TALKS TO TEACHERS

ON PSYCHOLOGY:

AND TO STUDENTS ON SOME OF LIFE’S IDEALS,

By WILLIAM JAMES

NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1925

COPYRIGHT, 1899, 1900

BY WILLIAM JAMES

PRESS OF GEO. H. ELLIS CO. (INC.) BOSTON

PREFACE.

In 1892 I was asked by the Harvard Corporation to give a few
public lectures on psychology to the Cambridge teachers. The talks
now printed form the substance of that course, which has since then
been delivered at various places to various teacher-audiences. I
have found by experience that what my hearers seem least to relish
is analytical technicality, and what they most care for is concrete
practical application. So I have gradually weeded out the former,
and left the latter unreduced; and now, that I have at last written
out the lectures, they contain a minimum of what is deemed
‘scientific’ in psychology, and are practical and popular in the
extreme.

Some of my colleagues may possibly shake their heads at this;
but in taking my cue from what has seemed to me to be the feeling
of the audiences I believe that I am shaping my book so as to
satisfy the more genuine public need.

Teachers, of course, will miss the minute divisions,
subdivisions, and definitions, the lettered and numbered headings,
the variations of type, and all the other mechanical artifices on
which they are accustomed to prop their minds. But my main desire
has been to make them conceive, and, if possible, reproduce
sympathetically in their imagination, the mental life of their
pupil as the sort of active unity which he himself feels it to be.
He doesn’t chop himself into distinct processes and
compartments; and it would have frustrated this deeper purpose of
my book to make it look, when printed, like a Baedeker’s handbook
of travel or a text-book of arithmetic. So far as books printed
like this book force the fluidity of the facts upon the young
teacher’s attention, so far I am sure they tend to do his intellect
a service, even though they may leave unsatisfied a craving (not
altogether without its legitimate grounds) for more nomenclature,
head-lines, and subdivisions.

Readers acquainted with my larger books on Psychology will meet
much familiar phraseology. In the chapters on habit and memory I
have even copied several pages verbatim, but I do not know that
apology is needed for such plagiarism as this.

The talks to students, which conclude the volume, were written
in response to invitations to deliver ‘addresses’ to students at
women’s colleges. The first one was to the graduating class of the
Boston Normal School of Gymnastics. Properly, it continues the
series of talks to teachers. The second and the third address
belong together, and continue another line of thought.

I wish I were able to make the second, ‘On a Certain Blindness
in Human Beings,’ more impressive. It is more than the mere piece
of sentimentalism which it may seem to some readers. It connects
itself with a definite view of the world and of our moral relations
to the same. Those who have done me the honor of reading my volume
of philosophic essays will recognize that I mean the pluralistic or
individualistic philosophy. According to that philosophy, the truth
is too great for any one actual mind, even though that mind be
dubbed ‘the Absolute,’ to know the whole of it. The facts and
worths of life need many cognizers to take them in. There is no
point of view absolutely public and universal. Private and
uncommunicable perceptions always remain over, and the worst of it
is that those who look for them from the outside never know
where.

The practical consequence of such a philosophy is the well-known
democratic respect for the sacredness of individuality,—is,
at any rate, the outward tolerance of whatever is not itself
intolerant. These phrases are so familiar that they sound now
rather dead in our ears. Once they had a passionate inner meaning.
Such a passionate inner meaning they may easily acquire again if
the pretension of our nation to inflict its own inner ideals and
institutions vi et armis upon Orientals should meet with a
resistance as obdurate as so far it has been gallant and spirited.
Religiously and philosophically, our ancient national doctrine of
live and let live may prove to have a far deeper meaning than our
people now seem to imagine it to possess.

CONTENTS.

The American educational organization,—What teachers may
expect from psychology,—Teaching methods must agree with
psychology, but cannot be immediately deduced therefrom,—The
science of teaching and the science of war,—The educational
uses of psychology defined,—The teacher’s duty toward
child-study.

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

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

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

No impression without expression,—Verbal
reproduction,—Manual training,—Pupils should know their
‘marks’.

The acquired reactions must be preceded by native
ones,—Illustration: teaching child to ask instead of
snatching,—Man has more instincts than other mammals.

Fear and
love,—Curiosity,—Imitation,—Emulation,—Forbidden
by Rousseau,—His error,—Ambition, pugnacity, and pride.
Soft pedagogics and the fighting
impulse,—Ownership,—Its educational
uses,—Constructiveness,—Manual
teaching,—Transitoriness in instincts,—Their order of
succession.

Good and bad habits,—Habit due to plasticity of organic
tissues,—The aim of education is to make useful habits
automatic,—Maxims relative to habit-forming: 1. Strong
initiative,—2. No exception,—3. Seize first opportunity
to act,—4. Don’t preach,—Darwin and poetry: without
exercise our capacities decay,—The habit of mental and
muscular relaxation,—Fifth maxim, keep the faculty of effort
trained,—Sudden conversions compatible with laws of
habit,—Momentous influence of habits on character.

A case of habit,—The two laws, contiguity and
similarity,—The teacher has to build up useful systems of
association,—Habitual associations determine
character,—Indeterminateness of our trains of
association,—We can trace them backward, but not foretell
them,—Interest deflects,—Prepotent parts of the
field,—In teaching, multiply cues.

The child’s native interests,—How uninteresting things
acquire an interest,—Rules for the
teacher,—’Preparation’ of the mind for the lesson: the pupil
must have something to attend with,—All later interests are
borrowed from original ones.

Interest and attention are two aspects of one
fact,—Voluntary attention comes in beats,—Genius and
attention,—The subject must change to win
attention,—Mechanical aids,—The physiological
process,—The new in the old is what excites
interest,—Interest and effort are
compatible,—Mind-wandering,—Not fatal to mental
efficiency.

Due to association,—No recall without a cue,—Memory
is due to brain-plasticity,—Native
retentiveness,—Number of associations may practically be its
equivalent,—Retentiveness is a fixed property of the
individual,—Memory versus memories,—Scientific
system as help to memory,—Technical
memories,—Cramming,—Elementary memory
unimprovable,—Utility of verbal
memorizing,—Measurements of immediate memory,—They
throw little light,—Passion is the important factor in human
efficiency,—Eye-memory, ear-memory, etc.,—The rate of
forgetting, Ebbinghaus’s results,—Influence of the
unreproducible,—To remember, one must think and connect.

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

Often a mystifying idea,—The process defined,—The
law of economy,—Old-fogyism,—How many types of
apperception?—New heads of classification must continually be
invented,—Alteration of the apperceiving mass,—Class
names are what we work by,—Few new fundamental conceptions
acquired after twenty-five.

The word defined,—All consciousness tends to
action,—Ideo-motor action,—Inhibition,—The
process of deliberation,—Why so few of our ideas result in
acts,—The associationist account of the will,—A balance
of impulses and inhibitions,—The over-impulsive and the
over-obstructed type,—The perfect type,—The balky
will,—What character building consists in,—Right action
depends on right apperception of the case,—Effort of will is
effort of attention: the drunkard’s dilemma,—Vital importance
of voluntary attention,—Its amount may be
indeterminate,—Affirmation of free-will,—Two types of
inhibition,—Spinoza on inhibition by a higher
good,—Conclusion.

TALKS TO
TEACHERS

I. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE
TEACHING ART

In the general activity and uprising of ideal interests which
every one with an eye for fact can discern all about us in American
life, there is perhaps no more promising feature than the
fermentation which for a dozen years or more has been going on
among the teachers. In whatever sphere of education their functions
may lie, there is to be seen among them a really inspiring amount
of searching of the heart about the highest concerns of their
profession. The renovation of nations begins always at the top,
among the reflective members of the State, and spreads slowly
outward and downward. The teachers of this country, one may say,
have its future in their hands. The earnestness which they at
present show in striving to enlighten and strengthen themselves is
an index of the nation’s probabilities of advance in all ideal
directions. The outward organization of education which we have in
our United States is perhaps, on the whole, the best organization
that exists in any country. The State school systems give a
diversity and flexibility, an opportunity for experiment and
keenness of competition, nowhere else to be found on such an
important scale. The independence of so many of the colleges and
universities; the give and take of students and instructors between
them all; their emulation, and their happy organic relations to the
lower schools; the traditions of instruction in them, evolved from
the older American recitation-method (and so avoiding on the one
hand the pure lecture-system prevalent in Germany and Scotland,
which considers too little the individual student, and yet not
involving the sacrifice of the instructor to the individual
student, which the English tutorial system would seem too often to
entail),—all these things (to say nothing of that coeducation
of the sexes in whose benefits so many of us heartily believe), all
these things, I say, are most happy features of our scholastic
life, and from them the most sanguine auguries may be drawn.

Having so favorable an organization, all we need is to
impregnate it with geniuses, to get superior men and women working
more and more abundantly in it and for it and at it, and in a
generation or two America may well lead the education of the world.
I must say that I look forward with no little confidence to the day
when that shall be an accomplished fact.

No one has profited more by the fermentation of which I speak,
in pedagogical circles, than we psychologists. The desire of the
schoolteachers for a completer professional training, and their
aspiration toward the ‘professional’ spirit in their work, have led
them more and more to turn to us for light on fundamental
principles. And in these few hours which we are to spend together
you look to me, I am sure, for information concerning the mind’s
operations, which may enable you to labor more easily and
effectively in the several schoolrooms over which you preside.

Far be it from me to disclaim for psychology all title to such
hopes. Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help.
And yet I confess that, acquainted as I am with the height of some
of your expectations, I feel a little anxious lest, at the end of
these simple talks of mine, not a few of you may experience some
disappointment at the net results. In other words, I am not sure
that you may not be indulging fancies that are just a shade
exaggerated. That would not be altogether astonishing, for we have
been having something like a ‘boom’ in psychology in this country.
Laboratories and professorships have been founded, and reviews
established. The air has been full of rumors. The editors of
educational journals and the arrangers of conventions have had to
show themselves enterprising and on a level with the novelties of
the day. Some of the professors have not been unwilling to
co-operate, and I am not sure even that the publishers have been
entirely inert. ‘The new psychology’ has thus become a term to
conjure up portentous ideas withal; and you teachers, docile and
receptive and aspiring as many of you are, have been plunged in an
atmosphere of vague talk about our science, which to a great extent
has been more mystifying than enlightening. Altogether it does seem
as if there were a certain fatality of mystification laid upon the
teachers of our day. The matter of their profession, compact enough
in itself, has to be frothed up for them in journals and
institutes, till its outlines often threaten to be lost in a kind
of vast uncertainty. Where the disciples are not independent and
critical-minded enough (and I think that, if you teachers in the
earlier grades have any defect—the slightest touch of a
defect in the world—it is that you are a mite too docile), we
are pretty sure to miss accuracy and balance and measure in those
who get a license to lay down the law to them from above.

As regards this subject of psychology, now, I wish at the very
threshold to do what I can to dispel the mystification. So I say at
once that in my humble opinion there is no ‘new psychology’
worthy of the name. There is nothing but the old psychology which
began in Locke’s time, plus a little physiology of the brain and
senses and theory of evolution, and a few refinements of
introspective detail, for the most part without adaptation to the
teacher’s use. It is only the fundamental conceptions of psychology
which are of real value to the teacher; and they, apart from the
aforesaid theory of evolution, are very far from being new.—I
trust that you will see better what I mean by this at the end of
all these talks.

I say moreover that you make a great, a very great mistake, if
you think that psychology, being the science of the mind’s laws, is
something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes
and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use. Psychology
is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate
arts directly out of themselves. An intermediary inventive mind
must make the application, by using its originality.

The science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the
science of ethics (if there be such a thing) never made a man
behave rightly. The most such sciences can do is to help us to
catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to
behave wrongly; and to criticise ourselves more articulately after
we have made mistakes. A science only lays down lines within which
the rules of the art must fall, laws which the follower of the art
must not transgress; but what particular thing he shall positively
do within those lines is left exclusively to his own genius. One
genius will do his work well and succeed in one way, while another
succeeds as well quite differently; yet neither will transgress the
lines.

The art of teaching grew up in the schoolroom, out of
inventiveness and sympathetic concrete observation. Even where (as
in the case of Herbart) the advancer of the art was also a
psychologist, the pedagogics and the psychology ran side by side,
and the former was not derived in any sense from the latter. The
two were congruent, but neither was subordinate. And so everywhere
the teaching must agree with the psychology, but need not
necessarily be the only kind of teaching that would so agree; for
many diverse methods of teaching may equally well agree with
psychological laws.

To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that
we shall be good teachers. To advance to that result, we must have
an additional endowment altogether, a happy tact and ingenuity to
tell us what definite things to say and do when the pupil is before
us. That ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for
the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the
teacher’s art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the
least.

The science of psychology, and whatever science of general
pedagogics may be based on it, are in fact much like the science of
war. Nothing is simpler or more definite than the principles of
either. In war, all you have to do is to work your enemy into a
position from which the natural obstacles prevent him from escaping
if he tries to; then to fall on him in numbers superior to his own,
at a moment when you have led him to think you far away; and so,
with a minimum of exposure of your own troops, to hack his force to
pieces, and take the remainder prisoners. Just so, in teaching, you
must simply work your pupil into such a state of interest in what
you are going to teach him that every other object of attention is
banished from his mind; then reveal it to him so impressively that
he will remember the occasion to his dying day; and finally fill
him with devouring curiosity to know what the next steps in
connection with the subject are. The principles being so plain,
there would be nothing but victories for the masters of the
science, either on the battlefield or in the schoolroom, if they
did not both have to make their application to an incalculable
quantity in the shape of the mind of their opponent. The mind of
your own enemy, the pupil, is working away from you as keenly and
eagerly as is the mind of the commander on the other side from the
scientific general. Just what the respective enemies want and
think, and what they know and do not know, are as hard things for
the teacher as for the general to find out. Divination and
perception, not psychological pedagogics or theoretic strategy, are
the only helpers here.

But, if the use of psychological principles thus be negative
rather than positive, it does not follow that it may not be a great
use, all the same. It certainly narrows the path for experiments
and trials. We know in advance, if we are psychologists, that
certain methods will be wrong, so our psychology saves us from
mistakes. It makes us, moreover, more clear as to what we are
about. We gain confidence in respect to any method which we are
using as soon as we believe that it has theory as well as practice
at its back. Most of all, it fructifies our independence, and it
reanimates our interest, to see our subject at two different
angles,—to get a stereoscopic view, so to speak, of the
youthful organism who is our enemy, and, while handling him with
all our concrete tact and divination, to be able, at the same time,
to represent to ourselves the curious inner elements of his mental
machine. Such a complete knowledge as this of the pupil, at once
intuitive and analytic, is surely the knowledge at which every
teacher ought to aim.

Fortunately for you teachers, the elements of the mental machine
can be clearly apprehended, and their workings easily grasped. And,
as the most general elements and workings are just those parts of
psychology which the teacher finds most directly useful, it follows
that the amount of this science which is necessary to all teachers
need not be very great. Those who find themselves loving the
subject may go as far as they please, and become possibly none the
worse teachers for the fact, even though in some of them one might
apprehend a little loss of balance from the tendency observable in
all of us to overemphasize certain special parts of a subject when
we are studying it intensely and abstractly. But for the great
majority of you a general view is enough, provided it be a true
one; and such a general view, one may say, might almost be written
on the palm of one’s hand.

Least of all need you, merely as teachers, deem it part
of your duty to become contributors to psychological science or to
make psychological observations in a methodical or responsible
manner. I fear that some of the enthusiasts for child-study have
thrown a certain burden on you in this way. By all means let
child-study go on,—it is refreshing all our sense of the
child’s life. There are teachers who take a spontaneous delight in
filling syllabuses, inscribing observations, compiling statistics,
and computing the per cent. Child-study will certainly enrich their
lives. And, if its results, as treated statistically, would seem on
the whole to have but trifling value, yet the anecdotes and
observations of which it in part consist do certainly acquaint us
more intimately with our pupils. Our eyes and ears grow quickened
to discern in the child before us processes similar to those we
have read of as noted in the children,—processes of which we
might otherwise have remained inobservant. But, for Heaven’s sake,
let the rank and file of teachers be passive readers if they so
prefer, and feel free not to contribute to the accumulation. Let
not the prosecution of it be preached as an imperative duty or
imposed by regulation on those to whom it proves an exterminating
bore, or who in any way whatever miss in themselves the appropriate
vocation for it. I cannot too strongly agree with my colleague,
Professor Münsterberg, when he says that the teacher’s
attitude toward the child, being concrete and ethical, is
positively opposed to the psychological observer’s, which is
abstract and analytic. Although some of us may conjoin the
attitudes successfully, in most of us they must conflict.

The worst thing that can happen to a good teacher is to get a
bad conscience about her profession because she feels herself
hopeless as a psychologist. Our teachers are overworked already.
Every one who adds a jot or tittle of unnecessary weight to their
burden is a foe of education. A bad conscience increases the weight
of every other burden; yet I know that child-study, and other
pieces of psychology as well, have been productive of bad
conscience in many a really innocent pedagogic breast. I should
indeed be glad if this passing word from me might tend to dispel
such a bad conscience, if any of you have it; for it is certainly
one of those fruits of more or less systematic mystification of
which I have already complained. The best teacher may be the
poorest contributor of child-study material, and the best
contributor may be the poorest teacher. No fact is more palpable
than this.

So much for what seems the most reasonable general attitude of
the teacher toward the subject which is to occupy our
attention.

II. THE STREAM OF
CONSCIOUSNESS

I said a few minutes ago that the most general elements and
workings of the mind are all that the teacher absolutely needs to
be acquainted with for his purposes.

Now the immediate fact which psychology, the science of
mind, has to study is also the most general fact. It is the fact
that in each of us, when awake (and often when asleep), some
kind of consciousness is always going on. There is a stream, a
succession of states, or waves, or fields (or of whatever you
please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of
deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that
constitute our inner life. The existence of this stream is the
primal fact, the nature and origin of it form the essential
problem, of our science. So far as we class the states or fields of
consciousness, write down their several natures, analyze their
contents into elements, or trace their habits of succession, we are
on the descriptive or analytic level. So far as we ask where they
come from or why they are just what they are, we are on the
explanatory level.

In these talks with you, I shall entirely neglect the questions
that come up on the explanatory level. It must be frankly confessed
that in no fundamental sense do we know where our successive fields
of consciousness come from, or why they have the precise inner
constitution which they do have. They certainly follow or accompany
our brain states, and of course their special forms are determined
by our past experiences and education. But, if we ask just
how the brain conditions them, we have not the remotest
inkling of an answer to give; and, if we ask just how the education
moulds the brain, we can speak but in the most abstract, general,
and conjectural terms. On the other hand, if we should say that
they are due to a spiritual being called our Soul, which reacts on
our brain states by these peculiar forms of spiritual energy, our
words would be familiar enough, it is true; but I think you will
agree that they would offer little genuine explanatory meaning. The
truth is that we really do not know the answers to the
problems on the explanatory level, even though in some directions
of inquiry there may be promising speculations to be found. For our
present purposes I shall therefore dismiss them entirely, and turn
to mere description. This state of things was what I had in mind
when, a moment ago, I said there was no ‘new psychology’ worthy of
the name.

We have thus fields of consciousness,—that is the
first general fact; and the second general fact is that the
concrete fields are always complex. They contain sensations of our
bodies and of the objects around us, memories of past experiences
and thoughts of distant things, feelings of satisfaction and
dissatisfaction, desires and aversions, and other emotional
conditions, together with determinations of the will, in every
variety of permutation and combination.

In most of our concrete states of consciousness all these
different classes of ingredients are found simultaneously present
to some degree, though the relative proportion they bear to one
another is very shifting. One state will seem to be composed of
hardly anything but sensations, another of hardly anything but
memories, etc. But around the sensation, if one consider carefully,
there will always be some fringe of thought or will, and around the
memory some margin or penumbra of emotion or sensation.

In most of our fields of consciousness there is a core of
sensation that is very pronounced. You, for example, now, although
you are also thinking and feeling, are getting through your eyes
sensations of my face and figure, and through your ears sensations
of my voice. The sensations are the centre or focus,
the thoughts and feelings the margin, of your actually
present conscious field.

On the other hand, some object of thought, some distant image,
may have become the focus of your mental attention even while I am
speaking,—your mind, in short, may have wandered from the
lecture; and, in that case, the sensations of my face and voice,
although not absolutely vanishing from your conscious field, may
have taken up there a very faint and marginal place.

Again, to take another sort of variation, some feeling connected
with your own body may have passed from a marginal to a focal
place, even while I speak.

The expressions ‘focal object’ and ‘marginal object,’ which we
owe to Mr. Lloyd Morgan, require, I think, no further explanation.
The distinction they embody is a very important one, and they are
the first technical terms which I shall ask you to remember.

In the successive mutations of our fields of consciousness, the
process by which one dissolves into another is often very gradual,
and all sorts of inner rearrangements of contents occur. Sometimes
the focus remains but little changed, while the margin alters
rapidly. Sometimes the focus alters, and the margin stays.
Sometimes focus and margin change places. Sometimes, again, abrupt
alterations of the whole field occur. There can seldom be a sharp
description. All we know is that, for the most part, each field has
a sort of practical unity for its possessor, and that from this
practical point of view we can class a field with other fields
similar to it, by calling it a state of emotion, of perplexity, of
sensation, of abstract thought, of volition, and the like.

Vague and hazy as such an account of our stream of consciousness
may be, it is at least secure from positive error and free from
admixture of conjecture or hypothesis. An influential school of
psychology, seeking to avoid haziness of outline, has tried to make
things appear more exact and scientific by making the analysis more
sharp.

The various fields of consciousness, according to this school,
result from a definite number of perfectly definite elementary
mental states, mechanically associated into a mosaic or chemically
combined. According to some thinkers,—Spencer, for example,
or Taine,—these resolve themselves at last into little
elementary psychic particles or atoms of ‘mind-stuff,’ out of which
all the more immediately known mental states are said to be built
up. Locke introduced this theory in a somewhat vague form. Simple
‘ideas’ of sensation and reflection, as he called them, were for
him the bricks of which our mental architecture is built up. If I
ever have to refer to this theory again, I shall refer to it as the
theory of ‘ideas.’ But I shall try to steer clear of it altogether.
Whether it be true or false, it is at any rate only conjectural;
and, for your practical purposes as teachers, the more unpretending
conception of the stream of consciousness, with its total waves or
fields incessantly changing, will amply suffice.[A]

III. THE CHILD AS A
BEHAVING ORGANISM

I wish now to continue the description of the peculiarities of
the stream of consciousness by asking whether we can in any
intelligible way assign its functions.

It has two functions that are obvious: it leads to knowledge,
and it leads to action.

Can we say which of these functions is the more essential?

An old historic divergence of opinion comes in here. Popular
belief has always tended to estimate the worth of a man’s mental
processes by their effects upon his practical life. But
philosophers have usually cherished a different view. “Man’s
supreme glory,” they have said, “is to be a rational being,
to know absolute and eternal and universal truth. The uses of his
intellect for practical affairs are therefore subordinate matters.
‘The theoretic life’ is his soul’s genuine concern.” Nothing can be
more different in its results for our personal attitude than to
take sides with one or the other of these views, and emphasize the
practical or the theoretical ideal. In the latter case, abstraction
from the emotions and passions and withdrawal from the strife of
human affairs would be not only pardonable, but praiseworthy; and
all that makes for quiet and contemplation should be regarded as
conducive to the highest human perfection. In the former, the man
of contemplation would be treated as only half a human being,
passion and practical resource would become once more glories of
our race, a concrete victory over this earth’s outward powers of
darkness would appear an equivalent for any amount of passive
spiritual culture, and conduct would remain as the test of every
education worthy of the name.

It is impossible to disguise the fact that in the psychology of
our own day the emphasis is transferred from the mind’s purely
rational function, where Plato and Aristotle, and what one may call
the whole classic tradition in philosophy had placed it, to the so
long neglected practical side. The theory of evolution is mainly
responsible for this. Man, we now have reason to believe, has been
evolved from infra-human ancestors, in whom pure reason hardly
existed, if at all, and whose mind, so far as it can have had any
function, would appear to have been an organ for adapting their
movements to the impressions received from the environment, so as
to escape the better from destruction. Consciousness would thus
seem in the first instance to be nothing but a sort of super-added
biological perfection,—useless unless it prompted to useful
conduct, and inexplicable apart from that consideration.

Deep in our own nature the biological foundations of our
consciousness persist, undisguised and undiminished. Our sensations
are here to attract us or to deter us, our memories to warn or
encourage us, our feelings to impel, and our thoughts to restrain
our behavior, so that on the whole we may prosper and our days be
long in the land. Whatever of transmundane metaphysical insight or
of practically inapplicable æsthetic perception or ethical
sentiment we may carry in our interiors might at this rate be
regarded as only part of the incidental excess of function that
necessarily accompanies the working of every complex machine.

I shall ask you now—not meaning at all thereby to close
the theoretic question, but merely because it seems to me the point
of view likely to be of greatest practical use to you as
teachers—to adopt with me, in this course of lectures, the
biological conception, as thus expressed, and to lay your own
emphasis on the fact that man, whatever else he may be, is
primarily a practical being, whose mind is given him to aid in
adapting him to this world’s life.

In the learning of all matters, we have to start with some one
deep aspect of the question, abstracting it as if it were the only
aspect; and then we gradually correct ourselves by adding those
neglected other features which complete the case. No one believes
more strongly than I do that what our senses know as ‘this world’
is only one portion of our mind’s total environment and object.
Yet, because it is the primal portion, it is the sine qua
nonof all the rest. If you grasp the facts about it firmly, you
may proceed to higher regions undisturbed. As our time must be so
short together, I prefer being elementary and fundamental to being
complete, so I propose to you to hold fast to the ultra-simple
point of view.

The reasons why I call it so fundamental can be easily told.

First, human and animal psychology thereby become less
discontinuous. I know that to some of you this will hardly seem an
attractive reason, but there are others whom it will affect.

Second, mental action is conditioned by brain action, and runs
parallel therewith. But the brain, so far as we understand it, is
given us for practical behavior. Every current that runs into it
from skin or eye or ear runs out again into muscles, glands, or
viscera, and helps to adapt the animal to the environment from
which the current came. It therefore generalizes and simplifies our
view to treat the brain life and the mental life as having one
fundamental kind of purpose.

Third, those very functions of the mind that do not refer
directly to this world’s environment, the ethical utopias,
æsthetic visions, insights into eternal truth, and fanciful
logical combinations, could never be carried on at all by a human
individual, unless the mind that produced them in him were also
able to produce more practically useful products. The latter are
thus the more essential, or at least the more primordial
results.

Fourth, the inessential ‘unpractical’ activities are themselves
far more connected with our behavior and our adaptation to the
environment than at first sight might appear. No truth, however
abstract, is ever perceived, that will not probably at some time
influence our earthly action. You must remember that, when I talk
of action here, I mean action in the widest sense. I mean speech, I
mean writing, I mean yeses and noes, and tendencies ‘from’ things
and tendencies ‘toward’ things, and emotional determinations; and I
mean them in the future as well as in the immediate present. As I
talk here, and you listen, it might seem as if no action followed.
You might call it a purely theoretic process, with no practical
result. But it must have a practical result. It cannot take
place at all and leave your conduct unaffected. If not to-day, then
on some far future day, you will answer some question differently
by reason of what you are thinking now. Some of you will be led by
my words into new veins of inquiry, into reading special books.
These will develop your opinion, whether for or against. That
opinion will in turn be expressed, will receive criticism from
others in your environment, and will affect your standing in their
eyes. We cannot escape our destiny, which is practical; and even
our most theoretic faculties contribute to its working out.

These few reasons will perhaps smooth the way for you to
acquiescence in my proposal. As teachers, I sincerely think it will
be a sufficient conception for you to adopt of the youthful
psychological phenomena handed over to your inspection if you
consider them from the point of view of their relation to the
future conduct of their possessor. Sufficient at any rate as a
first conception and as a main conception. You should regard your
professional task as if it consisted chiefly and essentially in
training the pupil to behavior; taking behavior, not in the
narrow sense of his manners, but in the very widest possible sense,
as including every possible sort of fit reaction on the
circumstances into which he may find himself brought by the
vicissitudes of life.

The reaction may, indeed, often be a negative reaction.
Not to speak, not to move, is one of the most
important of our duties, in certain practical emergencies. “Thou
shalt refrain, renounce, abstain”! This often requires a great
effort of will power, and, physiologically considered, is just as
positive a nerve function as is motor discharge.

IV. EDUCATION AND BEHAVIOR

In our foregoing talk we were led to frame a very simple
conception of what an education means. In the last analysis it
consists in the organizing of resources in the human being,
of powers of conduct which shall fit him to his social and physical
world. An ‘uneducated’ person is one who is nonplussed by all but
the most habitual situations. On the contrary, one who is educated
is able practically to extricate himself, by means of the examples
with which his memory is stored and of the abstract conceptions
which he has acquired, from circumstances in which he never was
placed before. Education, in short, cannot be better described than
by calling it the organization of acquired habits of conduct and
tendencies to behavior.

To illustrate. You and I are each and all of us educated, in our
several ways; and we show our education at this present moment by
different conduct. It would be quite impossible for me, with my
mind technically and professionally organized as it is, and with
the optical stimulus which your presence affords, to remain sitting
here entirely silent and inactive. Something tells me that I am
expected to speak, and must speak; something forces me to keep on
speaking. My organs of articulation are continuously innervated by
outgoing currents, which the currents passing inward at my eyes and
through my educated brain have set in motion; and the particular
movements which they make have their form and order determined
altogether by the training of all my past years of lecturing and
reading. Your conduct, on the other hand, might seem at first sight
purely receptive and inactive,—leaving out those among you
who happen to be taking notes. But the very listening which you are
carrying on is itself a determinate kind of conduct. All the
muscular tensions of your body are distributed in a peculiar way as
you listen. Your head, your eyes, are fixed characteristically.
And, when the lecture is over, it will inevitably eventuate in some
stroke of behavior, as I said on the previous occasion: you may be
guided differently in some special emergency in the schoolroom by
words which I now let fall.—So it is with the impressions you
will make there on your pupil. You should get into the habit of
regarding them all as leading to the acquisition by him of
capacities for behavior,—emotional, social, bodily, vocal,
technical, or what not. And, this being the case, you ought to feel
willing, in a general way, and without hair-splitting or farther
ado, to take up for the purposes of these lectures with the
biological conception of the mind, as of something given us for
practical use. That conception will certainly cover the greater
part of your own educational work.

If we reflect upon the various ideals of education that are
prevalent in the different countries, we see that what they all aim
at is to organize capacities for conduct. This is most immediately
obvious in Germany, where the explicitly avowed aim of the higher
education is to turn the student into an instrument for advancing
scientific discovery. The German universities are proud of the
number of young specialists whom they turn out every
year,—not necessarily men of any original force of intellect,
but men so trained to research that when their professor gives them
an historical or philological thesis to prepare, or a bit of
laboratory work to do, with a general indication as to the best
method, they can go off by themselves and use apparatus and consult
sources in such a way as to grind out in the requisite number of
months some little pepper-corn of new truth worthy of being added
to the store of extant human information on that subject. Little
else is recognized in Germany as a man’s title to academic
advancement than his ability thus to show himself an efficient
instrument of research.

In England, it might seem at first sight as if the higher
education of the universities aimed at the production of certain
static types of character rather than at the development of what
one may call this dynamic scientific efficiency. Professor Jowett,
when asked what Oxford could do for its students, is said to have
replied, “Oxford can teach an English gentleman how to be an
English gentleman.” But, if you ask what it means to ‘be’ an
English gentleman, the only reply is in terms of conduct and
behavior. An English gentleman is a bundle of specifically
qualified reactions, a creature who for all the emergencies of life
has his line of behavior distinctly marked out for him in advance.
Here, as elsewhere, England expects every man to do his duty.

V. THE NECESSITY OF
REACTIONS

If all this be true, then immediately one general aphorism
emerges which ought by logical right to dominate the entire conduct
of the teacher in the classroom.

No reception without reaction, no impression without
correlative expression,—this is the great maxim which the
teacher ought never to forget.

An impression which simply flows in at the pupil’s eyes or ears,
and in no way modifies his active life, is an impression gone to
waste. It is physiologically incomplete. It leaves no fruits behind
it in the way of capacity acquired. Even as mere impression, it
fails to produce its proper effect upon the memory; for, to remain
fully among the acquisitions of this latter faculty, it must be
wrought into the whole cycle of our operations. Its motor
consequences are what clinch it. Some effect due to it in the
way of an activity must return to the mind in the form of the
sensation of having acted, and connect itself with the
impression. The most durable impressions are those on account of
which we speak or act, or else are inwardly convulsed.

The older pedagogic method of learning things by rote, and
reciting them parrot-like in the schoolroom, rested on the truth
that a thing merely read or heard, and never verbally reproduced,
contracts the weakest possible adhesion in the mind. Verbal
recitation or reproduction is thus a highly important kind of
reactive behavior on our impressions; and it is to be feared that,
in the reaction against the old parrot-recitations as the beginning
and end of instruction, the extreme value of verbal recitation as
an element of complete training may nowadays be too much
forgotten.

