Talks to teachers on psychology: and to students on some of life's ideals

LIBRARY

UNIVERSITY OP
CALIFORNIA
SAN DIEGO

Works by WILLIAM JAMES, M.D., Ph. et
Liit.D., LL.D. ; Correspondent of the Insti-
tute of France ; Professor of Philosophy at
Harvard University.

The Principles of Psychology. 2 vols. 8vo.
New York: Henry Holt & Co. 1890.

Psychology : Briefer Course. i2mo. New
York: Henry Holt & Co. 1892.

The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in
Popular Philosophy. New York: Long-
mans, Green & Co. 1897.

Is Life Worth Living ? i8mo. Philadelphia:
S. B. Weston, 1305 Arch Street. 1896.

Human Immortality : Two Supposed Objec-
tions to the Doctrine. i6mo. Boston:
Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1898.

The Literary Remains of Henry James.

Edited, with an Introduction, by WILLIAM
JAMBS, With Portrait. Crown 8vo. 1885.

TALKS TO TEACHERS

ON PSYCHOLOGY: AND TO
STUDENTS ON SOME OF LIFE'S
IDEALS. By WILLIAM JAMES

NEW YORK

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
J899

COPYRIGHT

1899
BY WILLIAM JAM!

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-audi-
ences. 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 psy-
chology, and are practical and popular in the ex-
treme.

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 be-
lieve 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 num-
bered headings, the variations of type, and all the

IV PREFACE

other mechanical artifices on which they are accus-
tomed to prop their minds. But my main desire has
been to make them conceive, and, if possible, re-
produce 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 Bae-
deker's handbook of travel or a text-book of arithme-
tic. So far as books printed like this book force the
fluidity of the facts upon the young teacher's atten-
tion, 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 Psy-
chology 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 contin-

PREFACE V

ues the series of talks to teachers. The second and
the third address belong together, and continue an-
other line of thought.

I wish I were able to make the second, ' On a Cer-
tain 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 philos-
ophy, 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. Pri-
vate 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

VI PREFACE

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.

CAMBBHXJS, MASSU, March, 1899.

CONTENTS.

TALKS TO TEACHERS.

PAGE

I. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE TEACHING ART . . 3

The American educational organization, 3 —
What teachers may expect from psychology, 5 —
Teaching methods must agree with psychology,
but cannot be immediately deduced therefrom, 7 —
The science of teaching and the science of war,

9 — The educational uses of psychology defined,

10 — The teacher's duty toward child-study, 12.

II. THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS ... 15

Our mental life is a succession of conscious
fields,' 15 — They have a focus and a margin,
18 — This description contrasted with the theory
of 'ideas,' 20 — Wundt's conclusions, 20, note.

III. THE CHILD AS A BEHAVING ORGANISM . 22

Mind as pure reason and mind as practical
guide, 22 — The latter view the more fashionable
one to-day, 23 — It will be adopted in this work,
24 — Why so? 25 — The teacher's function is to
train pupils to behavior, 28.

IV. EDUCATION AND BEHAVIOR 29

Education defined, 29 — Conduct is always its
outcome, 30 — Different national ideals : Germany
and England, 31.

Vlil CONTENTS

PAGE

V. THE NECESSITY OF REACTIONS .... 33

, No impression without expression, 33 — Verbal

reproduction, 34 — Manual training, 35 — Pupils
should know their ' marks,' 37.

VI. NATIVE AND ACQUIRED REACTIONS . . 38

The acquired reactions must be preceded by
native ones, 38 — Illustration : teaching child to
ask instead of snatching, 39 — Man has more in-
stincts than other mammals, 43.

VII. WHAT THE NATIVE REACTIONS AKE . . 45

Fear and love, 45 — Curiosity, 45 — Imitation,
48 — Emulation, 49 — Forbidden by Rousseau, 61

— His error, 52 — Ambition, pugnacity, and pride.
Soft pedagogics and the fighting impulse, 54 —
Ownership, 55 — Its educational uses, 56 — Con-
structiveness, 58 — Manual teaching, 59 — Transi-
toriness in instincts, 60 — Their order of succes-
sion, 61.

VIII. THE LAWS OF HABIT 64

Good and bad habits, 64 — Habit due to plasti-
city of organic tissues, 65 — The aim of education
is to make useful habits automatic, 66 — Maxims
relative to habit-forming: 1. Strong initiative, 67

— 2. No exception, 68 — 3. Seize first opportunity
to act, 69 — 4. Don't preach, 71 — Darwin and
poetry : without exercise our capacities decay, 71

— The habit of mental and muscular relaxation,
74 — Fifth maxim, keep the faculty of effort,
trained, 75 — Sudden conversions compatible with
laws of habit, 76 — Momentous influence of habits
on character, 77.

CONTENTS ix

PAGE

IX. THE ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS 79

A case of habit, 79 — The two laws, contiguity
and similarity, 80 — The teacher has to build up
useful systems of association, 83 — Habitual asso-
ciations determine character, 84 — Indeterminate-
ness of our trains of association, 85 — We can
trace them backward, but not foretell them, 86 —
Interest deflects, 87 — Prepotent parts of the field,
88 — In teaching, multiply cues, 89.

X. INTEREST 91

The child's native interests, 91 — How uninterest-
ing things acquire an interest, 94 — Rules for the
teacher, 95 — 'Preparation' of the mind for the
lesson: the pupil must hare something to attend
with, 97 — All later interests are borrowed from
original ones, 99.

XI. ATTENTION 100

Interest and attention are two aspects of one
fact, 100 — Voluntary attention comes in beats,
101 — Genius and attention, 102 — The subject
must change to win attention, 103 — Mechanical
aids, 104 — The physiological process, 106 — The
new in the old is what excites interest, 108 — In-
terest and effort are compatible, 110 — Mind-wan-
dering, 112 — Not fatal to mental efficiency, 114.

XII. MEMORY 116

Due to association, 116 — No recall without a
cue, 118 — Memory is due to brain- plasticity, 119
— Native retentiveness, 120 — Number of associa-
tions may practically be its equivalent, 122 — Ke-
tentiveness is a fixed property of the individual,
123 — Memory versus memories, 124 — Scientific

X CONTENTS

PAGE

system as help to memory, 126 — Technical mem-
ories, 127 — Cramming, 129 — Elementary memory
unimprovable, 130 — Utility of verbal memorizing,
131 — Measurements of immediate memory, 133 —
They throw little light, 134 — Passion is the im-
portant factor in human efficiency, 137 — Eye-
memory, ear-memory, etc., 137 — The rate of
forgetting, Ebbinghaus's results, 139 — Influence
of the unreproducible, 142 — To remember, one
must think and connect, 143.

XIII. THE ACQUISITION OF IDEAS 144

Education gives a stock of conceptions, 144 —
The order of their acquisition, 146 — Value of
verbal material, 149 — Abstractions of different
orders: when are they assimilable, 151 — False
conceptions of children, 152.

XIV. APPERCEPTION 155

Often a mystifying idea, 155 — The process de-
fined, 157 — The law of economy, 159 — Old-
f ogyism, 160 — How many types of apperception ?
161 — New heads of classification must continually
be invented, 163 — Alteration of the apperceiving
mass, 165 — Class-names are what we work by,
166 — Few new fundamental conceptions acquired
after twenty-five, 167.

XV. THE WILL 169

The word defined, 169 — All consciousness tends
to action, 170 — Ideo-motor action, 171 — Inhibi-
tion, 172 — The process of deliberation, 174 —
Why so few of our ideas result in acts, 176 —
The associationist account of the will, 177 — A
balance of impulses and inhibitions, 178 — The

CONTENTS Xi

PAGE

orer-impulsive and the over-obstructed type, 179
— The perfect type, 180 — The balky will, 181 —
What character-building consists in, 184 — Right
action depends on right apperception of the case,
185 — Effort of will is effort of attention: the
drunkard's dilemma, 187 — Vital importance of
voluntary attention, 189 — Its amount maybe in-
determinate, 191 — Affirmation of free-will, 192 —
Two types of inhibition, 193 — Spinoza on inhibi-
tion by a higher good, 194 — Conclusion, 195

TALKS TO STUDENTS.

I.
THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION .... 199

II.
ON A CERTAIN BLINDNESS IN HUMAN BEINGS 229

III.
WHAT MAKES A LIFE SIGNIFICANT? . . 265

TALKS TO TEACHERS

I.

PSYCHOLOGY AND THE TEACHING ART

IN the general activity and uprising of ideal in-
terests which every one with an eye for fact can
discern all about us in American life, there is per-
haps no more promising feature than the fermen-
tation 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 educa-
tion which we have in our United States is per-

4 TALKS TO TEACHEES

haps, 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 uni-
versities; the give and take of students and in-
structors 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-sys-
tem 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 sys-
tem 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

PSYCHOLOGY AND THE TEACHING AET 5

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 con-
fess 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

6 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 educa-
tional 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 mystifi-
cation laid upon the teachers of our day. The mat-
ter of their profession, compact enough in itself,
has to be frothed up for them in journals and insti-
tutes, 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

THE 'NEW' PSYCHOLOGY 7

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 dis-
pel 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 intro-
spective detail, for the most part without adapta-
tion to the teacher's use. It is only the funda-
mental 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

8 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 our-
selves more articulately after we have made mis-
takes. 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 dif-
ferently ; yet neither will transgress the lines.

The art of teaching grew up in the schoolroom,
out of inventiveness and sympathetic concrete ob-
servation. 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

SCIENCES AND AETS 9

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 psychologi-
cal laws.

To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no
guarantee that we shall be good teachers. To ad-
vance 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 ob-
stacles 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 expos-
ure of your own troops, to hack his force to pieces,

10 TALKS TO TEACHBES

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 devour-
ing curiosity to know what the next steps in con-
nection 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 ene-
mies 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 per-
ception, 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

HOW PSYCHOLOGY SHEDS LIGHT 11

certainly narrows the path for experiments and
trials. We know in advance, if we are psycholo-
gist, 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 con-
crete 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

12 TALKS TO TEACHERS

be very great. Those who find themselves loving
the subject may go as far as they please, and be-
come possibly none the worse teachers for the fact,
even though in some of them one might appre-
hend 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, pro-
vided 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 man-
ner. 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, compil-
ing 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

CHILD-STUDY 13

and observations of which it in part consists 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 re-
mained 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 exter-
minating bore, or who in any way whatever miss
in themselves the appropriate vocation for it. I
cannot too strongly agree with my colleague,
Professor Miinsterberg, when he says that the
teacher's attitude toward the child, being concrete
and ethical, is positively opposed to the psycho-
logical 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 pro-
fession because she feels herself hopeless as a psy-
chologist. Our teachers are overworked already.
Every one who adds a jot or tittle of unnecessary

14 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 ped-
agogic 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 con-
stitute 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,

16 TALKS TO TEACHEKS

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 succes-
sive fields of consciousness come from, or why
they have the precise inner constitution which
they do have. They certainly follow or accom-
pany 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 con-
ditions 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 mean-
ing. The truth is that we really do not know the
answers to the problems on the explanatory level,

OUR STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 17

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 ob-
jects 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 com-
posed 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

18 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 sensa-
tions 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 mar-
gin, 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 speak-
ing,— 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, re-
quire, I think, no further explanation. The dis-
tinction they embody is a very important one, and

THE FIELDS OF CONSCIOUSNESS 19

they are the first technical terms which I shall ask
you to remember.

