LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OP CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO Works by WILLIAM JAMES, M.D., Ph. et Liit.D., LL.D. ; Correspondent of the Insti- tute of France ; Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. The Principles of Psychology. 2 vols. 8vo. New York: Henry Holt & Co. 1890. Psychology : Briefer Course. i2mo. New York: Henry Holt & Co. 1892. The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Long- mans, Green & Co. 1897. Is Life Worth Living ? i8mo. Philadelphia: S. B. Weston, 1305 Arch Street. 1896. Human Immortality : Two Supposed Objec- tions to the Doctrine. i6mo. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1898. The Literary Remains of Henry James. Edited, with an Introduction, by WILLIAM JAMBS, With Portrait. Crown 8vo. 1885. TALKS TO TEACHERS ON PSYCHOLOGY: AND TO STUDENTS ON SOME OF LIFE'S IDEALS. By WILLIAM JAMES NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY J899 COPYRIGHT 1899 BY WILLIAM JAM! PREFACE. IN 1892 I was asked by the Harvard Corporation to give a few public lectures on psychology to the Cambridge teachers. The talks now printed form the substance of that course, which has since then been delivered at various places to various teacher-audi- ences. I have found by experience that what my hearers seem least to relish is analytical technicality, and what they most care for is concrete practical application. So I have gradually weeded out the former, and left the latter unreduced ; and, now that I have at last written out the lectures, they contain a minimum of what is deemed 'scientific' in psy- chology, and are practical and popular in the ex- treme. Some of my colleagues may possibly shake their heads at this; but in taking my cue from what has seemed to me to be the feeling of the audiences I be- lieve that I am shaping my book so as to satisfy the more genuine public need. Teachers, of course, will miss the minute divisions, subdivisions, and definitions, the lettered and num- bered headings, the variations of type, and all the IV PREFACE other mechanical artifices on which they are accus- tomed to prop their minds. But my main desire has been to make them conceive, and, if possible, re- produce sympathetically in their imagination, the mental life of their pupil as the sort of active unity which he himself feels it to be. He doesn't chop himself into distinct processes and compartments; and it would have frustrated this deeper purpose of my book to make it look, when printed, like a Bae- deker's handbook of travel or a text-book of arithme- tic. So far as books printed like this book force the fluidity of the facts upon the young teacher's atten- tion, so far I am sure they tend to do his intellect a service, even though they may leave unsatisfied a craving (not altogether without its legitimate grounds) for more nomenclature, head-lines, and subdivisions. Readers acquainted with my larger books on Psy- chology will meet much familiar phraseology. In the chapters on habit and memory I have even copied several pages verbatim, but I do not know that apology is needed for such plagiarism as this. The talks to students, which conclude the volume, were written in response to invitations to deliver 'addresses' to students at women's colleges. The first one was to the graduating class of the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics. Properly, it contin- PREFACE V ues the series of talks to teachers. The second and the third address belong together, and continue an- other line of thought. I wish I were able to make the second, ' On a Cer- tain Blindness in Human Beings,' more impressive. It is more than the mere piece of sentimentalism which it may seem to some readers. It connects itself with a definite view of the world and of our moral relations to the same. Those who have done me the honor of reading my volume of philosophic essays will recognize that I mean the pluralistic or individualistic philosophy. According to that philos- ophy, the truth is too great for any one actual mind, even though that mind be dubbed ' the Absolute,' to know the whole of it. The facts and worths of life need many cognizers to take them in. There is no point of view absolutely public and universal. Pri- vate and uncommunicable perceptions always remain over, and the worst of it is that those who look for them from the outside never know where. The practical consequence of such a philosophy is the well-known democratic respect for the sacredness of individuality, is, at any rate, the outward tolerance of whatever is not itself intolerant. These phrases are so familiar that they sound now rather dead in our ears. Once they had a passionate inner meaning. Such a passionate inner meaning they may easily VI PREFACE acquire again if the pretension of our nation to inflict its own inner ideals and institutions vi et armis upon Orientals should meet with a resistance as obdurate as so far it has been gallant and spirited. Religiously and philosophically, our ancient national doctrine of live and let live may prove to have a far deeper meaning than our people now seem to imagine it to possess. CAMBBHXJS, MASSU, March, 1899. CONTENTS. TALKS TO TEACHERS. PAGE I. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE TEACHING ART . . 3 The American educational organization, 3 What teachers may expect from psychology, 5 Teaching methods must agree with psychology, but cannot be immediately deduced therefrom, 7 The science of teaching and the science of war, 9 The educational uses of psychology defined, 10 The teacher's duty toward child-study, 12. II. THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS ... 15 Our mental life is a succession of conscious fields,' 15 They have a focus and a margin, 18 This description contrasted with the theory of 'ideas,' 20 Wundt's conclusions, 20, note. III. THE CHILD AS A BEHAVING ORGANISM . 22 Mind as pure reason and mind as practical guide, 22 The latter view the more fashionable one to-day, 23 It will be adopted in this work, 24 Why so? 25 The teacher's function is to train pupils to behavior, 28. IV. EDUCATION AND BEHAVIOR 29 Education defined, 29 Conduct is always its outcome, 30 Different national ideals : Germany and England, 31. Vlil CONTENTS PAGE V. THE NECESSITY OF REACTIONS .... 33 , No impression without expression, 33 Verbal reproduction, 34 Manual training, 35 Pupils should know their ' marks,' 37. VI. NATIVE AND ACQUIRED REACTIONS . . 38 The acquired reactions must be preceded by native ones, 38 Illustration : teaching child to ask instead of snatching, 39 Man has more in- stincts than other mammals, 43. VII. WHAT THE NATIVE REACTIONS AKE . . 45 Fear and love, 45 Curiosity, 45 Imitation, 48 Emulation, 49 Forbidden by Rousseau, 61 His error, 52 Ambition, pugnacity, and pride. Soft pedagogics and the fighting impulse, 54 Ownership, 55 Its educational uses, 56 Con- structiveness, 58 Manual teaching, 59 Transi- toriness in instincts, 60 Their order of succes- sion, 61. VIII. THE LAWS OF HABIT 64 Good and bad habits, 64 Habit due to plasti- city of organic tissues, 65 The aim of education is to make useful habits automatic, 66 Maxims relative to habit-forming: 1. Strong initiative, 67 2. No exception, 68 3. Seize first opportunity to act, 69 4. Don't preach, 71 Darwin and poetry : without exercise our capacities decay, 71 The habit of mental and muscular relaxation, 74 Fifth maxim, keep the faculty of effort, trained, 75 Sudden conversions compatible with laws of habit, 76 Momentous influence of habits on character, 77. CONTENTS ix PAGE IX. THE ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS 79 A case of habit, 79 The two laws, contiguity and similarity, 80 The teacher has to build up useful systems of association, 83 Habitual asso- ciations determine character, 84 Indeterminate- ness of our trains of association, 85 We can trace them backward, but not foretell them, 86 Interest deflects, 87 Prepotent parts of the field, 88 In teaching, multiply cues, 89. X. INTEREST 91 The child's native interests, 91 How uninterest- ing things acquire an interest, 94 Rules for the teacher, 95 'Preparation' of the mind for the lesson: the pupil must hare something to attend with, 97 All later interests are borrowed from original ones, 99. XI. ATTENTION 100 Interest and attention are two aspects of one fact, 100 Voluntary attention comes in beats, 101 Genius and attention, 102 The subject must change to win attention, 103 Mechanical aids, 104 The physiological process, 106 The new in the old is what excites interest, 108 In- terest and effort are compatible, 110 Mind-wan- dering, 112 Not fatal to mental efficiency, 114. XII. MEMORY 116 Due to association, 116 No recall without a cue, 118 Memory is due to brain- plasticity, 119 Native retentiveness, 120 Number of associa- tions may practically be its equivalent, 122 Ke- tentiveness is a fixed property of the individual, 123 Memory versus memories, 124 Scientific X CONTENTS PAGE system as help to memory, 126 Technical mem- ories, 127 Cramming, 129 Elementary memory unimprovable, 130 Utility of verbal memorizing, 131 Measurements of immediate memory, 133 They throw little light, 134 Passion is the im- portant factor in human efficiency, 137 Eye- memory, ear-memory, etc., 137 The rate of forgetting, Ebbinghaus's results, 139 Influence of the unreproducible, 142 To remember, one must think and connect, 143. XIII. THE ACQUISITION OF IDEAS 144 Education gives a stock of conceptions, 144 The order of their acquisition, 146 Value of verbal material, 149 Abstractions of different orders: when are they assimilable, 151 False conceptions of children, 152. XIV. APPERCEPTION 155 Often a mystifying idea, 155 The process de- fined, 157 The law of economy, 159 Old- f ogyism, 160 How many types of apperception ? 