When we turn to modern pedagogics, we see how enormously the
field of reactive conduct has been extended by the introduction of
all those methods of concrete object teaching which are the glory
of our contemporary schools. Verbal reactions, useful as they are,
are insufficient. The pupil’s words may be right, but the
conceptions corresponding to them are often direfully wrong. In a
modern school, therefore, they form only a small part of what the
pupil is required to do. He must keep notebooks, make drawings,
plans, and maps, take measurements, enter the laboratory and
perform experiments, consult authorities, and write essays. He must
do in his fashion what is often laughed at by outsiders when it
appears in prospectuses under the title of ‘original work,’ but
what is really the only possible training for the doing of original
work thereafter. The most colossal improvement which recent years
have seen in secondary education lies in the introduction of the
manual training schools; not because they will give us a people
more handy and practical for domestic life and better skilled in
trades, but because they will give us citizens with an entirely
different intellectual fibre. Laboratory work and shop work
engender a habit of observation, a knowledge of the difference
between accuracy and vagueness, and an insight into nature’s
complexity and into the inadequacy of all abstract verbal accounts
of real phenomena, which once wrought into the mind, remain there
as lifelong possessions. They confer precision; because, if you are
doing a thing, you must do it definitely right or definitely
wrong. They give honesty; for, when you express yourself by making
things, and not by using words, it becomes impossible to
dissimulate your vagueness or ignorance by ambiguity. They beget a
habit of self-reliance; they keep the interest and attention always
cheerfully engaged, and reduce the teacher’s disciplinary functions
to a minimum.

Of the various systems of manual training, so far as woodwork is
concerned, the Swedish Sloyd system, if I may have an opinion on
such matters, seems to me by far the best, psychologically
considered. Manual training methods, fortunately, are being slowly
but surely introduced into all our large cities. But there is still
an immense distance to traverse before they shall have gained the
extension which they are destined ultimately to possess.

No impression without expression, then,—that is the first
pedagogic fruit of our evolutionary conception of the mind as
something instrumental to adaptive behavior. But a word may be said
in continuation. The expression itself comes back to us, as I
intimated a moment ago, in the form of a still farther
impression,—the impression, namely, of what we have done. We
thus receive sensible news of our behavior and its results. We hear
the words we have spoken, feel our own blow as we give it, or read
in the bystander’s eyes the success or failure of our conduct. Now
this return wave of impression pertains to the completeness of the
whole experience, and a word about its importance in the schoolroom
may not be out of place.

It would seem only natural to say that, since after acting we
normally get some return impression of result, it must be well to
let the pupil get such a return impression in every possible case.
Nevertheless, in schools where examination marks and ‘standing’ and
other returns of result are concealed, the pupil is frustrated of
this natural termination of the cycle of his activities, and often
suffers from the sense of incompleteness and uncertainty; and there
are persons who defend this system as encouraging the pupil to work
for the work’s sake, and not for extraneous reward. Of course, here
as elsewhere, concrete experience must prevail over psychological
deduction. But, so far as our psychological deduction goes, it
would suggest that the pupil’s eagerness to know how well he does
is in the line of his normal completeness of function, and should
never be balked except for very definite reasons indeed.

Acquaint them, therefore, with their marks and standing and
prospects, unless in the individual case you have some special
practical reason for not so doing.

VI. NATIVE
REACTIONS AND ACQUIRED REACTIONS

We are by this time fully launched upon the biological
conception. Man is an organism for reacting on impressions: his
mind is there to help determine his reactions, and the purpose of
his education is to make them numerous and perfect. Our
education means, in short, little more than a mass of possibilities
of reaction, acquired at home, at school, or in the training of
affairs. The teacher’s task is that of supervising the acquiring
process.

This being the case, I will immediately state a principle which
underlies the whole process of acquisition and governs the entire
activity of the teacher. It is this:—

Every acquired reaction is, as a rule, either a complication
grafted on a native reaction, or a substitute for a native
reaction, which the same object originally tended to
provoke.

The teacher’s art consists in bringing about the substitution
or complication, and success in the art presupposes a sympathetic
acquaintance with the reactive tendencies natively there.

Without an equipment of native reactions on the child’s part,
the teacher would have no hold whatever upon the child’s attention
or conduct. You may take a horse to the water, but you cannot make
him drink; and so you may take a child to the schoolroom, but you
cannot make him learn the new things you wish to impart, except by
soliciting him in the first instance by something which natively
makes him react. He must take the first step himself. He must
do something before you can get your purchase on him. That
something may be something good or something bad. A bad reaction is
better than no reaction at all; for, if bad, you can couple it with
consequences which awake him to its badness. But imagine a child so
lifeless as to react in no way to the teacher’s first
appeals, and how can you possibly take the first step in his
education?

To make this abstract conception more concrete, assume the case
of a young child’s training in good manners. The child has a native
tendency to snatch with his hands at anything that attracts his
curiosity; also to draw back his hands when slapped, to cry under
these latter conditions, to smile when gently spoken to, and to
imitate one’s gestures.

Suppose now you appear before the child with a new toy intended
as a present for him. No sooner does he see the toy than he seeks
to snatch it. You slap the hand; it is withdrawn, and the child
cries. You then hold up the toy, smiling and saying, “Beg for it
nicely,—so!” The child stops crying, imitates you, receives
the toy, and crows with pleasure; and that little cycle of training
is complete. You have substituted the new reaction of ‘begging’ for
the native reaction of snatching, when that kind of impression
comes.

Now, if the child had no memory, the process would not be
educative. No matter how often you came in with a toy, the same
series of reactions would fatally occur, each called forth by its
own impression: see, snatch; slap, cry; hear, ask; receive, smile.
But, with memory there, the child, at the very instant of
snatching, recalls the rest of the earlier experience, thinks of
the slap and the frustration, recollects the begging and the
reward, inhibits the snatching impulse, substitutes the ‘nice’
reaction for it, and gets the toy immediately, by eliminating all
the intermediary steps. If a child’s first snatching impulse be
excessive or his memory poor, many repetitions of the discipline
may be needed before the acquired reaction comes to be an ingrained
habit; but in an eminently educable child a single experience will
suffice.

One can easily represent the whole process by a brain-diagram.
Such a diagram can be little more than a symbolic translation of
the immediate experience into spatial terms; yet it may be useful,
so I subjoin it.

Figure 1 shows the paths of the four successive reflexes
executed by the lower or instinctive centres. The dotted lines that
lead from them to the higher centres and connect the latter
together, represent the processes of memory and association which
the reactions impress upon the higher centres as they take
place.

In Figure 2 we have the final result. The impression see
awakens the chain of memories, and the only reactions that take
place are the beg and smile. The thought of the
slap, connected with the activity of Centre 2, inhibits the
snatch, and makes it abortive, so it is represented only by
a dotted line of discharge not reaching the terminus. Ditto of the
cry reaction. These are, as it were, short-circuited by the
current sweeping through the higher centres from see to
smile. Beg and smile, thus substituted for the
original reaction snatch, become at last the immediate
responses when the child sees a snatchable object in some one’s
hands.

The first thing, then, for the teacher to understand is the
native reactive tendencies,—the impulses and instincts of
childhood,—so as to be able to substitute one for another,
and turn them on to artificial objects.

It is often said that man is distinguished from the lower
animals by having a much smaller assortment of native instincts and
impulses than they, but this is a great mistake. Man, of course,
has not the marvellous egg-laying instincts which some articulates
have; but, if we compare him with the mammalia, we are forced to
confess that he is appealed to by a much larger array of objects
than any other mammal, that his reactions on these objects are
characteristic and determinate in a very high degree. The monkeys,
and especially the anthropoids, are the only beings that approach
him in their analytic curiosity and width of imitativeness. His
instinctive impulses, it is true, get overlaid by the secondary
reactions due to his superior reasoning power; but thus man loses
the simply instinctive demeanor. But the life of instinct is
only disguised in him, not lost; and when the higher
brain-functions are in abeyance, as happens in imbecility or
dementia, his instincts sometimes show their presence in truly
brutish ways.

I will therefore say a few words about those instinctive
tendencies which are the most important from the teacher’s point of
view.

VII. WHAT THE NATIVE
REACTIONS ARE

First of all, Fear. Fear of punishment has always been
the great weapon of the teacher, and will always, of course, retain
some place in the conditions of the schoolroom. The subject is so
familiar that nothing more need be said about it.

The same is true of Love, and the instinctive desire to
please those whom we love. The teacher who succeeds in getting
herself loved by the pupils will obtain results which one of a more
forbidding temperament finds it impossible to secure.

Next, a word might be said about Curiosity. This is
perhaps a rather poor term by which to designate the impulse
toward better cognition in its full extent; but you will
readily understand what I mean. Novelties in the way of sensible
objects, especially if their sensational quality is bright, vivid,
startling, invariably arrest the attention of the young and hold it
until the desire to know more about the object is assuaged. In its
higher, more intellectual form, the impulse toward completer
knowledge takes the character of scientific or philosophic
curiosity. In both its sensational and its intellectual form the
instinct is more vivacious during childhood and youth than in after
life. Young children are possessed by curiosity about every new
impression that assails them. It would be quite impossible for a
young child to listen to a lecture for more than a few minutes, as
you are now listening to me. The outside sights and sounds would
inevitably carry his attention off. And, for most people in middle
life, the sort of intellectual effort required of the average
schoolboy in mastering his Greek or Latin lesson, his algebra or
physics, would be out of the question. The middle-aged citizen
attends exclusively to the routine details of his business; and new
truths, especially when they require involved trains of close
reasoning, are no longer within the scope of his capacity.

The sensational curiosity of childhood is appealed to more
particularly by certain determinate kinds of objects. Material
things, things that move, living things, human actions and accounts
of human action, will win the attention better than anything that
is more abstract. Here again comes in the advantage of the
object-teaching and manual training methods. The pupil’s attention
is spontaneously held by any problem that involves the presentation
of a new material object or of an activity on any one’s part. The
teacher’s earliest appeals, therefore, must be through objects
shown or acts performed or described. Theoretic curiosity,
curiosity about the rational relations between things, can hardly
be said to awake at all until adolescence is reached. The sporadic
metaphysical inquiries of children as to who made God, and why they
have five fingers, need hardly be counted here. But, when the
theoretic instinct is once alive in the pupil, an entirely new
order of pedagogic relations begins for him. Reasons, causes,
abstract conceptions, suddenly grow full of zest, a fact with which
all teachers are familiar. And, both in its sensible and in its
rational developments, disinterested curiosity may be successfully
appealed to in the child with much more certainty than in the
adult, in whom this intellectual instinct has grown so torpid as
usually never to awake unless it enters into association with some
selfish personal interest. Of this latter point I will say more
anon.

Imitation. Man has always been recognized as the
imitative animal par excellence. And there is hardly a book
on psychology, however old, which has not devoted at least one
paragraph to this fact. It is strange, however, that the full scope
and pregnancy of the imitative impulse in man has had to wait till
the last dozen years to become adequately recognized. M. Tarde led
the way in his admirably original work, “Les Lois de l’Imitation”;
and in our own country Professors Royce and Baldwin have kept the
ball rolling with all the energy that could be desired. Each of us
is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his
imitativeness. We become conscious of what we ourselves are by
imitating others—the consciousness of what the others are
precedes—the sense of self grows by the sense of pattern. The
entire accumulated wealth of mankind—languages, arts,
institutions, and sciences—is passed on from one generation
to another by what Baldwin has called social heredity, each
generation simply imitating the last. Into the particulars of this
most fascinating chapter of psychology I have no time to go. The
moment one hears Tarde’s proposition uttered, however, one feels
how supremely true it is. Invention, using the term most broadly,
and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the
human race historically has walked.

Imitation shades imperceptibly into Emulation. Emulation
is the impulse to imitate what you see another doing, in order not
to appear inferior; and it is hard to draw a sharp line between the
manifestations of the two impulses, so inextricably do they mix
their effects. Emulation is the very nerve of human society. Why
are you, my hearers, sitting here before me? If no one whom you
ever heard of had attended a ‘summer school’ or teachers’
institute, would it have occurred to any one of you to break out
independently and do a thing so unprescribed by fashion? Probably
not. Nor would your pupils come to you unless the children of their
parents’ neighbors were all simultaneously being sent to school. We
wish not to be lonely or eccentric, and we wish not to be cut off
from our share in things which to our neighbors seem desirable
privileges.

In the schoolroom, imitation and emulation play absolutely vital
parts. Every teacher knows the advantage of having certain things
performed by whole bands of children at a time. The teacher who
meets with most success is the teacher whose own ways are the most
imitable. A teacher should never try to make the pupils do a thing
which she cannot do herself. “Come and let me show you how” is an
incomparably better stimulus than “Go and do it as the book
directs.” Children admire a teacher who has skill. What he does
seems easy, and they wish to emulate it. It is useless for a dull
and devitalized teacher to exhort her pupils to wake up and take an
interest. She must first take one herself; then her example is
effective, as no exhortation can possibly be.

Every school has its tone, moral and intellectual. And this tone
is a mere tradition kept up by imitation, due in the first instance
to the example set by teachers and by previous pupils of an
aggressive and dominating type, copied by the others, and passed on
from year to year, so that the new pupils take the cue almost
immediately. Such a tone changes very slowly, if at all; and then
always under the modifying influence of new personalities
aggressive enough in character to set new patterns and not merely
to copy the old. The classic example of this sort of tone is the
often quoted case of Rugby under Dr. Arnold’s administration. He
impressed his own character as a model on the imagination of the
oldest boys, who in turn were expected and required to impress
theirs upon the younger set. The contagiousness of Arnold’s genius
was such that a Rugby man was said to be recognizable all through
life by a peculiar turn of character which he acquired at school.
It is obvious that psychology as such can give in this field no
precepts of detail. As in so many other fields of teaching, success
depends mainly on the native genius of the teacher, the sympathy,
tact, and perception which enable him to seize the right moment and
to set the right example.

Among the recent modern reforms of teaching methods, a certain
disparagement of emulation, as a laudable spring of action in the
schoolroom, has often made itself heard. More than a century ago,
Rousseau, in his ‘Émile,’ branded rivalry between one pupil
and another as too base a passion to play a part in an ideal
education. “Let Émile,” he said, “never be led to compare
himself to other children. No rivalries, not even in running, as
soon as he begins to have the power of reason. It were a hundred
times better that he should not learn at all what he could only
learn through jealousy or vanity. But I would mark out every year
the progress he may have made, and I would compare it with the
progress of the following years. I would say to him: ‘You are now
grown so many inches taller; there is the ditch which you jumped
over, there is the burden which you raised. There is the distance
to which you could throw a pebble, there the distance you could run
over without losing breath. See how much more you can do now!’ Thus
I should excite him without making him jealous of any one. He would
wish to surpass himself. I can see no inconvenience in this
emulation with his former self.”

Unquestionably, emulation with one’s former self is a noble form
of the passion of rivalry, and has a wide scope in the training of
the young. But to veto and taboo all possible rivalry of one youth
with another, because such rivalry may degenerate into greedy and
selfish excess, does seem to savor somewhat of sentimentality, or
even of fanaticism. The feeling of rivalry lies at the very basis
of our being, all social improvement being largely due to it. There
is a noble and generous kind of rivalry, as well as a spiteful and
greedy kind; and the noble and generous form is particularly common
in childhood. All games owe the zest which they bring with them to
the fact that they are rooted in the emulous passion, yet they are
the chief means of training in fairness and magnanimity. Can the
teacher afford to throw such an ally away? Ought we seriously to
hope that marks, distinctions, prizes, and other goals of effort,
based on the pursuit of recognized superiority, should be forever
banished from our schools? As a psychologist, obliged to notice the
deep and pervasive character of the emulous passion, I must confess
my doubts.

The wise teacher will use this instinct as he uses others,
reaping its advantages, and appealing to it in such a way as to
reap a maximum of benefit with a minimum of harm; for, after all,
we must confess, with a French critic of Rousseau’s doctrine, that
the deepest spring of action in us is the sight of action in
another. The spectacle of effort is what awakens and sustains our
own effort. No runner running all alone on a race-track will find
in his own will the power of stimulation which his rivalry with
other runners incites, when he feels them at his heels, about to
pass. When a trotting horse is ‘speeded,’ a running horse must go
beside him to keep him to the pace.

As imitation slides into emulation, so emulation slides into
Ambition; and ambition connects itself closely with
Pugnacity and Pride. Consequently, these five
instinctive tendencies form an interconnected group of factors,
hard to separate in the determination of a great deal of our
conduct. The Ambitious Impulses would perhaps be the best
name for the whole group.

Pride and pugnacity have often been considered unworthy passions
to appeal to in the young. But in their more refined and noble
forms they play a great part in the schoolroom and in education
generally, being in some characters most potent spurs to effort.
Pugnacity need not be thought of merely in the form of physical
combativeness. It can be taken in the sense of a general
unwillingness to be beaten by any kind of difficulty. It is what
makes us feel ‘stumped’ and challenged by arduous achievements, and
is essential to a spirited and enterprising character. We have of
late been hearing much of the philosophy of tenderness in
education; ‘interest’ must be assiduously awakened in everything,
difficulties must be smoothed away. Soft pedagogics have
taken the place of the old steep and rocky path to learning. But
from this lukewarm air the bracing oxygen of effort is left out. It
is nonsense to suppose that every step in education can be
interesting. The fighting impulse must often be appealed to. Make
the pupil feel ashamed of being scared at fractions, of being
‘downed’ by the law of falling bodies; rouse his pugnacity and
pride, and he will rush at the difficult places with a sort of
inner wrath at himself that is one of his best moral faculties. A
victory scored under such conditions becomes a turning-point and
crisis of his character. It represents the high-water mark of his
powers, and serves thereafter as an ideal pattern for his
self-imitation. The teacher who never rouses this sort of
pugnacious excitement in his pupils falls short of one of his best
forms of usefulness.

The next instinct which I shall mention is that of
Ownership, also one of the radical endowments of the race.
It often is the antagonist of imitation. Whether social progress is
due more to the passion for keeping old things and habits or to the
passion of imitating and acquiring new ones may in some cases be a
difficult thing to decide. The sense of ownership begins in the
second year of life. Among the first words which an infant learns
to utter are the words ‘my’ and ‘mine,’ and woe to the parents of
twins who fail to provide their gifts in duplicate. The depth and
primitiveness of this instinct would seem to cast a sort of
psychological discredit in advance upon all radical forms of
communistic utopia. Private proprietorship cannot be practically
abolished until human nature is changed. It seems essential to
mental health that the individual should have something beyond the
bare clothes on his back to which he can assert exclusive
possession, and which he may defend adversely against the world.
Even those religious orders who make the most stringent vows of
poverty have found it necessary to relax the rule a little in favor
of the human heart made unhappy by reduction to too disinterested
terms. The monk must have his books: the nun must have her little
garden, and the images and pictures in her room.

In education, the instinct of ownership is fundamental, and can
be appealed to in many ways. In the house, training in order and
neatness begins with the arrangement of the child’s own personal
possessions. In the school, ownership is particularly important in
connection with one of its special forms of activity, the
collecting impulse. An object possibly not very interesting in
itself, like a shell, a postage stamp, or a single map or drawing,
will acquire an interest if it fills a gap in a collection or helps
to complete a series. Much of the scholarly work of the world, so
far as it is mere bibliography, memory, and erudition (and this
lies at the basis of all our human scholarship), would seem to owe
its interest rather to the way in which it gratifies the
accumulating and collecting instinct than to any special appeal
which it makes to our cravings after rationality. A man wishes a
complete collection of information, wishes to know more about a
subject than anybody else, much as another may wish to own more
dollars or more early editions or more engravings before the letter
than anybody else.

The teacher who can work this impulse into the school tasks is
fortunate. Almost all children collect something. A tactful teacher
may get them to take pleasure in collecting books; in keeping a
neat and orderly collection of notes; in starting, when they are
mature enough, a card catalogue; in preserving every drawing or map
which they may make. Neatness, order, and method are thus
instinctively gained, along with the other benefits which the
possession of the collection entails. Even such a noisome thing as
a collection of postage stamps may be used by the teacher as an
inciter of interest in the geographical and historical information
which she desires to impart. Sloyd successfully avails itself of
this instinct in causing the pupil to make a collection of wooden
implements fit for his own private use at home. Collecting is, of
course, the basis of all natural history study; and probably nobody
ever became a good naturalist who was not an unusually active
collector when a boy.

Constructiveness is another great instinctive tendency
with which the schoolroom has to contract an alliance. Up to the
eighth or ninth year of childhood one may say that the child does
hardly anything else than handle objects, explore things with his
hands, doing and undoing, setting up and knocking down, putting
together and pulling apart; for, from the psychological point of
view, construction and destruction are two names for the same
manual activity. Both signify the production of change, and the
working of effects, in outward things. The result of all this is
that intimate familiarity with the physical environment, that
acquaintance with the properties of material things, which is
really the foundation of human consciousness. To the very
last, in most of us, the conceptions of objects and their
properties are limited to the notion of what we can do with
them. A ‘stick’ means something we can lean upon or strike
with; ‘fire,’ something to cook, or warm ourselves, or burn things
up withal; ‘string,’ something with which to tie things together.
For most people these objects have no other meaning. In geometry,
the cylinder, circle, sphere, are defined as what you get by going
through certain processes of construction, revolving a
parallelogram upon one of its sides, etc. The more different kinds
of things a child thus gets to know by treating and handling them,
the more confident grows his sense of kinship with the world in
which he lives. An unsympathetic adult will wonder at the
fascinated hours which a child will spend in putting his blocks
together and rearranging them. But the wise education takes the
tide at the flood, and from the kindergarten upward devotes the
first years of education to training in construction and to
object-teaching. I need not recapitulate here what I said awhile
back about the superiority of the objective and experimental
methods. They occupy the pupil in a way most congruous with the
spontaneous interests of his age. They absorb him, and leave
impressions durable and profound. Compared with the youth taught by
these methods, one brought up exclusively by books carries through
life a certain remoteness from reality: he stands, as it were, out
of the pale, and feels that he stands so; and often suffers a kind
of melancholy from which he might have been rescued by a more real
education.

There are other impulses, such as love of approbation or vanity,
shyness and secretiveness, of which a word might be said; but they
are too familiar to need it. You can easily pursue the subject by
your own reflection. There is one general law, however, that
relates to many of our instinctive tendencies, and that has no
little importance in education; and I must refer to it briefly
before I leave the subject. It has been called the law of
transitoriness in instincts. Many of our impulsive tendencies ripen
at a certain period; and, if the appropriate objects be then and
there provided, habits of conduct toward them are acquired which
last. But, if the objects be not forthcoming then, the impulse may
die out before a habit is formed; and later it may be hard to teach
the creature to react appropriately in those directions. The
sucking instincts in mammals, the following instinct in certain
birds and quadrupeds, are examples of this: they fade away shortly
after birth.

In children we observe a ripening of impulses and interests in a
certain determinate order. Creeping, walking, climbing, imitating
vocal sounds, constructing, drawing, calculating, possess the child
in succession; and in some children the possession, while it lasts,
may be of a semi-frantic and exclusive sort. Later, the interest in
any one of these things may wholly fade away. Of course, the proper
pedagogic moment to work skill in, and to clench the useful habit,
is when the native impulse is most acutely present. Crowd on the
athletic opportunities, the mental arithmetic, the verse-learning,
the drawing, the botany, or what not, the moment you have reason to
think the hour is ripe. The hour may not last long, and while it
continues you may safely let all the child’s other occupations take
a second place. In this way you economize time and deepen skill;
for many an infant prodigy, artistic or mathematical, has a
flowering epoch of but a few months.

One can draw no specific rules for all this. It depends on close
observation in the particular case, and parents here have a great
advantage over teachers. In fact, the law of transitoriness has
little chance of individualized application in the schools.

Such is the little interested and impulsive psychophysical
organism whose springs of action the teacher must divine, and to
whose ways he must become accustomed. He must start with the native
tendencies, and enlarge the pupil’s entire passive and active
experience. He must ply him with new objects and stimuli, and make
him taste the fruits of his behavior, so that now that whole
context of remembered experience is what shall determine his
conduct when he gets the stimulus, and not the bare immediate
impression. As the pupil’s life thus enlarges, it gets fuller and
fuller of all sorts of memories and associations and substitutions;
but the eye accustomed to psychological analysis will discern,
underneath it all, the outlines of our simple psychophysical
scheme.

Respect then, I beg you, always the original reactions, even
when you are seeking to overcome their connection with certain
objects, and to supplant them with others that you wish to make the
rule. Bad behavior, from the point of view of the teacher’s art, is
as good a starting-point as good behavior. In fact, paradoxical as
it may sound to say so, it is often a better starting-point than
good behavior would be.

The acquired reactions must be made habitual whenever they are
appropriate. Therefore Habit is the next subject to which your
attention is invited.

VIII. THE LAWS OF HABIT

It is very important that teachers should realize the importance
of habit, and psychology helps us greatly at this point. We speak,
it is true, of good habits and of bad habits; but, when people use
the word ‘habit,’ in the majority of instances it is a bad habit
which they have in mind. They talk of the smoking-habit and the
swearing-habit and the drinking-habit, but not of the
abstention-habit or the moderation-habit or the courage-habit. But
the fact is that our virtues are habits as much as our vices. All
our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of
habits,—practical, emotional, and
intellectual,—systematically organized for our weal or woe,
and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter
may be.

Since pupils can understand this at a comparatively early age,
and since to understand it contributes in no small measure to their
feeling of responsibility, it would be well if the teacher were
able himself to talk to them of the philosophy of habit in some
such abstract terms as I am now about to talk of it to you.

I believe that we are subject to the law of habit in consequence
of the fact that we have bodies. The plasticity of the living
matter of our nervous system, in short, is the reason why we do a
thing with difficulty the first time, but soon do it more and more
easily, and finally, with sufficient practice, do it
semi-mechanically, or with hardly any consciousness at all. Our
nervous systems have (in Dr. Carpenter’s words) grown to the
way in which they have been exercised, just as a sheet of paper or
a coat, once creased or folded, tends to fall forever afterward
into the same identical folds.

Habit is thus a second nature, or rather, as the Duke of
Wellington said, it is ‘ten times nature,’—at any rate as
regards its importance in adult life; for the acquired habits of
our training have by that time inhibited or strangled most of the
natural impulsive tendencies which were originally there.
Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine
thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from
our rising in the morning to our lying down each night. Our
dressing and undressing, our eating and drinking, our greetings and
partings, our hat-raisings and giving way for ladies to precede,
nay, even most of the forms of our common speech, are things of a
type so fixed by repetition as almost to be classed as reflex
actions. To each sort of impression we have an automatic,
ready-made response. My very words to you now are an example of
what I mean; for having already lectured upon habit and printed a
chapter about it in a book, and read the latter when in print, I
find my tongue inevitably falling into its old phrases and
repeating almost literally what I said before.

So far as we are thus mere bundles of habit, we are stereotyped
creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves. And since
this, under any circumstances, is what we always tend to become, it
follows first of all that the teacher’s prime concern should be to
ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most
useful to him throughout life. Education is for behavior, and
habits are the stuff of which behavior consists.

To quote my earlier book directly, the great thing in all
education is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our
enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live
at ease upon the interest of the fund. For this we must make
automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful
actions as we can, and as carefully guard against the growing
into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous. The more of the
details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless
custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be
set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable
human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision,
and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every
cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the
beginning of every bit of work are subjects of express volitional
deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding
or regretting of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as
practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. If there be
such daily duties not yet ingrained in any one of my hearers, let
him begin this very hour to set the matter right.

In Professor Bain’s chapter on ‘The Moral Habits’ there are some
admirable practical remarks laid down. Two great maxims emerge from
the treatment. The first is that in the acquisition of a new habit,
or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to launch
ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible.
Accumulate all the possible circumstances which shall reinforce the
right motives; put yourself assiduously in conditions that
encourage the new way; make engagements incompatible with the old;
take a public pledge, if the case allows; in short, envelope your
resolution with every aid you know. This will give your new
beginning such a momentum that the temptation to break down will
not occur as soon as it otherwise might; and every day during which
a breakdown is postponed adds to the chances of its not occurring
at all.

I remember long ago reading in an Austrian paper the
advertisement of a certain Rudolph Somebody, who promised fifty
gulden reward to any one who after that date should find him at the
wine-shop of Ambrosius So-and-so. ‘This I do,’ the advertisement
continued, ‘in consequence of a promise which I have made my wife.’
With such a wife, and such an understanding of the way in which to
start new habits, it would be safe to stake one’s money on
Rudolph’s ultimate success.

The second maxim is, Never suffer an exception to occur till
the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is
like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully
winding up: a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will
wind again. Continuity of training is the great means of making the
nervous system act infallibly right. As Professor Bain
says:—

“The peculiarity of the moral habits, contradistinguishing them
from the intellectual acquisitions, is the presence of two hostile
powers, one to be gradually raised into the ascendant over the
other. It is necessary above all things, in such a situation, never
to lose a battle. Every gain on the wrong side undoes the effect of
many conquests on the right. The essential precaution, therefore,
is so to regulate the two opposing powers that the one may have a
series of uninterrupted successes, until repetition has fortified
it to such a degree as to enable it to cope with the opposition,
under any circumstances. This is the theoretically best career of
mental progress.”

A third maxim may be added to the preceding pair: Seize the
very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you
make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the
direction of the habits you aspire to gain. It is not in the
moment of their forming, but in the moment of their producing motor
effects, that resolves and aspirations communicate the new ‘set’ to
the brain.

No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no
matter how good one’s sentiments may be, if one have not taken
advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one’s character may
remain entirely unaffected for the better. With good intentions,
hell proverbially is paved. This is an obvious consequence of the
principles I have laid down. A ‘character,’ as J.S. Mill says, ‘is
a completely fashioned will’; and a will, in the sense in which he
means it, is an aggregate of tendencies to act in a firm and prompt
and definite way upon all the principal emergencies of life. A
tendency to act only becomes effectively ingrained in us in
proportion to the uninterrupted frequency with which the actions
actually occur, and the brain ‘grows’ to their use. When a resolve
or a fine glow of feeling is allowed to evaporate without bearing
practical fruit, it is worse than a chance lost: it works so as
positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from taking
the normal path of discharge. There is no more contemptible type of
human character than that of the nerveless sentimentalist and
dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility, but
never does a concrete manly deed.

This leads to a fourth maxim. Don’t preach too much to your
pupils or abound in good talk in the abstract. Lie in wait
rather for the practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as
they pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils both to think,
to feel, and to do. The strokes of behavior are what give
the new set to the character, and work the good habits into its
organic tissue. Preaching and talking too soon become an
ineffectual bore.

There is a passage in Darwin’s short autobiography which has
been often quoted, and which, for the sake of its bearing on our
subject of habit, I must now quote again. Darwin says: “Up to the
age of thirty or beyond it, poetry of many kinds gave me great
pleasure; and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in
Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said
that pictures formerly gave me considerable, and music very great
delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of
poetry. I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so
intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my
taste for pictures or music…. My mind seems to have become a kind
of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of
facts; but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of
the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot
conceive…. If I had to live my life again, I would have made a
rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once
every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would
thus have been kept alive through use. The loss of these tastes is
a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the
intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling
the emotional part of our nature.”

We all intend when young to be all that may become a man, before
the destroyer cuts us down. We wish and expect to enjoy poetry
always, to grow more and more intelligent about pictures and music,
to keep in touch with spiritual and religious ideas, and even not
to let the greater philosophic thoughts of our time develop quite
beyond our view. We mean all this in youth, I say; and yet in how
many middle-aged men and women is such an honest and sanguine
expectation fulfilled? Surely, in comparatively few; and the laws
of habit show us why. Some interest in each of these things arises
in everybody at the proper age; but, if not persistently fed with
the appropriate matter, instead of growing into a powerful and
necessary habit, it atrophies and dies, choked by the rival
interests to which the daily food is given. We make ourselves into
Darwins in this negative respect by persistently ignoring the
essential practical conditions of our case. We say abstractly: “I
mean to enjoy poetry, and to absorb a lot of it, of course. I fully
intend to keep up my love of music, to read the books that shall
give new turns to the thought of my time, to keep my higher
spiritual side alive, etc.” But we do not attack these things
concretely, and we do not begin to-day. We forget that every
good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily
effort. We postpone and postpone, until those smiling possibilities
are dead. Whereas ten minutes a day of poetry, of spiritual reading
or meditation, and an hour or two a week at music, pictures, or
philosophy, provided we began now and suffered no remission,
would infallibly give us in due time the fulness of all we desire.
By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing ourselves
the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our
higher possibilities. This is a point concerning which you teachers
might well give a little timely information to your older and more
aspiring pupils.

According as a function receives daily exercise or not, the man
becomes a different kind of being in later life. We have lately had
a number of accomplished Hindoo visitors at Cambridge, who talked
freely of life and philosophy. More than one of them has confided
to me that the sight of our faces, all contracted as they are with
the habitual American over-intensity and anxiety of expression, and
our ungraceful and distorted attitudes when sitting, made on him a
very painful impression. “I do not see,” said one, “how it is
possible for you to live as you do, without a single minute in your
day deliberately given to tranquillity and meditation. It is an
invariable part of our Hindoo life to retire for at least half an
hour daily into silence, to relax our muscles, govern our
breathing, and meditate on eternal things. Every Hindoo child is
trained to this from a very early age.” The good fruits of such a
discipline were obvious in the physical repose and lack of tension,
and the wonderful smoothness and calmness of facial expression, and
imperturbability of manner of these Orientals. I felt that my
countrymen were depriving themselves of an essential grace of
character. How many American children ever hear it said by parent
or teacher, that they should moderate their piercing voices, that
they should relax their unused muscles, and as far as possible,
when sitting, sit quite still? Not one in a thousand, not one in
five thousand! Yet, from its reflex influence on the inner mental
states, this ceaseless over-tension, over-motion, and
over-expression are working on us grievous national harm.