In the successive mutations of our fields of con-
sciousness, the process by which one dissolves into
another is often very gradual, and all sorts of
inner rearrangements of contents occur. Some-
times 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 se-
cure from positive error and free from admixture
of conjecture or hypothesis. An influential school
of psychology, seeking to avoid haziness of out-
line, has tried to make things appear more exact
and scientific by making the analysis more sharp.

20 TALKS TO TEACHEBS

The various fields of consciousness, according to
this school, result from a definite number of per-
fectly definite elementary mental states, mechani-
cally associated into a mosaic or chemically com-
bined. 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 sensa-
tion 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.*

* In the light of some of the expectation that are abroad concern-
ing the ' new psychology,' it is instructive to read the unusually can-
did confession of its founder Wundt, after his thirty years of labora-
tory-experience :

" The service which it [the experimental method] can yield consists
essentially in perfecting our inner observation, or rather, as I believe,

PBOFESSOE WUNDT'S VIEWS 21

in making this really possible, in any exact sense. Well, has our
experimental self-observation , BO 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 1 were asked in what for me the worth of ex-
perimental 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 synthe-
sis. . . . From my inquiry into time-relations, etc I attained an

insight into the close union of all those psychic functions usually sepa-
rated 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 Vorttcllungen] was one of those numerous self-decep-
tions which are no sooner stamped in a verbal term than they forth-
with thrust non-existent fictions into the place of the reality. I
learned to understand an ' idea ' as a process no less melting and fleet-
ing 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 psycho-physical 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. "— Phttotophitctie
Studien, x. 111-124. 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 esti-
mate the worth of a man's mental processes by
their effects upon his practical life. But philo-
sophers 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

THE TWO VIEWS OF OUR MIND 23

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 con-
templation would be treated as only half a human
being, passion and practical resource would be-
come once more glories of our race, a concrete
victory over this earth's outward powers of dark-
ness 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 trans-
ferred 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

24 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 founda-
tions of our consciousness persist, undisguised and
undiminished. Our sensations are here to attract
us or to deter us, our memories to warn or encour-
age 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 ac-
companies 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 —

THE BIOLOGICAL VIEW 25

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, ab-
stracting 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 ob-
ject. 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

26 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 indi-
vidual, 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 be-
havior and our adaptation to the environment than
at first sight might appear. No truth, however
abstract, is ever perceived, that will not probably

ALL CONSCIOUSNESS LEADS TO ACTION 27

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 ten-
dencies ' 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 re-
ceive 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.

28 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 psy-
chological phenomena handed over to your inspec-
tion 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 con-
ception and as a main conception. You should
regard your professional task as if it consisted
chiefly and essentially in training the pupil to be-
havior ; taking behavior, not in the narrow sense
of his manners, but in the very widest possible
sense, as including every possible sort of fit re-
action 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, ab-
stain ! " 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 4 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 organiza-
tion 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,

80 TALKS TO TEACHERS

with my mind technically and professionally or-
ganized 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 deter-
mined 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

GERMAN AND ENGLISH IDEALS 31

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 con-
ception 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 educa-
tion 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 discov-
ery. 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 labora-
tory work to do, with a general indication as to
the best method, they can go off by themselves

32 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 hu-
man 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.

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 with-
out 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 ef-
fect 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 re-
turn to the mind in the form of the sensation of
having acted, and connect itself with the impres-
sion. The most durable impressions are those on

34 TALKS TO TEACHERS

account of which we speak or act, or else are in-
wardly 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 repro-
duced, 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 com-
plete training may nowadays be too much for-
gotten.

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 reac-
tions, 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,

THE MANUAL TRAINING METHODS 35

and maps, take measurements, enter the labora-
tory and perform experiments, consult authorities,
and write essays. He must do in his fashion
what is often laughed at by outsiders when it ap-
pears in prospectuses under the title of * original
work,' but what is really the only possible train-
ing for the doing of original work thereafter.
The most colossal improvement which recent years
have seen in secondary education lies in the in-
troduction 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. La-
boratory work and shop work engender a habit
of observation, a knowledge of the difference be-
tween 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 mak-
ing things, and not by using words, it becomes
impossible to dissimulate your vagueness or igno-

36 TALKS TO TEACHEES

ranee by ambiguity. They beget a habit of self-
reliance ; they keep the interest and attention
always cheerfully engaged, and reduce the teach-
er'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 con-
sidered. 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 re-

MARKS AND STANDING 37

turn wave of impression pertains to the complete-
ness 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 impres-
sion 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 un-
certainty ; 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 RE-
ACTIONS fc

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 per-
fect. 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 sub-
stitute for a native reaction, which the same object
originally tended to provoke.

The teacher's art consists in bringing about the

NATIVE AND ACQUIRED REACTIONS 39

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 can-
not 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 conse-
quences 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 con-
crete, assume the case of a young child's training
in good manners. The child has a native ten-
dency to snatch with his hands at anything that
attracts his curiosity ; also to draw back his hands

40 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 train-
ing 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 reac-
tions 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 immedi-
ately, by eliminating all the intermediary steps. If

NATIVE AND ACQUIRED REACTIONS

41

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 ex-
perience into spatial terms ; yet it may be useful,
so I subjoin it.

CENTRES OF MEMORY AND WILL.

See — snatch Slap — cry Listen — beg Get — smile
FIGURE L 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 to-

42

TALKS TO TBACHEES

gether, represent the processes of memory and as-
sociation which the reactions impress upon the
higher centres as they take place.

CENTRES OF MEMORY AND WILL.

See— beg smile

FIGURE 2. THE BRAIN-PROCESS AFTER EDUCATION.

In Figure 2 we have the final result. The im-
pression 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 termi-
nus. 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

MAN'S NUMEROUS INSTINCTS 43

reaction snatch, become at last the immediate re-
sponses when the child sees a snatchable object in
some one's hands.

The first thing, then, for the teacher to under-
stand is the native reactive tendencies, — the im-
pulses and instincts of childhood, — so aa 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 as-
sortment 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 imi-
tativeness. His instinctive impulses, it is true,
get overlaid by the secondary reactions due to his
superior reasoning power ; and thus man loses the
simply instinctive demeanor. But the life of in-

44 TALKS TO TEACHERS

stinct 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 impor-
tant 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,

46 TALKS TO TEACHERS

more intellectual form, the impulse toward com-
pleter 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 school-
boy 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 ap-
pealed 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

CURIOSITY 47

in the advantage of the object-teaching and manual-
training methods. The pupil's attention is spon-
taneously 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 curios-
ity, 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 peda-
gogic 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.

48 TALKS TO TEACHERS

Imitation. Man has always been recognized as
the imitative animal par excellence. And there is
hardly a book on psycholog}r, 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 Tlmita-
tion " ; 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 con-
sciousness 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 genera-
tion simply imitating the last. Into the particu-
lars 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

IMITATION AND EMULATION 49

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 mani-
festations of the two impulses, so inextricably do
they mix their effects. Emulation is the very
nerve of human society. "Why are you, my hear-
ers, 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 simul-
taneously 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 neigh-
bors 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

50 TALKS TO TEACHEES

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 stimu-
lus 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 intellect-
ual. 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 ag-
gressive 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,

EMULATION1 51

who in turn were expected and required to im-
press theirs upon the younger set. The conta-
giousness 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 psychol-
ogy 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 be-
tween one pupil and another as too base a pas-
sion 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 run-
ning, 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,

52 TALKS TO TEACHEKS

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 ex-
cite 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

ITS USEFULNESS IN THE SCHOOLROOM 53

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 superior-
ity, 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 ef-
fort. 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.

54 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 inter-
connected 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 educa-
tion generally, being in some characters most po-
tent spurs to effort. Pugnacity need not be
thought of merely in the form of physical com-
bativeness. It can be taken in the sense of a gen-
eral 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, diffi-
culties 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

OWNERSHIP 55

bracing oxygen of effort is left out. It is nonsense
to suppose that every step in education can be in-
teresting. The fighting impulse must often be ap-
pealed 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 con-
ditions becomes a turning-point and crisis of his
character. It represents the high-water mark of
his powers, and serves thereafter as an ideal pat-
tern 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 use-
fulness.

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 imita-
tion. 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

56 TALKS TO TEACHEES

learns to utter are the words 'my' and 'mine,'
and woe to the parents of twins who fail to pro-
vide 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 un-
til 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 disinter-
ested 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 fun-
damental, and can be appealed to in many ways.
In the house, training in order and neatness be-
gins 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 im-

UTILITY OF THE COLLECTING IMPULSE 57

pulse. 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 scholar-
ship), would seem to owe its interest rather to the
way in which it gratifies the accumulating and col-
lecting 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 any-
body else, much as another may wish to own
more dollars or more early editions or more en-
gravings 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

58 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 geographi-
cal 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 unusu-
ally active collector when a boy.

Constructiveness is another great instinctive ten-
dency 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 pro-
duction of change, and the working of effects, in
outward things. The result of all this is that in-
timate familiarity with the physical environment,
that acquaintance with the properties of material

CONSTEUCTIVENESS 59

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 to-
gether. 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, revolv-
ing 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 kinder-
garten upward devotes the first years of educa-
tion 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 oc-

60 TALKS TO TEACHERS

cupy 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 res-
cued by a more real education.

There are other impulses, such as love of appro-
bation 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 impor-
tance 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 ac-
quired which last. But, if the objects be not forth-
coming then, the impulse may die out before a

THE TEANSITORIKESS OF INSTINCTS 61

habit is formed ; and later it may be hard to teach
the creature to react appropriately in those direc-
tions. 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, pos-
sess the child in succession; and in some chil-
dren the possession, while it lasts, may be of a
semi-frantic and exclusive sort. Later, the inter-
est 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, artis-
tic or mathematical, has a flowering epoch of but
a few months.

62 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 psy-
chophysical organism whose springs of action the
teacher must divine, and to whose ways he must
become accustomed. He must start with the na-
tive tendencies, and enlarge the pupil's entire pas-
sive 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 sub-
stitutions ; but the eye accustomed to psychologi-
cal analysis will discern, underneath it all, the
outlines of our simple psychophysical scheme.

Respect then, I beg y6u, always the original
reactions, even when you are seeking to overcome
their connection with certain objects, and to sup-

BAD AND GOOD BEHAVIOR 63

plant 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, — prac-
tical, emotional, and intellectual, — systematically
organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us
irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the lat-
ter may be.