161 New heads of classification must continually be invented, 163 Alteration of the apperceiving mass, 165 Class-names are what we work by, 166 Few new fundamental conceptions acquired after twenty-five, 167. XV. THE WILL 169 The word defined, 169 All consciousness tends to action, 170 Ideo-motor action, 171 Inhibi- tion, 172 The process of deliberation, 174 Why so few of our ideas result in acts, 176 The associationist account of the will, 177 A balance of impulses and inhibitions, 178 The CONTENTS Xi PAGE orer-impulsive and the over-obstructed type, 179 The perfect type, 180 The balky will, 181 What character-building consists in, 184 Right action depends on right apperception of the case, 185 Effort of will is effort of attention: the drunkard's dilemma, 187 Vital importance of voluntary attention, 189 Its amount maybe in- determinate, 191 Affirmation of free-will, 192 Two types of inhibition, 193 Spinoza on inhibi- tion by a higher good, 194 Conclusion, 195 TALKS TO STUDENTS. I. THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION .... 199 II. ON A CERTAIN BLINDNESS IN HUMAN BEINGS 229 III. WHAT MAKES A LIFE SIGNIFICANT? . . 265 TALKS TO TEACHERS I. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE TEACHING ART IN the general activity and uprising of ideal in- terests which every one with an eye for fact can discern all about us in American life, there is per- haps no more promising feature than the fermen- tation which for a dozen years or more has been going on among the teachers. In whatever sphere of education their functions may lie, there is to be seen among them a really inspiring amount of searching of the heart about the highest concerns of their profession. The renovation of nations begins always at the top, among the reflective members of the State, and spreads slowly outward and downward. The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands. The earnestness which they at present show in striving to enlighten and strengthen themselves is an index of the nation's probabilities of advance in all ideal directions. The outward organization of educa- tion which we have in our United States is per- 4 TALKS TO TEACHEES haps, on the whole, the best organization that exists in any country. The State school systems give a diversity and flexibility, an opportunity for experiment and keenness of competition, nowhere else to be found on such an important scale. The independence of so many of the colleges and uni- versities; the give and take of students and in- structors between them all ; their emulation, and their happy organic relations to the lower schools ; the traditions of instruction in them, evolved from the older American recitation-method (and so avoiding on the one hand the pure lecture-sys- tem prevalent in Germany and Scotland, which considers too little the individual student, and yet not involving the sacrifice of the instructor to the individual student, which the English tutorial sys- tem would seem too often to entail), all these things (to say nothing of that coeducation of the sexes in whose benefits so many of us heartily believe), all these things, I say, are most happy features of our scholastic life, and from them the most sanguine auguries may be drawn. Having so favorable an organization, all we need is to impregnate it with geniuses, to get superior men and women working more and more abundantly in it and for it and at it, and in a PSYCHOLOGY AND THE TEACHING AET 5 generation or two America may well lead the education of the world. I must say that I look forward with no little confidence to the day when that shall be an accomplished fact. No one has profited more by the fermentation of which I speak, in pedagogical circles, than we psychologists. The desire of the schoolteachers for a completer professional training, and their aspiration toward the ' professional ' spirit in their work, have led them more and more to turn to us for light on fundamental principles. And in these few hours which we are to spend together you look to me, I am sure, for information concerning the mind's operations, which may enable you to labor more easily and effectively in the several schoolrooms over which you preside. Far be it from me to disclaim for psychology all title to such hopes. Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help. And yet I con- fess that, acquainted as I am with the height of some of your expectations, I feel a little anxious lest, at the end of these simple talks of mine, not a few of you may experience some disappointment at the net results. In other words, I am not sure that you may not be indulging fancies that are just a shade exaggerated. That would not be 6 TALKS TO TEACHERS altogether astonishing, for we have been having something like a 'boom' in psychology in this country. Laboratories and professorships have been founded, and reviews established. The air has been full of rumors. The editors of educa- tional journals and the arrangers of conventions have had to show themselves enterprising and on a level with the novelties of the day. Some of the professors have not been unwilling to co-operate, and I am not sure even that the publishers have been entirely inert. 