friends, how the plot now thickens; and how
+strangely the complexities of this wonderful human nature of ours
+begin to develop under our hands. We have seen the blindness and
+deadness to each other which are our natural inheritance; and, in
+spite of them, we have been led to acknowledge an inner meaning
+which passeth show, and which may be present in the lives of others
+where we least descry it. And now we are led to say that such inner
+meaning can be <i>complete</i> and <i>valid for us also</i>, only
+when the inner joy, courage, and endurance are joined with an
+ideal.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+
+
+<p>But what, exactly, do we mean by an ideal? Can we give no
+definite account of such a word?</p>
+
+<p>To a certain extent we can. An ideal, for instance, must be
+something intellectually conceived, something of which we are not
+unconscious, if we have it; and it must carry with it that sort of
+outlook, uplift, and brightness that go with all intellectual
+facts. Secondly, there must be <i>novelty</i> in an
+ideal,&mdash;novelty at least for him whom the ideal grasps. Sodden
+routine is incompatible with ideality, although what is sodden
+routine for one person may be ideal novelty for another. This shows
+that there is nothing absolutely ideal: ideals are relative to the
+lives that entertain them. To keep out of the gutter is for us here
+no part of consciousness at all, yet for many of our brethren it is
+the most legitimately engrossing of ideals.</p>
+
+<p>Now, taken nakedly, abstractly, and immediately, you see that
+mere ideals are the cheapest things in life. Everybody has them in
+some shape or other, personal or general, sound or mistaken, low or
+high; and the most worthless sentimentalists and dreamers,
+drunkards, shirks and verse-makers, who never show a grain of
+effort, courage, or endurance, possibly have them on the most
+copious scale. Education, enlarging as it does our horizon and
+perspective, is a means of multiplying our ideals, of bringing new
+ones into view. And your college professor, with a starched shirt
+and spectacles, would, if a stock of ideals were all alone by
+itself enough to render a life significant, be the most absolutely
+and deeply significant of men. Tolsto&iuml; would be completely
+blind in despising him for a prig, a pedant and a parody; and all
+our new insight into the divinity of muscular labor would be
+altogether off the track of truth.</p>
+
+<p>But such consequences as this, you instinctively feel, are
+erroneous. The more ideals a man has, the more contemptible, on the
+whole, do you continue to deem him, if the matter ends there for
+him, and if none of the laboring man's virtues are called into
+action on his part,&mdash;no courage shown, no privations
+undergone, no dirt or scars contracted in the attempt to get them
+realized. It is quite obvious that something more than the mere
+possession of ideals is required to make a life significant in any
+sense that claims the spectator's admiration. Inner joy, to be
+sure, it may <i>have</i>, with its ideals; but that is its own
+private sentimental matter. To extort from us, outsiders as we are,
+with our own ideals to look after, the tribute of our grudging
+recognition, it must back its ideal visions with what the laborers
+have, the sterner stuff of manly virtue; it must multiply their
+sentimental surface by the dimension of the active will, if we are
+to have <i>depth</i>, if we are to have anything cubical and solid
+in the way of character.</p>
+
+<p>The significance of a human life for communicable and publicly
+recognizable purposes is thus the offspring of a marriage of two
+different parents, either of whom alone is barren. The ideals taken
+by themselves give no reality, the virtues by themselves no
+novelty. And let the orientalists and pessimists say what they
+will, the thing of deepest&mdash;or, at any rate, of comparatively
+deepest&mdash;significance in life does seem to be its character of
+<i>progress</i>, or that strange union of reality with ideal
+novelty which it continues from one moment to another to present.
+To recognize ideal novelty is the task of what we call
+intelligence. Not every one's intelligence can tell which novelties
+are ideal. For many the ideal thing will always seem to cling still
+to the older more familiar good. In this case character, though not
+significant totally, may be still significant pathetically. So, if
+we are to choose which is the more essential factor of human
+character, the fighting virtue or the intellectual breadth, we must
+side with Tolsto&iuml;, and choose that simple faithfulness to his
+light or darkness which any common unintellectual man can show.</p>
+
+<br />
+<br />
+
+
+<p>But, with all this beating and tacking on my part, I fear you
+take me to be reaching a confused result. I seem to be just taking
+things up and dropping them again. First I took up Chautauqua, and
+dropped that; then Tolsto&iuml; and the heroism of common toil, and
+dropped them; finally, I took up ideals, and seem now almost
+dropping those. But please observe in what sense it is that I drop
+them. It is when they pretend <i>singly</i> to redeem life from
+insignificance. Culture and refinement all alone are not enough to
+do so. Ideal aspirations are not enough, when uncombined with pluck
+and will. But neither are pluck and will, dogged endurance and
+insensibility to danger enough, when taken all alone. There must be
+some sort of fusion, some chemical combination among these
+principles, for a life objectively and thoroughly significant to
+result.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, this is a somewhat vague conclusion. But in a
+question of significance, of worth, like this, conclusions can
+never be precise. The answer of appreciation, of sentiment, is
+always a more or a less, a balance struck by sympathy, insight, and
+good will. But it is an answer, all the same, a real conclusion.
+And, in the course of getting it, it seems to me that our eyes have
+been opened to many important things. Some of you are, perhaps,
+more livingly aware than you were an hour ago of the depths of
+worth that lie around you, hid in alien lives. And, when you ask
+how much sympathy you ought to bestow, although the amount is,
+truly enough, a matter of ideal on your own part, yet in this
+notion of the combination of ideals with active virtues you have a
+rough standard for shaping your decision. In any case, your
+imagination is extended. You divine in the world about you matter
+for a little more humility on your own part, and tolerance,
+reverence, and love for others; and you gain a certain inner
+joyfulness at the increased importance of our common life. Such
+joyfulness is a religious inspiration and an element of spiritual
+health, and worth more than large amounts of that sort of technical
+and accurate information which we professors are supposed to be
+able to impart.</p>
+
+<p>To show the sort of thing I mean by these words, I will just
+make one brief practical illustration and then close.</p>
+
+<p>We are suffering to-day in America from what is called the
+labor-question; and, when you go out into the world, you will each
+and all of you be caught up in its perplexities. I use the brief
+term labor-question to cover all sorts of anarchistic discontents
+and socialistic projects, and the conservative resistances which
+they provoke. So far as this conflict is unhealthy and
+regrettable,&mdash;and I think it is so only to a limited
+extent,&mdash;the unhealthiness consists solely in the fact that
+one-half of our fellow-countrymen remain entirely blind to the
+internal significance of the lives of the other half. They miss the
+joys and sorrows, they fail to feel the moral virtue, and they do
+not guess the presence of the intellectual ideals. They are at
+cross-purposes all along the line, regarding each other as they
+might regard a set of dangerously gesticulating automata, or, if
+they seek to get at the inner motivation, making the most horrible
+mistakes. Often all that the poor man can think of in the rich man
+is a cowardly greediness for safety, luxury, and effeminacy, and a
+boundless affectation. What he is, is not a human being, but a
+pocket-book, a bank-account. And a similar greediness, turned by
+disappointment into envy, is all that many rich men can see in the
+state of mind of the dissatisfied poor. And, if the rich man begins
+to do the sentimental act over the poor man, what senseless
+blunders does he make, pitying him for just those very duties and
+those very immunities which, rightly taken, are the condition of
+his most abiding and characteristic joys! Each, in short, ignores
+the fact that happiness and unhappiness and significance are a
+vital mystery; each pins them absolutely on some ridiculous feature
+of the external situation; and everybody remains outside of
+everybody else's sight.</p>
+
+<p>Society has, with all this, undoubtedly got to pass toward some
+newer and better equilibrium, and the distribution of wealth has
+doubtless slowly got to change: such changes have always happened,
+and will happen to the end of time. But if, after all that I have
+said, any of you expect that they will make any <i>genuine vital
+difference</i> on a large scale, to the lives of our descendants,
+you will have missed the significance of my entire lecture. The
+solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing,&mdash;the
+marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with
+some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some man's or woman's
+pains.&mdash;And, whatever or wherever life may be, there will
+always be the chance for that marriage to take place.</p>
+
+<p>Fitz-James Stephen wrote many years ago words to this effect
+more eloquent than any I can speak: "The 'Great Eastern,' or some
+of her successors," he said, "will perhaps defy the roll of the
+Atlantic, and cross the seas without allowing their passengers to
+feel that they have left the firm land. The voyage from the cradle
+to the grave may come to be performed with similar facility.
+Progress and science may perhaps enable untold millions to live and
+die without a care, without a pang, without an anxiety. They will
+have a pleasant passage and plenty of brilliant conversation. They
+will wonder that men ever believed at all in clanging fights and
+blazing towns and sinking ships and praying hands; and, when they
+come to the end of their course, they will go their way, and the
+place thereof will know them no more. But it seems unlikely that
+they will have such a knowledge of the great ocean on which they
+sail, with its storms and wrecks, its currents and icebergs, its
+huge waves and mighty winds, as those who battled with it for years
+together in the little craft, which, if they had few other merits,
+brought those who navigated them full into the presence of time and
+eternity, their maker and themselves, and forced them to have some
+definite view of their relations to them and to each other."<a
+name="FNanchor_A_20" id="FNanchor_A_20" /><a href="#Footnote_A_20"
+class="fnanchor">[A]</a></p>
+
+<div class="footnote">
+<p><a name="Footnote_A_20" id="Footnote_A_20" /><a
+href="#FNanchor_A_20"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> Essays by
+a Barrister, London, 1862, p. 318.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>In this solid and tridimensional sense, so to call it, those
+philosophers are right who contend that the world is a standing
+thing, with no progress, no real history. The changing conditions
+of history touch only the surface of the show. The altered
+equilibriums and redistributions only diversify our opportunities
+and open chances to us for new ideals. But, with each new ideal
+that comes into life, the chance for a life based on some old ideal
+will vanish; and he would needs be a presumptuous calculator who
+should with confidence say that the total sum of significances is
+positively and absolutely greater at any one epoch than at any
+other of the world.</p>
+
+<p>I am speaking broadly, I know, and omitting to consider certain
+qualifications in which I myself believe. But one can only make one
+point in one lecture, and I shall be well content if I have brought
+my point home to you this evening in even a slight degree. <i>There
+are compensations</i>: and no outward changes of condition in life
+can keep the nightingale of its eternal meaning from singing in all
+sorts of different men's hearts. That is the main fact to remember.
+If we could not only admit it with our lips, but really and truly
+believe it, how our convulsive insistencies, how our antipathies
+and dreads of each other, would soften down! If the poor and the
+rich could look at each other in this way, <i>sub specie
+&aelig;ternatis</i>, how gentle would grow their disputes! what
+tolerance and good humor, what willingness to live and let live,
+would come into the world!</p>
+
+<p>THE END.</p>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And
+To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals, by William James
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TALKS TO TEACHERS ***
+
+***** This file should be named 16287-h.htm or 16287-h.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/1/6/2/8/16287/
+
+Produced by David Newman, Dave Macfarlane and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+
+
+</pre>
+
+</body>
+</html>
+
diff --git a/16287-h/images/illus051.gif b/16287-h/images/illus051.gif
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..4b38d8d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/16287-h/images/illus051.gif
diff --git a/16287-h/images/illus052.gif b/16287-h/images/illus052.gif
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..22df957
--- /dev/null
+++ b/16287-h/images/illus052.gif
diff --git a/16287.txt b/16287.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..decc986
--- /dev/null
+++ b/16287.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,6486 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To
+Students On Some Of Life's Ideals, by William James
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals
+
+Author: William James
+
+Release Date: July 13, 2005 [EBook #16287]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TALKS TO TEACHERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Newman, Dave Macfarlane and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+#TALKS TO TEACHERS#
+
+ON PSYCHOLOGY: AND TO
+STUDENTS ON SOME OF LIFE'S
+IDEALS, By WILLIAM JAMES
+
+#NEW YORK
+HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY#
+#1925#
+
+
+#COPYRIGHT, 1899, 1900#
+#BY WILLIAM JAMES#
+
+#PRESS OF GEO. H. ELLIS CO. (INC.) BOSTON#
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+In 1892 I was asked by the Harvard Corporation to give a few public
+lectures on psychology to the Cambridge teachers. The talks now printed
+form the substance of that course, which has since then been delivered
+at various places to various teacher-audiences. I have found by
+experience that what my hearers seem least to relish is analytical
+technicality, and what they most care for is concrete practical
+application. So I have gradually weeded out the former, and left the
+latter unreduced; and now, that I have at last written out the lectures,
+they contain a minimum of what is deemed 'scientific' in psychology, and
+are practical and popular in the extreme.
+
+Some of my colleagues may possibly shake their heads at this; but in
+taking my cue from what has seemed to me to be the feeling of the
+audiences I believe that I am shaping my book so as to satisfy the more
+genuine public need.
+
+Teachers, of course, will miss the minute divisions, subdivisions, and
+definitions, the lettered and numbered headings, the variations of type,
+and all the other mechanical artifices on which they are accustomed to
+prop their minds. But my main desire has been to make them conceive,
+and, if possible, reproduce sympathetically in their imagination, the
+mental life of their pupil as the sort of active unity which he himself
+feels it to be. _He_ doesn't chop himself into distinct processes and
+compartments; and it would have frustrated this deeper purpose of my
+book to make it look, when printed, like a Baedeker's handbook of travel
+or a text-book of arithmetic. So far as books printed like this book
+force the fluidity of the facts upon the young teacher's attention, so
+far I am sure they tend to do his intellect a service, even though they
+may leave unsatisfied a craving (not altogether without its legitimate
+grounds) for more nomenclature, head-lines, and subdivisions.
+
+Readers acquainted with my larger books on Psychology will meet much
+familiar phraseology. In the chapters on habit and memory I have even
+copied several pages verbatim, but I do not know that apology is needed
+for such plagiarism as this.
+
+The talks to students, which conclude the volume, were written in
+response to invitations to deliver 'addresses' to students at women's
+colleges. The first one was to the graduating class of the Boston Normal
+School of Gymnastics. Properly, it continues the series of talks to
+teachers. The second and the third address belong together, and continue
+another line of thought.
+
+I wish I were able to make the second, 'On a Certain Blindness in Human
+Beings,' more impressive. It is more than the mere piece of
+sentimentalism which it may seem to some readers. It connects itself
+with a definite view of the world and of our moral relations to the
+same. Those who have done me the honor of reading my volume of
+philosophic essays will recognize that I mean the pluralistic or
+individualistic philosophy. According to that philosophy, the truth is
+too great for any one actual mind, even though that mind be dubbed 'the
+Absolute,' to know the whole of it. The facts and worths of life need
+many cognizers to take them in. There is no point of view absolutely
+public and universal. Private and uncommunicable perceptions always
+remain over, and the worst of it is that those who look for them from
+the outside never know _where_.
+
+The practical consequence of such a philosophy is the well-known
+democratic respect for the sacredness of individuality,--is, at any
+rate, the outward tolerance of whatever is not itself intolerant. These
+phrases are so familiar that they sound now rather dead in our ears.
+Once they had a passionate inner meaning. Such a passionate inner
+meaning they may easily acquire again if the pretension of our nation
+to inflict its own inner ideals and institutions _vi et armis_ upon
+Orientals should meet with a resistance as obdurate as so far it has
+been gallant and spirited. Religiously and philosophically, our ancient
+national doctrine of live and let live may prove to have a far deeper
+meaning than our people now seem to imagine it to possess.
+
+CAMBRIDGE, MASS., March, 1899.
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+
+TALKS TO TEACHERS.
+
+I. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE TEACHING ART
+
+The American educational organization,--What teachers may expect from
+psychology,--Teaching methods must agree with psychology, but cannot
+be immediately deduced therefrom,--The science of teaching and the
+science of war,--The educational uses of psychology defined,--The
+teacher's duty toward child-study.
+
+II. THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
+
+Our mental life is a succession of conscious 'fields,'--They have a
+focus and a margin,--This description contrasted with the theory of
+'ideas,'--Wundt's conclusions, note.
+
+III. THE CHILD AS A BEHAVING ORGANISM
+
+Mind as pure reason and mind as practical guide,--The latter view the
+more fashionable one to-day,--It will be adopted in this work,--Why
+so?--The teacher's function is to train pupils to behavior.
+
+IV. EDUCATION AND BEHAVIOR
+
+Education defined,--Conduct is always its outcome,--Different
+national ideals: Germany and England.
+
+V. THE NECESSITY OF REACTIONS
+
+No impression without expression,--Verbal reproduction,--Manual
+training,--Pupils should know their 'marks'.
+
+VI. NATIVE AND ACQUIRED REACTIONS
+
+The acquired reactions must be preceded by native ones,--Illustration:
+teaching child to ask instead of snatching,--Man has more instincts than
+other mammals.
+
+VII. WHAT THE NATIVE REACTIONS ARE
+
+Fear and love,--Curiosity,--Imitation,--Emulation,--Forbidden by
+Rousseau,--His error,--Ambition, pugnacity, and pride. Soft
+pedagogics and the fighting impulse,--Ownership,--Its educational
+uses,--Constructiveness,--Manual teaching,--Transitoriness in
+instincts,--Their order of succession.
+
+VIII. THE LAWS OF HABIT
+
+Good and bad habits,--Habit due to plasticity of organic tissues,--The
+aim of education is to make useful habits automatic,--Maxims relative to
+habit-forming: 1. Strong initiative,--2. No exception,--3. Seize first
+opportunity to act,--4. Don't preach,--Darwin and poetry: without
+exercise our capacities decay,--The habit of mental and muscular
+relaxation,--Fifth maxim, keep the faculty of effort trained,--Sudden
+conversions compatible with laws of habit,--Momentous influence of
+habits on character.
+
+IX. THE ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS
+
+A case of habit,--The two laws, contiguity and similarity,--The teacher
+has to build up useful systems of association,--Habitual associations
+determine character,--Indeterminateness of our trains of
+association,--We can trace them backward, but not foretell
+them,--Interest deflects,--Prepotent parts of the field,--In teaching,
+multiply cues.
+
+X. INTEREST
+
+The child's native interests,--How uninteresting things acquire an
+interest,--Rules for the teacher,--'Preparation' of the mind for the
+lesson: the pupil must have something to attend with,--All later
+interests are borrowed from original ones.
+
+XI. ATTENTION
+
+Interest and attention are two aspects of one fact,--Voluntary attention
+comes in beats,--Genius and attention,--The subject must change to win
+attention,--Mechanical aids,--The physiological process,--The new in
+the old is what excites interest,--Interest and effort are
+compatible,--Mind-wandering,--Not fatal to mental efficiency.
+
+XII. MEMORY
+
+Due to association,--No recall without a cue,--Memory is due to
+brain-plasticity,--Native retentiveness,--Number of associations may
+practically be its equivalent,--Retentiveness is a fixed property of the
+individual,--Memory _versus_ memories,--Scientific system as help to
+memory,--Technical memories,--Cramming,--Elementary memory
+unimprovable,--Utility of verbal memorizing,--Measurements of immediate
+memory,--They throw little light,--Passion is the important factor in
+human efficiency,--Eye-memory, ear-memory, etc.,--The rate of
+forgetting, Ebbinghaus's results,--Influence of the unreproducible,--To
+remember, one must think and connect.
+
+XIII. THE ACQUISITION OF IDEAS
+
+Education gives a stock of conceptions,--The order of their
+acquisition,--Value of verbal material,--Abstractions of different
+orders: when are they assimilable,--False conceptions of children.
+
+XIV. APPERCEPTION
+
+Often a mystifying idea,--The process defined,--The law of
+economy,--Old-fogyism,--How many types of apperception?--New
+heads of classification must continually be invented,--Alteration of
+the apperceiving mass,--Class names are what we work by,--Few
+new fundamental conceptions acquired after twenty-five.
+
+XV. THE WILL
+
+The word defined,--All consciousness tends to action,--Ideo-motor
+action,--Inhibition,--The process of deliberation,--Why so few of our
+ideas result in acts,--The associationist account of the will,--A
+balance of impulses and inhibitions,--The over-impulsive and the
+over-obstructed type,--The perfect type,--The balky will,--What
+character building consists in,--Right action depends on right
+apperception of the case,--Effort of will is effort of attention: the
+drunkard's dilemma,--Vital importance of voluntary attention,--Its
+amount may be indeterminate,--Affirmation of free-will,--Two types of
+inhibition,--Spinoza on inhibition by a higher good,--Conclusion.
+
+
+TALKS TO STUDENTS.
+
+I. THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION
+
+II. ON A CERTAIN BLINDNESS IN HUMAN BEINGS
+
+III. WHAT MAKES A LIFE SIGNIFICANT?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+TALKS TO TEACHERS
+
+
+
+
+I. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE TEACHING ART
+
+
+In the general activity and uprising of ideal interests which every one
+with an eye for fact can discern all about us in American life, there is
+perhaps no more promising feature than the fermentation which for a
+dozen years or more has been going on among the teachers. In whatever
+sphere of education their functions may lie, there is to be seen among
+them a really inspiring amount of searching of the heart about the
+highest concerns of their profession. The renovation of nations begins
+always at the top, among the reflective members of the State, and
+spreads slowly outward and downward. The teachers of this country, one
+may say, have its future in their hands. The earnestness which they at
+present show in striving to enlighten and strengthen themselves is an
+index of the nation's probabilities of advance in all ideal directions.
+The outward organization of education which we have in our United States
+is perhaps, on the whole, the best organization that exists in any
+country. The State school systems give a diversity and flexibility, an
+opportunity for experiment and keenness of competition, nowhere else to
+be found on such an important scale. The independence of so many of the
+colleges and universities; the give and take of students and instructors
+between them all; their emulation, and their happy organic relations to
+the lower schools; the traditions of instruction in them, evolved from
+the older American recitation-method (and so avoiding on the one hand
+the pure lecture-system prevalent in Germany and Scotland, which
+considers too little the individual student, and yet not involving the
+sacrifice of the instructor to the individual student, which the English
+tutorial system would seem too often to entail),--all these things (to
+say nothing of that coeducation of the sexes in whose benefits so many
+of us heartily believe), all these things, I say, are most happy
+features of our scholastic life, and from them the most sanguine
+auguries may be drawn.
+
+Having so favorable an organization, all we need is to impregnate it
+with geniuses, to get superior men and women working more and more
+abundantly in it and for it and at it, and in a generation or two
+America may well lead the education of the world. I must say that I look
+forward with no little confidence to the day when that shall be an
+accomplished fact.
+
+No one has profited more by the fermentation of which I speak, in
+pedagogical circles, than we psychologists. The desire of the
+schoolteachers for a completer professional training, and their
+aspiration toward the 'professional' spirit in their work, have led them
+more and more to turn to us for light on fundamental principles. And in
+these few hours which we are to spend together you look to me, I am
+sure, for information concerning the mind's operations, which may enable
+you to labor more easily and effectively in the several schoolrooms over
+which you preside.
+
+Far be it from me to disclaim for psychology all title to such hopes.
+Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help. And yet I
+confess that, acquainted as I am with the height of some of your
+expectations, I feel a little anxious lest, at the end of these simple
+talks of mine, not a few of you may experience some disappointment at
+the net results. In other words, I am not sure that you may not be
+indulging fancies that are just a shade exaggerated. That would not be
+altogether astonishing, for we have been having something like a 'boom'
+in psychology in this country. Laboratories and professorships have been
+founded, and reviews established. The air has been full of rumors. The
+editors of educational journals and the arrangers of conventions have
+had to show themselves enterprising and on a level with the novelties of
+the day. Some of the professors have not been unwilling to co-operate,
+and I am not sure even that the publishers have been entirely inert.
+'The new psychology' has thus become a term to conjure up portentous
+ideas withal; and you teachers, docile and receptive and aspiring as
+many of you are, have been plunged in an atmosphere of vague talk about
+our science, which to a great extent has been more mystifying than
+enlightening. Altogether it does seem as if there were a certain
+fatality of mystification laid upon the teachers of our day. The matter
+of their profession, compact enough in itself, has to be frothed up for
+them in journals and institutes, till its outlines often threaten to be
+lost in a kind of vast uncertainty. Where the disciples are not
+independent and critical-minded enough (and I think that, if you
+teachers in the earlier grades have any defect--the slightest touch of a
+defect in the world--it is that you are a mite too docile), we are
+pretty sure to miss accuracy and balance and measure in those who get a
+license to lay down the law to them from above.
+
+As regards this subject of psychology, now, I wish at the very threshold
+to do what I can to dispel the mystification. So I say at once that in
+my humble opinion there _is_ no 'new psychology' worthy of the name.
+There is nothing but the old psychology which began in Locke's time,
+plus a little physiology of the brain and senses and theory of
+evolution, and a few refinements of introspective detail, for the most
+part without adaptation to the teacher's use. It is only the fundamental
+conceptions of psychology which are of real value to the teacher; and
+they, apart from the aforesaid theory of evolution, are very far from
+being new.--I trust that you will see better what I mean by this at the
+end of all these talks.
+
+I say moreover that you make a great, a very great mistake, if you think
+that psychology, being the science of the mind's laws, is something from
+which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of
+instruction for immediate schoolroom use. Psychology is a science, and
+teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of
+themselves. An intermediary inventive mind must make the application, by
+using its originality.
+
+The science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of
+ethics (if there be such a thing) never made a man behave rightly. The
+most such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and check
+ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly; and to criticise
+ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes. A science only
+lays down lines within which the rules of the art must fall, laws which
+the follower of the art must not transgress; but what particular thing
+he shall positively do within those lines is left exclusively to his own
+genius. One genius will do his work well and succeed in one way, while
+another succeeds as well quite differently; yet neither will transgress
+the lines.
+
+The art of teaching grew up in the schoolroom, out of inventiveness and
+sympathetic concrete observation. Even where (as in the case of Herbart)
+the advancer of the art was also a psychologist, the pedagogics and the
+psychology ran side by side, and the former was not derived in any sense
+from the latter. The two were congruent, but neither was subordinate.
+And so everywhere the teaching must _agree_ with the psychology, but
+need not necessarily be the only kind of teaching that would so agree;
+for many diverse methods of teaching may equally well agree with
+psychological laws.
+
+To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall
+be good teachers. To advance to that result, we must have an additional
+endowment altogether, a happy tact and ingenuity to tell us what
+definite things to say and do when the pupil is before us. That
+ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete
+situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are
+things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.
+
+The science of psychology, and whatever science of general pedagogics
+may be based on it, are in fact much like the science of war. Nothing is
+simpler or more definite than the principles of either. In war, all you
+have to do is to work your enemy into a position from which the natural
+obstacles prevent him from escaping if he tries to; then to fall on him
+in numbers superior to his own, at a moment when you have led him to
+think you far away; and so, with a minimum of exposure of your own
+troops, to hack his force to pieces, and take the remainder prisoners.
+Just so, in teaching, you must simply work your pupil into such a state
+of interest in what you are going to teach him that every other object
+of attention is banished from his mind; then reveal it to him so
+impressively that he will remember the occasion to his dying day; and
+finally fill him with devouring curiosity to know what the next steps in
+connection with the subject are. The principles being so plain, there
+would be nothing but victories for the masters of the science, either on
+the battlefield or in the schoolroom, if they did not both have to make
+their application to an incalculable quantity in the shape of the mind
+of their opponent. The mind of your own enemy, the pupil, is working
+away from you as keenly and eagerly as is the mind of the commander on
+the other side from the scientific general. Just what the respective
+enemies want and think, and what they know and do not know, are as hard
+things for the teacher as for the general to find out. Divination and
+perception, not psychological pedagogics or theoretic strategy, are the
+only helpers here.
+
+But, if the use of psychological principles thus be negative rather than
+positive, it does not follow that it may not be a great use, all the
+same. It certainly narrows the path for experiments and trials. We know
+in advance, if we are psychologists, that certain methods will be wrong,
+so our psychology saves us from mistakes. It makes us, moreover, more
+clear as to what we are about. We gain confidence in respect to any
+method which we are using as soon as we believe that it has theory as
+well as practice at its back. Most of all, it fructifies our
+independence, and it reanimates our interest, to see our subject at two
+different angles,--to get a stereoscopic view, so to speak, of the
+youthful organism who is our enemy, and, while handling him with all our
+concrete tact and divination, to be able, at the same time, to represent
+to ourselves the curious inner elements of his mental machine. Such a
+complete knowledge as this of the pupil, at once intuitive and analytic,
+is surely the knowledge at which every teacher ought to aim.
+
+Fortunately for you teachers, the elements of the mental machine can be
+clearly apprehended, and their workings easily grasped. And, as the most
+general elements and workings are just those parts of psychology which
+the teacher finds most directly useful, it follows that the amount of
+this science which is necessary to all teachers need not be very great.
+Those who find themselves loving the subject may go as far as they
+please, and become possibly none the worse teachers for the fact, even
+though in some of them one might apprehend a little loss of balance from
+the tendency observable in all of us to overemphasize certain special
+parts of a subject when we are studying it intensely and abstractly. But
+for the great majority of you a general view is enough, provided it be a
+true one; and such a general view, one may say, might almost be written
+on the palm of one's hand.
+
+Least of all need you, merely _as teachers_, deem it part of your duty
+to become contributors to psychological science or to make psychological
+observations in a methodical or responsible manner. I fear that some of
+the enthusiasts for child-study have thrown a certain burden on you in
+this way. By all means let child-study go on,--it is refreshing all our
+sense of the child's life. There are teachers who take a spontaneous
+delight in filling syllabuses, inscribing observations, compiling
+statistics, and computing the per cent. Child-study will certainly
+enrich their lives. And, if its results, as treated statistically, would
+seem on the whole to have but trifling value, yet the anecdotes and
+observations of which it in part consist do certainly acquaint us more
+intimately with our pupils. Our eyes and ears grow quickened to discern
+in the child before us processes similar to those we have read of as
+noted in the children,--processes of which we might otherwise have
+remained inobservant. But, for Heaven's sake, let the rank and file of
+teachers be passive readers if they so prefer, and feel free not to
+contribute to the accumulation. Let not the prosecution of it be
+preached as an imperative duty or imposed by regulation on those to whom
+it proves an exterminating bore, or who in any way whatever miss in
+themselves the appropriate vocation for it. I cannot too strongly agree
+with my colleague, Professor Muensterberg, when he says that the
+teacher's attitude toward the child, being concrete and ethical, is
+positively opposed to the psychological observer's, which is abstract
+and analytic. Although some of us may conjoin the attitudes
+successfully, in most of us they must conflict.
+
+The worst thing that can happen to a good teacher is to get a bad
+conscience about her profession because she feels herself hopeless as a
+psychologist. Our teachers are overworked already. Every one who adds a
+jot or tittle of unnecessary weight to their burden is a foe of
+education. A bad conscience increases the weight of every other burden;
+yet I know that child-study, and other pieces of psychology as well,
+have been productive of bad conscience in many a really innocent
+pedagogic breast. I should indeed be glad if this passing word from me
+might tend to dispel such a bad conscience, if any of you have it; for
+it is certainly one of those fruits of more or less systematic
+mystification of which I have already complained. The best teacher may
+be the poorest contributor of child-study material, and the best
+contributor may be the poorest teacher. No fact is more palpable than
+this.
+
+So much for what seems the most reasonable general attitude of the
+teacher toward the subject which is to occupy our attention.
+
+
+
+
+II. THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
+
+
+I said a few minutes ago that the most general elements and workings of
+the mind are all that the teacher absolutely needs to be acquainted with
+for his purposes.
+
+Now the _immediate_ fact which psychology, the science of mind, has to
+study is also the most general fact. It is the fact that in each of us,
+when awake (and often when asleep), _some kind of consciousness is
+always going on_. There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves,
+or fields (or of whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of
+feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and
+repass, and that constitute our inner life. The existence of this stream
+is the primal fact, the nature and origin of it form the essential
+problem, of our science. So far as we class the states or fields of
+consciousness, write down their several natures, analyze their contents
+into elements, or trace their habits of succession, we are on the
+descriptive or analytic level. So far as we ask where they come from or
+why they are just what they are, we are on the explanatory level.
+
+In these talks with you, I shall entirely neglect the questions that
+come up on the explanatory level. It must be frankly confessed that in
+no fundamental sense do we know where our successive fields of
+consciousness come from, or why they have the precise inner constitution
+which they do have. They certainly follow or accompany our brain states,
+and of course their special forms are determined by our past experiences
+and education. But, if we ask just _how_ the brain conditions them, we
+have not the remotest inkling of an answer to give; and, if we ask just
+how the education moulds the brain, we can speak but in the most
+abstract, general, and conjectural terms. On the other hand, if we
+should say that they are due to a spiritual being called our Soul, which
+reacts on our brain states by these peculiar forms of spiritual energy,
+our words would be familiar enough, it is true; but I think you will
+agree that they would offer little genuine explanatory meaning. The
+truth is that we really _do not know_ the answers to the problems on the
+explanatory level, even though in some directions of inquiry there may
+be promising speculations to be found. For our present purposes I shall
+therefore dismiss them entirely, and turn to mere description. This
+state of things was what I had in mind when, a moment ago, I said there
+was no 'new psychology' worthy of the name.
+
+_We have thus fields of consciousness_,--that is the first general fact;
+and the second general fact is that the concrete fields are always
+complex. They contain sensations of our bodies and of the objects around
+us, memories of past experiences and thoughts of distant things,
+feelings of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, desires and aversions, and
+other emotional conditions, together with determinations of the will, in
+every variety of permutation and combination.
+
+In most of our concrete states of consciousness all these different
+classes of ingredients are found simultaneously present to some degree,
+though the relative proportion they bear to one another is very
+shifting. One state will seem to be composed of hardly anything but
+sensations, another of hardly anything but memories, etc. But around the
+sensation, if one consider carefully, there will always be some fringe
+of thought or will, and around the memory some margin or penumbra of
+emotion or sensation.
+
+In most of our fields of consciousness there is a core of sensation that
+is very pronounced. You, for example, now, although you are also
+thinking and feeling, are getting through your eyes sensations of my
+face and figure, and through your ears sensations of my voice. The
+sensations are the _centre_ or _focus_, the thoughts and feelings the
+_margin_, of your actually present conscious field.
+
+On the other hand, some object of thought, some distant image, may have
+become the focus of your mental attention even while I am
+speaking,--your mind, in short, may have wandered from the lecture; and,
+in that case, the sensations of my face and voice, although not
+absolutely vanishing from your conscious field, may have taken up there
+a very faint and marginal place.
+
+Again, to take another sort of variation, some feeling connected with
+your own body may have passed from a marginal to a focal place, even
+while I speak.
+
+The expressions 'focal object' and 'marginal object,' which we owe to
+Mr. Lloyd Morgan, require, I think, no further explanation. The
+distinction they embody is a very important one, and they are the first
+technical terms which I shall ask you to remember.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In the successive mutations of our fields of consciousness, the process
+by which one dissolves into another is often very gradual, and all sorts
+of inner rearrangements of contents occur. Sometimes the focus remains
+but little changed, while the margin alters rapidly. Sometimes the focus
+alters, and the margin stays. Sometimes focus and margin change places.
+Sometimes, again, abrupt alterations of the whole field occur. There can
+seldom be a sharp description. All we know is that, for the most part,
+each field has a sort of practical unity for its possessor, and that
+from this practical point of view we can class a field with other fields
+similar to it, by calling it a state of emotion, of perplexity, of
+sensation, of abstract thought, of volition, and the like.
+
+Vague and hazy as such an account of our stream of consciousness may be,
+it is at least secure from positive error and free from admixture of
+conjecture or hypothesis. An influential school of psychology, seeking
+to avoid haziness of outline, has tried to make things appear more exact
+and scientific by making the analysis more sharp.
+
+The various fields of consciousness, according to this school, result
+from a definite number of perfectly definite elementary mental states,
+mechanically associated into a mosaic or chemically combined. According
+to some thinkers,--Spencer, for example, or Taine,--these resolve
+themselves at last into little elementary psychic particles or atoms of
+'mind-stuff,' out of which all the more immediately known mental states
+are said to be built up. Locke introduced this theory in a somewhat
+vague form. Simple 'ideas' of sensation and reflection, as he called
+them, were for him the bricks of which our mental architecture is built
+up. If I ever have to refer to this theory again, I shall refer to it as
+the theory of 'ideas.' But I shall try to steer clear of it altogether.
+Whether it be true or false, it is at any rate only conjectural; and,
+for your practical purposes as teachers, the more unpretending
+conception of the stream of consciousness, with its total waves or
+fields incessantly changing, will amply suffice.[A]
+
+     [A] In the light of some of the expectations that are abroad
+     concerning the 'new psychology,' it is instructive to read
+     the unusually candid confession of its founder Wundt, after
+     his thirty years of laboratory-experience:
+
+     "The service which it [the experimental method] can yield
+     consists essentially in perfecting our inner observation, or
+     rather, as I believe, in making this really possible, in any
+     exact sense. Well, has our experimental self-observation, so
+     understood, already accomplished aught of importance? No
+     general answer to this question can be given, because in the
+     unfinished state of our science, there is, even inside of the
+     experimental lines of inquiry, no universally accepted body
+     of psychologic doctrine....