Since pupils can understand this at a compara-
tively early age, and since to understand it con-
tributes in no small measure to their feeling of
responsibility, it would be well if the teacher were

HABIT A SECOND NATURE 65

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 prac-
tice, 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 origi-
nally 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

66 TALKS TO TEACHEES

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 im-
pression we have an automatic, ready-made re-
sponse. My very words to you now are an exam-
ple 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 cir-
cumstances, is what we always tend to become,
it follows first of all that the teacher's prime con-
cern should be to ingrain into the pupil that as-
sortment 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 sys-
tem our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund
and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease

VALUE OF GOOD HABITS 57

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 habit-
ual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of
every cigar, the drinking of every cap, 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 in-
grained 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 re-
marks laid down. Two great maxims emerge
from the treatment. The first is that in the ac-
quisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an

68 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 post-
poned 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

MAXIMS FOR HABIT-FORMING 69

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, contradis-
tinguishing them from the intellectual acquisi-
tions, 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 con-
quests on the right. The essential precaution,
therefore, is so to regulate the two opposing
powers that the one may have a series of unin-
terrupted 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 emo-
tional prompting you may experience in the direc*
tion of the habits you aspire to gain. It is not in

70 TALKS TO TEACHEBS

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 senti-
ments 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 defi-
nite 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 re-
solve or a fine glow of feeling is allowed to evap-
orate without bearing practical fruit, it is worse
than a chance lost: it works so as positively to
hinder future resolutions and emotions from tak-
ing the normal path of discharge. There is no
more contemptible type of human character than

MAXTMR FOB HABIT-FOBMING 71

that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer,
who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibil-
ity, 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 charac-
ter, 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 auto-
biography 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

72 TALKS TO TEACHEKS

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

DABWIN'S CASE AS A WARNING 73

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 appropri-
ate 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 es-
sential practical conditions of our case. We say
abstractly : " I mean to enjoy poetry, and to ab-
sorb 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

74 TALKS TO TEACHEES

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 habit-
ual American over-intensity and anxiety of expres-
sion, and our ungraceful and distorted attitudes
when sitting, made on him a very painful impres-
sion. " 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

THE HABIT OF EELAXATION 75

expression, and imperturbability of manner of
these Orientals. I felt that my countrymen were
depriving themselves of an essential grace of char-
acter. How many American children ever hear it
said, by parent or teacher, that they should moder-
ate 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 gen-
eration of Americans toward the beginning of a
better set of personal ideals.*

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

* See the Address on the Gospel of Relaxation, later in this volume.

76 TALKS TO TEACHERS

may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand
the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insur-
ance which a man pays on his house and goods.
The tax does him no good at the time, and possi-
bly 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, ener-
getic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things.
He will stand like a tower when everything rocks
around him, and his softer fellow-mortals are win-
nowed like chaff in the blast.

I have been accused, when talking of the sub-
ject of habit, of making old habits appear so
strong that the acquiring of new ones, and partic-
ularly anything like a sudden reform or conver-
sion, would be made impossible by my doctrine.
Of course, this would sufiice to condemn the lat-
ter; 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 condi-
tion of there being new stimuli and new excite-

THE SCOPE OF HABIT'S EFFECTS 77

ments. Now life abounds in these, and sometimes
they are such critical and revolutionary experi-
ences 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 regener-
ate '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 here-
after, of which theology tells, is no worse than the
hell we make for ourselves in this world by habit-
ually 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 Win-
kle, 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

78 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 sepa-
rate 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 faith-
fully 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 en-
gendered more discouragement and faint-hearted-
ness 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 promi-
nent 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. De-
scribing 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,

80 TALKS TO TEACHERS

everything is indeterminate. But inspection
shows that each wave has a constitution which
can be to some degree explained by the constitu-
tion 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 repre-
sented in the wave that is passing away. The
vanishing objects were once formerly their neigh-
bors 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 contigu-
ity 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 think-

THE TWO LAWS OF ASSOCIATION 81

ing of just this object now ? " we can almost al-
ways 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 rou-
tine of our memorized acquisitions, for example,
is a consequence of nothing but the Law of Con-
tiguity. 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 se-
quences flow along these lines of habitual rou-
tine 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 sug-
gest another with which perhaps in the whole his-
tory of human thinking it had never once before
been coupled. The link here is usually some anal-
ogy 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

82 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 pres-
ence of the other. I myself am disposed to think
that the phenomena of association depend on our
cerebral constitution, and are not immediate con-
sequences 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-reduci-
ble, to one. Your pupils, whatever else they are,
are at any rate little pieces of associating machin-
ery. Their education consists in the organizing

THEIR GREAT SCOPE 83

within them of determinate tendencies to associate
one thing with another, — impressions with conse-
quences, 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 him-
self 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 asso-
ciation in the pupil's mind. This description
sounds wider than the one I began by giving.
But, when one thinks that our trains of associa-
tion, whatever they may be, normally issue in ac-
quired 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,

84 TALKS TO TEACHERS

when the field is analyzed into its parts, those
parts can be shown to have proceeded from parts
of fields previously before consciousness, in con-
sequence of one or other of the laws of association
just laid down. Those laws run the mind : inter-
est, 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 associa-
tions 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 dif-
ficulty 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 expe-
rience that our minds may pass from one object to
another by various intermediary fields of conscious-
ness. The indeterminateness of our paths of asso-
ciation in concrete is thus almost as striking a feat-
ure of them as the uniformity of their abstract

INDETERMINATENESS OF ASSOCIATIONS 85

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 diver-
sity 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 meteo-
rology 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 melan-
choly, and a train of associates connected with
morbid psychology may proceed to unroll them-
selves.

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 Miinsterberg performed this experiment

86 TALKS TO TEACHERS

methodically, using the same words four times
over, at three-month intervals, as ' cues ' for four
different persons who were the subjects of obser-
vation. He found almost no constancy in their
associations taken at these different times. In
short, the entire potential content of one's con-
sciousness is accessible from any one of its points.
This is why we can never work the laws of asso-
ciation 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 prepo-
tent 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 indetermina-
ble 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.

SOME CUES ABE PREPOTENT 87

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 an-
other may thus be roused to predominant activ-
ity ; 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 run-
ning 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.

88 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 ex-
ample, does the process seem to torn round a
single item in the mental field, or even round the
entire field that is immediately in the act of pass-
ing. 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 ABODE
F, . . . they probably suggest to you G H I. . . .

THE PUPIL AN ASSOCIATING MACHINE 89

But, if I write A B A D D E F, if they suggest
anything, they suggest as their complement E C T
orEFICIENCY. 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 asso-
ciations into your pupils' minds, you must not rely
on single cues, but multiply the cues as much as
possible. Couple the desired reaction with numer-
ous 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 mem-
ory, we shall learn still more about this.

So much, then, for the general subject of asso-
ciation. 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

90 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 acquain-
tances, for example, as characterized by certain
'tendencies.' These tendencies will in almost
every instance prove to be tendencies to associa-
tion. 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.

INTEREST

AT our last meeting I treated of the native ten-
dencies of the pupil to react in characteristically
definite ways upon different stimuli or exciting
circumstances. In fact, I treated of the pupil's in-
stincts. Now some situations appeal to special
instincts from the very outset, and others fail to
do so until the proper connections have been or-
ganized 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 origi-
nally. 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 peda-
gogical writers than that of interest. It is the
natural sequel to the instincts we so lately dis-
cussed, 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

92 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 in-
volve the spectacle of action of a violent sort, will
always divert the attention from abstract concep-
tions 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 inter-
esting have incessantly to cope. The child will
always attend more to what a teacher does than
to what the same teacher says. During the per-
formance of experiments or while the teacher is
drawing on the blackboard, the children are tran-
quil and absorbed. I have seen a roomful of col-
lege 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

NATIVELY INTERESTING THINGS 93

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 dra-
matic quality, — these are the objects natively in-
teresting to childhood, to the exclusion of almost
everything else; and the teacher of young chil-
dren, 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, anec-
dotally. The blackboard-drawing and story-tell-
ing 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 con-
nect themselves with these early ones that the
child brings with him to the school?

Fortunately, we can : there is a very simple law

94 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 to-
gether 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 an-
other 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 interest-
ing 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 ex-
amples,— the interest which things borrow from

HOW INTEREST IS ACQUIRED 90

their connection with our own personal welfare.
The most natively interesting object to a man is
his own personal self and its fortunes. We ac-
cordingly 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 alto-
gether. In mature life, all the drudgery of a
man's business or profession, intolerable in itself,
is shot through with engrossing significance be-
cause he knows it to be associated with his per-
sonal 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 per-
sonal 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

96 TALKS TO TEACHERS

these. The kindergarten methods, the object-
teaching routine, the blackboard and manual-train-
ing 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 threat-
ening 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 inventive-
ness 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 experi-
ence. Anecdotes and reminiscences will abound
in her talk ; and the shuttle of interest will shoot

SOMETHING TO ATTEND WITH 97

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 an-
other, 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 them-
selves, 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, al-
most any kind of a connection is sufficient to

98 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 manu-
factured. External links will serve as well as
those that are deeper and more logical. But in-
terest, once shed upon a subject, is liable to re-
main 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 consoli-
dates, 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 excit-
ing objects as one's personal fortune, one's social
responsibilities, and especially by the force of in-
veterate habit, they grow to be the only things for
which in middle life a man profoundly cares.

THE SYSTEM OF OUR INTERESTS 99

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 pro-
fessional 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 opera-
tion 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

WHOEVEB treats of interest inevitably treats of
attention, for to say that an object is interesting
is only another way of saying that it excites atten-
tion. But in addition to the attention which
any object already interesting or just becoming
interesting claims — passive attention or sponta-
neous attention, we may call it — there is a more
deliberate attention, — voluntary attention or atten-
tion with effort, as it is called, — which we can give
to objects less interesting or uninteresting in them-
selves. The distinction between active and pas-
sive 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 ma-
terial requires no further elucidation on this occa-
sion. 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

ATTENTION AND GENIUS 101

kind of attention requiring effort is appealed to ;
the more smoothly and pleasantly the class-room
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 popu-
lar impression probably prevails that men of
genius are remarkable for their voluntary powers
in this direction. But a little introspective obser-
vation will show any one that voluntary attention
cannot be continuously sustained, — t hat 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 spon-
taneous interest, until again some intercurrent
idea captures it and takes it off. Then the proc-
esses 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

102 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 re-
ceives 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

CONDITIONS OP VOLUNTARY ATTENTION 103

itself. He breaks his engagements, leaves his
letters unanswered, neglects his family duties in-
corrigibly, because he is powerless to turn his at-
tention down and back from those more interest-
ing trains of imagery with which his genius con-
stantly occupies his mind.

Voluntary attention is thus an essentially in-
stantaneous 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 minda will soon be
wandering again. To keep them where you have
called them, you must make the subject too inter-
esting 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 ques-
tions ; in a word, to change. From an unchanging
subject the attention inevitably wanders away.
You can test this by the simplest possible case of

104 TALKS TO TEACHERS

sensorial attention. Try to attend steadfastly to
a dot on the paper or on the wall. You pres-
ently 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 some-
thing 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. j in other
words, if you turn it over, if you think of it in
various ways, and along with various kinds of asso-
ciates,— you can keep your mind on it for a com-
paratively 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 ap-
peals 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 keep-
ing 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 un-

MECHANICAL AIDS TO ATTENTION 105

exciting, and to which it is impossible in any con-
tinous way to contribute an interest associatively
derived. There are, therefore, certain external
methods, which every teacher knows, of volun-
tarily 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 post-
ure must be changed; places can be changed.
Questions, after being answered singly, may occa-
sionally be answered in concert. Elliptical ques-
tions may be asked, the pupil supplying the miss-
ing 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 con-
tributing 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 pres-
ence and can make their exercises interesting,
while others simply cannot. And psychology and
general pedagogy here confess their failure, and

106 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 oc-
cupies the mind. For simplicity's sake suppose
the object to 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 opti-
cal impression may affect solely the marginal con-
sciousness, 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

ATTENTION, PHYSIOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED 107

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 en-
ters the focus of the field, consciousness being sus-
tained 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 to-
gether 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

108 TALKS TO TEACHERS

newer element ; the ideas which re-enforce and sus-
tain 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 systema-
tic 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 modifi-
cation 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

INTEREST AND EFFOKT ABE COMPATIBLES 109

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 sentimen-
talism. The greater part of schoolroom work, you
say, must, in the nature of things, always be repul-
sive. To face uninteresting drudgery is a good
part of life's work. Why seek to eliminate it
from the school-room 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