'The new psychology' has thus become a term to conjure up portentous ideas withal; and you teachers, docile and receptive and aspiring as many of you are, have been plunged in an atmosphere of vague talk about our science, which to a great extent has been more mystifying than enlightening. Altogether it does seem as if there were a certain fatality of mystifi- cation laid upon the teachers of our day. The mat- ter of their profession, compact enough in itself, has to be frothed up for them in journals and insti- tutes, till its outlines often threaten to be lost in a kind of vast uncertainty. Where the disciples are not independent and critical-minded enough (and I think that, if you teachers in the earlier grades have any defect the slightest touch of a THE 'NEW' PSYCHOLOGY 7 defect in the world it is that you are a mite too docile), we are pretty sure to miss accuracy and balance and measure in those who get a license to lay down the law to them from above. As regards this subject of psychology, now, I wish at the very threshold to do what I can to dis- pel the mystification. So I say at once that in my humble opinion there is no * new psychology ' worthy of the name. There is nothing but the old psychology which began in Locke's time, plus a little physiology of the brain and senses and theory of evolution, and a few refinements of intro- spective detail, for the most part without adapta- tion to the teacher's use. It is only the funda- mental conceptions of psychology which are of real value to the teacher ; and they, apart from the aforesaid theory of evolution, are very far from being new. I trust that you will see better what I mean by this at the end of all these talks. I say moreover that you make a great, a very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind's laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use. Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate 8 TALKS TO TEACHERS arts directly out of themselves. An intermediary inventive mind must make the application, by using its originality. The science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of ethics (if there be such a thing) never made a man behave rightly. The most such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly ; and to criticise our- selves more articulately after we have made mis- takes. A science only lays down lines within which the rules of the art must fall, laws which the follower of the art must not transgress ; but what particular thing he shall positively do within those lines is left exclusively to his own genius. One genius will do his work well and succeed in one way, while another succeeds as well quite dif- ferently ; yet neither will transgress the lines. The art of teaching grew up in the schoolroom, out of inventiveness and sympathetic concrete ob- servation. Even where (as in the case of Herbart) the advancer of the art was also a psychologist, the pedagogics and the psychology ran side by side, and the former was not derived in any sense from the latter. The two were congruent, but neither was subordinate. And so everywhere the SCIENCES AND AETS 9 teaching must agree with the psychology, but need not necessarily be the only kind of teaching that would so agree ; for many diverse methods of teaching may equally well agree with psychologi- cal laws. To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teachers. To ad- vance to that result, we must have an additional endowment altogether, a happy tact and ingenuity to tell us what definite things to say and do when the pupil is before us. That ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least. The science of psychology, and whatever science of general pedagogics may be based on it, are in fact much like the science of war. Nothing is simpler or more definite than the principles of either. In war, all you have to do is to work your enemy into a position from which the natural ob- stacles prevent him from escaping if he tries to ; then to fall on him in numbers superior to his own, at a moment when you have led him to think you far away ; and so, with a minimum of expos- ure of your own troops, to hack his force to pieces, 10 TALKS TO TEACHBES and take the remainder prisoners. Just so, in teaching, you must simply work your pupil into such a state of interest in what you are going to teach him that every other object of attention is banished from his mind ; then reveal it to him so impressively that he will remember the occasion to his dying day ; and finally fill him with devour- ing curiosity to know what the next steps in con- nection with the subject are. The principles being so plain, there would be nothing but victories for the