1 
 
 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 AND STUDENTS 
 
 By WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 mm 
 
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 I 
 
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 .-S. WELL'S, 
 
 COLUMBUS. O.
 
 y v
 
 Works by WILLIAM JAMES, M.D., Ph. tt 
 Litt.D., LL.D. ; Correspondent of the Insti- 
 tute of France ; Professor of Philosophy at 
 Harvard University, 
 
 The Principle! of Psychology. 2 vols. Svo. 
 New York: Henry Holt & Co. 1890. 
 
 Psychology : Briefer Course. 12010. New 
 York: Henry Holt & Co. 1892. 
 
 The Will to Believe, and Other Essays In 
 Popular Philosophy. New York: Long- 
 mans, Green & Co. 1897. 
 
 Is Life Worth Living ? i8mo. Philadelphia: 
 S. 6. Weston, 1305 Arch Street 1896. 
 
 Human Immortality : Two Supposed Objec- 
 tions to the Doctrine. i6mo. Boston: 
 Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1898. 
 
 The Literary Remains of Henry James. 
 
 Edited, with an Introduction, by WILLIAM 
 JAMBS. With Portrait. Crown Svo. Boston: 
 Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1885.
 
 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 AND STUDENTS 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 NEW YORK 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 1900
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1899, 1900 
 
 BY 
 WILLIAM JAMBS
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 IN 1892 I was asked by the Harvard Corporation 
 to give a few public lectures on psychology to the 
 Cambridge teachers. The talks now printed form the 
 substance of that course, which has since then been 
 delivered at various places to various teacher-audi- 
 ences. I have found by experience that what my 
 hearers seem least to relish is analytical technicality, 
 and what they most care for is concrete practical 
 application. So I have gradually weeded out the 
 former, and left the latter unreduced ; and now, that 
 I have at last written out the lectures, they contain 
 a minimum of what is deemed ' scientific' in psy- 
 chology, and are practical and popular in the ex- 
 treme. 
 
 Some of my colleagues may possibly shake their 
 heads at this ; but in taking my cue from what has 
 seemed to me to be the feeling of the audiences I be- 
 lieve that I am shaping my book so as to satisfy the 
 more genuine public need. 
 
 Teachers, of course, will miss the minute divisions, 
 subdivisions, and definitions, the lettered and num- 
 bered headings, the variations of type, and all the 
 
 206598O
 
 IV PREFACE 
 
 other mechanical artifices on which they are accus- 
 tomed to prop their minds. But my main desire has 
 been to make them conceive, and, if possible, re- 
 produce sympathetically in their imagination, the 
 mental life of their pupil as the sort of active unity 
 which he himself feels it to be. He doesn't chop 
 himself into distinct processes and compartments ; 
 and it would have frustrated this deeper purpose of 
 my book to make it look, when printed, like a Bae- 
 deker's handbook of travel or a text-book of arithme- 
 tic. So far as books printed like this book force the 
 fluidity of the facts upon the young teacher's atten- 
 tion, so far I am sure they tend to do his intellect 
 a service, even though they may leave unsatisfied 
 a craving (not altogether without its legitimate 
 grounds) for more nomenclature, head-lines, and 
 subdivisions. 
 
 Readers acquainted with my larger books on Psy- 
 chology will meet much familiar phraseology. In the 
 chapters on habit and memory I have even copied 
 several pages verbatim, but I do not know that 
 apology is needed for such plagiarism as this. 
 
 The talks to students, which conclude the volume, 
 were written in response to invitations to deliver 
 1 addresses ' to students at women's colleges. The 
 first one was to the graduating class of the Boston 
 Normal School of Gymnastics. Properly, it contiri-
 
 PREFACE T 
 
 ues the series of talks to teachers. The second and 
 the third address belong together, and continue an- 
 other line of thought. 
 
 I wish I were able to make the second, ' On a Cer- 
 tain Blindness in Human Beings,' more impressive. 
 It is more than the mere piece of sentimentalism 
 which it may seem to some readers. It connects 
 itself with a definite view of the world and of our 
 moral relations to the same. Those who have done 
 me the honor of reading my volume of philosophic 
 essays will recognize that I mean the pluralistic or 
 individualistic philosophy. According to that philos- 
 ophy, the truth is too great for any one actual mind, 
 even though that mind be dubbed ' the Absolute,' to 
 know the whole of it. The facts and worths of life 
 need many cognizers to take them in. There is no 
 point of view absolutely public and universal. Pri- 
 vate and uncommunicable perceptions always remain 
 over, and the worst of it is that those who look for 
 them from the outside never know where. 
 
 The practical consequence of such a philosophy is 
 the well-known democratic respect for the sacredness 
 of individuality, is, at any rate, the outward toler- 
 ance 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
 
 Tl PREFACE 
 
 easily acquire again if the pretension of our nation to 
 inflict its own inner ideals and institutions vi et 
 armis upon Orientals should meet with a resistance 
 as obdurate as so far it has been gallant and spirited. 
 Religiously and philosophically, our ancient national 
 doctrine of live and let live may prove to have 
 a far deeper meaning than our people now seem to 
 imagine it to possess. 
 
 CAMBRIDGE, MASS., March, 1899.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 TALKS TO TEACHERS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE TEACHING ART . . 3 
 
 The American educational organization, 3 
 What teachers may expect from psychology, 5 
 Teaching methods must agree with psychology, 
 but cannot be immediately deduced therefrom, 7 
 The science of teaching and the science of war, 
 
 9 The educational uses of psychology denned, 
 
 10 The teacher's duty toward child-study, 12. 
 
 II. THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS .... 15 
 
 Our mental life is a succession of conscious 
 ' fields,' 15 They have a focus and a margin, 
 18 This description contrasted with the theory 
 of 'ideas,' 20 Wundt's conclusions, 20, note. 
 
 III. THE CHILD AS A BEHAVING ORGANISM . 22 
 
 Mind as pure reason and mind as practical 
 guide, 22 The latter view the more fashionable 
 one to-day, 23 It will be adopted in this work, 
 24 Why BO? 25 The teacher's function is to 
 train pupils to behavior, 28. 
 
 IV. EDUCATION AND BEHAVIOR 29 
 
 Education defined, 29 Conduct is always its 
 outcome, 30 Different national ideals : Germany 
 and England, 31.
 
 Till CONTENTS 
 
 PAOE 
 
 V. THE NECESSITY OF REACTIONS .... 33 
 
 No impression without expression, 33 Verbal 
 reproduction, 34 Manual training, 35 Pupils 
 should know their ' marks,' 37. 
 
 VI. NATIVE AND ACQUIRED REACTIONS ... 38 
 
 The acquired reactions must be preceded by 
 native ones, 38 Illustration: teaching child to 
 ask instead of snatching, 39 Man has more in- 
 stincts than other rnarpT"al", 43. 
 
 VII. WHAT THE NATIVE REACTIONS ABE . . 45 
 
 Fear and love, 45 Curiosity, 45 Imitation, 
 48 Emulation, 49 Forbidden by Rousseau, 51 
 
 His error, 52 Ambition, pugnacity, and pride. 
 Soft pedagogics and the fighting impulse, 54 
 Ownership, 55 Its educational uses, 56 Con- 
 structiveness, 58 Manual teaching, 59 Transi- 
 toriness in instincts, 60 Their order of succes- 
 sion, 61. 
 
 Vin. THE LAWS OF HABIT 64 
 
 Good and bad habits, 64 Habit due to plasti- 
 city of organic tissues, 65 The aim of education 
 is to make useful habits automatic, 66 Maxims . 
 relative to habit-forming: 1. Strong initiative, 67 
 
 2. No exception, 68 3. Seize first opportunity 
 to act, 69 4. Don't preach, 71 Darwin and 
 poetry: without exercise our capacities decay, 71 
 
 The habit of mental and muscular relaxation, 
 74 Fifth maxim, keep the faculty of effort 
 trained, 75 Sudden conversions compatible with 
 laws of habit, 70 Momentous influence of habits 
 on character, 77.
 
 CONTENTS IX 
 
 FAOB 
 
 IX. THE ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS 79 
 
 A case of habit, 79 The two laws, contiguity 
 and similarity, 80 The teacher has to build up 
 useful systems of association, 83 Habitual asso- 
 ciations determine character, 84 Indetermiaate- 
 ness of our trains of association, 85 We can 
 trace them backward, but not foretell them, 86 
 Interest deflects, 87 Prepotent parts of the field, 
 88 In teaching, multiply cues, 89. 
 
 X. INTEREST 91 
 
 The child's native interests, 91 How uninterest- 
 ing things acquire an interest, 94 Rules for the 
 teacher, 95 ' Preparation ' of the mind for the 
 lesson: the pupil must have something to attend 
 with, 97 All later interests are borrowed from 
 original ones, 99. 
 
 XI. ATTENTION 100 
 
 Interest and attention are two aspects of one 
 fact, 100 Voluntary attention comes in beats, 
 101 Genius and attention, 102 The subject 
 must change to win attention, 103 Mechanical 
 aids, 104 The physiological process, 106 The 
 new in the old is what excites interest, 108 In- 
 terest and effort are compatible, 110 Mind-wan- 
 dering, 112 Not fatal to mental efficiency, 114. 
 
 XII. MEMORY 116 
 
 Due to association, 116 No recall without a 
 cue, 118 Memory is due to brain-plasticity, 119 
 Native retentiveness, 120- Number of associa- 
 tions may practically be its equivalent, 122 Re- 
 tentiveness is a fixed property of the individual, 
 123 Memory versus memories, 124 Scientific
 
 X CONTEXTS 
 
 FAOK 
 
 system as help to memory, 126 Technical mem- 
 ories, 127 Cramming, 129 Elementary memory 
 unimprovable, 130 Utility of verbal memorizing, 
 131 Measurements of immediate memory, 133 
 They throw little light, 134 Passion is the im- 
 portant factor in human efficiency, 137 Eye- 
 memory, ear-memory, etc., 137 The rate of 
 forgetting, Ebbinghans's results, 139 Influence 
 of the unreproducible, 142 To remember, one 
 must think and connect, 143. 
 
 XIII. THE ACQUISITION OF IDEAS 144 
 
 Education gives a stock of conceptions, 144 
 The order of their acquisition, 146 Value of 
 verbal material, 149 Abstractions of different 
 orders : when are they assimilable, 151 False 
 conceptions of children, 152. 
 
 XIV. APPERCEPTION 155 
 
 Often a mystifying idea, 155 The process de- 
 fined, 157 The law of economy, 159 Old- 
 fogyism, 160 How many types of apperception ? 
 161 New heads of classification must continually 
 be invented, 163 Alteration of the apperceiving 
 mass, 165 Class names are what we work by, 
 166 Few new fundamental conceptions acquired 
 after twenty-five, 167. 
 
 XV. THE WILL 169 
 
 The word defined, 169 All consciousness tends 
 to action, 170 Ideo-motor action, 171 Inhibi- 
 tion, 172 The process of deliberation, 174 
 Why so few of our ideas result in acts, 176 
 The associationist account of the will, 177 A 
 balance of impulses and inhibitions, 178 The
 
 CONTENTS XI 
 
 PAGE 
 
 over-impulsive and the over-obstructed type, 179 
 The perfect type, 180 The balky will, 181 
 What character building consists in, 184 Right 
 action depends on right apperception of the case, 
 185 Effort of will is effort of attention : the 
 drunkard's dilemma, 187 Vital importance of 
 voluntary attention, 189 Its amount may be in- 
 determinate, 191 Affirmation of free-will, 192 
 Two types of inhibition, 193 Spinoza on inhibi- 
 tion by a higher good, 194 Conclusion, 195. 
 
 TALKS TO STUDENTS. 
 
 I. 
 THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION 199 
 
 II. 
 ON A CERTAIN BLINDNESS IN HUMAN BEINGS 229 
 
 III. 
 WHAT MAKES A LIFE SIGNIFICANT? . 265
 
 TALKS TO TEACHERS
 
 I. 
 
 PSYCHOLOGY AND THE TEACHING ART 
 
 IN the general activity and uprising of ideal in- 
 terests which every one with an eye for fact can 
 discern all about us in American life, there is per- 
 il aps no more promising feature than the fermen- 
 tation which for a dozen years or more has been 
 going on among the teachers. In whatever sphere 
 of education their functions may lie, there is to 
 be seen among them a really inspiring amount of 
 searching of the heart about the highest concerns 
 of their profession. The renovation of nations 
 begins always at the top, among the reflective 
 members of the State, and spreads slowly outward 
 and downward. The teachers of this country, 
 one may say, have its future in their hands. The 
 earnestness which they at present show in striving 
 to enlighten and strengthen themselves is an index 
 of the nation's probabilities of advance in all ideal 
 directions. The outward organization of educa- 
 tion which we have in our United States is per-
 
 4 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 haps, on the whole, the best organization that 
 exists in any country. The State school systems 
 give a diversity and flexibility, an opportunity for 
 experiment and keenness of competition, nowhere 
 else to be found on such an important scale. The 
 independence of so many of the colleges and uni- 
 versities; the give and take of students and in- 
 structors between them all; their emulation, and 
 their happy organic relations to the lower schools ; 
 the traditions of instruction in them, evolved from 
 the older American recitation-method (and so 
 avoiding on the one hand the pure lecture-sys- 
 tem prevalent in Germany and Scotland, which 
 considers too little the individual student, and yet 
 not involving the sacrifice of the instructor to the 
 individual student, which the English tutorial sys- 
 tem would seem too often to entail), all these 
 things (to say nothing of that coeducation of the 
 sexes in whose benefits so many of us heartily 
 believe), all these things, I say, are most happy 
 features of our scholastic life, and from them the 
 most sanguine auguries may be drawn. 
 
 Having so favorable an organization, all we 
 need is to impregnate it with geniuses, to get 
 superior men and women working more and more 
 abundantly in it and for it and at it, and in a
 
 PSYCHOLOGY AND THE TEACHING ART 5 
 
 generation or two America may well lead the 
 education of the world. I must say that I look 
 forward with no little confidence to the day when 
 that shall be an accomplished fact. 
 
 No one has profited more by the fermentation 
 of which I speak, in pedagogical circles, than we 
 psychologists. The desire of the schoolteachers 
 for a completer professional training, and their 
 aspiration toward the ' professional * spirit in their 
 work, have led them more and more to turn to us 
 for light on fundamental principles. And in these 
 few hours which we are to spend together you 
 look to me, I am sure, for information concerning 
 the mind's operations, which may enable you to 
 labor more easily and effectively in the several 
 schoolrooms over which you preside. 
 
 Far be it from me to disclaim for psychology all 
 title to such hopes. Psychology ought certainly 
 to give the teacher radical help. And yet I con- 
 fess that, acquainted as I am with the height of 
 some of your expectations, I feel a little anxious 
 lest, at the end of these simple talks of mine, not 
 a few of you may experience some disappointment 
 at the net results. In other words, I am not sure 
 that you may not be indulging fancies that are 
 just a shade exaggerated. That would not be
 
 6 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 altogether astonishing, for we have been having 
 something like a 4 boom ' in psychology in this 
 country. Laboratories and professorships have 
 been founded, and reviews established. The air 
 has been full of rumors. The editors of educa- 
 tional journals and the arrangers of conventions 
 have had to show themselves enterprising and on a 
 level with the novelties of the day. Some of the 
 professors have not been unwilling to co-operate, 
 and I am not sure even that the publishers have 
 been entirely inert. 'The new psychology' has 
 tWs become a term to conjure up portentous ideas 
 
 ^ t m </ 
 
 withal; and you teachers, docile and receptive 
 5* and aspiring as many of you are, have been 
 plunged in an atmosphere of vague talk about our 
 "/ science, which to a great extent has been more 
 mystifying than enlightening. Altogether it does 
 seem as if there were a certain fatality of mystifi- 
 cation laid upon the teachers of our day. The mat- 
 ter of their profession, compact enough in itself, 
 has to be frothed up for them in journals and insti- 
 tutes, till its outlines often threaten to be lost in 
 a kind of vast uncertainty. Where the disciples 
 are not independent and critical-minded enough 
 (and I think that, if you teachers in the earlier 
 grades have any defect the slightest touch of a
 
 THE 'NEW' PSYCHOLOGY 7 
 
 defect in the world it is that you are a mite too 
 docile), we are pretty sure to miss accuracy and 
 balance and measure in those who get a license to 
 lay down the law to them from above. 
 
 As regards this subject of psychology, now, I 
 wish at the very threshold to do what I can to dis- 
 pel the mystification. So I say at once that in 
 my humble opinion there is no * new psychology ' 
 worthy of the name. There is. nothing but the 
 old psychology which began in Locke's time, plus 
 a little physiology of the brain and senses and 
 theory of evolution, and a few refinements of intro- 
 spective detail, for the most part without adapta- 
 tion to the teacher's use. It is only the .funda- 
 mental conceptions of psychology which are of 
 real value to the teacher ; and they, apart from the 
 aforesaid theory of evolution, are very far from 
 being new. I trust that you will see better what 
 I mean by this at the end of all these talks. 
 
 I say moreover that you make a great, a very 
 great mistake, if you think that psychology, being 
 the science of the mind's laws, is something from 
 which you can deduce definite programmes and 
 schemes and methods of instruction for immediate 
 schoolroom use. Psychology is a science, and 
 teaching is an art; and sciences never generate
 
 8 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 arts directly out of themselves. An intermediary 
 inventive mind must make the application, by 
 using its originality. 
 
 The science of logic never made a man reason 
 rightly, and the science of ethics (if there be such 
 a thing) never made a man behave rightly. The 
 most such sciences can do is to help us to catch 
 ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to 
 reason or to behave wrongly ; and to criticise our- 
 selves more articulately after we have made mis- 
 takes. A science only lays down lines within 
 which the rules of the art must fall, laws which 
 the follower of the art must not transgress ; but 
 what particular thing he shall positively do within 
 those lines is left exclusively to his own genius. 
 One genius will do his work well and succeed hi 
 one way, while another succeeds as well quite dif- 
 ferently ; yet neither will transgress the lines. 
 
 The art of teaching grew up in the schoolroom, 
 out of inventiveness and sympathetic concrete ob- 
 servation. Even where (as in the case of Herbart) 
 the advancer of the art was also a psychologist, 
 the pedagogics and the psychology ran side by 
 side, and the former was not derived in any sense 
 from the latter. The two were congruent, but 
 neither was subordinate. And so even- where the
 
 SCIENCES AND ARTS 
 
 teaching must agree with the psychology, but need 
 not necessarily be the only kind of teaching that 
 would so agree ; for many diverse methods of 
 teaching may equally well agree with psychologi- 
 cal laws. 
 
 To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no 
 guarantee that we shall be good teachers. To ad- 
 vance to that result, we must have an additional 
 endowment altogether, a happy tact and ingenuity 
 to tell us what definite things to say and do when 
 the pupil is before us. That ingenuity in meeting 
 and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete 
 situation, though they are the alpha and omega of 
 the teacher's art^ are things to which psychology 
 cannot help us in the least. 
 
 The science of psychology, and whatever science 
 of general pedagogics may be based on it, are in 
 fact much like the science of war. Nothing is 
 simpler or more definite than the principles of 
 either. In war, all you have to do is to work your 
 enemy into a position from which the natural ob- 
 stacles prevent him from escaping if he tries to ; 
 then to fall on him in numbers superior to his 
 own, at a moment when you have led him to think 
 you far away ; and so, with a minimum of expos- 
 ure of your own troops, to hack his force to pieces,
 
 10 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 and take the remainder prisoners. Just so, in 
 teaching, you must simply work your pupil into 
 such a state of interest in what you are going to 
 teach him that every other object of attention is 
 banished from his mind ; then reveal it to him so 
 impressively that he will remember the occasion 
 to his dying day ; and finally fill him with devour- 
 ing curiosity to know what the next steps in con- 
 nection with the subject are. The principles being 
 so plain, there would be nothing but victories for 
 the masters of the science, either on the battlefield 
 or in the schoolroom, if they did not both have to 
 make their application to an incalculable quantity 
 in the shape of the mind of their opponent. The 
 mind of your own enemy, the pupil, is working 
 away from you as keenly and eagerly as is the 
 mind of the commander on the other side from the 
 scientific general. Just what the respective ene- 
 mies want and think, and what they know and do 
 not know, are as hard things for the teacher as 
 for the general to find out. Divination and per- 
 ception, not psychological pedagogics or theoretic 
 strategy, are the only helpers here. 
 
 But, if the use of psychological principles thus 
 be negative rather than positive, it does not follow 
 that it may not be a great use, all the same. It
 
 HOAV PSYCHOLOGY SHEDS LIGHT 11 
 
 certainly narrows the path for experiments and 
 trials. We know in advance, if we are psycholo- 
 gists, that certain methods will be wrong, so our 
 psychology saves us from mistakes. It makes us, 
 moreover, more clear as to what we are about. 
 We gain confidence in respect to any method 
 which we are using as soon as we believe that 
 it has theory as well as practice at its back. 
 Most of all, it fructifies our independence, and 
 it reanimates our interest, to see our subject at 
 two different angles, to get a stereoscopic view, 
 so to speak, of the youthful organism who is our 
 enemy, and, while handling him with all our con- 
 crete tact and divination, to be able, at the same 
 time, to represent to ourselves the curious inner 
 elements of his mental machine. Such a complete 
 knowledge as this of the pupil, at once intuitive 
 and analytic, is surely the knowledge at which 
 every teacher ought to aim. 
 
 Fortunately for you teachers, the elements of 
 the mental machine can be clearly apprehended, 
 and their workings easily grasped. And, as the 
 most general elements and workings are just those 
 parts of psychology which the teacher finds most 
 directly useful, it follows that the amount of this 
 science which is ne_cess_ary to all teachers need not
 
 12 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 be very great. Those who find themselves loving 
 the subject may go as far as they please, and be- 
 come possibly none the worse teachers for the fact, 
 even though in some of them one might appre- 
 hend a little loss of balance from -the tendency 
 observable in all of us to overemphasize certain 
 special parts of a subject when we are studying 
 it intensely and abstractly. But for the great 
 majority of you a general view is enough, pro- 
 vided it be a true one ; and such a general view, 
 one may sa}', might almost be written on the palm 
 of one's hand. 
 
 Least of all need you, merely as teachers, deem 
 it part of your duty to become contributors to 
 psychological science or to make psychological 
 observations in a methodical or responsible man- 
 ner. I fear that some of the enthusiasts for child- 
 study have thrown a certain burden on you in this 
 way. By all means let child-study go on, it is 
 refreshing all our sense of the child's life. There 
 are teachers who take a spontaneous delight in 
 filling syllabuses, inscribing observations, compil- 
 ing statistics, and computing the per cent. Child- 
 study will certainly enrich their lives. And, if its 
 results, as treated statistically, would seem on the 
 whole to have but trifling value, yet the anecdotes
 
 CHILD-STUDY 13 
 
 and observations of which it in part consist do 
 certainly acquaint us more intimately with our 
 pupils. Our eyes and ears grow quickened to 
 discern in the child before us processes similiar to 
 those we have read of as noted in the children, 
 processes of which we might otherwise have re- 
 mained inobservant. But, for Heaven's sake, let 
 the rank and file of teachers be passive readers if 
 they so prefer, and feel free not to contribute to 
 the accumulation. Let not the prosecution of it 
 be preached as an imperative duty or imposed by 
 regulation on those to whom it proves an exter- 
 minating bore, or who in any way whatever miss 
 in themselves the appropriate vocation for it. I 
 cannot too strongly agree with my colleague, 
 Professor Miinsterberg, when he says that the 
 teacher's attitude toward the child, being concrete 
 and ethical, is positively opposed to the psycho- 
 logical observer's, which is abstract and analytic. 
 Although some of us may conjoin the attitudes 
 successfully, in most of us they must conflict. 
 
 The worst thing that can happen to a good 
 teacher is to get a bad conscience about her pro- 
 fession because she feels herself hopeless as a psy- 
 chologist. Our teachers are overworked already. 
 Every one who adds a jot or tittle of unnecessary
 
 14 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 weight to their burden is a foe of education. A 
 bad conscience increases the weight of every other 
 burden; yet I know that child-study, and other 
 pieces of psychology as well, have been productive 
 of bad conscience in many a really innocent ped- 
 agogic breast. I should indeed be glad if this 
 passing word from me might tend to dispel such 
 a bad conscience, if any of you have it; for it 
 is certainly one of those fruits of more or less 
 systematic mystification of which I have already 
 complained. The best teacher may be the poorest 
 contributor of child-study material, and the best 
 contributor may be the poorest teacher. No fact 
 is more palpable than this. 
 
 So much for what seems the most reasonable 
 general attitude of the teacher toward the subject 
 which is to occupy our attention.
 
 II. 
 
 THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 I SAID a few minutes ago that the most general 
 elements and workings of the mind are all that 
 the teacher absolutely needs to be acquainted with 
 for his purposes. 
 
 Now the immediate fact which psychology, the 
 science of mind, has to study is also the most 
 general fact. It is the fact that in each of us, 
 when awake (and often when asleep), some kind 
 ofconsciousness is always going on. There is a 
 stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields 
 (or of whatever you please to call them), of 
 knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, 
 etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that con- 
 stitute our inner life. The existence of this stream 
 is the primal fact, the nature and origin of it form 
 the essential problem, of our science. So far as 
 we class the states or fields of consciousness, write 
 down their several natures, analyze their contents 
 into elements, or trace their habits of succession,
 
 16 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 we are on the descriptive or analytic level. So 
 far as we ask where they come from or why they 
 are just what they are, we are on the explanatory 
 level. 
 
 In these talks with you, I shall entirely neglect 
 the questions that come up on the explanatory 
 leveL It must be frankly confessed that in no 
 fundamental sense do we know where our succes- 
 sive fields of consciousness come from, or why 
 they have the precise inner constitution which 
 they do have. They certainly follow or accom- 
 pany our brain states, and of course their special 
 forms are determined by our past experiences and 
 education. But, if we ask just how the brain con- 
 ditions them, we have not the remotest inkling of 
 an answer to give ; and, if we ask just how the 
 education moulds the brain, we can speak but in 
 the most abstract, general, and conjectural terms. 
 On the other hand, if we should say that they are 
 due to a spiritual being called our Soul, which 
 reacts on our brain states by these peculiar forms 
 of spiritual energy, our words would be familiar 
 enough, it is true ; but I think you will agree that 
 they would offer little genuine explanatory mean- 
 ing. The truth is that we really do not know the 
 answers to the problems on the explanatory level,
 
 OUR STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 17 
 
 even though in some directions of inquiry there 
 may be promising speculations to be found. For 
 our present purposes I shall therefore dismiss them 
 entirely, and turn to mere description. This state 
 of things was what I had in mind when, a moment 
 ago, I said there was no ' new psychology ' worthy 
 of the name. 
 
 We have thus fields of consciousness, that is the 
 first general fact ; and the second general fact is 
 that the concrete fields are always complex. They 
 contain sensations of our bodies and of the ob- 
 jects around us, memories of past experiences and 
 thoughts of distant things, feelings of satisfaction 
 and dissatisfaction, desires and aversions, and other 
 emotional conditions, together with determinations 
 of the will, in every variety of permutation and 
 combination. 
 
 In most of our concrete states of consciousness 
 all these different classes of ingredients are found 
 simultaneously present to some degree, though the 
 relative proportion they bear to one another is 
 very shifting. One state will seem to be com- 
 posed of hardly anything but sensations, another 
 of hardly anything but memories, etc. But around 
 the sensation, if one consider carefully, there will 
 always be some fringe of thought or will, and
 
 18 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 around the memory some margin or penumbra of 
 emotion or sensation. 
 
 In most of our fields of consciousness there is a 
 core of sensation that is very pronounced. You, 
 for example, now, although you are also thinking 
 and feeling, are getting through your eyes sensa- 
 tions of my face and figure, and through your ears 
 sensations of my voice. The sensations are the 
 centre or focus, the thoughts and feelings the mar- 
 gin, of your actually present conscious field. 
 
 On the other hand, some object of thought, 
 some distant image, may have become the focus 
 of your mental attention even while I am speak- 
 ing, your mind, in short, may have wandered 
 from the lecture ; and, in that case, the sensations 
 of my face and voice, although not absolutely 
 vanishing from your conscious field, may have 
 taken up there a very faint and marginal place. 
 
 Again, to take another sort of variation, some 
 feeling connected with your own body may have 
 passed from a marginal to a focal place, even 
 while I speak. 
 
 The expressions 'focal object' and 'marginal 
 object,' which we owe to Mr, Lloyd Morgan, re- 
 quire, I think, no further explanation. The dis- 
 tinction they embody is a very important one, and
 
 THE FIELDS OF CONSCIOUSNESS 19 
 
 they are the first technical terms which I shall ask 
 you to remember. 
 
 In the successive mutations of our fields of con- 
 sciousness, the process by which one dissolves into 
 another is often very gradual, and all sorts of 
 inner rearrangements of contents occur. Some- 
 times the focus remains but little changed, while 
 the margin alters rapidly. Sometimes the focus 
 alters, and the margin stays.~~~Sometimes focus 
 
 and margin change places. Sometimes, again, 
 abrupt alterations of the whole field occur. 
 There can seldom be a sharp description. All 
 we know is that, for the most part, each field has 
 a sort of practical unity for its possessor, and that 
 from this practical point of view we can class a 
 field with other fields similar to it, by calling it 
 a state of emotion, of perplexity, of sensation, of 
 abstract thought, of volition, and the like. 
 
 Vague and hazy as such an account of our 
 stream of consciousness may be, it is at least se- 
 cure from positive error and free from admixture 
 of conjecture or hypothesis. An influential school 
 of psychology, seeking to avoid haziness of out- 
 line, has tried to make things appear more exact 
 and scientific by making the analysis more sharp.
 
 20 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 The various fields of consciousness, according to 
 this school, result from a definite number of per- 
 fectly definite elementary mental states, mechani- 
 cally associated into a mosaic or chemically com- 
 bined. According to some thinkers, Spencer, 
 for example, or Taine, these resolve themselves 
 at last into little elementary psychic particles or 
 atoms of * mind-stuff,' out of which all the more 
 immediately known mental states are said to be 
 built up. Locke introduced this theory hi a 
 somewhat vague form. Simple * ideas ' of sensa- 
 tion and reflection, as he called them, were for 
 him the bricks of which our mental architecture 
 is built up. If I ever have to refer to this theory 
 again, I shall refer to it as the theory of ' ideas.' 
 But I shall try to steer clear of it altogether. 
 Whether it be true or false, it is at any rate only 
 conjectural; and, for your practical purposes as 
 teachers, the more unpretending conception of the 
 stream of consciousness, with its total waves or 
 fields incessantly changing, will amply suffice.* 
 
 * In the light of some of the expiations that are abroad concern- 
 ing the ' new psychology,' it is instructive to read the unusually can- 
 did confession of its founder Wundt, after his thirty years of labora- 
 tory-experience : 
 
 " The service which it [the experimental method] can yield consists 
 essentially in perfecting our inner observation, or rather, as I believe,
 
 PROFESSOR WUNDT'S VIEWS 21 
 
 in making this really possible, in any exact sense. Well, has our 
 experimental self-observation, so understood, already accomplished 
 aught of importance? No general answer to this question can be 
 given, because in the unfinished state of our science, there is, even 
 inside of the experimental lines of inquiry, no universally accepted 
 body of psychologic doctrine. . . . 
 
 " In such a discord of opinions (comprehensible enough at a time 
 of uncertain and groping development), the individual inquirer can 
 only tell for what views and insights he himself has to thank the 
 newer methods. And if I were asked in what for me the worth of ex- 
 perimental observation in psychology has consisted, and still consists, 
 I should say that it has given me an entirely new idea of the nature 
 and connection of our inner processes. I learned in the achievements 
 of the sense of sight to apprehend the fact of creative mental synthe- 
 sis. . . . From my inquiry into time-relations, etc., ... I attained an 
 insight into the close union of all those psychic functions usually sepa- 
 rated by artificial abstractions and names, such as ideation, feeling, 
 will; and I saw the indivisibility and inner homogeneity, in all its 
 phases, of the mental life. The chronometric study of association- 
 processes finally showed me that the notion of distinct mental ' images ' 
 [reproducirten Vorstellungen] was one of those numerous self-decep- 
 tions which are no sooner stamped in a verbal term than they forth- 
 with thrust non-existent fictions into the place of the reality. I 
 learned to understand an ' idea ' as a process no less melting and fleet- 
 ing than an act of feeling or of will, and I comprehended the older 
 doctrine of association of ' ideas ' to be no longer tenable. . . . Besides 
 all this, experimental observation yielded much other information 
 about the span of consciousness, the rapidity of certain processes, the 
 exact numerical value of certain psycho-physical data, and the like. 
 But I hold all these more special results to be relatively insignificant 
 by-products, and by no means the important thing." Philosophische 
 Studien, x. 121-124. The whole passage should be read. As I interpret 
 it, it amounts to a complete espousal of the vaguer conception of the 
 stream of thought, and a complete renunciation of the whole business, 
 still so industriously carried on in text-books, of chopping up 'the 
 mind' into distinct units of composition or function, numbering these 
 off, and labelling them by technical names.
 
 III. 
 
 THE CHILD AS A BEHAVING ORGANISM 
 
 I WISH now to continue the description of the 
 peculiarities of the stream of consciousness by 
 asking whether we can hi any intelligible way 
 ff- , ^assign its function*. 
 
 It has two functions that are obvious : it leads 
 to knowledge, and it leads to action. 
 
 Can we say which of these functions is the 
 more essential? 
 
 An old historic divergence of opinion comes in 
 here. Popular belief has always tended to esti- 
 mate the worth of a man's mental processes by 
 their effects upon his practical life. But philo- 
 sophers have usually cherished a different view. 
 "Man's supreme glory," they have said, "is to be 
 a rational being, to know absolute and eternal and 
 universal truth. The uses of his intellect for 
 practical affairs are therefore subordinate matters. 
 4 The theoretic life ' is his soul's genuine concern." 
 Nothing can be more different in its results for 
 our personal attitude than to take sides with one
 
 THE TWO VIEWS OF OUR MIND 23 
 
 or the other of these views, and emphasize the 
 practical or the theoretical ideal. In the latter 
 case, abstraction from the emotions and passions 
 and withdrawal from the strife of human affairs 
 would be not only pardonable, but praiseworthy ; 
 and all that makes for quiet and contemplation 
 should be regarded as conducive to the highest 
 human perfection. In the former, the man of con- 
 templation would be treated as only half a human 
 being, passion and practical resource would be- 
 come once more glories of our race, a concrete 
 victory over this earth's outward powers of dark- 
 ness would appear an equivalent for any amount 
 of passive spiritual culture, and conduct would 
 remain as the test of every education worthy of 
 the name. 
 
 It is impossible to disguise the fact that in the 
 psychology of our own day the emphasis is trans- 
 ferred from the mind's purely rational function, 
 where Plato and Aristotle, and what one may call 
 the whole classic tradition in philosophy had 
 placed it, to the so long neglected practical side. 
 The theory of evolution is mainly responsible for 
 this. Man, we now have reason to believe, has 
 been evolved from infra-human ancestors, in whom 
 pure reason hardly existed, if at all, and whose
 
 24 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 mind, so far as it can have had any function, 
 would appear to have been an organ for adapting 
 their movements to the impressions received from 
 the environment, so as to escape the better from 
 destruction. Consciousness would thus seem in 
 the first instance to be nothing but a sort of super- 
 added biological perfection, useless unless it 
 prompted to useful conduct, and inexplicable 
 apart from that consideration. 
 
 Deep in our own nature the biological founda- 
 tions of our consciousness persist, undisguised and 
 undiminished. Our sensations are here to attract 
 us or to deter us, our memories to warn or encour- 
 age us, our feelings to impel, and our thoughts to 
 restrain our behavior, so that on the whole we 
 may prosper and our days be long in the land. 
 Whatever of transmundane metaphysical insight 
 or of practically inapplicable aesthetic perception 
 or ethical sentiment we may carry in our interiors 
 might at this rate be regarded as only part of the 
 incidental excess of function that necessarily ac- 
 companies the working of every complex machine. 
 
 I shall ask you now not meaning at all 
 thereby to close the theoretic question, but merely 
 because it seems to me the point of view likely to 
 be of greatest practical use to you as teachers
 
 THE BIOLOGICAL VIEW 25 
 
 to adopt with me, in this course of lectures, the 
 biological conception, as thus expressed, and to 
 lay your own emphasis on the fact that man, 
 whatever else he may be, is primarily a practical 
 being, whose mind is given him to aid in adapting 
 him to this world's life. 
 
 In the learning of all matters, we have to start 
 with some one deep aspect of the question, ab- 
 stracting it as if it were the only aspect ; and then 
 we gradually correct ourselves by adding those 
 neglected other features which complete the case. 
 No one believes more strongly than I do that 
 what our senses know as ' this world ' is only one 
 portion of our mind's total environment and ob- 
 ject. Yet, because it is the primal portion, it is 
 the sine qua non of all the rest. If you grasp the 
 facts about it firmly, you may proceed to higher 
 regions undisturbed. As our time must be so 
 short together, I prefer being elementary and 
 fundamental to being complete, so I propose to 
 you to hold fast to the ultra-simple point of 
 view. 
 
 The reasons why I call it so fundamental can 
 be easily told. 
 
 First, human and animal psychology thereby 
 become less discontinuous. I know that to some
 
 26 TALKS TO TEACHEBS 
 
 of you this will hardly seem an attractive reason, 
 but there are others whom it will affect. 
 
 Second, mental action is conditioned by brain 
 action, and runs parallel therewith. But the 
 brain, so far as we understand it, is given us for 
 practical behavior. Every current that runs into 
 it from skin or eye or ear runs out again into 
 muscles, glands, or viscera, and helps to adapt the 
 animal to the environment from which the current 
 came. It therefore generalizes and simplifies our 
 view to treat the brain life and the mental life as 
 having one fundamental kind of purpose. 
 
 Third, those very functions of the mind that do 
 not refer directly to this world's environment, the 
 ethical Utopias, aesthetic visions, insights into 
 eternal truth, and fanciful logical combinations, 
 could never be carried on at all by a human indi- 
 vidual, unless the mind that produced them in 
 him were also able to produce more practically 
 useful products. The latter are thus the more 
 essential, or at least the more primordial results. 
 
 Fourth, the inessential 'unpractical' activities 
 are themselves far more connected with our be- 
 havior and our adaptation to the environment than 
 at first sight might appear. No truth, however 
 abstract, is ever perceived, that will not probably
 
 ALL CONSCIOUSNESS LEADS TO ACTION 27 
 
 at some time influence our earthly action. You 
 must remember that, when I talk of action here, 
 I mean action in the widest sense. I mean speech, 
 I mean writing, I mean yeses and noes, and ten- 
 dencies ' from ' things and tendencies ' toward ' 
 things, and emotional determinations ; and I mean 
 them in the future as well as in the immediate 
 present. As I talk here, and you listen, it might 
 seem as if no action followed. You might call it 
 a purely theoretic process, with no practical 
 result. But it must have a practical result. It 
 cannot take place at all and leave your conduct 
 unaffected. If not to-day, then on some far future 
 day, you will answer some question differently by 
 reason of what you are thinking now. Some of 
 you will be led by my words into new veins of 
 inquiry, into reading special books. These will 
 develop your opinion, whether for or against. 
 That opinion will in turn be expressed, will re- 
 ceive criticism from others in your environment, 
 and will affect your standing in their eyes. We 
 cannot escape our destiny, which is practical ; and 
 even our most theoretic faculties contribute to its 
 working out.
 
 28 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 These few reasons will perhaps smooth the way 
 for you to acquiescence in my proposal. As 
 teachers, I sincerely think it will be a sufficient 
 conception for you to adopt of the youthful psy- 
 chological phenomena handed over to your inspec- 
 tion if you consider them from the point of view 
 of their relation to the future conduct of their 
 possessor. Sufficient at any rate as a first con- 
 ception and as a main conception. You should 
 regard your professional task as if it consisted 
 chiefly and essentially in training the pupil to be- 
 havior ; taking behavior, not in the narrow sense 
 of his manners, but in the very widest possible 
 sense, as including every possible sort of fit re- 
 action on the circumstances into which he may 
 find himself brought by the vicissitudes of life. 
 
 The reaction may, indeed, often be a negative 
 reaction. Not to speak, not to move, is one of the 
 most important of our duties, in certain practical 
 emergencies. "Thou shalt refrain, renounce, ab- 
 stain I " 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 organiza- 
 tion of acquired habits of conduct and tendencies 
 to behavior. 
 