110 TALKS TO TEACHERS

It flows from the inherent nature of the subjects
and of the learning mind. The repulsive proc-
esses 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. With-
out 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 pug-

INTEREST AND EFFORT ARE COMPATIBLES 111

nacious 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 re-
pulsive 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 mak-
ing 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 preach-
ing 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

112 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 sub-
ject, if you do not wish him to wander from it
altogether to something else, variety in unity be-
ing 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 scatter-
brained, and others follow easily a train of con-
nected 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,

CAN MIND-WANDEBDSG BE CURED 113

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 at-
tention 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 char-
acteristic 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

114 TALKS TO TEACHEES

practical mental efficiency based on its degrees.
The total mental efficiency of a man is the result-
ant 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. Con-
centration, memory, reasoning power, inventive-
ness, 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 effi-
cient workers I know are of the ultra-scatter-
brained 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 ;

ATTENTION, CONCLUDED 115

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 exhib-
iting the fertility of the laws of association as
principles of psychological analysis. Memory,
moreover, is so important a faculty in the school-
room 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

SHALL WE CALL MEMORY A FACULTY 117

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 recol-
lect; 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 super-
seded 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 expla-
nation of our general power to recall, your psychol-
ogy is empty. The associationist psychology, on
the other hand, gives an explanation of each par-
ticular fact of recollection ; and, in so doing, it
also gives an explanation of the general faculty-
The ' faculty ' of memory is thus no or real ulti-
mate 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 : " Remem-

118 TALKS TO TEACHERS

ber ! Recollect ! " Does your faculty of memory
obey the order, and reproduce any definite image
from your past? Certainly not. It stands star-
ing 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 im-
mediately 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 ex-
cept 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 sen-
sations breaking on us from without. Whatever
appears in the mind must be introduced; and,
introduced, it is as the associate of some-

PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS OF MEMORY 119

thing 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 peculi-
arities in your memory which would be quite
whimsical and unaccountable if we were forced
to regard them as the product of a purely spir-
itual 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 repeti-
tion, 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 incomprehen-
sible anomaly on such a view. But if we remem-
ber 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

120 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 them-
selves 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 partic-
ular 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 mem-
ory depends on an organized system of associa-
tions; and its goodness depends on two of their
peculiarities : first, on the persistency of the asso-
ciations ; 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

THE GIFT OF ORGANIC RETENTIVENESS 121

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, an-
ecdotes, 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 philo-
sophic tendency in the mind, no impulse to weave
the materials acquired into anything like a logical
system. In the books of anecdotes, and, more re-
cently, in the psychology-books, we find recorded
instances of monstrosities, as we may call them, of
this desultory memory ; and they are often other-
wise 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 phi-
losophy combine together in one person, then in-
deed 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. Effi-
ciency on a colossal scale would indeed seem to
require it. For, although your philosophic or
systematic mind without good desultory memory

TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 sys-
tematizing power, we call them simply feeble in-
tellects ; 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 gelati-
nous 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 re-
produced if they ever get excited again. And its
liability to reproduction will depend of course
upon the variety of these paths and upon the fre-

THE SECRET OF A GOOD MEMORY 12S

quency 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 sub-
stitute 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 associa-
tions 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 think* 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
psedagogic consequence follows. There can be no
improvement of the general or elementary faculty of
memory : there can only be improvement of our mem-
ory for special systems of associated things; and

124 TALKS TO TEACHEES

this latter improvement is due to the way in
which the things in question are woven into asso-
ciation 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 re-
citing 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 drop-
ping out.

We have, then, not so much a faculty of mem-
ory 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

MEMOEIES KATHER THAN MEMORY 125

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 con-
nected with their own pursuits. A college ath-
lete, 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 incompati-
ble with the possession on their part of a mind
with only a middling degree of physiological re-
tentiveness. Let a man early in life set himself
the task of verifying such a theory as that of evo-
lution, and facts will soon cluster and cling to him
like grapes to their stem. Their relations to the

126 TALKS TO TEACHERS

theory will hold them fast ; and, the more of these
the mind is able to discern, the greater the erudi-
tion will become. Meanwhile the theorist may
have little, if any, desultory memory. Unutiliza-
ble facts may be unnoted by him, and forgotten
as soon as heard. An ignorance almost as ency-
clopedic 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, re-
placing, as it does, merely contiguous associations
by the logical ones of identity, similarity, or anal-
ogy. If you know a 'law,' you may discharge
your memory of masses of particular instances,
for the law will reproduce them for you whenever

TECHNICAL MNEMONICS 127

you require them. The law of refraction, for ex-
ample : If you know that, you can with a pencil
and a bit of paper immediately discern how a con-
vex lens, a concave lens, or a prism, must sever-
ally 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 con-
nected together as causes and effects, would be
the perfect mnemonic system, in which the great-
est 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 me-
thodical 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 de-
tail. But a single example, from a popular sys-
tem, will show what I mean. I take the number-
alphabet, the great mnemonic device for recollect-
ing numbers and dates. In this system each digit

128 TALKS TO TEACHBES

is represented by a consonant, thus : 1 is t or d ;
2, n; 3, m; 4, r; 5, 1; 6, sh,j, ch, or g ; 7, c, k, g,
or qu ; 8, / or v ; 9, 5 or p; 0, «, <?, or z. Suppose,
now, you wish to remember the velocity of sound,
1,142 feet a second: £, £, r, w, 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 L, 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 land-
mark-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

WHY CRAMMING IS BAD 129

purely detached facts as enjoy no rational connec-
tion 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 re-
member 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 con-
texts, 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

130 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 in-
coming new fact will then find all sorts of ana-
logues 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 retentive-
ness of the individual, which, as we have seen, is
practically a fixed quantity. Nevertheless, one
often hears people say : " A great sin was com-
mitted 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 chemis-
try 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.

VERBAL MEMORIZING 131

But, since it has brought me to speak of learn-
ing things by heart, I think that a general prac-
tical remark about verbal memorizing may now
not be out of place. The excesses of old-fash-
ioned verbal memorizing, and the immense ad-
vantages of object-teaching in the earlier stages
of culture, have perhaps led those who philoso-
phize 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 ma-
terial is, on the whole, the handiest and most use-
ful 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.
1 should say, therefore, that constant exercise in
verbal memorizing must still be an indispensable
feature in all sound education. Nothing is more

132 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 delight-
ful 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 incom-
parable 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 ham-
mer 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 con-
tributions to our knowledge of memory which have
recently come from the laboratory-psychologists.
Many of the enthusiasts for scientific or brass-in-
strument child-study are taking accurate measure-
ments 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 re-
produce the list, either directly, or after an inter-
val 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

134 TALKS TO TEACKEBS

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 ser-
vice 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 bot-
tom of the scale thus experimentally established
might, by dint of the strength of his passion for
a subject, and in consequence of the logical asso-
ciation 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 work-

ELEMENT AEY DEFECTS NOT FATAX 135

ing 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 dogged-
ness, 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 pas-
sion 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 element-
ary 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 con-
tents. 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 recollecters,

136 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 ex-
periment 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 be-
lieve that the total impression which a perceptive
teacher will get of the pupil's condition, as indi-
cated 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 measure-
ments 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

VARIOUS TYPES OF IMAGINATION 137

down by the discovery of his deficiency in any ele-
mentary faculty of the mind. "What tells in life
is the whole mind working together, and the de-
ficiencies 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 ex-
clusiveness, and not wish at the same time a hun-
dred other incompatible things just as strongly.

One of the most important discoveries of the
4 scientific ' sort that have recently been made in
psychology is that of Mr. Galton and others con-
cerning 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, defi-
niteness, and extent of their visual images. These
are singularly perfect in a large number of indi-
viduals, and in a few are so rudimentary as hardly

138 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 varia-
tions 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 recom-
mended to sort their pupils in this way, and treat
them as the result falls out. You should inter-
rogate 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 distinct-
ness might doubtless thus be obtained by a pains-
taking teacher. But it is obvious that in the usual
school-room 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 al-
ready reached in a purely empirical way, that

SENSE-IMPRESSIONS SHOULD BE VARIED 139

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 dia-
grams 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 recog-
nized, 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 unrepro-
ducible part of our acquisitions, and I shall have
done with the topic of memory.

Professor Ebbinghaus, in a heroic little investi-
gation into the laws of memory which he per-
formed 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.

140 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 unhes-
itating 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 unhesi-
tating recollection of the piece after five minutes,
half an hour, an hour, a day, a week, a month,
had elapsed. The number of rereadings requir-
ed he took to be a measure of the amount of for-
getting that had occurred in the elapsed interval.
And he found some remarkable facts. The proc-
ess 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

THE RATE OF FORGETTING 141

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, Pro-
fessor 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 ap-
prehensions 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 con-
sciousness, 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 repro-
ducing in a recitation or an examination such

142 TALKS TO TEACHERS

matters as they may have learned, and inarticu-
late 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 naving 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

THE FORGOTTEN MAY STILL COUNT 143

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 re-
membering 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 im-
press and retain it as to connect it with some-
thing else already there. The connecting is the
thinking; and, if we attend clearly to the con-
nection, the connected thing will certainly be
likely to remain within recall.

I shall next aak you to consider the process by
which we acquire new knowledge, — the process of
' Apperception,' as it is called, by which we re-
ceive and deal with new experiences, and revise
our stock of ideas so as to form new or improved
conceptions.

XIII.

THE images of our past experiences, of what-
ever 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 concomi-
tant 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 un-
dated condition, we call them products of 'im-
agination ' or ' conception.' Imagination is the
term commonly used where the object represent-
ed is thought of as an individual thing. Concep-
tion 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 con-
templation, whether these be individual things,
like ' the sun ' or ' Julius Csesar,' or classes of

THE STOCK OF IDEAS 145

things, like 'animal kingdom,' or, finally, entirely
abstract attributes, like 'rationality' or 'rect-
itude.'

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 experi-
ence answered to so many ideas which he acquired
thereby, — ideas that remained with him associ-
ated 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 relation-
ship 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 ' syl-
logistic relation ' between propositions, or of four
quantities making a ' proportion,' or of the ' incon-
sistency ' 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,

146 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 con-
ception 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.
Construct™ eness 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 vari-
ous kinds of tools are made to contribute to the
store. A youth brought up with a sufficiently

IDEAS OF PHYSICAL THINGS 147

broad basis of this kind is always at home in the
world. He stands within the pale. He is ac-
quainted with Nature, and Nature in a certain
sense is acquainted with him. Whereas the
youth brought up alone at home, with no ac-
quaintance with anything but the printed page,
is always afflicted with a certain remoteness from
the material facts of life, and a correlative inse-
curity 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 re-
peat myself. Moreover, you fully realize, I am
sure, how important for life, — for the moral
tone of life, quite apart from definite practical pur-
suits,— 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 ac-
quisition. After adolescence it is rare to be able
to get into familiar touch with any of these

148 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 as-
pects 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 rela-
tions, properly so called, — to sociological ideas
and to metaphysical abstractions.