I beg you teachers to think a little seriously of this matter.
Perhaps you can help our rising generation of Americans toward the
beginning of a better set of personal ideals.[A]

To go back now to our general maxims, I may at last, as a fifth
and final practical maxim about habits, offer something like this:
Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous
exercise every day. That is, be systematically heroic in little
unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other
reason than its difficulty, so that, when the hour of dire need
draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the
test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man
pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time,
and possibly may never bring him a return. But, if the fire
does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from
ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of
concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in
unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything
rocks around him, and his softer fellow-mortals are winnowed like
chaff in the blast.

I have been accused, when talking of the subject of habit, of
making old habits appear so strong that the acquiring of new ones,
and particularly anything like a sudden reform or conversion, would
be made impossible by my doctrine. Of course, this would suffice to
condemn the latter; for sudden conversions, however infrequent they
may be, unquestionably do occur. But there is no incompatibility
between the general laws I have laid down and the most startling
sudden alterations in the way of character. New habits can
be launched, I have expressly said, on condition of there being new
stimuli and new excitements. Now life abounds in these, and
sometimes they are such critical and revolutionary experiences that
they change a man’s whole scale of values and system of ideas. In
such cases, the old order of his habits will be ruptured; and, if
the new motives are lasting, new habits will be formed, and build
up in him a new or regenerate ‘nature.’

All this kind of fact I fully allow. But the general laws of
habit are no wise altered thereby, and the physiological study of
mental conditions still remains on the whole the most powerful ally
of hortatory ethics. The hell to be endured hereafter, of which
theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in
this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong
way. Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere
walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their
conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates,
good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of
virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar. The drunken Rip
Van Winkle, in Jefferson’s play, excuses himself for every fresh
dereliction by saying, “I won’t count this time!” Well, he may not
count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being
counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the
molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used
against him when the next temptation comes. Nothing we ever do is,
in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.

Of course, this has its good side as well as its bad one. As we
become permanent drunkards by so many separate drinks, so we become
saints in the moral, and authorities and experts in the practical
and scientific spheres, by so many separate acts and hours of work.
Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education,
whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each
hour of the working day, he may safely leave the final result to
itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine
morning to find himself one of the competent ones of his
generation, in whatever pursuit he may have singled out. Silently,
between all the details of his business, the power of
judging in all that class of matter will have built itself up
within him as a possession that will never pass away. Young people
should know this truth in advance. The ignorance of it has probably
engendered more discouragement and faint-heartedness in youths
embarking on arduous careers than all other causes put
together.

IX. THE ASSOCIATION OF
IDEAS

In my last talk, in treating of Habit, I chiefly had in mind our
motor habits,—habits of external conduct. But our
thinking and feeling processes are also largely subject to the law
of habit, and one result of this is a phenomenon which you all know
under the name of ‘the association of ideas.’ To that phenomenon I
ask you now to turn.

You remember that consciousness is an ever-flowing stream of
objects, feelings, and impulsive tendencies. We saw already that
its phases or pulses are like so many fields or waves, each field
or wave having usually its central point of liveliest attention, in
the shape of the most prominent object in our thought, while all
around this lies a margin of other objects more dimly realized,
together with the margin of emotional and active tendencies which
the whole entails. Describing the mind thus in fluid terms, we
cling as close as possible to nature. At first sight, it might seem
as if, in the fluidity of these successive waves, everything is
indeterminate. But inspection shows that each wave has a
constitution which can be to some degree explained by the
constitution of the waves just passed away. And this relation of
the wave to its predecessors is expressed by the two fundamental
‘laws of association,’ so-called, of which the first is named the
Law of Contiguity, the second that of Similarity.

The Law of Contiguity tells us that objects thought of in
the coming wave are such as in some previous experience were
next to the objects represented in the wave that is passing
away. The vanishing objects were once formerly their neighbors in
the mind. When you recite the alphabet or your prayers, or when the
sight of an object reminds you of its name, or the name reminds you
of the object, it is through the law of contiguity that the terms
are suggested to the mind.

The Law of Similarity says that, when contiguity fails to
describe what happens, the coming objects will prove to
resemble the going objects, even though the two were never
experienced together before. In our ‘flights of fancy,’ this is
frequently the case.

If, arresting ourselves in the flow of reverie, we ask the
question, “How came we to be thinking of just this object now?” we
can almost always trace its presence to some previous object which
has introduced it to the mind, according to one or the other of
these laws. The entire routine of our memorized acquisitions, for
example, is a consequence of nothing but the Law of Contiguity. The
words of a poem, the formulas of trigonometry, the facts of
history, the properties of material things, are all known to us as
definite systems or groups of objects which cohere in an order
fixed by innumerable iterations, and of which any one part reminds
us of the others. In dry and prosaic minds, almost all the mental
sequences flow along these lines of habitual routine repetition and
suggestion.

In witty, imaginative minds, on the other hand, the routine is
broken through with ease at any moment; and one field of mental
objects will suggest another with which perhaps in the whole
history of human thinking it had never once before been coupled.
The link here is usually some analogy between the objects
successively thought of,—an analogy often so subtle that,
although we feel it, we can with difficulty analyze its ground; as
where, for example, we find something masculine in the color red
and something feminine in the color pale blue, or where, of three
human beings’ characters, one will remind us of a cat, another of a
dog, the third perhaps of a cow.

Psychologists have of course gone very deeply into the question
of what the causes of association may be; and some of them have
tried to show that contiguity and similarity are not two radically
diverse laws, but that either presupposes the presence of the
other. I myself am disposed to think that the phenomena of
association depend on our cerebral constitution, and are not
immediate consequences of our being rational beings. In other
words, when we shall have become disembodied spirits, it may be
that our trains of consciousness will follow different laws. These
questions are discussed in the books on psychology, and I hope that
some of you will be interested in following them there. But I will,
on the present occasion, ignore them entirely; for, as teachers, it
is the fact of association that practically concerns you,
let its grounds be spiritual or cerebral, or what they may, and let
its laws be reducible, or non-reducible, to one. Your pupils,
whatever else they are, are at any rate little pieces of
associating machinery. Their education consists in the organizing
within them of determinate tendencies to associate one thing with
another,—impressions with consequences, these with reactions,
those with results, and so on indefinitely. The more copious the
associative systems, the completer the individual’s adaptations to
the world.

The teacher can formulate his function to himself therefore in
terms of ‘association’ as well as in terms of ‘native and acquired
reaction.’ It is mainly that of building up useful systems of
association in the pupil’s mind. This description sounds wider
than the one I began by giving. But, when one thinks that our
trains of association, whatever they may be, normally issue in
acquired reactions or behavior, one sees that in a general way the
same mass of facts is covered by both formulas.

It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when
we have once grasped the principles of association. The great
problem which association undertakes to solve is, Why does just
this particular field of consciousness, constituted in this
particular way, now appear before my mind? It may be a field of
objects imagined; it may be of objects remembered or of objects
perceived; it may include an action resolved on. In either case,
when the field is analyzed into its parts, those parts can be shown
to have proceeded from parts of fields previously before
consciousness, in consequence of one or other of the laws of
association just laid down. Those laws run the mind:
interest, shifting hither and thither, deflects it; and attention,
as we shall later see, steers it and keeps it from too zigzag a
course.

To grasp these factors clearly gives one a solid and simple
understanding of the psychological machinery. The ‘nature,’ the
‘character,’ of an individual means really nothing but the habitual
form of his associations. To break up bad associations or wrong
ones, to build others in, to guide the associative tendencies into
the most fruitful channels, is the educator’s principal task. But
here, as with all other simple principles, the difficulty lies in
the application. Psychology can state the laws: concrete tact and
talent alone can work them to useful results.

Meanwhile it is a matter of the commonest experience that our
minds may pass from one object to another by various intermediary
fields of consciousness. The indeterminateness of our paths of
association in concreto is thus almost as striking a feature
of them as the uniformity of their abstract form. Start from any
idea whatever, and the entire range of your ideas is potentially at
your disposal. If we take as the associative starting-point, or
cue, some simple word which I pronounce before you, there is no
limit to the possible diversity of suggestions which it may set up
in your minds. Suppose I say ‘blue,’ for example: some of you may
think of the blue sky and hot weather from which we now are
suffering, then go off on thoughts of summer clothing, or possibly
of meteorology at large; others may think of the spectrum and the
physiology of color-vision, and glide into X-rays and recent
physical speculations; others may think of blue ribbons, or of the
blue flowers on a friend’s hat, and proceed on lines of personal
reminiscence. To others, again, etymology and linguistic thoughts
may be suggested; or blue may be ‘apperceived’ as a synonym for
melancholy, and a train of associates connected with morbid
psychology may proceed to unroll themselves.

In the same person, the same word heard at different times will
provoke, in consequence of the varying marginal preoccupations,
either one of a number of diverse possible associative sequences.
Professor Münsterberg performed this experiment methodically,
using the same words four times over, at three-month intervals, as
‘cues’ for four different persons who were the subjects of
observation. He found almost no constancy in their associations
taken at these different times. In short, the entire potential
content of one’s consciousness is accessible from any one of its
points. This is why we can never work the laws of association
forward: starting from the present field as a cue, we can never
cipher out in advance just what the person will be thinking of five
minutes later. The elements which may become prepotent in the
process, the parts of each successive field round which the
associations shall chiefly turn, the possible bifurcations of
suggestion, are so numerous and ambiguous as to be indeterminable
before the fact. But, although we cannot work the laws of
association forward, we can always work them backwards. We cannot
say now what we shall find ourselves thinking of five minutes
hence; but, whatever it may be, we shall then be able to trace it
through intermediary links of contiguity or similarity to what we
are thinking now. What so baffles our prevision is the shifting
part played by the margin and focus—in fact, by each element
by itself of the margin or focus—in calling up the next
ideas.

For example, I am reciting ‘Locksley Hall,’ in order to divert
my mind from a state of suspense that I am in concerning the will
of a relative that is dead. The will still remains in the mental
background as an extremely marginal or ultra-marginal portion of my
field of consciousness; but the poem fairly keeps my attention from
it, until I come to the line, “I, the heir of all the ages, in the
foremost files of time.” The words ‘I, the heir,’ immediately make
an electric connection with the marginal thought of the will; that,
in turn, makes my heart beat with anticipation of my possible
legacy, so that I throw down the book and pace the floor excitedly
with visions of my future fortune pouring through my mind. Any
portion of the field of consciousness that has more potentialities
of emotional excitement than another may thus be roused to
predominant activity; and the shifting play of interest now in one
portion, now in another, deflects the currents in all sorts of
zigzag ways, the mental activity running hither and thither as the
sparks run in burnt-up paper.

One more point, and I shall have said as much to you as seems
necessary about the process of association.

You just saw how a single exciting word may call up its own
associates prepotently, and deflect our whole train of thinking
from the previous track. The fact is that every portion of the
field tends to call up its own associates; but, if these
associates be severally different, there is rivalry, and as soon as
one or a few begin to be effective the others seem to get siphoned
out, as it were, and left behind. Seldom, however, as in our
example, does the process seem to turn round a single item in the
mental field, or even round the entire field that is immediately in
the act of passing. It is a matter of constellation, into
which portions of fields that are already past especially seem to
enter and have their say. Thus, to go back to ‘Locksley Hall,’ each
word as I recite it in its due order is suggested not solely by the
previous word now expiring on my lips, but it is rather the effect
of all the previous words, taken together, of the verse. “Ages,”
for example, calls up “in the foremost files of time,” when
preceded by “I, the heir of all the”—; but, when preceded by
“for I doubt not through the,”—it calls up “one increasing
purpose runs.” Similarly, if I write on the blackboard the letters
A B C D E F,… they probably suggest to you G H I…. But, if I
write A B A D D E F, if they suggest anything, they suggest as
their complement E C T or E F I C I E N C Y. The result depending
on the total constellation, even though most of the single items be
the same.

My practical reason for mentioning this law is this, that it
follows from it that, in working associations into your pupils’
minds, you must not rely on single cues, but multiply the cues as
much as possible. Couple the desired reaction with numerous
constellations of antecedents,—don’t always ask the question,
for example, in the same way; don’t use the same kind of data in
numerical problems; vary your illustrations, etc., as much as you
can. When we come to the subject of memory, we shall learn still
more about this.

So much, then, for the general subject of association. In
leaving it for other topics (in which, however, we shall abundantly
find it involved again), I cannot too strongly urge you to acquire
a habit of thinking of your pupils in associative terms. All
governors of mankind, from doctors and jail-wardens to demagogues
and statesmen, instinctively come so to conceive their charges. If
you do the same, thinking of them (however else you may think of
them besides) as so many little systems of associating machinery,
you will be astonished at the intimacy of insight into their
operations and at the practicality of the results which you will
gain. We think of our acquaintances, for example, as characterized
by certain ‘tendencies.’ These tendencies will in almost every
instance prove to be tendencies to association. Certain ideas in
them are always followed by certain other ideas, these by certain
feelings and impulses to approve or disapprove, assent or decline.
If the topic arouse one of those first ideas, the practical outcome
can be pretty well foreseen. ‘Types of character’ in short are
largely types of association.

X. INTEREST

At our last meeting I treated of the native tendencies of the
pupil to react in characteristically definite ways upon different
stimuli or exciting circumstances. In fact, I treated of the
pupil’s instincts. Now some situations appeal to special instincts
from the very outset, and others fail to do so until the proper
connections have been organized in the course of the person’s
training. We say of the former set of objects or situations that
they are interesting in themselves and originally. Of the
latter we say that they are natively uninteresting, and that
interest in them has first to be acquired.

No topic has received more attention from pedagogical writers
than that of interest. It is the natural sequel to the instincts we
so lately discussed, and it is therefore well fitted to be the next
subject which we take up.

Since some objects are natively interesting and in others
interest is artificially acquired, the teacher must know which the
natively interesting ones are; for, as we shall see immediately,
other objects can artificially acquire an interest only through
first becoming associated with some of these natively interesting
things.

The native interests of children lie altogether in the sphere of
sensation. Novel things to look at or novel sounds to hear,
especially when they involve the spectacle of action of a violent
sort, will always divert the attention from abstract conceptions of
objects verbally taken in. The grimace that Johnny is making, the
spitballs that Tommy is ready to throw, the dog-fight in the
street, or the distant firebells ringing,—these are the
rivals with which the teacher’s powers of being interesting have
incessantly to cope. The child will always attend more to what a
teacher does than to what the same teacher says. During the
performance of experiments or while the teacher is drawing on the
blackboard, the children are tranquil and absorbed. I have seen a
roomful of college students suddenly become perfectly still, to
look at their professor of physics tie a piece of string around a
stick which he was going to use in an experiment, but immediately
grow restless when he began to explain the experiment. A lady told
me that one day, during a lesson, she was delighted at having
captured so completely the attention of one of her young charges.
He did not remove his eyes from her face; but he said to her after
the lesson was over, “I looked at you all the time, and your upper
jaw did not move once!” That was the only fact that he had taken
in.

Living things, then, moving things, or things that savor of
danger or of blood, that have a dramatic quality,—these are
the objects natively interesting to childhood, to the exclusion of
almost everything else; and the teacher of young children, until
more artificial interests have grown up, will keep in touch with
her pupils by constant appeal to such matters as these. Instruction
must be carried on objectively, experimentally, anecdotally. The
blackboard-drawing and story-telling must constantly come in. But
of course these methods cover only the first steps, and carry one
but a little way.

Can we now formulate any general principle by which the later
and more artificial interests connect themselves with these early
ones that the child brings with him to the school?

Fortunately, we can: there is a very simple law that relates the
acquired and the native interests with each other.

Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting
through becoming associated with an object in which an interest
already exists. The two associated objects grow, as it were,
together: the interesting portion sheds its quality over the whole;
and thus things not interesting in their own right borrow an
interest which becomes as real and as strong as that of any
natively interesting thing. The odd circumstance is that the
borrowing does not impoverish the source, the objects taken
together being more interesting, perhaps, than the originally
interesting portion was by itself.

This is one of the most striking proofs of the range of
application of the principle of association of ideas in psychology.
An idea will infect another with its own emotional interest when
they have become both associated together into any sort of a mental
total. As there is no limit to the various associations into which
an interesting idea may enter, one sees in how many ways an
interest may be derived.

You will understand this abstract statement easily if I take the
most frequent of concrete examples,—the interest which things
borrow from their connection with our own personal welfare. The
most natively interesting object to a man is his own personal self
and its fortunes. We accordingly see that the moment a thing
becomes connected with the fortunes of the self, it forthwith
becomes an interesting thing. Lend the child his books, pencils,
and other apparatus: then give them to him, make them his own, and
notice the new light with which they instantly shine in his eyes.
He takes a new kind of care of them altogether. In mature life, all
the drudgery of a man’s business or profession, intolerable in
itself, is shot through with engrossing significance because he
knows it to be associated with his personal fortunes. What more
deadly uninteresting object can there be than a railroad
time-table? Yet where will you find a more interesting object if
you are going on a journey, and by its means can find your train?
At such times the time-table will absorb a man’s entire attention,
its interest being borrowed solely from its relation to his
personal life. From all these facts there emerges a very simple
abstract programme for the teacher to follow in keeping the
attention of the child: Begin with the line of his native
interests, and offer him objects that have some immediate
connection with these. The kindergarten methods, the
object-teaching routine, the blackboard and manual-training
work,—all recognize this feature. Schools in which these
methods preponderate are schools where discipline is easy, and
where the voice of the master claiming order and attention in
threatening tones need never be heard.

Next, step by step, connect with these first objects and
experiences the later objects and ideas which you wish to instill.
Associate the new with the old in some natural and telling way, so
that the interest, being shed along from point to point, finally
suffuses the entire system of objects of thought.

This is the abstract statement; and, abstractly, nothing can be
easier to understand. It is in the fulfilment of the rule that the
difficulty lies; for the difference between an interesting and a
tedious teacher consists in little more than the inventiveness by
which the one is able to mediate these associations and
connections, and in the dulness in discovering such transitions
which the other shows. One teacher’s mind will fairly coruscate
with points of connection between the new lesson and the
circumstances of the children’s other experience. Anecdotes and
reminiscences will abound in her talk; and the shuttle of interest
will shoot backward and forward, weaving the new and the old
together in a lively and entertaining way. Another teacher has no
such inventive fertility, and his lesson will always be a dead and
heavy thing. This is the psychological meaning of the Herbartian
principle of ‘preparation’ for each lesson, and of correlating the
new with the old. It is the psychological meaning of that whole
method of concentration in studies of which you have been recently
hearing so much. When the geography and English and history and
arithmetic simultaneously make cross-references to one another, you
get an interesting set of processes all along the line.

If, then, you wish to insure the interest of your pupils, there
is only one way to do it; and that is to make certain that they
have something in their minds to attend with, when you begin
to talk. That something can consist in nothing but a previous lot
of ideas already interesting in themselves, and of such a nature
that the incoming novel objects which you present can dovetail into
them and form with them some kind of a logically associated or
systematic whole. Fortunately, almost any kind of a connection is
sufficient to carry the interest along. What a help is our
Philippine war at present in teaching geography! But before the war
you could ask the children if they ate pepper with their eggs, and
where they supposed the pepper came from. Or ask them if glass is a
stone, and, if not, why not; and then let them know how stones are
formed and glass manufactured. External links will serve as well as
those that are deeper and more logical. But interest, once shed
upon a subject, is liable to remain always with that subject. Our
acquisitions become in a measure portions of our personal self; and
little by little, as cross-associations multiply and habits of
familiarity and practice grow, the entire system of our objects of
thought consolidates, most of it becoming interesting for some
purposes and in some degree.

An adult man’s interests are almost every one of them intensely
artificial: they have slowly been built up. The objects of
professional interest are most of them, in their original nature,
repulsive; but by their connection with such natively exciting
objects as one’s personal fortune, one’s social responsibilities,
and especially by the force of inveterate habit, they grow to be
the only things for which in middle life a man profoundly
cares.

But in all these the spread and consolidation have followed
nothing but the principles first laid down. If we could recall for
a moment our whole individual history, we should see that our
professional ideals and the zeal they inspire are due to nothing
but the slow accretion of one mental object to another, traceable
backward from point to point till we reach the moment when, in the
nursery or in the schoolroom, some little story told, some little
object shown, some little operation witnessed, brought the first
new object and new interest within our ken by associating it with
some one of those primitively there. The interest now suffusing the
whole system took its rise in that little event, so insignificant
to us now as to be entirely forgotten. As the bees in swarming
cling to one another in layers till the few are reached whose feet
grapple the bough from which the swarm depends; so with the objects
of our thinking,—they hang to each other by associated links,
but the original source of interest in all of them is the
native interest which the earliest one once possessed.

XI. ATTENTION

Whoever treats of interest inevitably treats of attention, for
to say that an object is interesting is only another way of saying
that it excites attention. But in addition to the attention which
any object already interesting or just becoming interesting
claims—passive attention or spontaneous attention, we may
call it—there is a more deliberate attention,—voluntary
attention or attention with effort, as it is called,—which we
can give to objects less interesting or uninteresting in
themselves. The distinction between active and passive attention is
made in all books on psychology, and connects itself with the
deeper aspects of the topic. From our present purely practical
point of view, however, it is not necessary to be intricate; and
passive attention to natively interesting material requires no
further elucidation on this occasion. All that we need explicitly
to note is that, the more the passive attention is relied on, by
keeping the material interesting; and the less the kind of
attention requiring effort is appealed to; the more smoothly and
pleasantly the classroom work goes on. I must say a few more
words, however, about this latter process of voluntary and
deliberate attention.

One often hears it said that genius is nothing but a power of
sustained attention, and the popular impression probably prevails
that men of genius are remarkable for their voluntary powers in
this direction. But a little introspective observation will show
any one that voluntary attention cannot be continuously
sustained,—that it comes in beats. When we are studying
an uninteresting subject, if our mind tends to wander, we have to
bring back our attention every now and then by using distinct
pulses of effort, which revivify the topic for a moment, the mind
then running on for a certain number of seconds or minutes with
spontaneous interest, until again some intercurrent idea captures
it and takes it off. Then the processes of volitional recall must
be repeated once more. Voluntary attention, in short, is only a
momentary affair. The process, whatever it is, exhausts itself in
the single act; and, unless the matter is then taken in hand by
some trace of interest inherent in the subject, the mind fails to
follow it at all. The sustained attention of the genius, sticking
to his subject for hours together, is for the most part of the
passive sort. The minds of geniuses are full of copious and
original associations. The subject of thought, once started,
develops all sorts of fascinating consequences. The attention is
led along one of these to another in the most interesting manner,
and the attention never once tends to stray away.

In a commonplace mind, on the other hand, a subject develops
much less numerous associates: it dies out then quickly; and, if
the man is to keep up thinking of it at all, he must bring his
attention back to it by a violent wrench. In him, therefore, the
faculty of voluntary attention receives abundant opportunity for
cultivation in daily life. It is your despised business man, your
common man of affairs, (so looked down on by the literary awarders
of fame) whose virtue in this regard is likely to be most
developed; for he has to listen to the concerns of so many
uninteresting people, and to transact so much drudging detail, that
the faculty in question is always kept in training. A genius, on
the contrary, is the man in whom you are least likely to find the
power of attending to anything insipid or distasteful in itself. He
breaks his engagements, leaves his letters unanswered, neglects his
family duties incorrigibly, because he is powerless to turn his
attention down and back from those more interesting trains of
imagery with which his genius constantly occupies his mind.

Voluntary attention is thus an essentially instantaneous affair.
You can claim it, for your purposes in the schoolroom, by
commanding it in loud, imperious tones; and you can easily get it
in this way. But, unless the subject to which you thus recall their
attention has inherent power to interest the pupils, you will have
got it for only a brief moment; and their minds will soon be
wandering again. To keep them where you have called them, you must
make the subject too interesting for them to wander again. And for
that there is one prescription; but the prescription, like all our
prescriptions, is abstract, and, to get practical results from it,
you must couple it with mother-wit.

The prescription is that the subject must be made to show new
aspects of itself; to prompt new questions; in a word, to
change. From an unchanging subject the attention inevitably
wanders away. You can test this by the simplest possible case of
sensorial attention. Try to attend steadfastly to a dot on the
paper or on the wall. You presently find that one or the other of
two things has happened: either your field of vision has become
blurred, so that you now see nothing distinct at all, or else you
have involuntarily ceased to look at the dot in question, and are
looking at something else. But, if you ask yourself successive
questions about the dot,—how big it is, how far, of what
shape, what shade of color, etc.; in other words, if you turn it
over, if you think of it in various ways, and along with various
kinds of associates,—you can keep your mind on it for a
comparatively long time. This is what the genius does, in whose
hands a given topic coruscates and grows. And this is what the
teacher must do for every topic if he wishes to avoid too frequent
appeals to voluntary attention of the coerced sort. In all
respects, reliance upon such attention as this is a wasteful
method, bringing bad temper and nervous wear and tear as well as
imperfect results. The teacher who can get along by keeping
spontaneous interest excited must be regarded as the teacher with
the greatest skill.

There is, however, in all schoolroom work a large mass of
material that must be dull and unexciting, and to which it is
impossible in any continuous way to contribute an interest
associatively derived. There are, therefore, certain external
methods, which every teacher knows, of voluntarily arousing the
attention from time to time and keeping it upon the subject. Mr.
Fitch has a lecture on the art of securing attention, and he
briefly passes these methods in review; the posture must be
changed; places can be changed. Questions, after being answered
singly, may occasionally be answered in concert. Elliptical
questions may be asked, the pupil supplying the missing word. The
teacher must pounce upon the most listless child and wake him up.
The habit of prompt and ready response must be kept up.
Recapitulations, illustrations, examples, novelty of order, and
ruptures of routine,—all these are means for keeping the
attention alive and contributing a little interest to a dull
subject. Above all, the teacher must himself be alive and ready,
and must use the contagion of his own example.

But, when all is said and done, the fact remains that some
teachers have a naturally inspiring presence, and can make their
exercises interesting, while others simply cannot. And psychology
and general pedagogy here confess their failure, and hand things
over to the deeper springs of human personality to conduct the
task.

A brief reference to the physiological theory of the attentive
process may serve still further to elucidate these practical
remarks, and confirm them by showing them from a slightly different
point of view.

What is the attentive process, psychologically considered?
Attention to an object is what takes place whenever that object
most completely occupies the mind. For simplicity’s sake suppose
the object be an object of sensation,—a figure approaching us
at a distance on the road. It is far off, barely perceptible, and
hardly moving: we do not know with certainty whether it is a man or
not. Such an object as this, if carelessly looked at, may hardly
catch our attention at all. The optical impression may affect
solely the marginal consciousness, while the mental focus keeps
engaged with rival things. We may indeed not ‘see’ it till some one
points it out. But, if so, how does he point it out? By his finger,
and by describing its appearance,—by creating a premonitory
image of where to look and of what to expect to see.
This premonitory image is already an excitement of the same
nerve-centres that are to be concerned with the impression. The
impression comes, and excites them still further; and now the
object enters the focus of the field, consciousness being sustained
both by impression and by preliminary idea. But the maximum of
attention to it is not yet reached. Although we see it, we may not
care for it; it may suggest nothing important to us; and a rival
stream of objects or of thoughts may quickly take our mind away.
If, however, our companion defines it in a significant way, arouses
in the mind a set of experiences to be apprehended from
it,—names it an enemy or as a messenger of important
tidings,—the residual and marginal ideas now aroused, so far
from being its rivals, become its associates and allies. They shoot
together into one system with it; they converge upon it; they keep
it steadily in focus; the mind attends to it with maximum
power.

The attentive process, therefore, at its maximum may be
physiologically symbolized by a brain-cell played on in two ways,
from without and from within. Incoming currents from the periphery
arouse it, and collateral currents from the centres of memory and
imagination re-enforce these.

In this process the incoming impression is the newer element;
the ideas which re-enforce and sustain it are among the older
possessions of the mind. And the maximum of attention may then be
said to be found whenever we have a systematic harmony or
unification between the novel and the old. It is an odd
circumstance that neither the old nor the new, by itself, is
interesting: the absolutely old is insipid; the absolutely new
makes no appeal at all. The old in the new is what claims
the attention,—the old with a slightly new turn. No one wants
to hear a lecture on a subject completely disconnected with his
previous knowledge, but we all like lectures on subjects of which
we know a little already, just as, in the fashions, every year must
bring its slight modification of last year’s suit, but an abrupt
jump from the fashion of one decade into another would be
distasteful to the eye.

The genius of the interesting teacher consists in sympathetic
divination of the sort of material with which the pupil’s mind is
likely to be already spontaneously engaged, and in the ingenuity
which discovers paths of connection from that material to the
matters to be newly learned. The principle is easy to grasp, but
the accomplishment is difficult in the extreme. And a knowledge of
such psychology as this which I am recalling can no more make a
good teacher than a knowledge of the laws of perspective can make a
landscape painter of effective skill.

A certain doubt may now occur to some of you. A while ago,
apropos of the pugnacious instinct, I spoke of our modern pedagogy
as being possibly too ‘soft.’ You may perhaps here face me with my
own words, and ask whether the exclusive effort on the teacher’s
part to keep the pupil’s spontaneous interest going, and to avoid
the more strenuous path of voluntary attention to repulsive work,
does not savor also of sentimentalism. The greater part of
schoolroom work, you say, must, in the nature of things, always be
repulsive. To face uninteresting drudgery is a good part of life’s
work. Why seek to eliminate it from the schoolroom or minimize the
sterner law?

A word or two will obviate what might perhaps become a serious
misunderstanding here.

It is certain that most schoolroom work, till it has become
habitual and automatic, is repulsive, and cannot be done without
voluntarily jerking back the attention to it every now and then.
This is inevitable, let the teacher do what he will.

It flows from the inherent nature of the subjects and of the
learning mind. The repulsive processes of verbal memorizing, of
discovering steps of mathematical identity, and the like, must
borrow their interest at first from purely external sources, mainly
from the personal interests with which success in mastering them is
associated, such as gaining of rank, avoiding punishment, not being
beaten by a difficulty and the like. Without such borrowed
interest, the child could not attend to them at all. But in these
processes what becomes interesting enough to be attended to is not
thereby attended to without effort. Effort always has to go
on* derived interest, for the most part, not awakening attention
that is easy, however spontaneous it may now have to be
called. The interest which the teacher, by his utmost skill, can
lend to the subject, proves over and over again to be only an
interest sufficient to let loose the effort. The teacher,
therefore, need never concern himself about inventing
occasions where effort must be called into play. Let him still
awaken whatever sources of interest in the subject he can by
stirring up connections between it and the pupil’s nature, whether
in the line of theoretic curiosity, of personal interest, or of
pugnacious impulse. The laws of mind will then bring enough pulses
of effort into play to keep the pupil exercised in the direction of
the subject. There is, in fact, no greater school of effort than
the steady struggle to attend to immediately repulsive or difficult
objects of thought which have grown to interest us through their
association as means, with some remote ideal end.

The Herbartian doctrine of interest ought not, therefore, in
principle to be reproached with making pedagogy soft. If it do so,
it is because it is unintelligently carried on. Do not, then, for
the mere sake of discipline, command attention from your pupils in
thundering tones. Do not too often beg it from them as a favor, nor
claim it as a right, nor try habitually to excite it by preaching
the importance of the subject. Sometimes, indeed, you must do these
things; but, the more you have to do them, the less skilful teacher
you will show yourself to be. Elicit interest from within, by the
warmth with which you care for the topic yourself, and by following
the laws I have laid down.

If the topic be highly abstract, show its nature by concrete
examples. If it be unfamiliar, trace some point of analogy in it
with the known. If it be inhuman, make it figure as part of a
story. If it be difficult, couple its acquisition with some
prospect of personal gain. Above all things, make sure that it
shall run through certain inner changes, since no unvarying object
can possibly hold the mental field for long. Let your pupil wander
from one aspect to another of your subject, if you do not wish him
to wander from it altogether to something else, variety in unity
being the secret of all interesting talk and thought. The relation
of all these things to the native genius of the instructor is too
obvious to need comment again.

One more point, and I am done with the subject of attention.
There is unquestionably a great native variety among individuals in
the type of their attention. Some of us are naturally
scatterbrained, and others follow easily a train of connected
thoughts without temptation to swerve aside to other subjects. This
seems to depend on a difference between individuals in the type of
their field of consciousness. In some persons this is highly
focalized and concentrated, and the focal ideas predominate in
determining association. In others we must suppose the margin to be
brighter, and to be filled with something like meteoric showers of
images, which strike into it at random, displacing the focal ideas,
and carrying association in their own direction. Persons of the
latter type find their attention wandering every minute, and must
bring it back by a voluntary pull. The others sink into a subject
of meditation deeply, and, when interrupted, are ‘lost’ for a
moment before they come back to the outer world.