 To illustrate. You and I are each and all of us 
 educated, hi our several ways ; and we show our 
 education at this present moment by different 
 conduct. It would be quite impossible for me,
 
 SO TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 with my mind technically and professionally or- 
 ganized as it is, and with the optical stimulus 
 which your presence affords, to remain sitting here 
 entirely silent and inactive. Something tells me 
 that I am expected to speak, and must speak; 
 something forces me to keep on speaking. My 
 organs of articulation are continuously innervated 
 by outgoing currents, which the currents passing 
 inward at my eyes and through my educated brain 
 have set in motion ; and the particular movements 
 which they make have their form and order deter- 
 mined altogether by the training of all my past 
 years of lecturing and reading. Your conduct, on 
 the other hand, might seem at first sight purely 
 receptive and inactive, leaving out those among 
 you who happen to be taking notes. But the 
 very listening which you are carrying on is itself 
 a determinate kind of conduct. All the muscular 
 tensions of your body are distributed in a peculiar 
 way as you listen. Your head, your eyes, are 
 fixed characteristically. And, when the lecture is 
 over, it will inevitably eventuate in some stroke 
 of behavior, as I said on the previous occasion : 
 you may be guided differently in some special 
 emergency in the schoolroom by words which 
 I now let fall. So it is with the impressions you
 
 GERMAN AND ENGLISH IDEALS 31 
 
 will make there on your pupil. You should get 
 into the habit of regarding them all as leading to 
 the acquisition by him of capacities for behavior, 
 emotional, social, bodily, vocal, technical, or 
 what not. And, this being the case, you ought 
 to feel willing, hi a general way, and without 
 hair-splitting or farther ado, to take up for the 
 purposes of these lectures with the biological con- 
 ception of the mind, as of something given us for 
 practical use. That conception will certainly cover 
 the greater part of your own educational work. 
 
 If we reflect upon the various ideals of educa- 
 tion that are prevalent in the different 'countries, 
 we see that what they all aim at is to organize 
 capacities for conduct. This is most immediately 
 obvious in Germany, where the explicitly avowed 
 aim of the higher education is to turn the student 
 into an instrument for advancing scientific discov- 
 ery. The German universities are proud of the 
 number of young specialists whom they turn out 
 every year, not necessarily men of any original 
 force of intellect, but men so trained to research 
 that when their professor gives them an historical 
 or philogical thesis to prepare, or a bit of labora- 
 tory work to do, with a general indication as to 
 the best method, they can go off by themselves
 
 32 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 and use apparatus and consult sources in such 
 a way as to grind out in the requisite number 
 of months some little pepper-corn of new truth 
 worthy of being added to the store of extant hu- 
 man information on that subject. Little else is 
 recognized in Germany as a man's title to academic 
 advancement than his ability thus to show himself 
 an efficient instrument of research. 
 
 In England, it might seem at first sight as if 
 the higher education of the universities aimed at 
 the production of certain static types of character 
 rather than at the development of what one may 
 call this dynamic scientific efficiency. Professor 
 Jowett, when asked what Oxford could do for its 
 students, is said to have replied, " Oxford can 
 teach an English gentleman how to be an English 
 gentleman." But, if you ask what it means to ' be ' 
 an English gentleman, the only reply is in terms 
 of conduct and behavior. An English gentleman 
 is a bundle of specifically qualified reactions, a 
 creature who for all the emergencies of life has 
 his line of behavior distinctly marked out for him 
 in advance. Here, as elsewhere, England expects 
 every man to do his duty.
 
 V. 
 
 THE NECESSITY OF REACTIONS 
 
 IP all this be true, then immediately one general 
 aphorism emerges which ought by logical right to 
 dominate the entire conduct of the teacher in the 
 classroom. 
 
 No reception without reaction, no impression with- 
 out correlative expression, this is the great maxim 
 which the teacher ought never to forget. 
 
 An impression which simply flows in at the 
 pupil's eyes or ears, and in no way modifies his 
 active life, is an impression gone to waste. It is 
 physiologically incomplete. It leaves no fruits 
 behind it in the way of capacity acquired. Even 
 as mere impression, it fails to produce its proper ef- 
 fect upon the memory ; for, to remain fully among 
 the acquisitions of this latter faculty, it must be 
 wrought into the whole cycle of our operations. 
 Its motor consequences are what clinch it. Some 
 effect due to it in the way of an activity must re- 
 turn to the mind in the form of the sensation of 
 having acted, and connect itself with the impres- 
 sion. The most durable impressions are those on
 
 34 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 account of which we speak or act, or else are in- 
 wardly convulsed. 
 
 The older pedagogic method of learning things 
 by rote, and reciting them parrot-like in the 
 schoolroom, rested on the truth that a thing 
 merely read or heard, and neyer verbally repro- 
 duced, contracts the weakest possible adhesion in 
 the mind. Verbal recitation or reproduction is 
 thus a highly important kind of reactive behavior 
 on our impressions ; and it is to be feared that, in 
 the reaction against the old parrot-recitations as 
 the beginning and end of instruction, the extreme 
 value of verbal recitation as an element of com- 
 plete training may nowadays be too much for- 
 gotten. 
 
 When we turn to modern pedagogics, we see 
 how enormously the field of reactive conduct has 
 been extended by the introduction of all those 
 methods of concrete object teaching which are the 
 glory of our contemporary schools. Verbal reac- 
 tions, useful as they are, are insufficient. The 
 pupil's words may be right, but the conceptions 
 corresponding to them are often direfully wrong. 
 In a modern school, therefore, they form only a 
 small part of what the pupil is required to do. 
 He must keep notebooks, make drawings, plans,
 
 THE MANUAL TRAINING METHODS 35 
 
 and maps, take measurements, enter the labora- 
 tory and perform experiments, consult authorities, 
 and write essays. He must do in his fashion 
 what is often laughed at by outsiders when it ap- 
 pears in prospectuses under the title of ' original 
 work,' but what is really the only possible train- 
 ing for the doing of original work thereafter. 
 The most colossal improvement which recent years 
 have seen in secondary education lies in the in- 
 troduction of the manual training schools; not 
 because they will give us a people more handy 
 and practical for domestic life and better skilled 
 in trades, but because they will give us citizens 
 with an entirely different intellectual fibre. La- 
 boratory work and shop work engender a habit 
 of observation, a knowledge of the difference be- 
 tween accuracy and vagueness, and an insight into 
 nature's complexity and into the inadequacy of 
 all abstract verbal accounts of real phenomena, 
 which once wrought into the mind, remain there 
 as lifelong possessions. They confer precision; 
 because, if you are doing a thing, you must do it 
 definitely right or definitely wrong. They give 
 honesty ; for, when you express yourself by mak- 
 ing things, and not by using words, it becomes 
 impossible to dissimulate your vagueness or igno-
 
 36 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 ranee by ambiguity. They beget a habit of self- 
 reliance; they keep the interest and attention 
 always cheerfully engaged, and reduce the teach- 
 er's disciplinary functions to a minimum. 
 
 Of the various systems of manual training, so 
 far as woodwork is concerned, the Swedish Sloyd 
 system, if I may have an opinion on such matters, 
 seems to me by far the best, psychologically con- 
 sidered. Manual training methods, fortunately, 
 are being slowly but surely introduced into all 
 our large cities. But there is still an immense 
 distance to traverse before they shall have gained 
 the extension which they are destined ultimately 
 to possess. 
 
 No impression without expression, then, that 
 is the first pedagogic fruit of our evolutionary 
 conception of the mind as something instrumental 
 to adaptive behavior. But a word may be said 
 in continuation. The expression itself comes back 
 to us, as I intimated a moment ago, in the form of 
 a still farther impression, the impression, namely, 
 of what we have done. We thus receive sensible 
 news of our behavior and its results. We hear 
 the words we have spoken, feel our own blow as 
 we give it, or read in the bystander's eyes the 
 success or failure of our conduct. Now this re-
 
 MARKS AND STANDING 37 
 
 turn wave of impression pertains to the complete- 
 ness of the whole experience, and a word about 
 its importance in the schoolroom may not be out 
 of place. 
 
 It would seem only natural to say that, since 
 after acting we normally get some return impres- 
 sion of result, it must be well to let the pupil get 
 such a return impression in every possible case. 
 Nevertheless, in schools where examination marks 
 and 'standing' and other returns of result are 
 concealed, the pupil is frustrated of this natural 
 termination of the cycle of his activities, and often 
 suffers from the sense of incompleteness and un- 
 certainty ; and there are persons who defend this 
 system as encouraging the pupil to work for the 
 work's sake, and not for extraneous reward. Of 
 course, here as elsewhere, concrete experience 
 must prevail over psychological deduction. But, 
 so far as our psychological deduction goes, it 
 would suggest that the pupil's eagerness to know 
 how well he does is in the line of his normal 
 completeness of function, and should never be 
 balked except for very definite reasons indeed. 
 
 Acquaint them, therefore, with their marks and 
 standing and prospects, unless in the individual 
 case you have some special practical reason for 
 not so doing.
 
 VI. 
 
 NATIVE REACTIONS AND ACQUIRED RE- 
 ACTIONS 
 
 WE are by this time fully launched upon the 
 biological conception. Man is an organism for 
 reacting on impressions: his mind is there to 
 help determine his reactions, and the purpose of 
 his education is to make them numerous and per- 
 fect. Our education means, in short, little more 
 than a mass of possibilities of reaction, acquired at 
 home, at school, or in the training of affairs. The 
 teacher's task is that of supervising the acquiring 
 process. 
 
 This being the case, I will immediately state 
 a principle which underlies the whole process of 
 acquisition and governs the entire activity of the 
 teacher. It is this : - 
 
 Every acquired reaction is, as a rule, either a 
 complication grafted on a native reaction, or a sub- 
 stitute for a native reaction, which the same object 
 originally tended to provoke. 
 
 The teacher's art consists in bringing about the
 
 NATIVE AND ACQUIEED REACTIONS 39 
 
 substitution or complication, and success in the art 
 presupposes a sympathetic acquaintance with the 
 reactive tendencies natively there. 
 
 Without an equipment of native reactions on 
 the child's part, the teacher would have no hold 
 whatever upon the child's attention or conduct. 
 You may take a horse to the water, but you can- 
 not make him drink ; and so you may take a child 
 to the schoolroom, but you cannot make him learn 
 the new things you wish to impart, except by 
 soliciting him in the first instance by something 
 which natively makes him react. He must take 
 the first step himself. He must do something 
 before you can get your purchase on him. That 
 something may be something good or something 
 bad. A bad reaction is better than no reaction 
 at all ; for, if bad, you can couple it with conse- 
 quences which awake him to its badness. But 
 imagine a child so lifeless as to react in no way 
 to the teacher's first appeals, and how can you 
 possibly take the first step in his education? 
 
 To make this abstract conception more con- 
 crete, assume the case of a young child's training 
 in good manners. The child has a native ten- 
 dency to snatch with his hands at anything that 
 attracts his curiosity ; also to draw back his hands
 
 40 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 when slapped, to cry under these latter conditions, 
 to smile when gently spoken to, and to imitate 
 one's gestures. 
 
 Suppose now you appear before the child with 
 a new toy intended as a present for him. No 
 sooner does he see the toy than he seeks to snatch 
 it. You slap the hand ; it is withdrawn, and the 
 child cries. You then hold up the toy, smiling 
 and saying, " Beg for it nicely, so ! " The child 
 stops crying, imitates you, receives the toy, and 
 crows with pleasure ; and that little cycle of train- 
 ing is complete. You have substituted the new 
 reaction of 'begging' for the native reaction of 
 snatching, when that kind of impression comes. 
 
 Now, if the child had no memory, the process 
 would not be educative. No matter how often 
 you came in with a toy, the same series of reac- 
 tions would fatally occur, each called forth by its 
 own impression : see, snatch ; slap, cry ; hear, 
 ask ; receive, smile. But, with memory there, the 
 child, at the very instant of snatching, recalls the 
 rest of the earlier experience, thinks of the slap 
 and the frustration, recollects the begging and the 
 reward, inhibits the snatching impulse, substitutes 
 the * nice ' reaction for it, and gets the toy immedi- 
 ately, by eliminating all the intermediary steps. If
 
 NATIVE AND ACQUIRED REACTIONS 
 
 41 
 
 a child's first snatching impulse be excessive or his 
 memory poor, many repetitions of the discipline 
 may be needed before the acquired reaction comes 
 to be an ingrained habit ; but in an eminently 
 educable child a single experience will suffice. 
 
 One can easily represent the whole process by a 
 brain-diagram. Such a diagram can be little more 
 than a symbolic translation of the immediate ex- 
 perience into spatial terms ; yet it may be useful, 
 so I subjoin it. 
 
 CENTRES OF MEMORY AND WILL. 
 
 See - - snatch Slap cry Listen beg Get smile 
 FIGURE 1. THE BRAIN-PROCESSES BEFORE EDUCATION. 
 
 Figure 1 shows the paths of the four succes- 
 sive reflexes executed by the lower or instinc- 
 tive centres. The dotted lines that lead from them 
 to the higher centres and connect the latter to-
 
 42 
 
 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 gether, represent the processes of memory and as- 
 sociation which the reactions impress upon the 
 higher centres as they take place. 
 
 CENTRES OF MEMORY AND WILL. 
 
 See beg smile 
 
 FIGURE 2. THE BRAIN-PROCESS AFTER EDUCATION. 
 
 In Figure 2 we have the final result. The im- 
 pression see awakens the chain of memories, and 
 the only reactions that take place are the beg and 
 smile. The thought of the slap, connected with 
 the activity of Centre 2, inhibits the snatch, and 
 makes it abortive, so it is represented only by 
 a dotted line of discharge not reaching the termi- 
 nus. Ditto of the cry reaction. These are, as 
 it were, short-circuited by the current sweeping 
 through the higher centres from see to smile. 
 Beg and smile, thus substituted for the original
 
 MAN'S NUMEROUS INSTINCTS 43 
 
 reaction snatch, become at last the immediate re- 
 sponses when the child sees a snatchable object in 
 some one's hands. 
 
 The first thing, then, for the teacher to under- 
 stand is the native reactive tendencies, the im- 
 pulses and instincts of childhood, so 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 as- 
 sortment of native instincts and impulses than 
 they, but this is a great mistake. Man, of course, 
 has not the marvellous egg-laying instincts which 
 some articulates have ; but, if we compare him 
 with the mammalia, we are forced to confess that 
 he is appealed to by a much larger array of objects 
 than any other mammal, that his reactions on 
 these objects are characteristic and determinate in 
 a very high degree. The monkeys, and especially 
 the anthropoids, are the only beings that approach 
 him in their analytic curiosity and width of imi- 
 tativeness. His instinctive impulses, it is true, 
 get overlaid by the secondary reactions due to his 
 superior reasoning power ; but thus man loses the 
 simply instinctive demeanor. But the life of in-
 
 44 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 stinet 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. 
 
 V 
 
 I will therefore say a few words about those 
 instinctive tendencies which are the most impor- 
 tant from the teacher's point of view.
 
 VII. 
 WHAT THE XATTVE REACTIONS ARE 
 
 FIRST of all, Fear. Fear of punishment has 
 always been the great weapon of the teacher, and 
 will always, of course, retain some place in the 
 conditions of the schoolroom. The subject is so 
 familiar that nothing more need be said about it. 
 
 The same is true of Love, and the instinctive 
 desire to please those whom we love. The teacher 
 who succeeds in getting herself loved by the 
 pupils will obtain results which one of a more 
 forbidding temperament finds it impossible to 
 secure. 
 
 Next, a word might be said about Curiosity. 
 This is perhaps a rather poor term by which to 
 designate the impulse toward better cognition in its 
 full extent ; but you will readily understand what 
 I mean. Novelties in the way of sensible objects, 
 especially if their sensational quality is bright, 
 vivid, startling, invariably arrest the attention of 
 the young and hold it until the desire to know 
 more about the object is assuaged. In its higher,
 
 46 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 more intellectual form, the impulse toward com- 
 pleter knowledge takes the character of scientific 
 or philosophic curiosity. In both its sensational and 
 its intellectual form the instinct is more vivacious 
 during childhood and youth than hi after life. 
 Young children are possessed by curiosity about 
 every new impression that assails them. It would 
 be quite impossible for a young child to listen to 
 a lecture for more than a few minutes, as you are 
 now listening to me. The outside sights and 
 sounds would inevitably carry his attention off. 
 And, for most people in middle life, the sort of 
 intellectual effort required of the average school- 
 boy hi mastering his Greek or Latin lesson, his 
 algebra or physics, would be out of the question. 
 The middle-aged citizen attends exclusively to the 
 routine details of his business; and new truths, 
 especially when they require involved trains of 
 close reasoning, are no longer within the scope of 
 his capacity. 
 
 The sensational curiosity of childhood is ap- 
 pealed to more particularly by certain determinate 
 kinds of objects. Material things, tilings that 
 move, living things, human actions and accounts 
 of human action, will win the attention better than 
 anything that is more abstract. Here again comes
 
 CURIOSITY 47 
 
 in the advantage of the object-teaching and manual 
 training methods. The pupil's attention is spon- 
 taneously held by any problem that involves the 
 presentation of a new material object or of an 
 activity on any one's part. The teacher's earliest 
 appeals, therefore, must be through objects shown 
 or acts performed or described. Theoretic curios- 
 ity, curiosity about the rational relations between 
 things, can hardly be said to awake at all until 
 adolescence is reached. The sporadic metaphysical 
 inquiries of children as to who made God, and why 
 they have five fingers, need hardly be counted 
 here. But, when the theoretic instinct is once 
 alive in the pupil, an entirely new order of peda- 
 gogic relations begins for him. Reasons, causes, 
 abstract conceptions, suddenly grow full of zest, a 
 fact with which all teachers are familiar. And, 
 both in its sensible and in its rational developments, 
 disinterested curiosity may be successfully appealed 
 to in the child with much more certainty than in 
 the adult, in whom this intellectual instinct has 
 grown so torpid as usually never to awake unless 
 it enters into association with some selfish personal 
 interest. Of this latter point I will say more 
 anon.
 
 48 TALKS TO TEACHEKS 
 
 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 1'Imita- 
 tion " ; and in our own country Professors Royce 
 and Baldwin have kept the ball rolling with all 
 the energy that could be desired. Each of us is 
 in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of 
 his imitativeness. We become conscious of what 
 we ourselves are by imitating others the con- 
 sciousness of what the others are precedes the 
 sense of self grows by the sense of pattern. 
 The entire accumulated wealth of mankind 
 languages, arts, institutions, and sciences is 
 passed on from one generation to another by what 
 Baldwin has called social heredity, each genera- 
 tion simply imitating the last. Into the particu- 
 lars of this most fascinating chapter of psychology 
 I have no time to go. The moment one hears 
 Tarde's proposition uttered, however, one feels 
 how supremely true it is. Invention, using the
 
 IMITATION AND EMULATION 49 
 
 term most broadly, and imitation, are the two 
 legs, so to call them, on which the human race 
 historically has walked. 
 
 Imitation shades imperceptibly into Emulation. 
 Emulation is the impulse to imitate what you see 
 another doing, hi order not to appear inferior ; and 
 it is hard to draw a sharp line between the mani- 
 festations of the two impulses, so inextricably do 
 they mix their effects. Emulation is the very 
 nerve of human society. Why are you, my hear- 
 ers, sitting here before me ? If no one whom you 
 ever heard of had attended a ' summer school ' or 
 teachers' institute, would it have occurred to any 
 one of you to break out independently and do a 
 thing so unprescribed by fashion? Probably not. 
 Nor would your pupils come to you unless the 
 children of their parents' neighbors were all simul- 
 taneously being sent to school. We wish not to 
 be lonely or eccentric, and we wish not to be cut 
 off from our share in tilings which to our neigh- 
 bors seem desirable privileges. 
 
 In the schoolroom, imitation and emulation play 
 absolutely vital parts. Every teacher knows the 
 advantage of having certain things performed by 
 whole bands of children at a time. The teacher 
 who meets with most success is the teacher whose
 
 50 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 own ways are the most imitable. A teacher 
 should never try to make the pupils do a thing 
 which she cannot do herself. " Come and let me 
 show you how " is an incomparably better stimu- 
 lus than " Go and do it as the book directs." 
 Children admire a teacher who has skill. What 
 he does seems easy, and they wish to emulate it. 
 It is useless for a dull and devitalized teacher to 
 exhort her pupils to wake up and take an interest. 
 She must first take one herself ; then her example 
 is effective as no exhortation can possibly be. 
 
 Every school has its tone, moral and intellect- 
 ual. And this tone is a mere tradition kept up by 
 imitation, due in the first instance to the example 
 set by teachers and by previous pupils of an ag- 
 gressive and dominating type, copied by the 
 others, and passed on from year to year, so that 
 the new pupils take the cue almost immediately. 
 Such a tone changes very slowly, if at all; and 
 then always under the modifying influence of new 
 personalities aggressive enough hi 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,
 
 EMULATION 51 
 
 who in turn were expected and required to im- 
 press theirs upon the younger set. The conta- 
 giousness of Arnold's genius was such that a 
 Rugby man was said to be recognizable all 
 through life by a peculiar turn of character which 
 he acquired at school. It is obvious that psychol- 
 ogy as such can give in this field no precepts of 
 detail. As in so many other fields of teaching, 
 success depends mainly on the native genius of 
 the teacher, the sympathy, tact, and perception 
 which enable him to seize the right moment and 
 to set the right example. 
 
 Among the recent modern reforms of teaching 
 methods, a certain disparagement of emulation, as 
 a laudable spring of action in the schoolroom, has 
 often made itself heard. More than a century 
 ago, Rousseau, in his ' Emile,' branded rivalry be- 
 tween one pupil and another as too base a pas- 
 sion to play a part in an ideal education. " Let 
 Emile," he said, " never be led to compare himself 
 to other children. No rivalries, not even in run- 
 ning, as soon as he begins to have the power of 
 reason. It were a hundred times better that he 
 should not learn at all what he could only learn 
 through jealousy or vanity. But I would mark 
 out every year the progress he may have made,
 
 52 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 and I would compare it with the progress of the 
 following years. I would say to him : * You are 
 now grown so many inches taller; there is the 
 ditch which you jumped over, there is the burden 
 which you raised. There is the distance to which 
 you could throw a pebble, there the distance you 
 could run over without losing breath. See how 
 much more you can do now ! ' Thus I should ex- 
 cite him without making him jealous of any one. 
 He would wish to surpass himself. I can see no 
 inconvenience in this emulation with his former 
 self." 
 
 Unquestionably, emulation with one's former 
 self is a noble form of the passion of rivalry, and 
 has a wide scope in the training of the young. 
 But to veto and taboo all possible rivalry of one 
 youth with another, because such rivalry may 
 degenerate into greedy and selfish excess, does 
 seem to savor somewhat of sentimentality, or even 
 of fanaticism. The feeling of rivalry lies at the 
 very basis of our being, all social improvement 
 being largely due to it. There is a noble and 
 generous kind of rivalry, as well as a spiteful and 
 greedy kind ; and the noble and generous form is 
 particularly common in childhood. All games owe 
 the zest which they bring with them to the fact
 
 ITS USEFULNESS IN THE SCHOOLROOM 53 
 
 that they are rooted in the emulous passion, yet 
 they are the chief means of training hi fairness and 
 magnanimity. Can the teacher afford to throw 
 such an ally away? Ought we seriously to hope 
 that marks, distinctions, prizes, and other goals of 
 effort, based on the pursuit of recognized superior- 
 ity, should be forever banished from our schools ? 
 As a psychologist, obliged to notice the deep and 
 pervasive character of the emulous passion, I must 
 confess my doubts. 
 
 The wise teacher will use this instinct as he 
 uses others, reaping its advantages, and appealing 
 to it hi 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 hi another. The spectacle of 
 effort is what awakens and sustains our own ef- 
 fort. No runner running all alone on a race-track 
 will find hi his own will the power of stimulation 
 which his rivalry with other runners incites, when 
 he feels them at his heels, about to pass. When a 
 trotting horse is ' speeded,' a running horse must 
 go beside him to keep him to the pace.
 
 54 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 As imitation slides into emulation, so emulation 
 slides into Ambition ; and ambition connects itself 
 closely with Pugnacity and Pride. Consequently, 
 these five instinctive tendencies form an niter- 
 connected group of factors, hard to separate in the 
 determination of a great deal of our conduct. 
 The Ambitious Impulses would perhaps be the 
 best name for the whole group. 
 
 Pride and pugnacity have often been considered 
 unworthy passions to appeal to in the young. 
 But in their more refined and noble forms they 
 play a great part in the schoolroom and in educa- 
 tion generally, being in some characters most po- 
 tent spurs to effort. Pugnacity need not be 
 thought of merely hi the form of physical com- 
 bativeness. It can be taken in the sense of a gen- 
 eral unwillingness to be beaten by any kind of 
 difficulty. It is what makes us feel 'stumped' 
 and challenged by arduous achievements, and is 
 essential to a spirited and enterprising character. 
 We have of late been hearing much of the 
 philosophy of tenderness in education; 'interest' 
 must be assiduously awakened in everything, diffi- 
 culties must be smoothed away. Soft pedagogics 
 have taken the place of the old steep and rocky 
 path to learning. But from this lukewarm air the
 
 OWNEKSHIP 55 
 
 bracing oxygen of effort is left out. It is nonsense 
 to suppose that every step in education can be in- 
 teresting. The fighting impulse must often be ap- 
 pealed to. Make the pupil feel ashamed of being 
 scared at fractions, of being ' downed ' by the law 
 of falling bodies ; rouse his pugnacity and pride, 
 and he will rush at the difficult places with a sort 
 of inner wrath at himself that is one of his best 
 moral faculties. A victory scored under such con- 
 ditions becomes a turning-point and crisis of his 
 character. It represents the high-water mark of 
 his powers, and serves thereafter as an ideal pat- 
 tern for his self-imitation. The teacher who never 
 rouses this sort of pugnacious excitement in his 
 pupils falls short of one of his best forms of use- 
 fulness. 
 
 The next instinct which I shall mention is that 
 of Ownership, also one of the radical endowments 
 of the race. It often is the antagonist of imita- 
 tion. Whether social progress is due more to 
 the passion for keeping old things and habits or to 
 the passion of imitating and acquiring new ones 
 may in some cases be a difficult thing to decide. 
 The sense of ownership begins in the second year 
 of life. Among the first words which an infant
 
 56 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 learns to utter are the words * my ' and * mine,' 
 and woe to the parents of twins who fail to pro- 
 vide their gifts in duplicate. The depth and 
 primitiveness of this instinct would seem to cast 
 a sort of psychological discredit in advance upon 
 all radical forms of communistic Utopia, Private 
 proprietorship cannot be practically abolished un- 
 til human nature is changed. It seems essential 
 to mental health that the individual should have 
 something beyond the bare clothes on his back to 
 which he can assert exclusive possession, and 
 which he may defend adversely against the world. 
 Even those religious orders who make the most 
 stringent vows of poverty have found it necessary 
 to relax the rule a little in favor of the human 
 heart made unhappy by reduction to too disinter- 
 ested terms. The monk must have his books: 
 the nun must have her little garden, and the 
 images and pictures in her room. 
 
 In education, the instinct of ownership is fun- 
 damental, and can be appealed to in many ways. 
 In the house, training hi order and neatness be- 
 gins with the arrangement of the child's own 
 personal possessions. In the school, ownership 
 is particularly important in connection with one 
 of ite special forms of activity, the collecting im-
 
 UTILITY OF THE COLLECTING IMPULSE 57 
 
 pulse. An object possibly not very interesting 
 in itself, like a shell, a postage stamp, or a single 
 map or drawing, will acquire an interest if it fills 
 a gap in a collection or helps to complete a series. 
 Much of the scholarly work of the world, so far 
 as it is mere bibliography, memory, and erudition 
 (and this lies at the basis of all our human scholar- 
 ship), would seem to owe its interest rather to the 
 way in which it gratifies the accumulating and col- 
 lecting instinct than to any special appeal which 
 it makes to our cravings after rationality. A 
 man wishes a complete collection of information, 
 wishes to know more about a subject than any- 
 body else, much as another may wish to own 
 more dollars or more early editions or more en- 
 gravings before the letter than anybody else. 
 
 The teacher who can work this impulse into 
 the school tasks is fortunate. Almost all children 
 collect something. A tactful teacher may get 
 them to take pleasure in collecting books; in 
 keeping a neat and orderly collection of notes ; in 
 starting, when they are mature enough, a card 
 catalogue ; in preserving every drawing or map 
 which they may make. Neatness, order, and 
 method are thus instinctively gained, along with 
 the other benefits which the possession of the
 
 58 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 collection entails. Even such a noisome thing as 
 a collection of postage stamps may be used by the 
 teacher as an inciter of interest in the geographi- 
 cal and historical information which she desires to 
 impart. Sloyd successfully avails itself of this 
 instinct in causing the pupil to make a collection 
 of wooden implements fit for his own private use 
 at home. Collecting is, of course, the basis of all 
 natural history study ; and probably nobody ever 
 became a good naturalist who was not an unusu- 
 ally active collector when a boy. 
 
 Constructiveness is another great instinctive ten- 
 dency with which the schoolroom has to contract 
 an alliance. Up to the eighth or ninth year of 
 childhood one may say that the child does hardly 
 anything else than handle objects, explore tilings 
 with his hands, doing and undoing, setting up 
 and knocking down, putting together and pulling 
 apart; for, from the psychological point of view, 
 construction and destruction are two names for 
 the same manual activity. Both signify the pro- 
 duction of change, and the working of effects, in 
 outward things. The result of all this is that in- 
 timate familiarity with the physical environment, 
 that acquaintance with the properties of material
 
 CONSTRUCTIVENESS 59 
 
 things, which is really the foundation of human 
 consciousness. To the very last, in most of us, 
 the conceptions of objects and their properties 
 are limited to the notion of what we can do ivith 
 them. A ' stick ' means something we can lean 
 upon or strike with ; ' fire,' something to cook, 
 or warm ourselves, or burn things up withal; 
 'string,' something with which to tie things to- 
 gether. For most people these objects have no 
 other meaning. In geometry, the cylinder, circle, 
 sphere, are defined as what you get by going 
 through certain processes of construction, revolv- 
 ing a parallelogram upon one of its sides, etc. 
 The more different kinds of things a child thus 
 gets to know by treating and handling them, the 
 more confident grows his sense of kinship with 
 the world in which he lives. An unsympathetic 
 adult will wonder at the fascinated hours which 
 a child will spend in putting his blocks together 
 and rearranging them. But the wise education 
 takes the tide at the flood, and from the kinder- 
 garten upward devotes the first years of educa- 
 tion to training in construction and to object- 
 teaching. I need not recapitulate here what I 
 said awhile back about the superiority of the 
 objective and experimental methods. They oc-
 
 60 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 cupy the pupil in a way most congruous with the 
 spontaneous interests of his age. They absorb 
 him, and leave impressions durable and profound. 
 Compared with the youth taught by these methods, 
 one brought up exclusively by books carries 
 through life a certain remoteness from reality: 
 he stands, as it were, out of the pale, and feels 
 that he stands so; and often suffers a kind of 
 melancholy from which he might have been res- 
 cued by a more real education. 
 
 There are other impulses, such as love of appro- 
 bation or vanity, shyness and secretiveness, of 
 which a word might be said; but they are too 
 familiar to need it You can easily pursue the 
 subject by your own reflection. There is one 
 general law, however, that relates to many of our 
 instinctive tendencies, and that has no little impor- 
 tance in education; and I must refer to it briefly 
 before I leave the subject. It has been called the 
 law of transitoriness in instincts. Many of our 
 impulsive tendencies ripen at a certain period; 
 and, if the appropriate objects be then and there 
 provided, habits of conduct toward them are ac- 
 quired which last But, if the objects be not forth- 
 coming then, the impulse may die out before a
 
 THE TRANS1TORINESS OF INSTINCTS 61 
 
 habit is formed ; and later it may be hard to teach 
 the creature to react appropriately in those direc- 
 tions. The sucking instincts in mammals, the 
 following instinct in certain birds and quadrupeds, 
 are examples of this : they fade away shortly after 
 birth. 
 
 In children we observe a ripening of impulses 
 and interests in a certain determinate order. 
 Creeping, walking, climbing, imitating vocal 
 sounds, constructing, drawing, calculating, pos- 
 sess the child in succession ; and in some chil- 
 dren the possession, while it lasts, may be of a 
 semi-frantic and exclusive sort. Later, the inter- 
 est hi any one of these things may wholly fade 
 away. Of course, the proper pedagogic moment 
 to work skill in, and to clench the useful habit, is 
 when the native impulse is most acutely present. 
 Crowd on the athletic opportunities, the mental 
 arithmetic, the verse-learning, the drawing, the 
 botany, or what not, the moment you have reason 
 to think the hour is ripe. The hour may not last 
 long, and while it continues you may safely let 
 all the child's other occupations take a second 
 place. In this way you economize time and 
 deepen skill; for many an infant prodigy, artis- 
 tic or mathematical, has a flowering epoch of but 
 a few months.
 
 62 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 One can draw no specific rules for all this. It 
 depends on close observation in the particular 
 case, and parents here have a great advantage 
 over teachers. In fact, the law of transitoriness 
 has little chance of individualized application in 
 the schools. 
 
 Such is the little interested and impulsive psy- 
 chophysical organism whose springs of action the 
 teacher must divine, and to whose ways he must 
 become accustomed. He must start with the na- 
 tive tendencies, and enlarge the pupil's entire pas- 
 sive and active experience. He must ply him 
 with new objects and stimuli, and make him taste 
 the fruits of his behavior, so that now that whole 
 context of remembered experience is what shall 
 determine his conduct when he gets the stimulus, 
 and not the bare immediate impression. As the 
 pupil's life thus enlarges, it gets fuller and fuller 
 of all sorts of memories and associations and sub- 
 stitutions ; but the eye accustomed to psychologi- 
 cal analysis will discern, underneath it all, the 
 outlines of our simple psychophysical scheme. 
 
 Respect then, I beg you, always the original 
 reactions, even when you are seeking to overcome 
 their connection with certain objects, and to sup-
 
 BAD AND GOOD BEHAVIOR 63 
 
 plant them with others that you wish to make the 
 rule. Bad behavior, from the point of view of 
 the teacher's art, is as good a starting-point as 
 good behavior. In fact, paradoxical as it may 
 sound to say so, it is often a better starting-point 
 than good behavior would be. 
 
 The acquired reactions must be made habitual 
 whenever they are appropriate. Therefore Habit 
 is the next subject to which your attention is 
 invited.
 
 VIII. 
 
 THE LAWS OF HABIT 
 
 IT is very important that teachers should realize 
 the importance of habit, and psychology helps 
 us greatly at this point. We speak, it is true, of 
 good habits and of bad habits ; but, when people 
 use the word * habit,' in the majority of instances it 
 is a bad habit which they have hi mind. They 
 talk of the smoking-habit and the swearing-habit 
 and the drinking-habit, but not of the abstention- 
 habit or the moderation-habit or the courage- 
 habit. But the fact is that our virtues are habits 
 as much as our vices. All our life, so far as it 
 has definite form, is but a mass of habits, prac- 
 tical, emotional, and intellectual, systematically 
 organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us 
 irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the lat- 
 ter may be. 
 
 Since pupils can understand this at a compara- 
 tively early age, and since to understand it con- 
 tributes in no small measure to their feeling of 
 responsibility, it would be well if the teacher were
 
 HABIT A SECOND NATURE 65 
 
 able himself to talk to them of the philosophy of 
 habit in some such abstract terms as I am now 
 about to talk of it to you. 
 
 I believe that we are subject to the law of habit 
 in consequence of the fact that we have bodies. 
 The plasticity of the living matter of our nervous 
 system, hi short, is the reason why we do a thing 
 with difficulty the first time, but soon do it more 
 and more easily, and finally, with sufficient prac- 
 tice, do it semi-mechanic ally, or with hardly any 
 consciousness at all. Our nervous systems have 
 (hi Dr. Carpenter's words) grown to the way hi 
 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 
 lif e ; for the acquired habits of our training have 
 by that time inhibited or strangled most of the 
 natural impulsive tendencies which were origi- 
 nally there. Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, 
 nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our 
 activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our 
 rising in the morning to our lying down each
 
 66 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 night. Our dressing and undressing, our eating 
 and drinking, our greetings and partings, our hat- 
 raisings and giving way for ladies to precede, nay, 
 even most of the forms of our common speech, are 
 things of a type so fixed by repetition as almost to 
 be classed as reflex actions. To each sort of im- 
 pression we have an automatic, ready-made re- 
 sponse. My very words to you now are an exam- 
 ple of what I mean ; for having already lectured 
 upon habit and printed a chapter about it in a 
 book, and read the latter when in print, I find my 
 tongue inevitably falling into its old phrases and 
 repeating almost literally what I said before. 
 
 So far as we are thus mere bundles of habit, we 
 are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of 
 our past selves. And since this, under any cir- 
 cumstances, is what we always tend to become, 
 it follows first of all that the teacher's prime con- 
 cern should be to ingrain into the pupil that as- 
 sortment of habits that shall be most useful to 
 him throughout life. Education is for behavior, 
 and habits are the stuff of wliich behavior consists. 
 
 To quote my earlier book directly, the great 
 thing in all education is to make our nervous sys- 
 tem our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund 
 and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease
 
 67 
 
 upon the interest of the fund. For this we must 
 make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, 
 as many useful actions as we can, and as carefully 
 guard against the growing into ways that are 
 likely to be disadvantageous. The more of the 
 details of our daily life we can hand over to the 
 effortless custody of automatism, the more our 
 higher powers of mind will be set free for their 
 own proper work. There is no more miserable 
 human being than one in whom nothing is habit- 
 ual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of 
 every cigar, the drinking of every 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 in- 
 grained in any one of my hearers, let him begin 
 this very hour to set the matter right. 
 
 In Professor Bain's chapter on 'The Moral 
 Habits' there are some admirable practical re- 
 marks laid down. Two great maxims emerge 
 from the treatment. The first is that in the ac- 
 quisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an
 
 68 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 old one, we must take care to launch ourselves 
 u'itk as strong and decided an initiative as possible. 
 Accumulate all the possible circumstances which 
 shall reinforce the right motives; put yourself 
 assiduously in conditions that encourage the new 
 way; make engagements incompatible with the 
 old ; take a public pledge, if the case allows ; in 
 short, envelope your resolution with every aid 
 you know. This will give your new beginning 
 such a momentum that the temptation to break 
 down will not occur as soon as it otherwise might ; 
 and every day during which a breakdown is post- 
 poned adds to the chances of its not occurring 
 at all. 
 
 I remember long ago reading in an Austrian 
 paper the advertisement of a certain Rudolph 
 Somebody, who promised fifty gulden reward to 
 any one who after that date should find him at 
 the wine-shop of Ambrosius So-and-so. 'This I 
 do,' the advertisement continued, * in consequence 
 of a promise which I have made my wife.' With 
 such a wife, and such an understanding of the 
 way in which to start new habits, it would be 
 safe to stake one's money on Rudolph's ultimate 
 success. 
 
 The second maxim is, Never suffer an exception
 
 MAXIMS FOR HABIT-FORMING 69 
 
 to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your 
 life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of 
 string which one is carefully winding up : a single 
 slip undoes more than a great many turns will 
 wind again. Continuity of training is the great 
 means of making the nervous system act infallibly 
 right. As Professor Bain says : 
 
 " The peculiarity of the moral habits, contradis- 
 tinguishing them from the intellectual acquisi- 
 tions, is the presence of two hostile powers, one 
 to be gradually raised into the ascendant over the 
 other. It is necessary above all things, in such a 
 situation, never to lose a battle. Every gain on 
 the wrong side undoes the effect of many con- 
 quests on the right. The essential precaution, 
 therefore, is so to regulate the two opposing 
 powers that the one may have a series of unin- 
 terrupted successes, until repetition has fortified it 
 to such a degree as to enable it to cope with the 
 opposition, under any circumstances. This is the 
 theoretically best career of mental progress." 
 
 A third maxim may be added to the preceding 
 pair : Seize the very first possible opportunity to act 
 on every resolution you make, and on every emo- 
 tional prompting you may experience in the direc- 
 tion of the habits you aspire to gain. It is not in
 
 70 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 the moment of their forming, but in the moment 
 of their producing motor effects, that resolves and 
 aspirations communicate the new ' set ' to the 
 brain. 
 
 No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one 
 may possess, and no matter how good one's senti- 
 ments may be, if one have not taken advantage of 
 eveiy 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 wliich he means it, is an aggregate of 
 tendencies to act in a firm and prompt and defi- 
 nite way upon all the principal emergencies of 
 life. A tendency to act only becomes effectively 
 ingrained in us in proportion to the uninterrupted 
 frequency with which the actions actually occur, 
 and the brain ' grows ' to their use. When a re- 
 solve or a fine glow of feeling is allowed to evap- 
 orate without bearing practical fruit, it is worse 
 than a chance lost: it works so as positively to 
 hinder future resolutions and emotions from tak- 
 ing the normal path of discharge. There is no 
 more contemptible type of human character than
 
 MAXIMS FOE HABIT-FOE MING 71 
 
 that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, 
 who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibil- 
 ity, but never does a concrete manly deed. 
 
 This leads to a fourth maxim. Don't preach 
 too much to your pupils or abound in good talk in 
 the abstract. Lie in wait rather for the practical 
 opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they 
 pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils 
 both to think, to feel, and to do. The strokes of 
 behavior are what give the new set to the charac- 
 ter, and work the good habits into its organic 
 tissue. Preaching and talking too soon become 
 an ineffectual bore. 
 