masters of the science, either on the battlefield or in the schoolroom, if they did not both have to make their application to an incalculable quantity in the shape of the mind of their opponent. The mind of your own enemy, the pupil, is working away from you as keenly and eagerly as is the mind of the commander on the other side from the scientific general. Just what the respective ene- mies want and think, and what they know and do not know, are as hard things for the teacher as for the general to find out. Divination and per- ception, not psychological pedagogics or theoretic strategy, are the only helpers here. But, if the use of psychological principles thus be negative rather than positive, it does not follow that it may not be a great use, all the same. It HOW PSYCHOLOGY SHEDS LIGHT 11 certainly narrows the path for experiments and trials. We know in advance, if we are psycholo- gist, that certain methods will be wrong, so our psychology saves us from mistakes. It makes us, moreover, more clear as to what we are about. We gain confidence in respect to any method which we are using as soon as we believe that it has theory as well as practice at its back. Most of all, it fructifies our independence, and it reanimates our interest, to see our subject at two different angles, to get a stereoscopic view, so to speak, of the youthful organism who is our enemy, and, while handling him with all our con- crete tact and divination, to be able, at the same time, to represent to ourselves the curious inner elements of his mental machine. Such a complete knowledge as this of the pupil, at once intuitive and analytic, is surely the knowledge at which every teacher ought to aim. Fortunately for you teachers, the elements of the mental machine can be clearly apprehended, and their workings easily grasped. And, as the most general elements and workings are just those parts of psychology which the teacher finds most directly useful, it follows that the amount of this science which is necessary to all teachers need not 12 TALKS TO TEACHERS be very great. Those who find themselves loving the subject may go as far as they please, and be- come possibly none the worse teachers for the fact, even though in some of them one might appre- hend a little loss of balance from the tendency observable in all of us to overemphasize certain special parts of a subject when we are studying it intensely and abstractly. But for the great majority of you a general view is enough, pro- vided it be a true one ; and such a general view, one may say, might almost be written on the palm of one's hand. Least of all need you, merely as teachers, deem it part of your duty to become contributors to psychological science or to make psychological observations in a methodical or responsible man- ner. I fear that some of the enthusiasts for child- study have thrown a certain burden on you in this way. By all means let child-study go on, it is refreshing all our sense of the child's life. There are teachers who take a spontaneous delight in filling syllabuses, inscribing observations, compil- ing statistics, and computing the per cent. Child- study will certainly enrich their lives. And, if its results, as treated statistically, would seem on the whole to have but trifling value, yet the anecdotes CHILD-STUDY 13 and observations of which it in part consists do certainly acquaint us more intimately with our pupils. Our eyes and ears grow quickened to discern in the child before us processes similar to those we have read of as noted in the children, processes of which we might otherwise have re- mained inobservant. But, for Heaven's sake, let the rank and file of teachers be passive readers if they so prefer, and feel free not to contribute to the accumulation. Let not the prosecution of it be preached as an imperative duty or imposed by regulation on those to whom it proves an exter- minating bore, or who in any way whatever miss in themselves the appropriate vocation for it. I cannot too strongly agree with my colleague, Professor Miinsterberg, when he says that the teacher's attitude toward the child, being concrete and ethical, is positively opposed to the psycho- logical observer's, which is abstract and analytic. Although some of us may conjoin the attitudes successfully, in most of us they must conflict. The worst thing that can happen to a good teacher is to get a bad conscience about her pro- fession because she feels herself hopeless as a psy- chologist. Our teachers are overworked already. Every one who adds a jot or tittle of unnecessary 14 TALKS TO TEACHERS weight to their burden is a foe of education. A bad conscience increases the weight of every other burden; yet I know that child-study, and other pieces of psychology as well, have been productive of bad conscience in many a really innocent ped- agogic breast. I should indeed be glad if this passing word from me might tend to dispel such