The possession of such a steady faculty of attention is
unquestionably a great boon. Those who have it can work more
rapidly, and with less nervous wear and tear. I am inclined to
think that no one who is without it naturally can by any amount of
drill or discipline attain it in a very high degree. Its amount is
probably a fixed characteristic of the individual. But I wish to
make a remark here which I shall have occasion to make again in
other connections. It is that no one need deplore unduly the
inferiority in himself of any one elementary faculty. This
concentrated type of attention is an elementary faculty: it is one
of the things that might be ascertained and measured by exercises
in the laboratory. But, having ascertained it in a number of
persons, we could never rank them in a scale of actual and
practical mental efficiency based on its degrees. The total mental
efficiency of a man is the resultant of the working together of all
his faculties. He is too complex a being for any one of them to
have the casting vote. If any one of them do have the casting vote,
it is more likely to be the strength of his desire and passion, the
strength of the interest he takes in what is proposed.
Concentration, memory, reasoning power, inventiveness, excellence
of the senses,—all are subsidiary to this. No matter how
scatter-brained the type of a man’s successive fields of
consciousness may be, if he really care for a subject, he
will return to it incessantly from his incessant wanderings, and
first and last do more with it, and get more results from it, than
another person whose attention may be more continuous during a
given interval, but whose passion for the subject is of a more
languid and less permanent sort. Some of the most efficient workers
I know are of the ultra-scatterbrained type. One friend, who does a
prodigious quantity of work, has in fact confessed to me that, if
he wants to get ideas on any subject, he sits down to work at
something else, his best results coming through his
mind-wanderings. This is perhaps an epigrammatic exaggeration on
his part; but I seriously think that no one of us need be too much
distressed at his own shortcomings in this regard. Our mind may
enjoy but little comfort, may be restless and feel confused; but it
may be extremely efficient all the same.

XII. MEMORY

We are following a somewhat arbitrary order. Since each and
every faculty we possess is either in whole or in part a resultant
of the play of our associations, it would have been as natural,
after treating of association, to treat of memory as to treat of
interest and attention next. But, since we did take the latter
operations first, we must take memory now without farther delay;
for the phenomena of memory are among the simplest and most
immediate consequences of the fact that our mind is essentially an
associating machine. There is no more pre-eminent example for
exhibiting the fertility of the laws of association as principles
of psychological analysis. Memory, moreover, is so important a
faculty in the schoolroom that you are probably waiting with some
eagerness to know what psychology has to say about it for your
help.

In old times, if you asked a person to explain why he came to be
remembering at that moment some particular incident in his previous
life, the only reply he could make was that his soul is endowed
with a faculty called memory; that it is the inalienable function
of this faculty to recollect; and that, therefore, he necessarily
at that moment must have a cognition of that portion of the past.
This explanation by a ‘faculty’ is one thing which explanation by
association has superseded altogether. If, by saying we have a
faculty of memory, you mean nothing more than the fact that we can
remember, nothing more than an abstract name for our power inwardly
to recall the past, there is no harm done: we do have the faculty;
for we unquestionably have such a power. But if, by faculty, you
mean a principle of explanation of our general power to
recall, your psychology is empty. The associationist
psychology, on the other hand, gives an explanation of each
particular fact of recollection; and, in so doing, it also gives an
explanation of the general faculty. The ‘faculty’ of memory is thus
no real or ultimate explanation; for it is itself explained as a
result of the association of ideas.

Nothing is easier than to show you just what I mean by this.
Suppose I am silent for a moment, and then say in commanding
accents: “Remember! Recollect!” Does your faculty of memory obey
the order, and reproduce any definite image from your past?
Certainly not. It stands staring into vacancy, and asking, “What
kind of a thing do you wish me to remember?” It needs in short, a
cue. But, if I say, remember the date of your birth, or
remember what you had for breakfast, or remember the succession of
notes in the musical scale; then your faculty of memory immediately
produces the required result: the ‘cue’ determines its vast
set of potentialities toward a particular point. And if you now
look to see how this happens, you immediately perceive that the cue
is something contiguously associated with the thing
recalled. The words, ‘date of my birth,’ have an ingrained
association with a particular number, month, and year; the words,
‘breakfast this morning,’ cut off all other lines of recall except
those which lead to coffee and bacon and eggs; the words, ‘musical
scale,’ are inveterate mental neighbors of do, ré, mi, fa,
sol, la, etc. The laws of association govern, in fact, all the
trains of our thinking which are not interrupted by sensations
breaking on us from without. Whatever appears in the mind must be
introduced; and, when introduced, it is as the associate of
something already there. This is as true of what you are
recollecting as it is of everything else you think of.

Reflection will show you that there are peculiarities in your
memory which would be quite whimsical and unaccountable if we were
forced to regard them as the product of a purely spiritual faculty.
Were memory such a faculty, granted to us solely for its practical
use, we ought to remember easiest whatever we most needed to
remember; and frequency of repetition, recency, and the like, would
play no part in the matter. That we should best remember frequent
things and recent things, and forget things that are ancient or
were experienced only once, could only be regarded as an
incomprehensible anomaly on such a view. But if we remember because
of our associations, and if these are (as the physiological
psychologists believe) due to our organized brain-paths, we easily
see how the law of recency and repetition should prevail. Paths
frequently and recently ploughed are those that lie most open,
those which may be expected most easily to lead to results. The
laws of our memory, as we find them, therefore are incidents of our
associational constitution; and, when we are emancipated from the
flesh, it is conceivable that they may no longer continue to
obtain.

We may assume, then, that recollection is a resultant of our
associative processes, these themselves in the last analysis being
most probably due to the workings of our brain.

Descending more particularly into the faculty of memory, we have
to distinguish between its potential aspect as a magazine or
storehouse and its actual aspect as recollection now of a
particular event. Our memory contains all sorts of items which we
do not now recall, but which we may recall, provided a sufficient
cue be offered. Both the general retention and the special recall
are explained by association. An educated memory depends on an
organized system of associations; and its goodness depends on two
of their peculiarities: first, on the persistency of the
associations; and, second, on their number.

Let us consider each of these points in turn.

First, the persistency of the associations. This gives what may
be called the quality of native retentiveness to the
individual. If, as I think we are forced to, we consider the brain
to be the organic condition by which the vestiges of our experience
are associated with each other, we may suppose that some brains are
‘wax to receive and marble to retain.’ The slightest impressions
made on them abide. Names, dates, prices, anecdotes, quotations,
are indelibly retained, their several elements fixedly cohering
together, so that the individual soon becomes a walking
cyclopædia of information. All this may occur with no
philosophic tendency in the mind, no impulse to weave the materials
acquired into anything like a logical system. In the books of
anecdotes, and, more recently, in the psychology-books, we find
recorded instances of monstrosities, as we may call them, of this
desultory memory; and they are often otherwise very stupid men. It
is, of course, by no means incompatible with a philosophic mind;
for mental characteristics have infinite capacities for
permutation. And, when both memory and philosophy combine together
in one person, then indeed we have the highest sort of intellectual
efficiency. Your Walter Scotts, your Leibnitzes, your Gladstones,
and your Goethes, all your folio copies of mankind, belong to this
type. Efficiency on a colossal scale would indeed seem to require
it. For, although your philosophic or systematic mind without good
desultory memory may know how to work out results and recollect
where in the books to find them, the time lost in the searching
process handicaps the thinker, and gives to the more ready type of
individual the economical advantage.

The extreme of the contrasted type, the type with associations
of small persistency, is found in those who have almost no
desultory memory at all. If they are also deficient in logical and
systematizing power, we call them simply feeble intellects; and no
more need to be said about them here. Their brain-matter, we may
imagine, is like a fluid jelly, in which impressions may be easily
made, but are soon closed over again, so that the brain reverts to
its original indifferent state.

But it may occur here, just as in other gelatinous substances,
that an impression will vibrate throughout the brain, and send
waves into other parts of it. In cases of this sort, although the
immediate impression may fade out quickly, it does modify the
cerebral mass; for the paths it makes there may remain, and become
so many avenues through which the impression may be reproduced if
they ever get excited again. And its liability to reproduction will
depend of course upon the variety of these paths and upon the
frequency with which they are used. Each path is in fact an
associated process, the number of these associates becoming thus to
a great degree a substitute for the independent tenacity of the
original impression. As I have elsewhere written: Each of the
associates is a hook to which it hangs, a means to fish it up when
sunk below the surface. Together they form a network of attachments
by which it is woven into the entire tissue of our thought. The
‘secret of a good memory’ is thus the secret of forming diverse and
multiple associations with every fact we care to retain. But this
forming of associations with a fact,—what is it but thinking
about the fact as much as possible? Briefly, then, of two
men with the same outward experiences, the one who thinks over
his experiences most, and weaves them into the most systematic
relations with each other, will be the one with the best
memory.

But, if our ability to recollect a thing be so largely a matter
of its associations with other things which thus becomes its cues,
an important pædagogic consequence follows. There can be
no improvement of the general or elementary faculty of memory:
there can only be improvement of our memory for special systems of
associated things; and this latter improvement is due to the
way in which the things in question are woven into association with
each other in the mind. Intricately or profoundly woven, they are
held: disconnected, they tend to drop out just in proportion as the
native brain retentiveness is poor. And no amount of training,
drilling, repeating, and reciting employed upon the matter of one
system of objects, the history-system, for example, will in the
least improve either the facility or the durability with which
objects belonging to a wholly disparate system—the system of
facts of chemistry, for instance—tend to be retained. That
system must be separately worked into the mind by itself,—a
chemical fact which is thought about in connection with the other
chemical facts, tending then to stay, but otherwise easily dropping
out.

We have, then, not so much a faculty of memory as many faculties
of memory. We have as many as we have systems of objects habitually
thought of in connection with each other. A given object is held in
the memory by the associates it has acquired within its own system
exclusively. Learning the facts of another system will in no wise
help it to stay in the mind, for the simple reason that it has no
‘cues’ within that other system.

We see examples of this on every hand. Most men have a good
memory for facts connected with their own pursuits. A college
athlete, who remains a dunce at his books, may amaze you by his
knowledge of the ‘records’ at various feats and games, and prove
himself a walking dictionary of sporting statistics. The reason is
that he is constantly going over these things in his mind, and
comparing and making series of them. They form for him, not so many
odd facts, but a concept-system, so they stick. So the merchant
remembers prices, the politician other politicians’ speeches and
votes, with a copiousness which astonishes outsiders, but which the
amount of thinking they bestow on these subjects easily
explains.

The great memory for facts which a Darwin or a Spencer reveal in
their books is not incompatible with the possession on their part
of a mind with only a middling degree of physiological
retentiveness. Let a man early in life set himself the task of
verifying such a theory as that of evolution, and facts will soon
cluster and cling to him like grapes to their stem. Their relations
to the theory will hold them fast; and, the more of these the mind
is able to discern, the greater the erudition will become.
Meanwhile the theorist may have little, if any, desultory memory.
Unutilizable facts may be unnoted by him, and forgotten as soon as
heard. An ignorance almost as encyclopedic as his erudition may
coexist with the latter, and hide, as it were, within the
interstices of its web. Those of you who have had much to do with
scholars and savants will readily think of examples of the
class of mind I mean.

The best possible sort of system into which to weave an object,
mentally, is a rational system, or what is called a
‘science.’ Place the thing in its pigeon-hole in a classificatory
series; explain it logically by its causes, and deduce from it its
necessary effects; find out of what natural law it is an
instance,—and you then know it in the best of all possible
ways. A ‘science’ is thus the greatest of labor-saving
contrivances. It relieves the memory of an immense number of
details, replacing, as it does, merely contiguous associations by
the logical ones of identity, similarity, or analogy. If you know a
‘law,’ you may discharge your memory of masses of particular
instances, for the law will reproduce them for you whenever you
require them. The law of refraction, for example: If you know that,
you can with a pencil and a bit of paper immediately discern how a
convex lens, a concave lens, or a prism, must severally alter the
appearance of an object. But, if you don’t know the general law,
you must charge your memory separately with each of the three kinds
of effect.

A ‘philosophic’ system, in which all things found their rational
explanation and were connected together as causes and effects,
would be the perfect mnemonic system, in which the greatest economy
of means would bring about the greatest richness of results. So
that, if we have poor desultory memories, we can save ourselves by
cultivating the philosophic turn of mind.

There are many artificial systems of mnemonics, some public,
some sold as secrets. They are all so many devices for training us
into certain methodical and stereotyped ways of thinking
about the facts we seek to retain. Even were I competent, I could
not here go into these systems in any detail. But a single example,
from a popular system, will show what I mean. I take the
number-alphabet, the great mnemonic device for recollecting numbers
and dates. In this system each digit is represented by a consonant,
thus: 1 is t or d; 2, n; 3, m; 4,
r; 5, l; 6, sh, j, ch, or g; 7, c,
k, g, or qu; 8, f or v; 9, b or
p; 0, s, c, or z. Suppose, now, you wish to
remember the velocity of sound, 1,142 feet a second: t, t, r,
n, are the letters you must use. They make the consonants of
tight run, and it would be a ‘tight run’ for you to keep up
such a speed. So 1649, the date of the execution of Charles I., may
be remembered by the word sharp, which recalls the
headsman’s axe.

Apart from the extreme difficulty of finding words that are
appropriate in this exercise, it is clearly an excessively poor,
trivial, and silly way of ‘thinking’ about dates; and the way of
the historian is much better. He has a lot of landmark-dates
already in his mind. He knows the historic concatenation of events,
and can usually place an event at its right date in the
chronology-table, by thinking of it in a rational way, referring it
to its antecedents, tracing its concomitants and consequences, and
thus ciphering out its date by connecting it with theirs. The
artificial memory-systems, recommending, as they do, such
irrational methods of thinking, are only to be recommended for the
first landmarks in a system, or for such purely detached facts as
enjoy no rational connection with the rest of our ideas. Thus the
student of physics may remember the order of the spectral colours
by the word vibgyor which their initial letters make. The
student of anatomy may remember the position of the Mitral valve on
the Left side of the heart by thinking that L.M. stands also for
‘long meter’ in the hymn-books.

You now see why ‘cramming’ must be so poor a mode of study.
Cramming seeks to stamp things in by intense application
immediately before the ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form
but few associations. On the other hand, the same thing recurring
on different days, in different contexts, read, recited on,
referred to again and again, related to other things and reviewed,
gets well wrought into the mental structure. This is the reason why
you should enforce on your pupils habits of continuous application.
There is no moral turpitude in cramming. It would be the best,
because the most economical, mode of study if it led to the results
desired. But it does not, and your older pupils can readily be made
to see the reason why.

It follows also, from what has been said, that the popular
idea that ‘the Memory,’ in the sense of a general elementary
faculty, can be improved by training, is a great mistake. Your
memory for facts of a certain class can be improved very much by
training in that class of facts, because the incoming new fact will
then find all sorts of analogues and associates already there, and
these will keep it liable to recall. But other kinds of fact will
reap none of that benefit, and, unless one have been also trained
and versed in their class, will be at the mercy of the mere
crude retentiveness of the individual, which, as we have seen, is
practically a fixed quantity. Nevertheless, one often hears people
say: “A great sin was committed against me in my youth: my teachers
entirely failed to exercise my memory. If they had only made me
learn a lot of things by heart at school, I should not be, as I am
now, forgetful of everything I read and hear.” This is a great
mistake: learning poetry by heart will make it easier to learn and
remember other poetry, but nothing else; and so of dates; and so of
chemistry and geography.

But, after what I have said, I am sure you will need no farther
argument on this point; and I therefore pass it by.

But, since it has brought me to speak of learning things by
heart, I think that a general practical remark about verbal
memorizing may now not be out of place. The excesses of
old-fashioned verbal memorizing, and the immense advantages of
object-teaching in the earlier stages of culture, have perhaps led
those who philosophize about teaching to an unduly strong reaction;
and learning things by heart is now probably somewhat too much
despised. For, when all is said and done, the fact remains that
verbal material is, on the whole, the handiest and most useful
material in which thinking can be carried on. Abstract conceptions
are far and away the most economical instruments of thought, and
abstract conceptions are fixed and incarnated for us in words.
Statistical inquiry would seem to show that, as men advance in
life, they tend to make less and less use of visual images, and
more and more use of words. One of the first things that Mr. Galton
discovered was that this appeared to be the case with the members
of the Royal Society whom he questioned as to their mental images.
I should say, therefore, that constant exercise in verbal
memorizing must still be an indispensable feature in all sound
education. Nothing is more deplorable than that inarticulate and
helpless sort of mind that is reminded by everything of some
quotation, case, or anecdote, which it cannot now exactly
recollect. Nothing, on the other hand, is more convenient to its
possessor, or more delightful to his comrades, than a mind able, in
telling a story, to give the exact words of the dialogue or to
furnish a quotation accurate and complete. In every branch of study
there are happily turned, concise, and handy formulas which in an
incomparable way sum up results. The mind that can retain such
formulas is in so far a superior mind, and the communication of
them to the pupil ought always to be one of the teacher’s favorite
tasks.

In learning ‘by heart,’ there are, however, efficient and
inefficient methods; and, by making the pupil skilful in the best
method, the teacher can both interest him and abridge the task. The
best method is of course not to ‘hammer in’ the sentences, by mere
reiteration, but to analyze them, and think. For example, if the
pupil should have to learn this last sentence, let him first strip
out its grammatical core, and learn, “The best method is not to
hammer in, but to analyze,” and then add the amplificative and
restrictive clauses, bit by bit, thus: “The best method is of
course not to hammer in the sentences, but to analyze
them and think.” Then finally insert the words ‘by mere
reiteration,’ and the sentence is complete, and both better
understood and quicker remembered than by a more purely mechanical
method.

In conclusion, I must say a word about the contributions to our
knowledge of memory which have recently come from the
laboratory-psychologists. Many of the enthusiasts for scientific or
brass-instrument child-study are taking accurate measurements of
children’s elementary faculties, and among these what we may call
immediate memory admits of easy measurement. All we need do
is to exhibit to the child a series of letters, syllables, figures,
pictures, or what-not, at intervals of one, two, three, or more
seconds, or to sound a similar series of names at the same
intervals, within his hearing, and then see how completely he can
reproduce the list, either directly, or after an interval of ten,
twenty, or sixty seconds, or some longer space of time. According
to the results of this exercise, the pupils may be rated in a
memory-scale; and some persons go so far as to think that the
teacher should modify her treatment of the child according to the
strength or feebleness of its faculty as thus made known.

Now I can only repeat here what I said to you when treating of
attention: man is too complex a being for light to be thrown on his
real efficiency by measuring any one mental faculty taken apart
from its consensus in the working whole. Such an exercise as this,
dealing with incoherent and insipid objects, with no logical
connection with each other, or practical significance outside of
the ‘test,’ is an exercise the like of which in real life we are
hardly ever called upon to perform. In real life, our memory is
always used in the service of some interest: we remember things
which we care for or which are associated with things we care for;
and the child who stands at the bottom of the scale thus
experimentally established might, by dint of the strength of his
passion for a subject, and in consequence of the logical
association into which he weaves the actual materials of his
experience, be a very effective memorizer indeed, and do his
school-tasks on the whole much better than an immediate parrot who
might stand at the top of the ‘scientifically accurate’ list.

This preponderance of interest, of passion, in determining the
results of a human being’s working life, obtains throughout. No
elementary measurement, capable of being performed in a laboratory,
can throw any light on the actual efficiency of the subject; for
the vital thing about him, his emotional and moral energy and
doggedness, can be measured by no single experiment, and becomes
known only by the total results in the long run. A blind man like
Huber, with his passion for bees and ants, can observe them through
other people’s eyes better than these can through their own. A man
born with neither arms nor legs, like the late Kavanagh,
M.P.—and what an icy heart his mother must have had about him
in his babyhood, and how ‘negative’ would the
laboratory-measurements of his motor-functions have been!—can
be an adventurous traveller, an equestrian and sportsman, and lead
an athletic outdoor life. Mr. Romanes studied the elementary rate
of apperception in a large number of persons by making them read a
paragraph as fast as they could take it in, and then immediately
write down all they could reproduce of its contents. He found
astonishing differences in the rapidity, some taking four times as
long as others to absorb the paragraph, and the swiftest readers
being, as a rule, the best immediate recollectors, too. But
not,—and this is my point,—not the most
intellectually capable subjects, as tested by the results of
what Mr. Romanes rightly names ‘genuine’ intellectual work; for he
tried the experiment with several highly distinguished men in
science and literature, and most of them turned out to be slow
readers.

In the light of all such facts one may well believe that the
total impression which a perceptive teacher will get of the pupil’s
condition, as indicated by his general temper and manner, by the
listlessness or alertness, by the ease or painfulness with which
his school work is done, will be of much more value than those
unreal experimental tests, those pedantic elementary measurements
of fatigue, memory, association, and attention, etc., which are
urged upon us as the only basis of a genuinely scientific pedagogy.
Such measurements can give us useful information only when we
combine them with observations made without brass instruments, upon
the total demeanor of the measured individual, by teachers with
eyes in their heads and common sense, and some feeling for the
concrete facts of human nature in their hearts.

Depend upon it, no one need be too much cast down by the
discovery of his deficiency in any elementary faculty of the mind.
What tells in life is the whole mind working together, and the
deficiencies of any one faculty can be compensated by the efforts
of the rest. You can be an artist without visual images, a reader
without eyes, a mass of erudition with a bad elementary memory. In
almost any subject your passion for the subject will save you. If
you only care enough for a result, you will almost certainly attain
it. If you wish to be rich, you will be rich; if you wish to be
learned, you will be learned; if you wish to be good, you will be
good. Only you must, then, really wish these things, and
wish them with exclusiveness, and not wish at the same time a
hundred other incompatible things just as strongly.

One of the most important discoveries of the ‘scientific’ sort
that have recently been made in psychology is that of Mr. Galton
and others concerning the great variations among individuals in the
type of their imagination. Every one is now familiar with the fact
that human beings vary enormously in the brilliancy, completeness,
definiteness, and extent of their visual images. These are
singularly perfect in a large number of individuals, and in a few
are so rudimentary as hardly to exist. The same is true of the
auditory and motor images, and probably of those of every kind; and
the recent discovery of distinct brain-areas for the various orders
of sensation would seem to provide a physical basis for such
variations and discrepancies. The facts, as I said, are nowadays so
popularly known that I need only remind you of their existence.
They might seem at first sight of practical importance to the
teacher; and, indeed, teachers have been recommended to sort their
pupils in this way, and treat them as the result falls out. You
should interrogate them as to their imagery, it is said, or exhibit
lists of written words to their eyes, and then sound similar lists
in their ears, and see by which channel a child retains most words.
Then, in dealing with that child, make your appeals predominantly
through that channel. If the class were very small, results of some
distinctness might doubtless thus be obtained by a painstaking
teacher. But it is obvious that in the usual schoolroom no such
differentiation of appeal is possible; and the only really useful
practical lesson that emerges from this analytic psychology in the
conduct of large schools is the lesson already reached in a purely
empirical way, that the teacher ought always to impress the class
through as many sensible channels as he can. Talk and write and
draw on blackboard, permit the pupils to talk, and make them write
and draw, exhibit pictures, plans, and curves, have your diagrams
colored differently in their different parts, etc.; and out of the
whole variety of impressions the individual child will find the
most lasting ones for himself. In all primary school work this
principle of multiple impressions is well recognized, so I need say
no more about it here.

This principle of multiplying channels and varying associations
and appeals is important, not only for teaching pupils to remember,
but for teaching them to understand. It runs, in fact, through the
whole teaching art.

One word about the unconscious and unreproducible part of our
acquisitions, and I shall have done with the topic of memory.

Professor Ebbinghaus, in a heroic little investigation into the
laws of memory which he performed a dozen or more years ago by the
method of learning lists of nonsense syllables, devised a method of
measuring the rate of our forgetfulness, which lays bare an
important law of the mind.

His method was to read over his list until he could repeat it
once by heart unhesitatingly. The number of repetitions required
for this was a measure of the difficulty of the learning in each
particular case. Now, after having once learned a piece in this
way, if we wait five minutes, we find it impossible to repeat it
again in the same unhesitating manner. We must read it over again
to revive some of the syllables, which have already dropped out or
got transposed. Ebbinghaus now systematically studied the number of
readings-over which were necessary to revive the unhesitating
recollection of the piece after five minutes, half an hour, an
hour, a day, a week, a month, had elapsed. The number of rereadings
required he took to be a measure of the amount of forgetting
that had occurred in the elapsed interval. And he found some
remarkable facts. The process of forgetting, namely, is vastly more
rapid at first than later on. Thus full half of the piece seems to
be forgotten within the first half-hour, two-thirds of it are
forgotten at the end of eight hours, but only four-fifths at the
end of a month. He made no trials beyond one month of interval;
but, if we ourselves prolong ideally the curve of remembrance,
whose beginning his experiments thus obtain, it is natural to
suppose that, no matter how long a time might elapse, the curve
would never descend quite so low as to touch the zero-line. In
other words, no matter how long ago we may have learned a poem, and
no matter how complete our inability to reproduce it now may be,
yet the first learning will still show its lingering effects in the
abridgment of the time required for learning it again. In short,
Professor Ebbinghaus’s experiments show that things which we are
quite unable definitely to recall have nevertheless impressed
themselves, in some way, upon the structure of the mind. We are
different for having once learned them. The resistances in our
systems of brain-paths are altered. Our apprehensions are
quickened. Our conclusions from certain premises are probably not
just what they would be if those modifications were not there. The
latter influence the whole margin of our consciousness, even though
their products, not being distinctly reproducible, do not directly
figure at the focus of the field.

The teacher should draw a lesson from these facts. We are all
too apt to measure the gains of our pupils by their proficiency in
directly reproducing in a recitation or an examination such matters
as they may have learned, and inarticulate power in them is
something of which we always underestimate the value. The boy who
tells us, “I know the answer, but I can’t say what it is,” we treat
as practically identical with him who knows absolutely nothing
about the answer at all. But this is a great mistake. It is but a
small part of our experience in life that we are ever able
articulately to recall. And yet the whole of it has had its
influence in shaping our character and defining our tendencies to
judge and act. Although the ready memory is a great blessing to its
possessor, the vaguer memory of a subject, of having once had to do
with it, of its neighborhood, and of where we may go to recover it
again, constitutes in most men and women the chief fruit of their
education. This is true even in professional education. The doctor,
the lawyer, are seldom able to decide upon a case off-hand. They
differ from other men only through the fact that they know how to
get at the materials for decision in five minutes or half an hour:
whereas the layman is unable to get at the materials at all, not
knowing in what books and indexes to look or not understanding the
technical terms.

Be patient, then, and sympathetic with the type of mind that
cuts a poor figure in examinations. It may, in the long examination
which life sets us, come out in the end in better shape than the
glib and ready reproducer, its passions being deeper, its purposes
more worthy, its combining power less commonplace, and its total
mental output consequently more important.

Such are the chief points which it has seemed worth while for me
to call to your notice under the head of memory. We can sum them up
for practical purposes by saying that the art of remembering is the
art of thinking; and by adding, with Dr. Pick, that, when we
wish to fix a new thing in either our own mind or a pupil’s, our
conscious effort should not be so much to impress and
retain it as to connect it with something else
already there. The connecting is the thinking; and, if we
attend clearly to the connection, the connected thing will
certainly be likely to remain within recall.

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

XIII. THE ACQUISITION OF
IDEAS

The images of our past experiences, of whatever nature they may
be, visual or verbal, blurred and dim, vivid and distinct, abstract
or concrete, need not be memory images, in the strict sense of the
word. That is, they need not rise before the mind in a marginal
fringe or context of concomitant circumstances, which mean for us
their date. They may be mere conceptions, floating pictures
of an object, or of its type or class. In this undated condition,
we call them products of ‘imagination’ or ‘conception.’ Imagination
is the term commonly used where the object represented is thought
of as an individual thing. Conception is the term where we think of
it as a type or class. For our present purpose the distinction is
not important; and I will permit myself to use either the word
‘conception,’ or the still vaguer word ‘idea,’ to designate the
inner objects of contemplation, whether these be individual things,
like ‘the sun’ or ‘Julius Cæsar,’ or classes of things, like
‘animal kingdom,’ or, finally, entirely abstract attributes, like
‘rationality’ or ‘rectitude.’

The result of our education is to fill the mind little by
little, as experiences accrete, with a stock of such ideas. In the
illustration I used at our first meeting, of the child snatching
the toy and getting slapped, the vestiges left by the first
experience answered to so many ideas which he acquired
thereby,—ideas that remained with him associated in a certain
order, and from the last one of which the child eventually
proceeded to act. The sciences of grammar and of logic are little
more than attempts methodically to classify all such acquired ideas
and to trace certain laws of relationship among them. The forms of
relation between them, becoming themselves in turn noticed by the
mind, are treated as conceptions of a higher and more abstract
order, as when we speak of a syllogistic relation’ between
propositions, or of four quantities making a ‘proportion,’ or of
the ‘inconsistency’ of two conceptions, or the ‘implication’ of one
in the other.

So you see that the process of education, taken in a large way,
may be described as nothing but the process of acquiring ideas or
conceptions, the best educated mind being the mind which has the
largest stock of them, ready to meet the largest possible variety
of the emergencies of life. The lack of education means only the
failure to have acquired them, and the consequent liability to be
‘floored’ and ‘rattled’ in the vicissitudes of experience.

In all this process of acquiring conceptions, a certain
instinctive order is followed. There is a native tendency to
assimilate certain kinds of conception at one age, and other kinds
of conception at a later age. During the first seven or eight years
of childhood the mind is most interested in the sensible properties
of material things. Constructiveness is the instinct most
active; and by the incessant hammering and sawing, and dressing and
undressing dolls, putting of things together and taking them apart,
the child not only trains the muscles to co-ordinate action, but
accumulates a store of physical conceptions which are the basis of
his knowledge of the material world through life. Object-teaching
and manual training wisely extend the sphere of this order of
acquisition. Clay, wood, metals, and the various kinds of tools are
made to contribute to the store. A youth brought up with a
sufficiently broad basis of this kind is always at home in the
world. He stands within the pale. He is acquainted with Nature, and
Nature in a certain sense is acquainted with him. Whereas the youth
brought up alone at home, with no acquaintance with anything but
the printed page, is always afflicted with a certain remoteness
from the material facts of life, and a correlative insecurity of
consciousness which make of him a kind of alien on the earth in
which he ought to feel himself perfectly at home.

I already said something of this in speaking of the constructive
impulse, and I must not repeat myself. Moreover, you fully realize,
I am sure, how important for life,—for the moral tone of
life, quite apart from definite practical pursuits,—is this
sense of readiness for emergencies which a man gains through early
familiarity and acquaintance with the world of material things. To
have grown up on a farm, to have haunted a carpenter’s and
blacksmith’s shop, to have handled horses and cows and boats and
guns, and to have ideas and abilities connected with such objects
are an inestimable part of youthful acquisition. After adolescence
it is rare to be able to get into familiar touch with any of these
primitive things. The instinctive propensions have faded, and the
habits are hard to acquire.

Accordingly, one of the best fruits of the ‘child-study’
movement has been to reinstate all these activities to their proper
place in a sound system of education. Feed the growing human
being, feed him with the sort of experience for which from year to
year he shows a natural craving, and he will develop in adult life
a sounder sort of mental tissue, even though he may seem to be
‘wasting’ a great deal of his growing time, in the eyes of those
for whom the only channels of learning are books and verbally
communicated information.

It is not till adolescence is reached that the mind grows able
to take in the more abstract aspects of experience, the hidden
similarities and distinctions between things, and especially their
causal sequences. Rational knowledge of such things as mathematics,
mechanics, chemistry, and biology, is now possible; and the
acquisition of conceptions of this order form the next phase of
education. Later still, not till adolescence is well advanced, does
the mind awaken to a systematic interest in abstract human
relations—moral relations, properly so called,—to
sociological ideas and to metaphysical abstractions.

This general order of sequence is followed traditionally of
course in the schoolroom. It is foreign to my purpose to do more
than indicate that general psychological principle of the
successive order of awakening of the faculties on which the whole
thing rests. I have spoken of it already, apropos of the
transitoriness of instincts. Just as many a youth has to go
permanently without an adequate stock of conceptions of a certain
order, because experiences of that order were not yielded at the
time when new curiosity was most acute, so it will conversely
happen that many another youth is spoiled for a certain subject of
study (although he would have enjoyed it well if led into it at a
later age) through having had it thrust upon him so prematurely
that disgust was created, and the bloom quite taken off from future
trials. I think I have seen college students unfitted forever for
‘philosophy’ from having taken that study up a year too soon.

In all these later studies, verbal material is the vehicle by
which the mind thinks. The abstract conceptions of physics and
sociology may, it is true, be embodied in visual or other images of
phenomena, but they need not be so; and the truth remains that,
after adolescence has begun, “words, words, words,” must constitute
a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what
the human being has to learn. This is so even in the natural
sciences, so far as these are causal and rational, and not merely
confined to description. So I go back to what I said awhile ago
apropos of verbal memorizing. The more accurately words are
learned, the better, if only the teacher make sure that what they
signify is also understood. It is the failure of this latter
condition, in so much of the old-fashioned recitation, that has
caused that reaction against ‘parrot-like reproduction’ that we are
so familiar with to-day. A friend of mine, visiting a school, was
asked to examine a young class in geography. Glancing, at the book,
she said: “Suppose you should dig a hole in the ground, hundreds of
feet deep, how should you find it at the bottom,—warmer or
colder than on top?” None of the class replying, the teacher said:
“I’m sure they know, but I think you don’t ask the question quite
rightly. Let me try.” So, taking the book, she asked: “In what
condition is the interior of the globe?” and received the immediate
answer from half the class at once: “The interior of the globe is
in a condition of igneous fusion.” Better exclusive
object-teaching than such verbal recitations as that; and yet
verbal reproduction, intelligently connected with more objective
work, must always play a leading, and surely the leading,
part in education. Our modern reformers, in their books, write too
exclusively of the earliest years of the pupil. These lend
themselves better to explicit treatment; and I myself, in dwelling
so much upon the native impulses, and object-teaching, and
anecdotes, and all that, have paid my tribute to the line of least
resistance in describing. Yet away back in childhood we find the
beginnings of purely intellectual curiosity, and the intelligence
of abstract terms. The object-teaching is mainly to launch
the pupils, with some concrete conceptions of the facts concerned,
upon the more abstract ideas.