 There is a passage hi Darwin's short auto- 
 biography which has been often quoted, and 
 which, for the sake of its bearing on our subject 
 of habit, I must now quote again. Darwin says : 
 "Up to the age of thirty or beyond it, poetry of 
 many kinds gave me great pleasure ; and even as 
 a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, 
 especially in the historical plays. I have also said 
 that pictures formerly gave me considerable, and 
 music very great delight. But now for many years 
 I cannot endure to read a line of poetry. I have 
 tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so
 
 72 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 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 cute 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
 
 DARWIN'S CASE AS A WARNING 73 
 
 fulfilled ? Surely, in comparatively few ; and the 
 laws of habit show us why. Some interest in each 
 of these tilings arises in everybody at the proper 
 age ; but, if not persistently fed with the appropri- 
 ate matter, instead of growing into a powerful and 
 necessary habit, it atrophies and dies, choked by 
 the rival interests to which the daily food is 
 given. We make ourselves into Darwins in this 
 negative respect by persistently ignoring the es- 
 sential practical conditions of our case. We say 
 abstractly: "I mean to enjoy poetry, and to ab- 
 sorb a lot of it, of course. I fully intend to keep 
 up my love of music, to read the books that shall 
 give new turns to the thought of my time, to keep 
 my higher spiritual side alive, etc." But we do 
 not attack these things concretely, and we do not 
 begin to-day. We forget that every good that is 
 worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of 
 daily effort. We postpone and postpone, until 
 those smiling possibilities are dead. Whereas ten 
 minutes a day of poetry, of spiritual reading or 
 meditation, and an hour or two a week at music, 
 pictures, or philosophy, provided we began now 
 and suffered no remission, would infallibly give 
 us in due time the fulness of all we desire. By 
 neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing
 
 74 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively 
 digging the graves of our higher possibilities. 
 This is a point concerning which you teachers 
 might well give a little timely information to your 
 older and more aspiring pupils. 
 
 According as a function receives daily exercise 
 or not, the man becomes a different kind of being 
 in later life. We have lately had a number of 
 accomplished Hindoo visitors at Cambridge, who 
 talked freely of life and philosophy. More than 
 one of them has confided to me that the sight of 
 our faces, all contracted as they are with the habit- 
 ual American over-intensity and anxiety of expres- 
 sion, and our ungraceful and distorted attitudes 
 when sitting, made on him a very painful impres- 
 sion. " I do not see," said one, " how it is possible 
 for you to live as you do, without a single minute 
 in your day deliberately given to tranquillity and 
 meditation. It is an invariable part of our Hindoo 
 life to retire for at least half an hour daily into 
 silence, to relax our muscles, govern our breathing, 
 and meditate on eternal things. Every Hindoo 
 child is trained to this from a very early age." 
 The good fruits of such a discipline were obvious 
 in the physical repose and lack of tension, and 
 the wonderful smoothness and calmness of facial
 
 THE HABIT OF RELAXATION 75 
 
 expression, and imperturbability of manner of 
 these Orientals. I felt that my countrymen were 
 depriving themselves of an essential grace of char- 
 acter. How many American children ever hear it 
 said by parent or teacher, that they should moder- 
 ate their piercing voices, that they should relax 
 their unused muscles, and as far as possible, when 
 sitting, sit quite still? Not one in a thousand, 
 not one in five thousand! Yet, from its reflex 
 influence on the inner mental states, this ceaseless 
 over-tension, over-motion, and over-expression are 
 working on us grievous national harm. 
 
 I beg you teachers to tliink a little seriously of 
 this matter. Perhaps you can help our rising gen- 
 eration of Americans toward the beginning of a 
 better set of personal ideals.* 
 
 To go back now to our general maxims, I may 
 at last, as a fifth and final practical maxim about 
 habits, offer something like this : Keep the faculty 
 of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise 
 every day. That is, be systematically heroic in 
 little unnecessary points, do every day or two 
 something for no other reason than its difficulty, 
 so that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it 
 
 * See the Address on the Gospel of Relaxation, later in this volume.
 
 76 TALKS TO TEACHEES 
 
 may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand 
 the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insur- 
 ance which a man pays on his house and goods. 
 The tax does him no good at the time, and possi- 
 bly may never bring him a return. But, if the fire 
 does come, his having paid it will be his salvation 
 from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured 
 himself to habits of concentrated attention, ener- 
 getic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. 
 He will stand like a tower when everything rocks 
 around him, and his softer fellow-mortals are win- 
 nowed like chaff in the blast. 
 
 I have been accused, when talking of the sub- 
 ject of habit, of making old habits appear so 
 strong that the acquiring of new ones, and partic- 
 ularly anything like a sudden reform or conver- 
 sion, would be made impossible by my doctrine. 
 Of course, this would suffice to condemn the lat- 
 ter; for sudden conversions, however infrequent 
 they may be, unquestionably do occur. But there 
 is no incompatibility between the general laws I 
 have laid down and the most startling sudden 
 alterations in the way of character. New habits 
 can be launched, I have expressly said, on condi- 
 tion of there being new stimuli and new excite-
 
 THE SCOPE OF HABIT'S EFFECTS 77 
 
 ments. Now life abounds in these, and sometimes 
 they are such critical and revolutionary experi- 
 ences that they change a man's whole scale of 
 values and system of ideas. In such cases, the 
 old order of his habits will be ruptured ; and, if 
 the new motives are lasting, new habits will be 
 formed, and build up in him a new or regener- 
 ate 'nature.' 
 
 All this kind of fact I fully allow. But the 
 general laws of habit are no wise altered thereby, 
 and the physiological study of mental conditions 
 still remains on the whole the most powerful ally 
 of hortatory ethics. The hell to be endured here- 
 after, of which theology tells, is no worse than the 
 hell we make for ourselves hi this world by habit- 
 ually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. 
 Could the young but realize how soon they will 
 become mere walking bundles of habits, they 
 would give more heed to their conduct while in 
 the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, 
 good or evil, and never to be undone. Every 
 smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its 
 never-so-little scar. The drunken Rip Van Win- 
 kle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every 
 fresh dereliction by saying, "I won't count this 
 time ! " Well, he may not count it, and a kind 
 Heaven may not count it ; but it is being counted
 
 78 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and 
 fibres the molecules are counting it, registering 
 and storing it up to be used against him when the 
 next temptation comes. Nothing we ever do is, 
 in strict scientific literalness, wiped out. 
 
 Of course, this has its good side as well as its 
 bad one. As we become permanent drunkards by 
 so many separate drinks, so we become saints in 
 the moral, and authorities and experts in the 
 practical and scientific spheres, by so many sepa- 
 rate acts and hours of work. Let no youth have 
 any anxiety about the upshot of his education, 
 whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faith- 
 fully busy each hour of the working day, he may 
 safely leave the final result to itself. He can with 
 perfect certainty count on waking up some fine 
 morning to find himself one of the competent 
 ones of his generation, in whatever pursuit he 
 may have singled out. Silently, between all the 
 details of his business, the power of judging in 
 all that class of matter will have built itself up 
 within liim as a possession that will never pass 
 away. Young people should know this truth in 
 advance. The ignorance of it has probably en- 
 gendered more discouragement and faint-hearted- 
 ness in youths embarking on arduous careers 
 than all other causes put together.
 
 IX. 
 
 THE ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS 
 
 IN my last talk, in treating of Habit, I chiefly 
 had in mind our motor habits, habits of external 
 conduct. But our thinking and feeling processes 
 are also largely subject to the law of habit, and 
 one result of this is a phenomenon which you all 
 know under the name of ' the association of ideas.' 
 To that phenomenon I ask you now to turn. 
 
 You remember that consciousness is an ever- 
 flowing stream of objects, feelings, and impulsive 
 tendencies. We saw already that its phases or 
 pulses are like so many fields or waves, each 
 field or wave having usually its central point of 
 liveliest attention, in the shape of the most promi- 
 nent object hi our thought, while all around this 
 lies a margin of other objects more dimly realized, 
 together with the margin of emotional and 
 active tendencies which the whole entails. De- 
 scribing the mind thus in fluid terms, we cling as 
 close as possible to nature. At first sight, it might 
 seem as if, in the fluidity of these successive waves,
 
 80 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 everything is indeterminate. But inspection 
 shows that each wave has a constitution which 
 can be to some degree explained by the constitu- 
 tion of the waves just passed away. And this 
 relation of the wave to its predecessors is expressed 
 by the two fundamental * laws of association,' so- 
 called, of which the first is named the Law of 
 
 Contiguity, the second that of Similarity. 
 
 The L<vr <>f Continuity tells us that objects 
 thought of hi the coming wave are such as in some 
 previous experience were next to the objects repre- 
 sented in the wave that is passing away. The 
 vanishing objects were once formerly their neigh- 
 bors in the mind. When you recite the alphabet 
 or your prayers, or when the sight of an object 
 reminds you of its name, or the name reminds you 
 of the object, it is through the law of contiguity 
 that the terms are suggested to the mind. 
 
 The Law of Similarity says that, when contigu- 
 ity fails to describe what happens, the coming 
 objects will prove to rt'stmLl*' the going objects, 
 even though the two were never experienced 
 together before. In our flights of fancy,' this is 
 frequently the case. 
 
 If, arresting ourselves in the flow of reverie, 
 we ask the question, " How came we to be think-
 
 THE TWO LAWS OP ASSOCIATION 81 
 
 ing of just this object now?" we can almost al- 
 ways trace its presence to some previous object 
 which has introduced it to the mind, according to 
 one or the other of these laws. The entire rou- 
 tine of our memorized acquisitions, for example, 
 is a consequence of nothing but the Law of Con- 
 tiguity. The words of a poem, the formulas of 
 trigonometry, the facts of history, the properties 
 of material things, are all known to us as definite 
 systems or groups of objects which cohere hi an 
 order fixed by innumerable iterations, and of 
 which any one part reminds us of the others. In 
 dry and prosaic minds, almost all the mental se- 
 quences flow along these lines of habitual rou- 
 tine repetition and suggestion. 
 
 In witty, imaginative minds, on the other hand, 
 the routine is broken through with ease at any 
 moment; and one field of mental objects will sug- 
 gest another with which perhaps in the whole his- 
 tory of human thinking it had never once before 
 been coupled. The link here is usually some anal- 
 ogy between the objects successively thought of, 
 an analogy often so subtle that, although we feel 
 it, we can with difficulty analyze its ground; as 
 where, for example, we find something masculine 
 in the color red and something feminine in the
 
 82 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 color pale blue, or where, of three human beings' 
 characters, one will remind us of a cat, another 
 of a dog, the third perhaps of a cow. 
 
 Psychologists have of course gone very deeply 
 into the question of what the causes of association 
 may be ; and some of them have tried to show that 
 contiguity and similarity are not two radically 
 diverse laws, but that either presupposes the pres- 
 ence of the other. I myself am disposed to think 
 that the phenomena of association depend on our 
 cerebral constitution, and are not immediate con- 
 sequences of our being rational beings. In other 
 words, when we shall have become disembodied 
 spirits, it may be that our trains of consciousness 
 will follow different laws. These questions are 
 discussed hi the books on psychology, and I hope 
 that some of you will be interested in following 
 them there. But I will, on the present occasion, 
 ignore them entirely; for, as teachers, it is the fact 
 of association that practically concerns you, let 
 its grounds be spiritual or cerebral, or what they 
 may, and let its laws be reducible, or non-reduci- 
 ble, to one. Your pupils, whatever else they are, 
 are at any rate little pieces of associating machin- 
 ery. Their education consists in the organizing
 
 THEIR GREAT SCOPE 83 
 
 within them of determinate tendencies to associate 
 one thing with another, impressions with conse- 
 quences, these with reactions, those with results, 
 and so on indefinitely. The more copious the 
 associative systems, the completer the individual's 
 adaptations to the world. 
 
 The teacher can formulate his function to him- 
 self therefore in terms of ' association ' as well as 
 in terms of native and acquired reaction.' It is 
 mainly that of building up useful systems of asso- 
 ciation in the pupil's mind. This description 
 sounds wider than the one I began by giving. 
 But, when one thinks that our trains of associa- 
 tion, whatever they may be, normally issue in ac- 
 quired reactions or behavior, one sees that in a 
 general way the same mass of facts is covered by 
 both formulas. 
 
 It is astonishing how many mental operations 
 we can explain when we have once grasped the 
 principles of association. The great problem which 
 association undertakes to solve is, Why does just 
 this particular field of consciousness, constituted in 
 this particular way, now appear before my mind ? 
 It may be a field of objects imagined ; it may be 
 of objects remembered or of objects perceived ; it 
 may include an action resolved on. In either case,
 
 84 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 when the field is analyzed into its parts, those 
 parts can be shown to have proceeded from parts 
 of fields previously before consciousness, in con- 
 sequence of one or other of the laws of association 
 just laid down. Those laws run the mind : inter- 
 est, shifting hither and thither, deflects it ; and 
 attention, as we shall later see, steers it and keeps 
 it from too zigzag a course. 
 
 To grasp these factors clearly gives one a solid 
 and simple understanding of the psychological 
 machinery. The 'nature,' the 'character,' of an 
 individual means really nothing but the habitual 
 form of his associations. To break up bad associa- 
 tions or wrong ones, to build others in, to guide 
 the associative tendencies into the most fruitful 
 channels, is the educator's principal task. But 
 here, as with all other simple principles, the dif- 
 ficulty lies in the application. Psychology can 
 state the laws : concrete tact arid talent alone can 
 work them to useful results. 
 
 Meanwhile it is a matter of the commonest expe- 
 rience that our minds may pass from one object to 
 another by various intermediary fields of conscious- 
 ness. The indetenninateness of our paths of asso- 
 ciation in concrete is thus almost as striking a feat- 
 ure of them as the uniformity of their abstract
 
 INDETEKMINATENESS OP ASSOCIATIONS 85 
 
 form. Start from any idea whatever, and the 
 entire range of your ideas is potentially at your 
 disposal. If we take as the associative starting- 
 point, or cue, some simple word which I pronounce 
 before you, there is no limit to the possible diver- 
 sity of suggestions which it may set up in your 
 minds. Suppose I say * blue,' for example : some 
 of you may think of the blue sky and hot weather 
 from which we now are suffering, then go off on 
 thoughts of summer clothing, or possibly of meteo- 
 rology at large ; others may think of the spectrum 
 and the physiology of color-vision, and glide into 
 X-rays and recent physical speculations; others 
 may think of blue ribbons, or of the blue flowers 
 on a friend's hat, and proceed on lines of personal 
 reminiscence. To others, again, etymology and 
 linguistic thoughts may be suggested; or blue 
 may be * apperceived ' as a synonym for melan- 
 choly, and a train of associates connected with 
 morbid psychology may proceed to unroll them- 
 selves. 
 
 In the same person, the same word heard at 
 different times will provoke, in consequence of 
 the varying marginal preoccupations, either one of 
 a number of diverse possible associative sequences. 
 Professor Miinsterberg performed this experiment
 
 86 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 methodically, using the same words four times 
 over, at three-month intervals, as ' cues ' for four 
 different persons who were the subjects of obser- 
 vation. He found almost no constancy in their 
 associations taken at these different times. In 
 short, the entire potential content of one's con- 
 sciousness is accessible from any one of its points. 
 This is why we can never work the laws of asso- 
 ciation forward : starting from the present field 
 as a cue, we can never cipher out in advance just 
 what the person will be thinking of five minutes 
 later. The elements which may become prepo- 
 tent in the process, the parts of each successive 
 field round which the associations shall chiefly 
 turn, the possible bifurcations of suggestion, are 
 so numerous and ambiguous as to be indetermina- 
 ble before the fact. But, although we cannot 
 work the laws of association forward, we can 
 always work them backwards. We cannot say 
 now what we shall find ourselves thinking of 
 five minutes hence ; but, whatever it may be, we 
 shall then be able to trace it through intermediary 
 links of contiguity or similarity to what we are 
 thinking now. What so baffles our prevision is 
 the shifting part played by the margin and focus 
 in fact, by each element by itself of the margin or 
 focus in calling up the next ideas.
 
 SOME CUES ARE PREPOTENT 87 
 
 For example, I am reciting ' Locksley Hall,' in 
 order to divert my mind from a state of suspense 
 that I am in concerning the will of a relative that 
 is dead. The will still remains hi the mental 
 background as an extremely marginal or ultra- 
 marginal portion of my field of consciousness ; but 
 the poem fairly keeps my attention from it, until 
 I come to the line, " I, the heir of all the ages, in 
 the foremost files of time." The words * I, the 
 heir,' immediately make an electric connection 
 with the marginal thought of the will; that, in 
 turn, makes my heart beat with anticipation of 
 my possible legacy, so that I throw down the book 
 and pace the floor excitedly with visions of my 
 future fortune pouring through my mind- Any 
 portion of the field of consciousness that has more 
 potentialities of emotional excitement than an- 
 other may thus be roused to predominant activ- 
 ity ; and the shifting play of interest now hi one 
 portion, now in another, deflects the currents in 
 all sorts of zigzag ways, the mental activity run- 
 ning hither and thither as the sparks run in 
 burnt-up paper. 
 
 One more point, and I shall have said as much 
 to you as seems necessary about the process of 
 association.
 
 88 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 You just saw how a single exciting word may 
 call up its own associates prepotently, and deflect 
 our whole train of thinking from the previous 
 track. The fact is that every portion of the field 
 tends to call up its own associates ; but, if these 
 associates be severally different, there is rivalry, 
 and as soon as one or a few begin to be effective 
 the others seem to get siphoned out, as it were, 
 and left behind. Seldom, however, as in our ex- 
 ample, does the process seem to turn round a 
 single item in the mental field, or even round the 
 entire field that is immediately in the act of pass- 
 ing. It is a matter of constellation, into which 
 portions of fields that are already past especially 
 seem to enter and have their say. Thus, to go 
 back to * Locksley Hall,' each word as I recite it 
 in its due order is suggested not solely by the 
 previous word now expiring on my lips, but it is 
 rather the effect of all the previous words, taken 
 together, of the verse. " Ages," for example, calls 
 up " in the foremost files of time," when preceded 
 by " I, the heir of all the " ; but, when preceded 
 by " for I doubt not through the," - it calls up 
 "one increasing purpose runs." Similarly, if I 
 write on the blackboard the letters ABODE 
 F, . . . they probably suggest to you G H I. . . .
 
 THE PUPIL AX ASSOCIATING MACHINE 89 
 
 But, if I write A B A D D E F, if they suggest 
 anything, they suggest as their complement EOT 
 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 asso- 
 ciations into your pupils' minds, you must not rely 
 on single cues, but multiply the cues as much as 
 possible. Couple the desired reaction with numer- 
 ous constellations of antecedents, don't always 
 ask the question, for example, in the same way; 
 don't use the same kind of data in numerical 
 problems ; vary your illustrations, etc., as much as 
 you can. When we come to the subject of mem- 
 ory, we shall learn still more about this. 
 
 So much, then, for the general subject of asso- 
 ciation. In leaving it for other topics (in which, 
 however, we shall abundantly find it involved 
 again), I cannot too strongly urge you to acquire 
 a habit of thinking of your pupils in associative 
 terms. All governors of mankind, from doctors 
 and jail-wardens to demagogues and statesmen, 
 instinctively come so to conceive their charges. 
 If you do the same, thinking of them (however 
 else you may think of them besides) as so many
 
 90 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 little systems of associating machinery, you will 
 be astonished at the intimacy of insight into their 
 operations and at the practicality of the results 
 which you will gain. We think of our acquain- 
 tances, for example, as characterized by certain 
 ' tendencies.' These tendencies will in almost 
 every instance prove to be tendencies to associa- 
 tion. Certain ideas in them are always followed 
 by certain other ideas, these by certain feelings 
 and impulses to approve or disapprove, assent 
 or decline. If the topic arouse one of those first 
 ideas, the practical outcome can be pretty well 
 foreseen. ' Types of character ' in short are 
 largely types of association.
 
 X. 
 
 INTEREST 
 
 AT our last meeting I treated of the native ten- 
 dencies of the pupil to react in characteristically 
 definite ways upon different stimuli or exciting 
 circumstances. In fact, I treated of the pupil's in- 
 stincts. Now some situations appeal to special 
 instincts from the very outset, and others fail to 
 do so until the proper connections have been or- 
 ganized in the course of the person's training. 
 We say of the former set of objects or situations 
 that they are interesting in themselves and origi- 
 nally. Of the latter we say that they are natively 
 uninteresting, and that interest in them has first 
 to be acquired. 
 
 No topic has received more attention from peda- 
 gogical writers than that of interest. It is the 
 natural sequel to the instincts we so lately dis- 
 cussed, and it is therefore well fitted to be the 
 next subject which we take up. 
 
 Since some objects are natively interesting and 
 hi others interest is artificially acquired, the
 
 92 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 teacher must know which the natively interesting 
 ones are ; for, as we shall see immediately, other 
 objects can artificially acquire an interest only 
 through first becoming associated with some of 
 these natively interesting things. 
 
 The native interests of children lie altogether in 
 the sphere of sensation. Novel things to look at 
 or novel sounds to hear, especially when they in- 
 volve the spectacle of action of a violent sort, will 
 always divert the attention from abstract concep- 
 tions of objects verbally taken in. The grimace 
 that Johnny is making, the spitballs that Tommy 
 is ready to throw, the dog-fight in the street, or 
 the distant firebells ringing, these are the rivals 
 with which the teacher's powers of being inter- 
 esting have incessantly to cope. The child will 
 always attend more to what a teacher does than 
 to what the same teacher says. During the per- 
 formance of experiments or while the teacher is 
 drawing on the blackboard, the children are tran- 
 quil and absorbed. I have seen a roomful of col- 
 lege students suddenly become perfectly still, to 
 look at their professor of physics tie a piece of 
 string around a stick which he was going to use 
 in an experiment, but immediately grow restless 
 when he began to explain the experiment. A
 
 NATIVELY INTERESTING THINGS 93 
 
 lady told me that one day, during a lesson, she 
 was delighted at having captured so completely 
 the attention of one of her young charges. He 
 did not remove his eyes from her face ; but he 
 said to her after the lesson was over, " I looked at 
 you all the time, and your upper jaw did not 
 move once I " That was the only fact that he had 
 taken in. 
 
 Living things, then, moving things, or things 
 that savor of danger or of blood, that have a dra- 
 matic quality, these are the objects natively in- 
 teresting to childhood, to the exclusion of almost 
 everything else; and the teacher of young chil- 
 dren, until more artificial interests have grown up, 
 will keep in touch with her pupils by constant 
 appeal to such matters as these. Instruction must 
 be carried on objectively, experimentally, anec- 
 dotally. The blackboard-drawing and story-tell- 
 ing must constantly come in. But of course these 
 methods cover only the first steps, and carry one 
 but a little way. 
 
 Can we now formulate any general principle by 
 which the later and more artificial interests con- 
 nect themselves with these early ones that the 
 child brings with him to the school? 
 
 Fortunately, we can: there is a very simple law
 
 94 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 that relates the acquired and the native interests 
 with each other. 
 
 Any object not interesting in itself may become 
 interesting through becoming associated with an 
 object in which an interest already exists. The two 
 associated objects grow, as it were, together: the 
 interesting portion sheds its quality over the whole ; 
 and thus things not interesting in their own right 
 borrow an interest which becomes as real and as 
 strong as that of any natively interesting thing. 
 The odd circumstance is that the borrowing does 
 not impoverish the source, the objects taken to- 
 gether being more interesting, perhaps, than the 
 originally interesting portion was by itself. 
 
 This is one of the most striking proofs of the 
 range of application of the principle of association 
 of ideas in psychology. An idea will infect an- 
 other with its own emotional interest when they 
 have become both associated together into any 
 sort of a mental total. As there is no limit to 
 the various associations into which an interest- 
 ing idea may enter, one sees in how many ways 
 an interest may be derived. 
 
 You will understand this abstract statement 
 easily if I take the most frequent of concrete ex- 
 amples, the interest which things borrow from
 
 HOW IXTEBEST IS ACQUIRED 95 
 
 their connection with our own personal welfare. 
 The most natively interesting object to a man is 
 his own personal self and its fortunes. We ac- 
 cordingly see that the moment a thing becomes 
 connected with the fortunes of the self, it forthwith 
 becomes an interesting thing. Lend the child his 
 books, pencils, and other apparatus: then give 
 them to him, make them his own, and notice the 
 new light with which they instantly shine in his 
 eyes. He takes a new kind of care of them alto- 
 gether. In mature life, all the drudgery of a 
 man's business or profession, intolerable hi itself, 
 is shot through with engrossing significance be- 
 cause he knows it to be associated with his per- 
 sonal fortunes. What more deadly uninteresting 
 object can there be than a railroad time-table? 
 Yet where will you find a more interesting object 
 if you are going on a journey, and by its means 
 can find your train ? At such times the time-table 
 will absorb a man's entire attention, its interest 
 being borrowed solely from its relation to his per- 
 sonal life. From all these facts there emerges a\ 
 very simple abstract programme for the teacher to 
 follow in keeping the attention of the child : Begin 
 ivith the line of his native interests, and offer him 
 objects that have some immediate connection with \
 
 96 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 these. The kindergarten methods, the objectr 
 teaching routine, the blackboard and manual-train- 
 ing work, all recognize this feature. Schools 
 in which these methods preponderate are schools 
 where discipline is easy, and where the voice of 
 the master claiming order and attention in threat- 
 ening tones need never be heard. 
 
 Next, step by step, connect with these first objects 
 and experiences the later objects and ideas which 
 you wish to instill. Associate the new with the old 
 in some, natural and telling way, so that the interest, 
 being shed along from point to point, finally suffuses 
 the entire system of objects of thought. 
 
 This is the abstract statement ; and, abstractly, 
 nothing can be easier to understand. It is in the 
 fulfilment of the rule that the difficulty lies ; for 
 the difference between an interesting and a tedious 
 teacher consists in little more than the inventive- 
 ness by which the one is able to mediate these 
 associations and connections, and in the dulness in 
 discovering such transitions which the other shows. 
 One teacher's mind will fairly coruscate with 
 points of connection between the new lesson and 
 the circumstances of the children's other experi- 
 ence. Anecdotes and reminiscences will abound 
 in her talk ; and the shuttle of interest will shoot
 
 SOMETHING TO ATTEND WITH 97 
 
 backward and forward, weaving the new and the 
 old together in a lively and entertaining way. 
 Another teacher has no such inventive fertility, 
 and his lesson will always be a dead and heavy 
 thing. This is the psychological meaning of the 
 Herbartian principle of * preparation ' for each 
 lesson, and of correlating the new with the old. 
 It is the psychological meaning of that whole 
 method of concentration in studies of which you 
 have been recently hearing so much. When the 
 geography and English and history and arithmetic 
 simultaneously make cross-references to one an- 
 other, you get an interesting set of processes all 
 along the line. 
 
 If, then, you wish to insure the interest of your 
 pupils, there is only one way to do it ; and that is 
 to make certain that they have something in their 
 rninds^fo attend^with, when you begin to talk. 
 That something can consist in nothing but a 
 previous lot of ideas already interesting in them- 
 selves, and of such a nature that the incoming 
 novel objects which you present can dovetail into 
 them and form with them some kind of a logically 
 associated or systematic whole. Fortunately, al- 
 most any kind of a connection is sufficient to
 
 98 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 cany the interest along. What a help is our 
 Philippine war at present in teaching geography ! 
 But before the war you could ask the children if 
 they ate pepper with their eggs, and where they 
 supposed the pepper came from. Or ask them if 
 glass is a stone, and, if not, why not ; and then let 
 them know how stones are formed and glass manu- 
 factured. External links will serve as well as 
 those that are deeper and more logical. But in- 
 terest, once shed upon a subject, is liable to re- 
 main always with that subject. Our acquisitions 
 become in a measure portions of our personal self ; 
 and little by little, as cross-associations multiply 
 and habits of familiarity and practice grow, the 
 entire system of our objects of thought consoli- 
 dates, most of it becoming interesting for some 
 purposes and in some degree. 
 
 An adult man's interests are almost every one of 
 them intensely artificial : they have slowly been 
 built up. The objects of professional interest are 
 most of them, in their original nature, repulsive ; 
 but by their connection with such natively excit- 
 ing objects as one's personal fortune, one's social 
 responsibilities, and especially by the force of in- 
 veterate habit, they grow to be the only things for 
 which in middle life a man profoundly cares.
 
 THE SYSTEM OF OUR INTERESTS 99 
 
 But in all these the spread and consolidation 
 have followed nothing but the principles first laid 
 down. If we could recall for a moment our whole 
 individual history, we should see that our pro- 
 fessional ideals and the zeal they inspire are due 
 to nothing but the slow accretion of one mental 
 object to another, traceable backward from point 
 to point till we reach the moment when, in the 
 nursery or in the schoolroom, some little story 
 told, some little object shown, some little opera- 
 tion witnessed, brought the first new object and 
 new interest within our ken by associating it with 
 some one of those primitively there. The interest 
 now suffusing the whole system took its rise in 
 that little event, so insignificant to us now as to 
 be entirely forgotten. As the bees in swarming 
 cling to one another in layers till the few are 
 reached whose feet grapple the bough from which 
 the swarm depends; so with the objects of our 
 thinking, they hang to each other by associated 
 links, but the original source of interest in all of 
 them is the native interest which the earliest one 
 once possessed.
 
 XI. 
 
 ATTENTION 
 
 WHOEVER treats of interest inevitably treats of 
 attention, for to say that an object is interesting 
 r ^r^.^'*' vs ^*is only another way of saying that it excites atten- 
 tion. But in addition to the attention which 
 any object already interesting or just becoming 
 interesting claims passive attention or sponta- 
 neous attention, we may call it there is a more 
 deliberate attention, voluntary attention or atten- 
 tion with effort, as it is called, which we can give 
 to objects less interesting or uninteresting in theni- 
 ., + selves. The distinction between active and jms- 
 sive attention is made in all books on psychology, 
 and connects itself with the deeper aspects of the 
 topic. From our present purely practical point of 
 view, however, it is not necessary to be intricate ; 
 and passive attention to natively interesting ma- 
 terial requires no further elucidation on this occa- 
 sion. All that we need explicitly to note is that, 
 the more the passive attention is relied on, by 
 keeping the material interesting; and the less the
 
 ATTENTION AND GENIUS 101 
 
 kind of attention requiring effort is appealed to; 
 the more smoothly and pleasantly the class-room 
 work goes on. I must say a few more words, 
 however, about this latter process of voluntary 
 and deliberate attention. 
 
 One often hears it said that genius is nothing 
 but a power of sustained attention, and the popu- 
 lar impression probably prevails that men of fo/^~Zi~y 
 genius are remarkable for their voluntary powers ^ctc^CU 
 in this direction. But a little introspective obser- 
 vation 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 ^J^ 
 bring back our attention every now and then by ^U, 
 using distinct pulses of effort, which revivify the 
 topic for a moment, the mind then running on for 
 a certain number of seconds or minutes with spon- 
 taneous interest, until again some intercurrent 
 idea captures it and takes it off. Then the proc- 
 esses of volitional recall must be repeated once 
 more. Voluntary attention, in short, is only a 
 momentary affair. The process, whatever it is, 
 exhausts itself in the single act; and, unless the 
 matter is then taken in hand by some trace of 
 interest inherent in the subject, the mind fails to 
 
 Vfr-w
 
 102 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 follow it at all. The sustained attention of the 
 : genius, sticking to his subject for hours together, 
 ' is for the most part of the passive sort. The 
 
 W IL ~ " 
 
 minds of geniuses are full of copious and original 
 e.iv< .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 
 
 JJ&0WVWI 
 
 subject develops much less numerous associates: 
 it dies out then quickly; and, if the man is to 
 (kA*Jb keep up thinking of it at all, he must bring his 
 attention back to it by a violent wrench. In him, 
 therefore, the faculty of voluntary attention re- 
 ceives abundant opportunity for cultivation in 
 daily life. It is your despised business man, your 
 union man of affairs, (so looked down on by the 
 literary awarders of fame) whose virtue in this 
 regard is likely to be most developed ; for he has 
 to listen to the concerns of so many uninteresting 
 people, and to transact so much drudging detail, 
 that the faculty in question is always kept in 
 training. A genius, on the contrary, is the man 
 in whom you are least likely to find the power of 
 attending to anything insipid or distasteful in 

 
 CONDITIONS OF VOLUNTARY ATTENTION 103 
 
 itself. He breaks his engagements, leaves his 
 letters unanswered, neglects his family duties in- 
 corrigibly, because he is powerless to turn his at- 
 tention down and back from those more interest- 
 ing trains of imagery with which his genius con- 
 stantly occupies his mind. 
 
 Voluntary attention is thus an essentially in- 
 stantaneous affair. You can claim it, for your 
 purposes in the schoolroom, by commanding it in 
 loud, imperious tones; and you can easily get it ^ 
 in this way. But, unless the subject to which yout*-^ ^ 
 thus recall their attention has inherent power toa^zc^^*-^ 
 interest the pupils, you will have got it for only^ i^f 
 
 a brief moment ; and their minds will soon be \w* 
 
 <- f" 
 wandering again. To keep them where you have^*^^**^ 
 
 called them, you must make the subject too inter- 
 esting for them to wander again. And for that 
 there is one prescription; but the prescription, 
 like all our prescriptions, is abstract, and, to get 
 practical results from it, you must couple it with 
 mother-wit, f 
 
 The prescription is that the subject must be made 
 to show new aspects of itself; to prompt new ques- 
 tions ; in a word, to change. From an unchanging 
 subject the attention inevitably wanders away. 
 You can test this by the simplest possible case of
 
 104 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 sensorial attention. Try to attend steadfastly to 
 a dot on the paper or on the wall. You pres- 
 t dL** en ^J nn d that one or the other of two things has 
 
 happened: either your field of vision has become 
 f ^ >-<~*^^ ~ 
 
 blurred, so that you now see nothing distinct at 
 
 all, or else you have involuntarily ceased to look 
 at the dot in question, and are looking at some- 
 thing else. But, if you ask yourself successive 
 questions about the dot, how big it is, how far, 
 of what shape, what shade of color, etc. ; in other 
 words, if you turn it over, if you think of it in 
 T various ways, and along with various kinds of asso- 
 ciates, you can keep your mind on it for a com- 
 paratively long time. This is what the genius 
 does, in whose hands a given topic coruscates and 
 grows. And this is what the teacher must do for 
 every topic if he wishes to avoid too frequent ap- 
 peals to voluntary attention of the coerced sort. 
 In all respects, reliance upon such attention as 
 this is a wasteful method, bringing bad temper 
 and nervous wear and tear as well as imperfect 
 results. The teacher who can get along by keep- 
 ti ing spontaneous interest excited must be regarded 
 u as the teacher with the greatest skill. 
 
 There is, however, in all schoolroom work a 
 large mass of material that must be dull and un-
 
 MECHANICAL AIDS TO ATTENTION 105 
 
 exciting, and to which it is impossible in any con- 
 tinuous way to contribute an interest associatively 
 derived. There are, therefore, certain external 
 methods, which every teacher knows, of volun- 
 tarily arousing the attention from time to time 
 and keeping it upon the subject. Mr. Fitch has 
 a lecture on the art of securing attention, and he 
 briefly passes these methods in review; the post- 
 ure must be changed; places can be changed. 
 Questions, after being answered singly, may occa- 
 sionally be answered in concert. Elliptical ques- 
 tions may be asked, the pupil supplying the miss- - ^^ fa* 
 ing word. The teacher must pounce upon the v 
 most listless child and wake him up. The habit *^ 
 
 * - fZIflr^ 
 
 of prompt and ready response must be kept 
 Recapitulations, illustrations, examples, novelty 
 order, and ruptures of routine, all these are 
 means for keeping the attention alive and con- 
 tributing a little interest to a dull subject. Above 
 all, the teacher must himself be alive and ready, 
 and must use the contagion of his own example. 
 
 But, when all is said and done, the fact remains 
 that some teachers have a naturally inspiring pres- 
 ence, and can make their exercises interesting, 
 while others simply cannot. And psychology and 
 general pedagogy here confess their failure, and
 
 106 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 /c^w.-^ * 
 
 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 
 Qjtfj*JU+s*> "-considered? Attention to an object is what takes 
 
 ^9 
 
 /^^jt - place whenever that object most completely oc- 
 cupies 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 opti- 
 cal impression may affect solely the marginal con- 
 sciousness, while the mental focus keeps engaged 
 with rival thuigs. We may indeed not 'see' it 
 till some one points it out. But, if so, how does 
 he point it out? By his finger, and by describing 
 its appearance, by creating a premonitory image 
 of where to look and of what to expect to see. 
 This premonitory image is already an excitement
 
 ATTENTION, PHYSIOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED 107 
 
 of the same nerve-centres that are to be concerned 
 with the impression. The impression comes, and 
 excites them still further; and now the object en- 
 ters the focus of the field, consciousness being sus- 
 tained both by impression and by preliminary idea. 
 But the maximum of attention to it is not yet 
 reached. Although we see it, we may not care 
 for it; it may suggest nothing important to us; 
 and a rival stream of objects or of thoughts may 
 quickly take our mind away. If, however, our 
 companion defines it in a significant way, arouses 
 hi the mind a set of experiences to be apprehended 
 from it, names it an enemy or as a messenger 
 of important tidings, the residual and marginal 
 ideas now aroused, so far from being its rivals, 
 become its associates and allies. They shoot to- 
 gether into one system with it; they converge 
 upon it; they keep it steadily in focus; the mind 
 attends to it with maximum power. 
 " The attentive process, therefore, at its maximum 
 may be physiologically symbolized by a brain-cell 1 "" 
 played on hi two ways, from without and from' 6 ' 
 within. Incoming currents from the periphery j^*^** 
 arouse it, and collateral currents from the centres^ ' 
 of memory and imagination re-enforce these. 
 
 In this process the incoming impression is the
 
 108 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 newer element ; the ideas which re-enforce and sus- 
 ..v.tain it are among the older possessions of the 
 i mind. And the maximui" nf attention may then 
 be said to be found whenever we have a systema- 
 . tic harmony or unification between the novel and 
 the old. It is an odd circumstance that neither 
 the old nor the new, by itself, is interesting: the 
 absolutely old is insipid ; the absolutely new 
 pj 0( ^. makes no appeal at all. The old in the new is 
 
 - , / -L wna t claims the attention, the old with a slightly 
 f new turn. No one wants to hear a lecture on a 
 
 AXX y0*~ tr^^*sttAJEti*f lit- iii 
 
 subject completely disconnected with his previous 
 knowledge, but we all like lectures on subjects of 
 which we know a little already, just as, in the 
 fashions, every year must bring its slight modifi- 
 cation of last year's suit, but an abrupt jump from 
 the fashion of one decade into another would be 
 distasteful to the eye. 
 
 The genius of the interesting teacher consists 
 ' in sympathetic divination of the sort of material 
 with which the pupil's mind is likely to be already 
 spontaneously engaged, and in the ingenuity which 
 discovers paths of connection from that material 
 to the matters to be newly learned. The principle 
 is easy to grasp, but the accomplishment is 
 difficult in the extreme. And a knowledge of 
 
 -'
 
 INTEREST AND EFFORT ARE COMPATIBLES 109 
 
 such psychology as this which I am recalling can 
 no more make a good teacher than a knowledge 
 of the laws of perspective can make a landscape 
 painter of effective skill. 
 
 A certain doubt may now occur to some of 
 you. A while ago, apropos of the pugnacious 
 instinct, I spoke of our modern pedagogy as being 
 possibly too 'soft.' You may perhaps here face 
 me with my own words, and ask whether the 
 exclusive effort on the teacher's part to keep the 
 pupil's spontaneous interest going, and to avoid 
 the more strenuous path of voluntary attention to 
 repulsive work, does not savor also of sentimen- 
 talism. The greater part of schoolroom work, you 
 say, must, in the nature of things, always be repul- 
 sive. To face uninteresting drudgery is a good 
 part of life's work. Why seek to eliminate it 
 from the 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.
 
 110 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 It flows from the inherent nature of the subjects 
 and of the learning mind. The repulsive proc- 
 esses of verbal memorizing, of discovering steps 
 of mathematical identity, and the like, must 
 borrow their interest at first from purely external 
 sources, mainly from the personal interests with 
 which success in mastering them is associated, 
 such as gaming of rank, avoiding punishment, not 
 being beaten by a difficulty and the like. With- 
 out such borrowed interest, the child could not 
 attend to them at all. But in these processes 
 what becomes interesting enough to be attended 
 to is not thereby attended to without effort. 
 Effort always has to go on, derived interest, for 
 the most part, not awakening attention that is 
 easy, however spontaneous it may now have to be 
 called. The interest which the teacher, by his 
 utmost skill, can lend to the subject, proves over 
 Mid over again to be only an interest sufficient to 
 let loose the effort. The teacher, therefore, need 
 ^ never concern himself about inventing occasions 
 ' - where effort must be called into play. Let him 
 
 still awaken whatever sources of interest in the 
 
 . . , . , 
 
 subject he can by stirring up connections between 
 
 it and the pupil's nature, whether in the line of 
 theoretic curiosity, of personal interest, or of pug-/
 
 INTEREST AND EFFORT ARE COMPATIBLES 111 
 
 nacious impulse. The laws of mind will then 
 bring enough pulses of effort into play to keep the 
 pupil exercised in the direction of the subject. 
 There is, in fact, no greater school of effort than 
 the steady struggle to attend to immediately re- 
 pulsive or difficult objects of thought which have 
 grown to interest us through their association as 
 means, with some remote ideal end. 
 
 The Herbartian doctrine of interest ought not, 
 therefore, in principle to be reproached with 
 ing pedagogy soft. If it do so, it is because it is 
 unintelligently carried on. Do not, then, for the 
 mere sake of discipline, command attention from 
 your pupils in thundering tones. Do not too 
 often beg it from them as a favor, nor claim it as 
 a right, nor try habitually to excite it by preach- 
 ing the importance of the subject. Sometimes, 
 indeed, you must do these things; but, the more 
 you have to do them, the less skilful teacher you 
 will show yourself to be. Elicit interest from 
 within, by the warmth with which you care for 
 the topic yourself, and by following the laws I 
 have laid down. 
 