+
+     "In such a discord of opinions (comprehensible enough at a
+     time of uncertain and groping development), the individual
+     inquirer can only tell for what views and insights he himself
+     has to thank the newer methods. And if I were asked in what
+     for me the worth of experimental observation in psychology
+     has consisted, and still consists, I should say that it has
+     given me an entirely new idea of the nature and connection of
+     our inner processes. I learned in the achievements of the
+     sense of sight to apprehend the fact of creative mental
+     synthesis.... From my inquiry into time-relations, etc.,... I
+     attained an insight into the close union of all those psychic
+     functions usually separated by artificial abstractions and
+     names, such as ideation, feeling, will; and I saw the
+     indivisibility and inner homogeneity, in all its phases, of
+     the mental life. The chronometric study of
+     association-processes finally showed me that the notion of
+     distinct mental 'images' [_reproducirten Vorstellungen_] was
+     one of those numerous self-deceptions which are no sooner
+     stamped in a verbal term than they forthwith thrust
+     non-existent fictions into the place of the reality. I
+     learned to understand an 'idea' as a process no less melting
+     and fleeting than an act of feeling or of will, and I
+     comprehended the older doctrine of association of 'ideas' to
+     be no longer tenable.... Besides all this, experimental
+     observation yielded much other information about the span of
+     consciousness, the rapidity of certain processes, the exact
+     numerical value of certain psychophysical data, and the like.
+     But I hold all these more special results to be relatively
+     insignificant by-products, and by no means the important
+     thing."--_Philosophische Studien_, x. 121-124. The whole
+     passage should be read. As I interpret it, it amounts to a
+     complete espousal of the vaguer conception of the stream of
+     thought, and a complete renunciation of the whole business,
+     still so industriously carried on in text-books, of chopping
+     up 'the mind' into distinct units of composition or function,
+     numbering these off, and labelling them by technical names.
+
+
+
+
+III. THE CHILD AS A BEHAVING ORGANISM
+
+
+I wish now to continue the description of the peculiarities of the
+stream of consciousness by asking whether we can in any intelligible way
+assign its _functions_.
+
+It has two functions that are obvious: it leads to knowledge, and it
+leads to action.
+
+Can we say which of these functions is the more essential?
+
+An old historic divergence of opinion comes in here. Popular belief has
+always tended to estimate the worth of a man's mental processes by their
+effects upon his practical life. But philosophers have usually cherished
+a different view. "Man's supreme glory," they have said, "is to be a
+_rational_ being, to know absolute and eternal and universal truth. The
+uses of his intellect for practical affairs are therefore subordinate
+matters. 'The theoretic life' is his soul's genuine concern." Nothing
+can be more different in its results for our personal attitude than to
+take sides with one or the other of these views, and emphasize the
+practical or the theoretical ideal. In the latter case, abstraction from
+the emotions and passions and withdrawal from the strife of human
+affairs would be not only pardonable, but praiseworthy; and all that
+makes for quiet and contemplation should be regarded as conducive to the
+highest human perfection. In the former, the man of contemplation would
+be treated as only half a human being, passion and practical resource
+would become once more glories of our race, a concrete victory over this
+earth's outward powers of darkness would appear an equivalent for any
+amount of passive spiritual culture, and conduct would remain as the
+test of every education worthy of the name.
+
+It is impossible to disguise the fact that in the psychology of our own
+day the emphasis is transferred from the mind's purely rational
+function, where Plato and Aristotle, and what one may call the whole
+classic tradition in philosophy had placed it, to the so long neglected
+practical side. The theory of evolution is mainly responsible for this.
+Man, we now have reason to believe, has been evolved from infra-human
+ancestors, in whom pure reason hardly existed, if at all, and whose
+mind, so far as it can have had any function, would appear to have been
+an organ for adapting their movements to the impressions received from
+the environment, so as to escape the better from destruction.
+Consciousness would thus seem in the first instance to be nothing but a
+sort of super-added biological perfection,--useless unless it prompted
+to useful conduct, and inexplicable apart from that consideration.
+
+Deep in our own nature the biological foundations of our consciousness
+persist, undisguised and undiminished. Our sensations are here to
+attract us or to deter us, our memories to warn or encourage us, our
+feelings to impel, and our thoughts to restrain our behavior, so that on
+the whole we may prosper and our days be long in the land. Whatever of
+transmundane metaphysical insight or of practically inapplicable
+aesthetic perception or ethical sentiment we may carry in our interiors
+might at this rate be regarded as only part of the incidental excess of
+function that necessarily accompanies the working of every complex
+machine.
+
+I shall ask you now--not meaning at all thereby to close the theoretic
+question, but merely because it seems to me the point of view likely to
+be of greatest practical use to you as teachers--to adopt with me, in
+this course of lectures, the biological conception, as thus expressed,
+and to lay your own emphasis on the fact that man, whatever else he may
+be, is primarily a practical being, whose mind is given him to aid in
+adapting him to this world's life.
+
+In the learning of all matters, we have to start with some one deep
+aspect of the question, abstracting it as if it were the only aspect;
+and then we gradually correct ourselves by adding those neglected other
+features which complete the case. No one believes more strongly than I
+do that what our senses know as 'this world' is only one portion of our
+mind's total environment and object. Yet, because it is the primal
+portion, it is the _sine qua non_ of all the rest. If you grasp the facts
+about it firmly, you may proceed to higher regions undisturbed. As our
+time must be so short together, I prefer being elementary and
+fundamental to being complete, so I propose to you to hold fast to the
+ultra-simple point of view.
+
+The reasons why I call it so fundamental can be easily told.
+
+First, human and animal psychology thereby become less discontinuous. I
+know that to some of you this will hardly seem an attractive reason,
+but there are others whom it will affect.
+
+Second, mental action is conditioned by brain action, and runs parallel
+therewith. But the brain, so far as we understand it, is given us for
+practical behavior. Every current that runs into it from skin or eye or
+ear runs out again into muscles, glands, or viscera, and helps to adapt
+the animal to the environment from which the current came. It therefore
+generalizes and simplifies our view to treat the brain life and the
+mental life as having one fundamental kind of purpose.
+
+Third, those very functions of the mind that do not refer directly to
+this world's environment, the ethical utopias, aesthetic visions,
+insights into eternal truth, and fanciful logical combinations, could
+never be carried on at all by a human individual, unless the mind that
+produced them in him were also able to produce more practically useful
+products. The latter are thus the more essential, or at least the more
+primordial results.
+
+Fourth, the inessential 'unpractical' activities are themselves far more
+connected with our behavior and our adaptation to the environment than
+at first sight might appear. No truth, however abstract, is ever
+perceived, that will not probably at some time influence our earthly
+action. You must remember that, when I talk of action here, I mean
+action in the widest sense. I mean speech, I mean writing, I mean yeses
+and noes, and tendencies 'from' things and tendencies 'toward' things,
+and emotional determinations; and I mean them in the future as well as
+in the immediate present. As I talk here, and you listen, it might seem
+as if no action followed. You might call it a purely theoretic process,
+with no practical result. But it _must_ have a practical result. It
+cannot take place at all and leave your conduct unaffected. If not
+to-day, then on some far future day, you will answer some question
+differently by reason of what you are thinking now. Some of you will be
+led by my words into new veins of inquiry, into reading special books.
+These will develop your opinion, whether for or against. That opinion
+will in turn be expressed, will receive criticism from others in your
+environment, and will affect your standing in their eyes. We cannot
+escape our destiny, which is practical; and even our most theoretic
+faculties contribute to its working out.
+
+These few reasons will perhaps smooth the way for you to acquiescence
+in my proposal. As teachers, I sincerely think it will be a sufficient
+conception for you to adopt of the youthful psychological phenomena
+handed over to your inspection if you consider them from the point of
+view of their relation to the future conduct of their possessor.
+Sufficient at any rate as a first conception and as a main conception.
+You should regard your professional task as if it consisted chiefly and
+essentially in _training the pupil to behavior_; taking behavior, not in
+the narrow sense of his manners, but in the very widest possible sense,
+as including every possible sort of fit reaction on the circumstances
+into which he may find himself brought by the vicissitudes of life.
+
+The reaction may, indeed, often be a negative reaction. _Not_ to speak,
+_not_ to move, is one of the most important of our duties, in certain
+practical emergencies. "Thou shalt refrain, renounce, abstain"! This
+often requires a great effort of will power, and, physiologically
+considered, is just as positive a nerve function as is motor discharge.
+
+
+
+
+IV. EDUCATION AND BEHAVIOR
+
+
+In our foregoing talk we were led to frame a very simple conception of
+what an education means. In the last analysis it consists in the
+organizing of _resources_ in the human being, of powers of conduct which
+shall fit him to his social and physical world. An 'uneducated' person
+is one who is nonplussed by all but the most habitual situations. On the
+contrary, one who is educated is able practically to extricate himself,
+by means of the examples with which his memory is stored and of the
+abstract conceptions which he has acquired, from circumstances in which
+he never was placed before. Education, in short, cannot be better
+described than by calling it _the organization of acquired habits of
+conduct and tendencies to behavior_.
+
+To illustrate. You and I are each and all of us educated, in our several
+ways; and we show our education at this present moment by different
+conduct. It would be quite impossible for me, with my mind technically
+and professionally organized as it is, and with the optical stimulus
+which your presence affords, to remain sitting here entirely silent and
+inactive. Something tells me that I am expected to speak, and must
+speak; something forces me to keep on speaking. My organs of
+articulation are continuously innervated by outgoing currents, which the
+currents passing inward at my eyes and through my educated brain have
+set in motion; and the particular movements which they make have their
+form and order determined altogether by the training of all my past
+years of lecturing and reading. Your conduct, on the other hand, might
+seem at first sight purely receptive and inactive,--leaving out those
+among you who happen to be taking notes. But the very listening which
+you are carrying on is itself a determinate kind of conduct. All the
+muscular tensions of your body are distributed in a peculiar way as you
+listen. Your head, your eyes, are fixed characteristically. And, when
+the lecture is over, it will inevitably eventuate in some stroke of
+behavior, as I said on the previous occasion: you may be guided
+differently in some special emergency in the schoolroom by words
+which I now let fall.--So it is with the impressions you will make
+there on your pupil. You should get into the habit of regarding them
+all as leading to the acquisition by him of capacities for
+behavior,--emotional, social, bodily, vocal, technical, or what not.
+And, this being the case, you ought to feel willing, in a general way,
+and without hair-splitting or farther ado, to take up for the purposes
+of these lectures with the biological conception of the mind, as of
+something given us for practical use. That conception will certainly
+cover the greater part of your own educational work.
+
+If we reflect upon the various ideals of education that are prevalent in
+the different countries, we see that what they all aim at is to organize
+capacities for conduct. This is most immediately obvious in Germany,
+where the explicitly avowed aim of the higher education is to turn the
+student into an instrument for advancing scientific discovery. The
+German universities are proud of the number of young specialists whom
+they turn out every year,--not necessarily men of any original force of
+intellect, but men so trained to research that when their professor
+gives them an historical or philological thesis to prepare, or a bit of
+laboratory work to do, with a general indication as to the best method,
+they can go off by themselves and use apparatus and consult sources in
+such a way as to grind out in the requisite number of months some little
+pepper-corn of new truth worthy of being added to the store of extant
+human information on that subject. Little else is recognized in Germany
+as a man's title to academic advancement than his ability thus to show
+himself an efficient instrument of research.
+
+In England, it might seem at first sight as if the higher education of
+the universities aimed at the production of certain static types of
+character rather than at the development of what one may call this
+dynamic scientific efficiency. Professor Jowett, when asked what Oxford
+could do for its students, is said to have replied, "Oxford can teach an
+English gentleman how to _be_ an English gentleman." But, if you ask
+what it means to 'be' an English gentleman, the only reply is in terms
+of conduct and behavior. An English gentleman is a bundle of
+specifically qualified reactions, a creature who for all the emergencies
+of life has his line of behavior distinctly marked out for him in
+advance. Here, as elsewhere, England expects every man to do his duty.
+
+
+
+
+V. THE NECESSITY OF REACTIONS
+
+
+If all this be true, then immediately one general aphorism emerges which
+ought by logical right to dominate the entire conduct of the teacher in
+the classroom.
+
+_No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative
+expression_,--this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to
+forget.
+
+An impression which simply flows in at the pupil's eyes or ears, and in
+no way modifies his active life, is an impression gone to waste. It is
+physiologically incomplete. It leaves no fruits behind it in the way of
+capacity acquired. Even as mere impression, it fails to produce its
+proper effect upon the memory; for, to remain fully among the
+acquisitions of this latter faculty, it must be wrought into the whole
+cycle of our operations. Its _motor consequences_ are what clinch it.
+Some effect due to it in the way of an activity must return to the mind
+in the form of the _sensation of having acted_, and connect itself with
+the impression. The most durable impressions are those on account of
+which we speak or act, or else are inwardly convulsed.
+
+The older pedagogic method of learning things by rote, and reciting them
+parrot-like in the schoolroom, rested on the truth that a thing merely
+read or heard, and never verbally reproduced, contracts the weakest
+possible adhesion in the mind. Verbal recitation or reproduction is thus
+a highly important kind of reactive behavior on our impressions; and it
+is to be feared that, in the reaction against the old parrot-recitations
+as the beginning and end of instruction, the extreme value of verbal
+recitation as an element of complete training may nowadays be too much
+forgotten.
+
+When we turn to modern pedagogics, we see how enormously the field of
+reactive conduct has been extended by the introduction of all those
+methods of concrete object teaching which are the glory of our
+contemporary schools. Verbal reactions, useful as they are, are
+insufficient. The pupil's words may be right, but the conceptions
+corresponding to them are often direfully wrong. In a modern school,
+therefore, they form only a small part of what the pupil is required to
+do. He must keep notebooks, make drawings, plans, and maps, take
+measurements, enter the laboratory and perform experiments, consult
+authorities, and write essays. He must do in his fashion what is often
+laughed at by outsiders when it appears in prospectuses under the title
+of 'original work,' but what is really the only possible training for
+the doing of original work thereafter. The most colossal improvement
+which recent years have seen in secondary education lies in the
+introduction of the manual training schools; not because they will give
+us a people more handy and practical for domestic life and better
+skilled in trades, but because they will give us citizens with an
+entirely different intellectual fibre. Laboratory work and shop work
+engender a habit of observation, a knowledge of the difference between
+accuracy and vagueness, and an insight into nature's complexity and into
+the inadequacy of all abstract verbal accounts of real phenomena, which
+once wrought into the mind, remain there as lifelong possessions. They
+confer precision; because, if you are _doing_ a thing, you must do it
+definitely right or definitely wrong. They give honesty; for, when you
+express yourself by making things, and not by using words, it becomes
+impossible to dissimulate your vagueness or ignorance by ambiguity.
+They beget a habit of self-reliance; they keep the interest and
+attention always cheerfully engaged, and reduce the teacher's
+disciplinary functions to a minimum.
+
+Of the various systems of manual training, so far as woodwork is
+concerned, the Swedish Sloyd system, if I may have an opinion on such
+matters, seems to me by far the best, psychologically considered. Manual
+training methods, fortunately, are being slowly but surely introduced
+into all our large cities. But there is still an immense distance to
+traverse before they shall have gained the extension which they are
+destined ultimately to possess.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+No impression without expression, then,--that is the first pedagogic
+fruit of our evolutionary conception of the mind as something
+instrumental to adaptive behavior. But a word may be said in
+continuation. The expression itself comes back to us, as I intimated a
+moment ago, in the form of a still farther impression,--the impression,
+namely, of what we have done. We thus receive sensible news of our
+behavior and its results. We hear the words we have spoken, feel our own
+blow as we give it, or read in the bystander's eyes the success or
+failure of our conduct. Now this return wave of impression pertains to
+the completeness of the whole experience, and a word about its
+importance in the schoolroom may not be out of place.
+
+It would seem only natural to say that, since after acting we normally
+get some return impression of result, it must be well to let the pupil
+get such a return impression in every possible case. Nevertheless, in
+schools where examination marks and 'standing' and other returns of
+result are concealed, the pupil is frustrated of this natural
+termination of the cycle of his activities, and often suffers from the
+sense of incompleteness and uncertainty; and there are persons who
+defend this system as encouraging the pupil to work for the work's sake,
+and not for extraneous reward. Of course, here as elsewhere, concrete
+experience must prevail over psychological deduction. But, so far as our
+psychological deduction goes, it would suggest that the pupil's
+eagerness to know how well he does is in the line of his normal
+completeness of function, and should never be balked except for very
+definite reasons indeed.
+
+Acquaint them, therefore, with their marks and standing and prospects,
+unless in the individual case you have some special practical reason for
+not so doing.
+
+
+
+
+VI. NATIVE REACTIONS AND ACQUIRED REACTIONS
+
+
+We are by this time fully launched upon the biological conception. Man
+is an organism for reacting on impressions: his mind is there to help
+determine his reactions, and the purpose of his education is to make
+them numerous and perfect. _Our education means, in short, little more
+than a mass of possibilities of reaction,_ acquired at home, at school,
+or in the training of affairs. The teacher's task is that of supervising
+the acquiring process.
+
+This being the case, I will immediately state a principle which
+underlies the whole process of acquisition and governs the entire
+activity of the teacher. It is this:--
+
+_Every acquired reaction is, as a rule, either a complication grafted on
+a native reaction, or a substitute for a native reaction, which the same
+object originally tended to provoke._
+
+_The teacher's art consists in bringing about the substitution or
+complication, and success in the art presupposes a sympathetic
+acquaintance with the reactive tendencies natively there_.
+
+Without an equipment of native reactions on the child's part, the
+teacher would have no hold whatever upon the child's attention or
+conduct. You may take a horse to the water, but you cannot make him
+drink; and so you may take a child to the schoolroom, but you cannot
+make him learn the new things you wish to impart, except by soliciting
+him in the first instance by something which natively makes him react.
+He must take the first step himself. He must _do_ something before you
+can get your purchase on him. That something may be something good or
+something bad. A bad reaction is better than no reaction at all; for, if
+bad, you can couple it with consequences which awake him to its badness.
+But imagine a child so lifeless as to react in _no_ way to the teacher's
+first appeals, and how can you possibly take the first step in his
+education?
+
+To make this abstract conception more concrete, assume the case of a
+young child's training in good manners. The child has a native tendency
+to snatch with his hands at anything that attracts his curiosity; also
+to draw back his hands when slapped, to cry under these latter
+conditions, to smile when gently spoken to, and to imitate one's
+gestures.
+
+Suppose now you appear before the child with a new toy intended as a
+present for him. No sooner does he see the toy than he seeks to snatch
+it. You slap the hand; it is withdrawn, and the child cries. You then
+hold up the toy, smiling and saying, "Beg for it nicely,--so!" The child
+stops crying, imitates you, receives the toy, and crows with pleasure;
+and that little cycle of training is complete. You have substituted the
+new reaction of 'begging' for the native reaction of snatching, when
+that kind of impression comes.
+
+Now, if the child had no memory, the process would not be educative. No
+matter how often you came in with a toy, the same series of reactions
+would fatally occur, each called forth by its own impression: see,
+snatch; slap, cry; hear, ask; receive, smile. But, with memory there,
+the child, at the very instant of snatching, recalls the rest of the
+earlier experience, thinks of the slap and the frustration, recollects
+the begging and the reward, inhibits the snatching impulse, substitutes
+the 'nice' reaction for it, and gets the toy immediately, by eliminating
+all the intermediary steps. If a child's first snatching impulse be
+excessive or his memory poor, many repetitions of the discipline may be
+needed before the acquired reaction comes to be an ingrained habit; but
+in an eminently educable child a single experience will suffice.
+
+One can easily represent the whole process by a brain-diagram. Such a
+diagram can be little more than a symbolic translation of the immediate
+experience into spatial terms; yet it may be useful, so I subjoin it.
+
+[Illustration: FIGURE 1. THE BRAIN-PROCESSES BEFORE EDUCATION.]
+
+Figure 1 shows the paths of the four successive reflexes executed by the
+lower or instinctive centres. The dotted lines that lead from them to
+the higher centres and connect the latter together, represent the
+processes of memory and association which the reactions impress upon the
+higher centres as they take place.
+
+[Illustration: FIGURE 2. THE BRAIN-PROCESS AFTER EDUCATION.]
+
+In Figure 2 we have the final result. The impression _see_ awakens the
+chain of memories, and the only reactions that take place are the _beg_
+and _smile_. The thought of the _slap_, connected with the activity of
+Centre 2, inhibits the _snatch_, and makes it abortive, so it is
+represented only by a dotted line of discharge not reaching the
+terminus. Ditto of the _cry_ reaction. These are, as it were,
+short-circuited by the current sweeping through the higher centres from
+_see_ to _smile_. _Beg_ and _smile_, thus substituted for the original
+reaction _snatch_, become at last the immediate responses when the
+child sees a snatchable object in some one's hands.
+
+The first thing, then, for the teacher to understand is the native
+reactive tendencies,--the impulses and instincts of childhood,--so as to
+be able to substitute one for another, and turn them on to artificial
+objects.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is often said that man is distinguished from the lower animals by
+having a much smaller assortment of native instincts and impulses than
+they, but this is a great mistake. Man, of course, has not the
+marvellous egg-laying instincts which some articulates have; but, if we
+compare him with the mammalia, we are forced to confess that he is
+appealed to by a much larger array of objects than any other mammal,
+that his reactions on these objects are characteristic and determinate
+in a very high degree. The monkeys, and especially the anthropoids, are
+the only beings that approach him in their analytic curiosity and width
+of imitativeness. His instinctive impulses, it is true, get overlaid by
+the secondary reactions due to his superior reasoning power; but thus
+man loses the _simply_ instinctive demeanor. But the life of instinct
+is only disguised in him, not lost; and when the higher brain-functions
+are in abeyance, as happens in imbecility or dementia, his instincts
+sometimes show their presence in truly brutish ways.
+
+I will therefore say a few words about those instinctive tendencies
+which are the most important from the teacher's point of view.
+
+
+
+
+VII. WHAT THE NATIVE REACTIONS ARE
+
+
+First of all, _Fear_. Fear of punishment has always been the great
+weapon of the teacher, and will always, of course, retain some place in
+the conditions of the schoolroom. The subject is so familiar that
+nothing more need be said about it.
+
+The same is true of _Love_, and the instinctive desire to please those
+whom we love. The teacher who succeeds in getting herself loved by the
+pupils will obtain results which one of a more forbidding temperament
+finds it impossible to secure.
+
+Next, a word might be said about _Curiosity_. This is perhaps a rather
+poor term by which to designate the _impulse toward better cognition_ in
+its full extent; but you will readily understand what I mean. Novelties
+in the way of sensible objects, especially if their sensational quality
+is bright, vivid, startling, invariably arrest the attention of the
+young and hold it until the desire to know more about the object is
+assuaged. In its higher, more intellectual form, the impulse toward
+completer knowledge takes the character of scientific or philosophic
+curiosity. In both its sensational and its intellectual form the
+instinct is more vivacious during childhood and youth than in after
+life. Young children are possessed by curiosity about every new
+impression that assails them. It would be quite impossible for a young
+child to listen to a lecture for more than a few minutes, as you are now
+listening to me. The outside sights and sounds would inevitably carry
+his attention off. And, for most people in middle life, the sort of
+intellectual effort required of the average schoolboy in mastering his
+Greek or Latin lesson, his algebra or physics, would be out of the
+question. The middle-aged citizen attends exclusively to the routine
+details of his business; and new truths, especially when they require
+involved trains of close reasoning, are no longer within the scope of
+his capacity.
+
+The sensational curiosity of childhood is appealed to more particularly
+by certain determinate kinds of objects. Material things, things that
+move, living things, human actions and accounts of human action, will
+win the attention better than anything that is more abstract. Here again
+comes in the advantage of the object-teaching and manual training
+methods. The pupil's attention is spontaneously held by any problem that
+involves the presentation of a new material object or of an activity on
+any one's part. The teacher's earliest appeals, therefore, must be
+through objects shown or acts performed or described. Theoretic
+curiosity, curiosity about the rational relations between things, can
+hardly be said to awake at all until adolescence is reached. The
+sporadic metaphysical inquiries of children as to who made God, and why
+they have five fingers, need hardly be counted here. But, when the
+theoretic instinct is once alive in the pupil, an entirely new order of
+pedagogic relations begins for him. Reasons, causes, abstract
+conceptions, suddenly grow full of zest, a fact with which all teachers
+are familiar. And, both in its sensible and in its rational
+developments, disinterested curiosity may be successfully appealed to in
+the child with much more certainty than in the adult, in whom this
+intellectual instinct has grown so torpid as usually never to awake
+unless it enters into association with some selfish personal interest.
+Of this latter point I will say more anon.
+
+_Imitation_. Man has always been recognized as the imitative animal
+_par excellence_. And there is hardly a book on psychology, however old,
+which has not devoted at least one paragraph to this fact. It is
+strange, however, that the full scope and pregnancy of the imitative
+impulse in man has had to wait till the last dozen years to become
+adequately recognized. M. Tarde led the way in his admirably original
+work, "Les Lois de l'Imitation"; and in our own country Professors Royce
+and Baldwin have kept the ball rolling with all the energy that could be
+desired. Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue
+of his imitativeness. We become conscious of what we ourselves are by
+imitating others--the consciousness of what the others are precedes--the
+sense of self grows by the sense of pattern. The entire accumulated
+wealth of mankind--languages, arts, institutions, and sciences--is
+passed on from one generation to another by what Baldwin has called
+social heredity, each generation simply imitating the last. Into the
+particulars of this most fascinating chapter of psychology I have no
+time to go. The moment one hears Tarde's proposition uttered, however,
+one feels how supremely true it is. Invention, using the term most
+broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the
+human race historically has walked.
+
+Imitation shades imperceptibly into _Emulation_. Emulation is the
+impulse to imitate what you see another doing, in order not to appear
+inferior; and it is hard to draw a sharp line between the manifestations
+of the two impulses, so inextricably do they mix their effects.
+Emulation is the very nerve of human society. Why are you, my hearers,
+sitting here before me? If no one whom you ever heard of had attended a
+'summer school' or teachers' institute, would it have occurred to any
+one of you to break out independently and do a thing so unprescribed by
+fashion? Probably not. Nor would your pupils come to you unless the
+children of their parents' neighbors were all simultaneously being sent
+to school. We wish not to be lonely or eccentric, and we wish not to be
+cut off from our share in things which to our neighbors seem desirable
+privileges.
+
+In the schoolroom, imitation and emulation play absolutely vital parts.
+Every teacher knows the advantage of having certain things performed by
+whole bands of children at a time. The teacher who meets with most
+success is the teacher whose own ways are the most imitable. A teacher
+should never try to make the pupils do a thing which she cannot do
+herself. "Come and let me show you how" is an incomparably better
+stimulus than "Go and do it as the book directs." Children admire a
+teacher who has skill. What he does seems easy, and they wish to emulate
+it. It is useless for a dull and devitalized teacher to exhort her
+pupils to wake up and take an interest. She must first take one herself;
+then her example is effective, as no exhortation can possibly be.
+
+Every school has its tone, moral and intellectual. And this tone is a
+mere tradition kept up by imitation, due in the first instance to the
+example set by teachers and by previous pupils of an aggressive and
+dominating type, copied by the others, and passed on from year to year,
+so that the new pupils take the cue almost immediately. Such a tone
+changes very slowly, if at all; and then always under the modifying
+influence of new personalities aggressive enough in character to set new
+patterns and not merely to copy the old. The classic example of this
+sort of tone is the often quoted case of Rugby under Dr. Arnold's
+administration. He impressed his own character as a model on the
+imagination of the oldest boys, who in turn were expected and required
+to impress theirs upon the younger set. The contagiousness of Arnold's
+genius was such that a Rugby man was said to be recognizable all through
+life by a peculiar turn of character which he acquired at school. It is
+obvious that psychology as such can give in this field no precepts of
+detail. As in so many other fields of teaching, success depends mainly
+on the native genius of the teacher, the sympathy, tact, and perception
+which enable him to seize the right moment and to set the right example.
+
+Among the recent modern reforms of teaching methods, a certain
+disparagement of emulation, as a laudable spring of action in the
+schoolroom, has often made itself heard. More than a century ago,
+Rousseau, in his 'Emile,' branded rivalry between one pupil and another
+as too base a passion to play a part in an ideal education. "Let Emile,"
+he said, "never be led to compare himself to other children. No
+rivalries, not even in running, as soon as he begins to have the power
+of reason. It were a hundred times better that he should not learn at
+all what he could only learn through jealousy or vanity. But I would
+mark out every year the progress he may have made, and I would compare
+it with the progress of the following years. I would say to him: 'You
+are now grown so many inches taller; there is the ditch which you jumped
+over, there is the burden which you raised. There is the distance to
+which you could throw a pebble, there the distance you could run over
+without losing breath. See how much more you can do now!' Thus I should
+excite him without making him jealous of any one. He would wish to
+surpass himself. I can see no inconvenience in this emulation with his
+former self."
+
+Unquestionably, emulation with one's former self is a noble form of the
+passion of rivalry, and has a wide scope in the training of the young.
+But to veto and taboo all possible rivalry of one youth with another,
+because such rivalry may degenerate into greedy and selfish excess, does
+seem to savor somewhat of sentimentality, or even of fanaticism. The
+feeling of rivalry lies at the very basis of our being, all social
+improvement being largely due to it. There is a noble and generous kind
+of rivalry, as well as a spiteful and greedy kind; and the noble and
+generous form is particularly common in childhood. All games owe the
+zest which they bring with them to the fact that they are rooted in the
+emulous passion, yet they are the chief means of training in fairness
+and magnanimity. Can the teacher afford to throw such an ally away?
+Ought we seriously to hope that marks, distinctions, prizes, and other
+goals of effort, based on the pursuit of recognized superiority, should
+be forever banished from our schools? As a psychologist, obliged to
+notice the deep and pervasive character of the emulous passion, I must
+confess my doubts.
+
+The wise teacher will use this instinct as he uses others, reaping its
+advantages, and appealing to it in such a way as to reap a maximum of
+benefit with a minimum of harm; for, after all, we must confess, with a
+French critic of Rousseau's doctrine, that the deepest spring of action
+in us is the sight of action in another. The spectacle of effort is what
+awakens and sustains our own effort. No runner running all alone on a
+race-track will find in his own will the power of stimulation which his
+rivalry with other runners incites, when he feels them at his heels,
+about to pass. When a trotting horse is 'speeded,' a running horse must
+go beside him to keep him to the pace.
+
+As imitation slides into emulation, so emulation slides into
+_Ambition_; and ambition connects itself closely with _Pugnacity_ and
+_Pride_. Consequently, these five instinctive tendencies form an
+interconnected group of factors, hard to separate in the determination
+of a great deal of our conduct. The _Ambitious Impulses_ would perhaps
+be the best name for the whole group.
+
+Pride and pugnacity have often been considered unworthy passions to
+appeal to in the young. But in their more refined and noble forms they
+play a great part in the schoolroom and in education generally, being in
+some characters most potent spurs to effort. Pugnacity need not be
+thought of merely in the form of physical combativeness. It can be taken
+in the sense of a general unwillingness to be beaten by any kind of
+difficulty. It is what makes us feel 'stumped' and challenged by arduous
+achievements, and is essential to a spirited and enterprising character.
+We have of late been hearing much of the philosophy of tenderness in
+education; 'interest' must be assiduously awakened in everything,
+difficulties must be smoothed away. _Soft_ pedagogics have taken the
+place of the old steep and rocky path to learning. But from this
+lukewarm air the bracing oxygen of effort is left out. It is nonsense
+to suppose that every step in education _can_ be interesting. The
+fighting impulse must often be appealed to. Make the pupil feel ashamed
+of being scared at fractions, of being 'downed' by the law of falling
+bodies; rouse his pugnacity and pride, and he will rush at the difficult
+places with a sort of inner wrath at himself that is one of his best
+moral faculties. A victory scored under such conditions becomes a
+turning-point and crisis of his character. It represents the high-water
+mark of his powers, and serves thereafter as an ideal pattern for his
+self-imitation. The teacher who never rouses this sort of pugnacious
+excitement in his pupils falls short of one of his best forms of
+usefulness.
+
+The next instinct which I shall mention is that of _Ownership_, also one
+of the radical endowments of the race. It often is the antagonist of
+imitation. Whether social progress is due more to the passion for
+keeping old things and habits or to the passion of imitating and
+acquiring new ones may in some cases be a difficult thing to decide. The
+sense of ownership begins in the second year of life. Among the first
+words which an infant learns to utter are the words 'my' and 'mine,'
+and woe to the parents of twins who fail to provide their gifts in
+duplicate. The depth and primitiveness of this instinct would seem to
+cast a sort of psychological discredit in advance upon all radical forms
+of communistic utopia. Private proprietorship cannot be practically
+abolished until human nature is changed. It seems essential to mental
+health that the individual should have something beyond the bare clothes
+on his back to which he can assert exclusive possession, and which he
+may defend adversely against the world. Even those religious orders who
+make the most stringent vows of poverty have found it necessary to relax
+the rule a little in favor of the human heart made unhappy by reduction
+to too disinterested terms. The monk must have his books: the nun must
+have her little garden, and the images and pictures in her room.
+
+In education, the instinct of ownership is fundamental, and can be
+appealed to in many ways. In the house, training in order and neatness
+begins with the arrangement of the child's own personal possessions. In
+the school, ownership is particularly important in connection with one
+of its special forms of activity, the collecting impulse. An object
+possibly not very interesting in itself, like a shell, a postage stamp,
+or a single map or drawing, will acquire an interest if it fills a gap
+in a collection or helps to complete a series. Much of the scholarly
+work of the world, so far as it is mere bibliography, memory, and
+erudition (and this lies at the basis of all our human scholarship),
+would seem to owe its interest rather to the way in which it gratifies
+the accumulating and collecting instinct than to any special appeal
+which it makes to our cravings after rationality. A man wishes a
+complete collection of information, wishes to know more about a subject
+than anybody else, much as another may wish to own more dollars or more
+early editions or more engravings before the letter than anybody else.
+
+The teacher who can work this impulse into the school tasks is
+fortunate. Almost all children collect something. A tactful teacher may
+get them to take pleasure in collecting books; in keeping a neat and
+orderly collection of notes; in starting, when they are mature enough, a
+card catalogue; in preserving every drawing or map which they may make.
+Neatness, order, and method are thus instinctively gained, along with
+the other benefits which the possession of the collection entails. Even
+such a noisome thing as a collection of postage stamps may be used by
+the teacher as an inciter of interest in the geographical and historical
+information which she desires to impart. Sloyd successfully avails
+itself of this instinct in causing the pupil to make a collection of
+wooden implements fit for his own private use at home. Collecting is, of
+course, the basis of all natural history study; and probably nobody ever
+became a good naturalist who was not an unusually active collector when
+a boy.
+
+_Constructiveness_ is another great instinctive tendency with which the
+schoolroom has to contract an alliance. Up to the eighth or ninth year
+of childhood one may say that the child does hardly anything else than
+handle objects, explore things with his hands, doing and undoing,
+setting up and knocking down, putting together and pulling apart; for,
+from the psychological point of view, construction and destruction are
+two names for the same manual activity. Both signify the production of
+change, and the working of effects, in outward things. The result of all
+this is that intimate familiarity with the physical environment, that
+acquaintance with the properties of material things, which is really
+the foundation of human _consciousness_. To the very last, in most of
+us, the conceptions of objects and their properties are limited to the
+notion of what we can _do with them_. A 'stick' means something we can
+lean upon or strike with; 'fire,' something to cook, or warm ourselves,
+or burn things up withal; 'string,' something with which to tie things
+together. For most people these objects have no other meaning. In
+geometry, the cylinder, circle, sphere, are defined as what you get by
+going through certain processes of construction, revolving a
+parallelogram upon one of its sides, etc. The more different kinds of
+things a child thus gets to know by treating and handling them, the more
+confident grows his sense of kinship with the world in which he lives.
+An unsympathetic adult will wonder at the fascinated hours which a child
+will spend in putting his blocks together and rearranging them. But the
+wise education takes the tide at the flood, and from the kindergarten
+upward devotes the first years of education to training in construction
+and to object-teaching. I need not recapitulate here what I said awhile
+back about the superiority of the objective and experimental methods.
+They occupy the pupil in a way most congruous with the spontaneous
+interests of his age. They absorb him, and leave impressions durable and
+profound. Compared with the youth taught by these methods, one brought
+up exclusively by books carries through life a certain remoteness from
+reality: he stands, as it were, out of the pale, and feels that he
+stands so; and often suffers a kind of melancholy from which he might
+have been rescued by a more real education.
+
+There are other impulses, such as love of approbation or vanity, shyness
+and secretiveness, of which a word might be said; but they are too
+familiar to need it. You can easily pursue the subject by your own
+reflection. There is one general law, however, that relates to many of
+our instinctive tendencies, and that has no little importance in
+education; and I must refer to it briefly before I leave the subject. It
+has been called the law of transitoriness in instincts. Many of our
+impulsive tendencies ripen at a certain period; and, if the appropriate
+objects be then and there provided, habits of conduct toward them are
+acquired which last. But, if the objects be not forthcoming then, the
+impulse may die out before a habit is formed; and later it may be hard
+to teach the creature to react appropriately in those directions. The
+sucking instincts in mammals, the following instinct in certain birds
+and quadrupeds, are examples of this: they fade away shortly after
+birth.
+
+In children we observe a ripening of impulses and interests in a certain
+determinate order. Creeping, walking, climbing, imitating vocal sounds,
+constructing, drawing, calculating, possess the child in succession; and
+in some children the possession, while it lasts, may be of a
+semi-frantic and exclusive sort. Later, the interest in any one of these
+things may wholly fade away. Of course, the proper pedagogic moment to
+work skill in, and to clench the useful habit, is when the native
+impulse is most acutely present. Crowd on the athletic opportunities,
+the mental arithmetic, the verse-learning, the drawing, the botany, or
+what not, the moment you have reason to think the hour is ripe. The hour
+may not last long, and while it continues you may safely let all the
+child's other occupations take a second place. In this way you economize
+time and deepen skill; for many an infant prodigy, artistic or
+mathematical, has a flowering epoch of but a few months.