To hear some authorities on teaching, however, you would suppose
that geography not only began, but ended with the school-yard and
neighboring hill, that physics was one endless round of repeating
the same sort of tedious weighing and measuring operation: whereas
a very few examples are usually sufficient to set the imagination
free on genuine lines, and then what the mind craves is more rapid,
general, and abstract treatment. I heard a lady say that she had
taken her child to the kindergarten, “but he is so bright that he
saw through it immediately.” Too many school children ‘see’ as
immediately ‘through’ the namby-pamby attempts of the softer
pedagogy to lubricate things for them, and make them interesting.
Even they can enjoy abstractions, provided they be of the proper
order; and it is a poor compliment to their rational appetite to
think that anecdotes about little Tommies and little Jennies are
the only kind of things their minds can digest.

But here, as elsewhere, it is a matter of more or less; and, in
the last resort, the teacher’s own tact is the only thing that can
bring out the right effect. The great difficulty with abstractions
is that of knowing just what meaning the pupil attaches to the
terms he uses. The words may sound all right, but the meaning
remains the child’s own secret. So varied forms of words must be
insisted on, to bring the secret out. And a strange secret does it
often prove. A relative of mine was trying to explain to a little
girl what was meant by ‘the passive voice’: “Suppose that you kill
me: you who do the killing are in the active voice, and I, who am
killed, am in the passive voice.” “But how can you speak if you’re
killed?” said the child. “Oh, well, you may suppose that I am not
yet quite dead!” The next day the child was asked, in class, to
explain the passive voice, and said, “It’s the kind of voice you
speak with when you ain’t quite dead.”

In such a case as this the illustration ought to have been more
varied. Every one’s memory will probably furnish examples of the
fantastic meaning which their childhood attached to certain verbal
statements (in poetry often), and which their elders, not having
any reason to suspect, never corrected. I remember being greatly
moved emotionally at the age of eight by the ballad of Lord Ullin’s
Daughter. Yet I thought that the staining of the heather by the
blood was the evil chiefly dreaded, and that, when the boatman
said,

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

and finding no inward difficulty.

The only safeguard against this sort of misconceiving is to
insist on varied statement, and to bring the child’s conceptions,
wherever it be possible, to some sort of practical test.

Let us next pass to the subject of Apperception.

XIV.
APPERCEPTION

‘Apperception’ is a word which cuts a great figure in the
pedagogics of the present day. Read, for example, this
advertisement of a certain text-book, which I take from an
educational journal:—

WHAT IS APPERCEPTION?

For an explanation of Apperception see Blank’s PSYCHOLOGY,
Vol. —— of the —— Education Series, just
published.

The difference between Perception and Apperception is explained
for the teacher in the preface to Blank’s PSYCHOLOGY.

Many teachers are inquiring, “What is the meaning of
Apperception in educational psychology?” Just the book for them is
Blank’s PSYCHOLOGY in which the idea was first expounded.

The most important idea in educational psychology is
Apperception. The teacher may find this expounded in Blank’s
PSYCHOLOGY. The idea of Apperception is making a revolution in
educational methods in Germany. It is explained in Blank’s
PSYCHOLOGY, Vol. —— of the —— Education
Series, just published.

Blank’s PSYCHOLOGY will be mailed prepaid to any address on
receipt of $1.00.

Such an advertisement is in sober earnest a disgrace to all
concerned; and such talk as it indulges in is the sort of thing I
had in view when I said at our first meeting that the teachers were
suffering at the present day from a certain industrious
mystification on the part of editors and publishers. Perhaps the
word ‘apperception’ flourished in their eyes and ears as it
nowadays often is, embodies as much of this mystification as any
other single thing. The conscientious young teacher is led to
believe that it contains a recondite and portentous secret, by
losing the true inwardness of which her whole career may be
shattered. And yet, when she turns to the books and reads about it,
it seems so trivial and commonplace a matter,—meaning nothing
more than the manner in which we receive a thing into our
minds,—that she fears she must have missed the point through
the shallowness of her intelligence, and goes about thereafter
afflicted with a sense either of uncertainty or of stupidity, and
in each case remaining mortified at being so inadequate to her
mission.

Now apperception is an extremely useful word in pedagogics, and
offers a convenient name for a process to which every teacher must
frequently refer. But it verily means nothing more than the act of
taking a thing into the mind. It corresponds to nothing peculiar or
elementary in psychology, being only one of the innumerable results
of the psychological process of association of ideas; and
psychology itself can easily dispense with the word, useful as it
may be in pedagogics.

The gist of the matter is this: Every impression that comes in
from without, be it a sentence which we hear, an object of vision,
or an effluvium which assails our nose, no sooner enters our
consciousness than it is drafted off in some determinate direction
or other, making connection with the other materials already there,
and finally producing what we call our reaction. The particular
connections it strikes into are determined by our past experiences
and the ‘associations’ of the present sort of impression with them.
If, for instance, you hear me call out A, B, C, it is ten to one
that you will react on the impression by inwardly or outwardly
articulating D, E, F. The impression arouses its old associates:
they go out to meet it; it is received by them, recognized by the
mind as ‘the beginning of the alphabet.’ It is the fate of every
impression thus to fall into a mind preoccupied with memories,
ideas, and interests, and by these it is taken in. Educated as we
already are, we never get an experience that remains for us
completely nondescript: it always reminds of something
similar in quality, or of some context that might have surrounded
it before, and which it now in some way suggests. This mental
escort which the mind supplies is drawn, of course, from the mind’s
ready-made stock. We conceive the impression in some
definite way. We dispose of it according to our acquired
possibilities, be they few or many, in the way of ‘ideas.’ This way
of taking in the object is the process of apperception. The
conceptions which meet and assimilate it are called by Herbart the
‘apperceiving mass.’ The apperceived impression is engulfed in
this, and the result is a new field of consciousness, of which one
part (and often a very small part) comes from the outer world, and
another part (sometimes by far the largest) comes from the previous
contents of the mind.

I think that you see plainly enough now that the process of
apperception is what I called it a moment ago, a resultant of the
association of ideas. The product is a sort of fusion of the new
with the old, in which it is often impossible to distinguish the
share of the two factors. For example, when we listen to a person
speaking or read a page of print, much of what we think we see or
hear is supplied from our memory. We overlook misprints, imagining
the right letters, though we see the wrong ones; and how little we
actually hear, when we listen to speech, we realize when we go to a
foreign theatre; for there what troubles us is not so much that we
cannot understand what the actors say as that we cannot hear their
words. The fact is that we hear quite as little under similar
conditions at home, only our mind, being fuller of English verbal
associations, supplies the requisite material for comprehension
upon a much slighter auditory hint.

In all the apperceptive operations of the mind, a certain
general law makes itself felt,—the law of economy. In
admitting a new body of experience, we instinctively seek to
disturb as little as possible our pre-existing stock of ideas. We
always try to name a new experience in some way which will
assimilate it to what we already know. We hate anything
absolutely new, anything without any name, and for which a
new name must be forged. So we take the nearest name, even though
it be inappropriate. A child will call snow, when he sees it for
the first time, sugar or white butterflies. The sail of a boat he
calls a curtain; an egg in its shell, seen for the first time, he
calls a pretty potato; an orange, a ball; a folding corkscrew, a
pair of bad scissors. Caspar Hauser called the first geese he saw
horses, and the Polynesians called Captain Cook’s horses pigs. Mr.
Rooper has written a little book on apperception, to which he gives
the title of “A Pot of Green Feathers,” that being the name applied
to a pot of ferns by a child who had never seen ferns before.

In later life this economical tendency to leave the old
undisturbed leads to what we know as ‘old fogyism.’ A new idea or a
fact which would entail extensive rearrangement of the previous
system of beliefs is always ignored or extruded from the mind in
case it cannot be sophistically reinterpreted so as to tally
harmoniously with the system. We have all conducted discussions
with middle-aged people, overpowered them with our reasons, forced
them to admit our contention, and a week later found them back as
secure and constant in their old opinion as if they had never
conversed with us at all. We call them old fogies; but there are
young fogies, too. Old fogyism begins at a younger age than we
think. I am almost afraid to say so, but I believe that in the
majority of human beings it begins at about twenty-five.

In some of the books we find the various forms of apperception
codified, and their subdivisions numbered and ticketed in tabular
form in the way so delightful to the pedagogic eye. In one book
which I remember reading there were sixteen different types of
apperception discriminated from each other. There was associative
apperception, subsumptive apperception, assimilative apperception,
and others up to sixteen. It is needless to say that this is
nothing but an exhibition of the crass artificiality which has
always haunted psychology, and which perpetuates itself by
lingering along, especially in these works which are advertised as
‘written for the use of teachers.’ The flowing life of the mind is
sorted into parcels suitable for presentation in the
recitation-room, and chopped up into supposed ‘processes’ with long
Greek and Latin names, which in real life have no distinct
existence.

There is no reason, if we are classing the different types of
apperception, why we should stop at sixteen rather than sixteen
hundred. There are as many types of apperception as there are
possible ways in which an incoming experience may be reacted on by
an individual mind. A little while ago, at Buffalo, I was the guest
of a lady who, a fortnight before, had taken her seven-year-old boy
for the first time to Niagara Falls. The child silently glared at
the phenomenon until his mother, supposing him struck speechless by
its sublimity, said, “Well, my boy, what do you think of it?” to
which, “Is that the kind of spray I spray my nose with?” was the
boy’s only reply. That was his mode of apperceiving the spectacle.
You may claim this as a particular type, and call it by the Greek
name of rhinotherapeutical apperception, if you like; and, if you
do, you will hardly be more trivial or artificial than are some of
the authors of the books.

M. Perez, in one of his books on childhood, gives a good example
of the different modes of apperception of the same phenomenon which
are possible at different stages of individual experience. A
dwelling-house took fire, and an infant in the family, witnessing
the conflagration from the arms of his nurse, standing outside,
expressed nothing but the liveliest delight at its brilliancy. But,
when the bell of the fire engine was heard approaching, the child
was thrown by the sound into a paroxysm of fear, strange sounds
being, as you know, very alarming to young children. In what
opposite ways must the child’s parents have apperceived the burning
house and the engine respectively!

The self-same person, according to the line of thought he may be
in, or to his emotional mood, will apperceive the same impression
quite differently on different occasions. A medical or engineering
expert retained on one side of a case will not apperceive the facts
in the same way as if the other side had retained him. When people
are at loggerheads about the interpretation of a fact, it usually
shows that they have too few heads of classification to apperceive
by; for, as a general thing, the fact of such a dispute is enough
to show that neither one of their rival interpretations is a
perfect fit. Both sides deal with the matter by approximation,
squeezing it under the handiest or least disturbing conception:
whereas it would, nine times out of ten, be better to enlarge their
stock of ideas or invent some altogether new title for the
phenomenon.

Thus, in biology, we used to have interminable discussion as to
whether certain single-celled organisms were animals or vegetables,
until Haeckel introduced the new apperceptive name of Protista,
which ended the disputes. In law courts no tertium quid is
recognized between insanity and sanity. If sane, a man is punished:
if insane, acquitted; and it is seldom hard to find two experts who
will take opposite views of his case. All the while, nature is more
subtle than our doctors. Just as a room is neither dark nor light
absolutely, but might be dark for a watchmaker’s uses, and yet
light enough to eat in or play in, so a man may be sane for some
purposes and insane for others,—sane enough to be left at
large, yet not sane enough to take care of his financial affairs.
The word ‘crank,’ which became familiar at the time of Guiteau’s
trial, fulfilled the need of a tertium quid. The foreign
terms ‘déséquilibré,’ ‘hereditary degenerate,’
and ‘psychopathic’ subject, have arisen in response to the same
need.

The whole progress of our sciences goes on by the invention of
newly forged technical names whereby to designate the newly
remarked aspects of phenomena,—phenomena which could only be
squeezed with violence into the pigeonholes of the earlier stock of
conceptions. As time goes on, our vocabulary becomes thus ever more
and more voluminous, having to keep up with the ever-growing
multitude of our stock of apperceiving ideas.

In this gradual process of interaction between the new and the
old, not only is the new modified and determined by the particular
sort of old which apperceives it, but the apperceiving mass, the
old itself, is modified by the particular kind of new which it
assimilates. Thus, to take the stock German example of the child
brought up in a house where there are no tables but square ones,
‘table’ means for him a thing in which square corners are
essential. But, if he goes to a house where there are round tables
and still calls them tables, his apperceiving notion ‘table’
acquires immediately a wider inward content. In this way, our
conceptions are constantly dropping characters once supposed
essential, and including others once supposed inadmissible. The
extension of the notion ‘beast’ to porpoises and whales, of the
notion ‘organism’ to society, are familiar examples of what I
mean.

But be our conceptions adequate or inadequate, and be our stock
of them large or small, they are all we have to work with. If an
educated man is, as I said, a group of organized tendencies to
conduct, what prompts the conduct is in every case the man’s
conception of the way in which to name and classify the actual
emergency. The more adequate the stock of ideas, the more ‘able’ is
the man, the more uniformly appropriate is his behavior likely to
be. When later we take up the subject of the will, we shall see
that the essential preliminary to every decision is the finding of
the right names under which to class the proposed
alternatives of conduct. He who has few names is in so far forth an
incompetent deliberator. The names—and each name stands for a
conception or idea—are our instruments for handling our
problems and solving our dilemmas. Now, when we think of this, we
are too apt to forget an important fact, which is that in most
human beings the stock of names and concepts is mostly acquired
during the years of adolescence and the earliest years of adult
life. I probably shocked you a moment ago by saying that most men
begin to be old fogies at the age of twenty-five. It is true that a
grown-up adult keeps gaining well into middle age a great knowledge
of details, and a great acquaintance with individual cases
connected with his profession or business life. In this sense, his
conceptions increase during a very long period; for his knowledge
grows more extensive and minute. But the larger categories of
conception, the sorts of thing, and wider classes of relation
between things, of which we take cognizance, are all got into the
mind at a comparatively youthful date. Few men ever do acquaint
themselves with the principles of a new science after even
twenty-five. If you do not study political economy in college, it
is a thousand to one that its main conceptions will remain unknown
to you through life. Similarly with biology, similarly with
electricity. What percentage of persons now fifty years old have
any definite conception whatever of a dynamo, or how the
trolley-cars are made to run? Surely, a small fraction of one per
cent. But the boys in colleges are all acquiring these
conceptions.

There is a sense of infinite potentiality in us all, when young,
which makes some of us draw up lists of books we intend to read
hereafter, and makes most of us think that we can easily acquaint
ourselves with all sorts of things which we are now neglecting by
studying them out hereafter in the intervals of leisure of our
business lives. Such good intentions are hardly ever carried out.
The conceptions acquired before thirty remain usually the only ones
we ever gain. Such exceptional cases of perpetually self-renovating
youth as Mr. Gladstone’s only prove, by the admiration they awaken,
the universality of the rule. And it may well solemnize a teacher,
and confirm in him a healthy sense of the importance of his
mission, to feel how exclusively dependent upon his present
ministrations in the way of imparting conceptions the pupil’s
future life is probably bound to be.

XV. THE WILL

Since mentality terminates naturally in outward conduct, the
final chapter in psychology has to be the chapter on the will. But
the word ‘will’ can be used in a broader and in a narrower sense.
In the broader sense, it designates our entire capacity for
impulsive and active life, including our instinctive reactions and
those forms of behavior that have become secondarily automatic and
semi-unconscious through frequent repetition. In the narrower
sense, acts of will are such acts only as cannot be inattentively
performed. A distinct idea of what they are, and a deliberate
fiat on the mind’s part, must precede their execution.

Such acts are often characterized by hesitation, and accompanied
by a feeling, altogether peculiar, of resolve, a feeling which may
or may not carry with it a further feeling of effort. In my earlier
talks, I said so much of our impulsive tendencies that I will
restrict myself in what follows to volition in this narrower sense
of the term.

All our deeds were considered by the early psychologists to be
due to a peculiar faculty called the will, without whose fiat
action could not occur. Thoughts and impressions, being
intrinsically inactive, were supposed to produce conduct only
through the intermediation of this superior agent. Until they
twitched its coat-tails, so to speak, no outward behavior could
occur. This doctrine was long ago exploded by the discovery of the
phenomena of reflex action, in which sensible impressions, as you
know, produce movement immediately and of themselves. The doctrine
may also be considered exploded as far as ideas go.

The fact is that there is no sort of consciousness whatever, be
it sensation, feeling, or idea, which does not directly and of
itself tend to discharge into some motor effect. The motor effect
need not always be an outward stroke of behavior. It may be only an
alteration of the heart-beats or breathing, or a modification in
the distribution of blood, such as blushing or turning pale; or
else a secretion of tears, or what not. But, in any case, it is
there in some shape when any consciousness is there; and a belief
as fundamental as any in modern psychology is the belief at last
attained that conscious processes of any sort, conscious processes
merely as such, must pass over into motion, open or
concealed.

The least complicated case of this tendency is the case of a
mind possessed by only a single idea. If that idea be of an object
connected with a native impulse, the impulse will immediately
proceed to discharge. If it be the idea of a movement, the movement
will occur. Such a case of action from a single idea has been
distinguished from more complex cases by the name of ‘ideo-motor’
action, meaning action without express decision or effort. Most of
the habitual actions to which we are trained are of this ideo-motor
sort. We perceive, for instance, that the door is open, and we rise
and shut it; we perceive some raisins in a dish before us, and
extend our hand and carry one of them to our mouth without
interrupting the conversation; or, when lying in bed, we suddenly
think that we shall be late for breakfast, and instantly we get up
with no particular exertion or resolve. All the ingrained
procedures by which life is carried on—the manners and
customs, dressing and undressing, acts of salutation,
etc.—are executed in this semi-automatic way unhesitatingly
and efficiently, the very outermost margin of consciousness seeming
to be concerned in them, while the focus may be occupied with
widely different things.

But now turn to a more complicated case. Suppose two thoughts to
be in the mind together, of which one, A, taken alone, would
discharge itself in a certain action, but of which the other, B,
suggests an action of a different sort, or a consequence of the
first action calculated to make us shrink. The psychologists now
say that the second idea, B, will probably arrest or inhibit
the motor effects of the first idea, A. One word, then, about
‘inhibition’ in general, to make this particular case more
clear.

One of the most interesting discoveries of physiology was the
discovery, made simultaneously in France and Germany fifty years
ago, that nerve currents do not only start muscles into action, but
may check action already going on or keep it from occurring as it
otherwise might. Nerves of arrest were thus distinguished
alongside of motor nerves. The pneumogastric nerve, for example, if
stimulated, arrests the movements of the heart: the splanchnic
nerve arrests those of the intestines, if already begun. But it
soon appeared that this was too narrow a way of looking at the
matter, and that arrest is not so much the specific function of
certain nerves as a general function which any part of the nervous
system may exert upon other parts under the appropriate conditions.
The higher centres, for example, seem to exert a constant
inhibitive influence on the excitability of those below. The
reflexes of an animal with its hemispheres wholly or in part
removed become exaggerated. You all know that common reflex in
dogs, whereby, if you scratch the animal’s side, the corresponding
hind leg will begin to make scratching movements, usually in the
air. Now in dogs with mutilated hemispheres this scratching reflex
is so incessant that, as Goltz first described them, the hair gets
all worn off their sides. In idiots, the functions of the
hemispheres being largely in abeyance, the lower impulses, not
inhibited, as they would be in normal human beings, often express
themselves in most odious ways. You know also how any higher
emotional tendency will quench a lower one. Fear arrests appetite,
maternal love annuls fear, respect checks sensuality, and the like;
and in the more subtile manifestations of the moral life, whenever
an ideal stirring is suddenly quickened into intensity, it is as if
the whole scale of values of our motives changed its equilibrium.
The force of old temptations vanishes, and what a moment ago was
impossible is now not only possible, but easy, because of their
inhibition. This has been well called the ‘expulsive power of the
higher emotion.’

It is easy to apply this notion of inhibition to the case of our
ideational processes. I am lying in bed, for example, and think it
is time to get up; but alongside of this thought there is present
to my mind a realization of the extreme coldness of the morning and
the pleasantness of the warm bed. In such a situation the motor
consequences of the first idea are blocked; and I may remain for
half an hour or more with the two ideas oscillating before me in a
kind of deadlock, which is what we call the state of hesitation or
deliberation. In a case like this the deliberation can be resolved
and the decision reached in either of two ways:—

(1) I may forget for a moment the thermometric conditions, and
then the idea of getting up will immediately discharge into act: I
shall suddenly find that I have got up—or

(2) Still mindful of the freezing temperature, the thought of
the duty of rising may become so pungent that it determines action
in spite of inhibition. In the latter case, I have a sense of
energetic moral effort, and consider that I have done a virtuous
act.

All cases of wilful action properly so called, of choice after
hesitation and deliberation, may be conceived after one of these
latter patterns. So you see that volition, in the narrower sense,
takes place only when there are a number of conflicting systems of
ideas, and depends on our having a complex field of consciousness.
The interesting thing to note is the extreme delicacy of the
inhibitive machinery. A strong and urgent motor idea in the focus
may be neutralized and made inoperative by the presence of the very
faintest contradictory idea in the margin. For instance, I hold out
my forefinger, and with closed eyes try to realize as vividly as
possible that I hold a revolver in my hand and am pulling the
trigger. I can even now fairly feel my finger quivering with the
tendency to contract; and, if it were hitched to a recording
apparatus, it would certainly betray its state of tension by
registering incipient movements. Yet it does not actually crook,
and the movement of pulling the trigger is not performed. Why
not?

Simply because, all concentrated though I am upon the idea of
the movement, I nevertheless also realize the total conditions of
the experiment, and in the back of my mind, so to speak, or in its
fringe and margin, have the simultaneous idea that the movement is
not to take place. The mere presence of that marginal intention,
without effort, urgency, or emphasis, or any special reinforcement
from my attention, suffices to the inhibitive effect.

And this is why so few of the ideas that flit through our minds
do, in point of fact, produce their motor consequences. Life would
be a curse and a care for us if every fleeting fancy were to do so.
Abstractly, the law of ideo-motor action is true; but in the
concrete our fields of consciousness are always so complex that the
inhibiting margin keeps the centre inoperative most of the time. In
all this, you see, I speak as if ideas by their mere presence or
absence determined behavior, and as if between the ideas themselves
on the one hand and the conduct on the other there were no room for
any third intermediate principle of activity, like that called ‘the
will.’

If you are struck by the materialistic or fatalistic doctrines
which seem to follow this conception, I beg you to suspend your
judgment for a moment, as I shall soon have something more to say
about the matter. But, meanwhile yielding one’s self to the
mechanical conception of the psychophysical organism, nothing is
easier than to indulge in a picture of the fatalistic character of
human life. Man’s conduct appears as the mere resultant of all his
various impulsions and inhibitions. One object, by its presence,
makes us act: another object checks our action. Feelings aroused
and ideas suggested by objects sway us one way and another:
emotions complicate the game by their mutual inhibitive effects,
the higher abolishing the lower or perhaps being itself swept away.
The life in all this becomes prudential and moral; but the
psychologic agents in the drama may be described, you see, as
nothing but the ‘ideas’ themselves,—ideas for the whole
system of which what we call the ‘soul’ or character’ or ‘will’ of
the person is nothing but a collective name. As Hume said, the
ideas are themselves the actors, the stage, the theatre, the
spectators, and the play. This is the so-called ‘associationist’
psychology, brought down to its radical expression: it is useless
to ignore its power as a conception. Like all conceptions, when
they become clear and lively enough, this conception has a strong
tendency to impose itself upon belief; and psychologists trained on
biological lines usually adopt it as the last word of science on
the subject. No one can have an adequate notion of modern
psychological theory unless he has at some time apprehended this
view in the full force of its simplicity.

Let us humor it for a while, for it has advantages in the way of
exposition.

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

From this it immediately follows that there will be two types of
will, in one of which impulsions will predominate, in the other
inhibitions. We may speak of them, if you like, as the precipitate
and the obstructed will, respectively. When fully pronounced, they
are familiar to everybody. The extreme example of the precipitate
will is the maniac: his ideas discharge into action so rapidly, his
associative processes are so extravagantly lively, that inhibitions
have no time to arrive, and he says and does whatever pops into his
head without a moment of hesitation.

Certain melancholiacs furnish the extreme example of the
over-inhibited type. Their minds are cramped in a fixed emotion of
fear or helplessness, their ideas confined to the one thought that
for them life is impossible. So they show a condition of perfect
‘abulia,’ or inability to will or act. They cannot change their
posture or speech or execute the simplest command.

The different races of men show different temperaments in this
regard. The Southern races are commonly accounted the more
impulsive and precipitate: the English race, especially our New
England branch of it, is supposed to be all sicklied over with
repressive forms of self-consciousness, and condemned to express
itself through a jungle of scruples and checks.

The highest form of character, however, abstractly considered,
must be full of scruples and inhibitions. But action, in such a
character, far from being paralyzed, will succeed in energetically
keeping on its way, sometimes overpowering the resistances,
sometimes steering along the line where they lie thinnest.

Just as our extensor muscles act most truly when a simultaneous
contraction of the flexors guides and steadies them; so the mind of
him whose fields of consciousness are complex, and who, with the
reasons for the action, sees the reasons against it, and yet,
instead of being palsied, acts in the way that takes the whole
field into consideration,—so, I say, is such a mind the ideal
sort of mind that we should seek to reproduce in our pupils. Purely
impulsive action, or action that proceeds to extremities regardless
of consequences, on the other hand, is the easiest action in the
world, and the lowest in type. Any one can show energy, when made
quite reckless. An Oriental despot requires but little ability: as
long as he lives, he succeeds, for he has absolutely his own way;
and, when the world can no longer endure the horror of him, he is
assassinated. But not to proceed immediately to extremities, to be
still able to act energetically under an array of
inhibitions,—that indeed is rare and difficult. Cavour, when
urged to proclaim martial law in 1859, refused to do so, saying:
“Any one can govern in that way. I will be constitutional.” Your
parliamentary rulers, your Lincoln, your Gladstone, are the
strongest type of man, because they accomplish results under the
most intricate possible conditions. We think of Napoleon Bonaparte
as a colossal monster of will-power, and truly enough he was so.
But, from the point of view of the psychological machinery, it
would be hard to say whether he or Gladstone was the larger
volitional quantity; for Napoleon disregarded all the usual
inhibitions, and Gladstone, passionate as he was, scrupulously
considered them in his statesmanship.

A familiar example of the paralyzing power of scruples is the
inhibitive effect of conscientiousness upon conversation. Nowhere
does conversation seem to have flourished as brilliantly as in
France during the last century. But, if we read old French memoirs,
we see how many brakes of scrupulosity which tie our tongues to-day
were then removed. Where mendacity, treachery, obscenity, and
malignity find unhampered expression, talk can be brilliant indeed.
But its flame waxes dim where the mind is stitched all over with
conscientious fear of violating the moral and social
proprieties.

The teacher often is confronted in the schoolroom with an
abnormal type of will, which we may call the ‘balky will.’ Certain
children, if they do not succeed in doing a thing immediately,
remain completely inhibited in regard to it: it becomes literally
impossible for them to understand it if it be an intellectual
problem, or to do it if it be an outward operation, as long as this
particular inhibited condition lasts. Such children are usually
treated as sinful, and are punished; or else the teacher pits his
or her will against the child’s will, considering that the latter
must be ‘broken.’ “Break your child’s will, in order that it may
not perish,” wrote John Wesley. “Break its will as soon as it can
speak plainly—or even before it can speak at all. It should
be forced to do as it is told, even if you have to whip it ten
times running. Break its will, in order that its soul may live.”
Such will-breaking is always a scene with a great deal of nervous
wear and tear on both sides, a bad state of feeling left behind it,
and the victory not always with the would-be will-breaker.

When a situation of the kind is once fairly developed, and the
child is all tense and excited inwardly, nineteen times out of
twenty it is best for the teacher to apperceive the case as one of
neural pathology rather than as one of moral culpability. So long
as the inhibiting sense of impossibility remains in the child’s
mind, he will continue unable to get beyond the obstacle. The aim
of the teacher should then be to make him simply forget. Drop the
subject for the time, divert the mind to something else: then,
leading the pupil back by some circuitous line of association,
spring it on him again before he has time to recognize it, and as
likely as not he will go over it now without any difficulty. It is
in no other way that we overcome balkiness in a horse: we divert
his attention, do something to his nose or ear, lead him round in a
circle, and thus get him over a place where flogging would only
have made him more invincible. A tactful teacher will never let
these strained situations come up at all.

You perceive now, my friends, what your general or abstract duty
is as teachers. Although you have to generate in your pupils a
large stock of ideas, any one of which may be inhibitory, yet you
must also see to it that no habitual hesitancy or paralysis of the
will ensues, and that the pupil still retains his power of vigorous
action. Psychology can state your problem in these terms, but you
see how impotent she is to furnish the elements of its practical
solution. When all is said and done, and your best efforts are
made, it will probably remain true that the result will depend more
on a certain native tone or temper in the pupil’s psychological
constitution than on anything else. Some persons appear to have a
naturally poor focalization of the field of consciousness; and in
such persons actions hang slack, and inhibitions seem to exert
peculiarly easy sway.

But let us now close in a little more closely on this matter of
the education of the will. Your task is to build up a
character in your pupils; and a character, as I have so
often said, consists in an organized set of habits of reaction. Now
of what do such habits of reaction themselves consist? They consist
of tendencies to act characteristically when certain ideas possess
us, and to refrain characteristically when possessed by other
ideas.

Our volitional habits depend, then, first, on what the stock of
ideas is which we have; and, second, on the habitual coupling of
the several ideas with action or inaction respectively. How is it
when an alternative is presented to you for choice, and you are
uncertain what you ought to do? You first hesitate, and then you
deliberate. And in what does your deliberation consist? It consists
in trying to apperceive the ease successively by a number of
different ideas, which seem to fit it more or less, until at last
you hit on one which seems to fit it exactly. If that be an idea
which is a customary forerunner of action in you, which enters into
one of your maxims of positive behavior, your hesitation ceases,
and you act immediately. If, on the other hand, it be an idea which
carries inaction as its habitual result, if it ally itself with
prohibition, then you unhesitatingly refrain. The problem
is, you see, to find the right idea or conception for the case.
This search for the right conception may take days or weeks.

I spoke as if the action were easy when the conception once is
found. Often it is so, but it may be otherwise; and, when it is
otherwise, we find ourselves at the very centre of a moral
situation, into which I should now like you to look with me a
little nearer.

The proper conception, the true head of classification, may be
hard to attain; or it may be one with which we have contracted no
settled habits of action. Or, again, the action to which it would
prompt may be dangerous and difficult; or else inaction may appear
deadly cold and negative when our impulsive feeling is hot. In
either of these latter cases it is hard to hold the right idea
steadily enough before the attention to let it exert its adequate
effects. Whether it be stimulative or inhibitive, it is too
reasonable for us; and the more instinctive passional
propensity then tends to extrude it from our consideration. We shy
away from the thought of it. It twinkles and goes out the moment it
appears in the margin of our consciousness; and we need a resolute
effort of voluntary attention to drag it into the focus of the
field, and to keep it there long enough for its associative and
motor effects to be exerted. Every one knows only too well how the
mind flinches from looking at considerations hostile to the
reigning mood of feeling.

Once brought, however, in this way to the centre of the field of
consciousness, and held there, the reasonable idea will exert these
effects inevitably; for the laws of connection between our
consciousness and our nervous system provide for the action then
taking place. Our moral effort, properly so called, terminates in
our holding fast to the appropriate idea.

If, then, you are asked, “In what does a moral act
consist when reduced to its simplest and most elementary form?”
you can make only one reply. You can say that it consists in the
effort of attention by which we hold fast to an idea which but
for that effort of attention would be driven out of the mind by the
other psychological tendencies that are there. To think, in
short, is the secret of will, just as it is the secret of
memory.

This comes out very clearly in the kind of excuse which we most
frequently hear from persons who find themselves confronted by the
sinfulness or harmfulness of some part of their behavior. “I never
thought,” they say. “I never thought how mean the
action was, I never thought of these abominable
consequences.” And what do we retort when they say this? We say:
“Why didn’t you think? What were you there for but to
think?” And we read them a moral lecture on their
irreflectiveness.