 If the topic be highly abstract, show its nature 
 by concrete examples. If it be unfamiliar, trace 
 some point of analogy in it with the known. If
 
 _ t 
 
 112 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 it be inhuman, make it figure as part of a story. 
 If it be difficult, couple its acquisition with some 
 prospect of personal gain. Above all things, make 
 sure that it shall run through certain inner 
 changes, since no unvarying object can possibly 
 hold the mental field for long. Let your pupil 
 wander from one aspect to another of your sub- 
 ject, if you do not wish him to wander from it 
 altogether to something else, variety in unity be- 
 ing the secret of all interesting talk and thought. 
 The relation of all these things to the native 
 genius of the instructor is too obvious to need 
 comment again. 
 
 One more point, and I am done with the subject 
 of , attention. There is unquestionably a great 
 native variety among individuals in the type of 
 their attention. Some of us are naturally scatter- 
 brained, and others follow easily a train of con- 
 nected thoughts without temptation to swerve 
 aside to other subjects. This seems to depend on 
 a difference between individuals in the type of 
 their field of consciousness. In some persons this 
 is highly focalized and concentrated, and the focal 
 ideas predominate in determining association. In 
 others we must suppose the margin to be brighter,
 
 CAN M1ND-WANDE1UNG BE CU11ED 113 
 
 and to be filled with something like meteoric 
 showers of images, which strike into it at random, 
 displacing the focal ideas, and carrying association 
 in their own direction. Persons of the latter type 
 find their attention wandering every minute, and 
 must bring it back by a voluntary pull. The 
 others sink into a subject of meditation deeply, 
 and, when interrupted, are 'lost' for a moment 
 before they come back to the outer world. 
 
 The possession of such a steady faculty of at- 
 tention is unquestionably a great boon. Those 
 who have it can work more rapidly, and with less 
 nervous wear and tear. .1 am inclined to think 
 that no one who is without it naturally can by . A~ /r 
 
 any amount of drill or discipline attain it in a very ' 
 high degree. Its amount is probably a fixed char-J*^*** 
 acteristic of the individual. But I wish to make 'ff 
 a remark here which I shall have occasion to"^J*- v/u ** 
 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 ^ ^7 * 
 could never rank them in a scale of actual and *^^*^ 
 

 
 114 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 practical mental efficiency based on its degrees. 
 The total mental efficiency of a man is the results 
 ant of the working together of all his faculties. 
 He is too complex a being for any one of them to 
 have the casting vote. If any one of them do 
 have the casting vote, it is more likely to be the 
 strength of his desire and passion, the strength of 
 the interest he takes in what is proposed. Con- 
 centration, memory, reasoning power, inventive- 
 ness, excellence of the senses, all are subsidiary 
 to this. No matter how scatter-brained the type 
 of a man's successive fields of consciousness may 
 be, if he really care for a subject, he will return to 
 it incessantly from his incessant wanderings, and 
 first and last do more with it, and get more results 
 from it, than another person whose attention may 
 be more continuous during a given interval, but 
 whose passion for the subject is of a more languid 
 and less permanent sort. Some of the most effi- 
 cient workers I know are of the ultra-scatter- 
 brained type. One friend, who does a prodigious 
 quantity of work, has in fact confessed to me that, 
 if he wants to get ideas on any subject, he sits 
 down to work at something else, his best results 
 coming through his mind-wanderings. This is 
 perhaps an epigrammatic exaggeration on his part ;
 
 ATTENTION, CONCLUDED 115 
 
 but I seriously think that no one of us need be too 
 much distressed at his own shortcomings in this 
 regard. Our mind may enjoy but little comfort, 
 may be restless and feel confused ; but it may be 
 extremely efficient all the same.
 
 XII. 
 
 MEMORY 
 
 WE are following a somewhat arbitrary order. 
 Since each and every faculty we possess is either 
 in whole or hi part a resultant of the play of our 
 associations, it would have been as natural, after 
 treating of association, to treat of memory as to 
 treat of interest and attention next. But, since 
 we did take the latter operations first, we must 
 take memory now without farther delay ; for the 
 phenomena of memory are among the simplest 
 and most immediate consequences of the fact that 
 our mind is essentially an associating machine. 
 There is no more pre-eminent example for exhib- 
 iting the fertility of the laws of association as 
 principles of psychological analysis. Memory, 
 moreover, is so important a faculty in the school- 
 room that you are probably waiting with some 
 eagerness to know what psychology has to say 
 about it for your help. 
 
 In old times, if you asked a person to explain 
 why he came to be remembering at that moment
 
 SHALL WE CALL MEMORY A FACULTY 117 
 
 some particular incident in his previous life, the 
 only reply he could make was that his soul is 
 endowed with a faculty called memory ; that it is 
 the inalienable function of this faculty to recol- ^ 
 
 lect ; and that, therefore, he necessarily at 
 moment must have a cognition of that portion (rfjr^^/i 
 the past. This explanation by a 'faculty' is one 
 thing which explanation by association has super- 
 seded altogether. If, by saying we have a faculty 
 of memory, you mean nothing more than the fact 
 that we can remember, nothing more than an*' 
 abstract name for our power inwardly to recall ^ ' 
 the past, there is no harm done : we do have the 
 faculty ; for we unquestionably have such a power. 
 But if, by faculty, you mean a principle of expla- 
 nation of our general power to recall, your psychol- 
 ogy is empty. The associationist psychology, on 
 the other hand, gives an explanation of each par- 
 ticular fact of recollection ; and, in so doing, it 
 also gives an explanation of the general faculty. 
 The 'faculty' of memory is thus no or real ulti- 
 mate explanation ; for it is itself explained as a 
 result of the association of ideas. 
 
 Nothing is easier than to show you just what I 
 mean by this. Suppose I am silent for a moment, 
 and then say in commanding accents : " Reineni-
 
 118 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 ber ! Recollect ! " Does your faculty of memory 
 obey the order, and reproduce any definite image 
 from your past? Certainly not. It stands star- 
 ing into vacancy, and asking, "What kind of a 
 thing do you wish me to remember ? " It needs 
 in short, a cue. But, if I say, remember the date 
 of your birth, or remember what you had for 
 breakfast, or remember the succession of notes in 
 the musical scale ; then your faculty of memory im- 
 mediately produces the required result : the ' cue ' 
 determines its vast set of potentialities toward a 
 particular point. And if you now look to see how 
 this happens, you immediately perceive that the 
 
 /cue is something contiguously associated with the 
 thing recalled. The words, 'date of my birth,' 
 have an ingrained association with a particular 
 number, month, and year ; the words, ' breakfast 
 this morning,' cut off all other lines of recall ex- 
 cept those which lead to coffee and bacon and 
 eggs; the words, 'musical scale,' are inveterate 
 mental neighbors of do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, etc. The 
 laws of association govern, in fact, all the trains 
 of our thinking which are not interrupted by sen- 
 sations breaking on us from -without Whatever 
 appears in the mind must be introduced; and, 
 when introduced, it is as the associate of some-
 
 PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS OP MEMORY 
 
 119 
 
 ,^r&*t 
 
 thing already there. This is as true of what you 
 are recollecting as it is of everything else you 
 think of. 
 
 Reflection will show you that there are peculi- 
 arities in your memory which would be quite 
 whimsical and unaccountable if we were forced 
 to regard them as the product of a purely spir- 
 itual faculty. Were memory such a faculty, 
 granted to us solely for its practical use, vr&^ 
 ought to remember easiest whatever we most 
 needed to remember; and frequency of repeti- 
 tion, recency, and the like, would play no part 
 in the matter. That we should best remember 
 frequent things and recent things, and forget 
 things that are ancient or were experienced only 
 once, could only be regarded as an incomprehen- 
 sible anomaly on such a view. But if we remem- 
 ber because of our associations, and if these are 
 (as the physiological psychologists believe) due to 
 our organized brain-paths, we easily see how the J 
 law of recency and repetition^ jshould prevail. Jj + 
 
 Paths frequently and recently ploughed are those 
 that lie most open, those which may be expected 
 most easily to lead to results. The laws of our 
 memory, as we find them, therefore are incidents 
 of our associational constitution ; and, when we
 
 120 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 are emancipated from the flesh, it is conceivable 
 that they may no longer continue to obtain. 
 
 We may assume, then, that recollection is a 
 resultant of our associative processes, these them- 
 selves in the last analysis being most probably due 
 to the workings of our brain. 
 
 Descending more particularly into the faculty 
 -*. sr of memory, we have to distinguish between its 
 potential aspect as a magazine or storehouse and 
 vCu*A--C it* actual aspect as recollection now of a particu- 
 lar 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. 
 Botli the general retention and the special recall 
 are explained by association. An educated mem- 
 "ory depends on an organized system of associa- 
 tions^ and its goodness depends on two of their 
 peculiarities : first, on the persistency^ the asso- 
 ciations ; and, second, on their numbej. 
 
 Let us considereach of these points in turn. 
 
 First, the persistency of the associations. This 
 gives what may be called the quality of native 
 retentiveness to the individual. If, as I think 
 we are forced to, we consider the brain to be the 
 organic condition by which the vestiges of our
 
 THE GIFT OF ORGANIC RETENTIVENESS 121 
 
 experience are associated with each other, we 
 may suppose that some brains are ' wax to receive 
 and marble to retain.' The slightest impressions 
 made on them abide. Names, dates, prices, an- 
 ecdotes, quotations, are indelibly retained, their 
 several elements fixedly cohering together, so that 
 the individual soon becomes a walking cyclopedia 
 of information. All this may occur with no philo- 
 sophic tendency in the mind, no impulse to weave 
 the materials acquired into anything like a logical 
 system. In the books of anecdotes, and, more re- 
 cently, in the psychology-books, we find recorded 
 instances of monstrosities, as we may call them, of 
 this desultory memory ; and they are often other- 
 wise very stupid men. It is, of course, by no 
 means incompatible with a philosophic mind ; for 
 mental characteristics have infinite capacities for 
 permutation. And, when both memory and phi- 
 losophy combine together in one person, then in- 
 deed we have the highest sort of intellectual 
 efficiency. Your Walter Scotts, your Leibnitzes, 
 your Gladstones, and your Goethes, all your folio 
 copies of mankind, belong to this type. Effi- 
 ciency on a colossal scale would indeed seem to 
 require it. For, although your philosophic or 
 systematic mind without good desultory memory
 
 122 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 may know how to work out results and recollect 
 where in the books to find them, the time lost 
 in the searching process handicaps the thinker, 
 and gives to the more ready type of individual 
 the economical advantage. 
 
 The extreme of the contrasted type, the type 
 with associations of small persistency, is found in 
 those who have almost no desultory memory at 
 all. If they are also deficient in logical and sys- 
 tematizing power, we call them simply feeble in- 
 tellects ; and no more need to be said about them 
 here. Their brain-matter, we may imagine, is like 
 a fluid jelly, in which impressions may be easily 
 made, but are soon closed over again, so that the 
 brain reverts to its original indifferent state. 
 
 But it may occur here, just as in other gelati- 
 nous substances, that an impression will vibrate 
 throughout the brain, and send waves into other 
 parts of it. In cases of this sort, although the 
 immediate impression may fade out quickly, it 
 does modify the cerebral mass; for the paths it 
 makes there may remain, and become so many 
 avenues through which the impression may be re- 
 produced if they ever get excited again. And its 
 liability to reproduction will depend of course 
 upon the variety of these paths and upon the fre-
 
 THE SECRET OF A GOOD MEMORY 123 
 
 quency with which they are used. Each path is 
 in fact an associated process, the number of these 
 associates becoming thus to a great degree a sub- 
 stitute for the independent tenacity of the original 
 impression. As I have elsewhere written: Each 
 of the associates is a hook to which it hangs, a 
 means to fish it up when sunk below the surface. 
 Together they form a network of attachments by 
 which it is woven into the entire tissue of our 
 thought. The ' secret of a good memory ' is thus 
 the secret of forming diverse and multiple associa- 
 tions with every fact we care to retain. But this-, 
 forming of associations with a fact, what is i 
 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 tiling be so 
 largely a matter of its associations with other 
 things which thus becomes its cues, an important 
 pedagogic consequence follows. There can be no 
 improvement of the general or elementary faculty of 
 memory : there can only be improvement of our mem- 
 ory for special systems of associated things; and
 
 124 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 this latter improvement is due to the way in 
 which the things in question are woven into asso- 
 ciation with each other in the mind. Intricately 
 or profoundly woven, they are held : disconnected, 
 they tend to drop out just in proportion as the 
 native brain retentiveness is poor. And no 
 amount of training, drilling, repeating, and re- 
 citing employed upon the matter of one system 
 of objects, the history-system, for example, will 
 in the least improve either the facility or the 
 durability with which objects belonging to a 
 wholly disparate system the system of facts of 
 chemistry, for instance tend to be retained. 
 That system must be separately worked into the 
 mind by itself, a chemical fact which is thought 
 about in connection with the other chemical facts, 
 tending then to stay, but otherwise easily drop- 
 ping out 
 
 We have, then, not so much a faculty of mem- 
 \ > ^ A f J ffy as many faculties of memory. We have as 
 
 mnnv na w* Viavp avsrtama nf iiln. 
 
 many as we have 
 >O 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
 
 MEMORIES RATHER THAN MEMORY 125 
 
 reason that it has no * cues ' within that other 
 system. 
 
 We see examples of this on every hand. 
 Most men have a good memory for facts con- 
 nected with their own pursuits. A college ath- 
 lete, who remains a dunce at his books, may amaze 
 you by his knowledge of the * records ' at various 
 feats and games, and prove himself a walking 
 dictionary of sporting statistics. The reason is 
 that he is constantly going over these things in his 
 mind, and comparing and making series of them. 
 They form for him, not so many odd facts, but 
 a concept-system, so they stick. So the merchant 
 remembers prices, the politician other politicians' 
 speeches and votes, with a copiousness which 
 astonishes outsiders, but which the amount of 
 thinking they bestow on these subjects easily 
 explains. 
 
 The great memory for facts which a Darwin or 
 a Spencer reveal in their books is not incompati- 
 ble with the possession on their part of a mind 
 with only a middling degree of physiological re- 
 tentiveness. Let a man early in life set himself 
 the task of verifying such a theory as that of evo- 
 lution, and facts will soon cluster and cling to him 
 like grapes to their stem. Their relations to the
 
 120 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 theory will hold them fast ; and, the more of these 
 the mind is able to discern, the greater the erudi- 
 tion will become. Meanwhile the theorist may 
 have little, if any, desultory memory. Unutiliza- 
 ble facts may be unnoted by him, and forgotten 
 as soon as heard. An ignorance almost as ency- 
 clopedic as his erudition may coexist with the 
 latter, and hide, as it were, within the interstices 
 of its web. Those of you who have had much to 
 do with scholars and savants will readily think of 
 examples of the class of mind I mean. 
 
 The best possible sort of system into which to 
 weave an object, mentally, is a rational system, or 
 what is called a * science.' Place the thing in its 
 pigeon-hole in a classificatory series; explain it 
 logically by its causes, and deduce from it its 
 necessary effects ; find out of what natural law it 
 is an instance, and you then know it in the best 
 of all possible ways. A * science ' is thus the 
 greatest of labor-saving contrivances. It relieves 
 the memory of an immense number of details, re- 
 placing, as it does, merely contiguous associations 
 by the logical ones of identity, similarity, or anal- 
 ogy. If you know a 'law,' you may discharge 
 your memory of masses of particular instances, 
 for the law will reproduce them for you whenever
 
 TECHNICAL MNEMONICS 127 
 
 you require them. The law of refraction, for ex- 
 ample : If you know that, you can with a pencil 
 and a bit of paper immediately discern how a con- 
 vex lens, a concave lens, or a prism, must sever- 
 ally alter the appearance of an object. But, if 
 you don't know the general law, you must charge 
 your memory separately with each of the three 
 kinds of effect. f*P Ot*'&* > ** J 
 
 A 'philosophic' system, in which all things ' .JCZv**" 
 found their rational explanation and were con- -- ^,yV 9 
 nected together as causes and effects, would be ^*/ 
 the perfect mnemonic system, in which the great- 
 est economy of means would bring about the 
 greatest richness of results. So that, if we have 
 poor desultory memories, we can save ourselves 
 by cultivating the philosophic turn of mind. 
 
 There are many artificial systems of mnemonics, 
 some public, some sold as secrets. They are all 
 so many devices for training us into certain me-- 
 thodical and stereotyped ways of thinking about the y^^ 
 facts we seek to retain. Even were I competent, **'***' 
 I could not here go into these systems in any de- 
 tail. But a single example, from a popular sys- 
 tem, will show what I mean. I take the number- 
 alphabet, the great mnemonic device for recollect- 
 ing numbers and dates. In this system each digit
 
 128 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 is represented by a consonant, thus: 1 is t or d; 
 2, n; 3, m ; 4,r; 5, 1; 6, sh,j, ch, or g ; 7, c, k,g, 
 or g-w ; 8, / or v ; 9, b or ^? ; 0, , <?, or 2. Suppose, 
 now, you wish to remember the velocity of sound, 
 1,142 feet a second : , , 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 
 .4-- clearly an excessively poor, trivial, and silly way 
 
 of * thinking ' about dates ; and the way of the 
 historian is much better. He has a lot of land- 
 mark-dates already in his mind. He knows the 
 historic concatenation of events, and can usually 
 place an event at its right date in the chronology- 
 table, by thinking of it in a rational way, referring 
 it to its antecedents, tracing its concomitants and 
 consequences, and thus ciphering out its date by 
 connecting it with theirs. The artificial memory- 
 systems, recommending, as they do, such irrational 
 methods of thinking, are only to be recommended 
 for the first landmarks in a system, or for such
 
 WHY CRAMMING IS BAD 129 
 
 purely detached facts as enjoy no rational connec- 
 tion with the rest of our ideas. Thus the student 
 of physics may remember the order of the spectral 
 colours by the word vibgyor which their initial 
 letters make. The student of anatomy may re- 
 member the position of the Mitral valve on the 
 Left side of the heart by thinking that L. M. 
 stands also for ' long meter ' in the hymn-books. 
 
 You now see why ' cramming ' must be so poor 
 u mode of study. Cramming seeks to stamp things 
 in by intense application immediately before the 
 ordeal. But a thing thus learned cau form but 
 few associations. On the other hand, the same 
 thing recurring on different days, in different con- 
 texts, read, recited on, referred to again and again, 
 related to other things and reviewed, gets well 
 wrought into the mental structure. This is the 
 reason why you should enforce on your pupils 
 habits of continuous application. There is no 
 moral turpitude in cramming. It would be the 
 best, because the most economical, mode of study 
 if it led to the results desired. But it does not, 
 and your older pupils can readily be made to see 
 the reason why. 
 
 It follows also, from what has been said, that 
 the popular idea that l the Memory,' in the sense of
 
 130 TALKS TO TEACHEES 
 
 a general elementary faculty* can be improved by t 
 
 training, is a great mistake. Your memory for 
 facts of a certain class can be improved very much 
 by training in that class of facts, because the in- 
 coming new fact will then find all sorts of ana- 
 
 ' b I " ' 
 
 logues and associates already there, and these 
 
 will keep it liable to recall. But other kinds of 
 
 . r 
 fact will reap none of that benefit, and, unless one 
 
 have been also trained and versed in their class, 
 will be at the mercy of the mere crude retentive- 
 ness of the individual, which, as we have seen, is 
 practically a fixed quantity. Nevertheless, one 
 often hears people say: "A great sin was com- 
 mitted against me in my youth: my teachers 
 entirely failed to exercise my memory. If they 
 had only made me learn a lot of things by heart 
 at school, I should not be, as I am now, forgetful 
 of everything I read and hear." This is a great 
 mistake: learning poetry by heart will make it 
 easier to learn and remember other poetry, but 
 nothing else ; and so of dates ; and so of chemis- 
 try and geography. 
 
 But, after what I have said, I am sure you will 
 need no farther argument on this point; and I 
 therefore pass it by.
 
 VERBAL MEMORIZING 131 
 
 But, since it has brought me to speak of learn- 
 ing things by heart, I think that a general prac- 
 tical remark about verbal memorizing may now 
 not be out of place. The excesses of old-fash- 
 ioned verbal memorizing, and the immense ad- 
 vantages of object-teaching in the earlier stages ~f 
 of culture, have perhaps led those who philoso- 
 phize about teaching to an unduly strong reaction \^fjQtAc^\. V"t 
 and learning things by heart is now probably 
 somewhat too much despised. For, when all is 
 said and done, the fact remains that verbal ma- 
 terial is, on the whole, the handiest and most use- 
 ful material in which thinking can be carried on. 
 Abstract conceptions are far and away the most 
 economical instruments of thought, and abstract 
 conceptions are fixed and incarnated for us in 
 words. Statistical inquiry would seem to show 
 that, as men advance in life, they tend to make 
 less and less use of visual images, and more 
 more use of words! One of the first things that 
 Mr. Gallon discovered was that this appeared to 
 be the case with the members of the Royal Society 2&-Jh**/ ' 
 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
 
 132 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 deplorable than that inarticulate and helpless sort 
 of mind that is reminded by everything of some 
 quotation, case, or anecdote, which it cannot now 
 exactly recollect. Nothing, on the other hand, is 
 more convenient to its possessor, or more delight- 
 ful to his comrades, than a mind able, in telling 
 a story, to give the exact words of the dialogue 
 or to furnish a quotation accurate and complete. 
 In every branch of study there are happily turned, 
 concise, and handy formulas which in an incom- 
 parable way sum up results. The mind that can 
 retain such formulas is in so far a superior mind, 
 and the communication of them to the pupil 
 ought always to be one of the teacher's favorite 
 tasks. 
 
 n I n learning 'by heart,' there are, however, 
 efficient and inefficient methods ; and, by making 
 
 the pupil skilful in the best method, the teacher 
 
 f P 
 
 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,
 
 4 SCIENTIFIC ' MEASUREMENTS OF MEMORY 133 
 
 tlms : " The best method is of course not to ham- 
 mer in the sentences, but to analyze them and 
 think" Then finally insert the words 'by mere 
 reiteration? and the sentence is complete, and 
 both better understood and quicker remembered 
 than by a more purely mechanical method. 
 
 In conclusion, I must say a word about the con- 
 tributions to our knowledge of memory which 
 recently come from the laboratory-psychologists. 
 Many of the enthusiasts for scientific or brass-in- 
 strument child-study are taking accurate measure- 
 ments of children's elementary faculties, and 
 among these what we may call immediate memory 
 admits of easy measurement. All we need do is 
 to exhibit to the child a series of letters, syllables, 
 figures, pictures, or what-not, at intervals of one, 
 two, three, or more seconds, or to sound a similar 
 series of names at the same intervals, within his 
 hearing, and then see how completely he can re- 
 produce the list, either directly, or after an inter- 
 val of ten, twenty, or sixty seconds, or some longer 
 space of time. According to the results of this 
 exercise, the pupils may be rated in a memory- 
 scale ; and some persons go so far as to think that 
 the teacher should modify her treatment of the
 
 134 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 child according to the strength or feebleness 6f 
 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 
 
 J~eut+*JUZ/ >^H>eing 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 
 
 k*wv cL* a 11 exercise as this, dealing with incoherent and 
 insipid objects, with no logical connection with 
 each other, or practical significance outside of the 
 'test,' is an exercise the like of which in real 
 life we are hardly ever called upon to perform. 
 In real life, our memory is always used in the ser- 
 vice of some interest : we remember things which 
 we care for or which are associated with things 
 we care for; and the child who stands at the bot- 
 tom of the scale thus experimentally established 
 might, by dint of the strength of his passion for 
 a subject, and in consequence of the logical asso- 
 ciation into which he weaves the actual materials 
 of his experience, be a very effective memorizer 
 indeed, and do his school-tasks on the whole much 
 better than an immediate parrot who might stand 
 at the top of the scientifically accurate ' list. 
 
 This preponderance of interest, of passion, in 
 determining the results of a human being's work-
 
 ELEMENTARY DEFECTS NOT FATAL 135 
 
 ing life, obtains throughout. No elementary 
 measurement, capable of being performed in a 
 laboratory, can throw any 
 efficiency of the"subject ;for the vital thing about 
 him, his emotional and moral energy and dogged- 
 ness, can be measured by no single experiment, 
 and becomes known only by the total results in the 
 long run. A blind man like Huber, with his pas- 
 sion for bees and ants, can observe them through 
 other people's eyes better than these can through 
 their own. A man born with neither arms nor 
 legs, like the late Kavanagh, M. P. and what 
 an icy heart his mother must have had about him 
 in his babyhood, and how ' negative ' would the 
 laboratory-measurements of his motor-functions 
 have been ! can be an adventurous traveller, an 
 equestrian and sportsman, and lead an athletic 
 outdoor life. Mr. Romanes studied the element- 
 ary rate of apperception in a large number of 
 persons by making them read a paragraph as fast 
 as they could take it in, and then immediately 
 write down all they could reproduce of its con- 
 tents. He found astonishing differences in the 
 rapidity, some taking four times as long as others 
 to absorb the paragraph, and the swiftest readers 
 being, as a rule, the best immediate recollectors,
 
 136 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 too. But not, and this is my point, not the 
 most intellectually capable subjects, as tested by 
 the results of what Mr. Romanes rightly names 
 ' genuine ' intellectual work ; for he tried the ex- 
 periment with several highly distinguished men in 
 science and literature, and most of them turned 
 out to be slow readers. 
 
 In the light of all such facts one may well be- 
 lieve that the total impression which a perceptive 
 teacher will get of the pupil's condition, as indi- 
 cated by his general temper and manner, by the 
 listlessness or alertness, by the ease or painfulness 
 with which his school work is done, will be of 
 more value than those unreal experimental 
 
 tests, those pedantic elementary measurements of 
 
 . 
 fatigue, memory, association, and attention, etc., 
 
 which are urged upon us as the only basis of a 
 genuinely scientific pedagogy. Such measure- 
 ments can give us useful information only when 
 we combine them with observations made without 
 brass instruments, upon the total demeanor of the 
 measured individual, by teachers with eyes in 
 their heads and common sense, and some feeling 
 for the concrete facts of human nature in their 
 hearts. 
 
 Depend upon it, no one need be too much cast
 
 VAEIOUS TYPES OP IMAGINATION 137 
 
 down by the discovery of his deficiency in any ele- 
 mentary faculty of the mind. What tells in life 
 is the whole mind working together, and the de- 
 ficiencies of any one faculty can be compensated 
 by the efforts of the rest. You can be an artist 
 without visual images, a reader without eyes, a 
 mass of erudition with a bad elementary memory. 
 In almost any subject your passion for the subject 
 will save you. If you only care enough for a 
 result, you will almost certainly attain it. If you 
 wish to be rich, you will be rich ; if you wish to 
 be learned, you will be learned ; if you wish to be 
 good, you will be good, Only you must, then, 
 really wish these things, and wish them with ex- 
 clusiveness, and not wish at the same time a hun- 
 dred other incompatible things just as strongly. 
 
 One of the most important discoveries of the 
 'scientific' sort that have recently been made in 
 psychology is that of Mr. Galton and others con- 
 cerning the great variations among individuals inVfT** 
 the type of their imagination. Every one is now^xv*, fe^Lt 
 familiar with the fact that human beings vary 
 enormously in the brilliancy, completeness, defi- . 
 niteness, and extent of their visual images. These , 
 are singularly perfect in a large number of indi- 
 viduals, and in a few are so rudimentary as hardly
 
 138 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 to exist. The same is true of the auditory and 
 motor images, and probably of those of every 
 kind; and the recent discovery of distinct brain- 
 areas for the various orders of sensation would 
 seem to provide a physical basis for such varia- 
 tions and discrepancies. The facts, as I said, are 
 nowadays so popularly known that I need only 
 remind you of their existence. They might 
 seem at first sight of practical importance to the 
 teacher; and, indeed, teachers have been recom- 
 mended to sort their pupils in this way, and treat 
 them as the result falls out. You should inter- 
 rogate them as to their imagery, it is said, or 
 exhibit lists of written words to their eyes, and 
 then sound similar lists in their ears, and see by 
 which channel a child retains most words. Then, 
 in dealing with that child, make your appeals 
 predominantly through that channel. If the 
 class were very small, results of some distinct- 
 ness might doubtless thus be obtained by a pains- 
 taking teacher. But it is obvious that in the usual 
 school-room no such differentiation of appeal is 
 possible ; and the only really useful practical 
 lesson that emerges from this analytic psychology 
 in the conduct of large schools is the lesson al- 
 ready reached in a purely empirical way, that
 
 SENSE-IMPRESSIONS SHOULD BE VARIED 139 
 
 the teacher ought always to impress the class vr*fa** A * 
 through as many sensible channels as he can. (JL** 
 Talk and write and draw on blackboard, permit -^.^^^ 
 the pupils to talk, and make them write and draw, t 
 exhibit pictures, plans, and curves, have your dia- 
 grams colored differently in their different parts, 
 etc. ; and out of the whole variety of impressions 
 the individual child will find the most lasting 
 ones for himself. In all primary school work this 
 principle of multiple impressions is well recog- 
 nized, so I need say no more about it here. 
 
 This principle of multiplying channels and 
 varying associations and appeals is important, 
 not only for teaching pupils to remember, but 
 for teaching them to understand. It runs, in 
 fact, through the whole teaching art. 
 
 One word about the unconscious and unrepro- 
 ducible part of our acquisitions, and I shall have 
 done with the topic of memory. 
 
 Professor Ebbinghaus, in a heroic little investi- 
 gation into the laws of memory which he per- 
 formed a dozen or more years ago by the method 
 of learning lists of nonsense syllables, devised a 
 method of measuring the rate of our forgetfulness, 
 which lays bare an important law of the mind.
 
 - 7 
 ^rr-Q. 
 
 *^*^^ 
 
 140 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 His method was to read over his list until he 
 could repeat it once by heart unhesitatingly. 
 The number of repetitions required for this was 
 a measure of the difficulty of the learning in each 
 particular case. Now, after having once learned a 
 piece hi this way, if we wait five minutes, we find 
 it impossible to repeat it again hi the same unhes- 
 itating manner. We must read it over again to 
 revive some of the syllables, which have already 
 dropped out or got transposed. Ebbinghaus now 
 systematically studied the number of readings- 
 over which were necessary to revive the unhesi- 
 tating recollection of the piece after five minutes, 
 half an hour, an hour, a day, a week, a month, 
 had elapsed. The number of rereadings requir- 
 ed he took to be a measure of the amount of for- 
 getting that had occurred in the elapsed interval. 
 And he found some remarkable facts. The proc- 
 ess of forgetting, namely, is vastly more rapid 
 at first than later on. Thus full half of the piece 
 st-enis to lie forgotten within the first half-hour. 
 
 two-thirds of it are forgotten at the end of eight 
 ^ -K^- hours, but only four-fifths at the end of a month. 
 
 He made no trials beyond one month of interval ; 
 but, if we ourselves prolong ideally the curve of 
 remembrance, whose beginning his experiments
 
 THE RATE OP FORGETTING 141 
 
 thus obtain, it is natural to suppose that, no 
 matter how long a time might elapse, the curve 
 would never descend quite so low as to touch the 
 zero-line. In other words, no matter how long 
 ago we may have learned a poem, and no matter 
 how complete our inability to reproduce it now 
 may be, yet the first learning will still show its 
 lingering effects in the abridgment of the time 
 required for learning it again. In short, Profes- 
 sor 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 . 
 
 *'Q irn. 
 
 for having once learned them. The resistances 
 in our systems of brain-paths are altered. Our ap^*"*"^"" 
 prehensions are quickened. Our conclusions from 
 certain premises are probably not just what they 
 would be if those modifications were not there. 
 The latter influence the whole margin of our con- 
 sciousness, even though their products, not being 
 distinctly reproducible, do not directly figure at 
 the focus of the field. 
 
 The teacher should draw a lesson from these 
 facts. We are all too apt to measure the gains of 
 our pupils by their proficiency in directly repro- 
 ducing in a recitation or an examination such
 
 142 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 matters as they may have learned, and inarticu- 
 late power in them is something of which we 
 always underestimate the value. The boy who 
 tells us, " I know the answer, but I can't say what 
 it is," we treat as practically identical with him 
 who knows absolutely nothing about the answer 
 at all. But this is a great mistake. It is but a 
 small part of our experience in life that we are 
 ever able articulately to recall. And yet the 
 whole of it has had its influence hi shaping our 
 character and denning 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 
 tli at they know how to get at the materials for 
 decision in five minutes or half an hour : whereas 
 the layman is unable to get at the materials at all, 
 not knowing in what books and indexes to look or 
 not understanding the technical terms. 
 
 Be patient, then, and sympathetic with the type
 
 THE FORGOTTEN MAY STILL COUNT 143 
 
 of mind that cuts a poor figure in 
 
 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 u^dep<%X**^^*Y^ 
 the head of memory. We can sum them up for 
 practical purposes by saying that the art of re- 
 membering is the art of thinking ; and by adding, 
 with Dr. Pick, that, when we wish to fix a new 
 thing in either our own mind or a pupil's, our 
 conscious effort should not be so much to it 
 press and retain it as to connect it with some- 
 thing else already there. The connecting is the 
 thinking; and, if we attend clearly to the con-*"* 
 nection, the connected thing will certainly be 
 likely to remain within recall. 
 
 I shall next ask you to consider the process by 
 which we acquire new knowledge, the process of 
 'Apperception,' as it is called, by which we re- 
 ceive and deal with new experiences, and revise 
 our stock of ideas so as to form new or improved 
 conceptions.
 
 XIII. 
 
 THE ACQUISITION OF IDEAS 
 
 THE images of our past experiences, of what- 
 ever nature they may be, visual or verbal, blurred 
 and dim, vivid and distinct, abstract or concrete, 
 need not be memory images, in the strict sense of 
 the word. That is, they need not rise before the 
 mind in a marginal fringe or context of concomi- 
 tant circumstances, which mean for us their date. 
 They may be mere conceptions, floating pictures 
 of an object, or of its type or class. In this un- 
 dated condition, we call them products of 'im- 
 or 'conception.' Imagination is the 
 commonly used where the object represent- 
 ed is thought of as an individual thing. Concep- 
 **^ tion is the term where we think of it as a type or 
 class. For our present purpose the distinction 
 is not important ; and I will permit myself to use 
 either the word 'conception,' or the still vaguer 
 word ' idea,' to designate the inner objects of con- 
 templation, whether these be individual things, 
 like 'the sun' or 'Julius Caesar,' or classes of
 
 THE STOCK OF IDEAS 145 
 
 things, like ' animal kingdom,' or, finally, entirely 
 abstract attributes, like 'rationality' or 'rect- 
 itude.' 
 
 The result of our education is to fill the mind 
 little by little, as experiences accrete, with a stock 
 of such ideas. In the illustration I used at our 
 first meeting, of the child snatching the toy and 
 getting slapped, the vestiges left by the first experi- 
 ence answered to so many ideas which he acquired 
 thereby, ideas that remained with him associ- 
 ated in a certain order, and from the last one of 
 which the child eventually proceeded to act. The 
 sciences of grammar and of logic are little more 
 than attempts methodically to classify all such 
 acquired ideas and to trace certain laws of relation- 
 ship among them. The forms of relation between 
 them, becoming themselves in turn noticed by the 
 mind, are treated as conceptions of a higher and 
 more abstract order, as when we speak of a ' syl- 
 logistic relation' between propositions, or of four 
 quantities making a proportion,' or of the ' incon- 
 sistency ' of two conceptions, or the ' implication ' 
 of one in the other. 
 
 So you see that the process of education, taken 
 in a large way, may be described as nothing but 
 the process of acquiring ideas or conceptions,
 
 -v 
 
 **U4 , 1$ 'jw**-. 
 
 146 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 the best educated mind being the mind which 
 has the largest stock of them, ready to meet the 
 largest possible variety of the emergencies of life. 
 The lack of education means only the failure to 
 have acquired them, and the consequent liability 
 to be 'floored' and * rattled' in the vicissitudes 
 of experience. 
 
 In all this process of acquiring conceptions, a 
 certain instinctive order is followed. There is a 
 native tendency to assimilate certain kinds of con- 
 ception at one age, and other kinds of conception 
 at a later age. During the first seven or eight 
 years of childhood the mind is most interested 
 in the sensible properties of material things. 
 Conttructiveness is the instinct most active; and 
 <(U*t o^feL-^ay the incessant hammering and sawing, and 
 dressing and undressing dolls, putting of things 
 together and taking them apart, the child not 
 only trains the muscles to co-ordinate action, but 
 accumulates a store of physical conceptions which 
 are the basis of his knowledge of the material 
 world through life. Object-teaching and manual 
 training wisely extend the sphere of this order 
 of acquisition. Clay, wood, metals, and the vari- 
 ous kinds of tools are made to contribute to the 
 store. A youth brought up with a sufficiently
 
 IDEAS OF PHYSICAL THINGS 147 
 
 broad basis of this kind is always at home in the 
 world. He stands within the pale. He is ac- 
 quainted with Nature, and Nature in a certain 
 sense is acquainted with him. Whereas the 
 youth brought up alone at home, with no ac- 
 quaintance with anything but the printed page, 
 is always afflicted with a certain remoteness from 
 the material facts of life, and a correlative inse- 
 curity of consciousness which make of him a kind 
 of alien on the earth in which he ought to feel 
 himself perfectly at home. 
 
 I already said something of this in speaking 
 of the constructive impulse, and I must not re- 
 peat myself. Moreover, you fully realize, I am 
 sure, how important for life, for the moral 
 tone of life, quite apart from definite practical pur- 
 suits, is this sense of readiness for emergencies 
 which a man gains through early familiarity and 
 acquaintance with the world of material things. 
 To have grown up on a farm, to have haunted 
 a carpenter's and blacksmith's shop, to have 
 handled horses and cows and boats and guns, and 
 to have ideas and abilities connected with such 
 objects are an inestimable part of youthful ac- 
 quisition. After adolescence it is rare to be able 
 to get into familiar touch with any of these
 
 148 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 primitive tilings. 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 hi adult life a sounder sort of mental 
 tissue, even though he may seem to be * wasting ' 
 a great deal of his growing time, hi the eyes of 
 those for whom the only channels of learning are 
 books and verbally communicated information. 
 
 It is not till adolescence is reached that the 
 mind grows able to take in the more abstract as- 
 pects of experience, the hidden similarities and 
 distinctions between things, and especially their 
 causal sequences. Rational knowledge of such 
 things as mathematics, mechanics, chemistry, and 
 biology, is now possible; and the acquisition of 
 conceptions of this order form the next phase of 
 education. Later still, not till adolescence is well 
 advanced, does the mind awaken to a systematic 
 interest in abstract human relations moral rela- 
 tions, properly so called, to sociological ideas 
 and to metaphysical abstractions.
 
 NATURAL ORDER OF ACQUISITION 149 
 
 This general order of sequence is followed tra- 
 ditionally of course in the schoolroom. It is for- 
 eign to my purpose to do more than indicate that 
 general psychological principle of the successive 
 order of awakening of the faculties on which the 
 whole thing rests. I have spoken of it already, 
 apropos of the transitoriness of instincts. Just as 
 many a youth has to go permanently without an 
 adequate stock of conceptions of a certain order, 
 because experiences of that order were not yielded 
 at the time when new curiosity was most acute, 
 so it will conversely happen that many another 
 youth is spoiled for a certain subject of study 
 (although he would have enjoyed it well if led 
 into it at a later age) through having had it 
 thrust upon him so prematurely that disgust was 
 created, and the bloom quite taken off from future 
 trials. I think I have seen college students un- 
 fitted forever for philosophy ' from having taken 
 that study up a year too soon. 
 
 In all these later studies, verbal material is the 
 vehicle by which the mind thinks. The abstract 
 conceptions of physics and sociology may, it is 
 true, be embodied in visual or other images of 
 phenomena, but they need not be so ; and the 
 truth remains that, after adolescence has begun,
 
 150 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 "words, words, words," must constitute a large 
 part, and an always larger part as life advances, 
 of what the human being has to learn. This is 
 so even in the natural sciences, so far as these are 
 causal and rational, and not merely confined to 
 description. So I go back to what I said awhile 
 ago apropos of verbal memorizing. The more ac- 
 curately words are learned, the better, if only the 
 teacher make sure that what they signify is also 
 understood. It is the failure of this latter condi- 
 tion, in so much of the old-fashioned recitation, 
 that has caused that reaction against * parrot-like 
 reproduction ' that we are so familiar with to-day. 
 A friend of mine, visiting a school, was asked to 
 examine a young class in geography. Glancing 
 at the book, she said : " Suppose you should dig a 
 hole in the ground, hundreds of feet deep, how 
 should you find it at the bottom, warmer or 
 colder than on top ? " None of the class replying, 
 the teacher said : " I'm sure they know, but I think 
 you don't ask the question quite rightly. Let me 
 try." So, taking the book, she asked : " In what 
 condition is the ulterior of the globe?" and re- 
 ceived the immediate answer from half the class at 
 once : " The interior of the globe is in a condition 
 of igneous fusion ." Better exclusive object-teach-
 
 EACH AGE CAN APPREHEND ABSTRACTIONS 151 
 
 ing than such verbal recitations as that ; and yet 
 verbal reproduction, intelligently connected with 
 more objective work, must always play a leading, 
 and surely the leading, part in education. Our 
 modern reformers, in their books, write too ex- 
 clusively of the earliest years of the pupil. These 
 lend themselves better to explicit treatment ; and 
 I myself, in dwelling 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 intel- 
 lectual curiosity, and the intelligence of abstract 
 terms. The object-teaching is mainly to launch 
 the pupils, with some concrete conceptions of the 
 facts concerned, upon the more abstract ideas. 
 