NATT7BAL ORDEB OP ACQUISITION 149

This general order of sequence is followed tra-
ditionally of course in the schoolroom. It is for-
eign 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 fut-
ure 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,

150 TALKS TO TEACHERS

"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 ac-
curately 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 condi-
tion, 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 re-
ceived the immediate answer from half the class at
once : " The interior of the globe is in a condition
of igneous fusion ." Better exclusive object-teach-

EACH AGE CAN APPREHEND ABSTBACTIONS 151

ing 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 ex-
clusively of the earliest years of the pupil. These
lend themselves better to explicit treatment ; and
I myself, in dwelling BO 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 intel-
lectual 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 repeat-
ing the same sort of tedious weighing and meas-
uring 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

152 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 in-
teresting. Even they can enjoy abstractions, pro-
vided 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 at-
taches 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,

AMBIGUITY OF VEEBAL ABSTRACTIONS 153

you may suppose that I am not yet quite dead ! "
The next day the child was asked, in class, to ex-
plain 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 mean-
ing 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/oorf of rich and poor,
King in redness to all mankind,"

and finding no inward difficulty.

154 TALKS TO TEACHERS

The only safeguard against this sort of miscon-
ceiving is to insist on varied statement, and to
bring the child's conceptions, wherever it be pos-
sible, to some sort of practical test.

Let us next pass to the subject of Appercep-
tion.

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 IB
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 PSY-
CHOLOGY. 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.

156 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 'appercep-
tion,' 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 re-
ceive a thing into our minds, — that she fears she
must have missed the point through the shallow-
ness 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

APPERCEPTION DEFINED 157

refer. But it verily means nothing more than the
act of taking a thing into the mind. It corre-
sponds to nothing peculiar or elementary in psy-
chology, being only one of the innumerable re-
sults 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 conscious-
ness than it is drafted off in some determinate direc-
tion 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 experi-
ences and the 4 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 out-
wardly 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 pre-

158 TALKS TO TEACHERS

occupied 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 ap-
perception. The conceptions which meet and
assimilate it are called by Herbart the ' apperceiv-
ing mass.' The apperceived impression is en-
gulfed 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

THE LAW OF LEAST DISTURBANCE 159

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 under-
stand 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 expe-
rience, 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, any-
thing 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

160 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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. Hooper 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 pre-
vious system of beliefs is always ignored or ex-
truded from the mind in case it cannot be sophis-
tically reinterpreted so as to tally harmoniously
with the system. We have all conducted discus-
sions with middle-aged people, overpowered them
with our reasons, forced them to admit our con-
tention, 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

NUMBERLESS TYPES OF APPERCEPTION 161

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 dif-
ferent types of apperception discriminated from
each other. There was associative apperception,
subsumptive apperception, assimilative appercep-
tion, 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 psy-
chology, and which perpetuates itself by lingering
along, especially in these works which are adver-
tised 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 dif-
ferent types of apperception, why we should stop
at sixteen rather than sixteen hundred. There

162 TALKS TO TEACHERS

are as many types of apperception as there are pos-
sible 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 rhinothera-
peutical 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 apper-
ception of the same phenomenon which are pos-
sible 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

TOO FEW HEADS OP CLASSIETCATION 163

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 re-
spectively !

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 dif-
ferently on different occasions. A medical or en-
gineering expert retained on one side of a case
will not apperceive the foots 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 gen-
eral thing, the fact of such a dispute is enough
to show that neither one of their rival interpreta-
tions 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 en-
large 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 or-

164 TALKS TO TEACHEES

ganisms 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 watch-
maker'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 be-
came familiar at the time of Guiteau's trial, ful-
filled the need of a tertium quid. The foreign
terms ' de"se"quilibreY '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

THE APPEBCEIVING IDEA

on, our vocabulary becomes thus ever more and
more voluminous, having to keep up with the
ever-growing multitude of our stock of apperceiv-
ing 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 exten-
sion of the notion 4 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,

166 TALKS TO TEACHERS

as I said, a group of organized tendencies to con-
duct, 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 be-
havior 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 im-
portant fact, which is that in most human beings
the stock of names and concepts is mostly ac-
quired 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 con-
nected with his profession or business life. In

OLD FOGY1SM SETS IN EAELY

this sense, his conceptions increase during a very
long period ; for his knowledge grows more exten-
sive and minute, But the larger categories of
conception, the sorts of thing, and wider classes
of relation between things, of which we take cog-
nizance, are all got into the mind at a compara-
tively youthful date. Few men ever do acquaint
themselves with the principles of a new science
after even twenty-five. If you do not study politi-
cal 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 ac-
quaint 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 car-

168 TALKS TO TEACHERS

ried 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 im-
parting conceptions the pupil's future life is pro-
bably bound to be.

XV.

THE WILL

SINCE mentality terminates naturally in out-
ward 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 per-
formed. A distinct idea of what they are, and
a deliberate fat 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 voli-
tion in this narrower sense of the term.

170 TALKB TO TEACHEES

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 intrinsi-
cally 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 sen-
sible impressions, as you know, produce movement
immediately and of themselves. The doctrine
may also be considered exploded as far as ideas

g°-

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

IDEOMOTOE ACTION 171

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 pro-
ceed to discharge. If it be the idea of a move-
ment, 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 in-
terrupting the conversation; or, when lying hi
bed, we suddenly think that we shall be late for
breakfast, and instantly we get up with no par-
ticular exertion or resolve. All the ingrained
procedures by which life is carried on — the man-
ners and customs, dressing and undressing, acts
of salutation, etc. — are executed in this semi-auto-
matic way unhesitatingly and efficiently, the very

172 TALKS TO TBACHEBS

outermost margin of consciousness seeming to be
concerned in them, while the focus may be occu-
pied 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 phys-
iology 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 stimu-
lated, arrests the movements of the heart : the
splanchnic nerve arrests those of the intestines, if
already begun. But it soon appeared that this

THE FUNCTION OF INHIBITION 173

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 con-
stant 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 scratch-
ing reflex is so incessant that, as Goltz first de-
scribed 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 inten-

174 TALKS TO TEACHERS

sity, 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 eaey 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 oscillatr
ing before me in a kind of deadlock, which is
what we call the state of hesitation or delibera-
tion. 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 thermomet-
ric conditions, and then the idea of getting up
will immediately discharge into act : I shall sud-
denly find that I have got up — or

(2) Still mindful of the freezing temperature,

ANY IDEA MAY BE INHIBITORY 175

the thought of the duty of rising may become so
pungent that it determines action in spite of in-
hibition. 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 inhibi-
tive machinery. A strong and urgent motor idea
in the focus may be neutralized and made inopera-
tive by the presence of the very faintest contradic-
tory 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 ?

176 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 rein-
forcement from my attention, suffices to the in-
hibitive 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 con-
sciousness are always so complex that the inhibit-
ing 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 be-
havior, 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.'

MAN'S CONDUCT AS A EESULTANT 177

If you are struck by the materialistic or fatal-
istic doctrines which seem to follow this concep-
tion, 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. Feel-
ings 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 it-
self swept away. The life in all this becomes pru-
dential 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 * char-
acter' 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 ' as
sociationist ' psychology, brought down to its rad-

178 TALKS TO TEACHERS

ical 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 be-
lief; 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 advan-
tages in the way of exposition.

Voluntary action, then, is at all times a resultant
of the compounding of our impulsions with our inhi-
bitions.

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 rap-
idly, his associative processes are so extravagantly
lively, that inhibitions have no time to arrive, and

THE TWO EXTREME TYPES OF WILL 179

he says and does whatever pops into his head
without a moment of hesitation.

Certain melancholiacs furnish the extreme ex-
ample of the over-inhibited type. Their minds
are cramped in a fixed emotion of fear or helpless-
ness, their ideas confined to the one thought that
for them life is impossible. So they show a con-
dition 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 tem-
peraments 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, ab-
stractly considered, must be full of scruples and
inhibitions. But action, in such a character, far
from being paralyzed, will succeed in energet-
ically keeping on its way, sometimes overpowering
the resistances, sometimes steering along the line
where they lie thinnest.

Just as our flexor muscles act most firmly when

180 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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

THE BALKY WILL 181

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 ma-
chinery, 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 conscientious-
ness upon conversation. Nowhere does conversa-
tion 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, ob-
scenity, and malignity find unhampered expression,
talk can be brilliant indeed. But its flame waxes
dim where the mind is stitched all over with con-
scientious fear of violating the moral and social
proprieties.

The teacher often is confronted in the school-
room 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,

182 TALKS TO TEACHERS

remain completely inhibited in regard to it : it
becomes literally impossible for them to under-
stand it if it be an intellectual problem, or to do it
if it be an outward operation, as long as this par-
ticular 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 de-
Teloped, 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

THE TEACHEBS' IDEAL 183

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 associa-
tion, 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 gen-
eral 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. Psy-
chology 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

184 TALKS TO TEACHEES

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 con-
sciousness; 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 characteris-
tically 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

CHABACTER-BTJILDING 185

consists in trying to apperceive the case succes-
sively 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 im-
mediately. If, on the other hand, it be an idea
which carries inaction as its habitual result, if it
ally itself with prohibition, then you unhesitat-
ingly 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 sit-
uation, into which I should now like you to look
with me a little nearer.

The proper conception, the true head of clas-
sification, 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

186 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 cen-
tre of the field of consciousness, and held there,
the reasonable idea will exert these effects inevi-
tably; 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

TO THINK IS THE MOKAL ACT 187

elementary form?" you can make only one reply.
You can say that it consists in the effort of atten-
tion 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 per-
sons who find themselves confronted by the sin-
fulness 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 tempta-
tion. He has made a resolve to reform, but he is
now solicited again by the bottle. His moral tri-
umph 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

188 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 ; sec-
ond, by the amount of voluntary attention that
they can exert in holding to the right ones, how-
ever 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

WILL IS ATTENTION TO AN IDEA 189

how much more intermittent and brief our acts
of voluntary attention are than is commonly sup-
posed. 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 pro-
portion to their significance, and that I should re-
turn 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 atten-
tion, 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 there-
fore 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 in-
terests 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

190 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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, re-
ceived 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 prac-
tical and useful, and to keep free from all specu-
lative complications. Nevertheless, I do not wish
to leave any ambiguity about my own position;
and I will therefore say, in order to avoid all mis-
understanding, 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 ma-
chine'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 pos-
sible stock of ideas which a man's free spirit would

THE 'FREEDOM' OF THE WILL 191

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 indeter-
minate. We feel as if we could make it really
more or less, and as if our free action in this re-
gard 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 appear-
ance to be a reality : the detenninist believes that
it is an illusion. I myself hold with the free-will-
ists, — not because I cannot conceive the fatalist

192 TALKS TO TEACHERS

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 con-
sciences, 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 im-
portant subject and these lectures.

There are two types of will. There are also
two types of inhibition. We may call them inhibi-
tion by repression or by negation, and inhibition
by substitution, respectively. The difference be-
tween them is that, in the case of inhibition by

TWO TYPES OF INHIBITION 193

repression, both the inhibited idea and the inhi-
biting idea, the impulsive idea and the idea that
negates it, remain along with each other in con-
sciousness, producing a certain inward strain or
tension there : whereas, in inhibition by substitu-
tion, 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 win-
dow, which presently grows interesting enough
to claim all their attention. You can call the lat-
ter 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 at-
tractive disturbance, always there soliciting their
curiosity, will overpower them, and they will be
just as they were before : whereas, if, without say-
ing 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

194 TALKS TO TEACHEKS

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 gentle-
man is certainly, for this world's purposes, a more
valuable being than your " Crump, with his grunt-
ing 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 any-
thing that a man can avoid under the notion that
it is bad he may also avoid under the notion that

SPINOZA ON SLAVES AND FREEMEN 195

something else is good. He who habitually acts
sub specie mali, under the negative notion, the no-,
tion 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 ani-
mal'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 bless-
ings of having an organism kept in lifelong pos-
session 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 power-
ful intoxicants.