+
+One can draw no specific rules for all this. It depends on close
+observation in the particular case, and parents here have a great
+advantage over teachers. In fact, the law of transitoriness has little
+chance of individualized application in the schools.
+
+Such is the little interested and impulsive psychophysical organism
+whose springs of action the teacher must divine, and to whose ways he
+must become accustomed. He must start with the native tendencies, and
+enlarge the pupil's entire passive and active experience. He must ply
+him with new objects and stimuli, and make him taste the fruits of his
+behavior, so that now that whole context of remembered experience is
+what shall determine his conduct when he gets the stimulus, and not the
+bare immediate impression. As the pupil's life thus enlarges, it gets
+fuller and fuller of all sorts of memories and associations and
+substitutions; but the eye accustomed to psychological analysis will
+discern, underneath it all, the outlines of our simple psychophysical
+scheme.
+
+Respect then, I beg you, always the original reactions, even when you
+are seeking to overcome their connection with certain objects, and to
+supplant them with others that you wish to make the rule. Bad behavior,
+from the point of view of the teacher's art, is as good a starting-point
+as good behavior. In fact, paradoxical as it may sound to say so, it is
+often a better starting-point than good behavior would be.
+
+The acquired reactions must be made habitual whenever they are
+appropriate. Therefore Habit is the next subject to which your attention
+is invited.
+
+
+
+
+VIII. THE LAWS OF HABIT
+
+
+It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of
+habit, and psychology helps us greatly at this point. We speak, it is
+true, of good habits and of bad habits; but, when people use the word
+'habit,' in the majority of instances it is a bad habit which they
+have in mind. They talk of the smoking-habit and the swearing-habit
+and the drinking-habit, but not of the abstention-habit or the
+moderation-habit or the courage-habit. But the fact is that our
+virtues are habits as much as our vices. All our life, so far as it
+has definite form, is but a mass of habits,--practical, emotional, and
+intellectual,--systematically organized for our weal or woe, and
+bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be.
+
+Since pupils can understand this at a comparatively early age, and since
+to understand it contributes in no small measure to their feeling of
+responsibility, it would be well if the teacher were able himself to
+talk to them of the philosophy of habit in some such abstract terms as I
+am now about to talk of it to you.
+
+I believe that we are subject to the law of habit in consequence of the
+fact that we have bodies. The plasticity of the living matter of our
+nervous system, in short, is the reason why we do a thing with
+difficulty the first time, but soon do it more and more easily, and
+finally, with sufficient practice, do it semi-mechanically, or with
+hardly any consciousness at all. Our nervous systems have (in Dr.
+Carpenter's words) _grown_ to the way in which they have been exercised,
+just as a sheet of paper or a coat, once creased or folded, tends to
+fall forever afterward into the same identical folds.
+
+Habit is thus a second nature, or rather, as the Duke of Wellington
+said, it is 'ten times nature,'--at any rate as regards its importance
+in adult life; for the acquired habits of our training have by that time
+inhibited or strangled most of the natural impulsive tendencies which
+were originally there. Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred
+and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and
+habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night.
+Our dressing and undressing, our eating and drinking, our greetings and
+partings, our hat-raisings and giving way for ladies to precede, nay,
+even most of the forms of our common speech, are things of a type so
+fixed by repetition as almost to be classed as reflex actions. To each
+sort of impression we have an automatic, ready-made response. My very
+words to you now are an example of what I mean; for having already
+lectured upon habit and printed a chapter about it in a book, and read
+the latter when in print, I find my tongue inevitably falling into its
+old phrases and repeating almost literally what I said before.
+
+So far as we are thus mere bundles of habit, we are stereotyped
+creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves. And since this,
+under any circumstances, is what we always tend to become, it follows
+first of all that the teacher's prime concern should be to ingrain into
+the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him
+throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of
+which behavior consists.
+
+To quote my earlier book directly, the great thing in all education is
+to _make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy_. It is to
+fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the
+interest of the fund. _For this we must make automatic and habitual, as
+early as possible, as many useful actions as we can_, and as carefully
+guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be
+disadvantageous. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand
+over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers
+of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more
+miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but
+indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of
+every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the
+beginning of every bit of work are subjects of express volitional
+deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding or
+regretting of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as
+practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. If there be such
+daily duties not yet ingrained in any one of my hearers, let him begin
+this very hour to set the matter right.
+
+In Professor Bain's chapter on 'The Moral Habits' there are some
+admirable practical remarks laid down. Two great maxims emerge from the
+treatment. The first is that in the acquisition of a new habit, or the
+leaving off of an old one, we must take care to _launch ourselves with
+as strong and decided an initiative as possible_. Accumulate all the
+possible circumstances which shall reinforce the right motives; put
+yourself assiduously in conditions that encourage the new way; make
+engagements incompatible with the old; take a public pledge, if the case
+allows; in short, envelope your resolution with every aid you know. This
+will give your new beginning such a momentum that the temptation to
+break down will not occur as soon as it otherwise might; and every day
+during which a breakdown is postponed adds to the chances of its not
+occurring at all.
+
+I remember long ago reading in an Austrian paper the advertisement of a
+certain Rudolph Somebody, who promised fifty gulden reward to any one
+who after that date should find him at the wine-shop of Ambrosius
+So-and-so. 'This I do,' the advertisement continued, 'in consequence of
+a promise which I have made my wife.' With such a wife, and such an
+understanding of the way in which to start new habits, it would be safe
+to stake one's money on Rudolph's ultimate success.
+
+The second maxim is, _Never suffer an exception to occur till the new
+habit is securely rooted in your life_. Each lapse is like the letting
+fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up: a single
+slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. Continuity of
+training is the great means of making the nervous system act infallibly
+right. As Professor Bain says:--
+
+"The peculiarity of the moral habits, contradistinguishing them from the
+intellectual acquisitions, is the presence of two hostile powers, one to
+be gradually raised into the ascendant over the other. It is necessary
+above all things, in such a situation, never to lose a battle. Every
+gain on the wrong side undoes the effect of many conquests on the right.
+The essential precaution, therefore, is so to regulate the two opposing
+powers that the one may have a series of uninterrupted successes, until
+repetition has fortified it to such a degree as to enable it to cope
+with the opposition, under any circumstances. This is the theoretically
+best career of mental progress."
+
+A third maxim may be added to the preceding pair: _Seize the very first
+possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every
+emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits
+you aspire to gain._ It is not in the moment of their forming, but in
+the moment of their producing motor effects, that resolves and
+aspirations communicate the new 'set' to the brain.
+
+No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter
+how good one's sentiments may be, if one have not taken advantage of
+every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely
+unaffected for the better. With good intentions, hell proverbially is
+paved. This is an obvious consequence of the principles I have laid
+down. A 'character,' as J.S. Mill says, 'is a completely fashioned
+will'; and a will, in the sense in which he means it, is an aggregate of
+tendencies to act in a firm and prompt and definite way upon all the
+principal emergencies of life. A tendency to act only becomes
+effectively ingrained in us in proportion to the uninterrupted frequency
+with which the actions actually occur, and the brain 'grows' to their
+use. When a resolve or a fine glow of feeling is allowed to evaporate
+without bearing practical fruit, it is worse than a chance lost: it
+works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from
+taking the normal path of discharge. There is no more contemptible type
+of human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and
+dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility, but
+never does a concrete manly deed.
+
+This leads to a fourth maxim. _Don't preach too much to your pupils or
+abound in good talk in the abstract_. Lie in wait rather for the
+practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus
+at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do. The
+strokes of _behavior_ are what give the new set to the character, and
+work the good habits into its organic tissue. Preaching and talking too
+soon become an ineffectual bore.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There is a passage in Darwin's short autobiography which has been often
+quoted, and which, for the sake of its bearing on our subject of habit,
+I must now quote again. Darwin says: "Up to the age of thirty or beyond
+it, poetry of many kinds gave me great pleasure; and even as a schoolboy
+I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical
+plays. I have also said that pictures formerly gave me considerable, and
+music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read
+a line of poetry. I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it
+so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my
+taste for pictures or music.... My mind seems to have become a kind of
+machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts; but
+why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone,
+on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.... If I had to
+live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and
+listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of
+my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept alive through use. The
+loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be
+injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by
+enfeebling the emotional part of our nature."
+
+We all intend when young to be all that may become a man, before the
+destroyer cuts us down. We wish and expect to enjoy poetry always, to
+grow more and more intelligent about pictures and music, to keep in
+touch with spiritual and religious ideas, and even not to let the
+greater philosophic thoughts of our time develop quite beyond our view.
+We mean all this in youth, I say; and yet in how many middle-aged men
+and women is such an honest and sanguine expectation fulfilled? Surely,
+in comparatively few; and the laws of habit show us why. Some interest
+in each of these things arises in everybody at the proper age; but, if
+not persistently fed with the appropriate matter, instead of growing
+into a powerful and necessary habit, it atrophies and dies, choked by
+the rival interests to which the daily food is given. We make ourselves
+into Darwins in this negative respect by persistently ignoring the
+essential practical conditions of our case. We say abstractly: "I mean
+to enjoy poetry, and to absorb a lot of it, of course. I fully intend to
+keep up my love of music, to read the books that shall give new turns to
+the thought of my time, to keep my higher spiritual side alive, etc."
+But we do not attack these things concretely, and we do not begin
+_to-day. _We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be
+paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone, until
+those smiling possibilities are dead. Whereas ten minutes a day of
+poetry, of spiritual reading or meditation, and an hour or two a week at
+music, pictures, or philosophy, provided we began _now_ and suffered no
+remission, would infallibly give us in due time the fulness of all we
+desire. By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing
+ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of
+our higher possibilities. This is a point concerning which you teachers
+might well give a little timely information to your older and more
+aspiring pupils.
+
+According as a function receives daily exercise or not, the man becomes
+a different kind of being in later life. We have lately had a number of
+accomplished Hindoo visitors at Cambridge, who talked freely of life and
+philosophy. More than one of them has confided to me that the sight of
+our faces, all contracted as they are with the habitual American
+over-intensity and anxiety of expression, and our ungraceful and
+distorted attitudes when sitting, made on him a very painful impression.
+"I do not see," said one, "how it is possible for you to live as you do,
+without a single minute in your day deliberately given to tranquillity
+and meditation. It is an invariable part of our Hindoo life to retire
+for at least half an hour daily into silence, to relax our muscles,
+govern our breathing, and meditate on eternal things. Every Hindoo child
+is trained to this from a very early age." The good fruits of such a
+discipline were obvious in the physical repose and lack of tension, and
+the wonderful smoothness and calmness of facial expression, and
+imperturbability of manner of these Orientals. I felt that my countrymen
+were depriving themselves of an essential grace of character. How many
+American children ever hear it said by parent or teacher, that they
+should moderate their piercing voices, that they should relax their
+unused muscles, and as far as possible, when sitting, sit quite still?
+Not one in a thousand, not one in five thousand! Yet, from its reflex
+influence on the inner mental states, this ceaseless over-tension,
+over-motion, and over-expression are working on us grievous national
+harm.
+
+I beg you teachers to think a little seriously of this matter. Perhaps
+you can help our rising generation of Americans toward the beginning of
+a better set of personal ideals.[B]
+
+     [B] See the Address on the Gospel of Relaxation, later in
+     this volume.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+To go back now to our general maxims, I may at last, as a fifth and
+final practical maxim about habits, offer something like this: _Keep the
+faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every
+day._ That is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do
+every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so
+that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not
+unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is
+like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does
+him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But,
+if the fire _does_ come, his having paid it will be his salvation from
+ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of
+concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in
+unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks
+around him, and his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like chaff in the
+blast.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have been accused, when talking of the subject of habit, of making old
+habits appear so strong that the acquiring of new ones, and particularly
+anything like a sudden reform or conversion, would be made impossible by
+my doctrine. Of course, this would suffice to condemn the latter; for
+sudden conversions, however infrequent they may be, unquestionably do
+occur. But there is no incompatibility between the general laws I have
+laid down and the most startling sudden alterations in the way of
+character. New habits _can_ be launched, I have expressly said, on
+condition of there being new stimuli and new excitements. Now life
+abounds in these, and sometimes they are such critical and revolutionary
+experiences that they change a man's whole scale of values and system of
+ideas. In such cases, the old order of his habits will be ruptured; and,
+if the new motives are lasting, new habits will be formed, and build up
+in him a new or regenerate 'nature.'
+
+All this kind of fact I fully allow. But the general laws of habit are
+no wise altered thereby, and the physiological study of mental
+conditions still remains on the whole the most powerful ally of
+hortatory ethics. The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology
+tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by
+habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could the young
+but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits,
+they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.
+We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone.
+Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little
+scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself
+for every fresh dereliction by saying, "I won't count this time!" Well,
+he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being
+counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the
+molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used
+against him when the next temptation comes. Nothing we ever do is, in
+strict scientific literalness, wiped out.
+
+Of course, this has its good side as well as its bad one. As we become
+permanent drunkards by so many separate drinks, so we become saints in
+the moral, and authorities and experts in the practical and scientific
+spheres, by so many separate acts and hours of work. Let no youth have
+any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it
+may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working day, he may
+safely leave the final result to itself. He can with perfect certainty
+count on waking up some fine morning to find himself one of the
+competent ones of his generation, in whatever pursuit he may have
+singled out. Silently, between all the details of his business, the
+_power of judging_ in all that class of matter will have built itself up
+within him as a possession that will never pass away. Young people
+should know this truth in advance. The ignorance of it has probably
+engendered more discouragement and faint-heartedness in youths embarking
+on arduous careers than all other causes put together.
+
+
+
+
+IX. THE ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS
+
+
+In my last talk, in treating of Habit, I chiefly had in mind our _motor_
+habits,--habits of external conduct. But our thinking and feeling
+processes are also largely subject to the law of habit, and one result
+of this is a phenomenon which you all know under the name of 'the
+association of ideas.' To that phenomenon I ask you now to turn.
+
+You remember that consciousness is an ever-flowing stream of objects,
+feelings, and impulsive tendencies. We saw already that its phases or
+pulses are like so many fields or waves, each field or wave having
+usually its central point of liveliest attention, in the shape of the
+most prominent object in our thought, while all around this lies a
+margin of other objects more dimly realized, together with the margin of
+emotional and active tendencies which the whole entails. Describing the
+mind thus in fluid terms, we cling as close as possible to nature. At
+first sight, it might seem as if, in the fluidity of these successive
+waves, everything is indeterminate. But inspection shows that each wave
+has a constitution which can be to some degree explained by the
+constitution of the waves just passed away. And this relation of the
+wave to its predecessors is expressed by the two fundamental 'laws of
+association,' so-called, of which the first is named the Law of
+Contiguity, the second that of Similarity.
+
+The _Law of Contiguity_ tells us that objects thought of in the coming
+wave are such as in some previous experience were _next_ to the objects
+represented in the wave that is passing away. The vanishing objects were
+once formerly their neighbors in the mind. When you recite the alphabet
+or your prayers, or when the sight of an object reminds you of its name,
+or the name reminds you of the object, it is through the law of
+contiguity that the terms are suggested to the mind.
+
+The _Law of Similarity_ says that, when contiguity fails to describe
+what happens, the coming objects will prove to _resemble_ the going
+objects, even though the two were never experienced together before. In
+our 'flights of fancy,' this is frequently the case.
+
+If, arresting ourselves in the flow of reverie, we ask the question,
+"How came we to be thinking of just this object now?" we can almost
+always trace its presence to some previous object which has introduced
+it to the mind, according to one or the other of these laws. The entire
+routine of our memorized acquisitions, for example, is a consequence of
+nothing but the Law of Contiguity. The words of a poem, the formulas of
+trigonometry, the facts of history, the properties of material things,
+are all known to us as definite systems or groups of objects which
+cohere in an order fixed by innumerable iterations, and of which any one
+part reminds us of the others. In dry and prosaic minds, almost all the
+mental sequences flow along these lines of habitual routine repetition
+and suggestion.
+
+In witty, imaginative minds, on the other hand, the routine is broken
+through with ease at any moment; and one field of mental objects will
+suggest another with which perhaps in the whole history of human
+thinking it had never once before been coupled. The link here is usually
+some _analogy_ between the objects successively thought of,--an analogy
+often so subtle that, although we feel it, we can with difficulty
+analyze its ground; as where, for example, we find something masculine
+in the color red and something feminine in the color pale blue, or
+where, of three human beings' characters, one will remind us of a cat,
+another of a dog, the third perhaps of a cow.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Psychologists have of course gone very deeply into the question of what
+the causes of association may be; and some of them have tried to show
+that contiguity and similarity are not two radically diverse laws, but
+that either presupposes the presence of the other. I myself am disposed
+to think that the phenomena of association depend on our cerebral
+constitution, and are not immediate consequences of our being rational
+beings. In other words, when we shall have become disembodied spirits,
+it may be that our trains of consciousness will follow different laws.
+These questions are discussed in the books on psychology, and I hope
+that some of you will be interested in following them there. But I will,
+on the present occasion, ignore them entirely; for, as teachers, it is
+the _fact_ of association that practically concerns you, let its grounds
+be spiritual or cerebral, or what they may, and let its laws be
+reducible, or non-reducible, to one. Your pupils, whatever else they
+are, are at any rate little pieces of associating machinery. Their
+education consists in the organizing within them of determinate
+tendencies to associate one thing with another,--impressions with
+consequences, these with reactions, those with results, and so on
+indefinitely. The more copious the associative systems, the completer
+the individual's adaptations to the world.
+
+The teacher can formulate his function to himself therefore in terms of
+'association' as well as in terms of 'native and acquired reaction.' It
+is mainly that of _building up useful systems of association_ in the
+pupil's mind. This description sounds wider than the one I began by
+giving. But, when one thinks that our trains of association, whatever
+they may be, normally issue in acquired reactions or behavior, one sees
+that in a general way the same mass of facts is covered by both
+formulas.
+
+It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have
+once grasped the principles of association. The great problem which
+association undertakes to solve is, _Why does just this particular field
+of consciousness, constituted in this particular way, now appear before
+my mind?_ It may be a field of objects imagined; it may be of objects
+remembered or of objects perceived; it may include an action resolved
+on. In either case, when the field is analyzed into its parts, those
+parts can be shown to have proceeded from parts of fields previously
+before consciousness, in consequence of one or other of the laws of
+association just laid down. Those laws _run_ the mind: interest,
+shifting hither and thither, deflects it; and attention, as we shall
+later see, steers it and keeps it from too zigzag a course.
+
+To grasp these factors clearly gives one a solid and simple
+understanding of the psychological machinery. The 'nature,' the
+'character,' of an individual means really nothing but the habitual form
+of his associations. To break up bad associations or wrong ones, to
+build others in, to guide the associative tendencies into the most
+fruitful channels, is the educator's principal task. But here, as with
+all other simple principles, the difficulty lies in the application.
+Psychology can state the laws: concrete tact and talent alone can work
+them to useful results.
+
+Meanwhile it is a matter of the commonest experience that our minds may
+pass from one object to another by various intermediary fields of
+consciousness. The indeterminateness of our paths of association _in
+concreto_ is thus almost as striking a feature of them as the uniformity
+of their abstract form. Start from any idea whatever, and the entire
+range of your ideas is potentially at your disposal. If we take as the
+associative starting-point, or cue, some simple word which I pronounce
+before you, there is no limit to the possible diversity of suggestions
+which it may set up in your minds. Suppose I say 'blue,' for example:
+some of you may think of the blue sky and hot weather from which we now
+are suffering, then go off on thoughts of summer clothing, or possibly
+of meteorology at large; others may think of the spectrum and the
+physiology of color-vision, and glide into X-rays and recent physical
+speculations; others may think of blue ribbons, or of the blue flowers
+on a friend's hat, and proceed on lines of personal reminiscence. To
+others, again, etymology and linguistic thoughts may be suggested; or
+blue may be 'apperceived' as a synonym for melancholy, and a train of
+associates connected with morbid psychology may proceed to unroll
+themselves.
+
+In the same person, the same word heard at different times will provoke,
+in consequence of the varying marginal preoccupations, either one of a
+number of diverse possible associative sequences. Professor Muensterberg
+performed this experiment methodically, using the same words four times
+over, at three-month intervals, as 'cues' for four different persons who
+were the subjects of observation. He found almost no constancy in their
+associations taken at these different times. In short, the entire
+potential content of one's consciousness is accessible from any one of
+its points. This is why we can never work the laws of association
+forward: starting from the present field as a cue, we can never cipher
+out in advance just what the person will be thinking of five minutes
+later. The elements which may become prepotent in the process, the parts
+of each successive field round which the associations shall chiefly
+turn, the possible bifurcations of suggestion, are so numerous and
+ambiguous as to be indeterminable before the fact. But, although we
+cannot work the laws of association forward, we can always work them
+backwards. We cannot say now what we shall find ourselves thinking of
+five minutes hence; but, whatever it may be, we shall then be able to
+trace it through intermediary links of contiguity or similarity to what
+we are thinking now. What so baffles our prevision is the shifting part
+played by the margin and focus--in fact, by each element by itself of
+the margin or focus--in calling up the next ideas.
+
+For example, I am reciting 'Locksley Hall,' in order to divert my mind
+from a state of suspense that I am in concerning the will of a relative
+that is dead. The will still remains in the mental background as an
+extremely marginal or ultra-marginal portion of my field of
+consciousness; but the poem fairly keeps my attention from it, until I
+come to the line, "I, the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of
+time." The words 'I, the heir,' immediately make an electric connection
+with the marginal thought of the will; that, in turn, makes my heart
+beat with anticipation of my possible legacy, so that I throw down the
+book and pace the floor excitedly with visions of my future fortune
+pouring through my mind. Any portion of the field of consciousness that
+has more potentialities of emotional excitement than another may thus be
+roused to predominant activity; and the shifting play of interest now in
+one portion, now in another, deflects the currents in all sorts of
+zigzag ways, the mental activity running hither and thither as the
+sparks run in burnt-up paper.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One more point, and I shall have said as much to you as seems necessary
+about the process of association.
+
+You just saw how a single exciting word may call up its own associates
+prepotently, and deflect our whole train of thinking from the previous
+track. The fact is that every portion of the field _tends_ to call up
+its own associates; but, if these associates be severally different,
+there is rivalry, and as soon as one or a few begin to be effective the
+others seem to get siphoned out, as it were, and left behind. Seldom,
+however, as in our example, does the process seem to turn round a single
+item in the mental field, or even round the entire field that is
+immediately in the act of passing. It is a matter of _constellation_,
+into which portions of fields that are already past especially seem to
+enter and have their say. Thus, to go back to 'Locksley Hall,' each word
+as I recite it in its due order is suggested not solely by the previous
+word now expiring on my lips, but it is rather the effect of all the
+previous words, taken together, of the verse. "Ages," for example, calls
+up "in the foremost files of time," when preceded by "I, the heir of all
+the"--; but, when preceded by "for I doubt not through the,"--it calls
+up "one increasing purpose runs." Similarly, if I write on the
+blackboard the letters A B C D E F,... they probably suggest to you G H
+I.... But, if I write A B A D D E F, if they suggest anything, they
+suggest as their complement E C T or E F I C I E N C Y. The result
+depending on the total constellation, even though most of the single
+items be the same.
+
+My practical reason for mentioning this law is this, that it follows
+from it that, in working associations into your pupils' minds, you must
+not rely on single cues, but multiply the cues as much as possible.
+Couple the desired reaction with numerous constellations of
+antecedents,--don't always ask the question, for example, in the same
+way; don't use the same kind of data in numerical problems; vary your
+illustrations, etc., as much as you can. When we come to the subject of
+memory, we shall learn still more about this.
+
+So much, then, for the general subject of association. In leaving it for
+other topics (in which, however, we shall abundantly find it involved
+again), I cannot too strongly urge you to acquire a habit of thinking of
+your pupils in associative terms. All governors of mankind, from doctors
+and jail-wardens to demagogues and statesmen, instinctively come so to
+conceive their charges. If you do the same, thinking of them (however
+else you may think of them besides) as so many little systems of
+associating machinery, you will be astonished at the intimacy of insight
+into their operations and at the practicality of the results which you
+will gain. We think of our acquaintances, for example, as characterized
+by certain 'tendencies.' These tendencies will in almost every instance
+prove to be tendencies to association. Certain ideas in them are always
+followed by certain other ideas, these by certain feelings and impulses
+to approve or disapprove, assent or decline. If the topic arouse one of
+those first ideas, the practical outcome can be pretty well foreseen.
+'Types of character' in short are largely types of association.
+
+
+
+
+X. INTEREST
+
+
+At our last meeting I treated of the native tendencies of the pupil to
+react in characteristically definite ways upon different stimuli or
+exciting circumstances. In fact, I treated of the pupil's instincts. Now
+some situations appeal to special instincts from the very outset, and
+others fail to do so until the proper connections have been organized in
+the course of the person's training. We say of the former set of objects
+or situations that they are _interesting_ in themselves and originally.
+Of the latter we say that they are natively uninteresting, and that
+interest in them has first to be acquired.
+
+No topic has received more attention from pedagogical writers than that
+of interest. It is the natural sequel to the instincts we so lately
+discussed, and it is therefore well fitted to be the next subject which
+we take up.
+
+Since some objects are natively interesting and in others interest is
+artificially acquired, the teacher must know which the natively
+interesting ones are; for, as we shall see immediately, other objects
+can artificially acquire an interest only through first becoming
+associated with some of these natively interesting things.
+
+The native interests of children lie altogether in the sphere of
+sensation. Novel things to look at or novel sounds to hear, especially
+when they involve the spectacle of action of a violent sort, will always
+divert the attention from abstract conceptions of objects verbally taken
+in. The grimace that Johnny is making, the spitballs that Tommy is ready
+to throw, the dog-fight in the street, or the distant firebells
+ringing,--these are the rivals with which the teacher's powers of being
+interesting have incessantly to cope. The child will always attend more
+to what a teacher does than to what the same teacher says. During the
+performance of experiments or while the teacher is drawing on the
+blackboard, the children are tranquil and absorbed. I have seen a
+roomful of college students suddenly become perfectly still, to look at
+their professor of physics tie a piece of string around a stick which he
+was going to use in an experiment, but immediately grow restless when he
+began to explain the experiment. A lady told me that one day, during a
+lesson, she was delighted at having captured so completely the attention
+of one of her young charges. He did not remove his eyes from her face;
+but he said to her after the lesson was over, "I looked at you all the
+time, and your upper jaw did not move once!" That was the only fact that
+he had taken in.
+
+Living things, then, moving things, or things that savor of danger or of
+blood, that have a dramatic quality,--these are the objects natively
+interesting to childhood, to the exclusion of almost everything else;
+and the teacher of young children, until more artificial interests have
+grown up, will keep in touch with her pupils by constant appeal to such
+matters as these. Instruction must be carried on objectively,
+experimentally, anecdotally. The blackboard-drawing and story-telling
+must constantly come in. But of course these methods cover only the
+first steps, and carry one but a little way.
+
+Can we now formulate any general principle by which the later and more
+artificial interests connect themselves with these early ones that the
+child brings with him to the school?
+
+Fortunately, we can: there is a very simple law that relates the
+acquired and the native interests with each other.
+
+_Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through
+becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists.
+The two associated objects grow, as it were, together: the interesting
+portion sheds its quality over the whole; and thus things not
+interesting in their own right borrow an interest which becomes as real
+and as strong as that of any natively interesting thing._ The odd
+circumstance is that the borrowing does not impoverish the source, the
+objects taken together being more interesting, perhaps, than the
+originally interesting portion was by itself.
+
+This is one of the most striking proofs of the range of application of
+the principle of association of ideas in psychology. An idea will infect
+another with its own emotional interest when they have become both
+associated together into any sort of a mental total. As there is no
+limit to the various associations into which an interesting idea may
+enter, one sees in how many ways an interest may be derived.
+
+You will understand this abstract statement easily if I take the most
+frequent of concrete examples,--the interest which things borrow from
+their connection with our own personal welfare. The most natively
+interesting object to a man is his own personal self and its fortunes.
+We accordingly see that the moment a thing becomes connected with the
+fortunes of the self, it forthwith becomes an interesting thing. Lend
+the child his books, pencils, and other apparatus: then give them to
+him, make them his own, and notice the new light with which they
+instantly shine in his eyes. He takes a new kind of care of them
+altogether. In mature life, all the drudgery of a man's business or
+profession, intolerable in itself, is shot through with engrossing
+significance because he knows it to be associated with his personal
+fortunes. What more deadly uninteresting object can there be than a
+railroad time-table? Yet where will you find a more interesting object
+if you are going on a journey, and by its means can find your train? At
+such times the time-table will absorb a man's entire attention, its
+interest being borrowed solely from its relation to his personal life.
+_From all these facts there emerges a very simple abstract programme for
+the teacher to follow in keeping the attention of the child: Begin with
+the line of his native interests, and offer him objects that have some
+immediate connection with these_. The kindergarten methods, the
+object-teaching routine, the blackboard and manual-training work,--all
+recognize this feature. Schools in which these methods preponderate are
+schools where discipline is easy, and where the voice of the master
+claiming order and attention in threatening tones need never be heard.
+
+_Next, step by step, connect with these first objects and experiences
+the later objects and ideas which you wish to instill. Associate the new
+with the old in some natural and telling way, so that the interest,
+being shed along from point to point, finally suffuses the entire system
+of objects of thought._
+
+This is the abstract statement; and, abstractly, nothing can be easier
+to understand. It is in the fulfilment of the rule that the difficulty
+lies; for the difference between an interesting and a tedious teacher
+consists in little more than the inventiveness by which the one is able
+to mediate these associations and connections, and in the dulness in
+discovering such transitions which the other shows. One teacher's mind
+will fairly coruscate with points of connection between the new lesson
+and the circumstances of the children's other experience. Anecdotes and
+reminiscences will abound in her talk; and the shuttle of interest will
+shoot backward and forward, weaving the new and the old together in a
+lively and entertaining way. Another teacher has no such inventive
+fertility, and his lesson will always be a dead and heavy thing. This is
+the psychological meaning of the Herbartian principle of 'preparation'
+for each lesson, and of correlating the new with the old. It is the
+psychological meaning of that whole method of concentration in studies
+of which you have been recently hearing so much. When the geography and
+English and history and arithmetic simultaneously make cross-references
+to one another, you get an interesting set of processes all along the
+line.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If, then, you wish to insure the interest of your pupils, there is only
+one way to do it; and that is to make certain that they have something
+in their minds _to attend with_, when you begin to talk. That something
+can consist in nothing but a previous lot of ideas already interesting
+in themselves, and of such a nature that the incoming novel objects
+which you present can dovetail into them and form with them some kind of
+a logically associated or systematic whole. Fortunately, almost any kind
+of a connection is sufficient to carry the interest along. What a help
+is our Philippine war at present in teaching geography! But before the
+war you could ask the children if they ate pepper with their eggs, and
+where they supposed the pepper came from. Or ask them if glass is a
+stone, and, if not, why not; and then let them know how stones are
+formed and glass manufactured. External links will serve as well as
+those that are deeper and more logical. But interest, once shed upon a
+subject, is liable to remain always with that subject. Our acquisitions
+become in a measure portions of our personal self; and little by little,
+as cross-associations multiply and habits of familiarity and practice
+grow, the entire system of our objects of thought consolidates, most of
+it becoming interesting for some purposes and in some degree.
+
+An adult man's interests are almost every one of them intensely
+artificial: they have slowly been built up. The objects of professional
+interest are most of them, in their original nature, repulsive; but by
+their connection with such natively exciting objects as one's personal
+fortune, one's social responsibilities, and especially by the force of
+inveterate habit, they grow to be the only things for which in middle
+life a man profoundly cares.
+
+But in all these the spread and consolidation have followed nothing but
+the principles first laid down. If we could recall for a moment our
+whole individual history, we should see that our professional ideals and
+the zeal they inspire are due to nothing but the slow accretion of one
+mental object to another, traceable backward from point to point till we
+reach the moment when, in the nursery or in the schoolroom, some little
+story told, some little object shown, some little operation witnessed,
+brought the first new object and new interest within our ken by
+associating it with some one of those primitively there. The interest
+now suffusing the whole system took its rise in that little event, so
+insignificant to us now as to be entirely forgotten. As the bees in
+swarming cling to one another in layers till the few are reached whose
+feet grapple the bough from which the swarm depends; so with the objects
+of our thinking,--they hang to each other by associated links, but the
+_original_ source of interest in all of them is the native interest
+which the earliest one once possessed.
+
+
+
+
+XI. ATTENTION
+
+
+Whoever treats of interest inevitably treats of attention, for to say
+that an object is interesting is only another way of saying that it
+excites attention. But in addition to the attention which any object
+already interesting or just becoming interesting claims--passive
+attention or spontaneous attention, we may call it--there is a more
+deliberate attention,--voluntary attention or attention with effort, as
+it is called,--which we can give to objects less interesting or
+uninteresting in themselves. The distinction between active and passive
+attention is made in all books on psychology, and connects itself with
+the deeper aspects of the topic. From our present purely practical point
+of view, however, it is not necessary to be intricate; and passive
+attention to natively interesting material requires no further
+elucidation on this occasion. All that we need explicitly to note is
+that, the more the passive attention is relied on, by keeping the
+material interesting; and the less the kind of attention requiring
+effort is appealed to; the more smoothly and pleasantly the classroom
+work goes on. I must say a few more words, however, about this latter
+process of voluntary and deliberate attention.
+
+One often hears it said that genius is nothing but a power of sustained
+attention, and the popular impression probably prevails that men of
+genius are remarkable for their voluntary powers in this direction. _But
+a little introspective observation will show any one that voluntary
+attention cannot be continuously sustained,--that it comes in beats._
+When we are studying an uninteresting subject, if our mind tends to
+wander, we have to bring back our attention every now and then by using
+distinct pulses of effort, which revivify the topic for a moment, the
+mind then running on for a certain number of seconds or minutes with
+spontaneous interest, until again some intercurrent idea captures it and
+takes it off. Then the processes of volitional recall must be repeated
+once more. Voluntary attention, in short, is only a momentary affair.
+The process, whatever it is, exhausts itself in the single act; and,
+unless the matter is then taken in hand by some trace of interest
+inherent in the subject, the mind fails to follow it at all. The
+sustained attention of the genius, sticking to his subject for hours
+together, is for the most part of the passive sort. The minds of
+geniuses are full of copious and original associations. The subject of
+thought, once started, develops all sorts of fascinating consequences.
+The attention is led along one of these to another in the most
+interesting manner, and the attention never once tends to stray away.
+
+In a commonplace mind, on the other hand, a subject develops much less
+numerous associates: it dies out then quickly; and, if the man is to
+keep up thinking of it at all, he must bring his attention back to it by
+a violent wrench. In him, therefore, the faculty of voluntary attention
+receives abundant opportunity for cultivation in daily life. It is your
+despised business man, your common man of affairs, (so looked down on by
+the literary awarders of fame) whose virtue in this regard is likely to
+be most developed; for he has to listen to the concerns of so many
+uninteresting people, and to transact so much drudging detail, that the
+faculty in question is always kept in training. A genius, on the
+contrary, is the man in whom you are least likely to find the power of
+attending to anything insipid or distasteful in itself. He breaks his
+engagements, leaves his letters unanswered, neglects his family duties
+incorrigibly, because he is powerless to turn his attention down and
+back from those more interesting trains of imagery with which his genius
+constantly occupies his mind.
+
+Voluntary attention is thus an essentially instantaneous affair. You can
+claim it, for your purposes in the schoolroom, by commanding it in loud,
+imperious tones; and you can easily get it in this way. But, unless the
+subject to which you thus recall their attention has inherent power to
+interest the pupils, you will have got it for only a brief moment; and
+their minds will soon be wandering again. To keep them where you have
+called them, you must make the subject too interesting for them to
+wander again. And for that there is one prescription; but the
+prescription, like all our prescriptions, is abstract, and, to get
+practical results from it, you must couple it with mother-wit.
+
+The prescription is that _the subject must be made to show new aspects
+of itself; to prompt new questions; in a word, to change_. From an
+unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away. You can test
+this by the simplest possible case of sensorial attention. Try to
+attend steadfastly to a dot on the paper or on the wall. You presently
+find that one or the other of two things has happened: either your field
+of vision has become blurred, so that you now see nothing distinct at
+all, or else you have involuntarily ceased to look at the dot in
+question, and are looking at something else. But, if you ask yourself
+successive questions about the dot,--how big it is, how far, of what
+shape, what shade of color, etc.; in other words, if you turn it over,
+if you think of it in various ways, and along with various kinds of
+associates,--you can keep your mind on it for a comparatively long time.
+This is what the genius does, in whose hands a given topic coruscates
+and grows. And this is what the teacher must do for every topic if he
+wishes to avoid too frequent appeals to voluntary attention of the
+coerced sort. In all respects, reliance upon such attention as this is a
+wasteful method, bringing bad temper and nervous wear and tear as well
+as imperfect results. The teacher who can get along by keeping
+spontaneous interest excited must be regarded as the teacher with the
+greatest skill.
+
+There is, however, in all schoolroom work a large mass of material that
+must be dull and unexciting, and to which it is impossible in any
+continuous way to contribute an interest associatively derived. There
+are, therefore, certain external methods, which every teacher knows, of
+voluntarily arousing the attention from time to time and keeping it upon
+the subject. Mr. Fitch has a lecture on the art of securing attention,
+and he briefly passes these methods in review; the posture must be
+changed; places can be changed. Questions, after being answered singly,
+may occasionally be answered in concert. Elliptical questions may be
+asked, the pupil supplying the missing word. The teacher must pounce
+upon the most listless child and wake him up. The habit of prompt and
+ready response must be kept up. Recapitulations, illustrations,
+examples, novelty of order, and ruptures of routine,--all these are
+means for keeping the attention alive and contributing a little interest
+to a dull subject. Above all, the teacher must himself be alive and
+ready, and must use the contagion of his own example.