 To hear some authorities on teaching, however, 
 you would suppose that geography not only began, 
 but ended with the school-yard and neighboring 
 hill, that physics was one endless round of repeat- 
 ing the same sort of tedious weighing and meas- 
 uring operation: whereas a very few examples 
 are usually sufficient to set the imagination free 
 on genuine lines, and then what the mind craves 
 is more rapid, general, and abstract treatment. I 
 heard a lady say that she had taken her child to
 
 152 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 the kindergarten, "but he is so bright that he 
 saw through it immediately." Too many school 
 children ' see ' as immediately * through ' the 
 namby-pamby attempts of the softer pedagogy 
 to lubricate things for them, and make them in- 
 teresting. Even they can enjoy abstractions, pro- 
 vided they be of the proper order ; and it is a poor 
 compliment to their rational appetite to think that 
 anecdotes about little Tommies and little Jennies 
 are the only kind of things their minds can digest. 
 But here, as elsewhere, it is a matter of more 
 or less ; and, hi the last resort, the teacher's own 
 tact is the only thing that can bring out the right 
 effect. The great difficulty with abstractions is 
 that of knowing just what meaning the pupil at- 
 taches to the terms he uses. The words may 
 sound all right, but the meaning remains the 
 child's own secret. So varied forms of words 
 must be insisted on, to bring the secret out. And 
 a strange secret does it often prove. A relative 
 of mine was trying to explain to a little girl what 
 was meant by 'the passive voice': "Suppose 
 that you kill me : you who do the killing are in 
 the active voice, and I, who am killed, am in 
 the passive voice." " But how can you speak 
 if you're killed?" said the child. "Oh, well,
 
 AMBIGUITY OF VERBAL ABSTRACTIONS 153 
 
 you may suppose that I am not yet quite dead ! " 
 The next day the child was asked, in class, to ex- 
 plain the passive voice, and said, " It's the kind of 
 voice you speak with when you ain't quite dead." 
 In such a case as this the illustration ought to 
 have been more varied. Every one's memory will 
 probably furnish examples of the fantastic mean- 
 ing which their childhood attached to certain 
 verbal statements (in poetry often), and which 
 their elders, not having any reason to suspect, 
 never corrected. I remember being greatly moved 
 emotionally at the age of eight by the ballad of 
 Lord Ullin's Daughter. Yet I thought that the 
 staining of the heather by the blood was the evil 
 chiefly dreaded, and that, when the boatman said, 
 
 " I'll row you o'er the ferry. 
 It is not for your silver bright, 
 But for your winsome lady," 
 
 lie was to receive the lady for his pay. Similarly, 
 I recently found that one of my own children was 
 reading (and accepting) a verse of Tennyson's 
 In Memoriam as 
 
 " Ring out ihefood of rich and poor, 
 Ring in redness to all mankind," 
 
 and rinding no inward difficulty.
 
 154 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 The only safeguard against this sort of miscon- 
 ceiving is to insist on varied statement, and to 
 bring the child's conceptions, wherever it be pos- 
 sible, to some sort of practical test. 
 
 Let us next pass to the subject of Appercep- 
 tion.
 
 XIV. 
 APPERCEPTION 
 
 ' APPERCEPTION ' is a word which cuts a great 
 figure in the pedagogics of the present day. 
 Read, for example, this advertisement of a certain 
 text-book, which I take from an educational 
 journal : - 
 
 WHAT IS APPERCEPTION ? 
 
 For an explanation of Apperception see 
 
 Blank's PSYCHOLOGY, Vol. of the 
 
 Education Series, just published. 
 
 The difference between Perception and 
 Apperception is explained for the teacher in 
 the preface to Blank's PSYCHOLOGY. 
 
 Many teachers are inquiring, " What 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 PSY- 
 CHOLOGY. The idea of Apperception is 
 making a revolution in educational methods 
 in Germany. It is explained in Blank's 
 
 PSYCHOLOGY, Vol. of the 
 
 Education Series, just published. 
 
 Blank's PSYCHOLOGY will be mailed 
 prepaid to any address on receipt of $ 1.00.
 
 156 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 Such an advertisement is in sober earnest a 
 disgrace to all concerned ; and such talk as it 
 indulges-in is the sort of thing I had in view 
 when I said at our first meeting that the teachers 
 were suffering at the present day from a certain 
 industrious mystification on the part of editors 
 and publishers. Perhaps the word ' appercep- 
 tion' flourished in their eyes and ears as it 
 nowadays often is, embodies as much of this 
 mystification as any other single thing. The 
 conscientious young teacher is led to believe that 
 it contains a recondite and portentous secret, by 
 losing the true inwardness of which her whole 
 career may be shattered. And yet, when she 
 turns to the books and reads about it, it seems 
 so trivial and commonplace a matter, meaning 
 nothing more than the manner in which we re- 
 ceive a thing into our minds, that she fears she 
 must have missed the point through the shallow- 
 ness of her intelligence, and goes about thereafter 
 afflicted with a sense either of uncertainty or of 
 stupidity, and in each case remaining mortified at 
 being so inadequate to her mission. 
 
 Now apperception is an extremely useful word 
 in pedagogics, and offers a convenient name for a 
 process to which every teacher must frequently
 
 APPERCEPTION DEFINED 157 
 
 refer. But it verily means nothing more than the 
 act of taking a thing into the mind. It corre- 
 sponds to nothing peculiar or elementary in psy- 
 chology, being only one of the innumerable re- 
 sults of the psychological process of association of 
 ideas; and psychology itself can easily dispense 
 with the word, useful as it may be in pedagogics. 
 
 The gist of the matter is this : Every impression 
 that comes in from without, be it a sentence which 
 we hear, an object of vision, or an effluvium which 
 assails our nose, no sooner enters our conscious- 
 ness than it is drafted off hi some determinate direc- 
 tion or other, making connection with the other 
 materials already there, and finally producing what 
 we call our reaction. The particular connections 
 it strikes into are determined by our past experi- 
 ences and the ' associations ' of the present sort 
 of impression with them. If, for instance, you 
 hear me call out A, B, C, it is ten to one that you 
 will react on the impression by inwardly or out- 
 wardly articulating D, E, F. The impression 
 arouses its old associates ; they go out to meet it ; 
 it is received by them, recognized by the mind as 
 4 the beginning of the alphabet.' It is the fate of 
 every impression thus to fall into a mind pre-
 
 158 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 occupied with memories, ideas, and interests, and 
 by these it is taken in. Educated as we already 
 are, we never get an experience that remains for 
 us completely nondescript: it always reminds of 
 something similar in quality, or of some context 
 that might have surrounded it before, and which 
 it now hi 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 hi some definite way. We dispose 
 of it according to our acquired possibilities, be 
 they few or many, hi the way of 'ideas.' This 
 way of taking in the object is the process of ap- 
 perception. The conceptions which meet and 
 assimilate it are called by Herbert the * apperceiv- 
 ing mass.' The apperceived impression is en- 
 gulfed hi 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, hi which it is often impossible to
 
 THE LAW OF LEAST DISTURBANCE 159 
 
 distinguish the share of the two factors. For 
 example, when we listen to a person speaking or 
 read a page of print, much of what we think we 
 see or hear is supplied from our memory. We 
 overlook misprints, imagining the right letters, 
 though we see the wrong ones ; and how little we 
 actually hear, when we listen to speech, we realize 
 when we go to a foreign theatre ; for there what 
 troubles us is not so much that we cannot under- 
 stand what the actors say as that we cannot hear 
 their words. The fact is that we hear quite as 
 little under similar conditions at home, only our 
 mind, being fuller of English verbal associations, 
 supplies the requisite material for comprehension 
 upon a much slighter auditory hint. 
 
 In all the apperceptive operations of the mind, 
 a certain general law makes itself felt, the law 
 of economy. In admitting a new body of expe- 
 rience, we instinctively seek to disturb as little 
 as possible our pre-existing stock of ideas. We 
 always try to name a new experience hi some 
 way which will assimilate it to what we already 
 know. We hate anything absolutely new, any- 
 thing without any name, and for which a new 
 name must be forged. So we take the nearest 
 name, even though it be inappropriate. A child
 
 160 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 will call snow, when he sees it for the first time, 
 sugar or white butterflies. The sail of a boat he 
 calls a curtain ; an egg hi its shell, seen for the 
 first time, he calls a pretty potato ; an orange, a 
 ball; a folding corkscrew, a pair of bad scissors. 
 Caspar Hauser called the first geese he saw 
 horses, and the Polynesians called Captain Cook's 
 horses pigs. Mr. Hooper has written a little book 
 on apperception, to which he gives the title of 
 " A Pot of Green Feathers," that being the name 
 applied to a pot of ferns by a child who had never 
 seen ferns before. 
 
 In later life this economical tendency to leave 
 the old undisturbed leads to what we know as 
 'old fogyism.' A new idea or a fact which 
 would entail extensive rearrangement of the pre- 
 vious system of beliefs is always ignored or ex- 
 truded from the mind in case it cannot be sophis- 
 tically reinterpreted so as to tally harmoniously 
 with the system. We have all conducted discus- 
 sions with middle-aged people, overpowered them 
 with our reasons, forced them to admit our con- 
 tention, and a week later found them back as 
 secure and constant in their old opinion as if they 
 had never conversed with us at all. We call UK-MI 
 old fogies ; but there are young fogies, too. Old
 
 NUMBERLESS TYPES OF APPERCEPTION 161 
 
 fogyism begins at a younger age than we think. 
 I am almost afraid to say so, but I believe that 
 in the majority of human beings it begins at 
 about twenty-five. 
 
 In some of the books we find the various forms 
 of apperception codified, and their subdivisions 
 numbered and ticketed in tabular form in the way 
 so delightful to the pedagogic eye. In one book 
 which I remember reading there were sixteen dif- 
 ferent types of apperception discriminated from 
 each other. There was associative apperception, 
 subsumptive apperception, assimilative appercep- 
 tion, and others up to sixteen. It is needless to 
 say that this is nothing but an exhibition of the 
 crass artificiality which has always haunted psy- 
 chology, and which perpetuates itself by lingering 
 along, especially in these works which are adver- 
 tised as 'written for the use of teachers.' The 
 flowing life of the mind is sorted into parcels 
 suitable for presentation in the recitation-room, 
 and chopped up into supposed 'processes' with 
 long Greek and Latin names, which in real life 
 have no distinct existence. 
 
 There is no reason, if we are classing the dif- 
 ferent types of apperception, why we should stop 
 at sixteen rather than sixteen hundred. There
 
 162 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 are as many types of apperception as there are pos- 
 sible ways in which an incoming experience may 
 be reacted on by an individual mind. A little 
 while ago, at Buffalo, I was the guest of a lady 
 who, a fortnight before, had taken her seven-year- 
 old boy for the first time to Niagara Falls. The 
 child silently glared at the phenomenon until his 
 mother, supposing him struck speechless by its 
 sublimity, said, "Well, my boy, what do you 
 think of it?" to which, "Is that the kind of 
 spray I spray my nose with ? " was the boy's only 
 reply. That was his mode of apperceiving the 
 spectacle. You may claim this as a particular 
 type, and call it by the Greek name of rhinothera- 
 peutical apperception, if you like ; and, if you do, 
 you will hardly be more trivial or artificial than 
 are some of the authors of the books. 
 
 M. Perez, in one of his books on childhood, gives 
 a good example of the different modes of apper- 
 ception of the same phenomenon which are pos- 
 sible at different stages of individual experience. 
 A dwelling-house took fire, and an infant in the 
 family, witnessing the conflagration from the 
 arms of his nurse, standing outside, expressed 
 nothing but the liveliest delight at its brilliancy. 
 But, when the bell of the fire-engine was heard
 
 TOO FEW HEADS OF CLASSIFICATION 163 
 
 approaching, the child was thrown by the sound 
 into a paroxysm of fear, strange sounds being, as 
 you know, very alarming to young children. In 
 what opposite ways must the child's parents have 
 apperceived the burning house and the engine re- 
 spectively! 
 
 The self-same person, according to the line of 
 thought he may be in, or to his emotional mood, 
 will apperceive the same impression quite dif- 
 ferently on different occasions. A medical or en- 
 gineering expert retained on one side of a case 
 will not apperceive the 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 gen- 
 eral thing, the fact of such a dispute is enough 
 to show that neither one of their rival interpreta- 
 tions is a perfect fit. Both sides deal with the 
 matter by approximation, squeezing it under the 
 handiest or least disturbing conception: whereas 
 it would, nine times out of ten, be better to en- 
 large their stock of ideas or invent some altogether 
 new title for the phenomenon. 
 
 Thus, in biology, we used to have interminable 
 discussion as to whether certain single-celled or-
 
 164 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 ganisms were animals or vegetables, until Haeckel 
 introduced the new apperceptive name of Protista, 
 which ended the disputes. In law courts no 
 tertium quid is recognized between insanity and 
 sanity. . If sane, a man is punished: if insane, 
 acquitted; and it is seldom hard to find two 
 experts who will take opposite views of his 
 case. All the while, nature is more subtle than 
 our doctors. Just as a room is neither dark nor 
 light absolutely, but might be dark for a watch- 
 maker's uses, and yet light enough to eat in or 
 play in, so a man may be sane for some purposes 
 and insane for others, sane enough to be left at 
 large, yet not sane enough to take care of his 
 financial affairs. The word * crank,' which be- 
 came familiar at the time of Guiteau's trial, ful- 
 filled the need of a tertium quid. The foreign 
 terms * de'se'quilibre,' 'hereditary degenerate,' and 
 ' psychopathic ' subject, have arisen in response 
 to the same need. 
 
 The whole progress of our sciences goes on by 
 the invention of newly forged technical names 
 whereby to designate the newly remarked aspects 
 of phenomena, phenomena which could only be 
 squeezed with violence into the pigeonholes of 
 the earlier stock of conceptions. As time goes
 
 THE APPERCEIVING IDEA 165 
 
 on, our vocabulary becomes thus ever more and 
 more voluminous, having to keep up with the 
 ever-growing multitude of our stock of apperceiv- 
 ing ideas. 
 
 In this gradual process of interaction between 
 the new and the old, not only is the new modified 
 and determined by the particular sort of old 
 which apperceives it, but the apperceiving mass, 
 the old itself, is modified by the particular kind 
 of new which it assimilates. Thus, to take the 
 stock German example of the child brought up in 
 a house where there are no tables but square ones, 
 'table' means for him a thing in which square 
 corners are essential. But, if he goes to a house 
 where there are round tables and still calls them 
 tables, his apperceiving notion * table ' acquires 
 immediately a wider inward content. In this 
 way, our conceptions are constantly dropping 
 characters once supposed essential, and including 
 others once supposed inadmissible. The exten- 
 sion of the notion beast ' to porpoises and whales, 
 of the notion ' organism ' to society, are familiar 
 examples of what I mean. 
 
 But be our conceptions adequate or inadequate, 
 and be our stock of them large or small, they are 
 all we have to work with. If an educated man is,
 
 166 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 as I said, a group of organized tendencies to con- 
 duct, what prompts the conduct is in every case 
 the man's conception of the way in which to name 
 and classify the actual emergency. The more 
 adequate the stock of ideas, the more 'able' is the 
 man, the more uniformly appropriate is his be- 
 havior likely to be. When later we take up the 
 subject of the will, we shall see that the essential 
 preliminary to every decision is the finding of the 
 right names under which to class the proposed 
 alternatives of conduct. He who has few names 
 is in so far forth an incompetent deliberator. The 
 names and each name stands for a conception 
 or idea are our instruments for handling our 
 problems and solving our dilemmas. Now, when 
 we think of this, we are too apt to forget an im- 
 portant fact, which is that in most human beings 
 the stock of names and concepts is mostly ac- 
 quired during the years of adolescence and the 
 earliest years of adult life. I probably shocked 
 you a moment ago by saying that most men begin 
 to be old fogies at the age of twenty-five. It is 
 true that a grown-up adult keeps gaining well 
 into middle age a great knowledge of details, and 
 a great acquaintance with individual cases con- 
 nected with his profession or business life. In
 
 OLD FOGYISM SETS IN EARLY 167 
 
 this sense, his conceptions increase during a very 
 long period ; for his knowledge grows more exten- 
 sive and minute. But the larger categories of 
 conception, the sorts of thing, and wider classes 
 of relation between things, of which we take cog- 
 nizance, are all got into the mind at a compara- 
 tively youthful date. Few men ever do acquaint 
 themselves with the principles of a new science 
 after even twenty-five. If you do not study politi- 
 cal economy in college, it is a thousand to one 
 that its main conceptions will remain unknown 
 to you through life. Similarly with biology, 
 similarly with electricity. What percentage of 
 persons now fifty years old have any definite 
 conception whatever of a dynamo, or how the 
 trolley-cars are made to run? Surely, a small 
 fraction of one per cent. But the boys in colleges 
 are all acquiring these conceptions. 
 
 There is a sense of infinite potentiality in us all, 
 when young, which makes some of us draw up 
 lists of books we intend to read hereafter, and 
 makes most of us think that we can easily ac- 
 quaint ourselves with all sorts of tilings which 
 we are now neglecting by studying them out 
 hereafter in the intervals of leisure of our business 
 lives. Such good intentions are hardly ever car-
 
 168 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 ried out. The conceptions acquired before thirty 
 remain usually the only ones we ever gain. Such 
 exceptional cases of perpetually self-renovating 
 youth as Mr. Gladstone's only prove, by the 
 admiration they awaken, the universality of the 
 rule. And it may well solemnize a teacher, and 
 confirm in him a healthy sense of the importance 
 of his mission, to feel how exclusively dependent 
 upon his present ministrations in the way of im- 
 parting conceptions the pupil's future life is prob- 
 ably bound to be.
 
 XV. 
 
 THE WILL 
 
 SINCE mentality terminates naturally in out- 
 ward conduct, the final chapter in psychology has 
 to be the chapter on the will. But the word 
 ' will ' can be used in a broader and in a narrower 
 sense. In the broader sense, it designates our 
 entire capacity for impulsive and active life, 
 including our instinctive reactions and those 
 forms of behavior that have become secondarily 
 automatic and semi-unconscious through frequent 
 repetition. In the narrower sense, acts of will are 
 such acts only as cannot be inattentively per- 
 formed. A distinct idea of what they are, and 
 a deliberate fiat on the mind's part, must precede 
 their execution7~~ 
 
 Such acts are often characterized by hesitation, 
 and accompanied by a feeling, altogether peculiar, 
 of resolve, a feeling which may or may not carry 
 with it a further feeling of effort. In my earlier 
 talks, I said so much of our impulsive tendencies 
 that I will restrict myself in what follows to voli- 
 tion hi this narrower sense of the term.
 
 170 
 
 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 ^ 
 
 VJC>Ci.*Trv 
 
 *M,tv 
 '** . "_/ 
 
 H.lio^- r< 
 
 
 
 All our deeds were considered by the early 
 psychologists to be due to a peculiar faculty called 
 the will, without whose fiat action could not 
 occur. Thoughts and impressions, being intrinsi- 
 cally inactive, were supposed to produce conduct 
 only through the intermediation of this superior 
 agent. Until they twitched its coat-tails, so to 
 speak, no outward behavior could occur. This 
 doctrine was long ago exploded by the discovery 
 
 of the phenomena of reflex action, in which sen- 
 
 ^ 
 
 sible impressions, as you know, produce movement 
 immediately and of themselves. The doctrine 
 may also be considered exploded as far as ideas 
 
 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 
 always be an outward stroke of behavior. It 
 
 may be only an alteration of the heart-beats or 
 breathing, or a modification in the distribution of 
 blood, such as blushing or turning pale ; or else a 
 secretion of tears, or what not. But, in any case, 
 it is there in some shape when any consciousness 
 is there ; and a belief as fundamental as any 
 in modern psychology is the belief at last attained
 
 IDEOMOTOE ACTION 171 
 
 that conscious processes of any sort, conscious 
 processes merely as such, must pass over into 
 motion, open or concealed. 
 
 The least complicated case of this tendency is 
 the case of a mind possessed by only a single idea. 
 If that idea be of an object connected with a 
 native impulse, the impulse will immediately pro- 
 ceed to discharge. If it be the idea of a move- 
 ment, the movement will occur. Such a case 
 of action from a single idea has been distinguished, . 
 
 from more complex cases by the name of ideo- 
 r J 
 
 motor* action, meaning action without express 
 decision or effort. Most of the habitual actions 
 to which we are trained are of this ideo-motor ~D ?j* 
 sort. We perceive, for instance, that the door is 
 open, and we rise and shut it; we perceive some 
 raisins in a dish before us, and extend our hand 
 and carry one of them to our mouth without in- 
 terrupting the conversation; or, when lying in 
 bed, we suddenly think that we shall be late for 
 breakfast, and instantly we get up with no par- 
 ticular exertion or resolve. All the ingrained 
 procedures by which life is carried on the man- 
 ners and customs, dressing and undressing, acts 
 of salutation, etc. are executed in this semi-auto- 
 matic way unhesitatingly and efficiently, the very
 
 172 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 outermost margin of consciousness seeming to be 
 concerned in them, while the focus may be occu- 
 pied with widely different things. 
 
 But now turn to a more complicated case. 
 Suppose two thoughts to be hi the mind together, 
 of which one, A, taken alone, would discharge 
 itself hi 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 slirink. 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 physi- 
 ology was the discovery, made simultaneously hi 
 France and Germany fifty years ago, that nerve 
 currents do not only start muscles into action, but 
 may check action already going on or keep it from 
 occurring as it otherwise might. Nerves of arrest 
 were thus distinguished alongside of motor nerves. 
 The pneumogastric nerve, for example, if stimu- 
 lated, arrests the movements of the heart: the 
 splanchnic nerve arrests those of the intestines, if 
 already begun. But it soon appeared that this
 
 THE FUNCTION OF INHIBITION 173 
 
 was too narrow a way of looking at the matter, 
 and that arrest is not so much the specific function 
 of certain nerves as a general function which any 
 part of the nervous system may exert upon 
 parts under the appropriate conditions. The 
 higher centres, for example, seem to exert a con- 
 stant inhibitive influence on the excitability of 
 those below. The reflexes of an animal with its 
 hemispheres wholly or hi part removed become 
 exaggerated. You all know that common reflex 
 in dogs, whereby, if you scratch the animal's side, 
 the corresponding hind leg will begin to make 
 scratching movements, usually in the air. Now 
 in dogs with mutilated hemispheres this scratch- 
 ing reflex is so incessant that, as Goltz first de- 
 scribed them, the hair gets all worn off their 
 sides. In idiots, the functions of the hemispheres 
 being largely in abeyance, the lower impulses, 
 not inhibited, as they would be in normal 
 beings, often express themselves in most odious 
 ways. You know also how any higher emotional 
 tendency will quench a lower one. Fear arrests 
 appetite, maternal love annuls fear, respect checks 
 sensuality, and the like ; and in the more subtile 
 manifestations of the moral life, whenever an 
 ideal stirring is suddenly quickened into inten-
 
 174 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 sity, it is as if the whole scale of values of our 
 motives changed its equilibrium. The force of 
 old temptations vanishes, and what a moment 
 ago was impossible is now not only possible, but 
 easy, because of their inhibition. This has been 
 well called the * expulsive power of the higher 
 emotion.* 
 
 It is 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 oscillat- 
 ing before me in a kind of deadlock, which is 
 what we call the state of hesitation or delibera- 
 tion. In a case like this the deliberation can be 
 resolved and the decision reached in either of two 
 ways : 
 
 (1) I may forget for a moment the thermomet- 
 ric conditions, and then the idea of getting up 
 will immediately discharge into act: I shall sud- 
 denly find that I have got up or 
 
 (2) Still mindful of the freezing temperature,
 
 ANY IDEA MAY BE INHIBITORY 175 
 
 the thought of the duty of rising may become so 
 pungent that it determines action in spite of in- 
 hibition. In the latter case, I have a sense of 
 energetic moral effort, and consider that I have 
 done a virtuous act. 
 
 All cases of wilful action properly so called, of 
 choice after hesitation and deliberation, may be 
 conceived after one of these latter patterns. So 
 you see that volition, in the narrower sense, takes 
 place only when there are a number of conflicting 
 systems of ideas, and depends on our having a 
 complex field of consciousness. The interesting 
 thing to note is the extreme delicacy of the inhibi- 
 tive machinery, A strong and urgent motor idea K "~~~ 
 in the focus may be neutralized and made inopera-^ 
 tive by the presence of the very faintest contradic-*~T - 
 tory idea in the margin. For instance, I hold oufr*-^ 
 my forefinger, and with closed eyes try to realize ^k^ *- 
 as vividly as possible that I hold a revolver hi my 
 hand and am pulling the trigger. I can even now 
 fairly feel my finger quivering with the tendency 
 to contract ; and, if it were hitched to a recording 
 apparatus, it would certainly betray its state of 
 tension by registering incipient movements. Yet 
 it does not actually crook, and the movement of 
 pulling the trigger is not performed. Why not?
 
 176 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 Simply because, all concentrated though I am 
 upon the idea of the movement, I nevertheless 
 also realize the total conditions of the experiment, 
 and in the back of my mind, so to speak, or in its 
 fringe and margin, have the simultaneous idea 
 that the movement is not to take place. The 
 mere presence of that marginal intention, without 
 effort, urgency, or emphasis, or any special rein- 
 forcement from my attention, suffices to the in- 
 hibitive effect 
 
 And this is why so few of the ideas that flit 
 through our minds do, in point of fact, produce 
 their motor consequences. Life would be a curse 
 and a care for us if every fleeting fancy were to 
 do so. Abstractly, the law of ideo-motor action 
 is true ; but in the concrete our fields of con- 
 sciousness are always so complex that the inhibit- 
 ing margin keeps the centre inoperative most of 
 the time. In all this, you see, I speak as if ideas 
 by their mere presence or absence determined be- 
 havior, and as if between the ideas themselves on 
 the one hand and the conduct on the other there 
 were no room for any third intermediate principle 
 of activity, like that called * the will.'
 
 MAN'S CONDUCT AS A RESULTANT 177 
 
 If you are struck by the materialistic or fatal- 
 istic doctrines which seem to follow this concep- 
 tion, I beg you to suspend your judgment for a 
 moment, as I shall soon have something more to 
 say about the matter. But, meanwhile yielding 
 one's self to the mechanical conception of the 
 psychophysical organism, nothing is easier than 
 to indulge in a picture of the fatalistic character 
 of human life. Man's conduct appears as 
 mere resultant of all his various impulsions and ' 
 inhibitions. One object, by its presence, makes 
 us act: another object checks our action. Feel- 
 ings aroused and ideas suggested by objects sway 
 us one way and another: emotions complicate 
 the game by their mutual inhibitive effects, the 
 higher abolishing the lower or perhaps being it- 
 self swept away. The life hi all this becomes pru- 
 dential and moral; but the psychologic agents in 
 the drama may be described, you see, as nothing 
 but the 'ideas' themselves, ideas for the whole 
 system of which what we call the ' soul ' or * char- 
 acter ' or will ' of the person is nothing but a 
 collective name. As Hume said, the ideas are 
 themselves the actors, the stage, the theatre, the 
 spectators, and the play. This is the so-called as- 
 sociationist' psychology, brought down to its rad-
 
 178 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 ical expression: it is useless to ignore its power 
 as a conception. Like all conceptions, when they 
 become clear and lively enough, this conception 
 has a strong tendency to impose itself upon be- 
 lief; and psychologists trained on biological lines 
 usually adopt it as the last word of science on the 
 subject. No one can have an adequate notion of 
 modern psychological theory unless he has at 
 some time apprehended this view in the full force 
 of its simplicity. 
 
 Let us humor it for a while, for it has advan- 
 tages in the way of exposition. 
 
 Voluntary action, then, is at all times a resultant 
 of the compounding of our impulsions with our inhi- 
 bitions. 
 
 From this it immediately follows that there will 
 be two types of will, in one of which impulsions 
 will predominate, in the other inhibitions. We 
 , may speak of them, if you like, as the precipitate 
 
 ^vxU* 
 
 ^vxU*i6 and the obstructed will, respectively. When fully 
 pronounced, they are familiar to everybody. The 
 extreme example of the precipitate will is the 
 
 maniac : his ideas discharge into action so rap- 
 
 ... , . 
 
 idly, his associative processes are so extravagantly 
 
 lively, that inhibitions have no time to arrive, and
 
 THE TWO EXTKEME TYPES OF WILL 179 
 
 he says and does whatever pops into his head 
 without a moment of hesitation. 
 
 Certain melancholiacs furnish the extreme ex-< u 
 ample of the over-inhibited type. Their minds ^ u/ *-* t 
 are cramped in a fixed emotion of fear or helpless- 
 ness, their ideas confined to the one thought that 
 for them life is impossible. So they show a con- 
 dition of perfect ' abulia,' or inability to will or 
 act. They cannot change their posture or speech 
 or execute the simplest command. 
 
 The different races of men show different tem- 
 peraments in this regard. The Southern races'" "**""* 
 are commonly accounted the more impulsive and 
 precipitate : the English race, especially our New^ 
 England branch of it, is supposed to be all sicklied 
 over with repressive forms of self-consciousness, 
 and condemned to express itself through a jungle 
 of scruples and checks. 
 
 The highest form of character, however, ab- 
 stractly considered, must be full of scruples and 
 inhibitions. But action, in such a character, far 
 from being paralyzed, will succeed in energet- 
 ically keeping on its way, sometimes overpowering 
 the resistances, sometimes steering along the line 
 where they lie thinnest. 
 
 Just as our extensor muscles act most truly when
 
 180 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 a simultaneous contraction of the flexors guides 
 and steadies them ; so the mind of him whose fields 
 of consciousness are complex, and who, with the 
 ^ * reasons for the action, sees the reasons against it, 
 and yet, instead of being palsied, acts in the way 
 
 <i- .< 
 
 that takes the whole field into consideration, 
 so, I say, is such a mind the ideal sort of mind 
 That we should seek to reproduce in our pupils. 
 Purely impulsive action, or action that proceeds 
 to extremities regardless of consequences, on the 
 other hand, is the easiest action in the world, and 
 the lowest in type. Any one can show energy, 
 when made quite reckless. An Oriental despot 
 requires but little ability: as long as he lives, he 
 succeeds, for he has absolutely his own way ; and, 
 when the world can no longer endure the horror 
 of him, he is assassinated. But not to proceed 
 immediately to extremities, to be still able to act 
 energetically under an array of inhibitions, that 
 indeed is rare and difficult. Cavour, when urged 
 to proclaim martial law in 1859, refused to do so, 
 saying : " Any one can govern in that way. I will 
 be constitutional." Your parliamentary rulers, 
 your Lincoln, your Gladstone, are the strongest 
 type of man, because they accomplish results 
 under the most intricate possible conditions. We
 
 THE BALKY WILL 181 
 
 think of Napoleon Bonaparte as a colossal monster 
 of will-power, and truly enough he was so. But, 
 from the point of view of the psychological ma- 
 chinery, it would be hard to say whether he or 
 Gladstone was the larger volitional quantity ; for 
 Napoleon disregarded all the usual inhibitions, 
 and Gladstone, passionate as he was, scrupulously 
 considered them in his statesmanship. 
 
 A familiar example of the paralyzing power of 
 scruples is the inhibitive effect of conscientious- 
 ness upon conversation. Nowhere does conversa- 
 tion seem to have flourished as brilliantly as in 
 France during the last century. But, if we read^ 
 old French memoirs, we see how many brakes 
 of scrupulosity which tie our tongues to-day were 
 then removed. Where mendacity, treachery, ob- 
 scenity, and malignity find unhampered expression, 
 talk can be brilliant indeed. But its flame waxes 
 dim where the mind is stitched all over with con- 
 scientious fear of violating the moral and social 
 proprieties. 
 
 The teacher often is confronted in the school- 
 room with an abnormal type of will, which we 
 may call the ' balky will.' Certain children, if they 
 do not succeed hi doing a thing immediately,
 
 182 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 remain completely inhibited in regard to it : it 
 becomes literally impossible for them to under- 
 stand it if it be an Intellectual problem, or to do it 
 if it be an outward operation, as long as this par- 
 ticular inhibited condition lasts. Such children 
 are usually treated as sinful, and are punished ; or 
 else the teacher pits his or her -will against the 
 child's will, considering that the latter must be 
 ' broken.' " Break your child's will, in order that 
 it may not perish," wrote John "Wesley. " Break 
 its will as soon as it can speak plainly or even 
 before it can speak at all. It should be forced to 
 do as it is told, even if you have to whip it ten 
 times running. Break its will, in order that its 
 soul may live." Such will-breaking is always a 
 scene with a great deal of nervous wear and tear 
 on both sides, a bad state of feeling left behind it, 
 and the victory not always with the would-be 
 will-breaker. 
 
 When a situation of the kind is once fairly de- 
 veloped, 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 hi the child's mind, he will
 
 THE TEACHERS' IDEAL 183 
 
 continue unable to get beyond the obstacle. The 
 aim of the teacher should then be to make him 
 simply forget. Drop the subject for the time, 
 divert the mind to something else : then, leading 
 the pupil back by some circuitous line of associa- 
 tion, spring it on him again before he has time to 
 recognize it, and as likely as not he will go over 
 it now without any difficulty. It is in no other 
 way that we overcome balkiness in a horse: we 
 divert his attention, do something to his nose or 
 ear, lead him round in a circle, and thus get him 
 over a place where flogging would only have 
 made him more invincible. A tactful teacher will 
 never let these strained situations come up at all. 
 
 You perceive now, my friends, what your gen- 
 eral or abstract duty is as. teachers. Although 
 you have to generate in your pupils a large stoc 
 of ideas, any one of which may be inhibitory, yet . 
 you must also see to it that no habitual hesitancy /^ 
 or paralysis of the will ensues, and that the pupil 
 still retains his power of vigorous action. Psy- 
 
 -rfct-C*"- 
 
 chology can state your problem in these terms, 
 but you see how impotent she is to furnish the 
 elements of its practical solution. When all is 
 said and done, and your best efforts are made, it
 
 184 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 will probably remain true that the result will 
 depend more on a certain native tone or temper 
 hi the pupil's psychological constitution than on 
 anything else. Some persons appear to have a 
 naturally poor focalization of the field of con- 
 sciousness; and in such persons actions hang 
 slack, and inhibitions seem to exert peculiarly 
 easy sway. 
 
 But let us now close in a little more closely on 
 this matter of the education of the will. Your 
 task is to build up a character in your pupils ; and 
 a character, as I have so often said, consists hi an^ 
 organized set of habits of reaction. Now of what 
 do such ~~habits of reaction themselves consist? 
 They consist of tendencies to act characteris- 
 tically when certain ideas possess us, and to 
 refrain characteristically when possessed by other 
 ideas. 
 
 Our volitional habits depend, then, first, on 
 what the stock of ideas is which we have ; and, 
 second, on the habitual coupling of the several 
 ideas with action or inaction respectively. How 
 is it when an alternative is presented to you for 
 choice, and you are uncertain what you ought to 
 do? You first hesitate, and then you deliberate. 
 And in what does your deliberation consist? It
 
 CHAEACTER-BUILDING 185 
 
 consists in trying to apperceive the case succes- 
 sively by a number of different ideas, which seem 
 to fit it more or less, until at last you hit on one 
 which seems to fit it exactly. If that be an idea 
 which is a customary forerunner of action in you, 
 which enters into one of your maxims of positive 
 behavior, your hesitation ceases, and you act im- 
 mediately. If, on the other hand, it be an idea 
 which carries inaction as its habitual result, if it 
 ally itself with prohibition, then you unhesitat- 
 ingly refrain. The problem is, you see, to find 
 the right idea or conception for the case. This 
 search for the right conception may take days or 
 weeks. 
 
 I spoke as if the action were easy when the 
 conception once is found. Often it is so, but it 
 may be otherwise ; and, when it is otherwise, we 
 find ourselves at the very centre of a moral sit- 
 uation, into which I should now like you to look 
 with me a little nearer. 
 
 The proper conception, the true head of clas- 
 sification, may be hard to attain ; or it may be one 
 with which we have contracted no settled habits 
 of action. Or, again, the action to which it would 
 prompt may be dangerous and difficult; or else 
 inaction may appear deadly cold and negative
 
 186 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 when our impulsive feeling is hot In either of 
 these latter cases it is hard to hold the right idea 
 steadily enough before the attention to let it exert 
 its adequate effects. Whether it be stimulative 
 or inhibitive, it is too reasonable for us ; and the 
 more instinctive passional propensity then tends 
 to extrude it from our consideration. We shy 
 away from the thought of it. It twinkles and 
 goes out the moment it appears in the margin of 
 our consciousness ; and we need a resolute effort 
 of voluntary attention to drag it into the focus 
 of the field, and to keep it there long enough for 
 its associative and motor effects to be exerted. 
 Every one knows only too well how the mind 
 flinches from looking at considerations hostile to 
 the reigning mood of feeling. 
 
 Once brought, however, in this way to the cen- 
 tre of the field of consciousness, and held there, 
 the reasonable idea will exert these effects inevi- 
 tably; for the laws of connection between our 
 consciousness and our nervous system provide for 
 the action then taking place. Our moral effort, 
 properly so called, terminates in our holding fast 
 to the appropriate idea. 
 
 If, then, you are asked, " In what does a moral 
 act consist when reduced to its simplest and most
 
 TO THINK IS THE MORAL ACT 187 
 
 elementary form ? " you can make only one reply. 
 You can say that it consists in the effort of atten\ 
 tion by which we hold fast to an idea which but for { 
 that effort of attention would be driven out of the 
 mind by the other psychological tendencies that 
 are there. To think, in short, is the secret of will, 
 just as it is the secret of memory. 
 
 This comes out very clearly in the kind of 
 excuse which we most frequently hear from per- 
 sons who find themselves confronted by the sin- 
 fulness or harmfulness of some part of their 
 behavior. " I never thought" they say. " I never 
 thought how mean the action was, I never thought 
 of these abominable consequences." And what 
 do we retort when they say this ? We say : " Why 
 didn't you think ? What were you there for but 
 to think ? " And we read them a moral lecture 
 on their irreflectiveness. 
 
 The hackneyed example of moral deliberation 
 is the case of an habitual drunkard under tempta- 
 tion. He has made a resolve to reform, but he is 
 now solicited again by the bottle. His moral tri- 
 umph or failure literally consists in his finding 
 the right name for the case. If he says that it is 
 a case of not wasting good liquor already poured 
 out, or a case of not being churlish and unsociable
 
 188 
 
 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 
 when in the midst of friends, or a case of learning 
 something at last about a brand of whiskey which 
 he never met before, or a case of celebrating a 
 public holiday, or a case of stimulating himself 
 to a more energetic resolve in favor of abstinence 
 than any he has ever yet made, then he is lost. 
 His choice of the wrong name seals his doom. 
 But if, in spite of all the plausible good names 
 with which his thirsty fancy so copiously furnishes 
 him, he unwaveringly clings to the truer bad 
 name, and apperceives the case as that of " being 
 a drunkard, being a drunkard, being a drunkard," 
 his feet are planted on the road to salvation. He 
 saves himself by thinking rightly. 
 
 Thus are your pupils to be saved : first, by the 
 stock of ideas with which you furnish them ; sec- 
 ond, by the amount of voluntary attention that 
 they can exert in holding to the right ones, how- 
 ever unpalatable ; and, third, by the several habits 
 of acting definitely on these latter to which they 
 have been successfully trained. 
 
 In all this the power of voluntarily attending 
 is the point of the whole procedure. Just as a 
 balance turns on its knife-edges, so on it our moral 
 destiny turns. You remember that, when we were 
 talking of the subject of attention, we discovered
 
 WILL IS ATTENTION TO AN IDEAL 189 
 
 how much more intermittent and brief our acts 
 of voluntary attention are than is commonly sup- 
 posed. If they were all summed together, the time 
 that they occupy would cover an almost incredibly 
 small portion of our lives. But I also said, you 
 will remember, that their brevity was not hi pro- 
 portion to their significance, and that I should re- 
 turn to the subject again. So I return to it now. 
 It is not the mere size of a thing which constitutes 
 its importance : it is its position in the organism 
 to which it belongs. Our acts of voluntary atten- _*-; 
 tion, brief and fitful as they are, are nevertheless"^*/ *" 
 momentous and critical, determining us, as they^/f 
 do, to higher or lower destinies. The exercise of ^ 
 voluntary attention in the schoolroom must there- 
 fore be counted one of the most important points 
 of training that take place there ; and the first- 
 rate teacher, by the keenness of the remoter in- 
 terests which he is able to awaken, will provide 
 abundant opportunities for its occurrence. I hope 
 that you appreciate this now without any further 
 explanation. 
 