196 CONCLUSION

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 school-
room 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 turn-
ing towards psychology nowadays with great ex-
pectations ; 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 pecu-
liar 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

200 TALKS TO STUDENTS

this bodily commotion suppressed, we should not
so much/eeZ fear as call the situation fearful; we
should not feel surprise, but coldly recognize that
the object was indeed astonishing. One enthusi-
ast 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 con-
versely. 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 ex-
aggeration 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 ex-
pression 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 train-
ing 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

BEFLEX-THEORY OF EMOTION 201

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 cheerful-
ness, 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 de-
liberately 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 feel-

202 TALKS TO STUDENTS

ing soon folds its tent like an Arab, and silently
steals away.

The best manuals of religious devotion accord-
ingly 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 feel-
ings 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 inpour-
ing currents of sensation come, which help to de-
termine from moment to moment what our inner

THE INlirER LIFE OF INVALIDS 203

states shall be : that is a fundamental law of psy-
chology which I will therefore proceed to assume.

A Viennese neurologist of considerable reputa-
tion has recently written about the Binnenlelen,
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 Bin-
nenleben is, of the sort of unuttered inner atmos-
phere 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 character
istic quality. In the unhealthy-minded, apart
from all sorts of old regrets, ambitions checked
by shames and aspirations obstructed by timidi-
ties, 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

204 TALKS TO STUDENTS

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 tradi-
tional feminine pallor and delicacy of constitution,
but actually taking the lead in every educational

MUSCULAR TONE AND INNER MOOD 205

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 Eng-
lishman, taken all alone by himself. And that
strength, I am persuaded, is perennially nourished
and kept up by nothing so much as by the na-
tional worship, in which all classes meet, of ath-
letic 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 re-
member well an awful prophecy that it contained
about the future of our muscular system. Human
perfection, the writer said, means ability to cope

206 TALKS TO STUDENTS

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 ad-
vance, 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, challeng-
ing ever more and more our proper admiration,
will grow the gigantic domes of our crania, arch-
ing over our spectacled eyes, and animating our
flexible little lips to those floods of learned and

MUSCULAB TONE AND INNEB, MOOD 207

ingenious talk which will constitute our most
congenial occupation.

I am sure that your flesh creeps at this apoca-
lyptic vision. Mine certainly did so ; and I can-
not 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, seren-
ity, and cheerfulness to life, to give moral elastic-
ity 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 me-
chanical 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 sym-
pathy in a cause which I believe is one of para-
mount patriotic importance to us Yankees. Many

208 TALKS TO STUDENTS

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 re-
quires 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 some-
how 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 counte-
nance, 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 ex-

THE OVER-EXPRESSION OF AMERICANS 209

presses 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 in-
tense 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 some-
thing of a nationally accepted ideal ; and the medi-
cal 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 Amer-
ican ideals, even of a young girl's character ! Now

210 TALKS TO STUDENTS

it is most ungracious, and it may seem to some
persons unpatriotic, to criticise in public the phys-
ical 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

THE OVEB-CONTRACTED PERSON 211

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 the-
ory of our emotions to which I made reference at
the beginning of this article. For by the sensa-
tions 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, threat-
ening, exhausting, thunderous inner atmosphere
never quite clears away. If you never wholly
give yourself up to the chair you sit in, but al-
ways keep your leg- and body-muscles half con-
tracted for a rise ; if you breathe eighteen or nine-
teen 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 ex-
pectancy, 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 com-
plete, and your muscles all relaxed ?

Now what is the cause of this absence of re-
pose, this bottled-lightning quality in us Ameri-
cans ? The explanation of it that is usually given
is that it comes from the extreme dryness of our

212 TALKS TO STUDENTS

climate and the acrobatic performances of our
thermometer, coupled with the extraordinary pro-
gressiveness of our life, the hard work, the rail-
road speed, the rapid success, and all the other
things we know so well by heart. Well, our cli-
mate is certainly exciting, but hardly more so
than that of many parts of Europe, where never-
theless no bottled-lightning girls are found. And
the work done and the pace of life are as extreme
in 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 ade-
quacy is the chapter on the imitative impulse.
First Bagehot, then Tarde, then Royce and Bald-
win here, have shown that invention and imita-
tion, taken together, form, one may say, the entire
warp and woof of human life, in so far as it is so-
cial. The American over-tension and jerkiness
and breathlessness and intensity and agony of ex-
pression are primarily social, and only secondarily
physiological, phenomena. They are lad habits,
nothing more or less, bred of custom and example,

AMERICAN TENSION ONLY A BAD HABIT 213

born of the imitation of bad models and the culti-
vation of false personal ideals. How are idioms
acquired, how do local peculiarities of phrase and
accent come about? Through an accidental ex-
ample 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 charac-
teristic national type, — a type with the produc-
tion of which, so far as these habits go, the cli-
mate 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 bet-
ter or worse. Now no type can be wholly disad-
vantageous ; 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

214 TALKS TO STUDENTS

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, un-
hurried 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 col-
lapse, 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

AMERICAN FATIGUE 215

perfectly wanton and unnecessary tricks of inner
attitude and outer manner in us, caught from the
social atmosphere, kept up by tradition, and ideal-
ized 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 com-
pensation, 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 thought-
less 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

216 TALKS TO STUDENTS

progress and hindrances to our success. My col-
league, Professor Miinsterberg, an excellent ob-
server, 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 de-
fective 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 fee-
bleness, 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 experi-
ence to appeal to in its proof.

Well, my friends, if our dear American char-
acter 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

WE MUST IMITATE NEW PATTERNS 217

with new standards, yet, if there is to be any re-
lief, 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 our-
selves, and that is by some of us setting an ex-
ample 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 imi-
tated by somebody. Thackeray somewhere says
of the Irish nation that there never was an Irish-
man 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 per-
son, you may depend upon it that a wave of

218 TALKS TO STUDENTS

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 form-
ed a society for the improvement of our nation-
al vocalization, and one perceives its machina-
tions 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 gos-
pel of relaxation, as one may call it, preached by
Miss Annie Payson Call, of Boston, in her admi-
rable 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 al-
ready 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 conta-
gious, one feels by instinct that the less volunta-
rily one aims at getting imitated, the more uncon-
scious one keeps in the matter, the more likely

EGOISTIC PBEOCCUPATIONS IMPEDE ACTION 219

one is to succeed. Become the imitdble thing, and
you may then discharge your minds of all respon-
sibility for the imitation. The laws of social na-
ture will take care of that result. Now the psycho-
logical 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 fed-
ing about one's self tends to arrest the free associa-
tion of one's objective ideas and motor processes.
We get the extreme example of this in the men-
tal 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 monot-
onous 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 emo-

220 TALKS TO STUDENTS

tion 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 tempo-
rarily half-idiotic by some great success or piece
of good fortune. " G-ood ! 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 re-
flection 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.

LET YOUR MACHINERY RUN" FREE 221

But confine them as far as possible to the occa-
sions when you are making your general resolu-
tions and deciding on your plans of campaign, and
keep them out of the details. When once a de-
cision 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 indif-
ferent. 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 Eng-
land 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 un-
worthy of one's interlocutor, or something in some
way or other not adequate to the occasion ? How
can conversation possibly steer itself through such

222 TALKS TO STUDENTS

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 class-room trust your spon-
taneity and fling away all further care.

My advice to students, especially to girl-stu-
dents, would be somewhat similar. Just as a bi-
cycle-chain may be too tight, so may one's careful-
ness 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 nerv-

MORAL OVER-TENSION 223

ous tone in an examination is worth many pounds
of anxious study for it in advance. If you want
really to do your best at 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 vari-
ous 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.

224

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." * I extract a few
passages, the conversations being given in in-
direct discourse. Brother Lawrence was a Car-
melite friar, converted at Paris in 1666. "He
said that he had been footman to M. Fieubert,
the Treasurer, and that he was a great awk-
ward fellow, who broke everything. That he had
desired to be received into a monastery, thinking

•Fleming H. Rerell Company, New York.

BROTHER LAWRENCE 226

that he would there be made to smart for his awk-
wardness and the faults he should commit, and so
he should sacrifice to God his life, with its pleas-
ures ; but that God had disappointed him, he hav-
ing met with nothing but satisfaction in that
state. . . .

" 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 per-
suaded him to the contrary ; but that he had thus
reasoned with himself about it : I engaged in a re-
ligious life only for the love of Q-od, and I have en-
deavored to act only for Him ; whatever becomes of
me, whether I be lost or saved, I will always con-
tinue to act purely for the love of G-od. I shall
have this good at least, that till death I shall have
done all that is in me to love Sim. . . . 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, say-
ing, ' 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

TALKS TO STUDENTS

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 after-
ward 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 mat-
ter 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

CONCLUSION 227

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 per-
mitted 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 now-
adays is not the exacerbation, but rather the ton-
ing-down of their moral tensions. Even now I
fear that some one of my fair hearers may be mak-
ing an undying resolve to become strenuously re-
laxed, cost what it will, for the remainder of her
life. It is needless to say that that is not the way

228 TALKS TO STUDENTS

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.

OUB 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 feel-
ingless, 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 valu-
able 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

230 TALKS TO STUDENTS %

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 fond-
ness, 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

WHAT THE BLINDNESS IS 231

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, where-
ever 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 moun-
tains of North Carolina, I passed by a large num-

232 TALKS TO STUDENTS

her 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 manage-
able 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, be-
ginning again away back where our first ancestors
started, and by hardly a single item the better off

THE 'COVES* Eff THE SMOKY MOUNTAINS 233

for all the achievements of the intervening genera-
tions.

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 heri-
tage and birthright. No modern person ought to
be willing to live a day in such a state of rudir
mentariness and denudation.

Then I said to the mountaineer who was driv-
ing 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 in-
ward 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

234 TALKS TO STUDENTS

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 clear-
ing, 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 activi-
ties, 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 posi-
tive sense in which importance ever anywhere
can be.

Robert Louis Stevenson has illustrated this by
a case, drawn from the sphere of the imagination,

THE LANTEKN BEABERS 235

in an essay which I really think deserves to be-
come 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 com-
merce 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 pre-
tend to be policemen. Burglars, indeed, we may

236 TALKS TO STUDENTS

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 lan-
tern-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 dis-
covered; 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 speci-

STEVENSON QUOTED 237

mens ! . . . 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 es-
caping, whether to conduct your footsteps or to
make your glory public, — a mere pillar of dark-
ness 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 imagi-
nation. 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 de-
lighted; 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

238 TALKS TO STUDENTS

song, hearkened for a trill or two, and found him-
self 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 incommu-
nicable. And it is just a knowledge of this, and
a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which
the bird has sung to MS, 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 de-
sires 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 ro-
mance] on some such business as that of my Ian-

STEVENSON QUOTED 239

tern-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 them-
selves, 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 altogether in the field of
fancy. ... In such a case the poetry runs under-
ground. The observer (poor soul, with his docu-
ments !) 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 squir-
rel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven in

240 TALKS TO STUDENTS

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 haunt-
ing and truly spectral unreality of realistic books.
... In each we miss the personal poetry, the en-
chanted 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 incon-
ceivable ; for no man lives in the external truth
among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantas-
magoric chamber of his brain, with the painted
windows and the storied wall."*

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 harden-

*'The Lantern-bearers,' in the volume entitled ' Across the Plains.'
Abridged in the quotation.