+
+But, when all is said and done, the fact remains that some teachers have
+a naturally inspiring presence, and can make their exercises
+interesting, while others simply cannot. And psychology and general
+pedagogy here confess their failure, and hand things over to the deeper
+springs of human personality to conduct the task.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A brief reference to the physiological theory of the attentive process
+may serve still further to elucidate these practical remarks, and
+confirm them by showing them from a slightly different point of view.
+
+What is the attentive process, psychologically considered? Attention to
+an object is what takes place whenever that object most completely
+occupies the mind. For simplicity's sake suppose the object be an object
+of sensation,--a figure approaching us at a distance on the road. It is
+far off, barely perceptible, and hardly moving: we do not know with
+certainty whether it is a man or not. Such an object as this, if
+carelessly looked at, may hardly catch our attention at all. The optical
+impression may affect solely the marginal consciousness, while the
+mental focus keeps engaged with rival things. We may indeed not 'see' it
+till some one points it out. But, if so, how does he point it out? By
+his finger, and by describing its appearance,--by creating a premonitory
+image of _where_ to look and of _what_ to expect to see. This
+premonitory image is already an excitement of the same nerve-centres
+that are to be concerned with the impression. The impression comes, and
+excites them still further; and now the object enters the focus of the
+field, consciousness being sustained both by impression and by
+preliminary idea. But the maximum of attention to it is not yet reached.
+Although we see it, we may not care for it; it may suggest nothing
+important to us; and a rival stream of objects or of thoughts may
+quickly take our mind away. If, however, our companion defines it in a
+significant way, arouses in the mind a set of experiences to be
+apprehended from it,--names it an enemy or as a messenger of important
+tidings,--the residual and marginal ideas now aroused, so far from being
+its rivals, become its associates and allies. They shoot together into
+one system with it; they converge upon it; they keep it steadily in
+focus; the mind attends to it with maximum power.
+
+The attentive process, therefore, at its maximum may be physiologically
+symbolized by a brain-cell played on in two ways, from without and from
+within. Incoming currents from the periphery arouse it, and collateral
+currents from the centres of memory and imagination re-enforce these.
+
+In this process the incoming impression is the newer element; the ideas
+which re-enforce and sustain it are among the older possessions of the
+mind. And the maximum of attention may then be said to be found whenever
+we have a systematic harmony or unification between the novel and the
+old. It is an odd circumstance that neither the old nor the new, by
+itself, is interesting: the absolutely old is insipid; the absolutely
+new makes no appeal at all. The old _in_ the new is what claims the
+attention,--the old with a slightly new turn. No one wants to hear a
+lecture on a subject completely disconnected with his previous
+knowledge, but we all like lectures on subjects of which we know a
+little already, just as, in the fashions, every year must bring its
+slight modification of last year's suit, but an abrupt jump from the
+fashion of one decade into another would be distasteful to the eye.
+
+The genius of the interesting teacher consists in sympathetic divination
+of the sort of material with which the pupil's mind is likely to be
+already spontaneously engaged, and in the ingenuity which discovers
+paths of connection from that material to the matters to be newly
+learned. The principle is easy to grasp, but the accomplishment is
+difficult in the extreme. And a knowledge of such psychology as this
+which I am recalling can no more make a good teacher than a knowledge of
+the laws of perspective can make a landscape painter of effective skill.
+
+A certain doubt may now occur to some of you. A while ago, apropos of
+the pugnacious instinct, I spoke of our modern pedagogy as being
+possibly too 'soft.' You may perhaps here face me with my own words, and
+ask whether the exclusive effort on the teacher's part to keep the
+pupil's spontaneous interest going, and to avoid the more strenuous path
+of voluntary attention to repulsive work, does not savor also of
+sentimentalism. The greater part of schoolroom work, you say, must, in
+the nature of things, always be repulsive. To face uninteresting
+drudgery is a good part of life's work. Why seek to eliminate it from
+the schoolroom or minimize the sterner law?
+
+A word or two will obviate what might perhaps become a serious
+misunderstanding here.
+
+It is certain that most schoolroom work, till it has become habitual and
+automatic, is repulsive, and cannot be done without voluntarily jerking
+back the attention to it every now and then. This is inevitable, let the
+teacher do what he will.
+
+It flows from the inherent nature of the subjects and of the learning
+mind. The repulsive processes of verbal memorizing, of discovering steps
+of mathematical identity, and the like, must borrow their interest at
+first from purely external sources, mainly from the personal interests
+with which success in mastering them is associated, such as gaining of
+rank, avoiding punishment, not being beaten by a difficulty and the
+like. Without such borrowed interest, the child could not attend to them
+at all. But in these processes what becomes interesting enough to be
+attended to is not thereby attended to _without effort_. Effort always
+has to go on, derived interest, for the most part, not awakening
+attention that is _easy_, however spontaneous it may now have to be
+called. The interest which the teacher, by his utmost skill, can lend to
+the subject, proves over and over again to be only an interest
+sufficient _to let loose the effort_. The teacher, therefore, need never
+concern himself about _inventing_ occasions where effort must be called
+into play. Let him still awaken whatever sources of interest in the
+subject he can by stirring up connections between it and the pupil's
+nature, whether in the line of theoretic curiosity, of personal
+interest, or of pugnacious impulse. The laws of mind will then bring
+enough pulses of effort into play to keep the pupil exercised in the
+direction of the subject. There is, in fact, no greater school of effort
+than the steady struggle to attend to immediately repulsive or difficult
+objects of thought which have grown to interest us through their
+association as means, with some remote ideal end.
+
+The Herbartian doctrine of interest ought not, therefore, in principle
+to be reproached with making pedagogy soft. If it do so, it is because
+it is unintelligently carried on. Do not, then, for the mere sake of
+discipline, command attention from your pupils in thundering tones. Do
+not too often beg it from them as a favor, nor claim it as a right, nor
+try habitually to excite it by preaching the importance of the subject.
+Sometimes, indeed, you must do these things; but, the more you have to
+do them, the less skilful teacher you will show yourself to be. Elicit
+interest from within, by the warmth with which you care for the topic
+yourself, and by following the laws I have laid down.
+
+If the topic be highly abstract, show its nature by concrete examples.
+If it be unfamiliar, trace some point of analogy in it with the known.
+If it be inhuman, make it figure as part of a story. If it be
+difficult, couple its acquisition with some prospect of personal gain.
+Above all things, make sure that it shall run through certain inner
+changes, since no unvarying object can possibly hold the mental field
+for long. Let your pupil wander from one aspect to another of your
+subject, if you do not wish him to wander from it altogether to
+something else, variety in unity being the secret of all interesting
+talk and thought. The relation of all these things to the native genius
+of the instructor is too obvious to need comment again.
+
+One more point, and I am done with the subject of attention. There is
+unquestionably a great native variety among individuals in the type of
+their attention. Some of us are naturally scatterbrained, and others
+follow easily a train of connected thoughts without temptation to swerve
+aside to other subjects. This seems to depend on a difference between
+individuals in the type of their field of consciousness. In some persons
+this is highly focalized and concentrated, and the focal ideas
+predominate in determining association. In others we must suppose the
+margin to be brighter, and to be filled with something like meteoric
+showers of images, which strike into it at random, displacing the focal
+ideas, and carrying association in their own direction. Persons of the
+latter type find their attention wandering every minute, and must bring
+it back by a voluntary pull. The others sink into a subject of
+meditation deeply, and, when interrupted, are 'lost' for a moment before
+they come back to the outer world.
+
+The possession of such a steady faculty of attention is unquestionably a
+great boon. Those who have it can work more rapidly, and with less
+nervous wear and tear. I am inclined to think that no one who is without
+it naturally can by any amount of drill or discipline attain it in a
+very high degree. Its amount is probably a fixed characteristic of the
+individual. But I wish to make a remark here which I shall have occasion
+to make again in other connections. It is that no one need deplore
+unduly the inferiority in himself of any one elementary faculty. This
+concentrated type of attention is an elementary faculty: it is one of
+the things that might be ascertained and measured by exercises in the
+laboratory. But, having ascertained it in a number of persons, we could
+never rank them in a scale of actual and practical mental efficiency
+based on its degrees. The total mental efficiency of a man is the
+resultant of the working together of all his faculties. He is too
+complex a being for any one of them to have the casting vote. If any
+one of them do have the casting vote, it is more likely to be the
+strength of his desire and passion, the strength of the interest he
+takes in what is proposed. Concentration, memory, reasoning power,
+inventiveness, excellence of the senses,--all are subsidiary to this.
+No matter how scatter-brained the type of a man's successive fields
+of consciousness may be, if he really _care_ for a subject, he will
+return to it incessantly from his incessant wanderings, and first and
+last do more with it, and get more results from it, than another
+person whose attention may be more continuous during a given interval,
+but whose passion for the subject is of a more languid and less
+permanent sort. Some of the most efficient workers I know are of the
+ultra-scatterbrained type. One friend, who does a prodigious quantity of
+work, has in fact confessed to me that, if he wants to get ideas on any
+subject, he sits down to work at something else, his best results coming
+through his mind-wanderings. This is perhaps an epigrammatic
+exaggeration on his part; but I seriously think that no one of us need
+be too much distressed at his own shortcomings in this regard. Our mind
+may enjoy but little comfort, may be restless and feel confused; but it
+may be extremely efficient all the same.
+
+
+
+
+XII. MEMORY
+
+
+We are following a somewhat arbitrary order. Since each and every
+faculty we possess is either in whole or in part a resultant of the play
+of our associations, it would have been as natural, after treating of
+association, to treat of memory as to treat of interest and attention
+next. But, since we did take the latter operations first, we must take
+memory now without farther delay; for the phenomena of memory are among
+the simplest and most immediate consequences of the fact that our mind
+is essentially an associating machine. There is no more pre-eminent
+example for exhibiting the fertility of the laws of association as
+principles of psychological analysis. Memory, moreover, is so important
+a faculty in the schoolroom that you are probably waiting with some
+eagerness to know what psychology has to say about it for your help.
+
+In old times, if you asked a person to explain why he came to be
+remembering at that moment some particular incident in his previous
+life, the only reply he could make was that his soul is endowed with a
+faculty called memory; that it is the inalienable function of this
+faculty to recollect; and that, therefore, he necessarily at that moment
+must have a cognition of that portion of the past. This explanation by a
+'faculty' is one thing which explanation by association has superseded
+altogether. If, by saying we have a faculty of memory, you mean nothing
+more than the fact that we can remember, nothing more than an abstract
+name for our power inwardly to recall the past, there is no harm done:
+we do have the faculty; for we unquestionably have such a power. But if,
+by faculty, you mean a principle of _explanation of our general power to
+recall_, your psychology is empty. The associationist psychology, on the
+other hand, gives an explanation of each particular fact of
+recollection; and, in so doing, it also gives an explanation of the
+general faculty. The 'faculty' of memory is thus no real or ultimate
+explanation; for it is itself explained as a result of the association
+of ideas.
+
+Nothing is easier than to show you just what I mean by this. Suppose I
+am silent for a moment, and then say in commanding accents: "Remember!
+Recollect!" Does your faculty of memory obey the order, and reproduce
+any definite image from your past? Certainly not. It stands staring into
+vacancy, and asking, "What kind of a thing do you wish me to remember?"
+It needs in short, a _cue_. But, if I say, remember the date of your
+birth, or remember what you had for breakfast, or remember the
+succession of notes in the musical scale; then your faculty of memory
+immediately produces the required result: the _'cue'_ determines its
+vast set of potentialities toward a particular point. And if you now
+look to see how this happens, you immediately perceive that the cue is
+something _contiguously associated_ with the thing recalled. The words,
+'date of my birth,' have an ingrained association with a particular
+number, month, and year; the words, 'breakfast this morning,' cut off
+all other lines of recall except those which lead to coffee and bacon
+and eggs; the words, 'musical scale,' are inveterate mental neighbors of
+do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, etc. The laws of association govern, in fact,
+all the trains of our thinking which are not interrupted by sensations
+breaking on us from without. Whatever appears in the mind must be
+_introduced_; and, when introduced, it is as the associate of something
+already there. This is as true of what you are recollecting as it is of
+everything else you think of.
+
+Reflection will show you that there are peculiarities in your memory
+which would be quite whimsical and unaccountable if we were forced to
+regard them as the product of a purely spiritual faculty. Were memory
+such a faculty, granted to us solely for its practical use, we ought to
+remember easiest whatever we most _needed_ to remember; and frequency of
+repetition, recency, and the like, would play no part in the matter.
+That we should best remember frequent things and recent things, and
+forget things that are ancient or were experienced only once, could only
+be regarded as an incomprehensible anomaly on such a view. But if we
+remember because of our associations, and if these are (as the
+physiological psychologists believe) due to our organized brain-paths,
+we easily see how the law of recency and repetition should prevail.
+Paths frequently and recently ploughed are those that lie most open,
+those which may be expected most easily to lead to results. The laws of
+our memory, as we find them, therefore are incidents of our
+associational constitution; and, when we are emancipated from the
+flesh, it is conceivable that they may no longer continue to obtain.
+
+We may assume, then, that recollection is a resultant of our associative
+processes, these themselves in the last analysis being most probably due
+to the workings of our brain.
+
+Descending more particularly into the faculty of memory, we have to
+distinguish between its potential aspect as a magazine or storehouse and
+its actual aspect as recollection now of a particular event. Our memory
+contains all sorts of items which we do not now recall, but which we may
+recall, provided a sufficient cue be offered. Both the general retention
+and the special recall are explained by association. An educated memory
+depends on an organized system of associations; and its goodness depends
+on two of their peculiarities: first, on the persistency of the
+associations; and, second, on their number.
+
+Let us consider each of these points in turn.
+
+First, the persistency of the associations. This gives what may be
+called the _quality of native retentiveness_ to the individual. If, as I
+think we are forced to, we consider the brain to be the organic
+condition by which the vestiges of our experience are associated with
+each other, we may suppose that some brains are 'wax to receive and
+marble to retain.' The slightest impressions made on them abide. Names,
+dates, prices, anecdotes, quotations, are indelibly retained, their
+several elements fixedly cohering together, so that the individual soon
+becomes a walking cyclopaedia of information. All this may occur with no
+philosophic tendency in the mind, no impulse to weave the materials
+acquired into anything like a logical system. In the books of anecdotes,
+and, more recently, in the psychology-books, we find recorded instances
+of monstrosities, as we may call them, of this desultory memory; and
+they are often otherwise very stupid men. It is, of course, by no means
+incompatible with a philosophic mind; for mental characteristics have
+infinite capacities for permutation. And, when both memory and
+philosophy combine together in one person, then indeed we have the
+highest sort of intellectual efficiency. Your Walter Scotts, your
+Leibnitzes, your Gladstones, and your Goethes, all your folio copies of
+mankind, belong to this type. Efficiency on a colossal scale would
+indeed seem to require it. For, although your philosophic or systematic
+mind without good desultory memory may know how to work out results and
+recollect where in the books to find them, the time lost in the
+searching process handicaps the thinker, and gives to the more ready
+type of individual the economical advantage.
+
+The extreme of the contrasted type, the type with associations of small
+persistency, is found in those who have almost no desultory memory at
+all. If they are also deficient in logical and systematizing power, we
+call them simply feeble intellects; and no more need to be said about
+them here. Their brain-matter, we may imagine, is like a fluid jelly, in
+which impressions may be easily made, but are soon closed over again, so
+that the brain reverts to its original indifferent state.
+
+But it may occur here, just as in other gelatinous substances, that an
+impression will vibrate throughout the brain, and send waves into other
+parts of it. In cases of this sort, although the immediate impression
+may fade out quickly, it does modify the cerebral mass; for the paths it
+makes there may remain, and become so many avenues through which the
+impression may be reproduced if they ever get excited again. And its
+liability to reproduction will depend of course upon the variety of
+these paths and upon the frequency with which they are used. Each path
+is in fact an associated process, the number of these associates
+becoming thus to a great degree a substitute for the independent
+tenacity of the original impression. As I have elsewhere written: Each
+of the associates is a hook to which it hangs, a means to fish it up
+when sunk below the surface. Together they form a network of attachments
+by which it is woven into the entire tissue of our thought. The 'secret
+of a good memory' is thus the secret of forming diverse and multiple
+associations with every fact we care to retain. But this forming of
+associations with a fact,--what is it but thinking _about_ the fact as
+much as possible? Briefly, then, of two men with the same outward
+experiences, _the one who thinks over his experiences most_, and weaves
+them into the most systematic relations with each other, will be the one
+with the best memory.
+
+But, if our ability to recollect a thing be so largely a matter of its
+associations with other things which thus becomes its cues, an important
+paedagogic consequence follows. _There can be no improvement of the
+general or elementary faculty of memory: there can only be improvement
+of our memory for special systems of associated things_; and this
+latter improvement is due to the way in which the things in question are
+woven into association with each other in the mind. Intricately or
+profoundly woven, they are held: disconnected, they tend to drop out
+just in proportion as the native brain retentiveness is poor. And no
+amount of training, drilling, repeating, and reciting employed upon the
+matter of one system of objects, the history-system, for example, will
+in the least improve either the facility or the durability with which
+objects belonging to a wholly disparate system--the system of facts of
+chemistry, for instance--tend to be retained. That system must be
+separately worked into the mind by itself,--a chemical fact which is
+thought about in connection with the other chemical facts, tending then
+to stay, but otherwise easily dropping out.
+
+We have, then, not so much a faculty of memory as many faculties of
+memory. We have as many as we have systems of objects habitually thought
+of in connection with each other. A given object is held in the memory
+by the associates it has acquired within its own system exclusively.
+Learning the facts of another system will in no wise help it to stay in
+the mind, for the simple reason that it has no 'cues' within that other
+system.
+
+We see examples of this on every hand. Most men have a good memory for
+facts connected with their own pursuits. A college athlete, who remains
+a dunce at his books, may amaze you by his knowledge of the 'records' at
+various feats and games, and prove himself a walking dictionary of
+sporting statistics. The reason is that he is constantly going over
+these things in his mind, and comparing and making series of them. They
+form for him, not so many odd facts, but a concept-system, so they
+stick. So the merchant remembers prices, the politician other
+politicians' speeches and votes, with a copiousness which astonishes
+outsiders, but which the amount of thinking they bestow on these
+subjects easily explains.
+
+The great memory for facts which a Darwin or a Spencer reveal in their
+books is not incompatible with the possession on their part of a mind
+with only a middling degree of physiological retentiveness. Let a man
+early in life set himself the task of verifying such a theory as that of
+evolution, and facts will soon cluster and cling to him like grapes to
+their stem. Their relations to the theory will hold them fast; and, the
+more of these the mind is able to discern, the greater the erudition
+will become. Meanwhile the theorist may have little, if any, desultory
+memory. Unutilizable facts may be unnoted by him, and forgotten as soon
+as heard. An ignorance almost as encyclopedic as his erudition may
+coexist with the latter, and hide, as it were, within the interstices of
+its web. Those of you who have had much to do with scholars and
+_savants_ will readily think of examples of the class of mind I mean.
+
+The best possible sort of system into which to weave an object,
+mentally, is a _rational_ system, or what is called a 'science.' Place
+the thing in its pigeon-hole in a classificatory series; explain it
+logically by its causes, and deduce from it its necessary effects; find
+out of what natural law it is an instance,--and you then know it in the
+best of all possible ways. A 'science' is thus the greatest of
+labor-saving contrivances. It relieves the memory of an immense number
+of details, replacing, as it does, merely contiguous associations by the
+logical ones of identity, similarity, or analogy. If you know a 'law,'
+you may discharge your memory of masses of particular instances, for the
+law will reproduce them for you whenever you require them. The law of
+refraction, for example: If you know that, you can with a pencil and a
+bit of paper immediately discern how a convex lens, a concave lens, or a
+prism, must severally alter the appearance of an object. But, if you
+don't know the general law, you must charge your memory separately with
+each of the three kinds of effect.
+
+A 'philosophic' system, in which all things found their rational
+explanation and were connected together as causes and effects, would be
+the perfect mnemonic system, in which the greatest economy of means
+would bring about the greatest richness of results. So that, if we have
+poor desultory memories, we can save ourselves by cultivating the
+philosophic turn of mind.
+
+There are many artificial systems of mnemonics, some public, some sold
+as secrets. They are all so many devices for training us into certain
+methodical and stereotyped _ways of thinking_ about the facts we seek to
+retain. Even were I competent, I could not here go into these systems in
+any detail. But a single example, from a popular system, will show what
+I mean. I take the number-alphabet, the great mnemonic device for
+recollecting numbers and dates. In this system each digit is
+represented by a consonant, thus: 1 is _t_ or _d_; 2, _n_; 3, _m_; 4,
+_r_; 5, _l_; 6, _sh, j, ch_, or _g_; 7, _c, k, g_, or _qu_; 8, _f_ or
+_v_; 9, _b_ or _p_; 0, _s, c_, or _z_. Suppose, now, you wish to
+remember the velocity of sound, 1,142 feet a second: _t, t, r, n_, are
+the letters you must use. They make the consonants of _tight run_, and
+it would be a 'tight run' for you to keep up such a speed. So 1649, the
+date of the execution of Charles I., may be remembered by the word
+_sharp_, which recalls the headsman's axe.
+
+Apart from the extreme difficulty of finding words that are appropriate
+in this exercise, it is clearly an excessively poor, trivial, and silly
+way of 'thinking' about dates; and the way of the historian is much
+better. He has a lot of landmark-dates already in his mind. He knows the
+historic concatenation of events, and can usually place an event at its
+right date in the chronology-table, by thinking of it in a rational way,
+referring it to its antecedents, tracing its concomitants and
+consequences, and thus ciphering out its date by connecting it with
+theirs. The artificial memory-systems, recommending, as they do, such
+irrational methods of thinking, are only to be recommended for the first
+landmarks in a system, or for such purely detached facts as enjoy no
+rational connection with the rest of our ideas. Thus the student of
+physics may remember the order of the spectral colours by the word
+_vibgyor_ which their initial letters make. The student of anatomy may
+remember the position of the Mitral valve on the Left side of the heart
+by thinking that L.M. stands also for 'long meter' in the hymn-books.
+
+You now see why 'cramming' must be so poor a mode of study. Cramming
+seeks to stamp things in by intense application immediately before the
+ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form but few associations. On the
+other hand, the same thing recurring on different days, in different
+contexts, read, recited on, referred to again and again, related to
+other things and reviewed, gets well wrought into the mental structure.
+This is the reason why you should enforce on your pupils habits of
+continuous application. There is no moral turpitude in cramming. It
+would be the best, because the most economical, mode of study if it led
+to the results desired. But it does not, and your older pupils can
+readily be made to see the reason why.
+
+It follows also, from what has been said, that _the popular idea that
+'the Memory,' in the sense of a general elementary faculty, can be
+improved by training, is a great mistake_. Your memory for facts of a
+certain class can be improved very much by training in that class of
+facts, because the incoming new fact will then find all sorts of
+analogues and associates already there, and these will keep it liable to
+recall. But other kinds of fact will reap none of that benefit, and,
+unless one have been also trained and versed in _their_ class, will be
+at the mercy of the mere crude retentiveness of the individual, which,
+as we have seen, is practically a fixed quantity. Nevertheless, one
+often hears people say: "A great sin was committed against me in my
+youth: my teachers entirely failed to exercise my memory. If they had
+only made me learn a lot of things by heart at school, I should not be,
+as I am now, forgetful of everything I read and hear." This is a great
+mistake: learning poetry by heart will make it easier to learn and
+remember other poetry, but nothing else; and so of dates; and so of
+chemistry and geography.
+
+But, after what I have said, I am sure you will need no farther argument
+on this point; and I therefore pass it by.
+
+But, since it has brought me to speak of learning things by heart, I
+think that a general practical remark about verbal memorizing may now
+not be out of place. The excesses of old-fashioned verbal memorizing,
+and the immense advantages of object-teaching in the earlier stages of
+culture, have perhaps led those who philosophize about teaching to an
+unduly strong reaction; and learning things by heart is now probably
+somewhat too much despised. For, when all is said and done, the fact
+remains that verbal material is, on the whole, the handiest and most
+useful material in which thinking can be carried on. Abstract
+conceptions are far and away the most economical instruments of thought,
+and abstract conceptions are fixed and incarnated for us in words.
+Statistical inquiry would seem to show that, as men advance in life,
+they tend to make less and less use of visual images, and more and more
+use of words. One of the first things that Mr. Galton discovered was
+that this appeared to be the case with the members of the Royal Society
+whom he questioned as to their mental images. I should say, therefore,
+that constant exercise in verbal memorizing must still be an
+indispensable feature in all sound education. Nothing is more
+deplorable than that inarticulate and helpless sort of mind that is
+reminded by everything of some quotation, case, or anecdote, which it
+cannot now exactly recollect. Nothing, on the other hand, is more
+convenient to its possessor, or more delightful to his comrades, than a
+mind able, in telling a story, to give the exact words of the dialogue
+or to furnish a quotation accurate and complete. In every branch of
+study there are happily turned, concise, and handy formulas which in an
+incomparable way sum up results. The mind that can retain such formulas
+is in so far a superior mind, and the communication of them to the pupil
+ought always to be one of the teacher's favorite tasks.
+
+In learning 'by heart,' there are, however, efficient and inefficient
+methods; and, by making the pupil skilful in the best method, the
+teacher can both interest him and abridge the task. The best method is
+of course not to 'hammer in' the sentences, by mere reiteration, but to
+analyze them, and think. For example, if the pupil should have to learn
+this last sentence, let him first strip out its grammatical core, and
+learn, "The best method is not to hammer in, but to analyze," and then
+add the amplificative and restrictive clauses, bit by bit, thus: "The
+best method is of course not to hammer in _the sentences_, but to
+analyze _them and think_." Then finally insert the words '_by mere
+reiteration_,' and the sentence is complete, and both better understood
+and quicker remembered than by a more purely mechanical method.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In conclusion, I must say a word about the contributions to
+our knowledge of memory which have recently come from the
+laboratory-psychologists. Many of the enthusiasts for scientific or
+brass-instrument child-study are taking accurate measurements of
+children's elementary faculties, and among these what we may call
+_immediate memory_ admits of easy measurement. All we need do is to
+exhibit to the child a series of letters, syllables, figures, pictures,
+or what-not, at intervals of one, two, three, or more seconds, or to
+sound a similar series of names at the same intervals, within his
+hearing, and then see how completely he can reproduce the list, either
+directly, or after an interval of ten, twenty, or sixty seconds, or some
+longer space of time. According to the results of this exercise, the
+pupils may be rated in a memory-scale; and some persons go so far as to
+think that the teacher should modify her treatment of the child
+according to the strength or feebleness of its faculty as thus made
+known.
+
+Now I can only repeat here what I said to you when treating of
+attention: man is too complex a being for light to be thrown on his real
+efficiency by measuring any one mental faculty taken apart from its
+consensus in the working whole. Such an exercise as this, dealing with
+incoherent and insipid objects, with no logical connection with each
+other, or practical significance outside of the 'test,' is an exercise
+the like of which in real life we are hardly ever called upon to
+perform. In real life, our memory is always used in the service of some
+interest: we remember things which we care for or which are associated
+with things we care for; and the child who stands at the bottom of the
+scale thus experimentally established might, by dint of the strength of
+his passion for a subject, and in consequence of the logical association
+into which he weaves the actual materials of his experience, be a very
+effective memorizer indeed, and do his school-tasks on the whole much
+better than an immediate parrot who might stand at the top of the
+'scientifically accurate' list.
+
+This preponderance of interest, of passion, in determining the results
+of a human being's working life, obtains throughout. No elementary
+measurement, capable of being performed in a laboratory, can throw any
+light on the actual efficiency of the subject; for the vital thing about
+him, his emotional and moral energy and doggedness, can be measured by
+no single experiment, and becomes known only by the total results in the
+long run. A blind man like Huber, with his passion for bees and ants,
+can observe them through other people's eyes better than these can
+through their own. A man born with neither arms nor legs, like the late
+Kavanagh, M.P.--and what an icy heart his mother must have had about him
+in his babyhood, and how 'negative' would the laboratory-measurements of
+his motor-functions have been!--can be an adventurous traveller, an
+equestrian and sportsman, and lead an athletic outdoor life. Mr. Romanes
+studied the elementary rate of apperception in a large number of persons
+by making them read a paragraph as fast as they could take it in, and
+then immediately write down all they could reproduce of its contents. He
+found astonishing differences in the rapidity, some taking four times as
+long as others to absorb the paragraph, and the swiftest readers being,
+as a rule, the best immediate recollectors, too. But not,--and this is
+my point,--_not_ the most _intellectually capable subjects_, as tested
+by the results of what Mr. Romanes rightly names 'genuine' intellectual
+work; for he tried the experiment with several highly distinguished men
+in science and literature, and most of them turned out to be slow
+readers.
+
+In the light of all such facts one may well believe that the total
+impression which a perceptive teacher will get of the pupil's condition,
+as indicated by his general temper and manner, by the listlessness or
+alertness, by the ease or painfulness with which his school work is
+done, will be of much more value than those unreal experimental tests,
+those pedantic elementary measurements of fatigue, memory, association,
+and attention, etc., which are urged upon us as the only basis of a
+genuinely scientific pedagogy. Such measurements can give us useful
+information only when we combine them with observations made without
+brass instruments, upon the total demeanor of the measured individual,
+by teachers with eyes in their heads and common sense, and some feeling
+for the concrete facts of human nature in their hearts.
+
+Depend upon it, no one need be too much cast down by the discovery of
+his deficiency in any elementary faculty of the mind. What tells in life
+is the whole mind working together, and the deficiencies of any one
+faculty can be compensated by the efforts of the rest. You can be an
+artist without visual images, a reader without eyes, a mass of erudition
+with a bad elementary memory. In almost any subject your passion for the
+subject will save you. If you only care enough for a result, you will
+almost certainly attain it. If you wish to be rich, you will be rich; if
+you wish to be learned, you will be learned; if you wish to be good, you
+will be good. Only you must, then, _really_ wish these things, and wish
+them with exclusiveness, and not wish at the same time a hundred other
+incompatible things just as strongly.
+
+One of the most important discoveries of the 'scientific' sort that have
+recently been made in psychology is that of Mr. Galton and others
+concerning the great variations among individuals in the type of their
+imagination. Every one is now familiar with the fact that human beings
+vary enormously in the brilliancy, completeness, definiteness, and
+extent of their visual images. These are singularly perfect in a large
+number of individuals, and in a few are so rudimentary as hardly to
+exist. The same is true of the auditory and motor images, and probably
+of those of every kind; and the recent discovery of distinct brain-areas
+for the various orders of sensation would seem to provide a physical
+basis for such variations and discrepancies. The facts, as I said, are
+nowadays so popularly known that I need only remind you of their
+existence. They might seem at first sight of practical importance to the
+teacher; and, indeed, teachers have been recommended to sort their
+pupils in this way, and treat them as the result falls out. You should
+interrogate them as to their imagery, it is said, or exhibit lists of
+written words to their eyes, and then sound similar lists in their ears,
+and see by which channel a child retains most words. Then, in dealing
+with that child, make your appeals predominantly through that channel.
+If the class were very small, results of some distinctness might
+doubtless thus be obtained by a painstaking teacher. But it is obvious
+that in the usual schoolroom no such differentiation of appeal is
+possible; and the only really useful practical lesson that emerges from
+this analytic psychology in the conduct of large schools is the lesson
+already reached in a purely empirical way, that the teacher ought
+always to impress the class through as many sensible channels as he can.
+Talk and write and draw on blackboard, permit the pupils to talk, and
+make them write and draw, exhibit pictures, plans, and curves, have your
+diagrams colored differently in their different parts, etc.; and out of
+the whole variety of impressions the individual child will find the most
+lasting ones for himself. In all primary school work this principle of
+multiple impressions is well recognized, so I need say no more about it
+here.
+
+This principle of multiplying channels and varying associations and
+appeals is important, not only for teaching pupils to remember, but for
+teaching them to understand. It runs, in fact, through the whole
+teaching art.
+
+One word about the unconscious and unreproducible part of our
+acquisitions, and I shall have done with the topic of memory.
+
+Professor Ebbinghaus, in a heroic little investigation into the laws of
+memory which he performed a dozen or more years ago by the method of
+learning lists of nonsense syllables, devised a method of measuring the
+rate of our forgetfulness, which lays bare an important law of the mind.
+
+His method was to read over his list until he could repeat it once by
+heart unhesitatingly. The number of repetitions required for this was a
+measure of the difficulty of the learning in each particular case. Now,
+after having once learned a piece in this way, if we wait five minutes,
+we find it impossible to repeat it again in the same unhesitating
+manner. We must read it over again to revive some of the syllables,
+which have already dropped out or got transposed. Ebbinghaus now
+systematically studied the number of readings-over which were necessary
+to revive the unhesitating recollection of the piece after five minutes,
+half an hour, an hour, a day, a week, a month, had elapsed. The number
+of rereadings required he took to be a measure of the _amount of
+forgetting_ that had occurred in the elapsed interval. And he found some
+remarkable facts. The process of forgetting, namely, is vastly more
+rapid at first than later on. Thus full half of the piece seems to be
+forgotten within the first half-hour, two-thirds of it are forgotten at
+the end of eight hours, but only four-fifths at the end of a month. He
+made no trials beyond one month of interval; but, if we ourselves
+prolong ideally the curve of remembrance, whose beginning his
+experiments thus obtain, it is natural to suppose that, no matter how
+long a time might elapse, the curve would never descend quite so low as
+to touch the zero-line. In other words, no matter how long ago we may
+have learned a poem, and no matter how complete our inability to
+reproduce it now may be, yet the first learning will still show its
+lingering effects in the abridgment of the time required for learning it
+again. In short, Professor Ebbinghaus's experiments show that things
+which we are quite unable definitely to recall have nevertheless
+impressed themselves, in some way, upon the structure of the mind. We
+are different for having once learned them. The resistances in our
+systems of brain-paths are altered. Our apprehensions are quickened. Our
+conclusions from certain premises are probably not just what they would
+be if those modifications were not there. The latter influence the whole
+margin of our consciousness, even though their products, not being
+distinctly reproducible, do not directly figure at the focus of the
+field.
+
+The teacher should draw a lesson from these facts. We are all too apt to
+measure the gains of our pupils by their proficiency in directly
+reproducing in a recitation or an examination such matters as they may
+have learned, and inarticulate power in them is something of which we
+always underestimate the value. The boy who tells us, "I know the
+answer, but I can't say what it is," we treat as practically identical
+with him who knows absolutely nothing about the answer at all. But this
+is a great mistake. It is but a small part of our experience in life
+that we are ever able articulately to recall. And yet the whole of it
+has had its influence in shaping our character and defining our
+tendencies to judge and act. Although the ready memory is a great
+blessing to its possessor, the vaguer memory of a subject, of having
+once had to do with it, of its neighborhood, and of where we may go to
+recover it again, constitutes in most men and women the chief fruit of
+their education. This is true even in professional education. The
+doctor, the lawyer, are seldom able to decide upon a case off-hand. They
+differ from other men only through the fact that they know how to get at
+the materials for decision in five minutes or half an hour: whereas the
+layman is unable to get at the materials at all, not knowing in what
+books and indexes to look or not understanding the technical terms.
+
+Be patient, then, and sympathetic with the type of mind that cuts a
+poor figure in examinations. It may, in the long examination which life
+sets us, come out in the end in better shape than the glib and ready
+reproducer, its passions being deeper, its purposes more worthy, its
+combining power less commonplace, and its total mental output
+consequently more important.
+
+Such are the chief points which it has seemed worth while for me to call
+to your notice under the head of memory. We can sum them up for
+practical purposes by saying that the art of remembering is the art of
+_thinking_; and by adding, with Dr. Pick, that, when we wish to fix a
+new thing in either our own mind or a pupil's, our conscious effort
+should not be so much to _impress_ and _retain_ it as to _connect_ it
+with something else already there. The connecting _is_ the thinking;
+and, if we attend clearly to the connection, the connected thing will
+certainly be likely to remain within recall.
+
+I shall next ask you to consider the process by which we acquire new
+knowledge,--the process of 'Apperception,' as it is called, by which we
+receive and deal with new experiences, and revise our stock of ideas so
+as to form new or improved conceptions.
+
+
+
+
+XIII. THE ACQUISITION OF IDEAS
+
+
+The images of our past experiences, of whatever nature they may be,
+visual or verbal, blurred and dim, vivid and distinct, abstract or
+concrete, need not be memory images, in the strict sense of the word.
+That is, they need not rise before the mind in a marginal fringe or
+context of concomitant circumstances, which mean for us their _date_.
+They may be mere conceptions, floating pictures of an object, or of its
+type or class. In this undated condition, we call them products of
+'imagination' or 'conception.' Imagination is the term commonly used
+where the object represented is thought of as an individual thing.
+Conception is the term where we think of it as a type or class. For our
+present purpose the distinction is not important; and I will permit
+myself to use either the word 'conception,' or the still vaguer word
+'idea,' to designate the inner objects of contemplation, whether these
+be individual things, like 'the sun' or 'Julius Caesar,' or classes of
+things, like 'animal kingdom,' or, finally, entirely abstract
+attributes, like 'rationality' or 'rectitude.'