 I have been accused of holding up before you, 
 in the course of these talks, a mechanical and 
 even a materialistic view of the mind. I have
 
 190 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 called it an organism and a machine. I have 
 spoken of its reaction on the environment as the 
 essential thing about it ; and I have referred this, 
 either openly or implicitly, to the construction of 
 the nervous system. I have, in consequence, re- 
 ceived notes from some of you, begging me to be 
 more explicit on this point ; and to let you know 
 frankly whether I am a complete materialist, 
 or not. 
 
 Now in these lectures I wish to be strictly prac- 
 tical and useful, and to keep free from all specu- 
 lative complications. Nevertheless, I do not wish 
 to leave any ambiguity about my own position ; 
 and I will therefore say, in order to avoid all mis- 
 understanding, that in no sense do I count myself 
 a materialist. I cannot see how such a thing as 
 our consciousness can possibly be produced by a 
 nervous machinery, though I can perfectly well 
 see how, if 'ideas' do accompany the workings 
 of the machinery, the order of the ideas might 
 very well follow exactly the order of the ma- 
 chine's operations. Our habitual associations of 
 ideas, trains of thought, and sequences of action, 
 might thus be consequences of the succession of 
 currents in our nervous systems. And the pos- 
 sible stock of ideas which a man's free spirit would
 
 THE 'FREEDOM' OF THE WILL 191 
 
 have to choose from might depend exclusively on 
 the native and acquired powers of his brain. If 
 this were all, we might indeed adopt the fatalist 
 conception which I sketched for you but a short 
 while ago. Our ideas would be determined by 
 brain currents, and these by purely mechanical 
 laws. 
 
 But, after what we have just seen, namely, the 
 part played by voluntary attention in volition, 
 a belief in free will and purely spiritual causation 
 is still open to us. The duration and amount of 
 this attention seem within certain limits indeter- 
 minate. We feel as if we could make it really 
 more or less, and as if our free action in this re- 
 gard were a genuine critical point in nature, 
 a point on which our destiny and that of others 
 might hinge. The whole question of free will 
 concentrates itself, then, at this same small point : 
 " Is or is not the appearance of indetermination 
 at this point an illusion ? " 
 
 It is plain that such a question can be decided 
 only by general analogies, and not by accurate 
 observations. The free-willist believes the appear- 
 ance to be a reality : the determinist believes that 
 it is an illusion. I myself hold with the free-will- 
 ists, not because I cannot conceive the fatalist
 
 192 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 theory clearly, or because I fail to understand its 
 plausibility, but simply because, if free will were 
 true, it would be absurd to have the belief in it 
 fatally forced on our acceptance. Considering the 
 inner fitness of things, one would rather think 
 that the very first act of a will endowed with 
 freedom should be to sustain the belief in the 
 freedom itself. I accordingly believe freely in my 
 freedom ; I do so with the best of scientific con- 
 sciences, knowing that the predetermination of 
 the amount of my effort of attention can never 
 receive objective proof, and hoping that, whether 
 you follow my example in this respect or not, it 
 will at least make you see that such psychological 
 and psychophysical theories as I hold do not 
 necessarily force a man to become a fatalist or 
 a materialist. 
 
 Let me say one more final word now about 
 the will, and therewith conclude both that im- 
 portant subject and these lectures. 
 
 There are two types of will. There are also 
 ~ two types of inhibition. We may call them inhibi- 
 tion by repression or by negation, and inhibition 
 by substitution, respectively. The difference be- 
 1 '-.tween them is that, in the case of inhibition by
 
 TWO TYPES OF INHIBITION 193 
 
 repression, both the inhibited idea and the inhi- 
 biting idea, the impulsive idea and the idea that 
 negates it, remain along with each other in con- 
 sciousness, producing a certain inward strain or^' 
 tension there : whereas, in inhibition by substitu- 
 tion, the inhibiting idea supersedes altogether the 
 idea which it inhibits, and the latter quickly 
 vanishes from the field. 
 
 For instance, your pupils are wandering in 
 mind, are listening to a sound outside the win- 
 dow, which presently grows interesting enough 
 to claim all their attention. You can call the lat- 
 ter back again by bellowing at them not to listen 
 to those sounds, but to keep their minds on their 
 books or on what you are saying. And, by thus 
 keeping them conscious that your eye is sternly 
 on them, you may produce a good effect. But it 
 will be a wasteful effect and an inf erior effect ; for 
 the moment you relax your supervision the at- 
 tractive disturbance, always there soliciting their 
 curiosity, will overpower them, and they will be 
 just as they were before : whereas, if, without say- 
 ing anything about the street disturbances, you 
 open a counter-attraction by starting some very 
 interesting talk or demonstration yourself, they 
 will altogether forget the distracting incident, and
 
 194 TALKS TO TEACHERS 
 
 without any effort follow you along. There are 
 many interests that can never be inhibited by the 
 way of negation. To a man in love, for example, 
 it is literally impossible, by any effort of will, to 
 annul his passion. But let * some new planet swim 
 into his ken,' and the former idol will immediately 
 cease to engross his mind. 
 
 It is clear that in general we ought, whenever 
 we can, to employ the method of inhibition by 
 substitution. He whose life is based upon the 
 word 'no,' who tells the truth because a lie is 
 wicked, and who has constantly to grapple with 
 his envious and cowardly and mean propensities, 
 is in an inferior situation in every respect to what 
 he would be if the love of truth and magnanimity 
 positively possessed him from the outset, and he 
 felt no inferior temptations. Your born gentle- 
 man is certainly, for this world's purposes, a more 
 valuable being than your " Crump, with his grunt- 
 ing resistance to his native devils," even though 
 in God's sight the latter may, as the Catholic 
 theologians say, be rolling up great stores of 
 * merit.' 
 
 Spinoza long ago wrote in his Ethics that any- 
 thing that a man can avoid under the notion that 
 it is bad he may also avoid under the notion that
 
 SPINOZA ON SLAVES AND FREEMEN 195 
 
 something else is good. He who habitually acts 
 sub specie mali, under the negative notion, the no- 
 tion of the bad, is called a slave by Spinoza. To 
 him who acts habitually under the notion of good 
 he gives the name of freeman. See to it now, I 
 beg you, that you make freemen of your pupils 
 by habituating them to act, whenever possible, 
 under the notion of a good. Get them habitually 
 to tell the truth, not so much through showing 
 them the wickedness of lying as by arousing their 
 enthusiasm for honor and veracity. Wean them 
 from their native cruelty by imparting to them 
 some of your own positive sympathy with an ani- 
 mal's inner springs of joy. And, in the lessons 
 which you may be legally obliged to conduct upon 
 the bad effects of alcohol, lay less stress than the 
 books do on the drunkard's stomach, kidneys, 
 nerves, and social miseries, and more on the bless- 
 ings of having an organism kept in lifelong pos- 
 session of its full youthful elasticity by a sweet, 
 sound blood, to which stimulants and narcotics 
 are unknown, and to which the morning sun and 
 air and dew will daily come as sufficiently power- 
 ful intoxicants.
 
 196 CONCLUSION 
 
 I have now ended these talks. If to some of 
 you the things I have said seem obvious or trivial, 
 it is possible that they may appear less so when, 
 in the course of a year or two, you find yourselves 
 noticing and apperceiving events in the school- 
 room a little differently, in consequence of some 
 of the conceptions I have tried to make more 
 clear. I cannot but think that to apperceive your 
 pupil as a little sensitive, impulsive, associative, 
 and reactive organism, partly fated and partly 
 free, will lead to a better intelligence of all his 
 ways. Understand him, then, as such a subtle 
 little piece of machinery. And if, in addition, you 
 can also see him sub specie boni, and love him as 
 well, you will be in the best possible position for 
 becoming perfect teachers.
 
 TALKS TO STUDENTS
 
 I. 
 
 THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION 
 
 I WISH in the following hour to take certain 
 psychological doctrines and show their practical 
 applications to mental hygiene, to the hygiene 
 of our American life more particularly. Our 
 people, especially in academic circles, are turn- 
 ing towards psychology nowadays with great ex- 
 pectations ; and, if psychology is to justify them, 
 it must be by showing fruits in the pedagogic and 
 therapeutic lines. 
 
 The reader may possibly have heard of a pecu- 
 liar theory of the emotions, commonly referred to 
 in psychological literature as the Lange-James 
 theory. According to this theory, our emotions 
 are mainly due to those organic stirrings that are 
 aroused in us in a reflex way by the stimulus of 
 the exciting object or situation. An emotion of 
 fear, for example, or surprise, is not a direct effect 
 of the object's presence on the mind, but an effect 
 of that still earlier effect, the bodily commotion 
 which the object suddenly excites ; so that, were
 
 200 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 this bodily commotion suppressed, we should not 
 so much feel fear as call the situation fearful ; we 
 should not feel surprise, but coldly recognize that 
 the object was indeed astonishing. One enthusi- 
 ast has even gone so far as to say that when we 
 feel sorry it is because we weep, when we feel 
 afraid it is because we run away, and not con- 
 versely. Some of you may perhaps be acquainted 
 with the paradoxical formula. Now, whatever 
 exaggeration may possibly lurk hi this account of 
 our emotions (and I doubt myself whether the ex- 
 aggeration be very great), it is certain that the 
 main core of it is true, and that the mere giving 
 way to tears, for example, or to the outward ex- 
 pression of an anger-fit, will result for the moment 
 hi making the inner grief or anger more acutely 
 felt. There is, accordingly, no better known or 
 more generally useful precept in the moral train- 
 ing of youth, or in one's personal self-discipline, 
 than that which bids us pay primary attention to 
 what we do and express, and not to care too much 
 for what we feeL If we only check a cowardly 
 impulse in time, for example, or if we only don't 
 strike the blow or rip out with the complaining or 
 insulting word that we shall regret as long as we 
 live, our feelings themselves will presently be the
 
 KEFLEX-THEOKY OF EMOTION 201 
 
 calmer and better, with no particular guidance 
 from us on their own account. Action seems to 
 follow feeling, but really action and feeling go 
 together; and by regulating the action, which is 
 under the more direct control of the will, we can 
 indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. 
 
 Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerful- 
 ness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to 
 sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and 
 to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already 
 there. If such conduct does not make you soon 
 feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can. 
 So to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all 
 our will to that end, and a courage-fit will very 
 likely replace the fit of fear. Again, in order to 
 feel kindly toward a person to whom we have 
 been inimical, the only way is more or less de- 
 liberately to smile, to make sympathetic inquiries, 
 and to force ourselves to say genial things. One 
 hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a 
 closer communion of heart than hours spent on 
 both sides in inward wrestling with the mental 
 demon of uncharitable feeling. To wrestle with 
 a bad feeling only pins our attention on it, and 
 keeps it still fastened in the mind : whereas, if we 
 act as if from some better feeling, the old bad feel-
 
 202 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 ing soon folds its tent like an Arab, and silently 
 steals away. 
 
 The best manuals of religious devotion accord- 
 ingly reiterate the maxim that we must let our 
 feelings go, and pay no regard to them whatever. 
 In an admirable and widely successful little book 
 called * The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life,' 
 by Mrs. Hannah Whitall Smith, I find this lesson 
 on almost every page. Act faithfully, and you 
 really have faith, no matter how cold and even 
 how dubious you may feel. " It is your purpose 
 God looks at," writes Mrs. Smith, " not your feel- 
 ings about that purpose; and your purpose, or 
 will, is therefore the only thing you need attend 
 to. ... Let your emotions come or let them go, 
 just as God pleases, and make no account of them 
 either way. . . . They really have nothing to do 
 with the matter. They are not the indicators of 
 your spiritual state, but are merely the indicators 
 of your temperament or of your present physical 
 condition." 
 
 But you all know these facts already, so I need 
 no longer press them on your attention. From 
 our acts and from our attitudes ceaseless inpour- 
 ing currents of sensation come, which help to de- 
 termine from moment to moment what our inner
 
 THE INNER LIFE OF INVALIDS 203 
 
 states shall be : that is a fundamental law of psy- 
 chology which I will therefore proceed to assume. 
 
 A Viennese neurologist of considerable reputa- 
 tion has recently written about the 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 Bin- 
 nenleben is, of the sort of unuttered inner atmos- 
 phere in which his consciousness dwells alone 
 with the secrets of its prison-house. This inner 
 personal tone is what we can't communicate or 
 describe articulately to others; but the wraith 
 and ghost of it, so to speak, are often what our 
 friends and intimates feel as our most character- 
 istic quality. In the unhealthy-minded, apart 
 from all sorts of old regrets, ambitions checked 
 by shames and aspirations obstructed by timidi- 
 ties, it consists mainly of bodily discomforts not 
 distinctly localized by the sufferer, but breeding 
 a general self-mistrust and sense that things are 
 not as they should be with him. Half the thirst 
 for alcohol that exists in the world exists simply 
 because alcohol acts as a temporary anesthetic 
 and effacer to all these morbid feelings that never
 
 204 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 ought to be in a human being at all. In the 
 healthy-minded, on the contrary, there are no 
 fears or shames to discover; and the sensations 
 that pour in from the organism only help to swell 
 the general vital sense of security and readiness 
 for anything that may turn up. 
 
 Consider, for example, the effects of a well- 
 toned motor-apparatus, nervous and muscular, on 
 our general personal self-consciousness, the sense 
 of elasticity and efficiency that results. They 
 tell us that in Norway the life of the women has 
 lately been entirely revolutionized by the new 
 order of muscular feelings with which the use of 
 the ski, or long snow-shoes, as a sport for both 
 sexes, has made the women acquainted. Fifteen 
 years ago the Norwegian women were even more 
 than the women of other lands votaries of the 
 old-fashioned ideal of femininity, 'the domestic 
 angel,' the ' gentle and refining influence ' sort of 
 thing. Now these sedentary fireside tabby-cats 
 of Norway have been trained, they say, by the 
 snow-shoes into lithe and audacious creatures, for 
 whom no night is too dark or height too giddy, 
 and who are not only saying good-bye to the tradi- 
 tional feminine pallor and delicacy of constitution, 
 but actually taking the lead in every educational
 
 MUSCULAR TONE AND INNER MOOD 205 
 
 and social reform. I cannot but think that the 
 tennis and tramping and skating habits and the 
 bicycle-craze which are so rapidly extending 
 among our dear sisters and daughters in this 
 country are going also to lead to a sounder and 
 heartier moral tone, which will send its tonic 
 breath through all our American life. 
 
 I hope that here in America more and more the 
 ideal of the well-trained and vigorous body will 
 be maintained neck by neck with that of the well- 
 trained and vigorous mind as the two coequal 
 halves of the higher education for men and women 
 alike. The strength of the British Empire lies in 
 the strength of character of the individual Eng- 
 lishman, taken all alone by himself. And that 
 strength, I am persuaded, is perennially nourished 
 and kept up by nothing so much as by the na- 
 tional worship, in which all classes meet, of ath- 
 letic outdoor life and sport. 
 
 I recollect, years ago, reading a certain work 
 by an American doctor on hygiene and the laws 
 of life and the type of future humanity. I have 
 forgotten its author's name and its title, but I re- 
 member well an awful prophecy that it contained 
 about the future of our muscular system. Human 
 perfection, the writer said, means ability to cope
 
 206 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 with the environment; but the environment will 
 more and more require mental power from us, and 
 less and less will ask for bare brute strength. 
 Wars will cease, machines will do all our heavy 
 work, man will become more and more a mere 
 director of nature's energies, and less and less an 
 exerter of energy on his own account. So that, if 
 the homo sapiens of the future can only digest his 
 food and think, what need will he have of well- 
 developed muscles at all? And why, pursued 
 this writer, should we not even now be satisfied 
 with a more delicate and intellectual type of 
 beauty than that which pleased our ancestors? 
 Nay, I have heard a fanciful friend make a still 
 further advance in this 'new-man' direction. 
 With our future food, he says, itself prepared 
 hi liquid form from the chemical elements of the 
 atmosphere, pepsinated or half-digested in ad- 
 vance, and sucked up through a glass tube from 
 a tin can, what need shall we have of teeth, or 
 stomachs even? They may go, along with our 
 muscles and our physical courage, while, challeng- 
 ing ever more and more our proper admiration, 
 will grow the gigantic domes of our crania, arch- 
 ing over our spectacled eyes, and animating our 
 flexible little lips to those floods of learned and
 
 MUSCULAR TONE AND INNER MOOD 207 
 
 ingenious talk which will constitute our most 
 congenial occupation. 
 
 I am sure that your flesh creeps at this apoca- 
 lyptic vision. Mine certainly did so ; and I can- 
 not believe that our muscular vigor will ever be a 
 superfluity. Even if the day ever dawns in which 
 it will not be needed for fighting the old heavy 
 battles against Nature, it will still always be 
 needed to furnish the background of sanity, seren- 
 ity, and cheerfulness to life, to give moral elastic- 
 ity to our disposition, to round off the wiry edge 
 of our fretfulness, and make us good-humored 
 and easy of approach. Weakness is too apt to 
 be what the doctors call irritable weakness. And 
 that blessed internal peace and confidence, that 
 acquiescentia in seipso, as Spinoza used to call it, 
 that wells up from every part of the body of a 
 muscularly well-trained human being, and soaks 
 the indwelling soul of him with satisfaction, is, 
 quite apart from every consideration of its me- 
 chanical utility, an element of spiritual hygiene of 
 supreme significance. 
 
 And now let me go a step deeper into mental 
 hygiene, and try to enlist your insight and sym- 
 pathy in a cause which I believe is one of para- 
 mount patriotic importance to us Yankees. Many
 
 208 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 years ago a Scottish medical man, Dr. Clouston, 
 a mad-doctor as they call him there, or what we 
 should call an asylum physician (the most emi- 
 nent 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 liv- 
 ing like an army with all its reserves engaged in 
 action. The duller countenances of the British 
 population betoken a better scheme of life. They 
 suggest stores of reserved nervous force to fall 
 back upon, if any occasion should arise that re- 
 quires it. This inexcitability, this presence at 
 all times of power not used, I regard," continued 
 Dr. Clouston, "as the great safeguard of our 
 British people. The other thing in you gives 
 me a sense of insecurity, and you ought 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 counte- 
 nance, and the observation of his which I quote 
 seems to me to mean a great deal. And all 
 Americans who stay in Europe long enough to 
 get accustomed to the spirit that reigns and ex-
 
 THE OVER-EXPRESSION OF AMERICANS 209 
 
 presses itself there, so unexcitable as compared 
 with ours, make a similar observation when they 
 return to their native shores. They find a wild- 
 eyed look upon their compatriots' faces, either of 
 too desperate eagerness and anxiety or of too in- 
 tense responsiveness and good-will. It is hard to 
 say whether the men or the women show it most. 
 It is true that we do not all feel about it as Dr. 
 Clouston felt. Many of us, far from deploring it, 
 admire it. We say : " What intelligence it shows ! 
 How different from the stolid cheeks, the codfish 
 eyes, the slow, inanimate demeanor we have been 
 seeing in the British Isles 1 " Intensity, rapidity, 
 vivacity of appearance, are indeed with us some- 
 thing of a nationally accepted ideal ; and the medi- 
 cal notion of ' irritable weakness ' is not the first 
 thing suggested by them to our mind, as it was 
 to Dr. Clouston's. In a weekly paper not very 
 long ago I remember reading a story in which, 
 after describing the beauty and interest of the 
 heroine's personality, the author summed up her 
 charms by saying that to all who looked upon 
 her an impression as of 'bottled lightning' was 
 irresistibly conveyed. 
 
 Bottled lightning, in truth, is one of our Amer- 
 ican ideals, even of a young girl's character ! Now
 
 210 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 it is most ungracious, and it may seem to some 
 persons unpatriotic, to criticise in public the phys- 
 ical peculiarities of one's own people, of one's own 
 family, so to speak. Besides, it may be said, and 
 said with justice, that there are plenty of bottled- 
 lightning temperaments in other countries, and 
 plenty of phlegmatic temperaments here ; and that, 
 when all is said and done, the more or less of ten- 
 sion about which I am making such a fuss is a 
 veiy small item in the sum total of a nation's life, 
 and not worth solemn treatment at a time when 
 agreeable rather than disagreeable things should 
 be talked about. Well, in one sense the more or 
 less of tension in our faces and in our unused 
 muscles is a small thing: not much mechanical 
 work is done by these contractions. But it is not 
 always the material size of a thing that measures 
 its importance : often it is its place and function. 
 One of the most philosophical remarks I ever 
 heard made was by an unlettered workman who 
 was doing some repairs at my house many years 
 ago. " There is very little difference between one 
 man and another," he said, " when you go to the 
 bottom of it. But what little there is, is very 
 important." And the remark certainly applies 
 to this case. The general over-contraction may
 
 THE OVER-CONTRACTED PERSON 211 
 
 be small when estimated in foot-pounds, but its 
 importance is immense on account of its effects 
 on the over-contracted person's spiritual life. This 
 follows as a necessary consequence from the the- 
 ory of our emotions to which I made reference at 
 the beginning of this article. For by the sensa- 
 tions that so incessantly pour in from the over- 
 tense excited body the over-tense and excited 
 habit of mind is kept up ; and the sultry, threat- 
 ening, exhausting, thunderous inner atmosphere 
 never quite clears away. If you never wholly 
 give yourself up to the chair you sit in, but al- 
 ways keep your leg- and body-muscles half con- 
 tracted for a rise ; if you breathe eighteen or nine- 
 teen instead of sixteen times a minute, and never 
 quite breathe out at that, what mental mood 
 can you be in but one of inner panting and ex- 
 pectancy, and how can the future and its worries 
 possibly forsake your mind? On the other hand, 
 how can they gain admission to your mind if your 
 brow be unruffled, your respiration calm and com- 
 plete, and your muscles all relaxed ? 
 
 Now what is the cause of this absence of re- 
 pose, this bottled-lightning quality in us Ameri- 
 cans ? The explanation of it that is usually given 
 is that it comes from the extreme dryness of our
 
 212 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 climate and the acrobatic performances of our 
 thermometer, coupled with the extraordinary pro- 
 gressiveness of our life, the hard work, the rail- 
 road speed, the rapid success, and all the other 
 things we know so well by heart. Well, our cli- 
 mate is certainly exciting, but hardly more so 
 than that of many parts of Europe, where never- 
 theless no bottled-lightning girls are found. And 
 the work done and the pace of life are as extreme 
 in every great capital of Europe as they are here. 
 To me both of these pretended causes are utterly 
 insufficient to explain the facts. 
 
 To explain them, we must go not to physical 
 geography, but to psychology and sociology. The 
 latest chapter both in sociology and in psychology 
 to be developed hi a manner that approaches ade- 
 quacy is the chapter on the imitative impulse. 
 First Bagehot, then Tarde, then Royce and Bald- 
 win here, have shown that invention and imita- 
 tion, taken together, form, one may say, the entire 
 warp and woof of human life, in so far as it is so- 
 cial. The American over-tension and jerkiness 
 and breathlessness and intensity and agony of ex- 
 pression are primarily social, and only secondarily 
 physiological, phenomena. They are bad habits, 
 nothing more or less, bred of custom and example,
 
 AMEBICAN TENSION ONLY A BAD HABIT 213 
 
 born of the imitation of bad models and the culti- 
 vation of false personal ideals. How are idioms 
 acquired, how do local peculiarities of phrase and 
 accent come about? Through an accidental ex- 
 ample set by some one, which struck the ears of 
 others, and was quoted and copied till at last 
 every one in the locality chimed in. Just so it is 
 with national tricks of vocalization or intonation, 
 with national manners, fashions of movement and 
 gesture, and habitual expressions of face. We, 
 here in America, through following a succession 
 of pattern-setters whom it is now impossible to 
 trace, and through influencing each other in a bad 
 direction, have at last settled down collectively 
 into what, for better or worse, is our own charac- 
 teristic national type, a type with the produc- 
 tion of which, so far as these habits go, the cli- 
 mate and conditions have had practically nothing 
 at all to do. 
 
 This type, which we have thus reached by our 
 imitativeness, we now have fixed upon us, for bet- 
 ter or worse, Now no type can be wholly disad- 
 vantageous; but, so far as our type follows the 
 bottled-lightning fashion, it cannot be wholly good. 
 Dr. Clouston was certainly right in thinking that 
 eagerness, brcathlessncss, and anxiety are not signs
 
 214 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 of strength : they are signs of weakness and of bad 
 co-ordination. The even forehead, the slab-like 
 cheek, the codfish eye, may be less interesting for 
 the moment; but they are more promising signs 
 than intense expression is of what we may expect 
 of their possessor in the long run. Your dull, un- 
 hurried worker gets over a great deal of ground, 
 because he never goes backward or breaks down. 
 Your intense, convulsive worker breaks down and 
 has bad moods so often that you never know 
 where he may be when you most need his help, 
 he may be having one of his bad days.' \Ve 
 say that so many of our fellow-countrymen col- 
 lapse, and have to be sent abroad to rest their 
 nerves, because they work so hard. I suspect 
 that this is an immense mistake. I suspect that 
 neither the nature nor the amount of our work is 
 accountable for the frequency and severity of our 
 breakdowns, but that their cause lies rather in 
 those absurd feelings of hurry and having no time, 
 in that breathlessness and tension, that anxiety of 
 feature and that solicitude for results, that lack 
 of inner harmony and ease, in short, by which 
 with us the work is so apt to be accompanied, and 
 from which a European who should do the same 
 work would nine times out of ten be free. These
 
 AMERICAN FATIGUE 
 
 perfectly wanton and unnecessary tricks of inner 
 attitude and outer manner in us, caught from the 
 social atmosphere, kept up by tradition, and ideal- 
 ized by many as the admirable way of life, are the 
 last straws that break the American camel's back, 
 the final overflowers of our measure of wear and 
 tear and fatigue. 
 
 The voice, for example, in a surprisingly large 
 number of us has a tired and plaintive sound. 
 Some of us are really tired (for I do not mean 
 absolutely to deny that our climate has a tiring 
 quality) ; but far more of us are not tired at all, or 
 would not be tired at all unless we had got into a 
 wretched trick of feeling tired, by following the 
 prevalent habits of vocalization and expression. 
 And if talking high and tired, and living excitedly 
 and hurriedly, would only enable us to do more by 
 the way, even while breaking us down in the end, 
 it would be different. There would be some com- 
 pensation, some excuse, for going on so. But the 
 exact reverse is the case. It is your relaxed and 
 easy worker, who is in no hurry, and quite thoughts 
 less most of the while of consequences, who is 
 your efficient worker; and tension and anxiety, 
 and present and future, all mixed up together in 
 our mind at once, are the surest drags upon steady
 
 216 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 progress and hindrances to our success. My col- 
 league, Professor Miinsterberg, an excellent ob- 
 server, who came here recently, has written some 
 notes on America to German papers. He says in 
 substance that the appearance of unusual energy 
 in America is superficial and illusory, being really 
 due to nothing but the habits of jerkiness and bad 
 co-ordination for wluch we have to thank the de- 
 fective training of our people. I think myself 
 that it is high time for old legends and traditional 
 opinions to be changed ; and that, if any one should 
 begin to write about Yankee inefficiency and fee- 
 bleness, and inability to do anything with time 
 except to waste it, he would have a very pretty 
 paradoxical little thesis to sustain, with a great 
 many facts to quote, and a great deal of experi- 
 ence to appeal to in its proof. 
 
 Well, my friends, if our dear American char- 
 acter is weakened by all this over-tension, and 
 I think, whatever reserves you may make, that 
 you will agree as to the main facts, where does 
 the remedy lie? It lies, of course, where lay the 
 origins of the disease. If a vicious fashion and 
 taste are to blame for the thing, the fashion and 
 taste must be changed. And, though it is no 
 small thing to inoculate seventy millions of people
 
 WE MUST IMITATE NEW PATTERNS 217 
 
 with new standards, yet, if there is to be any re- 
 lief, that will have to be done. We must change 
 ourselves from a race that admires jerk and snap 
 for their own sakes, and looks down upon low 
 voices and quiet ways as dull, to one that, on the 
 contrary, has calm for its ideal, and for their own 
 sakes loves harmony, dignity, and ease. 
 
 So we go back to the psychology of imitation 
 again. There is only one way to improve our- 
 selves, and that is by some of us setting an ex- 
 ample which the others may pick up and imitate 
 till the new fashion spreads from east to west. 
 Some of us are in more favorable positions than 
 others to set new fashions. Some are much more 
 striking personally and imitable, so to speak. But 
 no living person is sunk so low as not to be imi- 
 tated by somebody. Thackeray somewhere says 
 of the Irish nation that there never was an Irish- 
 man so poor that he didn't have a still poorer 
 Irishman living at his expense ; and, surely, there 
 is no human being whose example doesn't work 
 contagiously in some particular. The very idiots 
 at our public institutions imitate each other's 
 peculiarities. And, if you should individually 
 achieve calmness and harmony in your own per- 
 son, you may depend upon it that a wave of
 
 218 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 imitation will spread from you, as surely as the 
 circles spread outward when a stone is dropped 
 into a lake. 
 
 Fortunately, we shall not have to be absolute 
 pioneers. Even now in New York they have form- 
 ed a society for the improvement of our nation- 
 al vocalization, and one perceives its machina- 
 tions already in the shape of various newspaper 
 paragraphs intended to stir up dissatisfaction with 
 the awful thing that it is. And, better still than 
 that, because more radical and general, is the gos- 
 pel of relaxation, as one may call it, preached by 
 Miss Annie Payson Call, of Boston, in her admi- 
 rable little volume called * Power through Repose,' 
 a book that ought to be in the hands of every 
 teacher and student in America of either sex. 
 You need only be followers, then, on a path al- 
 ready opened up by others. But of one thing be 
 confident: others still will follow you. 
 
 And this brings me to one more application of 
 psychology to practical life, to which I will call 
 attention briefly, and then close. If one's example 
 of easy and calm ways is to be effectively conta- 
 gious, one feels by instinct that the less volunta- 
 rily one aims at getting imitated, the more uncon- 
 scious one keeps in the matter, the more likely
 
 EGOISTIC PREOCCUPATIONS IMPEDE ACTION 219 
 
 one is to succeed. Become the imitable tiling, and 
 you may then discharge your minds of all respon- 
 sibility for the imitation. The laws of social na- 
 ture will take care of that result. Now the psycho- 
 logical principle on which this precept reposes is 
 a law of very deep and wide-spread importance in 
 the conduct of our lives, and at the same time a 
 law which we Americans most grievously neglect. 
 Stated technically, the law is this : that strong feel- 
 ing about one's self tends to arrest the free associa- 
 tion of one's objective ideas and motor processes. 
 We get the extreme example of this in the men- 
 tal disease called melancholia. 
 
 A melancholic patient is filled through and 
 through with intensely painful emotion about 
 himself. He is threatened, he is guilty, he is 
 doomed, he is annihilated, he is lost. His mind 
 is fixed as if in a cramp on these feelings of his 
 own situation, and in all the books on insanity 
 you may read that the usual varied flow of his 
 thoughts has ceased. His associative processes, 
 to use the technical phrase, are inhibited ; and his 
 ideas stand stock-still, shut up to their one monot- 
 onous function of reiterating inwardly the fact of 
 the man's desperate estate. And this inhibitive 
 influence is not due to the mere fact that his emo-
 
 220 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 tion is painful. Joyous emotions about the self 
 also stop the association of our ideas. A saint in 
 ecstasy is as motionless and irresponsive and one- 
 idea'd as a melancholiac. And, without going as 
 far as ecstatic saints, we know how in every one 
 a great or sudden pleasure may paralyze the flow 
 of thought. Ask young people returning from a 
 party or a spectacle, and all excited about it, what 
 it was. " Oh, it was fine ! it was fine ! it was fine ! " 
 is all the information you are likely to receive 
 until the excitement has calmed down. Probably 
 every one of my hearers has been made tempo- 
 rarily half-idiotic by some great success or piece 
 of good fortune. " Good ! GOOD I GOOD 1 " 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 extreme!}' 
 practical conclusion. If, namely, we wish our 
 trains of ideation and volition to be copious and 
 varied and effective, we must form the habit of 
 freeing them from the inhibitive influence of re- 
 flection upon them, of egoistic preoccupation about 
 their results. Such a habit, like other habits, can 
 be formed. Prudence and duty and self-regard, 
 emotions of ambition and emotions of anxiety, 
 have, of course, a needful part to play in our lives.
 
 LET YOUR MACHINERY RUN FREE 221 
 
 But confine them as far as possible to the occa- 
 sions when you are making your general resolu- 
 tions and deciding on your plans of campaign, and 
 keep them out of the details. When once a de- 
 cision is reached and execution is the order of 
 the day, dismiss absolutely all responsibility and 
 care about the outcome. Unclamp, in a word, 
 your intellectual and practical machinery, and let 
 it run free ; and the service it will do you will be 
 twice as good. Who are the scholars who get 
 'rattled' in the recitation-room? Those who think 
 of the possibilities of failure and feel the great 
 importance of the act. Who are those who do 
 recite well? Often those who are most indif- 
 ferent. Their ideas reel themselves out of their 
 memory of their own accord. Why do we hear 
 the complaint so often that social life in New Eng- 
 land is either less rich and expressive or more 
 fatiguing than it is in some other parts of the 
 world? To what is the fact, if fact it be, due 
 unless to the over-active conscience of the people, 
 afraid of either saying something too trivial and 
 obvious, or something insincere, or something un- 
 worthy of one's interlocutor, or something in some 
 way or other not adequate to the occasion ? How 
 can conversation possibly steer itself through such
 
 222 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 a sea of responsibilities and inhibitions as this? 
 On the other hand, conversation does flourish and 
 society is refreshing, and neither dull on the one 
 hand nor exhausting from its effort on the other, 
 wherever people forget their scruples and take 
 the brakes off their hearts, and let their tongues 
 wag as automatically and irresponsibly as they 
 will. 
 
 They talk much in pedagogic circles to-day 
 about the duty of the teacher to prepare for every 
 lesson in advance. To some extent this is useful. 
 But we Yankees are assuredly not those to whom 
 such a general doctrine should be preached. We 
 are only too careful as it is. The advice I should 
 give to most teachers would be in the words of 
 one who is herself an admirable teacher. Prepare 
 yourself in the subject so well that it shall be always 
 on tap : then in the class-room trust your spon- 
 taneity and fling away all further care. 
 
 My advice to students, especially to girl-stu- 
 dents, would be somewhat similar. Just as a bi- 
 cycle-chain may be too tight, so may one's careful- 
 ness and conscientiousness be so tense as to hinder 
 the running of one's mind. Take, for example, 
 periods when there are many successive days of 
 examination impending. One ounce of good nerv-
 
 MORAL OVER-TENSION 223 
 
 ous tone in an examination is worth many pounds 
 of anxious study for it in advance. If you want 
 really to do your best 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 vari- 
 ous mind -curing sects, and such writers as Mr. 
 Dresser, Prentice Mulford, Mr. Horace Fletcher, 
 and Mr. Trine to help, and the whole band of 
 schoolteachers and magazine-readers chiming in, 
 it really looks as if a good start might be made in 
 the direction of changing our American mental 
 habit into something more indifferent and strong.
 
 224 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 Worry means always and invariably inhibition 
 of associations and loss of effective power. Of 
 course, the sovereign cure for worry is religious 
 faith; and this, of course, you also know. The 
 turbulent billows of the fretful surface leave the 
 deep parts of the ocean undisturbed, and to him 
 who has a hold on vaster and more permanent 
 realities the hourly vicissitudes of his personal 
 destiny seem relatively insignificant things. The 
 really religious person is accordingly unshakable 
 and full of equanimity, and calmly ready for any 
 duty that the day may bring forth. This is 
 charmingly illustrated by a little work with which 
 I recently became acquainted, " The Practice of 
 the Presence of God, the Best Ruler of a Holy 
 Life, by Brother Lawrence, being Conversations 
 and Letters of Nicholas Herman of Lorraine, 
 Translated from the French." * I extract a few 
 passages, the conversations being given in in- 
 direct discourse. Brother Lawrence was a Car- 
 melite friar, converted at Paris in 1666. "He 
 said that he had been footman to M. Fieubert, 
 the Treasurer, and that he was a great awkward 
 fellow, who broke everything. That he had de- 
 sired to be received into a monastery, thinking 
 
 * Fleming H. Revell Company, New York.
 
 BROTHER LAWRENCE 225 
 
 that he would there be made to smart for his awk- 
 wardness and the faults he should commit, and so 
 he should sacrifice to God his life, with its pleas- 
 ures ; but that God had disappointed him, he hav- 
 ing met with nothing but satisfaction in that 
 state. . . . 
 
 " That he had long been troubled in mind from 
 a certain belief that he should be damned ; that 
 all the men in the world could not have per- 
 suaded him to the contrary ; but that he had thus 
 reasoned with himself about it : / engaged in a re- 
 ligious life only for the love of Grod, and I have en- 
 deavored to act only for Him ; whatever becomes of 
 me, whether I be lost or saved, I will always con- 
 tinue to act purely for the love of Crod. 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, say- 
 ing, Lord, I cannot do this unless thou enablest 
 me'; and that then he received strength more 
 than sufficient. That, when he had failed in his 
 duty, he only confessed his fault, saying to God, 
 'I shall never do otherwise, if You leave me to
 
 226 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 myself; it is You who must hinder my failing, 
 and mend what is amiss.' That after this he gave 
 himself no further uneasiness about it. 
 
 " That he had been lately sent into Burgundy 
 to buy the provision of wine for the society, which 
 was a very unwelcome task for him, because he 
 had no turn for business, and because he was 
 lame, and could not go about the boat but by 
 rolling himself over the casks. That, however, he 
 gave himself no uneasiness about it, nor about the 
 purchase of the wine. That he said to God, It 
 was his business he was about,' and that he after- 
 ward found it well performed. That he had been 
 sent into Auvergne, the year before, upon the 
 same account ; that he could not tell how the mat- 
 ter passed, but that it proved very well. 
 
 " So, likewise, in his business in the kitchen (to 
 which he had naturally a great aversion), having 
 accustomed himself to do everything there for the 
 love of God, and with prayer upon all occasions, 
 for his grace to do his work well, he had found 
 everything easy during fifteen years that he had 
 been employed there. 
 
 " That he was very well pleased with the post 
 he was now in, but that he was as ready to quit 
 that as the former, since he was always pleasing
 
 CONCLUSION 227 
 
 himself in every condition, by doing little things 
 for the love of God, 
 
 "That the goodness of God assured him he 
 would not forsake him utterly, and that he would 
 give him strength to bear whatever evil he per- 
 mitted to happen to him ; and, therefore, that he 
 feared nothing, and had no occasion to consult 
 with anybody about his state. That, when he 
 had attempted to do it, he had always come away 
 more perplexed." 
 
 The simple-heartedness of the good Brother 
 Lawrence, and the relaxation of all unnecessary 
 solicitudes and anxieties in him, is a refreshing 
 spectacle. 
 
 .The need of feeling responsible all the livelong 
 day has been preached long enough hi our New 
 England. Long enough exclusively, at any rate, 
 and long enough to the female sex. What our 
 girl-students and woman-teachers most need now- 
 adays is not the exacerbation, but rather the ton- 
 ing-down of their moral tensions. Even now I 
 fear that some one of my fair hearers may be mak- 
 ing an undying resolve to become strenuously re- 
 laxed, cost what it will, for the remainder of her 
 life. It is needless to say that that is not the way
 
 228 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 to do it. The way to do it, paradoxical as it may 
 seem, is genuinely not to care whether you are 
 doing it or not. Then, possibly, by the grace of 
 God, you may all at once find that you are doing 
 it, and, having learned what the trick feels like, 
 you may (again by the grace of God) be enabled 
 to go on. 
 
 And that something like this may be the happy 
 experience of all my hearers is, in closing, my 
 most earnest wish.
 
 II. 
 
 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 hi consequence of the idea we frame of it, 
 this is only because the idea is itself associated 
 already with a feeling. If we were radically feel- 
 ingless, and if ideas were the only things our 
 mind could entertain, we should lose all our likes 
 and dislikes at a stroke, and be unable to point to 
 any one situation or experience in life more valu- 
 able or significant than any other. 
 
 Now the blindness in human beings, of which 
 this discourse will treat, is the blindness with 
 which we all are afflicted in regard to the feelings 
 of creatures and people different from ourselves. 
 
 We are practical beings, each of us with limited 
 functions and duties to perform. Each is bound to 
 feel intensely the importance of his own duties and 
 the significance of the situations that call these
 
 230 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 forth. But this feeling is in each of us a vital 
 secret, for sympathy with which we vainly look 
 to others. The others are too much absorbed in 
 their own vital secrets to take an interest in ours. 
 Hence the stupidity and injustice of our opinions, 
 so far as they deal with the significance of alien 
 lives. Hence the falsity of our judgments, so far 
 as they presume to decide in an absolute way on 
 the value of other persons' conditions or ideals. 
 
 Take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we 
 are by a tie more intimate than most ties in this 
 world ; and yet, outside of that tie of friendly fond- 
 ness, how insensible, each of us, to all that makes 
 life significant for the other 1 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 I What queer disease is this that comes 
 over you every day, of holding things and staring 
 at them like that for hours together, paralyzed of
 
 WHAT THE BLINDNESS IS 231 
 
 motion and vacant of all conscious life? The 
 African savages came nearer the truth ; but they, 
 too, missed it, when they gathered wonderingly 
 round one of our American travellers who, in the 
 interior, had just come into possession of a stray 
 copy of the New York Commercial Advertiser, and 
 was devouring it column by column. When he 
 got through, they offered him a high price for the 
 mysterious object ; and, being asked for what they 
 wanted it, they said: "For an eye medicine," 
 that being the only reason they could conceive of 
 for the protracted bath which he had given his 
 eyes upon its surface. 
 