BOYCE QUOTED 241

ing 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 re-
garded his thought, his feeling, as somehow differ-
ent 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

242 TALKS TO STUDENTS

[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 cap-
tor's power ; in the boundless sea where the myr-
iads of water-creatures strive and die; amid all
the countless hordes of savage men; in all sick-
ness and sorrow; in all exultation and hope,
everywhere, from the lowest to the noblest, the
same conscious, burning, wilful life is found, end-
lessly 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."*

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 his-
tory. As Emerson says, there is a depth in those
moments that constrains us to ascribe more reality

• The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, pp. 157-162 (abridged).

OBERMANN QUOTED 243

to them than to all other experiences. The pas-
sion of love will shake one like an explosion, or
some act mil 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 Obennann, 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 1 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 per-
fume 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 noth-
ing will express ; this form that nothing will con-
tain ; this ideal of a better world which one feels,
but which it would seem that nature has not
made." *

•De Senancour: Obermann, Lettre XXX.

244 TALKS TO STUDENTS

Wordsworth and Shelley are similarly full of
this sense of a limitless significance in natural
things. In Wordsworth it was a somewhat aus-
tere 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." *

" 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 Prelude, Book III.

WORDSWORTH'S INNER LIFE 245

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 1 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." *

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 per-
sonage. 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 auto-

*The Prelude, Book IV.

246 TALKS TO STUDENTS

biographic 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 slgnk . . . 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 man-
ner 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 in-
flatus, 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 shep-
herd accidently seen me lying on the turf, he
would only have thought I was resting a few
minutes. I made no outward show. Who could

BICHAUD JEFFERIE6 QUOTED 247

have imagined the whirlwind of passion that was
going on in me as I reclined there ! " *

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 sig-
nificance 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 be-
come 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 sympa-
thetic 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 con-
ventional man a lifetime to build up. You may
be a prophet, at this rate ; but you cannot be a
worldly success.

* Op. dt. , Boston, Roberts, 1883, pp. 6, 6.

248 TALKS TO STUDENTS

Walt Whitman, for instance, is accounted by
many of us a contemporary prophet. He abolishes
the usual human distinctions, brings all con-
ventionalisms into solution, and loves and cele-
brates 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 im-
mense scale. He felt the human crowd as raptur-
ously 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 hoar high! I see
you also face to face.

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes t
how curious you are to me I

On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross,
returning home, are more curious to me than you sup-
pose;

WALT WHITMAN QUOTED 249

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 refreshed 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,

250 TALKS TO STUDENTS

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 wares 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 shore, the fires from the foundry chim-
neys 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.*

And so on, through the rest of a divinely beau-
tiful 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

• ' Crossing Brooklyn Ferry ' (abridged).

WALT WHITMAN QUOTED 251

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 per-
haps 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 side-
walks 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

252 TALKS TO STUDENTS

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." *

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 in-
spires 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

* Calamus, Boston, 1397, pp. 41, 42.

CARLYLE AND SCHOPENHAUER 253

in the fields of vision over which his eyes so care-
lessly 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 ser-
mon, 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 repeti-
tion 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, forevennore ? Y"et 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 Whit-

254 TALKS TO STUDENTS

man, 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 signifi-
cance and importance. But how can one attain
to the feeling of the vital significance of an ex-
perience, 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 mysteri-
ously unexpected ways. It blossoms sometimes
from out of the very grave wherein we imagined
that our happiness was buried. Benvenuto Cel-
lini, 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 him-
self, 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

BENVENT7TO CELLINI A.ND TOLSTOI 255

vanities of the world: from this year hencefor-
ward 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 ! ' " *

But the great understander of these mysterious
ebbs and flows is Tolstoi. They throb all through
hia 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 reve-
lation 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

•Vita, lib. 2, chap. iv.

256 TALKS TO STUDENTS

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 cu-
polas, 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 hun-
dred-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

EMERSON AND NATURE 257

shut up in a cabin ! ' So he smiled, and turned in
to sleep among his comrades." *

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 ab-
sorbed by what is given. " Crossing a bare com-
mon," says Emerson, "in snow puddles, at twi-
light, 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 exclu-
sively, 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

•La Guerre et la Paix, Paris, 1884, vol. iii. pp. 268, 275, 316.

258 TALKS TO STUDENTS

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 funda-
mental 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

THE NON-THINKING LEVEL 259

ours, — the life that is as naught to them ? Blind
that they are, they lose it all ! But we live in the
present," *

The intense interest that life can assume when
brought down to the non-thinking level, the
level of pure sensorial perception, has been beau-
tifully 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 morn-
ing 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 in-
stead of only five miles separated me from the
valley and river. So wild and solitary and re-
mote 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 wilder-
ness of thorns. . . . Not once nor twice nor

* Quoted by Lotze, Microcosmus, English translation, vol. ii. p. 240.

260 TALKS TO STUDENTS

thrice, but day after day I returned to this soli-
tude, 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 undu-
lations, 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. Descend-
ing from my outlook, I would take up my aim-
less wanderings again, and visit other elevations

THE PATAGONIAN WILDERNESS 261

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 rest-
ing-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 mill-
ions of trees and bushes on any other hillside.
I thought nothing about it, but acted uncon-
sciously. 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 be-
neath; 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

262 TALKS TO STUDENTS

sit down and rest, since I was never tired ; and
yet, without being tired, that noon-day pause, dur-
ing 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 shud-
der. 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 im-
possible. My state was one of suspense and watch-
fulness ; 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 be-
tween me and my intellect until I returned to my
former self, — to thinking, and the old insipid ex-
istence [again].

" I had undoubtedly gone back ; and that state
of intense watchfulness or alertness, rather, with
suspension of the higher intellectual faculties, re-
presented the mental state of the pure savage. He

FELICITY OF THE SENSOEIAL LIFE

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." *

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 sensorjal
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 irrespon-
sible spell.

And now what is the result of all these consid-
erations and quotations? It is negative in one
sense, but positive in another. It absolutely for-
bids us to be forward in pronouncing on the

« Op. cit., pp. 210-222 (abridged).

264 TALKS TO STUDENTS

meaninglessness of forms of existence other than
our own ; and it commands us to tolerate, respect,
and indulge those whom we see harmlessly inter-
ested and happy in their own ways, however unin-
telligible these may be to us. Hands off: neither
the whole of truth nor the whole of good is re-
vealed to any single observer, although each ob-
server gains a partial superiority of insight from
the peculiar position in which he stands. Even
prisons and sick-rooms have their special revela-
tions. 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 pre-
suming 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 in-
sensible 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, relig-
ious, 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 in-

266 TALKS TO STUDENTS

sight into all the ideals. No one should presume
to judge them off-hand. The pretension to dog-
matize 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 in-
sight 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 pathologi-
cal anaesthesia as regards Jill's magical impor-
tance? 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 sympa-
thetic interest ; and it is to our shame that the
rest of us cannot feel like Jack. For Jack real-
izes Jill concretely, and we do not. He strug-
gles toward a union with her inner life, divining
her feelings, anticipating her desires, understand-
ing her limits as manfully as he can, and yet
inadequately, too; for he also is afflicted with

LOVE DISPELS BLINDNESS 267

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 im-
portantly — 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 can-
not 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 inten-
sity, but its exclusions and its jealousies. Leave
those out, and you see that the ideal I am holding

\

268 TALKS TO STUDENTS

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 revela-
tions 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, can-
not 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 hide-
ous ancestral intolerances and cruelties, and posi-
tive reversals of the truth ?

For the remainder of this hour I invite you to
seek with me some principle to make our toler-
ance 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 atmos-

CHAUTAUQUA 269

phere of success. Sobriety and industry, intelli-
gence and goodness, orderliness and ideality, pros-
perity 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 in-
habitants, beautifully laid out in the forest and
drained, and equipped with means for satisfying
all the necessary lower and most of the super-
fluous 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 exer-
cise 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 com-
pany, 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

270 TALKS TO STUDENTS

bled and striven for under the name of civiliza-
tion for centuries. You have, in short, a fore-
taste 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 involunta-
rily saying : " Ouf ! what a relief ! Now for some-
thing primordial and savage, even though it were
as bad as an Armenian massacre, to set the bal-
ance straight again. This order is too tame, this
culture too second-rate, this goodness too uninspir-
ing. 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

CHAUTAUQTTA 271

are the heights and depths, tne precipices and the
steep ideals, the gleams of the awful and the in-
finite ; 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, in-
telligence, 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-contra-
diction and paradox somewhere, which I, as a pro-
fessor 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 content-
ment. And I soon recognized that it was the ele-
ment 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.

272 TALKS TO STUDENTS

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 func-
tion of all the higher forms of literature and fine
art to bring home to us and suggest. At Chau-
tauqua there were no racks, even in the place's
historical museum ; and no sweat, except possibly

GBOWING TAMENESS OF THE WOULD 273

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 any-
where 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 GLe&ang soil leben muss im Leben untergehn.
Even now, in our own country, correctness, fair-
ness, and compromise for every small advantage
are crowding out all other qualities. The higher

274 TALKS TO STUDENTS

heroisms and the old rare flavors are passing out
of life.*

With these thoughts in my mind, I was speed-
ing with the train toward Buffalo, when, near
that city, the sight of a workman doing some-
thing on the dizzy edge of a sky-scaling iron con-
struction 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 clang-
ing 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 fire-

•Thia address was composed before the Cuban and Philippine
wan. Such outbursts of the passion of mastery are, however, only
episodes in a social process which in the long ran seems everywhere
tending towards the Chautauquan ideals.

THE HEROIC ASPECT OF COMMON LABOR 275

men and the policemen, the demand for courage
is incessant: and the supply never fails. There,
every day of the year somewhere, is human nat-
ure 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 coun-
try on their business at the market for the day.
Old hags many of them were, dried and brown

276 TALKS TO STUDENTS

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, re-
mote;— and yet at bottom, when you came to
think of it, bearing the whole fabric of the splen-
dors and corruptions of that city on their labori-
ous backs. For where would any of it have been
without their unremitting, unrewarded labor in
the fields? And so with us: not to our gen-
erals 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 simi-
lar to his, with its abhorrence of all that conven-
tionally passes for distinguished, and its exclusive
deification of the bravery, patience, kindliness,
and dumbness of the unconscious natural man.

Where now is our Tolsto'i, 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

THE DIVINE IS THE COMMON 277

our wretched culture — as it calls itself — is fed ?
Divinity lies all about us, and culture is too hide-
bound 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 fantasti-
cally pin their pride, must be so small as practi-
cally, 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 sev-
erally 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;

278 TALKS TO STUDENTS

and the distinctions of position can only be a
manner of diversifying the phenomenal surface
upon which these underground virtues may mani-
fest 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 dec-
oration 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
lias 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.

TOLSTOI ON COMMON PEOPLE 279

This, as I said, became for a time my convic-
tion, 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 Con-
fession,' which led the way to his more specifically
religious works. In his masterpiece 4 War and
Peace,' — assuredly the greatest of human novels, —
the r61e of the spiritual hero is given to a poor little
soldier named Karata'ieff, 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 prin-
cipal character of the book ; and his example evi-
dently 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 ex-
hausted 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.