+
+The result of our education is to fill the mind little by little, as
+experiences accrete, with a stock of such ideas. In the illustration I
+used at our first meeting, of the child snatching the toy and getting
+slapped, the vestiges left by the first experience answered to so many
+ideas which he acquired thereby,--ideas that remained with him
+associated in a certain order, and from the last one of which the child
+eventually proceeded to act. The sciences of grammar and of logic are
+little more than attempts methodically to classify all such acquired
+ideas and to trace certain laws of relationship among them. The forms of
+relation between them, becoming themselves in turn noticed by the mind,
+are treated as conceptions of a higher and more abstract order, as when
+we speak of a syllogistic relation' between propositions, or of four
+quantities making a 'proportion,' or of the 'inconsistency' of two
+conceptions, or the 'implication' of one in the other.
+
+So you see that the process of education, taken in a large way, may be
+described as nothing but the process of acquiring ideas or conceptions,
+the best educated mind being the mind which has the largest stock of
+them, ready to meet the largest possible variety of the emergencies of
+life. The lack of education means only the failure to have acquired
+them, and the consequent liability to be 'floored' and 'rattled' in the
+vicissitudes of experience.
+
+In all this process of acquiring conceptions, a certain instinctive
+order is followed. There is a native tendency to assimilate certain
+kinds of conception at one age, and other kinds of conception at a later
+age. During the first seven or eight years of childhood the mind is most
+interested in the sensible properties of material things.
+_Constructiveness_ is the instinct most active; and by the incessant
+hammering and sawing, and dressing and undressing dolls, putting of
+things together and taking them apart, the child not only trains the
+muscles to co-ordinate action, but accumulates a store of physical
+conceptions which are the basis of his knowledge of the material world
+through life. Object-teaching and manual training wisely extend the
+sphere of this order of acquisition. Clay, wood, metals, and the various
+kinds of tools are made to contribute to the store. A youth brought up
+with a sufficiently broad basis of this kind is always at home in the
+world. He stands within the pale. He is acquainted with Nature, and
+Nature in a certain sense is acquainted with him. Whereas the youth
+brought up alone at home, with no acquaintance with anything but the
+printed page, is always afflicted with a certain remoteness from the
+material facts of life, and a correlative insecurity of consciousness
+which make of him a kind of alien on the earth in which he ought to feel
+himself perfectly at home.
+
+I already said something of this in speaking of the constructive
+impulse, and I must not repeat myself. Moreover, you fully realize, I am
+sure, how important for life,--for the moral tone of life, quite apart
+from definite practical pursuits,--is this sense of readiness for
+emergencies which a man gains through early familiarity and acquaintance
+with the world of material things. To have grown up on a farm, to have
+haunted a carpenter's and blacksmith's shop, to have handled horses and
+cows and boats and guns, and to have ideas and abilities connected with
+such objects are an inestimable part of youthful acquisition. After
+adolescence it is rare to be able to get into familiar touch with any of
+these primitive things. The instinctive propensions have faded, and the
+habits are hard to acquire.
+
+Accordingly, one of the best fruits of the 'child-study' movement has
+been to reinstate all these activities to their proper place in a sound
+system of education. _Feed_ the growing human being, feed him with the
+sort of experience for which from year to year he shows a natural
+craving, and he will develop in adult life a sounder sort of mental
+tissue, even though he may seem to be 'wasting' a great deal of his
+growing time, in the eyes of those for whom the only channels of
+learning are books and verbally communicated information.
+
+It is not till adolescence is reached that the mind grows able to take
+in the more abstract aspects of experience, the hidden similarities and
+distinctions between things, and especially their causal sequences.
+Rational knowledge of such things as mathematics, mechanics, chemistry,
+and biology, is now possible; and the acquisition of conceptions of this
+order form the next phase of education. Later still, not till
+adolescence is well advanced, does the mind awaken to a systematic
+interest in abstract human relations--moral relations, properly so
+called,--to sociological ideas and to metaphysical abstractions.
+
+This general order of sequence is followed traditionally of course in
+the schoolroom. It is foreign to my purpose to do more than indicate
+that general psychological principle of the successive order of
+awakening of the faculties on which the whole thing rests. I have spoken
+of it already, apropos of the transitoriness of instincts. Just as many
+a youth has to go permanently without an adequate stock of conceptions
+of a certain order, because experiences of that order were not yielded
+at the time when new curiosity was most acute, so it will conversely
+happen that many another youth is spoiled for a certain subject of study
+(although he would have enjoyed it well if led into it at a later age)
+through having had it thrust upon him so prematurely that disgust was
+created, and the bloom quite taken off from future trials. I think I
+have seen college students unfitted forever for 'philosophy' from having
+taken that study up a year too soon.
+
+In all these later studies, verbal material is the vehicle by which the
+mind thinks. The abstract conceptions of physics and sociology may, it
+is true, be embodied in visual or other images of phenomena, but they
+need not be so; and the truth remains that, after adolescence has begun,
+"words, words, words," must constitute a large part, and an always
+larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn. This
+is so even in the natural sciences, so far as these are causal and
+rational, and not merely confined to description. So I go back to what I
+said awhile ago apropos of verbal memorizing. The more accurately words
+are learned, the better, if only the teacher make sure that what they
+signify is also understood. It is the failure of this latter condition,
+in so much of the old-fashioned recitation, that has caused that
+reaction against 'parrot-like reproduction' that we are so familiar with
+to-day. A friend of mine, visiting a school, was asked to examine a
+young class in geography. Glancing, at the book, she said: "Suppose you
+should dig a hole in the ground, hundreds of feet deep, how should you
+find it at the bottom,--warmer or colder than on top?" None of the class
+replying, the teacher said: "I'm sure they know, but I think you don't
+ask the question quite rightly. Let me try." So, taking the book, she
+asked: "In what condition is the interior of the globe?" and received
+the immediate answer from half the class at once: "The interior of the
+globe is in a condition of _igneous fusion_." Better exclusive
+object-teaching than such verbal recitations as that; and yet verbal
+reproduction, intelligently connected with more objective work, must
+always play a leading, and surely _the_ leading, part in education. Our
+modern reformers, in their books, write too exclusively of the earliest
+years of the pupil. These lend themselves better to explicit treatment;
+and I myself, in dwelling so much upon the native impulses, and
+object-teaching, and anecdotes, and all that, have paid my tribute to
+the line of least resistance in describing. Yet away back in childhood
+we find the beginnings of purely intellectual curiosity, and the
+intelligence of abstract terms. The object-teaching is mainly to
+_launch_ the pupils, with some concrete conceptions of the facts
+concerned, upon the more abstract ideas.
+
+To hear some authorities on teaching, however, you would suppose that
+geography not only began, but ended with the school-yard and neighboring
+hill, that physics was one endless round of repeating the same sort of
+tedious weighing and measuring operation: whereas a very few examples
+are usually sufficient to set the imagination free on genuine lines, and
+then what the mind craves is more rapid, general, and abstract
+treatment. I heard a lady say that she had taken her child to the
+kindergarten, "but he is so bright that he saw through it immediately."
+Too many school children 'see' as immediately 'through' the namby-pamby
+attempts of the softer pedagogy to lubricate things for them, and make
+them interesting. Even they can enjoy abstractions, provided they be of
+the proper order; and it is a poor compliment to their rational appetite
+to think that anecdotes about little Tommies and little Jennies are the
+only kind of things their minds can digest.
+
+But here, as elsewhere, it is a matter of more or less; and, in the last
+resort, the teacher's own tact is the only thing that can bring out the
+right effect. The great difficulty with abstractions is that of knowing
+just what meaning the pupil attaches to the terms he uses. The words may
+sound all right, but the meaning remains the child's own secret. So
+varied forms of words must be insisted on, to bring the secret out. And
+a strange secret does it often prove. A relative of mine was trying to
+explain to a little girl what was meant by 'the passive voice': "Suppose
+that you kill me: you who do the killing are in the active voice, and I,
+who am killed, am in the passive voice." "But how can you speak if
+you're killed?" said the child. "Oh, well, you may suppose that I am
+not yet quite dead!" The next day the child was asked, in class, to
+explain the passive voice, and said, "It's the kind of voice you speak
+with when you ain't quite dead."
+
+In such a case as this the illustration ought to have been more varied.
+Every one's memory will probably furnish examples of the fantastic
+meaning which their childhood attached to certain verbal statements (in
+poetry often), and which their elders, not having any reason to suspect,
+never corrected. I remember being greatly moved emotionally at the age
+of eight by the ballad of Lord Ullin's Daughter. Yet I thought that the
+staining of the heather by the blood was the evil chiefly dreaded, and
+that, when the boatman said,
+
+  "I'll row you o'er the ferry.
+  It is not for your silver bright,
+  But for your winsome lady,"
+
+he was to receive the lady for his pay. Similarly, I recently found that
+one of my own children was reading (and accepting) a verse of Tennyson's
+In Memoriam as
+
+  "Ring out the _food_ of rich and poor,
+     Ring in _redness_ to all mankind,"
+
+and finding no inward difficulty.
+
+The only safeguard against this sort of misconceiving is to insist on
+varied statement, and to bring the child's conceptions, wherever it be
+possible, to some sort of practical test.
+
+Let us next pass to the subject of Apperception.
+
+
+
+
+XIV. APPERCEPTION
+
+
+'Apperception' is a word which cuts a great figure in the pedagogics of
+the present day. Read, for example, this advertisement of a certain
+text-book, which I take from an educational journal:--
+
+     #WHAT IS APPERCEPTION?#
+
+     For an explanation of Apperception see Blank's PSYCHOLOGY,
+     Vol. ---- of the ---- Education Series, just published.
+
+     The difference between Perception and Apperception is
+     explained for the teacher in the preface to Blank's
+     PSYCHOLOGY.
+
+     Many teachers are inquiring, "What is the meaning of
+     Apperception in educational psychology?" Just the book for
+     them is Blank's PSYCHOLOGY in which the idea was first
+     expounded.
+
+     The most important idea in educational psychology is
+     Apperception. The teacher may find this expounded in Blank's
+     PSYCHOLOGY. The idea of Apperception is making a revolution
+     in educational methods in Germany. It is explained in Blank's
+     PSYCHOLOGY, Vol. ---- of the ---- Education Series, just
+     published.
+
+     Blank's PSYCHOLOGY will be mailed prepaid to any address on
+     receipt of $1.00.
+
+
+Such an advertisement is in sober earnest a disgrace to all concerned;
+and such talk as it indulges in is the sort of thing I had in view when
+I said at our first meeting that the teachers were suffering at the
+present day from a certain industrious mystification on the part of
+editors and publishers. Perhaps the word 'apperception' flourished in
+their eyes and ears as it nowadays often is, embodies as much of this
+mystification as any other single thing. The conscientious young teacher
+is led to believe that it contains a recondite and portentous secret, by
+losing the true inwardness of which her whole career may be shattered.
+And yet, when she turns to the books and reads about it, it seems so
+trivial and commonplace a matter,--meaning nothing more than the manner
+in which we receive a thing into our minds,--that she fears she must
+have missed the point through the shallowness of her intelligence, and
+goes about thereafter afflicted with a sense either of uncertainty or of
+stupidity, and in each case remaining mortified at being so inadequate
+to her mission.
+
+Now apperception is an extremely useful word in pedagogics, and offers a
+convenient name for a process to which every teacher must frequently
+refer. But it verily means nothing more than the act of taking a thing
+into the mind. It corresponds to nothing peculiar or elementary in
+psychology, being only one of the innumerable results of the
+psychological process of association of ideas; and psychology itself can
+easily dispense with the word, useful as it may be in pedagogics.
+
+The gist of the matter is this: Every impression that comes in from
+without, be it a sentence which we hear, an object of vision, or an
+effluvium which assails our nose, no sooner enters our consciousness
+than it is drafted off in some determinate direction or other, making
+connection with the other materials already there, and finally producing
+what we call our reaction. The particular connections it strikes into
+are determined by our past experiences and the 'associations' of the
+present sort of impression with them. If, for instance, you hear me call
+out A, B, C, it is ten to one that you will react on the impression by
+inwardly or outwardly articulating D, E, F. The impression arouses its
+old associates: they go out to meet it; it is received by them,
+recognized by the mind as 'the beginning of the alphabet.' It is the
+fate of every impression thus to fall into a mind preoccupied with
+memories, ideas, and interests, and by these it is taken in. Educated as
+we already are, we never get an experience that remains for us
+completely nondescript: it always _reminds_ of something similar in
+quality, or of some context that might have surrounded it before, and
+which it now in some way suggests. This mental escort which the mind
+supplies is drawn, of course, from the mind's ready-made stock. We
+_conceive_ the impression in some definite way. We dispose of it
+according to our acquired possibilities, be they few or many, in the way
+of 'ideas.' This way of taking in the object is the process of
+apperception. The conceptions which meet and assimilate it are called by
+Herbart the 'apperceiving mass.' The apperceived impression is engulfed
+in this, and the result is a new field of consciousness, of which one
+part (and often a very small part) comes from the outer world, and
+another part (sometimes by far the largest) comes from the previous
+contents of the mind.
+
+I think that you see plainly enough now that the process of apperception
+is what I called it a moment ago, a resultant of the association of
+ideas. The product is a sort of fusion of the new with the old, in which
+it is often impossible to distinguish the share of the two factors. For
+example, when we listen to a person speaking or read a page of print,
+much of what we think we see or hear is supplied from our memory. We
+overlook misprints, imagining the right letters, though we see the wrong
+ones; and how little we actually hear, when we listen to speech, we
+realize when we go to a foreign theatre; for there what troubles us is
+not so much that we cannot understand what the actors say as that we
+cannot hear their words. The fact is that we hear quite as little under
+similar conditions at home, only our mind, being fuller of English
+verbal associations, supplies the requisite material for comprehension
+upon a much slighter auditory hint.
+
+In all the apperceptive operations of the mind, a certain general law
+makes itself felt,--the law of economy. In admitting a new body of
+experience, we instinctively seek to disturb as little as possible our
+pre-existing stock of ideas. We always try to name a new experience in
+some way which will assimilate it to what we already know. We hate
+anything _absolutely_ new, anything without any name, and for which a
+new name must be forged. So we take the nearest name, even though it be
+inappropriate. A child will call snow, when he sees it for the first
+time, sugar or white butterflies. The sail of a boat he calls a curtain;
+an egg in its shell, seen for the first time, he calls a pretty potato;
+an orange, a ball; a folding corkscrew, a pair of bad scissors. Caspar
+Hauser called the first geese he saw horses, and the Polynesians called
+Captain Cook's horses pigs. Mr. Rooper has written a little book on
+apperception, to which he gives the title of "A Pot of Green Feathers,"
+that being the name applied to a pot of ferns by a child who had never
+seen ferns before.
+
+In later life this economical tendency to leave the old undisturbed
+leads to what we know as 'old fogyism.' A new idea or a fact which would
+entail extensive rearrangement of the previous system of beliefs is
+always ignored or extruded from the mind in case it cannot be
+sophistically reinterpreted so as to tally harmoniously with the system.
+We have all conducted discussions with middle-aged people, overpowered
+them with our reasons, forced them to admit our contention, and a week
+later found them back as secure and constant in their old opinion as if
+they had never conversed with us at all. We call them old fogies; but
+there are young fogies, too. Old fogyism begins at a younger age than
+we think. I am almost afraid to say so, but I believe that in the
+majority of human beings it begins at about twenty-five.
+
+In some of the books we find the various forms of apperception codified,
+and their subdivisions numbered and ticketed in tabular form in the way
+so delightful to the pedagogic eye. In one book which I remember reading
+there were sixteen different types of apperception discriminated from
+each other. There was associative apperception, subsumptive
+apperception, assimilative apperception, and others up to sixteen. It is
+needless to say that this is nothing but an exhibition of the crass
+artificiality which has always haunted psychology, and which perpetuates
+itself by lingering along, especially in these works which are
+advertised as 'written for the use of teachers.' The flowing life of the
+mind is sorted into parcels suitable for presentation in the
+recitation-room, and chopped up into supposed 'processes' with long
+Greek and Latin names, which in real life have no distinct existence.
+
+There is no reason, if we are classing the different types of
+apperception, why we should stop at sixteen rather than sixteen hundred.
+There are as many types of apperception as there are possible ways in
+which an incoming experience may be reacted on by an individual mind. A
+little while ago, at Buffalo, I was the guest of a lady who, a fortnight
+before, had taken her seven-year-old boy for the first time to Niagara
+Falls. The child silently glared at the phenomenon until his mother,
+supposing him struck speechless by its sublimity, said, "Well, my boy,
+what do you think of it?" to which, "Is that the kind of spray I spray
+my nose with?" was the boy's only reply. That was his mode of
+apperceiving the spectacle. You may claim this as a particular type, and
+call it by the Greek name of rhinotherapeutical apperception, if you
+like; and, if you do, you will hardly be more trivial or artificial than
+are some of the authors of the books.
+
+M. Perez, in one of his books on childhood, gives a good example of the
+different modes of apperception of the same phenomenon which are
+possible at different stages of individual experience. A dwelling-house
+took fire, and an infant in the family, witnessing the conflagration
+from the arms of his nurse, standing outside, expressed nothing but the
+liveliest delight at its brilliancy. But, when the bell of the fire
+engine was heard approaching, the child was thrown by the sound into a
+paroxysm of fear, strange sounds being, as you know, very alarming to
+young children. In what opposite ways must the child's parents have
+apperceived the burning house and the engine respectively!
+
+The self-same person, according to the line of thought he may be in, or
+to his emotional mood, will apperceive the same impression quite
+differently on different occasions. A medical or engineering expert
+retained on one side of a case will not apperceive the facts in the same
+way as if the other side had retained him. When people are at
+loggerheads about the interpretation of a fact, it usually shows that
+they have too few heads of classification to apperceive by; for, as a
+general thing, the fact of such a dispute is enough to show that neither
+one of their rival interpretations is a perfect fit. Both sides deal
+with the matter by approximation, squeezing it under the handiest or
+least disturbing conception: whereas it would, nine times out of ten, be
+better to enlarge their stock of ideas or invent some altogether new
+title for the phenomenon.
+
+Thus, in biology, we used to have interminable discussion as to whether
+certain single-celled organisms were animals or vegetables, until
+Haeckel introduced the new apperceptive name of Protista, which ended
+the disputes. In law courts no _tertium quid_ is recognized between
+insanity and sanity. If sane, a man is punished: if insane, acquitted;
+and it is seldom hard to find two experts who will take opposite views
+of his case. All the while, nature is more subtle than our doctors. Just
+as a room is neither dark nor light absolutely, but might be dark for a
+watchmaker's uses, and yet light enough to eat in or play in, so a man
+may be sane for some purposes and insane for others,--sane enough to be
+left at large, yet not sane enough to take care of his financial
+affairs. The word 'crank,' which became familiar at the time of
+Guiteau's trial, fulfilled the need of a _tertium quid_. The foreign
+terms 'desequilibre,' 'hereditary degenerate,' and 'psychopathic'
+subject, have arisen in response to the same need.
+
+The whole progress of our sciences goes on by the invention of newly
+forged technical names whereby to designate the newly remarked aspects
+of phenomena,--phenomena which could only be squeezed with violence into
+the pigeonholes of the earlier stock of conceptions. As time goes on,
+our vocabulary becomes thus ever more and more voluminous, having to
+keep up with the ever-growing multitude of our stock of apperceiving
+ideas.
+
+In this gradual process of interaction between the new and the old, not
+only is the new modified and determined by the particular sort of old
+which apperceives it, but the apperceiving mass, the old itself, is
+modified by the particular kind of new which it assimilates. Thus, to
+take the stock German example of the child brought up in a house where
+there are no tables but square ones, 'table' means for him a thing in
+which square corners are essential. But, if he goes to a house where
+there are round tables and still calls them tables, his apperceiving
+notion 'table' acquires immediately a wider inward content. In this way,
+our conceptions are constantly dropping characters once supposed
+essential, and including others once supposed inadmissible. The
+extension of the notion 'beast' to porpoises and whales, of the notion
+'organism' to society, are familiar examples of what I mean.
+
+But be our conceptions adequate or inadequate, and be our stock of them
+large or small, they are all we have to work with. If an educated man
+is, as I said, a group of organized tendencies to conduct, what prompts
+the conduct is in every case the man's conception of the way in which to
+name and classify the actual emergency. The more adequate the stock of
+ideas, the more 'able' is the man, the more uniformly appropriate is his
+behavior likely to be. When later we take up the subject of the will, we
+shall see that the essential preliminary to every decision is the
+finding of the right _names_ under which to class the proposed
+alternatives of conduct. He who has few names is in so far forth an
+incompetent deliberator. The names--and each name stands for a
+conception or idea--are our instruments for handling our problems and
+solving our dilemmas. Now, when we think of this, we are too apt to
+forget an important fact, which is that in most human beings the stock
+of names and concepts is mostly acquired during the years of adolescence
+and the earliest years of adult life. I probably shocked you a moment
+ago by saying that most men begin to be old fogies at the age of
+twenty-five. It is true that a grown-up adult keeps gaining well into
+middle age a great knowledge of details, and a great acquaintance with
+individual cases connected with his profession or business life. In
+this sense, his conceptions increase during a very long period; for his
+knowledge grows more extensive and minute. But the larger categories of
+conception, the sorts of thing, and wider classes of relation between
+things, of which we take cognizance, are all got into the mind at a
+comparatively youthful date. Few men ever do acquaint themselves with
+the principles of a new science after even twenty-five. If you do not
+study political economy in college, it is a thousand to one that its
+main conceptions will remain unknown to you through life. Similarly with
+biology, similarly with electricity. What percentage of persons now
+fifty years old have any definite conception whatever of a dynamo, or
+how the trolley-cars are made to run? Surely, a small fraction of one
+per cent. But the boys in colleges are all acquiring these conceptions.
+
+There is a sense of infinite potentiality in us all, when young, which
+makes some of us draw up lists of books we intend to read hereafter, and
+makes most of us think that we can easily acquaint ourselves with all
+sorts of things which we are now neglecting by studying them out
+hereafter in the intervals of leisure of our business lives. Such good
+intentions are hardly ever carried out. The conceptions acquired before
+thirty remain usually the only ones we ever gain. Such exceptional cases
+of perpetually self-renovating youth as Mr. Gladstone's only prove, by
+the admiration they awaken, the universality of the rule. And it may
+well solemnize a teacher, and confirm in him a healthy sense of the
+importance of his mission, to feel how exclusively dependent upon his
+present ministrations in the way of imparting conceptions the pupil's
+future life is probably bound to be.
+
+
+
+
+XV. THE WILL
+
+
+Since mentality terminates naturally in outward conduct, the final
+chapter in psychology has to be the chapter on the will. But the word
+'will' can be used in a broader and in a narrower sense. In the broader
+sense, it designates our entire capacity for impulsive and active life,
+including our instinctive reactions and those forms of behavior that
+have become secondarily automatic and semi-unconscious through frequent
+repetition. In the narrower sense, acts of will are such acts only as
+cannot be inattentively performed. A distinct idea of what they are, and
+a deliberate _fiat_ on the mind's part, must precede their execution.
+
+Such acts are often characterized by hesitation, and accompanied by a
+feeling, altogether peculiar, of resolve, a feeling which may or may not
+carry with it a further feeling of effort. In my earlier talks, I said
+so much of our impulsive tendencies that I will restrict myself in what
+follows to volition in this narrower sense of the term.
+
+All our deeds were considered by the early psychologists to be due to a
+peculiar faculty called the will, without whose fiat action could not
+occur. Thoughts and impressions, being intrinsically inactive, were
+supposed to produce conduct only through the intermediation of this
+superior agent. Until they twitched its coat-tails, so to speak, no
+outward behavior could occur. This doctrine was long ago exploded by the
+discovery of the phenomena of reflex action, in which sensible
+impressions, as you know, produce movement immediately and of
+themselves. The doctrine may also be considered exploded as far as ideas
+go.
+
+The fact is that there is no sort of consciousness whatever, be it
+sensation, feeling, or idea, which does not directly and of itself tend
+to discharge into some motor effect. The motor effect need not always be
+an outward stroke of behavior. It may be only an alteration of the
+heart-beats or breathing, or a modification in the distribution of
+blood, such as blushing or turning pale; or else a secretion of tears,
+or what not. But, in any case, it is there in some shape when any
+consciousness is there; and a belief as fundamental as any in modern
+psychology is the belief at last attained that conscious processes of
+any sort, conscious processes merely as such, _must_ pass over into
+motion, open or concealed.
+
+The least complicated case of this tendency is the case of a mind
+possessed by only a single idea. If that idea be of an object connected
+with a native impulse, the impulse will immediately proceed to
+discharge. If it be the idea of a movement, the movement will occur.
+Such a case of action from a single idea has been distinguished from
+more complex cases by the name of 'ideo-motor' action, meaning action
+without express decision or effort. Most of the habitual actions to
+which we are trained are of this ideo-motor sort. We perceive, for
+instance, that the door is open, and we rise and shut it; we perceive
+some raisins in a dish before us, and extend our hand and carry one of
+them to our mouth without interrupting the conversation; or, when lying
+in bed, we suddenly think that we shall be late for breakfast, and
+instantly we get up with no particular exertion or resolve. All the
+ingrained procedures by which life is carried on--the manners and
+customs, dressing and undressing, acts of salutation, etc.--are executed
+in this semi-automatic way unhesitatingly and efficiently, the very
+outermost margin of consciousness seeming to be concerned in them,
+while the focus may be occupied with widely different things.
+
+But now turn to a more complicated case. Suppose two thoughts to be in
+the mind together, of which one, A, taken alone, would discharge itself
+in a certain action, but of which the other, B, suggests an action of a
+different sort, or a consequence of the first action calculated to make
+us shrink. The psychologists now say that the second idea, B, will
+probably arrest or _inhibit_ the motor effects of the first idea, A. One
+word, then, about 'inhibition' in general, to make this particular case
+more clear.
+
+One of the most interesting discoveries of physiology was the discovery,
+made simultaneously in France and Germany fifty years ago, that nerve
+currents do not only start muscles into action, but may check action
+already going on or keep it from occurring as it otherwise might.
+_Nerves of arrest_ were thus distinguished alongside of motor nerves.
+The pneumogastric nerve, for example, if stimulated, arrests the
+movements of the heart: the splanchnic nerve arrests those of the
+intestines, if already begun. But it soon appeared that this was too
+narrow a way of looking at the matter, and that arrest is not so much
+the specific function of certain nerves as a general function which any
+part of the nervous system may exert upon other parts under the
+appropriate conditions. The higher centres, for example, seem to exert a
+constant inhibitive influence on the excitability of those below. The
+reflexes of an animal with its hemispheres wholly or in part removed
+become exaggerated. You all know that common reflex in dogs, whereby, if
+you scratch the animal's side, the corresponding hind leg will begin to
+make scratching movements, usually in the air. Now in dogs with
+mutilated hemispheres this scratching reflex is so incessant that, as
+Goltz first described them, the hair gets all worn off their sides. In
+idiots, the functions of the hemispheres being largely in abeyance, the
+lower impulses, not inhibited, as they would be in normal human beings,
+often express themselves in most odious ways. You know also how any
+higher emotional tendency will quench a lower one. Fear arrests
+appetite, maternal love annuls fear, respect checks sensuality, and the
+like; and in the more subtile manifestations of the moral life, whenever
+an ideal stirring is suddenly quickened into intensity, it is as if the
+whole scale of values of our motives changed its equilibrium. The force
+of old temptations vanishes, and what a moment ago was impossible is now
+not only possible, but easy, because of their inhibition. This has been
+well called the 'expulsive power of the higher emotion.'
+
+It is easy to apply this notion of inhibition to the case of our
+ideational processes. I am lying in bed, for example, and think it is
+time to get up; but alongside of this thought there is present to my
+mind a realization of the extreme coldness of the morning and the
+pleasantness of the warm bed. In such a situation the motor consequences
+of the first idea are blocked; and I may remain for half an hour or more
+with the two ideas oscillating before me in a kind of deadlock, which is
+what we call the state of hesitation or deliberation. In a case like
+this the deliberation can be resolved and the decision reached in either
+of two ways:--
+
+(1) I may forget for a moment the thermometric conditions, and then the
+idea of getting up will immediately discharge into act: I shall suddenly
+find that I have got up--or
+
+(2) Still mindful of the freezing temperature, the thought of the duty
+of rising may become so pungent that it determines action in spite of
+inhibition. In the latter case, I have a sense of energetic moral
+effort, and consider that I have done a virtuous act.
+
+All cases of wilful action properly so called, of choice after
+hesitation and deliberation, may be conceived after one of these latter
+patterns. So you see that volition, in the narrower sense, takes place
+only when there are a number of conflicting systems of ideas, and
+depends on our having a complex field of consciousness. The interesting
+thing to note is the extreme delicacy of the inhibitive machinery. A
+strong and urgent motor idea in the focus may be neutralized and made
+inoperative by the presence of the very faintest contradictory idea in
+the margin. For instance, I hold out my forefinger, and with closed eyes
+try to realize as vividly as possible that I hold a revolver in my hand
+and am pulling the trigger. I can even now fairly feel my finger
+quivering with the tendency to contract; and, if it were hitched to a
+recording apparatus, it would certainly betray its state of tension by
+registering incipient movements. Yet it does not actually crook, and the
+movement of pulling the trigger is not performed. Why not?
+
+Simply because, all concentrated though I am upon the idea of the
+movement, I nevertheless also realize the total conditions of the
+experiment, and in the back of my mind, so to speak, or in its fringe
+and margin, have the simultaneous idea that the movement is not to take
+place. The mere presence of that marginal intention, without effort,
+urgency, or emphasis, or any special reinforcement from my attention,
+suffices to the inhibitive effect.
+
+And this is why so few of the ideas that flit through our minds do, in
+point of fact, produce their motor consequences. Life would be a curse
+and a care for us if every fleeting fancy were to do so. Abstractly, the
+law of ideo-motor action is true; but in the concrete our fields of
+consciousness are always so complex that the inhibiting margin keeps the
+centre inoperative most of the time. In all this, you see, I speak as if
+ideas by their mere presence or absence determined behavior, and as if
+between the ideas themselves on the one hand and the conduct on the
+other there were no room for any third intermediate principle of
+activity, like that called 'the will.'
+
+If you are struck by the materialistic or fatalistic doctrines which
+seem to follow this conception, I beg you to suspend your judgment for a
+moment, as I shall soon have something more to say about the matter.
+But, meanwhile yielding one's self to the mechanical conception of the
+psychophysical organism, nothing is easier than to indulge in a picture
+of the fatalistic character of human life. Man's conduct appears as the
+mere resultant of all his various impulsions and inhibitions. One
+object, by its presence, makes us act: another object checks our action.
+Feelings aroused and ideas suggested by objects sway us one way and
+another: emotions complicate the game by their mutual inhibitive
+effects, the higher abolishing the lower or perhaps being itself swept
+away. The life in all this becomes prudential and moral; but the
+psychologic agents in the drama may be described, you see, as nothing
+but the 'ideas' themselves,--ideas for the whole system of which what we
+call the 'soul' or character' or 'will' of the person is nothing but a
+collective name. As Hume said, the ideas are themselves the actors, the
+stage, the theatre, the spectators, and the play. This is the so-called
+'associationist' psychology, brought down to its radical expression: it
+is useless to ignore its power as a conception. Like all conceptions,
+when they become clear and lively enough, this conception has a strong
+tendency to impose itself upon belief; and psychologists trained on
+biological lines usually adopt it as the last word of science on the
+subject. No one can have an adequate notion of modern psychological
+theory unless he has at some time apprehended this view in the full
+force of its simplicity.
+
+Let us humor it for a while, for it has advantages in the way of
+exposition.
+
+_Voluntary action, then, is at all times a resultant of the compounding
+of our impulsions with our inhibitions._
+
+From this it immediately follows that there will be two types of will,
+in one of which impulsions will predominate, in the other inhibitions.
+We may speak of them, if you like, as the precipitate and the obstructed
+will, respectively. When fully pronounced, they are familiar to
+everybody. The extreme example of the precipitate will is the maniac:
+his ideas discharge into action so rapidly, his associative processes
+are so extravagantly lively, that inhibitions have no time to arrive,
+and he says and does whatever pops into his head without a moment of
+hesitation.
+
+Certain melancholiacs furnish the extreme example of the over-inhibited
+type. Their minds are cramped in a fixed emotion of fear or
+helplessness, their ideas confined to the one thought that for them life
+is impossible. So they show a condition of perfect 'abulia,' or
+inability to will or act. They cannot change their posture or speech or
+execute the simplest command.
+
+The different races of men show different temperaments in this regard.
+The Southern races are commonly accounted the more impulsive and
+precipitate: the English race, especially our New England branch of it,
+is supposed to be all sicklied over with repressive forms of
+self-consciousness, and condemned to express itself through a jungle of
+scruples and checks.
+
+The highest form of character, however, abstractly considered, must be
+full of scruples and inhibitions. But action, in such a character, far
+from being paralyzed, will succeed in energetically keeping on its way,
+sometimes overpowering the resistances, sometimes steering along the
+line where they lie thinnest.
+
+Just as our extensor muscles act most truly when a simultaneous
+contraction of the flexors guides and steadies them; so the mind of him
+whose fields of consciousness are complex, and who, with the reasons for
+the action, sees the reasons against it, and yet, instead of being
+palsied, acts in the way that takes the whole field into
+consideration,--so, I say, is such a mind the ideal sort of mind that we
+should seek to reproduce in our pupils. Purely impulsive action, or
+action that proceeds to extremities regardless of consequences, on the
+other hand, is the easiest action in the world, and the lowest in type.
+Any one can show energy, when made quite reckless. An Oriental despot
+requires but little ability: as long as he lives, he succeeds, for he
+has absolutely his own way; and, when the world can no longer endure the
+horror of him, he is assassinated. But not to proceed immediately to
+extremities, to be still able to act energetically under an array of
+inhibitions,--that indeed is rare and difficult. Cavour, when urged to
+proclaim martial law in 1859, refused to do so, saying: "Any one can
+govern in that way. I will be constitutional." Your parliamentary
+rulers, your Lincoln, your Gladstone, are the strongest type of man,
+because they accomplish results under the most intricate possible
+conditions. We think of Napoleon Bonaparte as a colossal monster of
+will-power, and truly enough he was so. But, from the point of view of
+the psychological machinery, it would be hard to say whether he or
+Gladstone was the larger volitional quantity; for Napoleon disregarded
+all the usual inhibitions, and Gladstone, passionate as he was,
+scrupulously considered them in his statesmanship.
+
+A familiar example of the paralyzing power of scruples is the inhibitive
+effect of conscientiousness upon conversation. Nowhere does conversation
+seem to have flourished as brilliantly as in France during the last
+century. But, if we read old French memoirs, we see how many brakes of
+scrupulosity which tie our tongues to-day were then removed. Where
+mendacity, treachery, obscenity, and malignity find unhampered
+expression, talk can be brilliant indeed. But its flame waxes dim where
+the mind is stitched all over with conscientious fear of violating the
+moral and social proprieties.
+
+The teacher often is confronted in the schoolroom with an abnormal type
+of will, which we may call the 'balky will.' Certain children, if they
+do not succeed in doing a thing immediately, remain completely
+inhibited in regard to it: it becomes literally impossible for them to
+understand it if it be an intellectual problem, or to do it if it be an
+outward operation, as long as this particular inhibited condition lasts.
+Such children are usually treated as sinful, and are punished; or else
+the teacher pits his or her will against the child's will, considering
+that the latter must be 'broken.' "Break your child's will, in order
+that it may not perish," wrote John Wesley. "Break its will as soon as
+it can speak plainly--or even before it can speak at all. It should be
+forced to do as it is told, even if you have to whip it ten times
+running. Break its will, in order that its soul may live." Such
+will-breaking is always a scene with a great deal of nervous wear and
+tear on both sides, a bad state of feeling left behind it, and the
+victory not always with the would-be will-breaker.
+
+When a situation of the kind is once fairly developed, and the child is
+all tense and excited inwardly, nineteen times out of twenty it is best
+for the teacher to apperceive the case as one of neural pathology rather
+than as one of moral culpability. So long as the inhibiting sense of
+impossibility remains in the child's mind, he will continue unable to
+get beyond the obstacle. The aim of the teacher should then be to make
+him simply forget. Drop the subject for the time, divert the mind to
+something else: then, leading the pupil back by some circuitous line of
+association, spring it on him again before he has time to recognize it,
+and as likely as not he will go over it now without any difficulty. It
+is in no other way that we overcome balkiness in a horse: we divert his
+attention, do something to his nose or ear, lead him round in a circle,
+and thus get him over a place where flogging would only have made him
+more invincible. A tactful teacher will never let these strained
+situations come up at all.
+
+You perceive now, my friends, what your general or abstract duty is as
+teachers. Although you have to generate in your pupils a large stock of
+ideas, any one of which may be inhibitory, yet you must also see to it
+that no habitual hesitancy or paralysis of the will ensues, and that the
+pupil still retains his power of vigorous action. Psychology can state
+your problem in these terms, but you see how impotent she is to furnish
+the elements of its practical solution. When all is said and done, and
+your best efforts are made, it will probably remain true that the
+result will depend more on a certain native tone or temper in the
+pupil's psychological constitution than on anything else. Some persons
+appear to have a naturally poor focalization of the field of
+consciousness; and in such persons actions hang slack, and inhibitions
+seem to exert peculiarly easy sway.