 The spectator's judgment is sure to miss the 
 root of the matter, and to possess no truth. The 
 subject judged knows a part of the world of reality 
 which the judging spectator fails to see, knows 
 more while the spectator knows less ; and, where- 
 ever there is conflict of opinion and difference of 
 vision, we are bound to believe that the truer side 
 is the side that feels the more, and not the side 
 that feels the less. 
 
 Let me take a personal example of the kind that 
 befalls each one of us daily : 
 
 Some years ago, while journeying in the moun- 
 tains of North Carolina, I passed by a large num-
 
 232 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 her of 'coves,' as they call them there, or heads 
 of small valleys between the hills, which had been 
 newly cleared and planted. The impression on my 
 mind was one of unmitigated squalor. The settler 
 had in every case cut down the more manage- 
 able trees, and left their charred stumps standing. 
 The larger trees he had girdled and killed, in 
 order that their foliage should not cast a shade. 
 He had then built a log cabin, plastering its 
 chinks with clay, and had set up a tall zigzag rail 
 fence around the scene of his havoc, to keep the 
 pigs and cattle out. Finally, he had irregularly 
 planted the intervals between the stumps and 
 trees with Indian corn, which grew among the 
 chips; and there he dwelt with his wife and 
 babes an axe, a gun, a few utensils, and some 
 pigs and chickens feeding in the woods, being the 
 sum total of his possessions. 
 
 The forest had been destroyed; and what had 
 * improved ' it out of existence was hideous, a sort 
 of ulcer, without a single element of artificial 
 grace to make up for the loss of Nature's beauty. 
 Ugly, indeed, seemed the life of the squatter, 
 scudding, as the sailors say, under bare poles, be- 
 ginning again away back where our first ancestors 
 started, and by hardly a single item the better off
 
 THE 'COVES' IN THE SMOKY MOUNTAINS 233 
 
 for all the achievements of the intervening genera- 
 tions. 
 
 Talk about going back to nature! I said to 
 myself, oppressed by the dreariness, as I drove 
 by. Talk of a country life for one's old age and 
 for one's children 1 Never thus, with nothing but 
 the bare ground and one's bare hands to fight the 
 battle I Never, without the best spoils of culture 
 woven in 1 The beauties and commodities gained 
 by the centuries are sacred. They are our heri- 
 tage and birthright. No modern person ought to 
 be willing to live a day in such a state of rudi- 
 mentariness and denudation. 
 
 Then I said to the mountaineer who was driv- 
 ing me, " What sort of people are they who have 
 to make these new clearings ? " " All of us," he 
 replied. " Why, we ain't happy here, unless we are 
 getting one of these coves under cultivation." I 
 instantly felt that I had been losing the whole in- 
 ward significance of the situation. Because to me 
 the clearings spoke of naught but denudation, I 
 thought that to those whose sturdy arms and 
 obedient axes had made them they could tell 
 no other story. But, when they looked on the 
 hideous stumps, what they thought of was personal 
 victory. The chips, the girdled trees, and the vile
 
 234 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 split rails spoke of honest sweat, persistent toil and 
 final reward. The cabin was a warrant of safety 
 for self and wife and babes. In short, the clear- 
 ing, which to me was a mere ugly picture on the 
 retina, was to them a symbol redolent with moral 
 memories and sang a very paean of duty, struggle, 
 and success. 
 
 I had been as blind to the peculiar ideality of 
 their conditions as they certainly would also have 
 been to the ideality of mine, had they had a peep 
 at my strange indoor academic ways of life at 
 Cambridge. 
 
 Wherever a process of life communicates an 
 eagerness to him who lives it, there the life 
 becomes genuinely significant. Sometimes the 
 eagerness is more knit up with the motor activi- 
 ties, sometimes with the perceptions, sometimes 
 with the imagination, sometimes with reflective 
 thought. But, wherever it is found, there is the 
 zest, the tingle, the excitement of reality; and 
 there t * importance' in the only real and posi- 
 tive sense in which importance ever anywhere 
 can be. 
 
 Robert Louis Stevenson has illustrated this by 
 a case, drawn from the sphere of the imagination,
 
 THE LANTERN BEARERS 235 
 
 in an essay which I really think deserves to be- 
 come immortal, both for the truth of its matter 
 and the excellence of its form. 
 
 "Toward the end of September," Stevenson 
 writes, "when school-time was drawing near, and 
 the nights were already black, we would begin to 
 sally from our respective villas, each equipped 
 with a tin bull's-eye lantern. The thing was so 
 well known that it had worn a rut in the com- 
 merce of Great Britain; and the grocers, about 
 the due time, began to garnish their windows with 
 our particular brand of luminary. We wore them 
 buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over 
 them, such was the rigor of the game, a buttoned 
 top-coat. They smelled noisomely of blistered tin. 
 They never burned aright, though they would 
 always burn our fingers. Their use was naught, 
 the pleasure of them merely fanciful, and yet a 
 boy with a bull's-eye under his top-coat asked for 
 nothing more. The fishermen used lanterns about 
 their boats, and it was from them, I suppose, that 
 we had got the hint ; but theirs were not bull's- 
 eyes, nor did we ever play at being fishermen. 
 The police carried them at their belts, and we had 
 plainly copied them in that ; yet we did not pre- 
 tend to be policemen. Burglars, indeed, we may
 
 236 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 have had some haunting thought of ; and we had 
 certainly an eye to past ages when lanterns were 
 more common, and to certain story-books in which 
 we had found them to figure very largely. But 
 take it for all in all, the pleasure of the thing was 
 substantive; and to be a boy with a bull's-eye 
 under his top-coat was good enough for us. 
 
 " When two of these asses met, there would be 
 an anxious 'Have you got your lantern?' and 
 a gratified ' Yes I ' That was the shibboleth, and 
 very needful, too ; for, as it was the rule to keep 
 our glory contained, none could recognize a lan- 
 tern-bearer unless (like the polecat) by the smell. 
 Four or five would sometimes climb into the belly 
 of a ten-man lugger, with nothing but the thwarts 
 above them, for the cabin was usually locked, 
 or chose out some hollow of the links where the 
 wind might whistle overhead. Then the coats 
 would be unbuttoned, and the bull's-eyes dis- 
 covered; and in the chequering glimmer, under 
 the huge, windy hall of the night, and cheered by 
 a rich steam of toasting tinware, these fortunate 
 young gentlemen would crouch together in the 
 cold sand of the links, or on the scaly bilges of the 
 fishing-boat, and delight them with inappropriate 
 talk. Woe is me that I cannot give some speci-
 
 STEVENSON QUOTED 237 
 
 mens ! . . . But the talk was but a condiment, and 
 these gatherings themselves only accidents in the 
 career of the lantern-bearer. The essence of this 
 bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night, 
 the slide shut, the top-coat buttoned, not a ray es- 
 caping, whether to conduct your footsteps or to 
 make your glory public, a mere pillar of dark- 
 ness in the dark ; and all the while, deep down in 
 the privacy of your fool's heart, to know you had 
 a bull's-eye at your belt, and to exult and sing 
 over the knowledge. 
 
 " It is said that a poet has died young in the 
 breast of the most stolid. It may be contended 
 rather that a (somewhat minor) bard in almost 
 every case survives, and is the spice of life to his 
 possessor. Justice is not done to the versatility 
 and the unplumbed childishness of man's imagi- 
 nation. His life from without may seem but a 
 rude mound of mud: there will be some golden 
 chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells de- 
 lighted ; and for as dark as his pathway seems 
 to the observer, he will have some kind of bull's- 
 eye at his belt. 
 
 ..." There is one fable that touches very near 
 the quick of life, the fable of the monk who 
 passed into the woods, heard a bird break into
 
 238 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 song, hearkened for a trill or two, and found him- 
 self at his return a stranger at his convent gates ; 
 for he had been absent fifty years, and of all his 
 comrades there survived but one to recognize him. 
 It is not only in the woods that this enchanter 
 carols, though perhaps he is native there. He 
 sings hi the most doleful places. The miser hears 
 him and chuckles, and his days are moments. 
 With no more apparatus than an evil-smelling 
 lantern, I have evoked him on the naked links. 
 All life that is not merely mechanical is spun out 
 of two strands, seeking for that bird and hearing 
 him. And it is just this that makes life so hard 
 to value, and the delight of each so incommu- 
 nicable. And it is just a knowledge of this, and 
 a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which 
 the bird has sung to w, that fills us with such 
 wonder when we turn to the pages of the realist 
 There, to be sure, we find a picture of life in so far 
 as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap de- 
 sires and cheap fears, that which we are ashamed 
 to remember and that which we are careless 
 whether we forget ; but of the note of that time- 
 devouring nightingale we hear no news. 
 
 ..." Say that we came [in such a realistic ro- 
 mance] on some such business as that of my Ian-
 
 STEVENSON QUOTED 239 
 
 tern-bearers on the links, and described the boys 
 as very cold, spat upon by flurries of rain, and 
 drearily surrounded, all of which they were ; and 
 their talk as silly and indecent, which it certainly 
 was. To the eye of the observer they are wet 
 and cold and drearily surrounded ; but ask them- 
 selves, and they are in the heaven of a recondite 
 pleasure, the ground of which is an ill-smelling 
 lantern. 
 
 " For, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is 
 often hard to hit. It may hinge at times upon a 
 mere accessory, like the lantern ; it may reside in 
 the mysterious inwards of psychology. ... It has 
 so little bond with externals . . . that it may even 
 touch them not, and the man's true life, for which 
 he consents to live, lie together in the field of 
 fancy. ... In such a case the poetry runs under- 
 ground. The observer (poor soul, with his docu- 
 ments !) is all abroad. For to look at the man is 
 but to court deception. We shall see the trunk 
 from which he draws his nourishment; but he 
 himself is above and abroad in the green dome 
 of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested 
 in by nightingales. And the true realism were 
 that of the poets, to climb after him like a squir- 
 rel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven in
 
 240 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 which he lives. And the true realism, always and 
 everywhere, is that of the poets : to find out where 
 joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing. 
 
 " For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy 
 of the actors lies the sense of any action. That 
 is the explanation, that the excuse. To one who 
 has not the secret of the lanterns the scene upon 
 the links is meaningless. And hence the haunt- 
 ing and truly spectral unreality of realistic books. 
 ... In each we miss the personal poetry, the en- 
 chanted atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy 
 that clothes what is naked and seems to ennoble 
 what is base ; in each, life falls dead like dough, 
 instead of soaring away like a balloon into the 
 colors of the sunset; each is true, each incon- 
 ceivable ; for no man lives in the external truth 
 among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantas- 
 magoric chamber of his brain, with the painted 
 windows and the storied wall." * 
 
 These paragraphs are the best thing I know in 
 all Stevenson. "To miss the joy is to miss all." 
 Indeed, it is. Yet we are but finite, and each one 
 of us has some single specialized vocation of his 
 own. And it seems as if energy in the service of 
 its particular duties might be got only by harden- 
 
 'Thc Lantern-bearers,' in the volume entitled ' Across the Plains.' 
 Abridged in the quotation.
 
 KOYCE QUOTED 241 
 
 ing the heart toward everything unlike them. 
 Our deadness toward all but one particular kind 
 of joy would thus be the price we inevitably have 
 to pay for being practical creatures. Only in 
 some pitiful dreamer, some philosopher, poet, or 
 romancer, or when the common practical man 
 becomes a lover, does the hard externality give 
 way, and a gleam of insight into the ejective 
 world, as Clifford called it, the vast world of inner 
 life beyond us, so different from that of outer 
 seeming, illuminate our mind. Then the whole 
 scheme of our customary values gets confounded, 
 then our self is riven and its narrow interests fly 
 to pieces, then a new centre and a new perspective 
 must be found. 
 
 The change is well described by my colleague, 
 Josiah Royce : 
 
 " What, then, is our neighbor ? Thou hast re- 
 garded his thought, his feeling, as somehow differ- 
 ent from thine. Thou hast said, A pain hi him 
 is not like a pain in me, but something far easier 
 to bear.' He seems to thee a little less living 
 than thou ; his life is dim, it is cold, it is a pale fire 
 beside thy own burning desires. ... So, dimly and 
 by instinct hast thou lived with thy neighbor, and 
 hast known him not, being blind. Thou hast made
 
 242 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 [of him] a thing, no Self at all. Have done with 
 this illusion, and simply try to learn the truth. 
 Pain is pain, joy is joy, everywhere, even as in thee. 
 In all the songs of the forest birds ; in all the cries 
 of the wounded and dying, straggling in the cap- 
 tor's power ; in the boundless sea where the myr- 
 iads of water-creatures strive and die; amid all 
 the countless hordes of savage men ; in all sick- 
 ness and sorrow; in all exultation and hope, 
 everywhere, from the lowest to the noblest, the 
 same conscious, burning, wilful life is found, end- 
 lessly manifold as the forms of the living creatures, 
 unquenchable as the fires of the sun, real as these 
 impulses that even now throb in thine own little 
 selfish heart. Lift up thy eyes, behold that life, 
 and then turn away, and forget it as thou canst ; 
 but, if thou hast known that, thou hast begun to 
 know thy duty." * 
 
 This higher vision of an inner significance in 
 what, until then, we had realized only in the dead 
 external way, often comes over a person suddenly ; 
 and, when it does so, it makes an epoch in his his- 
 tory. As Emerson says, there is a depth in those 
 moments that constrains us to ascribe more reality 
 
 The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, pp. 157-162 (abridged).
 
 OBERMANN QUOTED 243 
 
 to them than to all other experiences. The pas- 
 sion of love will shake one like an explosion, or 
 some act 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 per- 
 fume of the year. I felt all the happiness destined 
 for man. This unutterable harmony of souls, the 
 phantom of the ideal world, arose in me complete. 
 I never felt anything so great or so instantaneous. 
 I know not what shape, what analogy, what secret 
 of relation it was that made me see in this flower 
 a limitless beauty. ... I shall never enclose in 
 a conception this power, this immensity that noth- 
 ing will express ; this form that nothing will con- 
 tain j this ideal of a better world which one feels, 
 but which it would seem that nature has not 
 made." * 
 
 
 
 *De S^nancour : Obermann, Lettre XXX.
 
 244 TAXKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 Wordsworth and Shelley are similarly full of 
 this sense of a limitless significance in natural 
 things. In "Wordsworth it was a somewhat aus- 
 tere and moral significance, a 'lonely cheer.' 
 
 " To every natural form, rock, fruit, or flower, 
 Even the loose stones that cover the highway, 
 I gave a moral life: I saw them feel 
 Or linked them to some feeling: the great mass 
 Lay bedded in some quickening soul, and all 
 That I beheld respired with inward meaning." * 
 
 "Authentic tidings of in visible things !" Just 
 what this hidden presence in nature was, which 
 Wordsworth so rapturously felt, and in the light 
 of which he lived, tramping the hills for days 
 together, the poet never could explain logically or 
 in articulate conceptions. Yet to the reader who 
 may himself have had gleaming moments of a 
 similar sort the verses in which Wordsworth 
 simply proclaims the fact of them come with a 
 heart-satisfying authority: 
 
 " Magnificent 
 
 The morning rose, in memorable pomp, 
 Glorious as ere I had beheld. In front 
 The sea lay laughing at a distance; near 
 
 The Prelude, Book 111.
 
 WORDSWORTH'S INNER LIFE 245 
 
 The solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds, 
 Grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light; 
 And in the meadows and the lower grounds 
 Was all the sweetness of a common dawn, 
 Dews, vapors, and the melody of birds, 
 And laborers going forth to till the fields." 
 
 "Ah! need I say, dear Friend, that to the brim 
 My heart was full ; I made no vows, but vows 
 Were then made for me ; bond unknown to me 
 Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly, 
 A dedicated Spirit. On I walked, 
 In thankful blessedness, which yet survives." * 
 
 As Wordsworth walked, filled with his strange 
 inner joy, responsive thus to the secret life of 
 nature round about him, his rural neighbors, 
 tightly and narrowly intent upon their own affairs, 
 their crops and lambs and fences, must have 
 thought him a very insignificant and foolish per- 
 sonage. It surely never occurred to any one of 
 them to wonder what was going on inside of him 
 or what it might be worth. And yet that inner 
 life of his carried the burden of a significance that 
 has fed the souls of others, and fills them to this 
 day with inner joy. 
 
 Richard Jefferies has written a remarkable auto- 
 
 *The Prelude, Book IV.
 
 246 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 biographic document entitled The Story of my 
 Heart. It tells, in many pages, of the rapture 
 with which in youth the sense of the life of nature 
 filled him. On a certain lull-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 feel- 
 ing 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, hi no man- 
 ner can the thrilling depth of these feelings be 
 written, with these I prayed as if they were the 
 keys of an instrument. . . . The great sun, burn- 
 ing with light, the strong earth, dear earth, 
 the warm sky, the pure air, the thought of ocean, 
 the inexpressible beauty of all filled me with 
 a rapture, an ecstasy, an inflatus. With this in- 
 flatus, too, I prayed. . . . The prayer, this soul- 
 emotion, was in itself, not for an object: it was 
 a passion. I hid my face in the grass. I was 
 wholly prostrated, I lost myself in the wrestle, 
 I was rapt and carried away. . . . Had any shep- 
 herd 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
 
 RICHARD JEFFERIES QUOTED 247 
 
 have imagined the whirlwind of passion that was 
 going on in me as I reclined there ! " * 
 
 Surely, a worthless hour of life, when measured 
 by the usual standards of commercial value. Yet 
 in what other kind of value can the preciousness 
 of any hour, made precious by any standard, 
 consist, if it consist not in feelings of excited sig- 
 nificance like these, engendered in some one, by 
 what the hour contains ? 
 
 Yet so blind and dead does the clamor of our 
 own practical interests make us to all other things, 
 that it seems almost as if it were necessary to be- 
 come worthless as a practical being, if one is to 
 hope to attain to any breadth of insight into the 
 impersonal world of worths as such, to have any 
 perception of life's meaning on a large objective 
 scale. Only your mystic, your dreamer, or your 
 insolvent tramp or loafer, can afford so sympa- 
 thetic an occupation, an occupation which will 
 change the usual standards of human value in the 
 twinkling of an eye, giving to foolishness a place 
 ahead of power, and laying low in a minute the 
 distinctions which it takes a hard-working con- 
 ventional man a lifetime to build up. You may 
 be a prophet, at this rate ; but you cannot be a 
 worldly success. 
 
 * Op. cit., Boston, Roberts, 1883, pp. 5, 6.
 
 248 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 Walt Whitman, for instance, is accounted by 
 many of us a contemporary prophet. He abolishes 
 the usual human distinctions, brings all con- 
 ventionalisms into solution, and loves and cele- 
 brates hardly any human attributes save those 
 elementary ones common to all members of the 
 race. For this he becomes a sort of ideal tramp, 
 a rider on omnibus -tops and ferry-boats, and, 
 considered either practically or academically, a 
 worthless, unproductive being. His verses are 
 but ejaculations things mostly without subject 
 or verb, a succession of interjections on an im- 
 mense scale. He felt the human crowd as raptur- 
 ously as Wordsworth felt the mountains, felt it as 
 an overpoweringly significant presence, simply to 
 absorb -one's mind in which should be business 
 sufficient and worthy to fill the days of a serious 
 man. As he crosses Brooklyn ferry, this is what 
 lie feels : 
 
 Flood-tide below me ! I watch you, face to face ; 
 
 Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see 
 you also face to face. 
 
 Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! 
 how curious you are to me! 
 
 On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, 
 returning home, are more curious to me than you sup- 
 pose;
 
 WALT WHITMAN QUOTED 249 
 
 And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, 
 
 are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you 
 
 might suppose. 
 Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from 
 
 shore to shore ; 
 
 Others will watch the run of the flood-tide ; 
 Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, 
 
 and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east; 
 Others will see the islands large and small; 
 Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the 
 
 sun half an hour high. 
 A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years 
 
 hence, others will see them, 
 Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the flood-tide, the 
 
 falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide. 
 It avails not, neither time or place distance avails not. 
 Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I 
 
 felt; 
 Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a 
 
 crowd ; 
 Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and 
 
 the bright flow, I was refresh'd; 
 Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the 
 
 swift current, I stood, yet was hurried; 
 Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the 
 
 thick-stemmed pipes of steamboats, I looked. 
 I too many and many a time cross' d the river, the sun half 
 
 an hour high ; 
 I watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls I saw them high in 
 
 the air, with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies,
 
 250 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 I saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies, 
 and left the rest in strong shadow, 
 
 I saw the slow-wheeling circles, and the gradual edging 
 toward the south. 
 
 Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops, saw the ships 
 at anchor, 
 
 The sailors at work in the rigging, or out astride the spars; 
 
 The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups, 
 the frolicsome crests and glistening; 
 
 The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray 
 walls of the granite store-houses by the docks ; 
 
 On the neighboring shores, the fires from the foundry chim- 
 neys burning high .... into the night, 
 
 Casting their flicker of black .... into the clefts of streets. 
 
 These, and all else, were to me the same as they are to you.* 
 
 And so on, through the rest of a divinely beau- 
 tiful poem. And, if you wish to see what this 
 hoary loafer considered the most worthy way of 
 profiting by life's heaven-sent opportunities, read 
 the delicious volume of his letters to a young car- 
 conductor who had become his friend : 
 
 " NEW YOBK, Oct 9, 1868. 
 
 M Dear Pete, It is splendid here this forenoon 
 bright and cool. I was out early taking a short 
 
 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry * (abridged).
 
 WALT WHITMAN QUOTED 251 
 
 walk by the river only two squares from where I 
 live. . . . Shall I tell you about [my life] just to 
 fill up? I generally spend the forenoon in my 
 room writing, etc., then take a bath fix up and 
 go out about twelve and loafe somewhere or call 
 on someone down town or on business, or per- 
 haps if it is very pleasant and I feel like it ride 
 a trip with some driver friend on Broadway from 
 23rd Street to Bowling Green, three miles each 
 way. (Every day I find I have plenty to do, 
 every hour is occupied with something.) You 
 know it is a never ending amusement and study 
 and recreation for me to ride a couple of hours 
 on a pleasant afternoon on a Broadway stage in 
 this way. You see everything as you pass, a sort 
 of living, endless panorama shops and splendid 
 buildings and great windows : on the broad side- 
 walks crowds of women richly dressed continually 
 passing, altogether different, superior in style and 
 looks from any to be seen anywhere else in fact 
 a perfect stream of people men too dressed in 
 high style, and plenty of foreigners and then in 
 the streets the thick crowd of carriages, stages, 
 carts, hotel and private coaches, and in fact all 
 sorts of vehicles and many first class teams, mile 
 after mile, and the splendor of such a great street
 
 252 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 and so many tall, ornamental, noble buildings 
 many of them of white marble, and the gayety 
 and motion on every side: you will net wonder 
 how much attraction all this is on a fine day, to a 
 great loafer like me, who enjoys so much seeing 
 the busy world move by him, and exhibiting itself 
 for his amusement, while he takes it easy and just 
 looks on and observes." * 
 
 Truly a futile way of passing the time, some of 
 you may say, and not altogether creditable to a 
 grown-up man. And yet, from the deepest point 
 of view, who knows the more of truth, and who 
 knows the less, Whitman on his omnibus-top, 
 full of the inner joy with which the spectacle in- 
 spires him, or you, full of the disdain which the 
 futility of his occupation excites ? 
 
 When your ordinary Brooklynite or New Yorker, 
 leading a life replete with too much luxury, or tired 
 and careworn about his personal affairs, crosses 
 the ferry or goes up Broadway, his fancy does 
 not thus soar away into the colors of the sunset ' 
 as did Whitman's, nor does he inwardly realize at 
 all the indisputable fact that this world never did 
 anywhere or at any time contain more of essential 
 divinity, or of eternal meaning, than is embodied 
 
 * Calamus, Boston, 1897, pp. 41, 42,
 
 CAKLYLE AND SCHOPENHAUER 253 
 
 in the fields of vision over which his eyes so care- 
 lessly pass. There is life ; and there, a step away, 
 is death. There is the only kind of beauty there 
 ever was. There is the old human struggle and 
 its fruits together. There is the text and the 
 sermon, the real and the ideal in one. But to 
 the jaded and unquickened eye it is all dead and 
 common, pure vulgarism, flatness, and disgust. 
 " Hech ! it is a sad sight ! " says Carlyle, walking 
 at night with some one who appeals to him to 
 note the splendor of the stars. And that very 
 repetition of the scene to new generations of men 
 in secula seculorum, that eternal recurrence of the 
 common order, which so fills a Whitman with 
 mystic satisfaction, is to a Schopenhauer, with the 
 emotional anaesthesia, the feeling of * awful inner 
 emptiness ' from out of which he views it all, the 
 chief ingredient of the tedium it instils. What 
 is life on the largest scale, he asks, but the same 
 recurrent inanities, the same dog barking, the 
 same fly buzzing, forevermore ? Yet of the kind 
 of fibre of which such inanities consist is the 
 material woven of all the excitements, joys, and 
 meanings that ever were, or ever shall be, in this 
 world. 
 
 To be rapt with satisfied attention, like Whit-
 
 254 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 man, to the mere spectacle of the world's presence, 
 is one way, and the most fundamental way, of 
 confessing one's sense of its unfathomable signifi- 
 cance and importance. But how can one attain 
 to the feeling of the vital significance of an expe- 
 rience, 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 myste- 
 riously unexpected ways. It blossoms sometimes 
 from out of the very grave wherein we imagined 
 that our happiness was buried. Benvenuto Cel- 
 lini, after a life all in the outer sunshine, made 
 of adventures and artistic excitements, suddenly 
 finds himself cast into a dungeon hi 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 liis cavern. 
 He has religious visions. He sings psalms to him- 
 self, and composes hymns. And thinking, on the 
 last day of July, of the festivities customary on 
 the morrow in Rome, he says to himself: "All 
 these past years I celebrated this holiday with the
 
 BENVENUTO CELLINI AND TOLSTOI 255 
 
 vanities of the world: from this year hencefor- 
 ward I will do it with the divinity of God. And 
 then I said to myself, Oh, how much more happy 
 I am for this present life of mine than for all those 
 things remembered ! '" * 
 
 But the great understander of these mysterious 
 ebbs and flows is Tolstoi. They throb all through 
 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 reve- 
 lation to him of the real scale of life's values. 
 " Here only, and for the first time, he appreciated, 
 because he was deprived of it, the happiness of 
 eating when he was hungry, of drinking when 
 he was thirsty, of sleeping when he was sleepy, 
 and of talking when he felt the desire to exchange 
 some words. . . . Later in life he always recurred 
 with joy to this month of captivity, arid never 
 failed to speak with enthusiasm of the powerful 
 and ineffaceable sensations, and especially of the 
 moral calm which he had experienced at this 
 epoch. When at daybreak, on the morrow of his 
 
 * Vita, lib. 2, chap. iv.
 
 256 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 imprisonment, he saw [I abridge here Tolstoi's 
 description] the mountains with their wooded 
 slopes disappearing in the grayish mist; when 
 he felt the cool breeze caress him; when he 
 saw the light drive away the vapors, and the 
 sun rise majestically behind the clouds and cu- 
 polas, and the crosses, the dew, the distance, the 
 river, sparkle in the splendid, cheerful rays, his 
 heart overflowed with emotion. This emotion 
 kept continually with him, and increased a hun- 
 dred-fold as the difficulties of his situation grew 
 graver. . . . He learnt that man is meant for 
 happiness, and that this happiness is in him, in 
 the satisfaction of the daily needs of existence, 
 and that unhappiness is the fatal result, not of 
 our need, but of our abundance. . . . When calm 
 reigned in the camp, and the embers paled, and 
 little by little went out, the full moon had reached 
 the zenith. The woods and the fields roundabout 
 lay clearly visible ; and, beyond the inundation of 
 light which filled them, the view plunged into the 
 limitless horizon. Then Peter cast his eyes upon 
 the firmament, filled at that hour with myriads of 
 stars. All that is mine,' he thought ' All that 
 is in me, is me 1 And that is what they think they 
 have taken prisoner! That is what they have
 
 EMERSON AND NATURE 257 
 
 shut up in a cabin ! ' So he smiled, and turned in 
 to sleep among his comrades." * 
 
 The occasion and the experience, then, are 
 nothing. It all depends on the capacity of the 
 soul to be grasped, to have its life-currents ab- 
 sorbed by what is given. " Crossing a bare com- 
 mon," says Emerson, "in snow puddles, at twi- 
 light, under a clouded sky, without having in my 
 thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, 
 I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad 
 to the brink of fear." 
 
 Life is always worth living, if one have such 
 responsive sensibilities. But we of the highly 
 educated classes (so called) have most of us got 
 far, far away from Nature. We are trained to 
 seek the choice, the rare, the exquisite exclu- 
 sively, and to overlook the common. We are 
 stuffed with abstract conceptions, and glib with 
 verbalities and verbosities ; and in the culture of 
 these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy 
 connected with our simpler functions often dry up, 
 and we grow stone-blind and insensible to life's 
 more elementary and general goods and joys. 
 
 The remedy under such conditions is to descend 
 to a more profound and primitive level. To be 
 
 *La Guerre et la Paix, Paris, 1884, vol. iii. pp. 268, 275, 316.
 
 258 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 imprisoned or shipwrecked or forced into the 
 army would permanently show the good of life 
 to many an over-educated pessimist. Living in 
 the open air and on the ground, the lop-sided 
 beam of the balance slowly rises to the level line ; 
 and the over-sensibilities and insensibilities even 
 themselves out. The good of all the artificial 
 schemes and fevers fades and pales ; and that of 
 seeing, smelling, tasting, sleeping, and daring and 
 doing with one's body, grows and grows. The 
 savages and children of nature, to whom we deem 
 ourselves so much superior, certainly are alive 
 where we are often dead, along these lines; and, 
 could they write as glibly as we do, they would 
 read us impressive lectures on our impatience for 
 improvement and on our blindness to the funda- 
 mental static goods of life. "Ah! my brother," 
 said a chieftain to his white guest, "thou wilt 
 never know the happiness of both thinking of 
 nothing and doing nothing. Tliis, next to sleep, 
 is the most enchanting of all things. Thus we 
 were before our birth, and thus we shall be after 
 death. Thy people, . . . when they have finished 
 reaping one field, they begin to plough another; 
 and, if the day were not enough, I have seen 
 them plough by moonlight. What is their life to
 
 THE NON-THINKING LEVEL 259 
 
 ours, the life that is as naught to them ? Blind 
 that they are, they lose it all ! But we live in the 
 present." * 
 
 The intense interest that life can assume when 
 brought down to the non-thinking level, the 
 level of pure sensorial perception, has been beau- 
 tifully described by a man who can write, Mr. 
 W. H. Hudson, in his volume, "Idle Days hi 
 Patagonia." 
 
 " I spent the greater part of one winter," says 
 this admirable author, " at a point on the Rio 
 Negro, seventy or eighty miles from the sea. 
 
 ..." It was my custom to go out every morn- 
 ing on horseback with my gun, and, followed by 
 one dog, to ride away from the valley; and no 
 sooner would I climb the terrace, and plunge into 
 the gray, universal thicket, than I would find 
 myself as completely alone as if five hundred in- 
 stead of only five miles separated me from the 
 valley and river. So wild and solitary and re- 
 mote seemed that gray waste, stretching away 
 into infinitude, a waste untrodden by man, and 
 where the wild animals are so few that they 
 have made no discoverable path in the wilder- 
 ness of thorns. . . . Not once nor twice nor 
 
 * Quoted by Lotze, Microcosmus, English translation, vol. ii. p. 240.
 
 260 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 thrice, but day .after day I returned to this soli- 
 tude, going to it in the morning as if to attend 
 a festival, and leaving it only when hunger and 
 thirst and the westering sun compelled me. 
 And yet I had no object in going, no motive 
 which could be put into words; for, although I 
 carried a gun, there was nothing to shoot, the 
 shooting was all left behind in the valley. . . . 
 Sometimes I would pass a whole day without 
 seeing one mammal, and perhaps not more than 
 a dozen birds of any size. The weather at that 
 time was cheerless, generally with a gray film of 
 cloud spread over the sky, and a bleak wind, 
 often cold enough to make my bridle-hand quite 
 numb. . . . At a slow pace, which would have 
 seemed intolerable under other circumstances, I 
 would ride about for hours together at a stretch. 
 On arriving at a hill, I would slowly ride to its 
 summit, and stand there to survey the prospect. 
 On every side it stretched away in great undu- 
 lations, wild and irregular. How gray it all 
 was I Hardly less so near at hand than on the 
 haze-wrapped horizon where the hills were dim 
 and the outline obscured by distance. Descend- 
 ing from my outlook, I would take up my aim- 
 less wanderings again, and visit other elevations
 
 THE PATAGONIAN WILDERNESS 261 
 
 to gaze on the same landscape from another 
 point; and so on for hours. And at noon I 
 would dismount, and sit or lie on my folded 
 poncho for an hour or longer. One day in these 
 rambles I discovered a small grove composed of 
 twenty or thirty trees, growing at a convenient 
 distance apart, that had evidently been resorted 
 to by a herd of deer or other wild animals. This 
 grove was on a hill differing in shape from other 
 hills in its neighborhood; and, after a time, I 
 made a point of finding and using it as a rest- 
 ing-place every day at noon. I did not ask 
 myself why I made choice of that one spot, 
 sometimes going out of my way to sit there, 
 instead of sitting down under any one of the mill- 
 ions of trees and bushes on any other hillside. 
 I thought nothing about it, but acted uncon- 
 sciously. Only afterward it seemed to me that, 
 after having rested there once, each time I 
 wished to rest again, the wish came associated 
 with the image of that particular clump of trees, 
 with polished stems and clean bed of sand be- 
 neath; and in a short time I formed a habit of 
 returning, animal like, to repose at that same 
 spot. 
 
 " It was, perhaps, a mistake to say that I would
 
 262 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 sit down and rest, since I was never tired ; and 
 yet, without being tired, that noon-day pause, dur- 
 ing which I sat for an hour without moving, was 
 strangely grateful. All day there would be no 
 sound, not even the rustling of a leaf. One day, 
 while listening to the silence, it occurred to my 
 mind to wonder what the effect would be if I 
 were to shout aloud. This seemed at the tune a 
 horrible suggestion, which almost made me shud- 
 der. But during those solitary days it was a rare 
 thing for any thought to cross my mind. In the 
 state of mind I was in, thought had become im- 
 possible. My state was one of suspense and watch- 
 fulness ; yet I had no expectation of meeting an 
 adventure, and felt as free from apprehension as 
 I feel now while sitting in a room hi London. 
 The state seemed familiar rather than strange, 
 and accompanied by a strong feeling of elation; 
 and I did not know that something had come be- 
 tween me and my intellect until I returned to my 
 former self, to thinking, and the old insipid ex- 
 istence [again]. 
 
 " I had undoubtedly gone back ; and that state 
 of intense watchfulness or alertness, rather, with 
 suspension of the higher intellectual faculties, re- 
 presented the mental state of the pure savage. He
 
 FELICITY OF THE SENSORIAL LIFE 263 
 
 thinks little, reasons little, having a surer guide 
 in his [mere sensory perceptions]. He is in per- 
 fect harmony with nature, and is nearly on a level, 
 mentally, with the wild animals he preys on, and 
 which in their turn sometimes prey on him." * 
 
 For the spectator, such hours as Mr. Hudson 
 writes of form a mere tale of emptiness, in which 
 nothing happens, nothing is gained, and there is 
 nothing to describe. They are meaningless and 
 vacant tracts of time. To him who feels their 
 inner secret, they tingle with an importance that 
 unutterably vouches for itself. I am sorry for the 
 boy or girl, or man or woman, who has never been 
 touched by the spell of this mysterious 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 irrespon- 
 sible spelL 
 
 And now what is the result of all these consid- 
 erations and quotations? It is negative in one 
 sense, but positive in another. It absolutely for- 
 bids us to be forward in pronouncing on the 
 
 * Op. tit., pp. 210-222 (abridged).
 
 264 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 meaninglessness of forms of existence other than 
 our own ; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, 
 and indulge those whom we see harmlessly inter- 
 ested and happy in their own ways, however unin- 
 telligible these may be to us. Hands off : neither 
 the whole of truth nor the whole of good is re- 
 vealed to any single observer, although each ob- 
 server gains a partial superiority of insight from 
 the peculiar position in which he stands. Even 
 prisons and sick-rooms have their special revela- 
 tions. It is enough to ask of each of us that he 
 should be faithful to his own opportunities and 
 make the most of his own blessings, without pre- 
 suming to regulate the rest of the vast field.
 
 III. 
 
 WHAT MAKES A LIFE SIGNIFICANT 
 
 IN my previous talk, * On a Certain Blindness,' 
 I tried to make you feel how soaked and shot- 
 through life is with values and meanings which 
 we fail to realize because of our external and in- 
 sensible point of view. The meanings are there 
 for the others, but they are not there for us. 
 There lies more than a mere interest of curious 
 speculation in understanding this. It has the 
 most tremendous practical importance. I wish 
 that I could convince you of it as I feel it myself. 
 It is the basis of all our tolerance, social, relig- 
 ious, and political. The forgetting of it lies at 
 the root of every stupid and sanguinary mistake 
 that rulers over subject-peoples make. The first 
 thing to learn in intercourse with others is non- 
 interference with their own peculiar ways of being 
 happy, provided those ways do not assume to 
 interfere by violence with ours. No one has in-
 
 266 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 sight into all the ideals. No one should presume 
 to judge them off-hand. The pretension to dog- 
 matize about them in each other is the root of 
 most human injustices and cruelties, and the trait 
 in human character most likely to make the angels 
 weep. 
 
 Every Jack sees in his own particular Jill 
 charms and perfections to the enchantment of 
 which we stolid onlookers are stone-cold. And 
 which has the superior view of the absolute truth, 
 he or we? Which has the more vital 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 pathologi- 
 cal anaesthesia as regards Jill's magical impor- 
 tance ? Surely the latter j surely to Jack are 
 the profounder truths revealed ; surely poor Jill's 
 palpitating little life-throbs are among the won- 
 ders 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 real- 
 izes Jill concretely, and we do not. He strug- 
 gles toward a union with her inner life, divining 
 her feelings, anticipating her desires, understand- 
 ing her limits as manfully as he can, and yet 
 inadequately, too; for he is also afflicted with
 
 LOVE DISPELS BLINDNESS 26 T 
 
 some blindness, even here. Whilst we, dead 
 clods that we are, do not even seek after these 
 things, but are contented that that portion of 
 eternal fact named Jill should be for us as 
 if it were not. Jill, who knows her inner life, 
 knows that Jack's way of taking it so im- 
 portantly is the true and serious way ; and she 
 responds to the truth in him by taking him truly 
 and seriously, too. May the ancient blindness 
 never wrap its clouds about either of them 
 again! Where would any of us be, were there 
 no one willing to know us as we really are 
 or ready to repay us for our insight by making 
 recognizant return? We ought, all of us, to 
 realize each other in this intense, pathetic, and 
 important way. 
 
 If you say that this is absurd, and that we can- 
 not be in love with everyone at once, I merely 
 point out to you that, as a matter of fact, certain 
 persons do exist with an enormous capacity for 
 friendship and for taking delight in other people's 
 lives ; and that such persons know more of truth 
 than if their hearts were not so big. The vice of 
 ordinary Jack and Jill affection is not its inten- 
 sity, but its exclusions and its jealousies. Leave 
 those out, and you see that the ideal I am holding
 
 268 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 up before you, however impracticable to-day, yet 
 contains nothing intrinsically absurd. 
 
 We have unquestionably a great cloud-bank of 
 ancestral blindness weighing down upon us, only 
 transiently riven here and there by fitful revela- 
 tions of the truth. It is vain to hope for this 
 state of tilings to alter much. Our inner secrets 
 must remain for the most part impenetrable by 
 others, for beings as essentially practical as we are 
 are necessarily short of sight. But, if we cannot 
 gain much positive insight into one another, can- 
 not we at least use our sense of our own blindness 
 to make us more cautious in going over the dark 
 places ? Cannot we escape some of those 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 toler- 
 ance less chaotic. And, as I began my previous 
 lecture by a personal reminiscence, I am going to 
 ask your indulgence for a similar bit of egotism 
 now. 
 
 A few summers ago I spent a happy week at 
 the famous Assembly Grounds on the borders of 
 Chautauqua Lake. The moment one treads that 
 sacred enclosure, one feels one's self in an atmos-
 
 CHAUTAUQUA 269 
 
 phere of success. Sobriety and industry, intelli- 
 gence and goodness, orderliness and ideality, pros- 
 perity and cheerfulness, pervade the air. It is a 
 serious and studious picnic on a gigantic scale. 
 Here you have a town of many thousands of in- 
 habitants, beautifully laid out in the forest and 
 drained, and equipped with means for satisfying 
 all the necessary lower and most of the super- 
 fluous higher wants of man. You have a first- 
 class college in full blast. You have magnificent 
 music a chorus of seven hundred voices, with 
 possibly the most perfect open-air auditorium in 
 the world. You have every sort of athletic exer- 
 cise from sailing, rowing, swimming, bicycling, to 
 the ball-field and the more artificial doings which 
 the gymnasium affords. You have kindergartens 
 and model secondary schools. You have general 
 religious services and special club-houses for the 
 several sects. You have perpetually running soda- 
 water fountains, and daily popular lectures by 
 distinguished men. You have the best of com- 
 pany, and yet no effort. You have no zymotic 
 diseases, no poverty, no drunkenness, no crime, 
 no police. You have culture, you have kindness, 
 you have cheapness, you have equality, you have 
 the best fruits of what mankind has fought and
 
 270 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 bled and striven for under the name of civiliza- 
 tion for centuries. You have, in short, a fore- 
 taste of what human society might be, were it 
 all in the light, with no suffering and no dark 
 corners. 
 