The hackneyed example of moral deliberation is the case of an
habitual drunkard under temptation. He has made a resolve to
reform, but he is now solicited again by the bottle. His moral
triumph or failure literally consists in his finding the right
name for the case. If he says that it is a case of not
wasting good liquor already poured out, or a case of not being
churlish and unsociable when in the midst of friends, or a case of
learning something at last about a brand of whiskey which he never
met before, or a case of celebrating a public holiday, or a case of
stimulating himself to a more energetic resolve in favor of
abstinence than any he has ever yet made, then he is lost. His
choice of the wrong name seals his doom. But if, in spite of all
the plausible good names with which his thirsty fancy so copiously
furnishes him, he unwaveringly clings to the truer bad name, and
apperceives the case as that of “being a drunkard, being a
drunkard, being a drunkard,” his feet are planted on the road to
salvation. He saves himself by thinking rightly.

Thus are your pupils to be saved: first, by the stock of ideas
with which you furnish them; second, by the amount of voluntary
attention that they can exert in holding to the right ones, however
unpalatable; and, third, by the several habits of acting definitely
on these latter to which they have been successfully trained.

In all this the power of voluntarily attending is the point of
the whole procedure. Just as a balance turns on its knife-edges, so
on it our moral destiny turns. You remember that, when we were
talking of the subject of attention, we discovered how much more
intermittent and brief our acts of voluntary attention are than is
commonly supposed. If they were all summed together, the time that
they occupy would cover an almost incredibly small portion of our
lives. But I also said, you will remember, that their brevity was
not in proportion to their significance, and that I should return
to the subject again. So I return to it now. It is not the mere
size of a thing which, constitutes its importance: it is its
position in the organism to which it belongs. Our acts of voluntary
attention, brief and fitful as they are, are nevertheless momentous
and critical, determining us, as they do, to higher or lower
destinies. The exercise of voluntary attention in the schoolroom
must therefore be counted one of the most important points of
training that take place there; and the first-rate teacher, by the
keenness of the remoter interests which he is able to awaken, will
provide abundant opportunities for its occurrence. I hope that you
appreciate this now without any further explanation.

I have been accused of holding up before you, in the course of
these talks, a mechanical and even a materialistic view of the
mind. I have called it an organism and a machine. I have spoken of
its reaction on the environment as the essential thing about it;
and I have referred this, either openly or implicitly, to the
construction of the nervous system. I have, in consequence,
received notes from some of you, begging me to be more explicit on
this point; and to let you know frankly whether I am a complete
materialist, or not.

Now in these lectures I wish to be strictly practical and
useful, and to keep free from all speculative complications.
Nevertheless, I do not wish to leave any ambiguity about my own
position; and I will therefore say, in order to avoid all
misunderstanding, that in no sense do I count myself a materialist.
I cannot see how such a thing as our consciousness can possibly be
produced by a nervous machinery, though I can perfectly well
see how, if ‘ideas’ do accompany the workings of the machinery, the
order of the ideas might very well follow exactly the
order of the machine’s operations. Our habitual associations
of ideas, trains of thought, and sequences of action, might thus be
consequences of the succession of currents in our nervous systems.
And the possible stock of ideas which a man’s free spirit would
have to choose from might depend exclusively on the native and
acquired powers of his brain. If this were all, we might indeed
adopt the fatalist conception which I sketched for you but a short
while ago. Our ideas would be determined by brain currents, and
these by purely mechanical laws.

But, after what we have just seen,—namely, the part played
by voluntary attention in volition,—a belief in free will and
purely spiritual causation is still open to us. The duration and
amount of this attention seem within certain limits
indeterminate. We feel as if we could make it really more or
less, and as if our free action in this regard were a genuine
critical point in nature,—a point on which our destiny and
that of others might hinge. The whole question of free will
concentrates itself, then, at this same small point: “Is or is not
the appearance of indetermination at this point an illusion?”

It is plain that such a question can be decided only by general
analogies, and not by accurate observations. The free-willist
believes the appearance to be a reality: the determinist believes
that it is an illusion. I myself hold with the
free-willists,—not because I cannot conceive the fatalist
theory clearly, or because I fail to understand its plausibility,
but simply because, if free will were true, it would be
absurd to have the belief in it fatally forced on our acceptance.
Considering the inner fitness of things, one would rather think
that the very first act of a will endowed with freedom should be to
sustain the belief in the freedom itself. I accordingly believe
freely in my freedom; I do so with the best of scientific
consciences, knowing that the predetermination of the amount of my
effort of attention can never receive objective proof, and hoping
that, whether you follow my example in this respect or not, it will
at least make you see that such psychological and psychophysical
theories as I hold do not necessarily force a man to become a
fatalist or a materialist.

Let me say one more final word now about the will, and therewith
conclude both that important subject and these lectures.

There are two types of will. There are also two types of
inhibition. We may call them inhibition by repression or by
negation, and inhibition by substitution, respectively. The
difference between them is that, in the case of inhibition by
repression, both the inhibited idea and the inhibiting idea, the
impulsive idea and the idea that negates it, remain along with each
other in consciousness, producing a certain inward strain or
tension there: whereas, in inhibition by substitution, the
inhibiting idea supersedes altogether the idea which it inhibits,
and the latter quickly vanishes from the field.

For instance, your pupils are wandering in mind, are listening
to a sound outside the window, which presently grows interesting
enough to claim all their attention. You can call the latter back
again by bellowing at them not to listen to those sounds, but to
keep their minds on their books or on what you are saying. And, by
thus keeping them conscious that your eye is sternly on them, you
may produce a good effect. But it will be a wasteful effect and an
inferior effect; for the moment you relax your supervision the
attractive disturbance, always there soliciting their curiosity,
will overpower them, and they will be just as they were before:
whereas, if, without saying anything about the street disturbances,
you open a counter-attraction by starting some very interesting
talk or demonstration yourself, they will altogether forget the
distracting incident, and without any effort follow you along.
There are many interests that can never be inhibited by the way of
negation. To a man in love, for example, it is literally
impossible, by any effort of will, to annul his passion. But let
‘some new planet swim into his ken,’ and the former idol will
immediately cease to engross his mind.

It is clear that in general we ought, whenever we can, to employ
the method of inhibition by substitution. He whose life is based
upon the word ‘no,’ who tells the truth because a lie is wicked,
and who has constantly to grapple with his envious and cowardly and
mean propensities, is in an inferior situation in every respect to
what he would be if the love of truth and magnanimity positively
possessed him from the outset, and he felt no inferior temptations.
Your born gentleman is certainly, for this world’s purposes, a more
valuable being than your “Crump, with his grunting resistance to
his native devils,” even though in God’s sight the latter may, as
the Catholic theologians say, be rolling up great stores of
‘merit.’

Spinoza long ago wrote in his Ethics that anything that a man
can avoid under the notion that it is bad he may also avoid under
the notion that something else is good. He who habitually acts
sub specie mali, under the negative notion, the notion of
the bad, is called a slave by Spinoza. To him who acts habitually
under the notion of good he gives the name of freeman. See to it
now, I beg you, that you make freemen of your pupils by habituating
them to act, whenever possible, under the notion of a good. Get
them habitually to tell the truth, not so much through showing them
the wickedness of lying as by arousing their enthusiasm for honor
and veracity. Wean them from their native cruelty by imparting to
them some of your own positive sympathy with an animal’s inner
springs of joy. And, in the lessons which you may be legally
obliged to conduct upon the bad effects of alcohol, lay less stress
than the books do on the drunkard’s stomach, kidneys, nerves, and
social miseries, and more on the blessings of having an organism
kept in lifelong possession of its full youthful elasticity by a
sweet, sound blood, to which stimulants and narcotics are unknown,
and to which the morning sun and air and dew will daily come as
sufficiently powerful intoxicants.

I have now ended these talks. If to some of you the things I
have said seem obvious or trivial, it is possible that they may
appear less so when, in the course of a year or two, you find
yourselves noticing and apperceiving events in the schoolroom a
little differently, in consequence of some of the conceptions I
have tried to make more clear. I cannot but think that to
apperceive your pupil as a little sensitive, impulsive,
associative, and reactive organism, partly fated and partly free,
will lead to a better intelligence of all his ways. Understand him,
then, as such a subtle little piece of machinery. And if, in
addition, you can also see him sub specie boni, and love him
as well, you will be in the best possible position for becoming
perfect teachers.

TALKS
TO STUDENTS

I. THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION

I wish in the following hour to take certain psychological
doctrines and show their practical applications to mental
hygiene,—to the hygiene of our American life more
particularly. Our people, especially in academic circles, are
turning towards psychology nowadays with great expectations; and,
if psychology is to justify them, it must be by showing fruits in
the pedagogic and therapeutic lines.

The reader may possibly have heard of a peculiar theory of the
emotions, commonly referred to in psychological literature as the
Lange-James theory. According to this theory, our emotions are
mainly due to those organic stirrings that are aroused in us in a
reflex way by the stimulus of the exciting object or situation. An
emotion of fear, for example, or surprise, is not a direct effect
of the object’s presence on the mind, but an effect of that still
earlier effect, the bodily commotion which the object suddenly
excites; so that, were this bodily commotion suppressed, we should
not so much feel fear as call the situation fearful; we
should not feel surprise, but coldly recognize that the object was
indeed astonishing. One enthusiast has even gone so far as to say
that when we feel sorry it is because we weep, when we feel afraid
it is because we run away, and not conversely. Some of you may
perhaps be acquainted with the paradoxical formula. Now, whatever
exaggeration may possibly lurk in this account of our emotions (and
I doubt myself whether the exaggeration be very great), it is
certain that the main core of it is true, and that the mere giving
way to tears, for example, or to the outward expression of an
anger-fit, will result for the moment in making the inner grief or
anger more acutely felt. There is, accordingly, no better known or
more generally useful precept in the moral training of youth, or in
one’s personal self-discipline, than that which bids us pay primary
attention to what we do and express, and not to care too much for
what we feel. If we only check a cowardly impulse in time, for
example, or if we only don’t strike the blow or rip out with
the complaining or insulting word that we shall regret as long as
we live, our feelings themselves will presently be the calmer and
better, with no particular guidance from us on their own account.
Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go
together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more
direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling,
which is not.

Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our
spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look
round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were
already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel
cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can. So to feel brave, act
as if we were brave, use all our will to that end, and a
courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear. Again, in
order to feel kindly toward a person to whom we have been inimical,
the only way is more or less deliberately to smile, to make
sympathetic inquiries, and to force ourselves to say genial things.
One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer
communion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward
wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling. To wrestle
with a bad feeling only pins our attention on it, and keeps it
still fastened in the mind: whereas, if we act as if from some
better feeling, the old bad feeling soon folds its tent like an
Arab, and silently steals away.

The best manuals of religious devotion accordingly reiterate the
maxim that we must let our feelings go, and pay no regard to them
whatever. In an admirable and widely successful little book called
‘The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life,’ by Mrs. Hannah Whitall
Smith, I find this lesson on almost every page. Act
faithfully, and you really have faith, no matter how cold and even
how dubious you may feel. “It is your purpose God looks at,” writes
Mrs. Smith, “not your feelings about that purpose; and your
purpose, or will, is therefore the only thing you need attend
to…. Let your emotions come or let them go, just as God pleases,
and make no account of them either way…. They really have nothing
to do with the matter. They are not the indicators of your
spiritual state, but are merely the indicators of your temperament
or of your present physical condition.”

But you all know these facts already, so I need no longer press
them on your attention. From our acts and from our attitudes
ceaseless inpouring currents of sensation come, which help to
determine from moment to moment what our inner states shall be:
that is a fundamental law of psychology which I will therefore
proceed to assume.

A Viennese neurologist of considerable reputation has recently
written about the Binnenleben, as he terms it, or buried
life of human beings. No doctor, this writer says, can get into
really profitable relations with a nervous patient until he gets
some sense of what the patient’s Binnenleben is, of the sort
of unuttered inner atmosphere in which his consciousness dwells
alone with the secrets of its prison-house. This inner personal
tone is what we can’t communicate or describe articulately to
others; but the wraith and ghost of it, so to speak, are often what
our friends and intimates feel as our most characteristic quality.
In the unhealthy-minded, apart from all sorts of old regrets,
ambitions checked by shames and aspirations obstructed by
timidities, it consists mainly of bodily discomforts not distinctly
localized by the sufferer, but breeding a general self-mistrust and
sense that things are not as they should be with him. Half the
thirst for alcohol that exists in the world exists simply because
alcohol acts as a temporary anæsthetic and effacer to all
these morbid feelings that never ought to be in a human being at
all. In the healthy-minded, on the contrary, there are no fears or
shames to discover; and the sensations that pour in from the
organism only help to swell the general vital sense of security and
readiness for anything that may turn up.

Consider, for example, the effects of a well-toned
motor-apparatus, nervous and muscular, on our general
personal self-consciousness, the sense of elasticity and efficiency
that results. They tell us that in Norway the life of the women has
lately been entirely revolutionized by the new order of muscular
feelings with which the use of the ski, or long snow-shoes,
as a sport for both sexes, has made the women acquainted. Fifteen
years ago the Norwegian women were even more than the women of
other lands votaries of the old-fashioned ideal of femininity, ‘the
domestic angel,’ the ‘gentle and refining influence’ sort of thing.
Now these sedentary fireside tabby-cats of Norway have been
trained, they say, by the snow-shoes into lithe and audacious
creatures, for whom no night is too dark or height too giddy, and
who are not only saying good-bye to the traditional feminine pallor
and delicacy of constitution, but actually taking the lead in every
educational and social reform. I cannot but think that the tennis
and tramping and skating habits and the bicycle-craze which are so
rapidly extending among our dear sisters and daughters in this
country are going also to lead to a sounder and heartier moral
tone, which will send its tonic breath through all our American
life.

I hope that here in America more and more the ideal of the
well-trained and vigorous body will be maintained neck by neck with
that of the well-trained and vigorous mind as the two coequal
halves of the higher education for men and women alike. The
strength of the British Empire lies in the strength of character of
the individual Englishman, taken all alone by himself. And that
strength, I am persuaded, is perennially nourished and kept up by
nothing so much as by the national worship, in which all classes
meet, of athletic outdoor life and sport.

I recollect, years ago, reading a certain work by an American
doctor on hygiene and the laws of life and the type of future
humanity. I have forgotten its author’s name and its title, but I
remember well an awful prophecy that it contained about the future
of our muscular system. Human perfection, the writer said, means
ability to cope with the environment; but the environment will more
and more require mental power from us, and less and less will ask
for bare brute strength. Wars will cease, machines will do all our
heavy work, man will become more and more a mere director of
nature’s energies, and less and less an exerter of energy on his
own account. So that, if the homo sapiens of the future can
only digest his food and think, what need will he have of
well-developed muscles at all? And why, pursued this writer, should
we not even now be satisfied with a more delicate and intellectual
type of beauty than that which pleased our ancestors? Nay, I have
heard a fanciful friend make a still further advance in this
‘new-man’ direction. With our future food, he says, itself prepared
in liquid form from the chemical elements of the atmosphere,
pepsinated or half-digested in advance, and sucked up through a
glass tube from a tin can, what need shall we have of teeth, or
stomachs even? They may go, along with our muscles and our physical
courage, while, challenging ever more and more our proper
admiration, will grow the gigantic domes of our crania, arching
over our spectacled eyes, and animating our flexible little lips to
those floods of learned and ingenious talk which will constitute
our most congenial occupation.

I am sure that your flesh creeps at this apocalyptic vision.
Mine certainly did so; and I cannot believe that our muscular vigor
will ever be a superfluity. Even if the day ever dawns in which it
will not be needed for fighting the old heavy battles against
Nature, it will still always be needed to furnish the background of
sanity, serenity, and cheerfulness to life, to give moral
elasticity to our disposition, to round off the wiry edge of our
fretfulness, and make us good-humored and easy of approach.
Weakness is too apt to be what the doctors call irritable weakness.
And that blessed internal peace and confidence, that
acquiescentia in seipso, as Spinoza used to call it, that
wells up from every part of the body of a muscularly well-trained
human being, and soaks the indwelling soul of him with
satisfaction, is, quite apart from every consideration of its
mechanical utility, an element of spiritual hygiene of supreme
significance.

And now let me go a step deeper into mental hygiene, and try to
enlist your insight and sympathy in a cause which I believe is one
of paramount patriotic importance to us Yankees. Many years ago a
Scottish medical man, Dr. Clouston, a mad-doctor as they call him
there, or what we should call an asylum physician (the most eminent
one in Scotland), visited this country, and said something that has
remained in my memory ever since. “You Americans,” he said, “wear
too much expression on your faces. You are living like an army with
all its reserves engaged in action. The duller countenances of the
British population betoken a better scheme of life. They suggest
stores of reserved nervous force to fall back upon, if any occasion
should arise that requires it. This inexcitability, this presence
at all times of power not used, I regard,” continued Dr. Clouston,
“as the great safeguard of our British people. The other thing in
you gives me a sense of insecurity, and you ought somehow to tone
yourselves down. You really do carry too much expression, you take
too intensely the trivial moments of life.”

Now Dr. Clouston is a trained reader of the secrets of the soul
as expressed upon the countenance, and the observation of his which
I quote seems to me to mean a great deal. And all Americans who
stay in Europe long enough to get accustomed to the spirit that
reigns and expresses itself there, so unexcitable as compared with
ours, make a similar observation when they return to their native
shores. They find a wild-eyed look upon their compatriots’ faces,
either of too desperate eagerness and anxiety or of too intense
responsiveness and good-will. It is hard to say whether the men or
the women show it most. It is true that we do not all feel about it
as Dr. Clouston felt. Many of us, far from deploring it, admire it.
We say: “What intelligence it shows! How different from the stolid
cheeks, the codfish eyes, the slow, inanimate demeanor we have been
seeing in the British Isles!” Intensity, rapidity, vivacity of
appearance, are indeed with us something of a nationally accepted
ideal; and the medical notion of ‘irritable weakness’ is not the
first thing suggested by them to our mind, as it was to Dr.
Clouston’s. In a weekly paper not very long ago I remember reading
a story in which, after describing the beauty and interest of the
heroine’s personality, the author summed up her charms by saying
that to all who looked upon her an impression as of ‘bottled
lightning’ was irresistibly conveyed.

Bottled lightning, in truth, is one of our American ideals, even
of a young girl’s character! Now it is most ungracious, and it may
seem to some persons unpatriotic, to criticise in public the
physical peculiarities of one’s own people, of one’s own family, so
to speak. Besides, it may be said, and said with justice, that
there are plenty of bottled-lightning temperaments in other
countries, and plenty of phlegmatic temperaments here; and that,
when all is said and done, the more or less of tension about which
I am making such a fuss is a very small item in the sum total of a
nation’s life, and not worth solemn treatment at a time when
agreeable rather than disagreeable things should be talked about.
Well, in one sense the more or less of tension in our faces and in
our unused muscles is a small thing: not much mechanical work is
done by these contractions. But it is not always the material size
of a thing that measures its importance: often it is its place and
function. One of the most philosophical remarks I ever heard made
was by an unlettered workman who was doing some repairs at my house
many years ago. “There is very little difference between one man
and another,” he said, “when you go to the bottom of it. But what
little there is, is very important.” And the remark certainly
applies to this case. The general over-contraction may be small
when estimated in foot-pounds, but its importance is immense on
account of its effects on the over-contracted person’s spiritual
life. This follows as a necessary consequence from the theory
of our emotions to which I made reference at the beginning of this
article. For by the sensations that so incessantly pour in from the
over-tense excited body the over-tense and excited habit of mind is
kept up; and the sultry, threatening, exhausting, thunderous inner
atmosphere never quite clears away. If you never wholly give
yourself up to the chair you sit in, but always keep your leg- and
body-muscles half contracted for a rise; if you breathe eighteen or
nineteen instead of sixteen times a minute, and never quite breathe
out at that,—what mental mood can you be in but one of
inner panting and expectancy, and how can the future and its
worries possibly forsake your mind? On the other hand, how can they
gain admission to your mind if your brow be unruffled, your
respiration calm and complete, and your muscles all relaxed?

Now what is the cause of this absence of repose, this
bottled-lightning quality in us Americans? The explanation of it
that is usually given is that it comes from the extreme dryness of
our climate and the acrobatic performances of our thermometer,
coupled with the extraordinary progressiveness of our life, the
hard work, the railroad speed, the rapid success, and all the other
things we know so well by heart. Well, our climate is certainly
exciting, but hardly more so than that of many parts of Europe,
where nevertheless no bottled-lightning girls are found. And the
work done and the pace of life are as extreme an every great
capital of Europe as they are here. To me both of these pretended
causes are utterly insufficient to explain the facts.

To explain them, we must go not to physical geography, but to
psychology and sociology. The latest chapter both in sociology and
in psychology to be developed in a manner that approaches adequacy
is the chapter on the imitative impulse. First Bagehot, then Tarde,
then Royce and Baldwin here, have shown that invention and
imitation, taken together, form, one may say, the entire warp and
woof of human life, in so far as it is social. The American
over-tension and jerkiness and breathlessness and intensity and
agony of expression are primarily social, and only secondarily
physiological, phenomena. They are bad habits, nothing more
or less, bred of custom and example, born of the imitation of bad
models and the cultivation of false personal ideals. How are idioms
acquired, how do local peculiarities of phrase and accent come
about? Through an accidental example set by some one, which struck
the ears of others, and was quoted and copied till at last every
one in the locality chimed in. Just so it is with national tricks
of vocalization or intonation, with national manners, fashions of
movement and gesture, and habitual expressions of face. We, here in
America, through following a succession of pattern-setters whom it
is now impossible to trace, and through influencing each other in a
bad direction, have at last settled down collectively into what,
for better or worse, is our own characteristic national
type,—a type with the production of which, so far as these
habits go, the climate and conditions have had practically nothing
at all to do.

This type, which we have thus reached by our imitativeness, we
now have fixed upon us, for better or worse. Now no type can be
wholly disadvantageous; but, so far as our type follows the
bottled-lightning fashion, it cannot be wholly good. Dr. Clouston
was certainly right in thinking that eagerness, breathlessness, and
anxiety are not signs of strength: they are signs of weakness and
of bad co-ordination. The even forehead, the slab-like cheek, the
codfish eye, may be less interesting for the moment; but they are
more promising signs than intense expression is of what we may
expect of their possessor in the long run. Your dull, unhurried
worker gets over a great deal of ground, because he never goes
backward or breaks down. Your intense, convulsive worker breaks
down and has bad moods so often that you never know where he may be
when you most need his help,—he may be having one of his ‘bad
days.’ We say that so many of our fellow-countrymen collapse, and
have to be sent abroad to rest their nerves, because they work so
hard. I suspect that this is an immense mistake. I suspect that
neither the nature nor the amount of our work is accountable for
the frequency and severity of our breakdowns, but that their cause
lies rather in those absurd feelings of hurry and having no time,
in that breathlessness and tension, that anxiety of feature and
that solicitude for results, that lack of inner harmony and ease,
in short, by which with us the work is so apt to be accompanied,
and from which a European who should do the same work would nine
times out of ten be free. These perfectly wanton and unnecessary
tricks of inner attitude and outer manner in us, caught from the
social atmosphere, kept up by tradition, and idealized by many as
the admirable way of life, are the last straws that break the
American camel’s back, the final overflowers of our measure of wear
and tear and fatigue.

The voice, for example, in a surprisingly large number of us has
a tired and plaintive sound. Some of us are really tired (for I do
not mean absolutely to deny that our climate has a tiring quality);
but far more of us are not tired at all, or would not be tired at
all unless we had got into a wretched trick of feeling tired, by
following the prevalent habits of vocalization and expression. And
if talking high and tired, and living excitedly and hurriedly,
would only enable us to do more by the way, even while
breaking us down in the end, it would be different. There would be
some compensation, some excuse, for going on so. But the exact
reverse is the case. It is your relaxed and easy worker, who is in
no hurry, and quite thoughtless most of the while of consequences,
who is your efficient worker; and tension and anxiety, and present
and future, all mixed up together in our mind at once, are the
surest drags upon steady progress and hindrances to our success. My
colleague, Professor Münsterberg, an excellent observer, who
came here recently, has written some notes on America to German
papers. He says in substance that the appearance of unusual energy
in America is superficial and illusory, being really due to nothing
but the habits of jerkiness and bad co-ordination for which we have
to thank the defective training of our people. I think myself that
it is high time for old legends and traditional opinions to be
changed; and that, if any one should begin to write about Yankee
inefficiency and feebleness, and inability to do anything with time
except to waste it, he would have a very pretty paradoxical little
thesis to sustain, with a great many facts to quote, and a great
deal of experience to appeal to in its proof.

Well, my friends, if our dear American character is weakened by
all this over-tension,—and I think, whatever reserves you may
make, that you will agree as to the main facts,—where does
the remedy lie? It lies, of course, where lay the origins of the
disease. If a vicious fashion and taste are to blame for the thing,
the fashion and taste must be changed. And, though it is no small
thing to inoculate seventy millions of people with new standards,
yet, if there is to be any relief, that will have to be done. We
must change ourselves from a race that admires jerk and snap for
their own sakes, and looks down upon low voices and quiet ways as
dull, to one that, on the contrary, has calm for its ideal, and for
their own sakes loves harmony, dignity, and ease.

So we go back to the psychology of imitation again. There is
only one way to improve ourselves, and that is by some of us
setting an example which the others may pick up and imitate till
the new fashion spreads from east to west. Some of us are in more
favorable positions than others to set new fashions. Some are much
more striking personally and imitable, so to speak. But no living
person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody. Thackeray
somewhere says of the Irish nation that there never was an Irishman
so poor that he didn’t have a still poorer Irishman living at his
expense; and, surely, there is no human being whose example doesn’t
work contagiously in some particular. The very idiots at our
public institutions imitate each other’s peculiarities. And, if you
should individually achieve calmness and harmony in your own
person, you may depend upon it that a wave of imitation will spread
from you, as surely as the circles spread outward when a stone is
dropped into a lake.

Fortunately, we shall not have to be absolute pioneers. Even now
in New York they have formed a society for the improvement of our
national vocalization, and one perceives its machinations already
in the shape of various newspaper paragraphs intended to stir up
dissatisfaction with the awful thing that it is. And, better still
than that, because more radical and general, is the gospel of
relaxation, as one may call it, preached by Miss Annie Payson Call,
of Boston, in her admirable little volume called ‘Power through
Repose,’ a book that ought to be in the hands of every teacher and
student in America of either sex. You need only be followers, then,
on a path already opened up by others. But of one thing be
confident: others still will follow you.

And this brings me to one more application of psychology to
practical life, to which I will call attention briefly, and then
close. If one’s example of easy and calm ways is to be effectively
contagious, one feels by instinct that the less voluntarily one
aims at getting imitated, the more unconscious one keeps in the
matter, the more likely one is to succeed. Become the imitable
thing, and you may then discharge your minds of all
responsibility for the imitation. The laws of social nature will
take care of that result. Now the psychological principle on which
this precept reposes is a law of very deep and wide-spread
importance in the conduct of our lives, and at the same time a law
which we Americans most grievously neglect. Stated technically, the
law is this: that strong feeling about one’s self tends to
arrest the free association of one’s objective ideas and motor
processes. We get the extreme example of this in the mental
disease called melancholia.

A melancholic patient is filled through and through with
intensely painful emotion about himself. He is threatened, he is
guilty, he is doomed, he is annihilated, he is lost. His mind is
fixed as if in a cramp on these feelings of his own situation, and
in all the books on insanity you may read that the usual varied
flow of his thoughts has ceased. His associative processes, to use
the technical phrase, are inhibited; and his ideas stand
stock-still, shut up to their one monotonous function of
reiterating inwardly the fact of the man’s desperate estate. And
this inhibitive influence is not due to the mere fact that his
emotion is painful. Joyous emotions about the self also stop
the association of our ideas. A saint in ecstasy is as motionless
and irresponsive and one-idea’d as a melancholiac. And, without
going as far as ecstatic saints, we know how in every one a great
or sudden pleasure may paralyze the flow of thought. Ask young
people returning from a party or a spectacle, and all excited about
it, what it was. “Oh, it was fine! it was fine! it
was fine!” is all the information you are likely to receive
until the excitement has calmed down. Probably every one of my
hearers has been made temporarily half-idiotic by some great
success or piece of good fortune. “Good! GOOD! GOOD!” is all
we can at such times say to ourselves until we smile at our own
very foolishness.

Now from all this we can draw an extremely practical conclusion.
If, namely, we wish our trains of ideation and volition to be
copious and varied and effective, we must form the habit of freeing
them from the inhibitive influence of reflection upon them, of
egoistic preoccupation about their results. Such a habit, like
other habits, can be formed. Prudence and duty and self-regard,
emotions of ambition and emotions of anxiety, have, of course, a
needful part to play in our lives.

But confine them as far as possible to the occasions when you
are making your general resolutions and deciding on your plans of
campaign, and keep them out of the details. When once a decision is
reached and execution is the order of the day, dismiss absolutely
all responsibility and care about the outcome. Unclamp, in a
word, your intellectual and practical machinery, and let it run
free; and the service it will do you will be twice as good. Who are
the scholars who get ‘rattled’ in the recitation-room? Those who
think of the possibilities of failure and feel the great importance
of the act. Who are those who do recite well? Often those who are
most indifferent. Their ideas reel themselves out of their
memory of their own accord. Why do we hear the complaint so often
that social life in New England is either less rich and expressive
or more fatiguing than it is in some other parts of the world? To
what is the fact, if fact it be, due unless to the over-active
conscience of the people, afraid of either saying something too
trivial and obvious, or something insincere, or something unworthy
of one’s interlocutor, or something in some way or other not
adequate to the occasion? How can conversation possibly steer
itself through such a sea of responsibilities and inhibitions as
this? On the other hand, conversation does flourish and society is
refreshing, and neither dull on the one hand nor exhausting from
its effort on the other, wherever people forget their scruples and
take the brakes off their hearts, and let their tongues wag as
automatically and irresponsibly as they will.

They talk much in pedagogic circles to-day about the duty of the
teacher to prepare for every lesson in advance. To some extent this
is useful. But we Yankees are assuredly not those to whom such a
general doctrine should be preached. We are only too careful as it
is. The advice I should give to most teachers would be in the words
of one who is herself an admirable teacher. Prepare yourself in the
subject so well that it shall be always on tap: then in the
class-room trust your spontaneity and fling away all further
care.

My advice to students, especially to girl-students, would be
somewhat similar. Just as a bicycle-chain may be too tight, so may
one’s carefulness and conscientiousness be so tense as to hinder
the running of one’s mind. Take, for example, periods when there
are many successive days of examination impending. One ounce of
good nervous tone in an examination is worth many pounds of anxious
study for it in advance. If you want really to do your best in an
examination, fling away the book the day before, say to yourself,
“I won’t waste another minute on this miserable thing, and I don’t
care an iota whether I succeed or not.” Say this sincerely, and
feel it; and go out and play, or go to bed and sleep, and I am sure
the results next day will encourage you to use the method
permanently. I have heard this advice given to a student by Miss
Call, whose book on muscular relaxation I quoted a moment ago. In
her later book, entitled ‘As a Matter of Course,’ the gospel of
moral relaxation, of dropping things from the mind, and not
‘caring,’ is preached with equal success. Not only our preachers,
but our friends the theosophists and mind-curers of various
religious sects are also harping on this string. And with the
doctors, the Delsarteans, the various mind-curing sects, and such
writers as Mr. Dresser, Prentice Mulford, Mr. Horace Fletcher, and
Mr. Trine to help, and the whole band of schoolteachers and
magazine-readers chiming in, it really looks as if a good start
might be made in the direction of changing our American mental
habit into something more indifferent and strong.

Worry means always and invariably inhibition of associations and
loss of effective power. Of course, the sovereign cure for worry is
religious faith; and this, of course, you also know. The turbulent
billows of the fretful surface leave the deep parts of the ocean
undisturbed, and to him who has a hold on vaster and more permanent
realities the hourly vicissitudes of his personal destiny seem
relatively insignificant things. The really religious person is
accordingly unshakable and full of equanimity, and calmly ready for
any duty that the day may bring forth. This is charmingly
illustrated by a little work with which I recently became
acquainted, “The Practice of the Presence of God, the Best Ruler of
a Holy Life, by Brother Lawrence, being Conversations and Letters
of Nicholas Herman of Lorraine, Translated from the French.”[A] I extract a few passages, the
conversations being given in indirect discourse. Brother Lawrence
was a Carmelite friar, converted at Paris in 1666. “He said that he
had been footman to M. Fieubert, the Treasurer, and that he was a
great awkward fellow, who broke everything. That he had desired to
be received into a monastery, thinking that he would there be made
to smart for his awkwardness and the faults he should commit, and
so he should sacrifice to God his life, with its pleasures; but
that God had disappointed him, he having met with nothing but
satisfaction in that state….

“That he had long been troubled in mind from a certain belief
that he should be damned; that all the men in the world could not
have persuaded him to the contrary; but that he had thus reasoned
with himself about it: I engaged in a religious life only for
the love of God, and I have endeavored to act only for Him;
whatever becomes of me, whether I be lost or saved, I will always
continue to act purely for the love of God. I shall have this good
at least, that till death I shall have done all that is in me to
love Him…. That since then he had passed his life in perfect
liberty and continual joy.

“That when an occasion of practising some virtue offered, he
addressed himself to God, saying, ‘Lord, I cannot do this unless
thou enablest me’; and that then he received strength more than
sufficient. That, when he had failed in his duty, he only confessed
his fault, saying to God, ‘I shall never do otherwise, if You leave
me to myself; it is You who must hinder my failing, and mend what
is amiss.’ That after this he gave himself no further uneasiness
about it.