+
+But let us now close in a little more closely on this matter of the
+education of the will. Your task is to build up a _character_ in your
+pupils; and a character, as I have so often said, consists in an
+organized set of habits of reaction. Now of what do such habits of
+reaction themselves consist? They consist of tendencies to act
+characteristically when certain ideas possess us, and to refrain
+characteristically when possessed by other ideas.
+
+Our volitional habits depend, then, first, on what the stock of ideas is
+which we have; and, second, on the habitual coupling of the several
+ideas with action or inaction respectively. How is it when an
+alternative is presented to you for choice, and you are uncertain what
+you ought to do? You first hesitate, and then you deliberate. And in
+what does your deliberation consist? It consists in trying to
+apperceive the ease successively by a number of different ideas, which
+seem to fit it more or less, until at last you hit on one which seems to
+fit it exactly. If that be an idea which is a customary forerunner of
+action in you, which enters into one of your maxims of positive
+behavior, your hesitation ceases, and you act immediately. If, on the
+other hand, it be an idea which carries inaction as its habitual result,
+if it ally itself with _prohibition_, then you unhesitatingly refrain.
+The problem is, you see, to find the right idea or conception for the
+case. This search for the right conception may take days or weeks.
+
+I spoke as if the action were easy when the conception once is found.
+Often it is so, but it may be otherwise; and, when it is otherwise, we
+find ourselves at the very centre of a moral situation, into which I
+should now like you to look with me a little nearer.
+
+The proper conception, the true head of classification, may be hard to
+attain; or it may be one with which we have contracted no settled habits
+of action. Or, again, the action to which it would prompt may be
+dangerous and difficult; or else inaction may appear deadly cold and
+negative when our impulsive feeling is hot. In either of these latter
+cases it is hard to hold the right idea steadily enough before the
+attention to let it exert its adequate effects. Whether it be
+stimulative or inhibitive, it is _too reasonable_ for us; and the more
+instinctive passional propensity then tends to extrude it from our
+consideration. We shy away from the thought of it. It twinkles and goes
+out the moment it appears in the margin of our consciousness; and we
+need a resolute effort of voluntary attention to drag it into the focus
+of the field, and to keep it there long enough for its associative and
+motor effects to be exerted. Every one knows only too well how the mind
+flinches from looking at considerations hostile to the reigning mood of
+feeling.
+
+Once brought, however, in this way to the centre of the field of
+consciousness, and held there, the reasonable idea will exert these
+effects inevitably; for the laws of connection between our consciousness
+and our nervous system provide for the action then taking place. Our
+moral effort, properly so called, terminates in our holding fast to the
+appropriate idea.
+
+If, then, you are asked, "_In what does a moral act consist_ when
+reduced to its simplest and most elementary form?" you can make only
+one reply. You can say that _it consists in the effort of attention by
+which we hold fast to an idea_ which but for that effort of attention
+would be driven out of the mind by the other psychological tendencies
+that are there. _To think_, in short, is the secret of will, just as it
+is the secret of memory.
+
+This comes out very clearly in the kind of excuse which we most
+frequently hear from persons who find themselves confronted by the
+sinfulness or harmfulness of some part of their behavior. "I never
+_thought_," they say. "I never _thought_ how mean the action was, I
+never _thought_ of these abominable consequences." And what do we retort
+when they say this? We say: "Why _didn't_ you think? What were you there
+for but to think?" And we read them a moral lecture on their
+irreflectiveness.
+
+The hackneyed example of moral deliberation is the case of an habitual
+drunkard under temptation. He has made a resolve to reform, but he is
+now solicited again by the bottle. His moral triumph or failure
+literally consists in his finding the right _name_ for the case. If he
+says that it is a case of not wasting good liquor already poured out, or
+a case of not being churlish and unsociable when in the midst of
+friends, or a case of learning something at last about a brand of
+whiskey which he never met before, or a case of celebrating a public
+holiday, or a case of stimulating himself to a more energetic resolve in
+favor of abstinence than any he has ever yet made, then he is lost. His
+choice of the wrong name seals his doom. But if, in spite of all the
+plausible good names with which his thirsty fancy so copiously furnishes
+him, he unwaveringly clings to the truer bad name, and apperceives the
+case as that of "being a drunkard, being a drunkard, being a drunkard,"
+his feet are planted on the road to salvation. He saves himself by
+thinking rightly.
+
+Thus are your pupils to be saved: first, by the stock of ideas with
+which you furnish them; second, by the amount of voluntary attention
+that they can exert in holding to the right ones, however unpalatable;
+and, third, by the several habits of acting definitely on these latter
+to which they have been successfully trained.
+
+In all this the power of voluntarily attending is the point of the whole
+procedure. Just as a balance turns on its knife-edges, so on it our
+moral destiny turns. You remember that, when we were talking of the
+subject of attention, we discovered how much more intermittent and
+brief our acts of voluntary attention are than is commonly supposed. If
+they were all summed together, the time that they occupy would cover an
+almost incredibly small portion of our lives. But I also said, you will
+remember, that their brevity was not in proportion to their
+significance, and that I should return to the subject again. So I return
+to it now. It is not the mere size of a thing which, constitutes its
+importance: it is its position in the organism to which it belongs. Our
+acts of voluntary attention, brief and fitful as they are, are
+nevertheless momentous and critical, determining us, as they do, to
+higher or lower destinies. The exercise of voluntary attention in the
+schoolroom must therefore be counted one of the most important points of
+training that take place there; and the first-rate teacher, by the
+keenness of the remoter interests which he is able to awaken, will
+provide abundant opportunities for its occurrence. I hope that you
+appreciate this now without any further explanation.
+
+I have been accused of holding up before you, in the course of these
+talks, a mechanical and even a materialistic view of the mind. I have
+called it an organism and a machine. I have spoken of its reaction on
+the environment as the essential thing about it; and I have referred
+this, either openly or implicitly, to the construction of the nervous
+system. I have, in consequence, received notes from some of you, begging
+me to be more explicit on this point; and to let you know frankly
+whether I am a complete materialist, or not.
+
+Now in these lectures I wish to be strictly practical and useful, and to
+keep free from all speculative complications. Nevertheless, I do not
+wish to leave any ambiguity about my own position; and I will therefore
+say, in order to avoid all misunderstanding, that in no sense do I count
+myself a materialist. I cannot see how such a thing as our consciousness
+can possibly be _produced_ by a nervous machinery, though I can
+perfectly well see how, if 'ideas' do accompany the workings of the
+machinery, the _order_ of the ideas might very well follow exactly the
+_order_ of the machine's operations. Our habitual associations of ideas,
+trains of thought, and sequences of action, might thus be consequences
+of the succession of currents in our nervous systems. And the possible
+stock of ideas which a man's free spirit would have to choose from
+might depend exclusively on the native and acquired powers of his brain.
+If this were all, we might indeed adopt the fatalist conception which I
+sketched for you but a short while ago. Our ideas would be determined by
+brain currents, and these by purely mechanical laws.
+
+But, after what we have just seen,--namely, the part played by voluntary
+attention in volition,--a belief in free will and purely spiritual
+causation is still open to us. The duration and amount of this attention
+_seem_ within certain limits indeterminate. We _feel_ as if we could
+make it really more or less, and as if our free action in this regard
+were a genuine critical point in nature,--a point on which our destiny
+and that of others might hinge. The whole question of free will
+concentrates itself, then, at this same small point: "Is or is not the
+appearance of indetermination at this point an illusion?"
+
+It is plain that such a question can be decided only by general
+analogies, and not by accurate observations. The free-willist believes
+the appearance to be a reality: the determinist believes that it is an
+illusion. I myself hold with the free-willists,--not because I cannot
+conceive the fatalist theory clearly, or because I fail to understand
+its plausibility, but simply because, if free will _were_ true, it would
+be absurd to have the belief in it fatally forced on our acceptance.
+Considering the inner fitness of things, one would rather think that the
+very first act of a will endowed with freedom should be to sustain the
+belief in the freedom itself. I accordingly believe freely in my
+freedom; I do so with the best of scientific consciences, knowing that
+the predetermination of the amount of my effort of attention can never
+receive objective proof, and hoping that, whether you follow my example
+in this respect or not, it will at least make you see that such
+psychological and psychophysical theories as I hold do not necessarily
+force a man to become a fatalist or a materialist.
+
+Let me say one more final word now about the will, and therewith
+conclude both that important subject and these lectures.
+
+There are two types of will. There are also two types of inhibition. We
+may call them inhibition by repression or by negation, and inhibition by
+substitution, respectively. The difference between them is that, in the
+case of inhibition by repression, both the inhibited idea and the
+inhibiting idea, the impulsive idea and the idea that negates it, remain
+along with each other in consciousness, producing a certain inward
+strain or tension there: whereas, in inhibition by substitution, the
+inhibiting idea supersedes altogether the idea which it inhibits, and
+the latter quickly vanishes from the field.
+
+For instance, your pupils are wandering in mind, are listening to a
+sound outside the window, which presently grows interesting enough to
+claim all their attention. You can call the latter back again by
+bellowing at them not to listen to those sounds, but to keep their minds
+on their books or on what you are saying. And, by thus keeping them
+conscious that your eye is sternly on them, you may produce a good
+effect. But it will be a wasteful effect and an inferior effect; for the
+moment you relax your supervision the attractive disturbance, always
+there soliciting their curiosity, will overpower them, and they will be
+just as they were before: whereas, if, without saying anything about the
+street disturbances, you open a counter-attraction by starting some very
+interesting talk or demonstration yourself, they will altogether forget
+the distracting incident, and without any effort follow you along.
+There are many interests that can never be inhibited by the way of
+negation. To a man in love, for example, it is literally impossible, by
+any effort of will, to annul his passion. But let 'some new planet swim
+into his ken,' and the former idol will immediately cease to engross his
+mind.
+
+It is clear that in general we ought, whenever we can, to employ the
+method of inhibition by substitution. He whose life is based upon the
+word 'no,' who tells the truth because a lie is wicked, and who has
+constantly to grapple with his envious and cowardly and mean
+propensities, is in an inferior situation in every respect to what he
+would be if the love of truth and magnanimity positively possessed him
+from the outset, and he felt no inferior temptations. Your born
+gentleman is certainly, for this world's purposes, a more valuable being
+than your "Crump, with his grunting resistance to his native devils,"
+even though in God's sight the latter may, as the Catholic theologians
+say, be rolling up great stores of 'merit.'
+
+Spinoza long ago wrote in his Ethics that anything that a man can avoid
+under the notion that it is bad he may also avoid under the notion that
+something else is good. He who habitually acts _sub specie mali_, under
+the negative notion, the notion of the bad, is called a slave by
+Spinoza. To him who acts habitually under the notion of good he gives
+the name of freeman. See to it now, I beg you, that you make freemen of
+your pupils by habituating them to act, whenever possible, under the
+notion of a good. Get them habitually to tell the truth, not so much
+through showing them the wickedness of lying as by arousing their
+enthusiasm for honor and veracity. Wean them from their native cruelty
+by imparting to them some of your own positive sympathy with an animal's
+inner springs of joy. And, in the lessons which you may be legally
+obliged to conduct upon the bad effects of alcohol, lay less stress than
+the books do on the drunkard's stomach, kidneys, nerves, and social
+miseries, and more on the blessings of having an organism kept in
+lifelong possession of its full youthful elasticity by a sweet, sound
+blood, to which stimulants and narcotics are unknown, and to which the
+morning sun and air and dew will daily come as sufficiently powerful
+intoxicants.
+
+I have now ended these talks. If to some of you the things I have said
+seem obvious or trivial, it is possible that they may appear less so
+when, in the course of a year or two, you find yourselves noticing and
+apperceiving events in the schoolroom a little differently, in
+consequence of some of the conceptions I have tried to make more clear.
+I cannot but think that to apperceive your pupil as a little sensitive,
+impulsive, associative, and reactive organism, partly fated and partly
+free, will lead to a better intelligence of all his ways. Understand
+him, then, as such a subtle little piece of machinery. And if, in
+addition, you can also see him _sub specie boni_, and love him as well,
+you will be in the best possible position for becoming perfect teachers.
+
+
+
+
+#TALKS TO STUDENTS#
+
+
+
+
+I. THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION
+
+
+I wish in the following hour to take certain psychological doctrines and
+show their practical applications to mental hygiene,--to the hygiene of
+our American life more particularly. Our people, especially in academic
+circles, are turning towards psychology nowadays with great
+expectations; and, if psychology is to justify them, it must be by
+showing fruits in the pedagogic and therapeutic lines.
+
+The reader may possibly have heard of a peculiar theory of the emotions,
+commonly referred to in psychological literature as the Lange-James
+theory. According to this theory, our emotions are mainly due to those
+organic stirrings that are aroused in us in a reflex way by the stimulus
+of the exciting object or situation. An emotion of fear, for example, or
+surprise, is not a direct effect of the object's presence on the mind,
+but an effect of that still earlier effect, the bodily commotion which
+the object suddenly excites; so that, were this bodily commotion
+suppressed, we should not so much _feel_ fear as call the situation
+fearful; we should not feel surprise, but coldly recognize that the
+object was indeed astonishing. One enthusiast has even gone so far as to
+say that when we feel sorry it is because we weep, when we feel afraid
+it is because we run away, and not conversely. Some of you may perhaps
+be acquainted with the paradoxical formula. Now, whatever exaggeration
+may possibly lurk in this account of our emotions (and I doubt myself
+whether the exaggeration be very great), it is certain that the main
+core of it is true, and that the mere giving way to tears, for example,
+or to the outward expression of an anger-fit, will result for the moment
+in making the inner grief or anger more acutely felt. There is,
+accordingly, no better known or more generally useful precept in the
+moral training of youth, or in one's personal self-discipline, than that
+which bids us pay primary attention to what we do and express, and not
+to care too much for what we feel. If we only check a cowardly impulse
+in time, for example, or if we only _don't_ strike the blow or rip out
+with the complaining or insulting word that we shall regret as long as
+we live, our feelings themselves will presently be the calmer and
+better, with no particular guidance from us on their own account. Action
+seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and
+by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the
+will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.
+
+Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous
+cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully,
+and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such
+conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that
+occasion can. So to feel brave, act as if we _were_ brave, use all our
+will to that end, and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of
+fear. Again, in order to feel kindly toward a person to whom we have
+been inimical, the only way is more or less deliberately to smile, to
+make sympathetic inquiries, and to force ourselves to say genial things.
+One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer communion of
+heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental
+demon of uncharitable feeling. To wrestle with a bad feeling only pins
+our attention on it, and keeps it still fastened in the mind: whereas,
+if we act as if from some better feeling, the old bad feeling soon
+folds its tent like an Arab, and silently steals away.
+
+The best manuals of religious devotion accordingly reiterate the maxim
+that we must let our feelings go, and pay no regard to them whatever. In
+an admirable and widely successful little book called 'The Christian's
+Secret of a Happy Life,' by Mrs. Hannah Whitall Smith, I find this
+lesson on almost every page. _Act_ faithfully, and you really have
+faith, no matter how cold and even how dubious you may feel. "It is your
+purpose God looks at," writes Mrs. Smith, "not your feelings about that
+purpose; and your purpose, or will, is therefore the only thing you need
+attend to.... Let your emotions come or let them go, just as God
+pleases, and make no account of them either way.... They really have
+nothing to do with the matter. They are not the indicators of your
+spiritual state, but are merely the indicators of your temperament or of
+your present physical condition."
+
+But you all know these facts already, so I need no longer press them on
+your attention. From our acts and from our attitudes ceaseless inpouring
+currents of sensation come, which help to determine from moment to
+moment what our inner states shall be: that is a fundamental law of
+psychology which I will therefore proceed to assume.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A Viennese neurologist of considerable reputation has recently written
+about the _Binnenleben_, as he terms it, or buried life of human beings.
+No doctor, this writer says, can get into really profitable relations
+with a nervous patient until he gets some sense of what the patient's
+_Binnenleben_ is, of the sort of unuttered inner atmosphere in which his
+consciousness dwells alone with the secrets of its prison-house. This
+inner personal tone is what we can't communicate or describe
+articulately to others; but the wraith and ghost of it, so to speak, are
+often what our friends and intimates feel as our most characteristic
+quality. In the unhealthy-minded, apart from all sorts of old regrets,
+ambitions checked by shames and aspirations obstructed by timidities, it
+consists mainly of bodily discomforts not distinctly localized by the
+sufferer, but breeding a general self-mistrust and sense that things are
+not as they should be with him. Half the thirst for alcohol that exists
+in the world exists simply because alcohol acts as a temporary
+anaesthetic and effacer to all these morbid feelings that never ought to
+be in a human being at all. In the healthy-minded, on the contrary,
+there are no fears or shames to discover; and the sensations that pour
+in from the organism only help to swell the general vital sense of
+security and readiness for anything that may turn up.
+
+Consider, for example, the effects of a well-toned _motor-apparatus_,
+nervous and muscular, on our general personal self-consciousness, the
+sense of elasticity and efficiency that results. They tell us that in
+Norway the life of the women has lately been entirely revolutionized by
+the new order of muscular feelings with which the use of the _ski_, or
+long snow-shoes, as a sport for both sexes, has made the women
+acquainted. Fifteen years ago the Norwegian women were even more than
+the women of other lands votaries of the old-fashioned ideal of
+femininity, 'the domestic angel,' the 'gentle and refining influence'
+sort of thing. Now these sedentary fireside tabby-cats of Norway have
+been trained, they say, by the snow-shoes into lithe and audacious
+creatures, for whom no night is too dark or height too giddy, and who
+are not only saying good-bye to the traditional feminine pallor and
+delicacy of constitution, but actually taking the lead in every
+educational and social reform. I cannot but think that the tennis and
+tramping and skating habits and the bicycle-craze which are so rapidly
+extending among our dear sisters and daughters in this country are going
+also to lead to a sounder and heartier moral tone, which will send its
+tonic breath through all our American life.
+
+I hope that here in America more and more the ideal of the well-trained
+and vigorous body will be maintained neck by neck with that of the
+well-trained and vigorous mind as the two coequal halves of the higher
+education for men and women alike. The strength of the British Empire
+lies in the strength of character of the individual Englishman, taken
+all alone by himself. And that strength, I am persuaded, is perennially
+nourished and kept up by nothing so much as by the national worship, in
+which all classes meet, of athletic outdoor life and sport.
+
+I recollect, years ago, reading a certain work by an American doctor on
+hygiene and the laws of life and the type of future humanity. I have
+forgotten its author's name and its title, but I remember well an awful
+prophecy that it contained about the future of our muscular system.
+Human perfection, the writer said, means ability to cope with the
+environment; but the environment will more and more require mental power
+from us, and less and less will ask for bare brute strength. Wars will
+cease, machines will do all our heavy work, man will become more and
+more a mere director of nature's energies, and less and less an exerter
+of energy on his own account. So that, if the _homo sapiens_ of the
+future can only digest his food and think, what need will he have of
+well-developed muscles at all? And why, pursued this writer, should we
+not even now be satisfied with a more delicate and intellectual type of
+beauty than that which pleased our ancestors? Nay, I have heard a
+fanciful friend make a still further advance in this 'new-man'
+direction. With our future food, he says, itself prepared in liquid form
+from the chemical elements of the atmosphere, pepsinated or
+half-digested in advance, and sucked up through a glass tube from a tin
+can, what need shall we have of teeth, or stomachs even? They may go,
+along with our muscles and our physical courage, while, challenging ever
+more and more our proper admiration, will grow the gigantic domes of our
+crania, arching over our spectacled eyes, and animating our flexible
+little lips to those floods of learned and ingenious talk which will
+constitute our most congenial occupation.
+
+I am sure that your flesh creeps at this apocalyptic vision. Mine
+certainly did so; and I cannot believe that our muscular vigor will ever
+be a superfluity. Even if the day ever dawns in which it will not be
+needed for fighting the old heavy battles against Nature, it will still
+always be needed to furnish the background of sanity, serenity, and
+cheerfulness to life, to give moral elasticity to our disposition, to
+round off the wiry edge of our fretfulness, and make us good-humored and
+easy of approach. Weakness is too apt to be what the doctors call
+irritable weakness. And that blessed internal peace and confidence, that
+_acquiescentia in seipso_, as Spinoza used to call it, that wells up
+from every part of the body of a muscularly well-trained human being,
+and soaks the indwelling soul of him with satisfaction, is, quite apart
+from every consideration of its mechanical utility, an element of
+spiritual hygiene of supreme significance.
+
+And now let me go a step deeper into mental hygiene, and try to enlist
+your insight and sympathy in a cause which I believe is one of paramount
+patriotic importance to us Yankees. Many years ago a Scottish medical
+man, Dr. Clouston, a mad-doctor as they call him there, or what we
+should call an asylum physician (the most eminent one in Scotland),
+visited this country, and said something that has remained in my memory
+ever since. "You Americans," he said, "wear too much expression on your
+faces. You are living like an army with all its reserves engaged in
+action. The duller countenances of the British population betoken a
+better scheme of life. They suggest stores of reserved nervous force to
+fall back upon, if any occasion should arise that requires it. This
+inexcitability, this presence at all times of power not used, I regard,"
+continued Dr. Clouston, "as the great safeguard of our British people.
+The other thing in you gives me a sense of insecurity, and you ought
+somehow to tone yourselves down. You really do carry too much
+expression, you take too intensely the trivial moments of life."
+
+Now Dr. Clouston is a trained reader of the secrets of the soul as
+expressed upon the countenance, and the observation of his which I quote
+seems to me to mean a great deal. And all Americans who stay in Europe
+long enough to get accustomed to the spirit that reigns and expresses
+itself there, so unexcitable as compared with ours, make a similar
+observation when they return to their native shores. They find a
+wild-eyed look upon their compatriots' faces, either of too desperate
+eagerness and anxiety or of too intense responsiveness and good-will. It
+is hard to say whether the men or the women show it most. It is true
+that we do not all feel about it as Dr. Clouston felt. Many of us, far
+from deploring it, admire it. We say: "What intelligence it shows! How
+different from the stolid cheeks, the codfish eyes, the slow, inanimate
+demeanor we have been seeing in the British Isles!" Intensity, rapidity,
+vivacity of appearance, are indeed with us something of a nationally
+accepted ideal; and the medical notion of 'irritable weakness' is not
+the first thing suggested by them to our mind, as it was to Dr.
+Clouston's. In a weekly paper not very long ago I remember reading a
+story in which, after describing the beauty and interest of the
+heroine's personality, the author summed up her charms by saying that to
+all who looked upon her an impression as of 'bottled lightning' was
+irresistibly conveyed.
+
+Bottled lightning, in truth, is one of our American ideals, even of a
+young girl's character! Now it is most ungracious, and it may seem to
+some persons unpatriotic, to criticise in public the physical
+peculiarities of one's own people, of one's own family, so to speak.
+Besides, it may be said, and said with justice, that there are plenty of
+bottled-lightning temperaments in other countries, and plenty of
+phlegmatic temperaments here; and that, when all is said and done, the
+more or less of tension about which I am making such a fuss is a very
+small item in the sum total of a nation's life, and not worth solemn
+treatment at a time when agreeable rather than disagreeable things
+should be talked about. Well, in one sense the more or less of tension
+in our faces and in our unused muscles is a small thing: not much
+mechanical work is done by these contractions. But it is not always the
+material size of a thing that measures its importance: often it is its
+place and function. One of the most philosophical remarks I ever heard
+made was by an unlettered workman who was doing some repairs at my house
+many years ago. "There is very little difference between one man and
+another," he said, "when you go to the bottom of it. But what little
+there is, is very important." And the remark certainly applies to this
+case. The general over-contraction may be small when estimated in
+foot-pounds, but its importance is immense on account of its _effects on
+the over-contracted person's spiritual life_. This follows as a
+necessary consequence from the theory of our emotions to which I made
+reference at the beginning of this article. For by the sensations that
+so incessantly pour in from the over-tense excited body the over-tense
+and excited habit of mind is kept up; and the sultry, threatening,
+exhausting, thunderous inner atmosphere never quite clears away. If you
+never wholly give yourself up to the chair you sit in, but always keep
+your leg- and body-muscles half contracted for a rise; if you breathe
+eighteen or nineteen instead of sixteen times a minute, and never quite
+breathe out at that,--what mental mood _can_ you be in but one of inner
+panting and expectancy, and how can the future and its worries possibly
+forsake your mind? On the other hand, how can they gain admission to
+your mind if your brow be unruffled, your respiration calm and complete,
+and your muscles all relaxed?
+
+Now what is the cause of this absence of repose, this bottled-lightning
+quality in us Americans? The explanation of it that is usually given is
+that it comes from the extreme dryness of our climate and the acrobatic
+performances of our thermometer, coupled with the extraordinary
+progressiveness of our life, the hard work, the railroad speed, the
+rapid success, and all the other things we know so well by heart. Well,
+our climate is certainly exciting, but hardly more so than that of many
+parts of Europe, where nevertheless no bottled-lightning girls are
+found. And the work done and the pace of life are as extreme an every
+great capital of Europe as they are here. To me both of these pretended
+causes are utterly insufficient to explain the facts.
+
+To explain them, we must go not to physical geography, but to psychology
+and sociology. The latest chapter both in sociology and in psychology to
+be developed in a manner that approaches adequacy is the chapter on the
+imitative impulse. First Bagehot, then Tarde, then Royce and Baldwin
+here, have shown that invention and imitation, taken together, form, one
+may say, the entire warp and woof of human life, in so far as it is
+social. The American over-tension and jerkiness and breathlessness and
+intensity and agony of expression are primarily social, and only
+secondarily physiological, phenomena. They are _bad habits_, nothing
+more or less, bred of custom and example, born of the imitation of bad
+models and the cultivation of false personal ideals. How are idioms
+acquired, how do local peculiarities of phrase and accent come about?
+Through an accidental example set by some one, which struck the ears of
+others, and was quoted and copied till at last every one in the locality
+chimed in. Just so it is with national tricks of vocalization or
+intonation, with national manners, fashions of movement and gesture, and
+habitual expressions of face. We, here in America, through following a
+succession of pattern-setters whom it is now impossible to trace, and
+through influencing each other in a bad direction, have at last settled
+down collectively into what, for better or worse, is our own
+characteristic national type,--a type with the production of which, so
+far as these habits go, the climate and conditions have had practically
+nothing at all to do.
+
+This type, which we have thus reached by our imitativeness, we now have
+fixed upon us, for better or worse. Now no type can be _wholly_
+disadvantageous; but, so far as our type follows the bottled-lightning
+fashion, it cannot be wholly good. Dr. Clouston was certainly right in
+thinking that eagerness, breathlessness, and anxiety are not signs of
+strength: they are signs of weakness and of bad co-ordination. The even
+forehead, the slab-like cheek, the codfish eye, may be less interesting
+for the moment; but they are more promising signs than intense
+expression is of what we may expect of their possessor in the long run.
+Your dull, unhurried worker gets over a great deal of ground, because he
+never goes backward or breaks down. Your intense, convulsive worker
+breaks down and has bad moods so often that you never know where he may
+be when you most need his help,--he may be having one of his 'bad days.'
+We say that so many of our fellow-countrymen collapse, and have to be
+sent abroad to rest their nerves, because they work so hard. I suspect
+that this is an immense mistake. I suspect that neither the nature nor
+the amount of our work is accountable for the frequency and severity of
+our breakdowns, but that their cause lies rather in those absurd
+feelings of hurry and having no time, in that breathlessness and
+tension, that anxiety of feature and that solicitude for results, that
+lack of inner harmony and ease, in short, by which with us the work is
+so apt to be accompanied, and from which a European who should do the
+same work would nine times out of ten be free. These perfectly wanton
+and unnecessary tricks of inner attitude and outer manner in us, caught
+from the social atmosphere, kept up by tradition, and idealized by many
+as the admirable way of life, are the last straws that break the
+American camel's back, the final overflowers of our measure of wear and
+tear and fatigue.
+
+The voice, for example, in a surprisingly large number of us has a tired
+and plaintive sound. Some of us are really tired (for I do not mean
+absolutely to deny that our climate has a tiring quality); but far more
+of us are not tired at all, or would not be tired at all unless we had
+got into a wretched trick of feeling tired, by following the prevalent
+habits of vocalization and expression. And if talking high and tired,
+and living excitedly and hurriedly, would only enable us to _do_ more by
+the way, even while breaking us down in the end, it would be different.
+There would be some compensation, some excuse, for going on so. But the
+exact reverse is the case. It is your relaxed and easy worker, who is in
+no hurry, and quite thoughtless most of the while of consequences, who
+is your efficient worker; and tension and anxiety, and present and
+future, all mixed up together in our mind at once, are the surest drags
+upon steady progress and hindrances to our success. My colleague,
+Professor Muensterberg, an excellent observer, who came here recently,
+has written some notes on America to German papers. He says in substance
+that the appearance of unusual energy in America is superficial and
+illusory, being really due to nothing but the habits of jerkiness and
+bad co-ordination for which we have to thank the defective training of
+our people. I think myself that it is high time for old legends and
+traditional opinions to be changed; and that, if any one should begin to
+write about Yankee inefficiency and feebleness, and inability to do
+anything with time except to waste it, he would have a very pretty
+paradoxical little thesis to sustain, with a great many facts to quote,
+and a great deal of experience to appeal to in its proof.
+
+Well, my friends, if our dear American character is weakened by all this
+over-tension,--and I think, whatever reserves you may make, that you
+will agree as to the main facts,--where does the remedy lie? It lies, of
+course, where lay the origins of the disease. If a vicious fashion and
+taste are to blame for the thing, the fashion and taste must be changed.
+And, though it is no small thing to inoculate seventy millions of people
+with new standards, yet, if there is to be any relief, that will have
+to be done. We must change ourselves from a race that admires jerk and
+snap for their own sakes, and looks down upon low voices and quiet ways
+as dull, to one that, on the contrary, has calm for its ideal, and for
+their own sakes loves harmony, dignity, and ease.
+
+So we go back to the psychology of imitation again. There is only one
+way to improve ourselves, and that is by some of us setting an example
+which the others may pick up and imitate till the new fashion spreads
+from east to west. Some of us are in more favorable positions than
+others to set new fashions. Some are much more striking personally and
+imitable, so to speak. But no living person is sunk so low as not to be
+imitated by somebody. Thackeray somewhere says of the Irish nation that
+there never was an Irishman so poor that he didn't have a still poorer
+Irishman living at his expense; and, surely, there is no human being
+whose example doesn't work contagiously in _some_ particular. The very
+idiots at our public institutions imitate each other's peculiarities.
+And, if you should individually achieve calmness and harmony in your own
+person, you may depend upon it that a wave of imitation will spread
+from you, as surely as the circles spread outward when a stone is
+dropped into a lake.
+
+Fortunately, we shall not have to be absolute pioneers. Even now in New
+York they have formed a society for the improvement of our national
+vocalization, and one perceives its machinations already in the shape of
+various newspaper paragraphs intended to stir up dissatisfaction with
+the awful thing that it is. And, better still than that, because more
+radical and general, is the gospel of relaxation, as one may call it,
+preached by Miss Annie Payson Call, of Boston, in her admirable little
+volume called 'Power through Repose,' a book that ought to be in the
+hands of every teacher and student in America of either sex. You need
+only be followers, then, on a path already opened up by others. But of
+one thing be confident: others still will follow you.
+
+And this brings me to one more application of psychology to practical
+life, to which I will call attention briefly, and then close. If one's
+example of easy and calm ways is to be effectively contagious, one feels
+by instinct that the less voluntarily one aims at getting imitated, the
+more unconscious one keeps in the matter, the more likely one is to
+succeed. _Become the imitable thing_, and you may then discharge your
+minds of all responsibility for the imitation. The laws of social nature
+will take care of that result. Now the psychological principle on which
+this precept reposes is a law of very deep and wide-spread importance in
+the conduct of our lives, and at the same time a law which we Americans
+most grievously neglect. Stated technically, the law is this: that
+_strong feeling about one's self tends to arrest the free association of
+one's objective ideas and motor processes_. We get the extreme example
+of this in the mental disease called melancholia.
+
+A melancholic patient is filled through and through with intensely
+painful emotion about himself. He is threatened, he is guilty, he is
+doomed, he is annihilated, he is lost. His mind is fixed as if in a
+cramp on these feelings of his own situation, and in all the books on
+insanity you may read that the usual varied flow of his thoughts has
+ceased. His associative processes, to use the technical phrase, are
+inhibited; and his ideas stand stock-still, shut up to their one
+monotonous function of reiterating inwardly the fact of the man's
+desperate estate. And this inhibitive influence is not due to the mere
+fact that his emotion is _painful_. Joyous emotions about the self also
+stop the association of our ideas. A saint in ecstasy is as motionless
+and irresponsive and one-idea'd as a melancholiac. And, without going as
+far as ecstatic saints, we know how in every one a great or sudden
+pleasure may paralyze the flow of thought. Ask young people returning
+from a party or a spectacle, and all excited about it, what it was. "Oh,
+it was _fine_! it was _fine_! it was _fine_!" is all the information you
+are likely to receive until the excitement has calmed down. Probably
+every one of my hearers has been made temporarily half-idiotic by some
+great success or piece of good fortune. "_Good_! GOOD! GOOD!" is all we
+can at such times say to ourselves until we smile at our own very
+foolishness.
+
+Now from all this we can draw an extremely practical conclusion. If,
+namely, we wish our trains of ideation and volition to be copious and
+varied and effective, we must form the habit of freeing them from the
+inhibitive influence of reflection upon them, of egoistic preoccupation
+about their results. Such a habit, like other habits, can be formed.
+Prudence and duty and self-regard, emotions of ambition and emotions of
+anxiety, have, of course, a needful part to play in our lives.
+
+But confine them as far as possible to the occasions when you are
+making your general resolutions and deciding on your plans of campaign,
+and keep them out of the details. When once a decision is reached and
+execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility
+and care about the outcome. _Unclamp_, in a word, your intellectual and
+practical machinery, and let it run free; and the service it will do you
+will be twice as good. Who are the scholars who get 'rattled' in the
+recitation-room? Those who think of the possibilities of failure and
+feel the great importance of the act. Who are those who do recite well?
+Often those who are most indifferent. _Their_ ideas reel themselves out
+of their memory of their own accord. Why do we hear the complaint so
+often that social life in New England is either less rich and expressive
+or more fatiguing than it is in some other parts of the world? To what
+is the fact, if fact it be, due unless to the over-active conscience of
+the people, afraid of either saying something too trivial and obvious,
+or something insincere, or something unworthy of one's interlocutor, or
+something in some way or other not adequate to the occasion? How can
+conversation possibly steer itself through such a sea of
+responsibilities and inhibitions as this? On the other hand,
+conversation does flourish and society is refreshing, and neither dull
+on the one hand nor exhausting from its effort on the other, wherever
+people forget their scruples and take the brakes off their hearts, and
+let their tongues wag as automatically and irresponsibly as they will.
+
+They talk much in pedagogic circles to-day about the duty of the teacher
+to prepare for every lesson in advance. To some extent this is useful.
+But we Yankees are assuredly not those to whom such a general doctrine
+should be preached. We are only too careful as it is. The advice I
+should give to most teachers would be in the words of one who is herself
+an admirable teacher. Prepare yourself in the _subject so well that it
+shall be always on tap_: then in the classroom trust your spontaneity
+and fling away all further care.
+
+My advice to students, especially to girl-students, would be somewhat
+similar. Just as a bicycle-chain may be too tight, so may one's
+carefulness and conscientiousness be so tense as to hinder the running
+of one's mind. Take, for example, periods when there are many successive
+days of examination impending. One ounce of good nervous tone in an
+examination is worth many pounds of anxious study for it in advance. If
+you want really to do your best in an examination, fling away the book
+the day before, say to yourself, "I won't waste another minute on this
+miserable thing, and I don't care an iota whether I succeed or not." Say
+this sincerely, and feel it; and go out and play, or go to bed and
+sleep, and I am sure the results next day will encourage you to use the
+method permanently. I have heard this advice given to a student by Miss
+Call, whose book on muscular relaxation I quoted a moment ago. In her
+later book, entitled 'As a Matter of Course,' the gospel of moral
+relaxation, of dropping things from the mind, and not 'caring,' is
+preached with equal success. Not only our preachers, but our friends the
+theosophists and mind-curers of various religious sects are also harping
+on this string. And with the doctors, the Delsarteans, the various
+mind-curing sects, and such writers as Mr. Dresser, Prentice Mulford,
+Mr. Horace Fletcher, and Mr. Trine to help, and the whole band of
+schoolteachers and magazine-readers chiming in, it really looks as if a
+good start might be made in the direction of changing our American
+mental habit into something more indifferent and strong.
+
+Worry means always and invariably inhibition of associations and loss
+of effective power. Of course, the sovereign cure for worry is religious
+faith; and this, of course, you also know. The turbulent billows of the
+fretful surface leave the deep parts of the ocean undisturbed, and to
+him who has a hold on vaster and more permanent realities the hourly
+vicissitudes of his personal destiny seem relatively insignificant
+things. The really religious person is accordingly unshakable and full
+of equanimity, and calmly ready for any duty that the day may bring
+forth. This is charmingly illustrated by a little work with which I
+recently became acquainted, "The Practice of the Presence of God, the
+Best Ruler of a Holy Life, by Brother Lawrence, being Conversations and
+Letters of Nicholas Herman of Lorraine, Translated from the French."[C]
+I extract a few passages, the conversations being given in indirect
+discourse. Brother Lawrence was a Carmelite friar, converted at Paris in
+1666. "He said that he had been footman to M. Fieubert, the Treasurer,
+and that he was a great awkward fellow, who broke everything. That he
+had desired to be received into a monastery, thinking that he would
+there be made to smart for his awkwardness and the faults he should
+commit, and so he should sacrifice to God his life, with its pleasures;
+but that God had disappointed him, he having met with nothing but
+satisfaction in that state...."