280 TALKS TO STUDENTS

"The more," writes Tolsto'i in the work 'My
Confession,' "the more I examined the life of
these laboring folks, the more persuaded I be-
came 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 suf-
fering and death, whereas these people live, suffer,
and draw near to death with tranquillity, and of-
tener 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 hun-
dreds, thousands, millions. They labor quietly,
endure privations and pains, live and die, and
throughout everything see the good without see-
ing the vanity. I had to love these people. The

STEVENSON ON COMMON PEOPLE 281

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 ac-
tions, our deliberations, our sciences, our arts,
all appeared to me with a new significance.
I understood that these things might be charm-
ing pastimes, but that one need seek in them
no depth, whereas the life of the hard-work-
ing populace, of that multitude of human be-
ings who really contribute to existence, ap-
peared 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." *

In a similar way does Stevenson appeal to our
piety toward the elemental virtue of mankind.

" What a wonderful thing," he writes, f " is this
Man ! How surprising are his attributes ! Poor
soul, here for so little, cast among so many
hardships, savagely surrounded, savagely de-
scended, irremediably condemned to prey upon
his fellow-lives, — who should have blamed him,

* My Confession, X. (condensed).

t Across the Plains : "Pulyis et Umbra " (abridged).

282 TALKS TO STUDENTS

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 mo-
rality; in ships at sea, a man inured to hard
ship 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 indiffer-
ent millions to mechanical employments, with-
out 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 cour-
age, 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

TOLSTOI'S ONB-SIDEDNESS 283

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."

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 ex-
clusive, and hardens his heart toward the edu-
cated 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 re-
curs, and forces itself upon us, Is it so certain
that the surroundings and circumstances of the
virtue do make so little difference in the impor-
tance 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

284 TALKS TO STUDENTS

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? Tol-
stoi's philosophy, deeply enlightening though it
certainly is, remains a false abstraction. It sa-
vors too much of that oriental pessimism and
nihilism of his, which declares the whole phenom-
enal 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

WALTER WYCKOFF QUOTED 285

a human being. We feel it to be some sort of a
product (if such a product -only could be calcu-
lated) of his inner virtue and his outer place, —
neither singly taken, but both conjoined. If the
outer differences had no meaning for life, why in-
deed 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 man-
ual 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 ne-
cessity of satisfying imminent hunger. Broadly

286 TALKS TO STUDENTS

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 ex-
haustion, 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 elimi-

WALTER WY.CKOFF QUOTED 287

nated every element which, constitutes the nobility
of labor. We feel no personal pride in its prog-
ress, and no community of interest with our em-
ployer. 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 em-
ployment, 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 ?

288 TALKS TO STUDENTS

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 under-
ground ; and he was too steeped in the ancestral
blindness to discern it.

If there were any such morally exceptional indi-
viduals, 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 actu-
ated by anything worthy of that name. These
ideals of other lives are among those secrets that
we can almost never penetrate, although some-
thing about the man may often tell us when they
are there. In Mr. WyckofFs 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

PHILLIPS BROOKS ON POVERTY 289

wished to enlarge his sympathetic insight into fel-
low-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 noth-
ing of wives and babies, one may have been a con-
vert 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 compa-
triot Bondareff, in the gang, voluntarily embrac-
ing labor as their religious mission. Class-loyalty
was undoubtedly an ideal with many. And who
knows how much of that higher manliness of pov-
erty, of which Phillips Brooks has spoken so pene-
tratingly, 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 thank-
ful 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 pov-
erty could show the moral geology of the world.
See how the hard ribs . . . stand out strong and

290 TALKS TO STUDENTS

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, de-
mands 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 reve-
lations of God. Let him resist the characterless-
ness which often come 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." *

The barrenness and ignobleness of the more
usual laborer's life consist in the fact that it is

•Sermons, 5th Series, New York, 1893, pp. 168, 167.

THE NEED OF AN IDEAL 291

moved by no such ideal inner springs. The back-
ache, 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 monu-
ment 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 sol-
diers, whose outward conditions were even brutal-
ler still. The soldiers are supposed to have fol-
lowed 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 wonder-
ful human nature of ours begin to develop under
our hands. We have seen the blindness and dead-
ness to each other which are our natural inheri-
tance ; 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

292 TALKS TO STUDENTS

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 in-
stance, must be something intellectually con-
ceived, something of which we are not uncon-
scious, 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 sod-
den 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 legiti-
mately engrossing of ideals.

Now, taken nakedly, abstractly, and imme-
diately, 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 sentimental-

MERE IDEALS ABB INSUFFICIENT 293

ists and dreamers, drunkards, shirks and verse-
makers, who never show a grain of effort, courage,
or endurance, possibly have them on the most co-
pious 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 de-
spising 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 con-
tinue 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

294 TALKS TO STUDENTS

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 recog-
nition, it must back its ideal visions with what
the laborers have, the sterner stuff of manly
virtue; it must multiply their sentimental sur-
face 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 communi-
cable and publicly recognizable purposes is thus
the offspring of a marriage of two different par-
ents, 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 com-
paratively deepest — significance in life does seem
to be its character of progress, or that strange
union of reality with ideal novelty which it con-
tinues 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

THE COMPLETELY SIGNIFICANT LIFE 295

older more familiar good. In this case character,
though not significant totally, may be still signifi-
cant 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 con-
fused result. I seem to be just taking things up
and dropping them again. First I took up Chau-
tauqua, 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 in-
sensibility to danger enough, when taken all
alone. There must be some sort of fusion, some
chemical combination among these principles, for

296 TALKS TO STUDENTS

a life objectively and thoroughly significant to
result.

Of course, this is a somewhat vague conclu-
sion. 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 impor-
tance of our common life. Such joyfulness is a
religious inspiration and an element of spiritual

THE LABOR-QUESTION 297

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 illus-
tration, 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 dis-
contents and socialistic projects, and the conserva-
tive 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 un-
healthiness consiits 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

298 TALKS TO STUDENTS

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 af-
fectation. What he is, is not a human being, but a
pocket-book, a bank-account. And a similar greedi-
ness, 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, pity-
ing 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 happi-
ness and unhappiness and significance are a vital
mystery ; each pins them absolutely on some ridic-
ulous feature of the external situation ; and every-
body 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 hap-
pened, 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,

F1TZ-JAMES STEPHEN QUOTED 299

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 en-
able 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

300 TALKS TO STUDENTS

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 to-
gether 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." *

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 presumptu-
ous calculator who should with confidence say that
the total sum of significances is positively and ab-
solutely greater at any one epoch than at any other
of the world.

I am speaking broadly, I know, and omitting to

* Essays by a Barrister, London, 1862, p. 318.

CONCLUSION 301

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 insistences,
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
ceternatii, 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.

BY PROFESSOR WILLIAM JAMES

Principles of
vo££t Psychology.

J 1 93 pp., 8vo. $4.80 net.

Psychology,

Briefer Course.

478 pp., 12mo. $1.60 net

John Dcwey, Professor in the University of Chicago. — "A
remarkable union of wide learning, originality of treatment, and,
above all, of never-failing suggestions. To me the beat treat-
ment of the whole matter of advanced psychology in existence.
It does more to put psychology in scientific position, both as to
the statement of established results and as stimulating to further
problems and their treatment, than any other book of which I
know."

James Sully, in Mind. — " Professor James is, before every-
thing else, original, — energetically, aggressively original. He
must see things with his own eyes ; and woe to the man who
comes between those eyes and their object ! This, I take it, is
the deepest source of charm in all his writings. The freshness,
the force, the wholesome contempt for other men's work, — when
this takes on the aspect of mere lumber, — all this is very admi-
rable. Our author has the magical power, given to the very few,
of re-creating his subject. The much-tormented human mind
loses its dull, worn look in his hands, and becomes alive again.
. . . His work will live — if only through the charm of its literary
expression — when most text-books lie dusty and forgotten."

Professor Victor Brochard, itt the article "James ( William) "
of the* Grande Encydopedie, vol. xx. — "This book of Mr. James's
is certainly one of the most important works of the time. Ad-
mirably informed on all the work accomplished in physiological
and psychological research in France, Germany, England, and
Italy, Mr. James has produced a very exact and complete picture

(JOJ)

of the science up to the moment of writing. . . . For vigor of
thought and clearness of exposition this work is at present un-
equalled, and it assures to the American thinker an eminent
place among the philosophers of the nineteenth century."
[Translated.}

The Nation. — " It is probably safe to say that it is the most
important contribution that has been made to the subject for
many years. Certainly, it is one of the most weighty productions
of American thought."

W. P. Coupland, in the Academy. — "We have found it im-
possible to give an estimate of its varied wealth within present
allowable limits. Almost every chapter teems with fertile sug-
gestions, and none the less evinces a first-hand acquaintance with
all the important work previously done. The general reader, it
may be added, will find the book anything but a dull one."

Leon Marillier, in the Revue Philosophique. — " In spite of the
objections which would necessarily be raised to the theories it
contains, it is nevertheless a glorious work, and one which for
the future will have a conspicuous place in the library of all
psychologists between the works of Taine and Stuart Mill."
[Translated.}

Hon. James Bryce, in the Speaker. — " Those who retain any
taste in that direction — namely, of philosophy — will find Mr.
James's book one of the brightest and freshest that recent years
have produced. In it metaphysics have again condescended to
speak the language of polite letters, and learning has been wise
enough to take wit for her companion."

Theodore Flournoy, in the Journal de Gentve. — " These brilliant
studies of powerful originality, broadly conceived and profoundly
tested, interest scholars as much as the popular manuals repel
them. Moreover, the author has done science no injury in
replacing the dry and pedantic style of his predecessors with a
composition full of life, spirit, and youthful fancy, of mischief
joined with bonhomie, — with happy applications to every-day
life, — holding the attention and diffusing charm and clearness
over the most difficult chapters." [Translated.}
(304)

W. D. Howells, in Harper's Monthly. — " The talk is not only
about, but round about, the human mind, which it penetrates
here and there, and wins a glimpse of unsayable things. The
fascination of the quest forever remains, and it is this fascination
which Professor James permits his reader to share. ... If psy-
chology in this book is treated philosophically rather than scien-
tifically, there can be no question but it is treated profoundly and
subtly, and with a never-failing, absolute devotion to the truth.
This devotion is as signal in it as the generosity of the feeling,
the elevation of the thought, the sweetness of the humanity, that
characterize it."

The Athenaeum. — "It is as racy and vivid in style, as full
of fresh and original thought, as it is replete with knowledge of
detail and animated by a broad and comprehensive view of its
subject-matter. ... Of the fourteen hundred pages, we do not
think that we have found one dull, though perhaps more than
one superfluous."

Max Dessoir, in the article on the " History of Psychology " in
Rein's Encyclopaedischen Handbuch der Paedagogik, 1896. — "A
strong inclination toward the study of abnormal phenomena is
also shown by that investigator whom we may single out from
the imposing array of American psychologists, — Baldwin, Ladd,
Jastrow, and others. I mean James [1890]. James's is not a
systematic mind. His accounts of things suffer from subjectivity
and ngurativeness ; yet, by the power of his separate thoughts
and the manner in which he sweeps one forward, he begins to
influence European science." [ Translated^

Professor J. McK. Cattell, in his vice-presidential address
before the American Association for the Advancement of Science,
1898. — "But the land lay fallow, and twenty years ago the seed
was sown. James at Harvard began the publication of a series
of striking articles, culminating in the issue in 1890 of the ' Prin-
ciples of Psychology,' a work of genius such as is rare in any
language and in any country."

HENRY HOLT & OCX, Publishers,

29 Vest 23d Street, New York.

(305)

A f\ r\ '" "'" 'HI I'll

v/ w I *r OOO 8

Date Due

OCT 2 6 1364