“That he had been lately sent into Burgundy to buy the provision
of wine for the society, which was a very unwelcome task for him,
because he had no turn for business, and because he was lame, and
could not go about the boat but by rolling himself over the casks.
That, however, he gave himself no uneasiness about it, nor about
the purchase of the wine. That he said to God, ‘It was his business
he was about,’ and that he afterward found it well performed. That
he had been sent into Auvergne, the year before, upon the same
account; that he could not tell how the matter passed, but that it
proved very well.

“So, likewise, in his business in the kitchen (to which he had
naturally a great aversion), having accustomed himself to do
everything there for the love of God, and with prayer upon all
occasions, for his grace to do his work well, he had found
everything easy during fifteen years that he had been employed
there.

“That he was very well pleased with the post he was now in, but
that he was as ready to quit that as the former, since he was
always pleasing himself in every condition, by doing little things
for the love of God.

“That the goodness of God assured him he would not forsake him
utterly, and that he would give him strength to bear whatever evil
he permitted to happen to him; and, therefore, that he feared
nothing, and had no occasion to consult with anybody about his
state. That, when he had attempted to do it, he had always come
away more perplexed.”

The simple-heartedness of the good Brother Lawrence, and the
relaxation of all unnecessary solicitudes and anxieties in him, is
a refreshing spectacle.

The need of feeling responsible all the livelong day has been
preached long enough in our New England. Long enough exclusively,
at any rate,—and long enough to the female sex. What our
girl-students and woman-teachers most need nowadays is not the
exacerbation, but rather the toning-down of their moral tensions.
Even now I fear that some one of my fair hearers may be making an
undying resolve to become strenuously relaxed, cost what it will,
for the remainder of her life. It is needless to say that that is
not the way to do it. The way to do it, paradoxical as it may seem,
is genuinely not to care whether you are doing it or not. Then,
possibly, by the grace of God, you may all at once find that you
are doing it, and, having learned what the trick feels like,
you may (again by the grace of God) be enabled to go on.

And that something like this may be the happy experience of all
my hearers is, in closing, my most earnest wish.

II. ON A CERTAIN
BLINDNESS IN HUMAN BEINGS

Our judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little,
depend on the feelings the things arouse in us. Where we
judge a thing to be precious in consequence of the idea we
frame of it, this is only because the idea is itself associated
already with a feeling. If we were radically feelingless, and if
ideas were the only things our mind could entertain, we should lose
all our likes and dislikes at a stroke, and be unable to point to
any one situation or experience in life more valuable or
significant than any other.

Now the blindness in human beings, of which this discourse will
treat, is the blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard
to the feelings of creatures and people different from
ourselves.

We are practical beings, each of us with limited functions and
duties to perform. Each is bound to feel intensely the importance
of his own duties and the significance of the situations that call
these forth. But this feeling is in each of us a vital secret, for
sympathy with which we vainly look to others. The others are too
much absorbed in their own vital secrets to take an interest in
ours. Hence the stupidity and injustice of our opinions, so far as
they deal with the significance of alien lives. Hence the falsity
of our judgments, so far as they presume to decide in an absolute
way on the value of other persons’ conditions or ideals.

Take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we are by a tie more
intimate than most ties in this world; and yet, outside of that tie
of friendly fondness, how insensible, each of us, to all that makes
life significant for the other!—we to the rapture of bones
under hedges, or smells of trees and lamp-posts, they to the
delights of literature and art. As you sit reading the most moving
romance you ever fell upon, what sort of a judge is your
fox-terrier of your behavior? With all his good will toward you,
the nature of your conduct is absolutely excluded from his
comprehension. To sit there like a senseless statue, when you might
be taking him to walk and throwing sticks for him to catch! What
queer disease is this that comes over you every day, of holding
things and staring at them like that for hours together, paralyzed
of motion and vacant of all conscious life? The African savages
came nearer the truth; but they, too, missed it, when they gathered
wonderingly round one of our American travellers who, in the
interior, had just come into possession of a stray copy of the New
York Commercial Advertiser, and was devouring it column by
column. When he got through, they offered him a high price for the
mysterious object; and, being asked for what they wanted it, they
said: “For an eye medicine,”—that being the only reason they
could conceive of for the protracted bath which he had given his
eyes upon its surface.

The spectator’s judgment is sure to miss the root of the matter,
and to possess no truth. The subject judged knows a part of the
world of reality which the judging spectator fails to see, knows
more while the spectator knows less; and, wherever there is
conflict of opinion and difference of vision, we are bound to
believe that the truer side is the side that feels the more, and
not the side that feels the less.

Let me take a personal example of the kind that befalls each one
of us daily:—

Some years ago, while journeying in the mountains of North
Carolina, I passed by a large number of ‘coves,’ as they call them
there, or heads of small valleys between the hills, which had been
newly cleared and planted. The impression on my mind was one of
unmitigated squalor. The settler had in every case cut down the
more manageable trees, and left their charred stumps standing. The
larger trees he had girdled and killed, in order that their foliage
should not cast a shade. He had then built a log cabin, plastering
its chinks with clay, and had set up a tall zigzag rail fence
around the scene of his havoc, to keep the pigs and cattle out.
Finally, he had irregularly planted the intervals between the
stumps and trees with Indian corn, which grew among the chips; and
there he dwelt with his wife and babes—an axe, a gun, a few
utensils, and some pigs and chickens feeding in the woods, being
the sum total of his possessions.

The forest had been destroyed; and what had ‘improved’ it out of
existence was hideous, a sort of ulcer, without a single element of
artificial grace to make up for the loss of Nature’s beauty. Ugly,
indeed, seemed the life of the squatter, scudding, as the sailors
say, under bare poles, beginning again away back where our first
ancestors started, and by hardly a single item the better off for
all the achievements of the intervening generations.

Talk about going back to nature! I said to myself, oppressed by
the dreariness, as I drove by. Talk of a country life for one’s old
age and for one’s children! Never thus, with nothing but the bare
ground and one’s bare hands to fight the battle! Never, without the
best spoils of culture woven in! The beauties and commodities
gained by the centuries are sacred. They are our heritage and
birthright. No modern person ought to be willing to live a day in
such a state of rudimentariness and denudation.

Then I said to the mountaineer who was driving me, “What sort of
people are they who have to make these new clearings?” “All of us,”
he replied. “Why, we ain’t happy here, unless we are getting one of
these coves under cultivation.” I instantly felt that I had been
losing the whole inward significance of the situation. Because to
me the clearings spoke of naught but denudation, I thought that to
those whose sturdy arms and obedient axes had made them they could
tell no other story. But, when they looked on the hideous
stumps, what they thought of was personal victory. The chips, the
girdled trees, and the vile split rails spoke of honest sweat,
persistent toil and final reward. The cabin was a warrant of safety
for self and wife and babes. In short, the clearing, which to me
was a mere ugly picture on the retina, was to them a symbol
redolent with moral memories and sang a very pæan of duty,
struggle, and success.

I had been as blind to the peculiar ideality of their conditions
as they certainly would also have been to the ideality of mine, had
they had a peep at my strange indoor academic ways of life at
Cambridge.

Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who
lives it, there the life becomes genuinely significant. Sometimes
the eagerness is more knit up with the motor activities, sometimes
with the perceptions, sometimes with the imagination, sometimes
with reflective thought. But, wherever it is found, there is the
zest, the tingle, the excitement of reality; and there is
‘importance’ in the only real and positive sense in which
importance ever anywhere can be.

Robert Louis Stevenson has illustrated this by a case, drawn
from the sphere of the imagination, in an essay which I really
think deserves to become immortal, both for the truth of its matter
and the excellence of its form.

“Toward the end of September,” Stevenson writes, “when
school-time was drawing near, and the nights were already black, we
would begin to sally from our respective villas, each equipped with
a tin bull’s-eye lantern. The thing was so well known that it had
worn a rut in the commerce of Great Britain; and the grocers, about
the due time, began to garnish their windows with our particular
brand of luminary. We wore them buckled to the waist upon a cricket
belt, and over them, such was the rigor of the game, a buttoned
top-coat. They smelled noisomely of blistered tin. They never
burned aright, though they would always burn our fingers. Their use
was naught, the pleasure of them merely fanciful, and yet a boy
with a bull’s-eye under his top-coat asked for nothing more. The
fishermen used lanterns about their boats, and it was from them, I
suppose, that we had got the hint; but theirs were not bull’s-eyes,
nor did we ever play at being fishermen. The police carried them at
their belts, and we had plainly copied them in that; yet we did not
pretend to be policemen. Burglars, indeed, we may have had some
haunting thought of; and we had certainly an eye to past ages when
lanterns were more common, and to certain story-books in which we
had found them to figure very largely. But take it for all in all,
the pleasure of the thing was substantive; and to be a boy with a
bull’s-eye under his top-coat was good enough for us.

“When two of these asses met, there would be an anxious ‘Have
you got your lantern?’ and a gratified ‘Yes!’ That was the
shibboleth, and very needful, too; for, as it was the rule to keep
our glory contained, none could recognize a lantern-bearer unless
(like the polecat) by the smell. Four or five would sometimes climb
into the belly of a ten-man lugger, with nothing but the thwarts
above them,—for the cabin was usually locked,—or chose
out some hollow of the links where the wind might whistle overhead.
Then the coats would be unbuttoned, and the bull’s-eyes discovered;
and in the chequering glimmer, under the huge, windy hall of the
night, and cheered by a rich steam of toasting tinware, these
fortunate young gentlemen would crouch together in the cold sand of
the links, or on the scaly bilges of the fishing-boat, and delight
them with inappropriate talk. Woe is me that I cannot give some
specimens!… But the talk was but a condiment, and these
gatherings themselves only accidents in the career of the
lantern-bearer. The essence of this bliss was to walk by yourself
in the black night, the slide shut, the top-coat buttoned, not a
ray escaping, whether to conduct your footsteps or to make your
glory public,—a mere pillar of darkness in the dark; and all
the while, deep down in the privacy of your fool’s heart, to know
you had a bull’s-eye at your belt, and to exult and sing over the
knowledge.

“It is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the most
stolid. It may be contended rather that a (somewhat minor) bard in
almost every case survives, and is the spice of life to his
possessor. Justice is not done to the versatility and the unplumbed
childishness of man’s imagination. His life from without may seem
but a rude mound of mud: there will be some golden chamber at the
heart of it, in which he dwells delighted; and for as dark as his
pathway seems to the observer, he will have some kind of bull’s-eye
at his belt.

…”There is one fable that touches very near the quick of
life,—the fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard
a bird break into song, hearkened for a trill or two, and found
himself at his return a stranger at his convent gates; for he had
been absent fifty years, and of all his comrades there survived but
one to recognize him. It is not only in the woods that this
enchanter carols, though perhaps he is native there. He sings in
the most doleful places. The miser hears him and chuckles, and his
days are moments. With no more apparatus than an evil-smelling
lantern, I have evoked him on the naked links. All life that is not
merely mechanical is spun out of two strands,—seeking for
that bird and hearing him. And it is just this that makes life so
hard to value, and the delight of each so incommunicable. And it is
just a knowledge of this, and a remembrance of those fortunate
hours in which the bird has sung to us, that fills us
with such wonder when we turn to the pages of the realist. There,
to be sure, we find a picture of life in so far as it consists of
mud and of old iron, cheap desires and cheap fears, that which we
are ashamed to remember and that which we are careless whether we
forget; but of the note of that time-devouring nightingale we hear
no news.

…”Say that we came [in such a realistic romance] on some such
business as that of my lantern-bearers on the links, and described
the boys as very cold, spat upon by flurries of rain, and drearily
surrounded, all of which they were; and their talk as silly and
indecent, which it certainly was. To the eye of the observer they
are wet and cold and drearily surrounded; but ask
themselves, and they are in the heaven of a recondite pleasure, the
ground of which is an ill-smelling lantern.

“For, to repeat, the ground of a man’s joy is often hard to hit.
It may hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like the lantern; it
may reside in the mysterious inwards of psychology…. It has so
little bond with externals … that it may even touch them not, and
the man’s true life, for which he consents to live, lie together in
the field of fancy…. In such a case the poetry runs underground.
The observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad. For to
look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk
from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and
abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and
nested in by nightingales. And the true realism were that of the
poets, to climb after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse
of the heaven in which he lives. And the true realism, always and
everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides,
and give it a voice far beyond singing.

“For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors
lies the sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the
excuse. To one who has not the secret of the lanterns the scene
upon the links is meaningless. And hence the haunting and truly
spectral unreality of realistic books…. In each we miss the
personal poetry, the enchanted atmosphere, that rainbow work of
fancy that clothes what is naked and seems to ennoble what is base;
in each, life falls dead like dough, instead of soaring away like a
balloon into the colors of the sunset; each is true, each
inconceivable; for no man lives in the external truth among salts
and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain,
with the painted windows and the storied wall.”[A]

These paragraphs are the best thing I know in all Stevenson. “To
miss the joy is to miss all.” Indeed, it is. Yet we are but finite,
and each one of us has some single specialized vocation of his own.
And it seems as if energy in the service of its particular duties
might be got only by hardening the heart toward everything unlike
them. Our deadness toward all but one particular kind of joy would
thus be the price we inevitably have to pay for being practical
creatures. Only in some pitiful dreamer, some philosopher, poet, or
romancer, or when the common practical man becomes a lover, does
the hard externality give way, and a gleam of insight into the
ejective world, as Clifford called it, the vast world of inner life
beyond us, so different from that of outer seeming, illuminate our
mind. Then the whole scheme of our customary values gets
confounded, then our self is riven and its narrow interests fly to
pieces, then a new centre and a new perspective must be found.

The change is well described by my colleague, Josiah
Royce:—

“What, then, is our neighbor? Thou hast regarded his thought,
his feeling, as somehow different from thine. Thou hast said, ‘A
pain in him is not like a pain in me, but something far easier to
bear.’ He seems to thee a little less living than thou; his life is
dim, it is cold, it is a pale fire beside thy own burning
desires…. So, dimly and by instinct hast thou lived with thy
neighbor, and hast known him not, being blind. Thou hast made [of
him] a thing, no Self at all. Have done with this illusion, and
simply try to learn the truth. Pain is pain, joy is joy,
everywhere, even as in thee. In all the songs of the forest birds;
in all the cries of the wounded and dying, struggling in the
captor’s power; in the boundless sea where the myriads of
water-creatures strive and die; amid all the countless hordes of
savage men; in all sickness and sorrow; in all exultation and hope,
everywhere, from the lowest to the noblest, the same conscious,
burning, wilful life is found, endlessly manifold as the forms of
the living creatures, unquenchable as the fires of the sun, real as
these impulses that even now throb in thine own little selfish
heart. Lift up thy eyes, behold that life, and then turn away, and
forget it as thou canst; but, if thou hast known that, thou
hast begun to know thy duty.”[A]

This higher vision of an inner significance in what, until then,
we had realized only in the dead external way, often comes over a
person suddenly; and, when it does so, it makes an epoch in his
history. As Emerson says, there is a depth in those moments that
constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other
experiences. The passion of love will shake one like an explosion,
or some act will awaken a remorseful compunction that hangs like a
cloud over all one’s later day.

This mystic sense of hidden meaning starts upon us often from
non-human natural things. I take this passage from ‘Obermann,’ a
French novel that had some vogue in its day: “Paris, March
7.—It was dark and rather cold. I was gloomy, and walked
because I had nothing to do. I passed by some flowers placed
breast-high upon a wall. A jonquil in bloom was there. It is the
strongest expression of desire: it was the first perfume of the
year. I felt all the happiness destined for man. This unutterable
harmony of souls, the phantom of the ideal world, arose in me
complete. I never felt anything so great or so instantaneous. I
know not what shape, what analogy, what secret of relation it was
that made me see in this flower a limitless beauty…. I shall
never enclose in a conception this power, this immensity that
nothing will express; this form that nothing will contain; this
ideal of a better world which one feels, but which it would seem
that nature has not made.”[A]

Wordsworth and Shelley are similarly full of this sense of a
limitless significance in natural things. In Wordsworth it was a
somewhat austere and moral significance,—a ‘lonely
cheer.’

“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:—

As Wordsworth walked, filled with his strange inner joy,
responsive thus to the secret life of nature round about him, his
rural neighbors, tightly and narrowly intent upon their own
affairs, their crops and lambs and fences, must have thought him a
very insignificant and foolish personage. It surely never occurred
to any one of them to wonder what was going on inside of him
or what it might be worth. And yet that inner life of his carried
the burden of a significance that has fed the souls of others, and
fills them to this day with inner joy.

Richard Jefferies has written a remarkable autobiographic
document entitled The Story of my Heart. It tells, in many pages,
of the rapture with which in youth the sense of the life of nature
filled him. On a certain hill-top he says:—

“I was utterly alone with the sun and the earth. Lying down on
the grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and
the distant sea, far beyond sight…. With all the intensity of
feeling which exalted me, all the intense communion I held with the
earth, the sun and sky, the stars hidden by the light, with the
ocean,—in no manner can the thrilling depth of these feelings
be written,—with these I prayed as if they were the keys of
an instrument…. The great sun, burning with light, the strong
earth,—dear earth,—the warm sky, the pure air, the
thought of ocean, the inexpressible beauty of all filled me with a
rapture, an ecstasy, an inflatus. With this inflatus, too, I
prayed…. The prayer, this soul-emotion, was in itself, not for an
object: it was a passion. I hid my face in the grass. I was wholly
prostrated, I lost myself in the wrestle, I was rapt and carried
away…. Had any shepherd accidentally seen me lying on the turf,
he would only have thought I was resting a few minutes. I made no
outward show. Who could have imagined the whirlwind of passion that
was going on in me as I reclined there!”[A]

Surely, a worthless hour of life, when measured by the usual
standards of commercial value. Yet in what other kind of
value can the preciousness of any hour, made precious by any
standard, consist, if it consist not in feelings of excited
significance like these, engendered in some one, by what the hour
contains?

Yet so blind and dead does the clamor of our own practical
interests make us to all other things, that it seems almost as if
it were necessary to become worthless as a practical being, if one
is to hope to attain to any breadth of insight into the impersonal
world of worths as such, to have any perception of life’s meaning
on a large objective scale. Only your mystic, your dreamer, or your
insolvent tramp or loafer, can afford so sympathetic an occupation,
an occupation which will change the usual standards of human value
in the twinkling of an eye, giving to foolishness a place ahead of
power, and laying low in a minute the distinctions which it takes a
hard-working conventional man a lifetime to build up. You may be a
prophet, at this rate; but you cannot be a worldly success.

Walt Whitman, for instance, is accounted by many of us a
contemporary prophet. He abolishes the usual human distinctions,
brings all conventionalisms into solution, and loves and celebrates
hardly any human attributes save those elementary ones common to
all members of the race. For this he becomes a sort of ideal tramp,
a rider on omnibus-tops and ferry-boats, and, considered either
practically or academically, a worthless, unproductive being. His
verses are but ejaculations—things mostly without subject or
verb, a succession of interjections on an immense scale. He felt
the human crowd as rapturously as Wordsworth felt the mountains,
felt it as an overpoweringly significant presence, simply to absorb
one’s mind in which should be business sufficient and worthy to
fill the days of a serious man. As he crosses Brooklyn ferry, this
is what he feels:—

And so on, through the rest of a divinely beautiful poem. And,
if you wish to see what this hoary loafer considered the most
worthy way of profiting by life’s heaven-sent opportunities, read
the delicious volume of his letters to a young car-conductor who
had become his friend:—

“NEW YORK, Oct. 9,
1868.

“Dear
Pete,—It is splendid here this forenoon—bright and
cool. I was out early taking a short walk by the river only two
squares from where I live…. Shall I tell you about [my life] just
to fill up? I generally spend the forenoon in my room writing,
etc., then take a bath fix up and go out about twelve and loafe
somewhere or call on someone down town or on business, or perhaps
if it is very pleasant and I feel like it ride a trip with some
driver friend on Broadway from 23rd Street to Bowling Green, three
miles each way. (Every day I find I have plenty to do, every hour
is occupied with something.) You know it is a never ending
amusement and study and recreation for me to ride a couple of hours
on a pleasant afternoon on a Broadway stage in this way. You see
everything as you pass, a sort of living, endless
panorama—shops and splendid buildings and great windows: on
the broad sidewalks crowds of women richly dressed continually
passing, altogether different, superior in style and looks from any
to be seen anywhere else—in fact a perfect stream of
people—men too dressed in high style, and plenty of
foreigners—and then in the streets the thick crowd of
carriages, stages, carts, hotel and private coaches, and in fact
all sorts of vehicles and many first class teams, mile after mile,
and the splendor of such a great street and so many tall,
ornamental, noble buildings many of them of white marble, and the
gayety and motion on every side: you will not wonder how much
attraction all this is on a fine day, to a great loafer like me,
who enjoys so much seeing the busy world move by him, and
exhibiting itself for his amusement, while he takes it easy and
just looks on and observes.”[A]

Truly a futile way of passing the time, some of you may say, and
not altogether creditable to a grown-up man. And yet, from the
deepest point of view, who knows the more of truth, and who knows
the less,—Whitman on his omnibus-top, full of the inner joy
with which the spectacle inspires him, or you, full of the disdain
which the futility of his occupation excites?

When your ordinary Brooklynite or New Yorker, leading a life
replete with too much luxury, or tired and careworn about his
personal affairs, crosses the ferry or goes up Broadway, his
fancy does not thus ‘soar away into the colors of the sunset’ as
did Whitman’s, nor does he inwardly realize at all the indisputable
fact that this world never did anywhere or at any time contain more
of essential divinity, or of eternal meaning, than is embodied in
the fields of vision over which his eyes so carelessly pass. There
is life; and there, a step away, is death. There is the only kind
of beauty there ever was. There is the old human struggle and its
fruits together. There is the text and the sermon, the real and the
ideal in one. But to the jaded and unquickened eye it is all dead
and common, pure vulgarism, flatness, and disgust. “Hech! it is a
sad sight!” says Carlyle, walking at night with some one who
appeals to him to note the splendor of the stars. And that very
repetition of the scene to new generations of men in secula
seculorum, that eternal recurrence of the common order, which
so fills a Whitman with mystic satisfaction, is to a Schopenhauer,
with the emotional anæsthesia, the feeling of ‘awful inner
emptiness’ from out of which he views it all, the chief ingredient
of the tedium it instils. What is life on the largest scale, he
asks, but the same recurrent inanities, the same dog barking, the
same fly buzzing, forevermore? Yet of the kind of fibre of which
such inanities consist is the material woven of all the
excitements, joys, and meanings that ever were, or ever shall be,
in this world.

To be rapt with satisfied attention, like Whitman, to the mere
spectacle of the world’s presence, is one way, and the most
fundamental way, of confessing one’s sense of its unfathomable
significance and importance. But how can one attain to the feeling
of the vital significance of an experience, if one have it not to
begin with? There is no receipt which one can follow. Being a
secret and a mystery, it often comes in mysteriously unexpected
ways. It blossoms sometimes from out of the very grave wherein we
imagined that our happiness was buried. Benvenuto Cellini, after a
life all in the outer sunshine, made of adventures and artistic
excitements, suddenly finds himself cast into a dungeon in the
Castle of San Angelo. The place is horrible. Rats and wet and mould
possess it. His leg is broken and his teeth fall out, apparently
with scurvy. But his thoughts turn to God as they have never turned
before. He gets a Bible, which he reads during the one hour in the
twenty-four in which a wandering ray of daylight penetrates his
cavern. He has religious visions. He sings psalms to himself, and
composes hymns. And thinking, on the last day of July, of the
festivities customary on the morrow in Rome, he says to himself:
“All these past years I celebrated this holiday with the vanities
of the world: from this year henceforward I will do it with the
divinity of God. And then I said to myself, ‘Oh, how much more
happy I am for this present life of mine than for all those things
remembered!'”[A]

But the great understander of these mysterious ebbs and flows is
Tolstoï. They throb all through his novels. In his ‘War and
Peace,’ the hero, Peter, is supposed to be the richest man in the
Russian empire. During the French invasion he is taken prisoner,
and dragged through much of the retreat. Cold, vermin, hunger, and
every form of misery assail him, the result being a revelation to
him of the real scale of life’s values. “Here only, and for the
first time, he appreciated, because he was deprived of it, the
happiness of eating when he was hungry, of drinking when he was
thirsty, of sleeping when he was sleepy, and of talking when he
felt the desire to exchange some words…. Later in life he always
recurred with joy to this month of captivity, and never failed to
speak with enthusiasm of the powerful and ineffaceable sensations,
and especially of the moral calm which he had experienced at this
epoch. When at daybreak, on the morrow of his imprisonment, he saw
[I abridge here Tolstoï’s description] the mountains with
their wooded slopes disappearing in the grayish mist; when he felt
the cool breeze caress him; when he saw the light drive away the
vapors, and the sun rise majestically behind the clouds and
cupolas, and the crosses, the dew, the distance, the river, sparkle
in the splendid, cheerful rays,—his heart overflowed with
emotion. This emotion kept continually with him, and increased a
hundred-fold as the difficulties of his situation grew graver….
He learnt that man is meant for happiness, and that this happiness
is in him, in the satisfaction of the daily needs of existence, and
that unhappiness is the fatal result, not of our need, but of our
abundance…. When calm reigned in the camp, and the embers paled,
and little by little went out, the full moon had reached the
zenith. The woods and the fields roundabout lay clearly visible;
and, beyond the inundation of light which filled them, the view
plunged into the limitless horizon. Then Peter cast his eyes upon
the firmament, filled at that hour with myriads of stars. ‘All that
is mine,’ he thought. ‘All that is in me, is me! And that is what
they think they have taken prisoner! That is what they have shut up
in a cabin!’ So he smiled, and turned in to sleep among his
comrades.”[A]

The occasion and the experience, then, are nothing. It all
depends on the capacity of the soul to be grasped, to have its
life-currents absorbed by what is given. “Crossing a bare common,”
says Emerson, “in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky,
without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good
fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the
brink of fear.”

Life is always worth living, if one have such responsive
sensibilities. But we of the highly educated classes (so called)
have most of us got far, far away from Nature. We are trained to
seek the choice, the rare, the exquisite exclusively, and to
overlook the common. We are stuffed with abstract conceptions, and
glib with verbalities and verbosities; and in the culture of these
higher functions the peculiar sources of joy connected with our
simpler functions often dry up, and we grow stone-blind and
insensible to life’s more elementary and general goods and
joys.

The remedy under such conditions is to descend to a more
profound and primitive level. To be imprisoned or shipwrecked or
forced into the army would permanently show the good of life to
many an over-educated pessimist. Living in the open air and on the
ground, the lop-sided beam of the balance slowly rises to the level
line; and the over-sensibilities and insensibilities even
themselves out. The good of all the artificial schemes and fevers
fades and pales; and that of seeing, smelling, tasting, sleeping,
and daring and doing with one’s body, grows and grows. The savages
and children of nature, to whom we deem ourselves so much superior,
certainly are alive where we are often dead, along these lines;
and, could they write as glibly as we do, they would read us
impressive lectures on our impatience for improvement and on our
blindness to the fundamental static goods of life. “Ah! my
brother,” said a chieftain to his white guest, “thou wilt never
know the happiness of both thinking of nothing and doing nothing.
This, next to sleep, is the most enchanting of all things. Thus we
were before our birth, and thus we shall be after death. Thy
people,… when they have finished reaping one field, they begin to
plough another; and, if the day were not enough, I have seen them
plough by moonlight. What is their life to ours,—the life
that is as naught to them? Blind that they are, they lose it all!
But we live in the present.”[A]

The intense interest that life can assume when brought down to
the non-thinking level, the level of pure sensorial perception, has
been beautifully described by a man who can write,—Mr.
W.H. Hudson, in his volume, “Idle Days in Patagonia.”

“I spent the greater part of one winter,” says this admirable
author, “at a point on the Rio Negro, seventy or eighty miles from
the sea.

…”It was my custom to go out every morning on horseback with
my gun, and, followed by one dog, to ride away from the valley; and
no sooner would I climb the terrace, and plunge into the gray,
universal thicket, than I would find myself as completely alone as
if five hundred instead of only five miles separated me from the
valley and river. So wild and solitary and remote seemed that gray
waste, stretching away into infinitude, a waste untrodden by man,
and where the wild animals are so few that they have made no
discoverable path in the wilderness of thorns…. Not once nor
twice nor thrice, but day after day I returned to this solitude,
going to it in the morning as if to attend a festival, and leaving
it only when hunger and thirst and the westering sun compelled me.
And yet I had no object in going,—no motive which could be
put into words; for, although I carried a gun, there was nothing to
shoot,—the shooting was all left behind in the valley….
Sometimes I would pass a whole day without seeing one mammal, and
perhaps not more than a dozen birds of any size. The weather at
that time was cheerless, generally with a gray film of cloud spread
over the sky, and a bleak wind, often cold enough to make my
bridle-hand quite numb…. At a slow pace, which would have seemed
intolerable under other circumstances, I would ride about for hours
together at a stretch. On arriving at a hill, I would slowly ride
to its summit, and stand there to survey the prospect. On every
side it stretched away in great undulations, wild and irregular.
How gray it all was! Hardly less so near at hand than on the
haze-wrapped horizon where the hills were dim and the outline
obscured by distance. Descending from my outlook, I would take up
my aimless wanderings again, and visit other elevations to gaze on
the same landscape from another point; and so on for hours. And at
noon I would dismount, and sit or lie on my folded poncho for an
hour or longer. One day in these rambles I discovered a small grove
composed of twenty or thirty trees, growing at a convenient
distance apart, that had evidently been resorted to by a herd of
deer or other wild animals. This grove was on a hill differing in
shape from other hills in its neighborhood; and, after a time, I
made a point of finding and using it as a resting-place every day
at noon. I did not ask myself why I made choice of that one spot,
sometimes going out of my way to sit there, instead of sitting down
under any one of the millions of trees and bushes on any other
hillside. I thought nothing about it, but acted unconsciously. Only
afterward it seemed to me that, after having rested there once,
each time I wished to rest again, the wish came associated with the
image of that particular clump of trees, with polished stems and
clean bed of sand beneath; and in a short time I formed a habit of
returning, animal like, to repose at that same spot.

“It was, perhaps, a mistake to say that I would sit down and
rest, since I was never tired; and yet, without being tired, that
noon-day pause, during which I sat for an hour without moving, was
strangely grateful. All day there would be no sound, not even the
rustling of a leaf. One day, while listening to the silence,
it occurred to my mind to wonder what the effect would be if I were
to shout aloud. This seemed at the time a horrible suggestion,
which almost made me shudder. But during those solitary days it was
a rare thing for any thought to cross my mind. In the state of mind
I was in, thought had become impossible. My state was one of
suspense and watchfulness; yet I had no expectation
of meeting an adventure, and felt as free from apprehension as I
feel now while sitting in a room in London. The state seemed
familiar rather than strange, and accompanied by a strong feeling
of elation; and I did not know that something had come between me
and my intellect until I returned to my former self,—to
thinking, and the old insipid existence [again].

“I had undoubtedly gone back; and that state of intense
watchfulness or alertness, rather, with suspension of the higher
intellectual faculties, represented the mental state of the pure
savage. He thinks little, reasons little, having a surer guide in
his [mere sensory perceptions]. He is in perfect harmony with
nature, and is nearly on a level, mentally, with the wild animals
he preys on, and which in their turn sometimes prey on him.”[A]

For the spectator, such hours as Mr. Hudson writes of form a
mere tale of emptiness, in which nothing happens, nothing is
gained, and there is nothing to describe. They are meaningless and
vacant tracts of time. To him who feels their inner secret, they
tingle with an importance that unutterably vouches for itself. I am
sorry for the boy or girl, or man or woman, who has never been
touched by the spell of this mysterious sensorial life, with its
irrationality, if so you like to call it, but its vigilance and its
supreme felicity. The holidays of life are its most vitally
significant portions, because they are, or at least should be,
covered with just this kind of magically irresponsible spell.

And now what is the result of all these considerations and
quotations? It is negative in one sense, but positive in another.
It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the
meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it
commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see
harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however
unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off: neither the whole of
truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer,
although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from
the peculiar position in which he stands. Even prisons and
sick-rooms have their special revelations. It is enough to ask of
each of us that he should be faithful to his own opportunities and
make the most of his own blessings, without presuming to regulate
the rest of the vast field.

III. WHAT MAKES A LIFE
SIGNIFICANT

In my previous talk, ‘On a Certain Blindness,’ I tried to make
you feel how soaked and shot-through life is with values and
meanings which we fail to realize because of our external and
insensible point of view. The meanings are there for the others,
but they are not there for us. There lies more than a mere interest
of curious speculation in understanding this. It has the most
tremendous practical importance. I wish that I could convince you
of it as I feel it myself. It is the basis of all our tolerance,
social, religious, and political. The forgetting of it lies at the
root of every stupid and sanguinary mistake that rulers over
subject-peoples make. The first thing to learn in intercourse with
others is non-interference with their own peculiar ways of being
happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence
with ours. No one has insight into all the ideals. No one should
presume to judge them off-hand. The pretension to dogmatize about
them in each other is the root of most human injustices and
cruelties, and the trait in human character most likely to make the
angels weep.