+
+     [C] Fleming H. Revell Company, New York.
+
+"That he had long been troubled in mind from a certain belief that he
+should be damned; that all the men in the world could not have persuaded
+him to the contrary; but that he had thus reasoned with himself about
+it: _I engaged in a religious life only for the love of God, and I have
+endeavored to act only for Him; whatever becomes of me, whether I be
+lost or saved, I will always continue to act purely for the love of God.
+I shall have this good at least, that till death I shall have done all
+that is in me to love Him_.... That since then he had passed his life in
+perfect liberty and continual joy."
+
+"That when an occasion of practising some virtue offered, he addressed
+himself to God, saying, 'Lord, I cannot do this unless thou enablest
+me'; and that then he received strength more than sufficient. That, when
+he had failed in his duty, he only confessed his fault, saying to God,
+'I shall never do otherwise, if You leave me to myself; it is You who
+must hinder my failing, and mend what is amiss.' That after this he gave
+himself no further uneasiness about it."
+
+"That he had been lately sent into Burgundy to buy the provision of wine
+for the society, which was a very unwelcome task for him, because he had
+no turn for business, and because he was lame, and could not go about
+the boat but by rolling himself over the casks. That, however, he gave
+himself no uneasiness about it, nor about the purchase of the wine. That
+he said to God, 'It was his business he was about,' and that he
+afterward found it well performed. That he had been sent into Auvergne,
+the year before, upon the same account; that he could not tell how the
+matter passed, but that it proved very well."
+
+"So, likewise, in his business in the kitchen (to which he had naturally
+a great aversion), having accustomed himself to do everything there for
+the love of God, and with prayer upon all occasions, for his grace to do
+his work well, he had found everything easy during fifteen years that he
+had been employed there."
+
+"That he was very well pleased with the post he was now in, but that he
+was as ready to quit that as the former, since he was always pleasing
+himself in every condition, by doing little things for the love of God."
+
+"That the goodness of God assured him he would not forsake him utterly,
+and that he would give him strength to bear whatever evil he permitted
+to happen to him; and, therefore, that he feared nothing, and had no
+occasion to consult with anybody about his state. That, when he had
+attempted to do it, he had always come away more perplexed."
+
+The simple-heartedness of the good Brother Lawrence, and the relaxation
+of all unnecessary solicitudes and anxieties in him, is a refreshing
+spectacle.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The need of feeling responsible all the livelong day has been preached
+long enough in our New England. Long enough exclusively, at any
+rate,--and long enough to the female sex. What our girl-students and
+woman-teachers most need nowadays is not the exacerbation, but rather
+the toning-down of their moral tensions. Even now I fear that some one
+of my fair hearers may be making an undying resolve to become
+strenuously relaxed, cost what it will, for the remainder of her life.
+It is needless to say that that is not the way to do it. The way to do
+it, paradoxical as it may seem, is genuinely not to care whether you are
+doing it or not. Then, possibly, by the grace of God, you may all at
+once find that you _are_ doing it, and, having learned what the trick
+feels like, you may (again by the grace of God) be enabled to go on.
+
+And that something like this may be the happy experience of all my
+hearers is, in closing, my most earnest wish.
+
+
+
+
+II. ON A CERTAIN BLINDNESS IN HUMAN BEINGS
+
+
+Our judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little, depend on
+the _feelings_ the things arouse in us. Where we judge a thing to be
+precious in consequence of the _idea_ we frame of it, this is only
+because the idea is itself associated already with a feeling. If we were
+radically feelingless, and if ideas were the only things our mind could
+entertain, we should lose all our likes and dislikes at a stroke, and be
+unable to point to any one situation or experience in life more valuable
+or significant than any other.
+
+Now the blindness in human beings, of which this discourse will treat,
+is the blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the
+feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves.
+
+We are practical beings, each of us with limited functions and duties to
+perform. Each is bound to feel intensely the importance of his own
+duties and the significance of the situations that call these forth.
+But this feeling is in each of us a vital secret, for sympathy with
+which we vainly look to others. The others are too much absorbed in
+their own vital secrets to take an interest in ours. Hence the stupidity
+and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the significance
+of alien lives. Hence the falsity of our judgments, so far as they
+presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other persons'
+conditions or ideals.
+
+Take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we are by a tie more intimate
+than most ties in this world; and yet, outside of that tie of friendly
+fondness, how insensible, each of us, to all that makes life significant
+for the other!--we to the rapture of bones under hedges, or smells of
+trees and lamp-posts, they to the delights of literature and art. As you
+sit reading the most moving romance you ever fell upon, what sort of a
+judge is your fox-terrier of your behavior? With all his good will
+toward you, the nature of your conduct is absolutely excluded from his
+comprehension. To sit there like a senseless statue, when you might be
+taking him to walk and throwing sticks for him to catch! What queer
+disease is this that comes over you every day, of holding things and
+staring at them like that for hours together, paralyzed of motion and
+vacant of all conscious life? The African savages came nearer the truth;
+but they, too, missed it, when they gathered wonderingly round one of
+our American travellers who, in the interior, had just come into
+possession of a stray copy of the New York _Commercial Advertiser_, and
+was devouring it column by column. When he got through, they offered him
+a high price for the mysterious object; and, being asked for what they
+wanted it, they said: "For an eye medicine,"--that being the only reason
+they could conceive of for the protracted bath which he had given his
+eyes upon its surface.
+
+The spectator's judgment is sure to miss the root of the matter, and to
+possess no truth. The subject judged knows a part of the world of
+reality which the judging spectator fails to see, knows more while the
+spectator knows less; and, wherever there is conflict of opinion and
+difference of vision, we are bound to believe that the truer side is the
+side that feels the more, and not the side that feels the less.
+
+Let me take a personal example of the kind that befalls each one of us
+daily:--
+
+Some years ago, while journeying in the mountains of North Carolina, I
+passed by a large number of 'coves,' as they call them there, or heads
+of small valleys between the hills, which had been newly cleared and
+planted. The impression on my mind was one of unmitigated squalor. The
+settler had in every case cut down the more manageable trees, and left
+their charred stumps standing. The larger trees he had girdled and
+killed, in order that their foliage should not cast a shade. He had then
+built a log cabin, plastering its chinks with clay, and had set up a
+tall zigzag rail fence around the scene of his havoc, to keep the pigs
+and cattle out. Finally, he had irregularly planted the intervals
+between the stumps and trees with Indian corn, which grew among the
+chips; and there he dwelt with his wife and babes--an axe, a gun, a few
+utensils, and some pigs and chickens feeding in the woods, being the sum
+total of his possessions.
+
+The forest had been destroyed; and what had 'improved' it out of
+existence was hideous, a sort of ulcer, without a single element of
+artificial grace to make up for the loss of Nature's beauty. Ugly,
+indeed, seemed the life of the squatter, scudding, as the sailors say,
+under bare poles, beginning again away back where our first ancestors
+started, and by hardly a single item the better off for all the
+achievements of the intervening generations.
+
+Talk about going back to nature! I said to myself, oppressed by the
+dreariness, as I drove by. Talk of a country life for one's old age and
+for one's children! Never thus, with nothing but the bare ground and
+one's bare hands to fight the battle! Never, without the best spoils of
+culture woven in! The beauties and commodities gained by the centuries
+are sacred. They are our heritage and birthright. No modern person ought
+to be willing to live a day in such a state of rudimentariness and
+denudation.
+
+Then I said to the mountaineer who was driving me, "What sort of people
+are they who have to make these new clearings?" "All of us," he replied.
+"Why, we ain't happy here, unless we are getting one of these coves
+under cultivation." I instantly felt that I had been losing the whole
+inward significance of the situation. Because to me the clearings spoke
+of naught but denudation, I thought that to those whose sturdy arms and
+obedient axes had made them they could tell no other story. But, when
+_they_ looked on the hideous stumps, what they thought of was personal
+victory. The chips, the girdled trees, and the vile split rails spoke
+of honest sweat, persistent toil and final reward. The cabin was a
+warrant of safety for self and wife and babes. In short, the clearing,
+which to me was a mere ugly picture on the retina, was to them a symbol
+redolent with moral memories and sang a very paean of duty, struggle, and
+success.
+
+I had been as blind to the peculiar ideality of their conditions as they
+certainly would also have been to the ideality of mine, had they had a
+peep at my strange indoor academic ways of life at Cambridge.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives
+it, there the life becomes genuinely significant. Sometimes the
+eagerness is more knit up with the motor activities, sometimes with the
+perceptions, sometimes with the imagination, sometimes with reflective
+thought. But, wherever it is found, there is the zest, the tingle, the
+excitement of reality; and there _is_ 'importance' in the only real and
+positive sense in which importance ever anywhere can be.
+
+Robert Louis Stevenson has illustrated this by a case, drawn from the
+sphere of the imagination, in an essay which I really think deserves to
+become immortal, both for the truth of its matter and the excellence of
+its form.
+
+"Toward the end of September," Stevenson writes, "when school-time was
+drawing near, and the nights were already black, we would begin to sally
+from our respective villas, each equipped with a tin bull's-eye lantern.
+The thing was so well known that it had worn a rut in the commerce of
+Great Britain; and the grocers, about the due time, began to garnish
+their windows with our particular brand of luminary. We wore them
+buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was the
+rigor of the game, a buttoned top-coat. They smelled noisomely of
+blistered tin. They never burned aright, though they would always burn
+our fingers. Their use was naught, the pleasure of them merely fanciful,
+and yet a boy with a bull's-eye under his top-coat asked for nothing
+more. The fishermen used lanterns about their boats, and it was from
+them, I suppose, that we had got the hint; but theirs were not
+bull's-eyes, nor did we ever play at being fishermen. The police carried
+them at their belts, and we had plainly copied them in that; yet we did
+not pretend to be policemen. Burglars, indeed, we may have had some
+haunting thought of; and we had certainly an eye to past ages when
+lanterns were more common, and to certain story-books in which we had
+found them to figure very largely. But take it for all in all, the
+pleasure of the thing was substantive; and to be a boy with a bull's-eye
+under his top-coat was good enough for us.
+
+"When two of these asses met, there would be an anxious 'Have you got
+your lantern?' and a gratified 'Yes!' That was the shibboleth, and very
+needful, too; for, as it was the rule to keep our glory contained, none
+could recognize a lantern-bearer unless (like the polecat) by the smell.
+Four or five would sometimes climb into the belly of a ten-man lugger,
+with nothing but the thwarts above them,--for the cabin was usually
+locked,--or chose out some hollow of the links where the wind might
+whistle overhead. Then the coats would be unbuttoned, and the
+bull's-eyes discovered; and in the chequering glimmer, under the huge,
+windy hall of the night, and cheered by a rich steam of toasting
+tinware, these fortunate young gentlemen would crouch together in the
+cold sand of the links, or on the scaly bilges of the fishing-boat, and
+delight them with inappropriate talk. Woe is me that I cannot give some
+specimens!... But the talk was but a condiment, and these gatherings
+themselves only accidents in the career of the lantern-bearer. The
+essence of this bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night, the
+slide shut, the top-coat buttoned, not a ray escaping, whether to
+conduct your footsteps or to make your glory public,--a mere pillar of
+darkness in the dark; and all the while, deep down in the privacy of
+your fool's heart, to know you had a bull's-eye at your belt, and to
+exult and sing over the knowledge.
+
+"It is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the most stolid.
+It may be contended rather that a (somewhat minor) bard in almost every
+case survives, and is the spice of life to his possessor. Justice is not
+done to the versatility and the unplumbed childishness of man's
+imagination. His life from without may seem but a rude mound of mud:
+there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells
+delighted; and for as dark as his pathway seems to the observer, he will
+have some kind of bull's-eye at his belt."
+
+... "There is one fable that touches very near the quick of life,--the
+fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard a bird break into
+song, hearkened for a trill or two, and found himself at his return a
+stranger at his convent gates; for he had been absent fifty years, and
+of all his comrades there survived but one to recognize him. It is not
+only in the woods that this enchanter carols, though perhaps he is
+native there. He sings in the most doleful places. The miser hears him
+and chuckles, and his days are moments. With no more apparatus than an
+evil-smelling lantern, I have evoked him on the naked links. All life
+that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two strands,--seeking for
+that bird and hearing him. And it is just this that makes life so hard
+to value, and the delight of each so incommunicable. And it is just a
+knowledge of this, and a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which
+the bird _has_ sung to _us_, that fills us with such wonder when we turn
+to the pages of the realist. There, to be sure, we find a picture of
+life in so far as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap desires and
+cheap fears, that which we are ashamed to remember and that which we are
+careless whether we forget; but of the note of that time-devouring
+nightingale we hear no news."
+
+... "Say that we came [in such a realistic romance] on some such business
+as that of my lantern-bearers on the links, and described the boys as
+very cold, spat upon by flurries of rain, and drearily surrounded, all
+of which they were; and their talk as silly and indecent, which it
+certainly was. To the eye of the observer they _are_ wet and cold and
+drearily surrounded; but ask themselves, and they are in the heaven of a
+recondite pleasure, the ground of which is an ill-smelling lantern."
+
+"For, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is often hard to hit. It may
+hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like the lantern; it may reside in
+the mysterious inwards of psychology.... It has so little bond with
+externals ... that it may even touch them not, and the man's true life,
+for which he consents to live, lie together in the field of fancy.... In
+such a case the poetry runs underground. The observer (poor soul, with
+his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court
+deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment;
+but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed
+through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realism
+were that of the poets, to climb after him like a squirrel, and catch
+some glimpse of the heaven in which he lives. And the true realism,
+always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy
+resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing."
+
+"For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the
+sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse. To one
+who has not the secret of the lanterns the scene upon the links is
+meaningless. And hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of
+realistic books.... In each we miss the personal poetry, the enchanted
+atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked and
+seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life falls dead like dough,
+instead of soaring away like a balloon into the colors of the sunset;
+each is true, each inconceivable; for no man lives in the external truth
+among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his
+brain, with the painted windows and the storied wall."[D]
+
+     [D] 'The Lantern-bearers,' in the volume entitled 'Across the
+     Plains.' Abridged in the quotation.
+
+These paragraphs are the best thing I know in all Stevenson. "To miss
+the joy is to miss all." Indeed, it is. Yet we are but finite, and each
+one of us has some single specialized vocation of his own. And it seems
+as if energy in the service of its particular duties might be got only
+by hardening the heart toward everything unlike them. Our deadness
+toward all but one particular kind of joy would thus be the price we
+inevitably have to pay for being practical creatures. Only in some
+pitiful dreamer, some philosopher, poet, or romancer, or when the common
+practical man becomes a lover, does the hard externality give way, and a
+gleam of insight into the ejective world, as Clifford called it, the
+vast world of inner life beyond us, so different from that of outer
+seeming, illuminate our mind. Then the whole scheme of our customary
+values gets confounded, then our self is riven and its narrow interests
+fly to pieces, then a new centre and a new perspective must be found.
+
+The change is well described by my colleague, Josiah Royce:--
+
+"What, then, is our neighbor? Thou hast regarded his thought, his
+feeling, as somehow different from thine. Thou hast said, 'A pain in him
+is not like a pain in me, but something far easier to bear.' He seems to
+thee a little less living than thou; his life is dim, it is cold, it is
+a pale fire beside thy own burning desires.... So, dimly and by instinct
+hast thou lived with thy neighbor, and hast known him not, being blind.
+Thou hast made [of him] a thing, no Self at all. Have done with this
+illusion, and simply try to learn the truth. Pain is pain, joy is joy,
+everywhere, even as in thee. In all the songs of the forest birds; in
+all the cries of the wounded and dying, struggling in the captor's
+power; in the boundless sea where the myriads of water-creatures strive
+and die; amid all the countless hordes of savage men; in all sickness
+and sorrow; in all exultation and hope, everywhere, from the lowest to
+the noblest, the same conscious, burning, wilful life is found,
+endlessly manifold as the forms of the living creatures, unquenchable as
+the fires of the sun, real as these impulses that even now throb in
+thine own little selfish heart. Lift up thy eyes, behold that life, and
+then turn away, and forget it as thou canst; but, if thou hast _known_
+that, thou hast begun to know thy duty."[E]
+
+     [E] The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, pp. 157-162
+     (abridged).
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+This higher vision of an inner significance in what, until then, we had
+realized only in the dead external way, often comes over a person
+suddenly; and, when it does so, it makes an epoch in his history. As
+Emerson says, there is a depth in those moments that constrains us to
+ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences. The passion
+of love will shake one like an explosion, or some act will awaken a
+remorseful compunction that hangs like a cloud over all one's later day.
+
+This mystic sense of hidden meaning starts upon us often from non-human
+natural things. I take this passage from 'Obermann,' a French novel that
+had some vogue in its day: "Paris, March 7.--It was dark and rather
+cold. I was gloomy, and walked because I had nothing to do. I passed by
+some flowers placed breast-high upon a wall. A jonquil in bloom was
+there. It is the strongest expression of desire: it was the first
+perfume of the year. I felt all the happiness destined for man. This
+unutterable harmony of souls, the phantom of the ideal world, arose in
+me complete. I never felt anything so great or so instantaneous. I know
+not what shape, what analogy, what secret of relation it was that made
+me see in this flower a limitless beauty.... I shall never enclose in a
+conception this power, this immensity that nothing will express; this
+form that nothing will contain; this ideal of a better world which one
+feels, but which it would seem that nature has not made."[F]
+
+    [F] De Senancour: Obermann, Lettre XXX.
+
+Wordsworth and Shelley are similarly full of this sense of a limitless
+significance in natural things. In Wordsworth it was a somewhat austere
+and moral significance,--a 'lonely cheer.'
+
+ "To every natural form, rock, fruit, or flower,
+  Even the loose stones that cover the highway,
+  I gave a moral life: I saw them feel
+  Or linked them to some feeling: the great mass
+  Lay bedded in some quickening soul, and all
+  That I beheld respired with inward meaning."[G]
+
+    [G] The Prelude, Book III.
+
+"Authentic tidings of invisible things!" Just what this hidden presence
+in nature was, which Wordsworth so rapturously felt, and in the light of
+which he lived, tramping the hills for days together, the poet never
+could explain logically or in articulate conceptions. Yet to the reader
+who may himself have had gleaming moments of a similar sort the verses
+in which Wordsworth simply proclaims the fact of them come with a
+heart-satisfying authority:--
+
+                                "Magnificent
+  The morning rose, in memorable pomp,
+  Glorious as ere I had beheld. In front
+  The sea lay laughing at a distance; near
+  The solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds,
+  Grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light;
+  And in the meadows and the lower grounds
+  Was all the sweetness of a common dawn,--
+  Dews, vapors, and the melody of birds,
+  And laborers going forth to till the fields."
+
+ "Ah! need I say, dear Friend, that to the brim
+  My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
+  Were then made for me; bond unknown to me
+  Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly,
+  A dedicated Spirit. On I walked,
+  In thankful blessedness, which yet survives."[H]
+
+    [H] The Prelude, Book IV.
+
+As Wordsworth walked, filled with his strange inner joy, responsive thus
+to the secret life of nature round about him, his rural neighbors,
+tightly and narrowly intent upon their own affairs, their crops and
+lambs and fences, must have thought him a very insignificant and foolish
+personage. It surely never occurred to any one of them to wonder what
+was going on inside of _him_ or what it might be worth. And yet that
+inner life of his carried the burden of a significance that has fed the
+souls of others, and fills them to this day with inner joy.
+
+Richard Jefferies has written a remarkable autobiographic document
+entitled The Story of my Heart. It tells, in many pages, of the rapture
+with which in youth the sense of the life of nature filled him. On a
+certain hill-top he says:--
+
+"I was utterly alone with the sun and the earth. Lying down on the
+grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the
+distant sea, far beyond sight.... With all the intensity of feeling
+which exalted me, all the intense communion I held with the earth, the
+sun and sky, the stars hidden by the light, with the ocean,--in no
+manner can the thrilling depth of these feelings be written,--with these
+I prayed as if they were the keys of an instrument.... The great sun,
+burning with light, the strong earth,--dear earth,--the warm sky, the
+pure air, the thought of ocean, the inexpressible beauty of all filled
+me with a rapture, an ecstasy, an inflatus. With this inflatus, too, I
+prayed.... The prayer, this soul-emotion, was in itself, not for an
+object: it was a passion. I hid my face in the grass. I was wholly
+prostrated, I lost myself in the wrestle, I was rapt and carried
+away.... Had any shepherd accidentally seen me lying on the turf, he
+would only have thought I was resting a few minutes. I made no outward
+show. Who could have imagined the whirlwind of passion that was going
+on in me as I reclined there!"[I]
+
+    [I] _Op. cit._, Boston, Roberts, 1883, pp. 5, 6.
+
+Surely, a worthless hour of life, when measured by the usual standards
+of commercial value. Yet in what other _kind_ of value can the
+preciousness of any hour, made precious by any standard, consist, if it
+consist not in feelings of excited significance like these, engendered
+in some one, by what the hour contains?
+
+Yet so blind and dead does the clamor of our own practical interests
+make us to all other things, that it seems almost as if it were
+necessary to become worthless as a practical being, if one is to hope to
+attain to any breadth of insight into the impersonal world of worths as
+such, to have any perception of life's meaning on a large objective
+scale. Only your mystic, your dreamer, or your insolvent tramp or
+loafer, can afford so sympathetic an occupation, an occupation which
+will change the usual standards of human value in the twinkling of an
+eye, giving to foolishness a place ahead of power, and laying low in a
+minute the distinctions which it takes a hard-working conventional man a
+lifetime to build up. You may be a prophet, at this rate; but you cannot
+be a worldly success.
+
+Walt Whitman, for instance, is accounted by many of us a contemporary
+prophet. He abolishes the usual human distinctions, brings all
+conventionalisms into solution, and loves and celebrates hardly any
+human attributes save those elementary ones common to all members of the
+race. For this he becomes a sort of ideal tramp, a rider on omnibus-tops
+and ferry-boats, and, considered either practically or academically, a
+worthless, unproductive being. His verses are but ejaculations--things
+mostly without subject or verb, a succession of interjections on an
+immense scale. He felt the human crowd as rapturously as Wordsworth felt
+the mountains, felt it as an overpoweringly significant presence, simply
+to absorb one's mind in which should be business sufficient and worthy
+to fill the days of a serious man. As he crosses Brooklyn ferry, this is
+what he feels:--
+
+  Flood-tide below me! I watch you, face to face;
+  Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see
+    you also face to face.
+  Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes!
+    how curious you are to me!
+  On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross,
+    returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose;
+  And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence,
+    are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you
+    might suppose.
+  Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from
+    shore to shore;
+  Others will watch the run of the flood-tide;
+  Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west,
+    and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east;
+  Others will see the islands large and small;
+  Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the
+    sun half an hour high.
+  A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years
+    hence, others will see them,
+  Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the flood-tide, the
+    falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide.
+  It avails not, neither time or place--distance avails not.
+  Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I
+    felt;
+  Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a
+    crowd;
+  Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and
+    the bright flow, I was refresh'd;
+  Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the
+    swift current, I stood, yet was hurried;
+  Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the
+    thick-stemmed pipes of steamboats, I looked.
+  I too many and many a time cross'd the river, the sun half
+    an hour high;
+  I watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls--I saw them high in
+    the air, with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies,
+  I saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies,
+    and left the rest in strong shadow,
+  I saw the slow-wheeling circles, and the gradual edging
+    toward the south.
+  Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops, saw the ships
+    at anchor,
+  The sailors at work in the rigging, or out astride the spars;
+  The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups,
+    the frolicsome crests and glistening;
+  The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray
+    walls of the granite store-houses by the docks;
+  On the neighboring shores, the fires from the foundry chimneys
+    burning high ... into the night,
+  Casting their flicker of black ... into the clefts of streets.
+  These, and all else, were to me the same as they are to you.[J]
+
+    [J] 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry' (abridged).
+
+And so on, through the rest of a divinely beautiful poem. And, if you
+wish to see what this hoary loafer considered the most worthy way of
+profiting by life's heaven-sent opportunities, read the delicious volume
+of his letters to a young car-conductor who had become his friend:--
+
+     "NEW YORK, Oct. 9, 1868.
+
+     "_Dear Pete_,--It is splendid here this forenoon--bright and
+     cool. I was out early taking a short walk by the river only
+     two squares from where I live.... Shall I tell you about [my
+     life] just to fill up? I generally spend the forenoon in my
+     room writing, etc., then take a bath fix up and go out about
+     twelve and loafe somewhere or call on someone down town or on
+     business, or perhaps if it is very pleasant and I feel like
+     it ride a trip with some driver friend on Broadway from 23rd
+     Street to Bowling Green, three miles each way. (Every day I
+     find I have plenty to do, every hour is occupied with
+     something.) You know it is a never ending amusement and study
+     and recreation for me to ride a couple of hours on a pleasant
+     afternoon on a Broadway stage in this way. You see everything
+     as you pass, a sort of living, endless panorama--shops and
+     splendid buildings and great windows: on the broad sidewalks
+     crowds of women richly dressed continually passing,
+     altogether different, superior in style and looks from any to
+     be seen anywhere else--in fact a perfect stream of
+     people--men too dressed in high style, and plenty of
+     foreigners--and then in the streets the thick crowd of
+     carriages, stages, carts, hotel and private coaches, and in
+     fact all sorts of vehicles and many first class teams, mile
+     after mile, and the splendor of such a great street and so
+     many tall, ornamental, noble buildings many of them of white
+     marble, and the gayety and motion on every side: you will not
+     wonder how much attraction all this is on a fine day, to a
+     great loafer like me, who enjoys so much seeing the busy
+     world move by him, and exhibiting itself for his amusement,
+     while he takes it easy and just looks on and observes."[K]
+
+    [K] Calamus, Boston, 1897, pp. 41, 42.
+
+Truly a futile way of passing the time, some of you may say, and not
+altogether creditable to a grown-up man. And yet, from the deepest point
+of view, who knows the more of truth, and who knows the less,--Whitman
+on his omnibus-top, full of the inner joy with which the spectacle
+inspires him, or you, full of the disdain which the futility of his
+occupation excites?
+
+When your ordinary Brooklynite or New Yorker, leading a life replete
+with too much luxury, or tired and careworn about his personal affairs,
+crosses the ferry or goes up Broadway, _his_ fancy does not thus 'soar
+away into the colors of the sunset' as did Whitman's, nor does he
+inwardly realize at all the indisputable fact that this world never did
+anywhere or at any time contain more of essential divinity, or of
+eternal meaning, than is embodied in the fields of vision over which
+his eyes so carelessly pass. There is life; and there, a step away, is
+death. There is the only kind of beauty there ever was. There is the old
+human struggle and its fruits together. There is the text and the
+sermon, the real and the ideal in one. But to the jaded and unquickened
+eye it is all dead and common, pure vulgarism, flatness, and disgust.
+"Hech! it is a sad sight!" says Carlyle, walking at night with some one
+who appeals to him to note the splendor of the stars. And that very
+repetition of the scene to new generations of men in _secula seculorum_,
+that eternal recurrence of the common order, which so fills a Whitman
+with mystic satisfaction, is to a Schopenhauer, with the emotional
+anaesthesia, the feeling of 'awful inner emptiness' from out of which he
+views it all, the chief ingredient of the tedium it instils. What is
+life on the largest scale, he asks, but the same recurrent inanities,
+the same dog barking, the same fly buzzing, forevermore? Yet of the kind
+of fibre of which such inanities consist is the material woven of all
+the excitements, joys, and meanings that ever were, or ever shall be, in
+this world.
+
+To be rapt with satisfied attention, like Whitman, to the mere
+spectacle of the world's presence, is one way, and the most fundamental
+way, of confessing one's sense of its unfathomable significance and
+importance. But how can one attain to the feeling of the vital
+significance of an experience, if one have it not to begin with? There
+is no receipt which one can follow. Being a secret and a mystery, it
+often comes in mysteriously unexpected ways. It blossoms sometimes from
+out of the very grave wherein we imagined that our happiness was buried.
+Benvenuto Cellini, after a life all in the outer sunshine, made of
+adventures and artistic excitements, suddenly finds himself cast into a
+dungeon in the Castle of San Angelo. The place is horrible. Rats and wet
+and mould possess it. His leg is broken and his teeth fall out,
+apparently with scurvy. But his thoughts turn to God as they have never
+turned before. He gets a Bible, which he reads during the one hour in
+the twenty-four in which a wandering ray of daylight penetrates his
+cavern. He has religious visions. He sings psalms to himself, and
+composes hymns. And thinking, on the last day of July, of the
+festivities customary on the morrow in Rome, he says to himself: "All
+these past years I celebrated this holiday with the vanities of the
+world: from this year henceforward I will do it with the divinity of
+God. And then I said to myself, 'Oh, how much more happy I am for this
+present life of mine than for all those things remembered!'"[L]
+
+    [L] Vita, lib. 2, chap. iv.
+
+But the great understander of these mysterious ebbs and flows is
+Tolstoi. They throb all through his novels. In his 'War and Peace,' the
+hero, Peter, is supposed to be the richest man in the Russian empire.
+During the French invasion he is taken prisoner, and dragged through
+much of the retreat. Cold, vermin, hunger, and every form of misery
+assail him, the result being a revelation to him of the real scale of
+life's values. "Here only, and for the first time, he appreciated,
+because he was deprived of it, the happiness of eating when he was
+hungry, of drinking when he was thirsty, of sleeping when he was sleepy,
+and of talking when he felt the desire to exchange some words.... Later
+in life he always recurred with joy to this month of captivity, and
+never failed to speak with enthusiasm of the powerful and ineffaceable
+sensations, and especially of the moral calm which he had experienced at
+this epoch. When at daybreak, on the morrow of his imprisonment, he saw
+[I abridge here Tolstoi's description] the mountains with their wooded
+slopes disappearing in the grayish mist; when he felt the cool breeze
+caress him; when he saw the light drive away the vapors, and the sun
+rise majestically behind the clouds and cupolas, and the crosses, the
+dew, the distance, the river, sparkle in the splendid, cheerful
+rays,--his heart overflowed with emotion. This emotion kept continually
+with him, and increased a hundred-fold as the difficulties of his
+situation grew graver.... He learnt that man is meant for happiness, and
+that this happiness is in him, in the satisfaction of the daily needs of
+existence, and that unhappiness is the fatal result, not of our need,
+but of our abundance.... When calm reigned in the camp, and the embers
+paled, and little by little went out, the full moon had reached the
+zenith. The woods and the fields roundabout lay clearly visible; and,
+beyond the inundation of light which filled them, the view plunged into
+the limitless horizon. Then Peter cast his eyes upon the firmament,
+filled at that hour with myriads of stars. 'All that is mine,' he
+thought. 'All that is in me, is me! And that is what they think they
+have taken prisoner! That is what they have shut up in a cabin!' So he
+smiled, and turned in to sleep among his comrades."[M]
+
+    [M] La Guerre et la Paix, Paris, 1884, vol. iii. pp. 268, 275, 316.
+
+The occasion and the experience, then, are nothing. It all depends on
+the capacity of the soul to be grasped, to have its life-currents
+absorbed by what is given. "Crossing a bare common," says Emerson, "in
+snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my
+thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a
+perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear."
+
+Life is always worth living, if one have such responsive sensibilities.
+But we of the highly educated classes (so called) have most of us got
+far, far away from Nature. We are trained to seek the choice, the rare,
+the exquisite exclusively, and to overlook the common. We are stuffed
+with abstract conceptions, and glib with verbalities and verbosities;
+and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy
+connected with our simpler functions often dry up, and we grow
+stone-blind and insensible to life's more elementary and general goods
+and joys.
+
+The remedy under such conditions is to descend to a more profound and
+primitive level. To be imprisoned or shipwrecked or forced into the
+army would permanently show the good of life to many an over-educated
+pessimist. Living in the open air and on the ground, the lop-sided
+beam of the balance slowly rises to the level line; and the
+over-sensibilities and insensibilities even themselves out. The good
+of all the artificial schemes and fevers fades and pales; and that of
+seeing, smelling, tasting, sleeping, and daring and doing with one's
+body, grows and grows. The savages and children of nature, to whom we
+deem ourselves so much superior, certainly are alive where we are often
+dead, along these lines; and, could they write as glibly as we do, they
+would read us impressive lectures on our impatience for improvement and
+on our blindness to the fundamental static goods of life. "Ah! my
+brother," said a chieftain to his white guest, "thou wilt never know the
+happiness of both thinking of nothing and doing nothing. This, next to
+sleep, is the most enchanting of all things. Thus we were before our
+birth, and thus we shall be after death. Thy people,... when they have
+finished reaping one field, they begin to plough another; and, if the
+day were not enough, I have seen them plough by moonlight. What is their
+life to ours,--the life that is as naught to them? Blind that they are,
+they lose it all! But we live in the present."[N]
+
+    [N] Quoted by Lotze, Microcosmus, English translation, vol. ii.
+    p. 240.
+
+The intense interest that life can assume when brought down to the
+non-thinking level, the level of pure sensorial perception, has been
+beautifully described by a man who _can_ write,--Mr. W.H. Hudson, in his
+volume, "Idle Days in Patagonia."
+
+"I spent the greater part of one winter," says this admirable author,
+"at a point on the Rio Negro, seventy or eighty miles from the sea."
+
+... "It was my custom to go out every morning on horseback with my gun,
+and, followed by one dog, to ride away from the valley; and no sooner
+would I climb the terrace, and plunge into the gray, universal thicket,
+than I would find myself as completely alone as if five hundred instead
+of only five miles separated me from the valley and river. So wild and
+solitary and remote seemed that gray waste, stretching away into
+infinitude, a waste untrodden by man, and where the wild animals are so
+few that they have made no discoverable path in the wilderness of
+thorns.... Not once nor twice nor thrice, but day after day I returned
+to this solitude, going to it in the morning as if to attend a festival,
+and leaving it only when hunger and thirst and the westering sun
+compelled me. And yet I had no object in going,--no motive which could
+be put into words; for, although I carried a gun, there was nothing to
+shoot,--the shooting was all left behind in the valley.... Sometimes I
+would pass a whole day without seeing one mammal, and perhaps not more
+than a dozen birds of any size. The weather at that time was cheerless,
+generally with a gray film of cloud spread over the sky, and a bleak
+wind, often cold enough to make my bridle-hand quite numb.... At a slow
+pace, which would have seemed intolerable under other circumstances, I
+would ride about for hours together at a stretch. On arriving at a hill,
+I would slowly ride to its summit, and stand there to survey the
+prospect. On every side it stretched away in great undulations, wild and
+irregular. How gray it all was! Hardly less so near at hand than on the
+haze-wrapped horizon where the hills were dim and the outline obscured
+by distance. Descending from my outlook, I would take up my aimless
+wanderings again, and visit other elevations to gaze on the same
+landscape from another point; and so on for hours. And at noon I would
+dismount, and sit or lie on my folded poncho for an hour or longer. One
+day in these rambles I discovered a small grove composed of twenty or
+thirty trees, growing at a convenient distance apart, that had evidently
+been resorted to by a herd of deer or other wild animals. This grove was
+on a hill differing in shape from other hills in its neighborhood; and,
+after a time, I made a point of finding and using it as a resting-place
+every day at noon. I did not ask myself why I made choice of that one
+spot, sometimes going out of my way to sit there, instead of sitting
+down under any one of the millions of trees and bushes on any other
+hillside. I thought nothing about it, but acted unconsciously. Only
+afterward it seemed to me that, after having rested there once, each
+time I wished to rest again, the wish came associated with the image of
+that particular clump of trees, with polished stems and clean bed of
+sand beneath; and in a short time I formed a habit of returning, animal
+like, to repose at that same spot."
+
+"It was, perhaps, a mistake to say that I would sit down and rest,
+since I was never tired; and yet, without being tired, that noon-day
+pause, during which I sat for an hour without moving, was strangely
+grateful. All day there would be no sound, not even the rustling of a
+leaf. One day, while _listening_ to the silence, it occurred to my mind
+to wonder what the effect would be if I were to shout aloud. This seemed
+at the time a horrible suggestion, which almost made me shudder. But
+during those solitary days it was a rare thing for any thought to cross
+my mind. In the state of mind I was in, thought had become impossible.
+My state was one of _suspense_ and _watchfulness_; yet I had no
+expectation of meeting an adventure, and felt as free from apprehension
+as I feel now while sitting in a room in London. The state seemed
+familiar rather than strange, and accompanied by a strong feeling of
+elation; and I did not know that something had come between me and my
+intellect until I returned to my former self,--to thinking, and the old
+insipid existence [again]."
+
+"I had undoubtedly _gone back_; and that state of intense watchfulness
+or alertness, rather, with suspension of the higher intellectual
+faculties, represented the mental state of the pure savage. He thinks
+little, reasons little, having a surer guide in his [mere sensory
+perceptions]. He is in perfect harmony with nature, and is nearly on a
+level, mentally, with the wild animals he preys on, and which in their
+turn sometimes prey on him."[O]
+
+    [O] _Op. cit._, pp. 210-222 (abridged).
+
+For the spectator, such hours as Mr. Hudson writes of form a mere tale
+of emptiness, in which nothing happens, nothing is gained, and there is
+nothing to describe. They are meaningless and vacant tracts of time. To
+him who feels their inner secret, they tingle with an importance that
+unutterably vouches for itself. I am sorry for the boy or girl, or man
+or woman, who has never been touched by the spell of this mysterious
+sensorial life, with its irrationality, if so you like to call it, but
+its vigilance and its supreme felicity. The holidays of life are its
+most vitally significant portions, because they are, or at least should
+be, covered with just this kind of magically irresponsible spell.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now what is the result of all these considerations and quotations?