 I went in curiosity for a day. I stayed for a 
 week, held spell-bound by the charm and ease of 
 everything, by the middle-class paradise, without 
 a sin, without a victim, without a blot, without a 
 tear. 
 
 And yet what was my own astonishment, on 
 emerging into the dark and wicked world again, 
 to catch myself quite unexpectedly and involunta- 
 rily saying : " Ouf ! what a relief 1 Now for some- 
 thing primordial and savage, even though it were 
 as bad as an Armenian massacre, to set the bal- 
 ance straight again. This order is too tame, this 
 culture too second-rate, this goodness too unin- 
 spiring. 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
 
 CHAUTAUQUA 271 
 
 are the heights and depths, the precipices and the 
 steep ideals, the gleams of the awful and the in- 
 finite ; and there is more hope and help a thousand 
 times than in this dead level and quintessence of 
 every mediocrity." 
 
 Such was the sudden right-about-face performed 
 for me by my lawless fancy! There had been 
 spread before me the realization on a small, 
 sample scale of course of all the ideals for which 
 our civilization has been striving: security, in- 
 telligence, humanity, and order; and here was 
 the instinctive hostile reaction, not of the natural 
 man, but of a so-called cultivated man upon such 
 a Utopia. There seemed thus to be a self-contra- 
 diction and paradox somewhere, which I, as a pro- 
 fessor drawing a full salary, was in duty bound to 
 unravel and explain, if I could. 
 
 So I meditated. And, first of all, I asked myself 
 what the thing was that was so lacking in this 
 Sabbatical city, and the lack of which kept one 
 forever falling short of the higher sort of content- 
 ment. And I soon recognized that it was the ele- 
 ment that gives to the wicked outer world all its 
 moral style, expressiveness and picturesqueness, 
 the element of precipitousness, so to call it, of 
 strength and strenuousness, intensity and danger.
 
 272 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 What excites and interests the looker-on at life, 
 what the romances and the statues celebrate and 
 the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the 
 everlasting battle of the powers of light with 
 those of darkness; with heroism, reduced to its 
 bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory 
 from the jaws of death. But in this unspeakable 
 Chautauqua there was no potentiality of death in 
 sight anywhere, and no point of the compass 
 visible from which danger might possibly appear. 
 The ideal was so completely victorious already 
 that no sign of any previous battle remained, 
 the place just resting on its oars. But what our 
 human emotions seem to require is the sight 
 of the struggle going on. The moment the fruits 
 are being merely eaten, things become ignoble. 
 Sweat and effort, human nature strained to its 
 uttermost and on the rack, yet getting through 
 alive, and then turning its back on its success to 
 pursue another more rare and arduous still this is 
 the sort of thing the presence of which inspires us, 
 and the reality of which it seems to be the func- 
 tion of all the higher forms of literature and fine 
 art to bring home to us and suggest. At Chau- 
 tauqua there were no racks, even in the place's 
 historical museum ; and no sweat, except possibly
 
 GROWING TAMENESS OF THE WOULD 273 
 
 the gentle moisture on the brow of some lecturer, 
 or on the sides of some player in the ball-field. 
 
 Such absence of human nature in extremis any- 
 where seemed, then, a sufficient explanation for 
 Chautauqua's flatness and lack of zest. 
 
 But was not this a paradox well calculated to 
 fill one with dismay? It looks indeed, thought I, 
 as if the romantic idealists with their pessimism 
 about our civilization were, after all, quite right. 
 An irremediable flatness is coming over the world. 
 Bourgeoisie and mediocrity, church sociables and 
 teachers' conventions, are taking the place of the 
 old heights and depths and romantic chiaroscuro. 
 And, to get human life in its wild intensity, we 
 must hi 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 G-esang soil leben muss im Leben untergehn. 
 Even now, in our own country, correctness, fair- 
 ness, and compromise for every small advantage 
 are crowding out all other qualities. The higher
 
 274 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 heroisms and the old rare flavors are passing out 
 of life.* 
 
 With these thoughts hi my mind, I was speed- 
 ing with the train toward Buffalo, when, near 
 that city, the sight of a workman doing some- 
 thing on the dizzy edge of a sky-scaling iron con- 
 struction brought me to my senses very suddenly. 
 And now I perceived, by a flash of insight, that 
 I had been steeping myself hi pure ancestral 
 blindness, and looking at life with the eyes of a 
 remote spectator. Wishing for heroism and the 
 spectacle of human nature on the rack, I had never 
 noticed the great fields of heroism lying round 
 about me, I had failed to see it present and alive. 
 I could only think of it as dead and embalmed, 
 labelled and costumed, as it is in the pages of 
 romance. And yet there it was before me in the 
 daily lives of the laboring classes. Not in clang- 
 ing fights and desperate marches only is heroism 
 to be looked for, but on every railway bridge and 
 fire-proof building that is going up to-day. On 
 freight-trains, on the decks of vessels, hi cattle- 
 yards and mines, on lumber-rafts, among the fire- 
 
 Thia address was composed before the Cuban and Philippine 
 wars. Such outbursts of the passion of mastery are, however, only 
 episodes in a social process which in the long run seems everywhere 
 tending toward the Chautauquan ideals.
 
 THE HEROIC ASPECT OF COMMON LABOR 275 
 
 men and the policemen, the demand for courage 
 is incessant ; and the supply never fails. There, 
 every day of the year somewhere, is human nat- 
 ure in extremis for you. And wherever a scythe, 
 an axe, a pick, or a shovel is wielded, you have 
 it sweating and aching and with its powers of 
 patient endurance racked to the utmost under 
 the length of hours of the strain. 
 
 As I awoke to all this unidealized heroic life 
 around me, the scales seemed to fall from my eyes ; 
 and a wave of sympathy greater than anything I 
 had ever before felt with the common life of 
 common men began to fill my soul. It began to 
 seem as if virtue with horny hands and dirty 
 skin were the only virtue genuine and vital 
 enough to take account of. Every other virtue 
 poses ; none is absolutely unconscious and simple, 
 and unexpectant of decoration or recognition, like 
 this. These are our soldiers, thought I, these 
 our sustainers, these the very parents of our 
 life. 
 
 Many years ago, when in Vienna, I had 
 had a similar feeling of awe and reverence in 
 looking at the peasant-women, in from the coun- 
 try on their business at the market for the day. 
 Old hags many of them were, dried and brown
 
 276 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 and wrinkled, kerchiefed and short-petticoated, 
 with thick wool stockings on their bony shanks, 
 stumping through the glittering thoroughfares, 
 looking neither to the right nor the left, bent 
 on duty, envying nothing, humble-hearted, re- 
 mote; and yet at bottom, when you came to 
 think of it, bearing the whole fabric of the splen- 
 dors and corruptions of that city on their labori- 
 ous backs. For where would any of it have been 
 without their unremitting, unrewarded labor in 
 the fields? And so with us: not to our gen- 
 erals and poets, I thought, but to the Italian and 
 Hungarian laborers hi the Subway, rather, ought 
 the monuments of gratitude and reverence of 
 a city like Boston to be reared. 
 
 If any of you have been readers of Tolstoi, you 
 will see that I passed into a vein of feeling simi- 
 lar to his, with its abhorrence of all that conven- 
 tionally passes for distinguished, and its exclusive 
 deification of the bravery, patience, kindliness, 
 and dumbness of the unconscious natural man. 
 
 Where now is our Tolstoi, I said, to bring the 
 truth of all this home to our American bosoms, 
 fill us with a better insight, and wean us away 
 from that spurious literary romanticism on which
 
 THE DIVINE IS THE COMMON 277 
 
 our \vretched culture as it calls itself is fed ? 
 Divinity lies all about us, and culture is too hide- 
 bound to even suspect the fact. Could a Howells 
 or a Kipling be enlisted in this mission? or are 
 they still too deep in the ancestral blindness, and 
 not humane enough for the inner joy and meaning 
 of the laborer's existence to be really revealed? 
 Must we wait for some one born and bred and 
 living as a laborer himself, but who, by grace of 
 Heaven, shall also find a literary voice? 
 
 And there I rested on that day, with a sense of 
 widening of vision, and with what it is surely fair 
 to call an increase of religious insight into life. 
 In God's eyes the differences of social position, 
 of intellect, of culture, of cleanliness, of dress, 
 which different men exhibit, and all the other 
 rarities and exceptions on which they so fantasti- 
 cally pin their pride, must be so small as practi- 
 cally quite to vanish ; and all that should remain 
 is the common fact that here we are, a countless 
 multitude of vessels of life, each of us pent in to 
 peculiar difficulties, with which we must sev- 
 erally struggle by using whatever of fortitude 
 and goodness we can summon up. The exercise 
 of the courage, patience, and kindness, must be 
 the significant portion of the whole business;
 
 278 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 and the distinctions of position can only be a 
 manner of diversifying the phenomenal surface 
 upon which these underground virtues may mani- 
 fest their effects. At this rate, the deepest human 
 life is everywhere, is eternal. And, if any human 
 attributes exist only in particular individuals, 
 they must belong to the mere trapping and dec- 
 oration of the surface-show. 
 
 Thus are men's lives levelled up as well as 
 levelled down, levelled up in their common inner 
 meaning, levelled down in their outer gloriousness 
 and show. Yet always, we must confess, this 
 levelling insight tends to be obscured again ; and 
 always the ancestral blindness returns and wraps 
 us up, so that we end once more by thinking that 
 creation can be for no other purpose than to 
 develop remarkable situations and conventional 
 distinctions and merits. And then always some 
 new leveller in the shape of a religious prophet 
 has to arise the Buddha, the Christ, or some 
 Saint Francis, some Rousseau or Tolstoi to 
 redispel our blindness. Yet, little by little, there 
 comes some stable gain ; for the world does get 
 more humane, and the religion of democracy 
 tends toward permanent increase.
 
 TOLSTOI ON COMMON PEOPLE 279 
 
 This, as I said, became for a time my convic- 
 tion, and gave me great content. I have put the 
 matter into the form of a personal reminiscence, so 
 that I might lead you into it more directly and 
 completely, and so save time. But now I am 
 going to discuss the rest of it with you in a more 
 impersonal way. 
 
 Tolstoi's levelling philosophy began long before 
 he had the crisis of melancholy commemorated in 
 that wonderful document of his entitled ' My Con- 
 fession,' which led the way to his more specifically 
 religious works. In his masterpiece 'War and 
 Peace,' assuredly the greatest of human novels, 
 the role of the spiritual hero is given to a poor little 
 soldier named Karataieff, so helpful, so cheerful, 
 and so devout that, in spite of his ignorance and 
 filthiness, the sight of him opens the heavens, 
 which have been closed, to the mind of the prin- 
 cipal character of the book ; and his example evi- 
 dently is meant by Tolstoi to let God into the 
 world again for the reader. Poor little Karataieff 
 is taken prisoner by the French ; and, when too ex- 
 hausted by hardship and fever to march, is shot as 
 other prisoners were in the famous retreat from 
 Moscow. The last view one gets of him is his 
 little figure leaning against a white birch-tree, and 
 uncomplainingly awaiting the end.
 
 280 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 "The more," writes Tolstoi in the work 'My 
 Confession,' "the more I examined the life of 
 these laboring folks, the more persuaded I be- 
 came that they veritably have faith, and get 
 from it alone the sense and the possibility of 
 life. . . . Contrariwise to those of our own class, 
 who protest against destiny and grow indignant 
 at its rigor, these people receive maladies and 
 misfortunes without revolt, without opposition, 
 and with a firm and tranquil confidence that all 
 had to be like that, could not be otherwise, 
 and that it is all right so. ... The more we live 
 by our intellect, the less we understand the 
 meaning of life. We see only a cruel jest in suf- 
 fering and death, whereas these people live, suffer, 
 and draw near to death with tranquillity, and of- 
 tener than not with joy. . . . There are enormous 
 multitudes of them happy with the most perfect 
 happiness, although deprived of what for us is the 
 sole good of life. Those who understand life's 
 meaning, and know how to live and die thus, are 
 to be counted not by twos, threes, tens, but by hun- 
 dreds, thousands, millions. They labor quietly, 
 endure privations and pains, live and die, and 
 throughout everything see the good without see- 
 ing the vanity. I had to love these people. The
 
 STEVENSON ON COMMON PEOPLE 281 
 
 more I entered into their life, the more I loved 
 them; and the more it became possible for me 
 to live, too. It came about not only that the 
 life of our society, of the learned and of the 
 rich, disgusted me more than that, it lost all 
 semblance of meaning in my eyes. All our ac- 
 tions, our deliberations, our sciences, our arts, 
 all appeared to me with a new significance. 
 I understood that these things might be charm- 
 ing pastimes, but that one need seek in them 
 no depth, whereas the life of the hard-work- 
 ing populace, of that multitude of human be- 
 ings who really contribute to existence, ap- 
 peared to me in its true light. I understood that 
 there veritably is life, that the meaning which life 
 there receives is the truth ; and I accepted it." * 
 
 In a similar way does Stevenson appeal to our 
 piety toward the elemental virtue of mankind. 
 
 " What a wonderful thing," he writes, f " is this 
 Man! How surprising are his attributes! Poor 
 soul, here for so little, cast among so many 
 hardships, savagely surrounded, savagely de- 
 scended, irremediably condemned to prey upon 
 his fellow-lives, who should have blamed him, 
 
 My Confession, X. (condensed). 
 
 t Across the Plains : " Pulvis et Umbra " (abridged).
 
 282 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 had he been of a piece with his destiny and a 
 being merely barbarous? . . . [Yet] it matters not 
 where we look, under what climate we observe 
 him, in what stage of society, in what depth 
 of ignorance, burdened with what erroneous mo- 
 rality; in ships at sea, a man inured to hard- 
 ship and vile pleasures, his brightest hope a 
 fiddle in a tavern, and a bedizened trull who 
 sells herself to rob him, and he, for all that, 
 simple, innocent, cheerful, kindly like a child, 
 constant to toil, brave to drown, for others ; . . . 
 in the slums of cities, moving among indiffer- 
 ent millions to mechanical employments, with- 
 out hope of change in the future, with scarce a 
 pleasure in the present, and yet true to his 
 virtues, honest up to his lights, kind to his 
 neighbors, tempted perhaps in vain by the bright 
 gin-palace, . . . often repaying the world's scorn 
 with service, often standing firm upon a scruple ; 
 . . . everywhere some virtue cherished or affected, 
 everywhere some decency of thought and cour- 
 age, everywhere the ensign of man's ineffectual 
 goodness, ah I if I could show you this ! If I 
 could show you these men and women all the 
 world over, in every stage of history, under 
 every abuse of error, under every circumstance
 
 TOLSTOI'S ONE-SIDEDNESS 283 
 
 of failure, without hope, without help, without 
 thanks, still obscurely fighting the lost fight of 
 virtue, still clinging to some rag of honor, the 
 poor jewel of their souls." 
 
 All this is as true as it is splendid, and terribly 
 do we need our Tolstois and Stevensons to keep 
 our sense for it alive. Yet you remember the 
 Irishman who, when asked, "Is not one man as 
 good as another?" replied, "Yes; and a great 
 deal better, too!" Similarly (it seems to me) 
 does Tolstoi overcorrect our social prejudices, 
 when he makes his love of the peasant so ex- 
 clusive, and hardens his heart toward the edu- 
 cated man as absolutely as he does. Grant that 
 at Chautauqua there was little moral effort, little 
 sweat or muscular strain in view. Still, deep 
 down in the souls of the participants we may be 
 sure that something of the sort was hid, some 
 inner stress, some vital virtue not found wanting 
 when required. And, after all, the question re- 
 curs, and forces itself upon us, Is it so certain 
 that the surroundings and circumstances of the 
 virtue do make so little difference in the impor- 
 tance of the result ? Is the functional utility, the 
 worth to the universe of a certain definite amount 
 of courage, kindliness, and patience, no greater if
 
 284 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 the possessor of these virtues is in an educated 
 situation, working out far-reaching tasks, than if 
 he be an illiterate nobody, hewing wood and 
 drawing water, just to keep himself alive ? Tol- 
 stoi's philosophy, deeply enlightening though it 
 certainly is, remains a false abstraction. It sa- 
 vors too much of that Oriental pessimism and 
 nihilism of his, which declares the whole phenom- 
 enal world and its facts and their distinctions to 
 be a cunning fraud. 
 
 A mere bare fraud is just what our Western 
 common sense will never believe the phenomenal 
 world to be. It admits fully that the inner joys 
 and virtues are the essential part of life's business, 
 but it is sure that some positive part is also played 
 by the adjuncts of the show. If it is idiotic in 
 romanticism to recognize the heroic only when it 
 sees it labelled and dressed-up in books, it is really 
 just as idiotic to see it only in the dirty boots and 
 sweaty shirt of some one in the fields. It is with 
 us really under every disguise : at Chautauqua ; 
 here in your college; in the stock-yards and on 
 the freight-trains; and in the czar of Russia's 
 court. But, instinctively, we make a combination 
 of two things in judging the total significance of
 
 WALTER WYCKOFF QUOTED 285 
 
 a human being. We feel it to be some sort of a 
 product (if such a product only could be calcu- 
 lated) of his inner virtue and his outer place, 
 neither singly taken, but both conjoined. If the 
 outer differences had no meaning for life, why in- 
 deed should all this immense variety of them 
 exist ? They must be significant elements of the 
 world as well. 
 
 Just test Tolstoi's deification of the mere man- 
 ual laborer by the facts. This is what Mr. Walter 
 Wyckoff, after working as an unskilled laborer in 
 the demolition of some buildings at West Point, 
 writes of the spiritual condition of the class of 
 men to which he temporarily chose to belong: 
 
 " The salient features of our condition are plain 
 enough. We are grown men, and are without a 
 trade. In the labor-market we stand ready to sell 
 to the highest bidder our mere muscular strength 
 for so many hours each day. We are thus in the 
 lowest grade of labor. And, selling our muscular 
 strength in the open market for what it will 
 bring, we sell it under peculiar conditions. It is 
 all the capital that we have. We have no reserve 
 means of subsistence, and cannot, therefore, stand 
 off for a ' reserve price.' We sell under the ne- 
 cessity of satisfying imminent hunger. Broadly
 
 286 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 speaking, we must sell our labor or starve ; and, 
 as hunger is a matter of a few hours, and we have 
 no other way of meeting this need, we must sell 
 at once for what the market offers for our labor. 
 
 " Our employer is buying labor in a dear market, 
 and he will certainly get from us as much work as 
 he can at the price. The gang-boss is secured for 
 this purpose, and thoroughly does he know his 
 business. He has sole command of us. He never 
 saw us before, and he will discharge us all when 
 the debris is cleared away. In the mean time he 
 must get from us, if he can, the utmost of physical 
 labor which we, individually and collectively, are 
 capable of. If he should drive some of us to ex- 
 haustion, and we should not be able to continue at 
 work, he would not be the loser ; for the market 
 would soon supply him with others to take our 
 places. 
 
 " We are ignorant men, but so much we clearly 
 see, that we have sold our labor where we could 
 sell it dearest, and our employer has bought it 
 where he could buy it cheapest. He has paid 
 high, and he must get all the labor that he can ; 
 and, by a streng instinct which possesses us, we 
 shall part with as little as we can. From work 
 like ours there seems to us to have been elimi-
 
 WALTER WYCKOFF QUOTED 287 
 
 nated every element which constitutes the nobility 
 of labor. We feel no personal pride in its prog- 
 ress, and no community of interest with our em- 
 ployer. There is none of the joy of responsibility, 
 none of the sense of achievement, only the dull 
 monotony of grinding toil, with the longing for the 
 signal to quit work, and for our wages at the end. 
 
 " And being what we are, the dregs of the labor- 
 market, and having no certainty of permanent em- 
 ployment, and no organization among ourselves, 
 we must expect to work under the watchful eye 
 of a gang-boss, and be driven, like the wage-slaves 
 that we are, through our tasks. 
 
 " All this is to tell us, in effect, that our lives 
 are hard, barren, hopeless lives." 
 
 And such hard, barren, hopeless lives, surely, 
 are not lives in which one ought to be willing 
 permanently to remain. And why is this so ? Is 
 it because they are so dirty? Well, Nansen grew 
 a great deal dirtier on his polar expedition ; and we 
 think none the worse of his life for that. Is it the 
 insensibility ? Our soldiers have to grow vastly 
 more insensible, and we extol them to the skies. 
 Is it the poverty? Poverty has been reckoned the 
 crowning beauty of many a heroic career. Is it 
 the slavery to a task, the loss of finer pleasures?
 
 288 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 Such slavery and loss are of the very essence of 
 the higher fortitude, and are always counted to its 
 credit, read the records of missionary devotion 
 all over the world. It is not any one of these 
 things, then, taken by itself, no, nor all of them 
 together, that make such a life undesirable. A 
 man might in truth live like an unskilled laborer, 
 and do the work of one, and yet count as one of the 
 noblest of God's creatures. Quite possibly there 
 were some such persons in the gang that our author 
 describes ; but the current of their souls ran under- 
 ground ; and he was too steeped in the ancestral 
 blindness to discern it. 
 
 If there were any such morally exceptional indi- 
 viduals, however, what made them different from 
 the rest? It can only have been this, that their 
 souls worked and endured in obedience to some 
 inner ideal, while their comrades were not actu- 
 ated by anything worthy of that name. These 
 ideals of other lives are among those secrets that 
 we can almost never penetrate, although some- 
 thing about the man may often tell us when they 
 are there. In Mr. 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
 
 PHILLIPS BROOKS ON POVERTY 289 
 
 wished to enlarge his sympathetic insight into fel- 
 low-lives. For this his sweat and toil acquire a 
 certain heroic significance, and make us accord to 
 him exceptional esteem. But it is easy to imagine 
 his fellows with various other ideals. To say noth- 
 ing of wives and babies, one may have been a con- 
 vert of the Salvation Army, and had a nightingale 
 singing of expiation and forgiveness in his heart 
 all the while he labored. Or there might have 
 been an apostle like Tolstoi himself, or his compa- 
 triot Bondareff, in the gang, voluntarily embrac- 
 ing labor as their religious mission. Class-loyalty 
 was undoubtedly an ideal with many. And who 
 knows how much of that higher manliness of pov- 
 erty, of which Phillips Brooks has spoken so pene- 
 tratingly, was or was not present in that gang? 
 
 " A rugged, barren land," says Phillips Brooks, 
 " is poverty to live in, a land where I am thank- 
 ful very often if I can get a berry or a root to eat. 
 But living in it really, letting it bear witness to 
 me of itself, not dishonoring it all the time by 
 judging it after the standard of the other lands, 
 gradually there come out its qualities. Behold! 
 no land like this barren and naked land of pov- 
 erty could show the moral geology of the world. 
 See how the hard ribs . . . stand out strong and
 
 200 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 solid. No life like poverty could so get one to 
 the heart of things and make men know their 
 meaning, could so let us feel life and the world 
 with all the soft cushions stripped off and thrown 
 away. . . . Poverty makes men come very near 
 each other, and recognize each other's human 
 hearts; and poverty, highest and best of all, de- 
 mands and cries out for faith in God. ... I know 
 how superficial and unfeeling, how like mere 
 mockery, words in praise of poverty may seem. . . . 
 But I am sure that the poor man's dignity and 
 freedom, his self-respect and energy, depend upon 
 his cordial knowledge that his poverty is a true 
 region and kind of life, with its own chances of 
 character, its own springs of happiness and reve- 
 lations of God. Let him resist the characterless- 
 ness which often come with being poor. Let him 
 insist on respecting the condition where he lives. 
 Let him learn to love it, so that by and by, [if] he 
 grows rich, he shall go out of the low door of the 
 old familiar poverty with a true pang of regret, 
 and with a true honor for the narrow home in 
 which he has lived so long." * 
 
 The barrenness and ignobleness of the more 
 usual laborer's life consist in the fact that it is 
 
 Sermons, 5th Series, New York, 1893, pp. 166, 167.
 
 THE NEED OF AN IDEAL 291 
 
 moved by no such ideal inner springs. The back- 
 ache, the long hours, the danger, are patiently 
 endured for what ? To gain a quid of tobacco, 
 a glass of beer, a cup of coffee, a meal, and a bed, 
 and to begin again the next day and shirk as much 
 as one can. This really is why we raise no monu- 
 ment to the laborers hi the Subway, even though 
 they be our conscripts, and even though after a 
 fashion our city is indeed based upon their patient 
 hearts and enduring backs and shoulders. And 
 this is why we do raise monuments to our sol- 
 diers, whose outward conditions were even bru- 
 taller 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 wonder- 
 ful human nature of ours begin to develop under 
 our hands. We have seen the blindness and dead- 
 ness to each other which are our natural inheri- 
 tance ; and, in spite of them, we have been led 
 to acknowledge an inner meaning which passeth 
 show, and which may be present hi the lives of 
 others where we least descry it. And now we 
 are led to say that such inner meaning can be 
 complete and valid for us also, only when the
 
 292 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 inner joy, courage, and endurance are joined with 
 an ideal. 
 
 But what, exactly, do we mean by an ideal? 
 Can we give no definite account of such a word? 
 
 To a certain extent we can. An ideal, for 
 instance, must be something intellectually con- 
 ceived, something of which we are not uncon- 
 scious, if we have it ; and it must carry with it 
 that sort of outlook, uplift, and brightness that 
 go with all intellectual facts. Secondly, there 
 must be novelty in an ideal, novelty at least for 
 him whom the ideal grasps. Sodden routine is 
 incompatible with ideality, although what is sod- 
 den routine for one person may be ideal novelty 
 for another. This shows that there is nothing 
 absolutely ideal: ideals are relative to the lives 
 that entertain them. To keep out of the gutter 
 is for us here no part of consciousness at all, yet 
 for many of our brethren it is the most legiti- 
 mately engrossing of ideals. 
 
 Now, taken nakedly, abstractly, and immedi- 
 ately, you see that mere ideals are the cheapest 
 things in life. Everybody lias them in some shape 
 or other, personal or general, sound or mistaken, 
 low or high ; and the most worthless sentimental-
 
 MERE IDEALS ARE INSUFFICIENT 293 
 
 ists and dreamers, drunkards, shirks and verse- 
 makers, who never show a grain of effort, courage, 
 or endurance, possibly have them on the most co- 
 pious scale. Education, enlarging as it does our 
 horizon and perspective, is a means of multiplying 
 our ideals, of bringing new ones into view. And 
 your college professor, with a starched shirt and 
 spectacles, would, if a stock of ideals were all 
 alone by itself enough to render a life significant, 
 be the most absolutely and deeply significant of 
 men. Tolstoi would be completely blind in de- 
 spising him for a prig, a pedant and a parody ; and 
 all our new insight into the divinity of muscular 
 labor would be altogether off the track of truth. 
 
 But such consequences as this, you instinctively 
 feel, are erroneous. The more ideals a man has, 
 the more contemptible, on the whole, do you con- 
 tinue to deem him, if the matter ends there for 
 him, and if none of the laboring man's virtues 
 are called into action on his part, no courage 
 shown, no privations undergone, no dirt or scars 
 contracted in the attempt to get them realized. 
 It is quite obvious that something more than 
 the mere possession of ideals is required to 
 make a life significant in any sense that claims 
 the spectator's admiration. Inner joy, to be
 
 294 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 sure, it may have, with its ideals; but that is 
 its own private sentimental matter. To extort 
 from us, outsiders as we are, with our own ideals 
 to look after, the tribute of our grudging recog- 
 nition, it must back its ideal visions with what 
 the laborers have, the sterner stuff of manly 
 virtue ; it must multiply their sentimental sur- 
 face by the dimension of the active will, if we 
 are to have depth, if we are to have anything 
 cubical and solid in the way of character. 
 
 The significance of a human life for communi- 
 cable and publicly recognizable purposes is thus 
 the offspring of a marriage of two different par- 
 ents, either of whom alone is barren. The 
 ideals taken by themselves give no reality, the 
 virtues by themselves no novelty. And let the 
 orientalists and pessimists say what they will, 
 the thing of deepest or, at any rate, of com- 
 paratively deepest significance in life does seem 
 to be its character of progress, or that strange 
 union of reality with ideal novelty which it con- 
 tinues from one moment to another to present. 
 To recognize ideal novelty is the task of what 
 we call intelligence. Not every one's intelligence 
 can tell which novelties are ideal. For many the 
 ideal tiling will always seem to cling still to the
 
 THE COMPLETELY SIGNIFICANT LIFE 295 
 
 older more familiar good. In this case character, 
 though not significant totally, may be still signifi- 
 cant pathetically. So, if we are to choose which 
 is the more essential factor of human character, 
 the fighting virtue or the intellectual breadth, we 
 must side with Tolstoi, and choose that simple 
 faithfulness to his light or darkness which any 
 common unintellectual man can show. 
 
 But, with all this beating and tacking on my 
 part, I fear you take me to be reaching a con- 
 fused result. I seem to be just taking things up 
 and dropping them again. First I took up Chau- 
 tauqua, and dropped that; then Tolstoi and the 
 heroism of common toil, and dropped them ; 
 finally, I took up ideals, and seem now almost 
 dropping those. But please observe in what 
 sense it is that I drop them. It is when they 
 pretend singly to redeem life from insignificance. 
 Culture and refinement all alone are not enough 
 to do so. Ideal aspirations are not enough, when 
 uncombined with pluck and will. But neither 
 are pluck and will, dogged endurance and in- 
 sensibility to danger enough, when taken all 
 alone. There must be some sort of fusion, some 
 chemical combination among these principles, for
 
 296 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 a life objectively and thoroughly significant to 
 result. 
 
 Of course, this is a somewhat vague conclu- 
 sion. But in a question of significance, of worth, 
 like this, conclusions can never be precise. The 
 answer of appreciation, of sentiment, is always 
 a more or a less, a balance struck by sympathy, 
 insight, and good will. But it is an answer, all 
 the same, a real conclusion. And, in the course 
 of getting it, it seems to me that our eyes have 
 been opened to many important things. Some of 
 you are, perhaps, more livingly aware than you 
 were an hour ago of the depths of worth that lie 
 around you, hid in alien lives. And, when you 
 ask how much sympathy you ought to bestow, 
 although the amount is, truly enough, a matter 
 of ideal on your own part, yet in this notion of 
 the combination of ideals with active virtues you 
 have a rough standard for shaping your decision. 
 In any case, your imagination is extended. You 
 divine in the world about you matter for a little 
 more humility on your own part, and tolerance, 
 reverence, and love for others; and you gain 
 a certain inner joyfulness at the increased impor- 
 tance of our common life. Such joyfulness is a 
 religious inspiration and an element of spiritual
 
 THE LABOR-QUESTION 297 
 
 health, and worth more than large amounts of that 
 sort of technical and accurate information which 
 we professors are supposed to be able to impart. 
 
 To show the sort of thing I mean by these 
 words, I will just make one brief practical illus- 
 tration, and then close. 
 
 We are suffering to-day in America from what 
 is called the labor-question ; and, when you go out 
 into the world, you will each and all of you be 
 caught up in its perplexities. I use the brief term 
 labor-question to cover all sorts of anarchistic dis- 
 contents and socialistic projects, and the conserva- 
 tive resistances which they provoke. So far as 
 this conflict is unhealthy and regrettable, and I 
 think it is so only to a limited extent, the un- 
 healthiness 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
 
 298 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 mistakes. Often all that the poor man can think 
 of in the rich man is a cowardly greediness for 
 safety, luxury, and effeminacy, and a boundless af- 
 fectation. What he is, is not a human being, but a 
 pocket-book, a bank-account. And a similar greedi- 
 ness, turned by disappointment into envy, is all 
 that many rich men can see in the state of mind 
 of the dissatisfied poor. And, if the rich man 
 begins to do the sentimental act over the poor 
 man, what senseless blunders does he make, pity- 
 ing him for just those very duties and those 
 very immunities which, rightly taken, are the 
 condition of his most abiding and characteristic 
 joys 1 Each, hi short, ignores the fact that happi- 
 ness and unhappiness and significance are a vital 
 mystery ; each phis them absolutely on some ridic- 
 ulous feature of the external situation ; and every- 
 body remains outside of everybody else's sight 
 
 Society has, with all this, undoubtedly got to 
 pass toward some newer and better equilibrium, 
 and the distribution of wealth has doubtless slowly 
 got to change: such changes have always hap- 
 pened, and will happen to the end of time. But 
 if, after all that I have said, any of you expect 
 that they will make any genuine vital difference 
 on a large scale, to the lives of our descendants,
 
 FITZ-JAMES STEPHEN QUOTED 299 
 
 you will have missed the significance of my entire 
 lecture. The solid meaning of life is always the 
 same eternal thing, the marriage, namely, of 
 some unhabitual ideal, however special, with some 
 fidelity, courage, and endurance ; with some man's 
 or woman's pains. And, whatever or wherever 
 life may be, there will always be the chance for 
 that marriage to take place. 
 
 Fitz-James Stephen wrote many years ago 
 words to this effect more eloquent than any I 
 can speak : " The ' Great Eastern,' or some of her 
 successors," he said, " will perhaps defy the roll of 
 the Atlantic, and cross the seas without allowing 
 their passengers to feel that they have left the 
 firm land. The voyage from the cradle to the 
 grave may come to be performed with similar 
 facility. Progress and science may perhaps en- 
 able untold millions to live and die without a 
 care, without a pang, without an anxiety. They 
 will have a pleasant passage and plenty of brilliant 
 conversation. They will wonder that men ever 
 believed at all in clanging fights and blazing 
 towns and sinking ships and praying hands ; and, 
 when they come to the end of their course, they 
 will go their way, and the place thereof will know 
 them no more. But it seems unlikely that they
 
 300 TALKS TO STUDENTS 
 
 will have such a knowledge of the great ocean on 
 which they sail, with its storms and wrecks, its 
 currents and icebergs, its huge waves and mighty 
 winds, as those who battled with it for years to- 
 gether in the little craft, which, if they had few 
 other merits, brought those who navigated them 
 full into the presence of time and eternity, their 
 maker and themselves, and forced them to have 
 some definite view of their relations to them and 
 to each other." * 
 
 In this solid and tridimensional sense, so to call 
 it, those philosophers are right who contend that 
 the world is a standing thing, with no -progress, no 
 real history. The changing conditions of history 
 touch only the surface of the show. The altered 
 equilibriums and redistributions only diversify our 
 opportunities and open chances to us for new 
 ideals. But, with each new ideal that comes into 
 life, the chance for a life based on some old ideal 
 will vanish ; and he would needs be a presumptu- 
 ous calculator who should with confidence say that 
 the total sum of significances is positively and ab- 
 solutely greater at any one epoch than at any other 
 of the world. 
 
 I am speaking broadly, I know, and omitting to 
 
 Essays by a Barrister, London, 1862, p. 318.
 
 CONCLUSION 301 
 
 consider certain qualifications in which I myself 
 believe. But one can only make one point in one 
 lecture, and I shall be well content if I have 
 brought my point home to you this evening in 
 even a slight degree. There are compensations: 
 and no outward changes of condition in life can 
 keep the nightingale of its eternal meaning from 
 singing in all sorts of different men's hearts. 
 That is the main fact to remember. If we could 
 not only admit it with our lips, but really and 
 truly believe it, how our convulsive 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 
 ceternatis, how gentle would grow their disputes ! 
 what tolerance and good humor, what willingness 
 to live and let live, would come into the world I 
 
 THE END.
 
 BY PROFESSOR WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 Principles of 
 voi^. Psychology. 
 
 H93pp^8vo. $4.80 net. 
 
 Psychology, 
 
 Briefer Course. 
 
 478 pp., 12mo. $(.60 net. 
 
 John Dewey, Professor in the University of Chicago. "A 
 remarkable union of wide learning, originality of treatment, and, 
 above all, of never-failing suggestions. To me the best treat- 
 ment of the whole matter of advanced psychology in existence. 
 It does more to put psychology in scientific position, both as to 
 the statement of established results and as stimulating to further 
 problems and their treatment, than any other book of which I 
 know." 
 
 James Sully, in Mind. " Professor James is, before every- 
 thing else, original, energetically, aggressively original. He 
 must see things with his own eyes ; and woe to the man who 
 comes between those eyes and their object! This, I take it, is 
 the deepest source of charm in all his writings. The freshness, 
 the force, the wholesome contempt for other men's work, when 
 this takes on the aspect of mere lumber, all this is very admi- 
 rable. Our author has the magical power, given to the very few, 
 of re-creating his subject. The much-tormented human mind 
 loses its dull, worn look in his hands, and becomes alive again. 
 . . . His work will live if only through the charm of its literary 
 expression when most text-books lie dusty and forgotten." 
 
 Professor Victor Brochard, in the article "James (William]" 
 of the Grande Encyclopedic, vol. xx. "This book of Mr. James's 
 is certainly one of the most important works of the time. Ad- 
 mirably informed on all the work accomplished in physiological 
 and psychological research in France, Germany, England, and 
 Italy, Mr. James has produced a very exact and complete picture 
 (303)
 
 of the science up to the moment of writing. . . . For vigor of 
 thought and clearness of exposition this work is at present un- 
 equalled, and it assures to the American thinker an eminent 
 place among the philosophers of the nineteenth century." 
 [ Translated.'} 
 
 The Nation. " It is probably safe to say that it is the most 
 important contribution that has been made to the subject for 
 many years. Certainly, it is one of the most weighty productions 
 of American thought." 
 
 W- P. Coupland, in the Academy. " We have found it im- 
 possible to give an estimate of its varied wealth within present 
 allowable limits. Almost every chapter teems with fertile sug- 
 gestions, and none the less evinces a first-hand acquaintance with 
 all the important work previously done. The general reader, 
 it may be added, will find the book anything but a dull one." 
 
 Leon MarUlier, in the Revue Philosophique. " In spite of the 
 objections which would necessarily be raised to the theories it 
 contains, it is nevertheless a glorious work, and one which for 
 the future will have a conspicuous place in the library of all 
 psychologists between the works of Taine and Stuart Mill." 
 [ Translated.} 
 
 Hon. James Bryce, in the Speaker. " Those who retain any 
 taste in that direction namely, of philosophy will find Mr. 
 James's book one of the brightest and freshest that recent years 
 have produced. In it metaphysics have again condescended to 
 speak the language of polite letters, and learning has been wise 
 enough to take wit for her companion." 
 
 Theodore Flournoy, in the Journal de Geneve. " These brilliant 
 studies of powerful originality, broadly conceived and profoundly 
 tested, interest scholars as much as the popular manuals repel 
 them. Moreover, the author has done science no injury in 
 replacing the dry and pedantic style of his predecessors with a 
 composition full of life, spirit, and youthful fancy, of mischief 
 joined with bonhomie, with happy applications to every-day 
 life, holding the attention and diffusing charm and clearness 
 over the most difficult chapters." [ Translated.} 
 (3<H)
 
 W. D. Howells, in Harper's Monthly. " The talk is not only 
 about, but round about, the human mind, which it penetrates 
 here and there, and wins a glimpse of unsayable things. The 
 fascination of the quest forever remains, and it is this fascination 
 which Professor James permits his reader to share. ... If psy- 
 chology in this book is treated philosophically rather than scien- 
 tifically, there can be no question but it is treated profoundly and 
 subtly, and with a never-failing, absolute devotion to the truth. 
 This devotion is as signal in it as the generosity of the feeling, 
 the elevation of the thought, the sweetness of the humanity, that 
 characterize it." 
 
 The Athenaeum. " It is as racy and vivid in style, as full 
 of fresh and original thought, as it is replete with knowledge of 
 detail and animated by a broad and comprehensive view of its 
 subject-matter. . . . Of the fourteen hundred pages, we do not 
 think that we have found one dull, though perhaps more than 
 one superfluous." 
 
 Max Dessoir, in the article on the " History of Psychology " in 
 Vein's Encyclopaedischen Handbi4ch der Paedagogik, 1896. "A 
 strong inclination toward the study of abnormal phenomena is 
 also shown by that investigator whom we may single out from 
 the imposing array of American psychologists, Baldwin, Ladd, 
 Jastrow, and others. I mean James [1890]. James's is not a 
 systematic mind. His accounts of things suffer from subjectivity 
 and figurativeness ; yet, by the power of his separate thoughts 
 and the manner in which he sweeps one forward, he begins to 
 influence European science." [ Translated.] 
 
 Professor J. McK. Cattell, in his vice-presidential address 
 before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 
 1898. "But the land lay fallow, and twenty years ago the seed 
 was sown. James at Harvard began the publication of a series 
 of striking articles, culminating in the issue in 1890 of the ' Prin- 
 ciples of Psychology,' a work of genius such as is rare in any 
 language and in any country." 
 
 HENRY HOLT & CO., Publishers, 
 
 29 West 23d Street, New York. 
 (305)
 
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