Every Jack sees in his own particular Jill charms and
perfections to the enchantment of which we stolid onlookers are
stone-cold. And which has the superior view of the absolute truth,
he or we? Which has the more vital insight into the nature of
Jill’s existence, as a fact? Is he in excess, being in this matter
a maniac? or are we in defect, being victims of a pathological
anæsthesia as regards Jill’s magical importance? Surely the
latter; surely to Jack are the profounder truths revealed; surely
poor Jill’s palpitating little life-throbs are among the
wonders of creation, are worthy of this sympathetic
interest; and it is to our shame that the rest of us cannot feel
like Jack. For Jack realizes Jill concretely, and we do not. He
struggles toward a union with her inner life, divining her
feelings, anticipating her desires, understanding her limits as
manfully as he can, and yet inadequately, too; for he is also
afflicted with some blindness, even here. Whilst we, dead clods
that we are, do not even seek after these things, but are contented
that that portion of eternal fact named Jill should be for us as if
it were not. Jill, who knows her inner life, knows that Jack’s way
of taking it—so importantly—is the true and serious
way; and she responds to the truth in him by taking him truly and
seriously, too. May the ancient blindness never wrap its clouds
about either of them again! Where would any of us be, were
there no one willing to know us as we really are or ready to repay
us for our insight by making recognizant return? We ought,
all of us, to realize each other in this intense, pathetic, and
important way.

If you say that this is absurd, and that we cannot be in love
with everyone at once, I merely point out to you that, as a matter
of fact, certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for
friendship and for taking delight in other people’s lives; and that
such persons know more of truth than if their hearts were not so
big. The vice of ordinary Jack and Jill affection is not its
intensity, but its exclusions and its jealousies. Leave those out,
and you see that the ideal I am holding up before you, however
impracticable to-day, yet contains nothing intrinsically
absurd.

We have unquestionably a great cloud-bank of ancestral blindness
weighing down upon us, only transiently riven here and there by
fitful revelations of the truth. It is vain to hope for this state
of things to alter much. Our inner secrets must remain for the most
part impenetrable by others, for beings as essentially practical as
we are are necessarily short of sight. But, if we cannot gain much
positive insight into one another, cannot we at least use our sense
of our own blindness to make us more cautious in going over the
dark places? Cannot we escape some of those hideous ancestral
intolerances and cruelties, and positive reversals of the
truth?

For the remainder of this hour I invite you to seek with me some
principle to make our tolerance less chaotic. And, as I began my
previous lecture by a personal reminiscence, I am going to ask your
indulgence for a similar bit of egotism now.

A few summers ago I spent a happy week at the famous Assembly
Grounds on the borders of Chautauqua Lake. The moment one treads
that sacred enclosure, one feels one’s self in an atmosphere of
success. Sobriety and industry, intelligence and goodness,
orderliness and ideality, prosperity and cheerfulness, pervade the
air. It is a serious and studious picnic on a gigantic scale. Here
you have a town of many thousands of inhabitants, beautifully laid
out in the forest and drained, and equipped with means for
satisfying all the necessary lower and most of the superfluous
higher wants of man. You have a first-class college in full blast.
You have magnificent music—a chorus of seven hundred voices,
with possibly the most perfect open-air auditorium in the world.
You have every sort of athletic exercise from sailing, rowing,
swimming, bicycling, to the ball-field and the more artificial
doings which the gymnasium affords. You have kindergartens and
model secondary schools. You have general religious services and
special club-houses for the several sects. You have perpetually
running soda-water fountains, and daily popular lectures by
distinguished men. You have the best of company, and yet no effort.
You have no zymotic diseases, no poverty, no drunkenness, no crime,
no police. You have culture, you have kindness, you have cheapness,
you have equality, you have the best fruits of what mankind has
fought and bled and striven for tinder the name of civilization for
centuries. You have, in short, a foretaste of what human society
might be, were it all in the light, with no suffering and no dark
corners.

I went in curiosity for a day. I stayed for a week, held
spell-bound by the charm and ease of everything, by the
middle-class paradise, without a sin, without a victim, without a
blot, without a tear.

And yet what was my own astonishment, on emerging into the dark
and wicked world again, to catch myself quite unexpectedly and
involuntarily saying: “Ouf! what a relief! Now for something
primordial and savage, even though it were as bad as an Armenian
massacre, to set the balance straight again. This order is too
tame, this culture too second-rate, this goodness too uninspiring.
This human drama without a villain or a pang; this community so
refined that ice-cream soda-water is the utmost offering it can
make to the brute animal in man; this city simmering in the tepid
lakeside sun; this atrocious harmlessness of all things,—I
cannot abide with them. Let me take my chances again in the big
outside worldly wilderness with all its sins and sufferings. There
are the heights and depths, the precipices and the steep ideals,
the gleams of the awful and the infinite; and there is more hope
and help a thousand times than in this dead level and quintessence
of every mediocrity.”

Such was the sudden right-about-face performed for me by my
lawless fancy! There had been spread before me the
realization—on a small, sample scale of course—of all
the ideals for which our civilization has been striving: security,
intelligence, humanity, and order; and here was the instinctive
hostile reaction, not of the natural man, but of a so-called
cultivated man upon such a Utopia. There seemed thus to be a
self-contradiction and paradox somewhere, which I, as a professor
drawing a full salary, was in duty bound to unravel and explain, if
I could.

So I meditated. And, first of all, I asked myself what the thing
was that was so lacking in this Sabbatical city, and the lack of
which kept one forever falling short of the higher sort of
contentment. And I soon recognized that it was the element that
gives to the wicked outer world all its moral style, expressiveness
and picturesqueness,—the element of precipitousness, so to
call it, of strength and strenuousness, intensity and danger.

What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the
romances and the statues celebrate and the grim civic monuments
remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with
those of darkness; with heroism, reduced to its bare chance, yet
ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death. But in this
unspeakable Chautauqua there was no potentiality of death in sight
anywhere, and no point of the compass visible from which danger
might possibly appear. The ideal was so completely victorious
already that no sign of any previous battle remained, the place
just resting on its oars. But what our human emotions seem to
require is the sight of the struggle going on. The moment the
fruits are being merely eaten, things become ignoble. Sweat and
effort, human nature strained to its uttermost and on the rack, yet
getting through alive, and then turning its back on its success to
pursue another more rare and arduous still—this is the sort
of thing the presence of which inspires us, and the reality of
which it seems to be the function of all the higher forms of
literature and fine art to bring home to us and suggest. At
Chautauqua there were no racks, even in the place’s historical
museum; and no sweat, except possibly the gentle moisture on the
brow of some lecturer, or on the sides of some player in the
ball-field.

Such absence of human nature in extremis anywhere seemed,
then, a sufficient explanation for Chautauqua’s flatness and lack
of zest.

But was not this a paradox well calculated to fill one with
dismay? It looks indeed, thought I, as if the romantic idealists
with their pessimism about our civilization were, after all, quite
right. An irremediable flatness is coming over the world.
Bourgeoisie and mediocrity, church sociables and teachers’
conventions, are taking the place of the old heights and depths and
romantic chiaroscuro. And, to get human life in its wild intensity,
we must in future turn more and more away from the actual, and
forget it, if we can, in the romancer’s or the poet’s pages. The
whole world, delightful and sinful as it may still appear for a
moment to one just escaped from the Chautauquan enclosure, is
nevertheless obeying more and more just those ideals that are sure
to make of it in the end a mere Chautauqua Assembly on an enormous
scale. Was im Gesang soll leben muss im Leben untergehn.
Even now, in our own country, correctness, fairness, and compromise
for every small advantage are crowding out all other qualities. The
higher heroisms and the old rare flavors are passing out of life.[A]

With these thoughts in my mind, I was speeding with the train
toward Buffalo, when, near that city, the sight of a workman doing
something on the dizzy edge of a sky-scaling iron construction
brought me to my senses very suddenly. And now I perceived, by a
flash of insight, that I had been steeping myself in pure ancestral
blindness, and looking at life with the eyes of a remote spectator.
Wishing for heroism and the spectacle of human nature on the rack,
I had never noticed the great fields of heroism lying round about
me, I had failed to see it present and alive. I could only think of
it as dead and embalmed, labelled and costumed, as it is in the
pages of romance. And yet there it was before me in the daily lives
of the laboring classes. Not in clanging fights and desperate
marches only is heroism to be looked for, but on every railway
bridge and fire-proof building that is going up to-day. On
freight-trains, on the decks of vessels, in cattle-yards and mines,
on lumber-rafts, among the firemen and the policemen, the demand
for courage is incessant; and the supply never fails. There, every
day of the year somewhere, is human nature in extremis for
you. And wherever a scythe, an axe, a pick, or a shovel is wielded,
you have it sweating and aching and with its powers of patient
endurance racked to the utmost under the length of hours of the
strain.

As I awoke to all this unidealized heroic life around me, the
scales seemed to fall from my eyes; and a wave of sympathy greater
than anything I had ever before felt with the common life of common
men began to fill my soul. It began to seem as if virtue with horny
hands and dirty skin were the only virtue genuine and vital enough
to take account of. Every other virtue poses; none is absolutely
unconscious and simple, and unexpectant of decoration or
recognition, like this. These are our soldiers, thought I, these
our sustainers, these the very parents of our life.

Many years ago, when in Vienna, I had had a similar feeling of
awe and reverence in looking at the peasant-women, in from the
country on their business at the market for the day. Old hags many
of them were, dried and brown and wrinkled, kerchiefed and
short-petticoated, with thick wool stockings on their bony shanks,
stumping through the glittering thoroughfares, looking neither to
the right nor the left, bent on duty, envying nothing,
humble-hearted, remote;—and yet at bottom, when you came to
think of it, bearing the whole fabric of the splendors and
corruptions of that city on their laborious backs. For where would
any of it have been without their unremitting, unrewarded labor in
the fields? And so with us: not to our generals and poets, I
thought, but to the Italian and Hungarian laborers in the Subway,
rather, ought the monuments of gratitude and reverence of a city
like Boston to be reared.

If any of you have been readers of Tolstoï, you will see
that I passed into a vein of feeling similar to his, with its
abhorrence of all that conventionally passes for distinguished, and
its exclusive deification of the bravery, patience, kindliness, and
dumbness of the unconscious natural man.

Where now is our Tolstoï, I said, to bring the truth
of all this home to our American bosoms, fill us with a better
insight, and wean us away from that spurious literary romanticism
on which our wretched culture—as it calls itself—is
fed? Divinity lies all about us, and culture is too hidebound to
even suspect the fact. Could a Howells or a Kipling be enlisted in
this mission? or are they still too deep in the ancestral
blindness, and not humane enough for the inner joy and meaning of
the laborer’s existence to be really revealed? Must we wait for
some one born and bred and living as a laborer himself, but who, by
grace of Heaven, shall also find a literary voice?

And there I rested on that day, with a sense of widening of
vision, and with what it is surely fair to call an increase of
religious insight into life. In God’s eyes the differences of
social position, of intellect, of culture, of cleanliness, of
dress, which different men exhibit, and all the other rarities and
exceptions on which they so fantastically pin their pride, must be
so small as practically quite to vanish; and all that should remain
is the common fact that here we are, a countless multitude of
vessels of life, each of us pent in to peculiar difficulties, with
which we must severally struggle by using whatever of fortitude and
goodness we can summon up. The exercise of the courage, patience,
and kindness, must be the significant portion of the whole
business; and the distinctions of position can only be a manner of
diversifying the phenomenal surface upon which these underground
virtues may manifest their effects. At this rate, the deepest human
life is everywhere, is eternal. And, if any human attributes exist
only in particular individuals, they must belong to the mere
trapping and decoration of the surface-show.

Thus are men’s lives levelled up as well as levelled
down,—levelled up in their common inner meaning, levelled
down in their outer gloriousness and show. Yet always, we must
confess, this levelling insight tends to be obscured again; and
always the ancestral blindness returns and wraps us up, so that we
end once more by thinking that creation can be for no other purpose
than to develop remarkable situations and conventional distinctions
and merits. And then always some new leveller in the shape of a
religious prophet has to arise—the Buddha, the Christ, or
some Saint Francis, some Rousseau or Tolstoï—to redispel
our blindness. Yet, little by little, there comes some stable gain;
for the world does get more humane, and the religion of democracy
tends toward permanent increase.

This, as I said, became for a time my conviction, and gave me
great content. I have put the matter into the form of a personal
reminiscence, so that I might lead you into it more directly and
completely, and so save time. But now I am going to discuss the
rest of it with you in a more impersonal way.

Tolstoï’s levelling philosophy began long before he had the
crisis of melancholy commemorated in that wonderful document of his
entitled ‘My Confession,’ which led the way to his more
specifically religious works. In his masterpiece ‘War and
Peace,’—assuredly the greatest of human novels,—the
rôle of the spiritual hero is given to a poor little soldier
named Karataïeff, so helpful, so cheerful, and so devout that,
in spite of his ignorance and filthiness, the sight of him opens
the heavens, which have been closed, to the mind of the principal
character of the book; and his example evidently is meant by
Tolstoï to let God into the world again for the reader. Poor
little Karataïeff is taken prisoner by the French; and, when
too exhausted by hardship and fever to march, is shot as other
prisoners were in the famous retreat from Moscow. The last view one
gets of him is his little figure leaning against a white
birch-tree, and uncomplainingly awaiting the end.

“The more,” writes Tolstoï in the work ‘My Confession,’
“the more I examined the life of these laboring folks, the more
persuaded I became that they veritably have faith, and get from it
alone the sense and the possibility of life…. Contrariwise to
those of our own class, who protest against destiny and grow
indignant at its rigor, these people receive maladies and
misfortunes without revolt, without opposition, and with a firm and
tranquil confidence that all had to be like that, could not be
otherwise, and that it is all right so…. The more we live by our
intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life. We see only
a cruel jest in suffering and death, whereas these people live,
suffer, and draw near to death with tranquillity, and oftener than
not with joy…. There are enormous multitudes of them happy with
the most perfect happiness, although deprived of what for us is the
sole good of life. Those who understand life’s meaning, and know
how to live and die thus, are to be counted not by twos, threes,
tens, but by hundreds, thousands, millions. They labor quietly,
endure privations and pains, live and die, and throughout
everything see the good without seeing the vanity. I had to love
these people. The more I entered into their life, the more I loved
them; and the more it became possible for me to live, too. It came
about not only that the life of our society, of the learned and of
the rich, disgusted me—more than that, it lost all semblance
of meaning in my eyes. All our actions, our deliberations, our
sciences, our arts, all appeared to me with a new significance. I
understood that these things might be charming pastimes, but that
one need seek in them no depth, whereas the life of the
hard-working populace, of that multitude of human beings who really
contribute to existence, appeared to me in its true light. I
understood that there veritably is life, that the meaning which
life there receives is the truth; and I accepted it.”[A]

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

“What a wonderful thing,” he writes,[B] “is this Man! How surprising are his
attributes! Poor soul, here for so little, cast among so many
hardships, savagely surrounded, savagely descended, irremediably
condemned to prey upon his fellow-lives,—who should have
blamed him, had he been of a piece with his destiny and a being
merely barbarous?… [Yet] it matters not where we look, under
what climate we observe him, in what stage of society, in what
depth of ignorance, burdened with what erroneous morality; in ships
at sea, a man inured to hardship and vile pleasures, his brightest
hope a fiddle in a tavern, and a bedizened trull who sells herself
to rob him, and he, for all that, simple, innocent, cheerful,
kindly like a child, constant to toil, brave to drown, for
others;… in the slums of cities, moving among indifferent
millions to mechanical employments, without hope of change in the
future, with scarce a pleasure in the present, and yet true to
his virtues, honest up to his lights, kind to his neighbors,
tempted perhaps in vain by the bright gin-palace,… often repaying
the world’s scorn with service, often standing firm upon a
scruple;… everywhere some virtue cherished or affected, everywhere
some decency of thought and courage, everywhere the ensign of man’s
ineffectual goodness,—ah! if I could show you this! If I
could show you these men and women all the world over, in every
stage of history, under every abuse of error, under every
circumstance of failure, without hope, without help, without
thanks, still obscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still
clinging to some rag of honor, the poor jewel of their souls.”

All this is as true as it is splendid, and terribly do we need
our Tolstoïs 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 Tolstoï overcorrect our social
prejudices, when he makes his love of the peasant so exclusive, and
hardens his heart toward the educated man as absolutely as he does.
Grant that at Chautauqua there was little moral effort, little
sweat or muscular strain in view. Still, deep down in the souls of
the participants we may be sure that something of the sort was hid,
some inner stress, some vital virtue not found wanting when
required. And, after all, the question recurs, and forces itself
upon us, Is it so certain that the surroundings and circumstances
of the virtue do make so little difference in the importance of the
result? Is the functional utility, the worth to the universe of a
certain definite amount of courage, kindliness, and patience, no
greater if the possessor of these virtues is in an educated
situation, working out far-reaching tasks, than if he be an
illiterate nobody, hewing wood and drawing water, just to keep
himself alive? Tolstoï’s philosophy, deeply enlightening
though it certainly is, remains a false abstraction. It savors too
much of that Oriental pessimism and nihilism of his, which declares
the whole phenomenal world and its facts and their distinctions to
be a cunning fraud.

A mere bare fraud is just what our Western common sense will
never believe the phenomenal world to be. It admits fully that the
inner joys and virtues are the essential part of life’s
business, but it is sure that some positive part is also
played by the adjuncts of the show. If it is idiotic in romanticism
to recognize the heroic only when it sees it labelled and
dressed-up in books, it is really just as idiotic to see it only in
the dirty boots and sweaty shirt of some one in the fields. It is
with us really under every disguise: at Chautauqua; here in your
college; in the stock-yards and on the freight-trains; and in the
czar of Russia’s court. But, instinctively, we make a combination
of two things in judging the total significance of a human being.
We feel it to be some sort of a product (if such a product only
could be calculated) of his inner virtue and his outer
place,—neither singly taken, but both conjoined. If the outer
differences had no meaning for life, why indeed should all this
immense variety of them exist? They must be significant
elements of the world as well.

Just test Tolstoï’s deification of the mere manual laborer
by the facts. This is what Mr. Walter Wyckoff, after working as an
unskilled laborer in the demolition of some buildings at West
Point, writes of the spiritual condition of the class of men to
which he temporarily chose to belong:—

“The salient features of our condition are plain enough. We are
grown men, and are without a trade. In the labor-market we stand
ready to sell to the highest bidder our mere muscular strength for
so many hours each day. We are thus in the lowest grade of labor.
And, selling our muscular strength in the open market for what it
will bring, we sell it under peculiar conditions. It is all the
capital that we have. We have no reserve means of subsistence, and
cannot, therefore, stand off for a ‘reserve price.’ We sell under
the necessity of satisfying imminent hunger. Broadly speaking, we
must sell our labor or starve; and, as hunger is a matter of a few
hours, and we have no other way of meeting this need, we must sell
at once for what the market offers for our labor.

“Our employer is buying labor in a dear market, and he will
certainly get from us as much work as he can at the price. The
gang-boss is secured for this purpose, and thoroughly does he know
his business. He has sole command of us. He never saw us before,
and he will discharge us all when the débris is cleared
away. In the mean time he must get from us, if he can, the utmost
of physical labor which we, individually and collectively, are
capable of. If he should drive some of us to exhaustion, and we
should not be able to continue at work, he would not be the loser;
for the market would soon supply him with others to take our
places.

“We are ignorant men, but so much we clearly see,—that we
have sold our labor where we could sell it dearest, and our
employer has bought it where he could buy it cheapest. He has paid
high, and he must get all the labor that he can; and, by a strong
instinct which possesses us, we shall part with as little as we
can. From work like ours there seems to us to have been eliminated
every element which constitutes the nobility of labor. We feel no
personal pride in its progress, and no community of interest with
our employer. There is none of the joy of responsibility, none of
the sense of achievement, only the dull monotony of grinding toil,
with the longing for the signal to quit work, and for our wages at
the end.

“And being what we are, the dregs of the labor-market, and
having no certainty of permanent employment, and no organization
among ourselves, we must expect to work under the watchful eye of a
gang-boss, and be driven, like the wage-slaves that we are, through
our tasks.

“All this is to tell us, in effect, that our lives are hard,
barren, hopeless lives.”

And such hard, barren, hopeless lives, surely, are not lives in
which one ought to be willing permanently to remain. And why is
this so? Is it because they are so dirty? Well, Nansen grew a great
deal dirtier on his polar expedition; and we think none the worse
of his life for that. Is it the insensibility? Our soldiers have to
grow vastly more insensible, and we extol them to the skies. Is it
the poverty? Poverty has been reckoned the crowning beauty of many
a heroic career. Is it the slavery to a task, the loss of finer
pleasures?

Such slavery and loss are of the very essence of the higher
fortitude, and are always counted to its credit,—read the
records of missionary devotion all over the world. It is not any
one of these things, then, taken by itself,—no, nor all of
them together,—that make such a life undesirable. A man might
in truth live like an unskilled laborer, and do the work of one,
and yet count as one of the noblest of God’s creatures. Quite
possibly there were some such persons in the gang that our author
describes; but the current of their souls ran underground; and he
was too steeped in the ancestral blindness to discern it.

If there were any such morally exceptional individuals,
however, what made them different from the rest? It can only have
been this,—that their souls worked and endured in obedience
to some inner ideal, while their comrades were not actuated
by anything worthy of that name. These ideals of other lives are
among those secrets that we can almost never penetrate, although
something about the man may often tell us when they are there. In
Mr. Wyckoff’s own case we know exactly what the self-imposed ideal
was. Partly he had stumped himself, as the boys say, to carry
through a strenuous achievement; but mainly he wished to enlarge
his sympathetic insight into fellow-lives. For this his sweat and
toil acquire a certain heroic significance, and make us accord to
him exceptional esteem. But it is easy to imagine his fellows with
various other ideals. To say nothing of wives and babies, one may
have been a convert of the Salvation Army, and had a nightingale
singing of expiation and forgiveness in his heart all the while he
labored. Or there might have been an apostle like Tolstoï
himself, or his compatriot Bondareff, in the gang, voluntarily
embracing labor as their religious mission. Class-loyalty was
undoubtedly an ideal with many. And who knows how much of that
higher manliness of poverty, of which Phillips Brooks has spoken so
penetratingly, was or was not present in that gang?

“A rugged, barren land,” says Phillips Brooks, “is poverty to
live in,—a land where I am thankful very often if I can get a
berry or a root to eat. But living in it really, letting it bear
witness to me of itself, not dishonoring it all the time by judging
it after the standard of the other lands, gradually there come out
its qualities. Behold! no land like this barren and naked land of
poverty could show the moral geology of the world. See how the hard
ribs … stand out strong and solid. No life like poverty could so
get one to the heart of things and make men know their meaning,
could so let us feel life and the world with all the soft cushions
stripped off and thrown away…. Poverty makes men come very near
each other, and recognize each other’s human hearts; and poverty,
highest and best of all, demands and cries out for faith in God….
I know how superficial and unfeeling, how like mere mockery, words
in praise of poverty may seem…. But I am sure that the poor man’s
dignity and freedom, his self-respect and energy, depend upon his
cordial knowledge that his poverty is a true region and kind of
life, with its own chances of character, its own springs of
happiness and revelations of God. Let him resist the
characterlessness which often goes with being poor. Let him insist
on respecting the condition where he lives. Let him learn to love
it, so that by and by, [if] he grows rich, he shall go out of the
low door of the old familiar poverty with a true pang of regret,
and with a true honor for the narrow home in which he has lived so
long.”[A]

The barrenness and ignobleness of the more usual laborer’s life
consist in the fact that it is moved by no such ideal inner
springs. The backache, the long hours, the danger, are patiently
endured—for what? To gain a quid of tobacco, a glass of beer,
a cup of coffee, a meal, and a bed, and to begin again the next day
and shirk as much as one can. This really is why we raise no
monument to the laborers in the Subway, even though they be our
conscripts, and even though after a fashion our city is indeed
based upon their patient hearts and enduring backs and shoulders.
And this is why we do raise monuments to our soldiers, whose
outward conditions were even brutaller still. The soldiers are
supposed to have followed an ideal, and the laborers are supposed
to have followed none.

You see, my friends, how the plot now thickens; and how
strangely the complexities of this wonderful human nature of ours
begin to develop under our hands. We have seen the blindness and
deadness to each other which are our natural inheritance; and, in
spite of them, we have been led to acknowledge an inner meaning
which passeth show, and which may be present in the lives of others
where we least descry it. And now we are led to say that such inner
meaning can be complete and valid for us also, only
when the inner joy, courage, and endurance are joined with an
ideal.

But what, exactly, do we mean by an ideal? Can we give no
definite account of such a word?

To a certain extent we can. An ideal, for instance, must be
something intellectually conceived, something of which we are not
unconscious, if we have it; and it must carry with it that sort of
outlook, uplift, and brightness that go with all intellectual
facts. Secondly, there must be novelty in an
ideal,—novelty at least for him whom the ideal grasps. Sodden
routine is incompatible with ideality, although what is sodden
routine for one person may be ideal novelty for another. This shows
that there is nothing absolutely ideal: ideals are relative to the
lives that entertain them. To keep out of the gutter is for us here
no part of consciousness at all, yet for many of our brethren it is
the most legitimately engrossing of ideals.

Now, taken nakedly, abstractly, and immediately, you see that
mere ideals are the cheapest things in life. Everybody has them in
some shape or other, personal or general, sound or mistaken, low or
high; and the most worthless sentimentalists and dreamers,
drunkards, shirks and verse-makers, who never show a grain of
effort, courage, or endurance, possibly have them on the most
copious scale. Education, enlarging as it does our horizon and
perspective, is a means of multiplying our ideals, of bringing new
ones into view. And your college professor, with a starched shirt
and spectacles, would, if a stock of ideals were all alone by
itself enough to render a life significant, be the most absolutely
and deeply significant of men. Tolstoï would be completely
blind in despising him for a prig, a pedant and a parody; and all
our new insight into the divinity of muscular labor would be
altogether off the track of truth.

But such consequences as this, you instinctively feel, are
erroneous. The more ideals a man has, the more contemptible, on the
whole, do you continue to deem him, if the matter ends there for
him, and if none of the laboring man’s virtues are called into
action on his part,—no courage shown, no privations
undergone, no dirt or scars contracted in the attempt to get them
realized. It is quite obvious that something more than the mere
possession of ideals is required to make a life significant in any
sense that claims the spectator’s admiration. Inner joy, to be
sure, it may have, with its ideals; but that is its own
private sentimental matter. To extort from us, outsiders as we are,
with our own ideals to look after, the tribute of our grudging
recognition, it must back its ideal visions with what the laborers
have, the sterner stuff of manly virtue; it must multiply their
sentimental surface by the dimension of the active will, if we are
to have depth, if we are to have anything cubical and solid
in the way of character.

The significance of a human life for communicable and publicly
recognizable purposes is thus the offspring of a marriage of two
different parents, either of whom alone is barren. The ideals taken
by themselves give no reality, the virtues by themselves no
novelty. And let the orientalists and pessimists say what they
will, the thing of deepest—or, at any rate, of comparatively
deepest—significance in life does seem to be its character of
progress, or that strange union of reality with ideal
novelty which it continues from one moment to another to present.
To recognize ideal novelty is the task of what we call
intelligence. Not every one’s intelligence can tell which novelties
are ideal. For many the ideal thing will always seem to cling still
to the older more familiar good. In this case character, though not
significant totally, may be still significant pathetically. So, if
we are to choose which is the more essential factor of human
character, the fighting virtue or the intellectual breadth, we must
side with Tolstoï, and choose that simple faithfulness to his
light or darkness which any common unintellectual man can show.

But, with all this beating and tacking on my part, I fear you
take me to be reaching a confused result. I seem to be just taking
things up and dropping them again. First I took up Chautauqua, and
dropped that; then Tolstoï and the heroism of common toil, and
dropped them; finally, I took up ideals, and seem now almost
dropping those. But please observe in what sense it is that I drop
them. It is when they pretend singly to redeem life from
insignificance. Culture and refinement all alone are not enough to
do so. Ideal aspirations are not enough, when uncombined with pluck
and will. But neither are pluck and will, dogged endurance and
insensibility to danger enough, when taken all alone. There must be
some sort of fusion, some chemical combination among these
principles, for a life objectively and thoroughly significant to
result.

Of course, this is a somewhat vague conclusion. But in a
question of significance, of worth, like this, conclusions can
never be precise. The answer of appreciation, of sentiment, is
always a more or a less, a balance struck by sympathy, insight, and
good will. But it is an answer, all the same, a real conclusion.
And, in the course of getting it, it seems to me that our eyes have
been opened to many important things. Some of you are, perhaps,
more livingly aware than you were an hour ago of the depths of
worth that lie around you, hid in alien lives. And, when you ask
how much sympathy you ought to bestow, although the amount is,
truly enough, a matter of ideal on your own part, yet in this
notion of the combination of ideals with active virtues you have a
rough standard for shaping your decision. In any case, your
imagination is extended. You divine in the world about you matter
for a little more humility on your own part, and tolerance,
reverence, and love for others; and you gain a certain inner
joyfulness at the increased importance of our common life. Such
joyfulness is a religious inspiration and an element of spiritual
health, and worth more than large amounts of that sort of technical
and accurate information which we professors are supposed to be
able to impart.

To show the sort of thing I mean by these words, I will just
make one brief practical illustration and then close.

We are suffering to-day in America from what is called the
labor-question; and, when you go out into the world, you will each
and all of you be caught up in its perplexities. I use the brief
term labor-question to cover all sorts of anarchistic discontents
and socialistic projects, and the conservative resistances which
they provoke. So far as this conflict is unhealthy and
regrettable,—and I think it is so only to a limited
extent,—the unhealthiness consists solely in the fact that
one-half of our fellow-countrymen remain entirely blind to the
internal significance of the lives of the other half. They miss the
joys and sorrows, they fail to feel the moral virtue, and they do
not guess the presence of the intellectual ideals. They are at
cross-purposes all along the line, regarding each other as they
might regard a set of dangerously gesticulating automata, or, if
they seek to get at the inner motivation, making the most horrible
mistakes. Often all that the poor man can think of in the rich man
is a cowardly greediness for safety, luxury, and effeminacy, and a
boundless affectation. What he is, is not a human being, but a
pocket-book, a bank-account. And a similar greediness, turned by
disappointment into envy, is all that many rich men can see in the
state of mind of the dissatisfied poor. And, if the rich man begins
to do the sentimental act over the poor man, what senseless
blunders does he make, pitying him for just those very duties and
those very immunities which, rightly taken, are the condition of
his most abiding and characteristic joys! Each, in short, ignores
the fact that happiness and unhappiness and significance are a
vital mystery; each pins them absolutely on some ridiculous feature
of the external situation; and everybody remains outside of
everybody else’s sight.

Society has, with all this, undoubtedly got to pass toward some
newer and better equilibrium, and the distribution of wealth has
doubtless slowly got to change: such changes have always happened,
and will happen to the end of time. But if, after all that I have
said, any of you expect that they will make any genuine vital
difference on a large scale, to the lives of our descendants,
you will have missed the significance of my entire lecture. The
solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing,—the
marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with
some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some man’s or woman’s
pains.—And, whatever or wherever life may be, there will
always be the chance for that marriage to take place.

Fitz-James Stephen wrote many years ago words to this effect
more eloquent than any I can speak: “The ‘Great Eastern,’ or some
of her successors,” he said, “will perhaps defy the roll of the
Atlantic, and cross the seas without allowing their passengers to
feel that they have left the firm land. The voyage from the cradle
to the grave may come to be performed with similar facility.
Progress and science may perhaps enable untold millions to live and
die without a care, without a pang, without an anxiety. They will
have a pleasant passage and plenty of brilliant conversation. They
will wonder that men ever believed at all in clanging fights and
blazing towns and sinking ships and praying hands; and, when they
come to the end of their course, they will go their way, and the
place thereof will know them no more. But it seems unlikely that
they will have such a knowledge of the great ocean on which they
sail, with its storms and wrecks, its currents and icebergs, its
huge waves and mighty winds, as those who battled with it for years
together in the little craft, which, if they had few other merits,
brought those who navigated them full into the presence of time and
eternity, their maker and themselves, and forced them to have some
definite view of their relations to them and to each other.”[A]

In this solid and tridimensional sense, so to call it, those
philosophers are right who contend that the world is a standing
thing, with no progress, no real history. The changing conditions
of history touch only the surface of the show. The altered
equilibriums and redistributions only diversify our opportunities
and open chances to us for new ideals. But, with each new ideal
that comes into life, the chance for a life based on some old ideal
will vanish; and he would needs be a presumptuous calculator who
should with confidence say that the total sum of significances is
positively and absolutely greater at any one epoch than at any
other of the world.

I am speaking broadly, I know, and omitting to consider certain
qualifications in which I myself believe. But one can only make one
point in one lecture, and I shall be well content if I have brought
my point home to you this evening in even a slight degree. There
are compensations: and no outward changes of condition in life
can keep the nightingale of its eternal meaning from singing in all
sorts of different men’s hearts. That is the main fact to remember.
If we could not only admit it with our lips, but really and truly
believe it, how our convulsive insistencies, how our antipathies
and dreads of each other, would soften down! If the poor and the
rich could look at each other in this way, sub specie
æternatis, 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.