+It is negative in one sense, but positive in another. It absolutely
+forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms
+of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate,
+respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy
+in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off:
+neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any
+single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of
+insight from the peculiar position in which he stands. Even prisons and
+sick-rooms have their special revelations. It is enough to ask of each
+of us that he should be faithful to his own opportunities and make the
+most of his own blessings, without presuming to regulate the rest of the
+vast field.
+
+
+
+
+III. WHAT MAKES A LIFE SIGNIFICANT
+
+
+In my previous talk, 'On a Certain Blindness,' I tried to make you feel
+how soaked and shot-through life is with values and meanings which we
+fail to realize because of our external and insensible point of view.
+The meanings are there for the others, but they are not there for us.
+There lies more than a mere interest of curious speculation in
+understanding this. It has the most tremendous practical importance. I
+wish that I could convince you of it as I feel it myself. It is the
+basis of all our tolerance, social, religious, and political. The
+forgetting of it lies at the root of every stupid and sanguinary mistake
+that rulers over subject-peoples make. The first thing to learn in
+intercourse with others is non-interference with their own peculiar ways
+of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by
+violence with ours. No one has insight into all the ideals. No one
+should presume to judge them off-hand. The pretension to dogmatize about
+them in each other is the root of most human injustices and cruelties,
+and the trait in human character most likely to make the angels weep.
+
+Every Jack sees in his own particular Jill charms and perfections to the
+enchantment of which we stolid onlookers are stone-cold. And which has
+the superior view of the absolute truth, he or we? Which has the more
+vital insight into the nature of Jill's existence, as a fact? Is he in
+excess, being in this matter a maniac? or are we in defect, being
+victims of a pathological anaesthesia as regards Jill's magical
+importance? Surely the latter; surely to Jack are the profounder truths
+revealed; surely poor Jill's palpitating little life-throbs _are_ among
+the wonders of creation, _are_ worthy of this sympathetic interest; and
+it is to our shame that the rest of us cannot feel like Jack. For Jack
+realizes Jill concretely, and we do not. He struggles toward a union
+with her inner life, divining her feelings, anticipating her desires,
+understanding her limits as manfully as he can, and yet inadequately,
+too; for he is also afflicted with some blindness, even here. Whilst
+we, dead clods that we are, do not even seek after these things, but are
+contented that that portion of eternal fact named Jill should be for us
+as if it were not. Jill, who knows her inner life, knows that Jack's way
+of taking it--so importantly--is the true and serious way; and she
+responds to the truth in him by taking him truly and seriously, too. May
+the ancient blindness never wrap its clouds about either of them again!
+Where would any of _us_ be, were there no one willing to know us as we
+really are or ready to repay us for _our_ insight by making recognizant
+return? We ought, all of us, to realize each other in this intense,
+pathetic, and important way.
+
+If you say that this is absurd, and that we cannot be in love with
+everyone at once, I merely point out to you that, as a matter of fact,
+certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and
+for taking delight in other people's lives; and that such persons know
+more of truth than if their hearts were not so big. The vice of ordinary
+Jack and Jill affection is not its intensity, but its exclusions and its
+jealousies. Leave those out, and you see that the ideal I am holding up
+before you, however impracticable to-day, yet contains nothing
+intrinsically absurd.
+
+We have unquestionably a great cloud-bank of ancestral blindness
+weighing down upon us, only transiently riven here and there by fitful
+revelations of the truth. It is vain to hope for this state of things to
+alter much. Our inner secrets must remain for the most part impenetrable
+by others, for beings as essentially practical as we are are necessarily
+short of sight. But, if we cannot gain much positive insight into one
+another, cannot we at least use our sense of our own blindness to make
+us more cautious in going over the dark places? Cannot we escape some of
+those hideous ancestral intolerances and cruelties, and positive
+reversals of the truth?
+
+For the remainder of this hour I invite you to seek with me some
+principle to make our tolerance less chaotic. And, as I began my
+previous lecture by a personal reminiscence, I am going to ask your
+indulgence for a similar bit of egotism now.
+
+A few summers ago I spent a happy week at the famous Assembly Grounds on
+the borders of Chautauqua Lake. The moment one treads that sacred
+enclosure, one feels one's self in an atmosphere of success. Sobriety
+and industry, intelligence and goodness, orderliness and ideality,
+prosperity and cheerfulness, pervade the air. It is a serious and
+studious picnic on a gigantic scale. Here you have a town of many
+thousands of inhabitants, beautifully laid out in the forest and
+drained, and equipped with means for satisfying all the necessary lower
+and most of the superfluous higher wants of man. You have a first-class
+college in full blast. You have magnificent music--a chorus of seven
+hundred voices, with possibly the most perfect open-air auditorium in
+the world. You have every sort of athletic exercise from sailing,
+rowing, swimming, bicycling, to the ball-field and the more artificial
+doings which the gymnasium affords. You have kindergartens and model
+secondary schools. You have general religious services and special
+club-houses for the several sects. You have perpetually running
+soda-water fountains, and daily popular lectures by distinguished men.
+You have the best of company, and yet no effort. You have no zymotic
+diseases, no poverty, no drunkenness, no crime, no police. You have
+culture, you have kindness, you have cheapness, you have equality, you
+have the best fruits of what mankind has fought and bled and striven
+for tinder the name of civilization for centuries. You have, in short, a
+foretaste of what human society might be, were it all in the light, with
+no suffering and no dark corners.
+
+I went in curiosity for a day. I stayed for a week, held spell-bound by
+the charm and ease of everything, by the middle-class paradise, without
+a sin, without a victim, without a blot, without a tear.
+
+And yet what was my own astonishment, on emerging into the dark and
+wicked world again, to catch myself quite unexpectedly and involuntarily
+saying: "Ouf! what a relief! Now for something primordial and savage,
+even though it were as bad as an Armenian massacre, to set the balance
+straight again. This order is too tame, this culture too second-rate,
+this goodness too uninspiring. This human drama without a villain or a
+pang; this community so refined that ice-cream soda-water is the utmost
+offering it can make to the brute animal in man; this city simmering in
+the tepid lakeside sun; this atrocious harmlessness of all things,--I
+cannot abide with them. Let me take my chances again in the big outside
+worldly wilderness with all its sins and sufferings. There are the
+heights and depths, the precipices and the steep ideals, the gleams of
+the awful and the infinite; and there is more hope and help a thousand
+times than in this dead level and quintessence of every mediocrity."
+
+Such was the sudden right-about-face performed for me by my lawless
+fancy! There had been spread before me the realization--on a small,
+sample scale of course--of all the ideals for which our civilization has
+been striving: security, intelligence, humanity, and order; and here was
+the instinctive hostile reaction, not of the natural man, but of a
+so-called cultivated man upon such a Utopia. There seemed thus to be a
+self-contradiction and paradox somewhere, which I, as a professor
+drawing a full salary, was in duty bound to unravel and explain, if I
+could.
+
+So I meditated. And, first of all, I asked myself what the thing was
+that was so lacking in this Sabbatical city, and the lack of which kept
+one forever falling short of the higher sort of contentment. And I soon
+recognized that it was the element that gives to the wicked outer world
+all its moral style, expressiveness and picturesqueness,--the element of
+precipitousness, so to call it, of strength and strenuousness, intensity
+and danger.
+
+What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and
+the statues celebrate and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the
+everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with
+heroism, reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory
+from the jaws of death. But in this unspeakable Chautauqua there was no
+potentiality of death in sight anywhere, and no point of the compass
+visible from which danger might possibly appear. The ideal was so
+completely victorious already that no sign of any previous battle
+remained, the place just resting on its oars. But what our human
+emotions seem to require is the sight of the struggle going on. The
+moment the fruits are being merely eaten, things become ignoble. Sweat
+and effort, human nature strained to its uttermost and on the rack, yet
+getting through alive, and then turning its back on its success to
+pursue another more rare and arduous still--this is the sort of thing
+the presence of which inspires us, and the reality of which it seems to
+be the function of all the higher forms of literature and fine art to
+bring home to us and suggest. At Chautauqua there were no racks, even in
+the place's historical museum; and no sweat, except possibly the gentle
+moisture on the brow of some lecturer, or on the sides of some player in
+the ball-field.
+
+Such absence of human nature _in extremis_ anywhere seemed, then, a
+sufficient explanation for Chautauqua's flatness and lack of zest.
+
+But was not this a paradox well calculated to fill one with dismay? It
+looks indeed, thought I, as if the romantic idealists with their
+pessimism about our civilization were, after all, quite right. An
+irremediable flatness is coming over the world. Bourgeoisie and
+mediocrity, church sociables and teachers' conventions, are taking the
+place of the old heights and depths and romantic chiaroscuro. And, to
+get human life in its wild intensity, we must in future turn more and
+more away from the actual, and forget it, if we can, in the romancer's
+or the poet's pages. The whole world, delightful and sinful as it may
+still appear for a moment to one just escaped from the Chautauquan
+enclosure, is nevertheless obeying more and more just those ideals that
+are sure to make of it in the end a mere Chautauqua Assembly on an
+enormous scale. _Was im Gesang soll leben muss im Leben untergehn_. Even
+now, in our own country, correctness, fairness, and compromise for every
+small advantage are crowding out all other qualities. The higher
+heroisms and the old rare flavors are passing out of life.[P]
+
+     [P] This address was composed before the Cuban and Philippine
+     wars. Such outbursts of the passion of mastery are, however,
+     only episodes in a social process which in the long run seems
+     everywhere tending toward the Chautauquan ideals.
+
+With these thoughts in my mind, I was speeding with the train toward
+Buffalo, when, near that city, the sight of a workman doing something on
+the dizzy edge of a sky-scaling iron construction brought me to my
+senses very suddenly. And now I perceived, by a flash of insight, that I
+had been steeping myself in pure ancestral blindness, and looking at
+life with the eyes of a remote spectator. Wishing for heroism and the
+spectacle of human nature on the rack, I had never noticed the great
+fields of heroism lying round about me, I had failed to see it present
+and alive. I could only think of it as dead and embalmed, labelled and
+costumed, as it is in the pages of romance. And yet there it was before
+me in the daily lives of the laboring classes. Not in clanging fights
+and desperate marches only is heroism to be looked for, but on every
+railway bridge and fire-proof building that is going up to-day. On
+freight-trains, on the decks of vessels, in cattle-yards and mines, on
+lumber-rafts, among the firemen and the policemen, the demand for
+courage is incessant; and the supply never fails. There, every day of
+the year somewhere, is human nature _in extremis_ for you. And wherever
+a scythe, an axe, a pick, or a shovel is wielded, you have it sweating
+and aching and with its powers of patient endurance racked to the utmost
+under the length of hours of the strain.
+
+As I awoke to all this unidealized heroic life around me, the scales
+seemed to fall from my eyes; and a wave of sympathy greater than
+anything I had ever before felt with the common life of common men began
+to fill my soul. It began to seem as if virtue with horny hands and
+dirty skin were the only virtue genuine and vital enough to take account
+of. Every other virtue poses; none is absolutely unconscious and simple,
+and unexpectant of decoration or recognition, like this. These are our
+soldiers, thought I, these our sustainers, these the very parents of our
+life.
+
+Many years ago, when in Vienna, I had had a similar feeling of awe and
+reverence in looking at the peasant-women, in from the country on their
+business at the market for the day. Old hags many of them were, dried
+and brown and wrinkled, kerchiefed and short-petticoated, with thick
+wool stockings on their bony shanks, stumping through the glittering
+thoroughfares, looking neither to the right nor the left, bent on duty,
+envying nothing, humble-hearted, remote;--and yet at bottom, when you
+came to think of it, bearing the whole fabric of the splendors and
+corruptions of that city on their laborious backs. For where would any
+of it have been without their unremitting, unrewarded labor in the
+fields? And so with us: not to our generals and poets, I thought, but to
+the Italian and Hungarian laborers in the Subway, rather, ought the
+monuments of gratitude and reverence of a city like Boston to be reared.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If any of you have been readers of Tolstoi, you will see that I passed
+into a vein of feeling similar to his, with its abhorrence of all that
+conventionally passes for distinguished, and its exclusive deification
+of the bravery, patience, kindliness, and dumbness of the unconscious
+natural man.
+
+Where now is _our_ Tolstoi, I said, to bring the truth of all this home
+to our American bosoms, fill us with a better insight, and wean us away
+from that spurious literary romanticism on which our wretched
+culture--as it calls itself--is fed? Divinity lies all about us, and
+culture is too hidebound to even suspect the fact. Could a Howells or a
+Kipling be enlisted in this mission? or are they still too deep in the
+ancestral blindness, and not humane enough for the inner joy and meaning
+of the laborer's existence to be really revealed? Must we wait for some
+one born and bred and living as a laborer himself, but who, by grace of
+Heaven, shall also find a literary voice?
+
+And there I rested on that day, with a sense of widening of vision, and
+with what it is surely fair to call an increase of religious insight
+into life. In God's eyes the differences of social position, of
+intellect, of culture, of cleanliness, of dress, which different men
+exhibit, and all the other rarities and exceptions on which they so
+fantastically pin their pride, must be so small as practically quite to
+vanish; and all that should remain is the common fact that here we are,
+a countless multitude of vessels of life, each of us pent in to peculiar
+difficulties, with which we must severally struggle by using whatever of
+fortitude and goodness we can summon up. The exercise of the courage,
+patience, and kindness, must be the significant portion of the whole
+business; and the distinctions of position can only be a manner of
+diversifying the phenomenal surface upon which these underground virtues
+may manifest their effects. At this rate, the deepest human life is
+everywhere, is eternal. And, if any human attributes exist only in
+particular individuals, they must belong to the mere trapping and
+decoration of the surface-show.
+
+Thus are men's lives levelled up as well as levelled down,--levelled up
+in their common inner meaning, levelled down in their outer gloriousness
+and show. Yet always, we must confess, this levelling insight tends to
+be obscured again; and always the ancestral blindness returns and wraps
+us up, so that we end once more by thinking that creation can be for no
+other purpose than to develop remarkable situations and conventional
+distinctions and merits. And then always some new leveller in the shape
+of a religious prophet has to arise--the Buddha, the Christ, or some
+Saint Francis, some Rousseau or Tolstoi--to redispel our blindness. Yet,
+little by little, there comes some stable gain; for the world does get
+more humane, and the religion of democracy tends toward permanent
+increase.
+
+This, as I said, became for a time my conviction, and gave me great
+content. I have put the matter into the form of a personal reminiscence,
+so that I might lead you into it more directly and completely, and so
+save time. But now I am going to discuss the rest of it with you in a
+more impersonal way.
+
+Tolstoi's levelling philosophy began long before he had the crisis of
+melancholy commemorated in that wonderful document of his entitled 'My
+Confession,' which led the way to his more specifically religious works.
+In his masterpiece 'War and Peace,'--assuredly the greatest of human
+novels,--the role of the spiritual hero is given to a poor little
+soldier named Karataieff, so helpful, so cheerful, and so devout that,
+in spite of his ignorance and filthiness, the sight of him opens the
+heavens, which have been closed, to the mind of the principal character
+of the book; and his example evidently is meant by Tolstoi to let God
+into the world again for the reader. Poor little Karataieff is taken
+prisoner by the French; and, when too exhausted by hardship and fever to
+march, is shot as other prisoners were in the famous retreat from
+Moscow. The last view one gets of him is his little figure leaning
+against a white birch-tree, and uncomplainingly awaiting the end.
+
+"The more," writes Tolstoi in the work 'My Confession,' "the more I
+examined the life of these laboring folks, the more persuaded I became
+that they veritably have faith, and get from it alone the sense and the
+possibility of life.... Contrariwise to those of our own class, who
+protest against destiny and grow indignant at its rigor, these people
+receive maladies and misfortunes without revolt, without opposition, and
+with a firm and tranquil confidence that all had to be like that, could
+not be otherwise, and that it is all right so.... The more we live by
+our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life. We see only a
+cruel jest in suffering and death, whereas these people live, suffer,
+and draw near to death with tranquillity, and oftener than not with
+joy.... There are enormous multitudes of them happy with the most
+perfect happiness, although deprived of what for us is the sole good of
+life. Those who understand life's meaning, and know how to live and die
+thus, are to be counted not by twos, threes, tens, but by hundreds,
+thousands, millions. They labor quietly, endure privations and pains,
+live and die, and throughout everything see the good without seeing the
+vanity. I had to love these people. The more I entered into their life,
+the more I loved them; and the more it became possible for me to live,
+too. It came about not only that the life of our society, of the learned
+and of the rich, disgusted me--more than that, it lost all semblance of
+meaning in my eyes. All our actions, our deliberations, our sciences,
+our arts, all appeared to me with a new significance. I understood that
+these things might be charming pastimes, but that one need seek in them
+no depth, whereas the life of the hard-working populace, of that
+multitude of human beings who really contribute to existence, appeared
+to me in its true light. I understood that there veritably is life, that
+the meaning which life there receives is the truth; and I accepted
+it."[Q]
+
+    [Q] My Confession, X. (condensed).
+
+In a similar way does Stevenson appeal to our piety toward the elemental
+virtue of mankind.
+
+"What a wonderful thing," he writes,[R] "is this Man! How surprising are
+his attributes! Poor soul, here for so little, cast among so many
+hardships, savagely surrounded, savagely descended, irremediably
+condemned to prey upon his fellow-lives,--who should have blamed him,
+had he been of a piece with his destiny and a being merely barbarous?
+... [Yet] it matters not where we look, under what climate we observe
+him, in what stage of society, in what depth of ignorance, burdened with
+what erroneous morality; in ships at sea, a man inured to hardship and
+vile pleasures, his brightest hope a fiddle in a tavern, and a bedizened
+trull who sells herself to rob him, and he, for all that, simple,
+innocent, cheerful, kindly like a child, constant to toil, brave to
+drown, for others;... in the slums of cities, moving among indifferent
+millions to mechanical employments, without hope of change in the
+future, with scarce a pleasure in the present, and yet true to his
+virtues, honest up to his lights, kind to his neighbors, tempted perhaps
+in vain by the bright gin-palace,... often repaying the world's scorn
+with service, often standing firm upon a scruple;... everywhere some
+virtue cherished or affected, everywhere some decency of thought and
+courage, everywhere the ensign of man's ineffectual goodness,--ah! if I
+could show you this! If I could show you these men and women all the
+world over, in every stage of history, under every abuse of error, under
+every circumstance of failure, without hope, without help, without
+thanks, still obscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still
+clinging to some rag of honor, the poor jewel of their souls."
+
+    [R] Across the Plains: "Pulvis et Umbra" (abridged).
+
+All this is as true as it is splendid, and terribly do we need our
+Tolstois and Stevensons to keep our sense for it alive. Yet you remember
+the Irishman who, when asked, "Is not one man as good as another?"
+replied, "Yes; and a great deal better, too!" Similarly (it seems to me)
+does Tolstoi overcorrect our social prejudices, when he makes his love
+of the peasant so exclusive, and hardens his heart toward the educated
+man as absolutely as he does. Grant that at Chautauqua there was little
+moral effort, little sweat or muscular strain in view. Still, deep down
+in the souls of the participants we may be sure that something of the
+sort was hid, some inner stress, some vital virtue not found wanting
+when required. And, after all, the question recurs, and forces itself
+upon us, Is it so certain that the surroundings and circumstances of the
+virtue do make so little difference in the importance of the result? Is
+the functional utility, the worth to the universe of a certain definite
+amount of courage, kindliness, and patience, no greater if the
+possessor of these virtues is in an educated situation, working out
+far-reaching tasks, than if he be an illiterate nobody, hewing wood and
+drawing water, just to keep himself alive? Tolstoi's philosophy, deeply
+enlightening though it certainly is, remains a false abstraction. It
+savors too much of that Oriental pessimism and nihilism of his, which
+declares the whole phenomenal world and its facts and their distinctions
+to be a cunning fraud.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A mere bare fraud is just what our Western common sense will never
+believe the phenomenal world to be. It admits fully that the inner joys
+and virtues are the _essential_ part of life's business, but it is sure
+that _some_ positive part is also played by the adjuncts of the show. If
+it is idiotic in romanticism to recognize the heroic only when it sees
+it labelled and dressed-up in books, it is really just as idiotic to see
+it only in the dirty boots and sweaty shirt of some one in the fields.
+It is with us really under every disguise: at Chautauqua; here in your
+college; in the stock-yards and on the freight-trains; and in the czar
+of Russia's court. But, instinctively, we make a combination of two
+things in judging the total significance of a human being. We feel it
+to be some sort of a product (if such a product only could be
+calculated) of his inner virtue _and_ his outer place,--neither singly
+taken, but both conjoined. If the outer differences had no meaning for
+life, why indeed should all this immense variety of them exist? They
+_must_ be significant elements of the world as well.
+
+Just test Tolstoi's deification of the mere manual laborer by the facts.
+This is what Mr. Walter Wyckoff, after working as an unskilled laborer
+in the demolition of some buildings at West Point, writes of the
+spiritual condition of the class of men to which he temporarily chose to
+belong:--
+
+"The salient features of our condition are plain enough. We are grown
+men, and are without a trade. In the labor-market we stand ready to sell
+to the highest bidder our mere muscular strength for so many hours each
+day. We are thus in the lowest grade of labor. And, selling our muscular
+strength in the open market for what it will bring, we sell it under
+peculiar conditions. It is all the capital that we have. We have no
+reserve means of subsistence, and cannot, therefore, stand off for a
+'reserve price.' We sell under the necessity of satisfying imminent
+hunger. Broadly speaking, we must sell our labor or starve; and, as
+hunger is a matter of a few hours, and we have no other way of meeting
+this need, we must sell at once for what the market offers for our
+labor.
+
+"Our employer is buying labor in a dear market, and he will certainly
+get from us as much work as he can at the price. The gang-boss is
+secured for this purpose, and thoroughly does he know his business. He
+has sole command of us. He never saw us before, and he will discharge us
+all when the debris is cleared away. In the mean time he must get from
+us, if he can, the utmost of physical labor which we, individually and
+collectively, are capable of. If he should drive some of us to
+exhaustion, and we should not be able to continue at work, he would not
+be the loser; for the market would soon supply him with others to take
+our places.
+
+"We are ignorant men, but so much we clearly see,--that we have sold our
+labor where we could sell it dearest, and our employer has bought it
+where he could buy it cheapest. He has paid high, and he must get all
+the labor that he can; and, by a strong instinct which possesses us, we
+shall part with as little as we can. From work like ours there seems to
+us to have been eliminated every element which constitutes the nobility
+of labor. We feel no personal pride in its progress, and no community of
+interest with our employer. There is none of the joy of responsibility,
+none of the sense of achievement, only the dull monotony of grinding
+toil, with the longing for the signal to quit work, and for our wages at
+the end.
+
+"And being what we are, the dregs of the labor-market, and having no
+certainty of permanent employment, and no organization among ourselves,
+we must expect to work under the watchful eye of a gang-boss, and be
+driven, like the wage-slaves that we are, through our tasks.
+
+"All this is to tell us, in effect, that our lives are hard, barren,
+hopeless lives."
+
+And such hard, barren, hopeless lives, surely, are not lives in which
+one ought to be willing permanently to remain. And why is this so? Is it
+because they are so dirty? Well, Nansen grew a great deal dirtier on his
+polar expedition; and we think none the worse of his life for that. Is
+it the insensibility? Our soldiers have to grow vastly more insensible,
+and we extol them to the skies. Is it the poverty? Poverty has been
+reckoned the crowning beauty of many a heroic career. Is it the slavery
+to a task, the loss of finer pleasures?
+
+Such slavery and loss are of the very essence of the higher fortitude,
+and are always counted to its credit,--read the records of missionary
+devotion all over the world. It is not any one of these things, then,
+taken by itself,--no, nor all of them together,--that make such a life
+undesirable. A man might in truth live like an unskilled laborer, and do
+the work of one, and yet count as one of the noblest of God's creatures.
+Quite possibly there were some such persons in the gang that our author
+describes; but the current of their souls ran underground; and he was
+too steeped in the ancestral blindness to discern it.
+
+If there _were_ any such morally exceptional individuals, however, what
+made them different from the rest? It can only have been this,--that
+their souls worked and endured in obedience to some inner _ideal_, while
+their comrades were not actuated by anything worthy of that name. These
+ideals of other lives are among those secrets that we can almost never
+penetrate, although something about the man may often tell us when they
+are there. In Mr. Wyckoff's own case we know exactly what the
+self-imposed ideal was. Partly he had stumped himself, as the boys say,
+to carry through a strenuous achievement; but mainly he wished to
+enlarge his sympathetic insight into fellow-lives. For this his sweat
+and toil acquire a certain heroic significance, and make us accord to
+him exceptional esteem. But it is easy to imagine his fellows with
+various other ideals. To say nothing of wives and babies, one may have
+been a convert of the Salvation Army, and had a nightingale singing of
+expiation and forgiveness in his heart all the while he labored. Or
+there might have been an apostle like Tolstoi himself, or his compatriot
+Bondareff, in the gang, voluntarily embracing labor as their religious
+mission. Class-loyalty was undoubtedly an ideal with many. And who knows
+how much of that higher manliness of poverty, of which Phillips Brooks
+has spoken so penetratingly, was or was not present in that gang?
+
+"A rugged, barren land," says Phillips Brooks, "is poverty to live
+in,--a land where I am thankful very often if I can get a berry or a
+root to eat. But living in it really, letting it bear witness to me of
+itself, not dishonoring it all the time by judging it after the standard
+of the other lands, gradually there come out its qualities. Behold! no
+land like this barren and naked land of poverty could show the moral
+geology of the world. See how the hard ribs ... stand out strong and
+solid. No life like poverty could so get one to the heart of things and
+make men know their meaning, could so let us feel life and the world
+with all the soft cushions stripped off and thrown away.... Poverty
+makes men come very near each other, and recognize each other's human
+hearts; and poverty, highest and best of all, demands and cries out for
+faith in God.... I know how superficial and unfeeling, how like mere
+mockery, words in praise of poverty may seem.... But I am sure that the
+poor man's dignity and freedom, his self-respect and energy, depend upon
+his cordial knowledge that his poverty is a true region and kind of
+life, with its own chances of character, its own springs of happiness
+and revelations of God. Let him resist the characterlessness which often
+goes with being poor. Let him insist on respecting the condition where
+he lives. Let him learn to love it, so that by and by, [if] he grows
+rich, he shall go out of the low door of the old familiar poverty with a
+true pang of regret, and with a true honor for the narrow home in which
+he has lived so long."[S]
+
+    [S] Sermons. 5th Series, New York, 1893, pp. 166, 167.
+
+The barrenness and ignobleness of the more usual laborer's life consist
+in the fact that it is moved by no such ideal inner springs. The
+backache, the long hours, the danger, are patiently endured--for what?
+To gain a quid of tobacco, a glass of beer, a cup of coffee, a meal, and
+a bed, and to begin again the next day and shirk as much as one can.
+This really is why we raise no monument to the laborers in the Subway,
+even though they be our conscripts, and even though after a fashion our
+city is indeed based upon their patient hearts and enduring backs and
+shoulders. And this is why we do raise monuments to our soldiers, whose
+outward conditions were even brutaller still. The soldiers are supposed
+to have followed an ideal, and the laborers are supposed to have
+followed none.
+
+You see, my friends, how the plot now thickens; and how strangely the
+complexities of this wonderful human nature of ours begin to develop
+under our hands. We have seen the blindness and deadness to each other
+which are our natural inheritance; and, in spite of them, we have been
+led to acknowledge an inner meaning which passeth show, and which may be
+present in the lives of others where we least descry it. And now we are
+led to say that such inner meaning can be _complete_ and _valid for us
+also_, only when the inner joy, courage, and endurance are joined with
+an ideal.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But what, exactly, do we mean by an ideal? Can we give no definite
+account of such a word?
+
+To a certain extent we can. An ideal, for instance, must be something
+intellectually conceived, something of which we are not unconscious, if
+we have it; and it must carry with it that sort of outlook, uplift, and
+brightness that go with all intellectual facts. Secondly, there must be
+_novelty_ in an ideal,--novelty at least for him whom the ideal grasps.
+Sodden routine is incompatible with ideality, although what is sodden
+routine for one person may be ideal novelty for another. This shows that
+there is nothing absolutely ideal: ideals are relative to the lives that
+entertain them. To keep out of the gutter is for us here no part of
+consciousness at all, yet for many of our brethren it is the most
+legitimately engrossing of ideals.
+
+Now, taken nakedly, abstractly, and immediately, you see that mere
+ideals are the cheapest things in life. Everybody has them in some shape
+or other, personal or general, sound or mistaken, low or high; and the
+most worthless sentimentalists and dreamers, drunkards, shirks and
+verse-makers, who never show a grain of effort, courage, or endurance,
+possibly have them on the most copious scale. Education, enlarging as it
+does our horizon and perspective, is a means of multiplying our ideals,
+of bringing new ones into view. And your college professor, with a
+starched shirt and spectacles, would, if a stock of ideals were all
+alone by itself enough to render a life significant, be the most
+absolutely and deeply significant of men. Tolstoi would be completely
+blind in despising him for a prig, a pedant and a parody; and all our
+new insight into the divinity of muscular labor would be altogether off
+the track of truth.
+
+But such consequences as this, you instinctively feel, are erroneous.
+The more ideals a man has, the more contemptible, on the whole, do you
+continue to deem him, if the matter ends there for him, and if none of
+the laboring man's virtues are called into action on his part,--no
+courage shown, no privations undergone, no dirt or scars contracted in
+the attempt to get them realized. It is quite obvious that something
+more than the mere possession of ideals is required to make a life
+significant in any sense that claims the spectator's admiration. Inner
+joy, to be sure, it may _have_, with its ideals; but that is its own
+private sentimental matter. To extort from us, outsiders as we are, with
+our own ideals to look after, the tribute of our grudging recognition,
+it must back its ideal visions with what the laborers have, the sterner
+stuff of manly virtue; it must multiply their sentimental surface by the
+dimension of the active will, if we are to have _depth_, if we are to
+have anything cubical and solid in the way of character.
+
+The significance of a human life for communicable and publicly
+recognizable purposes is thus the offspring of a marriage of two
+different parents, either of whom alone is barren. The ideals taken by
+themselves give no reality, the virtues by themselves no novelty. And
+let the orientalists and pessimists say what they will, the thing of
+deepest--or, at any rate, of comparatively deepest--significance in life
+does seem to be its character of _progress_, or that strange union of
+reality with ideal novelty which it continues from one moment to another
+to present. To recognize ideal novelty is the task of what we call
+intelligence. Not every one's intelligence can tell which novelties are
+ideal. For many the ideal thing will always seem to cling still to the
+older more familiar good. In this case character, though not
+significant totally, may be still significant pathetically. So, if we
+are to choose which is the more essential factor of human character, the
+fighting virtue or the intellectual breadth, we must side with Tolstoi,
+and choose that simple faithfulness to his light or darkness which any
+common unintellectual man can show.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But, with all this beating and tacking on my part, I fear you take me to
+be reaching a confused result. I seem to be just taking things up and
+dropping them again. First I took up Chautauqua, and dropped that; then
+Tolstoi and the heroism of common toil, and dropped them; finally, I
+took up ideals, and seem now almost dropping those. But please observe
+in what sense it is that I drop them. It is when they pretend _singly_
+to redeem life from insignificance. Culture and refinement all alone are
+not enough to do so. Ideal aspirations are not enough, when uncombined
+with pluck and will. But neither are pluck and will, dogged endurance
+and insensibility to danger enough, when taken all alone. There must be
+some sort of fusion, some chemical combination among these principles,
+for a life objectively and thoroughly significant to result.
+
+Of course, this is a somewhat vague conclusion. But in a question of
+significance, of worth, like this, conclusions can never be precise. The
+answer of appreciation, of sentiment, is always a more or a less, a
+balance struck by sympathy, insight, and good will. But it is an answer,
+all the same, a real conclusion. And, in the course of getting it, it
+seems to me that our eyes have been opened to many important things.
+Some of you are, perhaps, more livingly aware than you were an hour ago
+of the depths of worth that lie around you, hid in alien lives. And,
+when you ask how much sympathy you ought to bestow, although the amount
+is, truly enough, a matter of ideal on your own part, yet in this notion
+of the combination of ideals with active virtues you have a rough
+standard for shaping your decision. In any case, your imagination is
+extended. You divine in the world about you matter for a little more
+humility on your own part, and tolerance, reverence, and love for
+others; and you gain a certain inner joyfulness at the increased
+importance of our common life. Such joyfulness is a religious
+inspiration and an element of spiritual health, and worth more than
+large amounts of that sort of technical and accurate information which
+we professors are supposed to be able to impart.
+
+To show the sort of thing I mean by these words, I will just make one
+brief practical illustration and then close.
+
+We are suffering to-day in America from what is called the
+labor-question; and, when you go out into the world, you will each and
+all of you be caught up in its perplexities. I use the brief term
+labor-question to cover all sorts of anarchistic discontents and
+socialistic projects, and the conservative resistances which they
+provoke. So far as this conflict is unhealthy and regrettable,--and I
+think it is so only to a limited extent,--the unhealthiness consists
+solely in the fact that one-half of our fellow-countrymen remain
+entirely blind to the internal significance of the lives of the other
+half. They miss the joys and sorrows, they fail to feel the moral
+virtue, and they do not guess the presence of the intellectual ideals.
+They are at cross-purposes all along the line, regarding each other as
+they might regard a set of dangerously gesticulating automata, or, if
+they seek to get at the inner motivation, making the most horrible
+mistakes. Often all that the poor man can think of in the rich man is a
+cowardly greediness for safety, luxury, and effeminacy, and a boundless
+affectation. What he is, is not a human being, but a pocket-book, a
+bank-account. And a similar greediness, turned by disappointment into
+envy, is all that many rich men can see in the state of mind of the
+dissatisfied poor. And, if the rich man begins to do the sentimental act
+over the poor man, what senseless blunders does he make, pitying him for
+just those very duties and those very immunities which, rightly taken,
+are the condition of his most abiding and characteristic joys! Each, in
+short, ignores the fact that happiness and unhappiness and significance
+are a vital mystery; each pins them absolutely on some ridiculous
+feature of the external situation; and everybody remains outside of
+everybody else's sight.
+
+Society has, with all this, undoubtedly got to pass toward some newer
+and better equilibrium, and the distribution of wealth has doubtless
+slowly got to change: such changes have always happened, and will happen
+to the end of time. But if, after all that I have said, any of you
+expect that they will make any _genuine vital difference_ on a large
+scale, to the lives of our descendants, you will have missed the
+significance of my entire lecture. The solid meaning of life is always
+the same eternal thing,--the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal,
+however special, with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some
+man's or woman's pains.--And, whatever or wherever life may be, there
+will always be the chance for that marriage to take place.
+
+Fitz-James Stephen wrote many years ago words to this effect more
+eloquent than any I can speak: "The 'Great Eastern,' or some of her
+successors," he said, "will perhaps defy the roll of the Atlantic, and
+cross the seas without allowing their passengers to feel that they have
+left the firm land. The voyage from the cradle to the grave may come to
+be performed with similar facility. Progress and science may perhaps
+enable untold millions to live and die without a care, without a pang,
+without an anxiety. They will have a pleasant passage and plenty of
+brilliant conversation. They will wonder that men ever believed at all
+in clanging fights and blazing towns and sinking ships and praying
+hands; and, when they come to the end of their course, they will go
+their way, and the place thereof will know them no more. But it seems
+unlikely that they will have such a knowledge of the great ocean on
+which they sail, with its storms and wrecks, its currents and icebergs,
+its huge waves and mighty winds, as those who battled with it for years
+together in the little craft, which, if they had few other merits,
+brought those who navigated them full into the presence of time and
+eternity, their maker and themselves, and forced them to have some
+definite view of their relations to them and to each other."[T]
+
+    [T] Essays by a Barrister, London, 1862, p. 318.
+
+In this solid and tridimensional sense, so to call it, those
+philosophers are right who contend that the world is a standing thing,
+with no progress, no real history. The changing conditions of history
+touch only the surface of the show. The altered equilibriums and
+redistributions only diversify our opportunities and open chances to us
+for new ideals. But, with each new ideal that comes into life, the
+chance for a life based on some old ideal will vanish; and he would
+needs be a presumptuous calculator who should with confidence say that
+the total sum of significances is positively and absolutely greater at
+any one epoch than at any other of the world.
+
+I am speaking broadly, I know, and omitting to consider certain
+qualifications in which I myself believe. But one can only make one
+point in one lecture, and I shall be well content if I have brought my
+point home to you this evening in even a slight degree. _There are
+compensations_: and no outward changes of condition in life can keep the
+nightingale of its eternal meaning from singing in all sorts of
+different men's hearts. That is the main fact to remember. If we could
+not only admit it with our lips, but really and truly believe it, how
+our convulsive insistencies, how our antipathies and dreads of each
+other, would soften down! If the poor and the rich could look at each
+other in this way, _sub specie aeternatis_, how gentle would grow their
+disputes! what tolerance and good humor, what willingness to live and
+let live, would come into the world!
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And
+To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals, by William James
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TALKS TO TEACHERS ***
+
+***** This file should be named 16287.txt or 16287.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/1/6/2/8/16287/
+
+Produced by David Newman, Dave Macfarlane and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
diff --git a/16287.zip b/16287.zip
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..dee2d9b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/16287.zip
diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6312041
--- /dev/null
+++ b/LICENSE.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fb2f542
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #16287 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16287)