a bad conscience, if any of you have it; for it is certainly one of those fruits of more or less systematic mystification of which I have already complained. The best teacher may be the poorest contributor of child-study material, and the best contributor may be the poorest teacher. No fact is more palpable than this. So much for what seems the most reasonable general attitude of the teacher toward the subject which is to occupy our attention. II. THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS I SAID a few minutes ago that the most general elements and workings of the mind are all that the teacher absolutely needs to be acquainted with for his purposes. Now the immediate fact which psychology, the science of mind, has to study is also the most general fact. It is the fact that in each of us, when awake (and often when asleep), some kind of consciousness is always going on. There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves, or fields (or of whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and repass, and that con- stitute our inner life. The existence of this stream is the primal fact, the nature and origin of it form the essential problem, of our science. So far as we class the states or fields of consciousness, write down their several natures, analyze their contents into elements, or trace their habits of succession, 16 TALKS TO TEACHEKS we are on the descriptive or analytic level. So far as we ask where they come from or why they are just what they are, we are on the explanatory level. In these talks with you, I shall entirely neglect the questions that come up on the explanatory level. It must be frankly confessed that in no fundamental sense do we know where our succes- sive fields of consciousness come from, or why they have the precise inner constitution which they do have. They certainly follow or accom- pany our brain states, and of course their special forms are determined by our past experiences and education. But, if we ask just how the brain con- ditions them, we have not the remotest inkling of an answer to give ; and, if we ask just how the education moulds the brain, we can speak but in the most abstract, general, and conjectural terms. On the other hand, if we should say that they are due to a spiritual being called our Soul, which reacts on our brain states by these peculiar forms of spiritual energy, our words would be familiar enough, it is true ; but I think you will agree that they would offer little genuine explanatory mean- ing. The truth is that we really do not know the answers to the problems on the explanatory level, OUR STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 17 even though in some directions of inquiry there may be promising speculations to be found. For our present purposes I shall therefore dismiss them entirely, and turn to mere description. This state of things was what I had in mind when, a moment ago, I said there was no ' new psychology ' worthy of the name. We have thus fields of consciousness, that is the first general fact ; and the second general fact is that the concrete fields are always complex. They contain sensations of our bodies and of the ob- jects around us, memories of past experiences and thoughts of distant things, feelings of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, desires and aversions, and other emotional conditions, together with determinations of the will, in every variety of permutation and combination. In most of our concrete states of consciousness all these different classes of ingredients are found simultaneously present to some degree, though the relative proportion they bear to one another is very shifting. One state will seem to be com- posed of hardly anything but sensations, another of hardly anything but memories, etc. But around the sensation, if one consider carefully, there will always be some fringe of thought or will, and 18 TALKS TO TEACHERS around the memory some margin or penumbra of emotion or sensation. In most of our fields of consciousness there is a core of sensation that is very pronounced. You, for example, now, although you are also thinking and feeling, are getting through your eyes sensa- tions of my face and figure, and through your ears sensations of my voice. The sensations are the centre or focus, the thoughts and feelings the mar- gin, of your actually present conscious field. On the other hand, some object of thought, some distant image, may have become the focus of your mental attention even while I am speak- ing, your mind, in short, may have wandered from the lecture ; and, in that case, the sensations of my face and voice, although not absolutely vanishing from your conscious field, may have taken up there a very faint and marginal place. Again, to take another sort of variation, some feeling connected with your own body may have passed from a marginal to a focal place, even while I speak. The expressions ' focal object ' and ' marginal object,' which we owe to Mr. Lloyd Morgan, re- quire, I think, no further explanation. The dis- tinction they embody is a very important one, and THE FIELDS OF CONSCIOUSNESS 19 they are the first technical terms which I shall ask you to remember. In the successive mutations of our fields of con- sciousness, the process by which one dissolves into another is often very gradual, and all sorts of inner rearrangements of contents occur. Some- times the focus remains but little changed, while the margin alters rapidly. Sometimes the focus alters, and the margin stays. Sometimes focus and margin change places. Sometimes, again, abrupt alterations of the whole field occur. There can seldom be a sharp description. All we know is that, for the most part, each field has a sort of practical unity for its possessor, and that from this practical point of view we can class a field with other fields similar to it, by calling it a state of emotion, of perplexity, of sensation, of abstract thought, of volition, and the like. Vague and hazy as such an account of our stream of consciousness may be, it is at least se- cure from positive error and free from admixture of conjecture or hypothesis. An influential school of psychology, seeking to avoid haziness of out- line, has tried to make things appear more exact and scientific by making the analysis more sharp. 20 TALKS TO TEACHEBS The various fields of consciousness, according to this school, result from a definite number of per- fectly definite elementary mental states, mechani- cally associated into a mosaic or chemically com- bined. According to some thinkers, Spencer, for example, or Taine, these resolve themselves at last into little elementary psychic particles or atoms of * mind-stuff,' out of which all the more immediately known mental states are said to be built up. Locke introduced this theory in a somewhat vague form. Simple 'ideas' of sensa- tion and reflection, as he called them, were for him the bricks of which our mental architecture is built up. If I ever have to refer to this theory again, I shall refer to it as the theory of 'ideas.' But I shall try to steer clear of it altogether. Whether it be true or false, it is at any rate only conjectural; and, for your practical purposes as teachers, the more unpretending conception of the stream of consciousness, with its total waves or fields incessantly changing, will amply suffice.* * In the light of some of the expectation that are abroad concern- ing the ' new psychology,' it is instructive to read the unusually can- did confession of its founder Wundt, after his thirty years of labora- tory-experience : " The service which it [the experimental method] can yield consists essentially in perfecting our inner observation, or rather, as I believe, PBOFESSOE WUNDT'S VIEWS 21 in making this really possible, in any exact sense. Well, has our experimental self-observation , BO understood, already accomplished aught of importance ? No general answer to this question can be given, because in the unfinished state of our science, there is, even inside of the experimental lines of inquiry, no universally accepted body of psychologic doctrine. . . . In such a discord of opinions (comprehensible enough at a time of uncertain and groping development), the individual inquirer can only tell for what views and insights he himself has to thank the newer methods. And if 1 were asked in what for me the worth of ex- perimental observation in psychology has consisted, and still consists, I should say that it has given me an entirely new idea of the nature and connection of our inner processes. I learned in the achievements of the sense of sight to apprehend the fact of creative mental synthe- sis. . . . From my inquiry into time-relations, etc I attained an insight into the close union of all those psychic functions usually sepa- rated by artificial abstractions and names, such as ideation, feeling, will ; and I saw the indivisibility and inner homogeneity, in all its phases, of the mental life. The chronometric study of association- processes finally showed me that the notion of distinct mental ' images ' [reproducirten Vorttcllungen] was one of those numerous self-decep- tions which are no sooner stamped in a verbal term than they forth- with thrust non-existent fictions into the place of the reality. I learned to understand an ' idea ' as a process no less melting and fleet- ing than an act of feeling or of will, and I comprehended the older doctrine of association of ' ideas ' to be no longer tenable. . . . Besides all this, experimental observation yielded much other information about the span of consciousness, the rapidity of certain processes, the exact numerical value of certain psycho-physical data, and the like. But I hold all these more special results to be relatively insignificant by-products, and by no means the important thing. " Phttotophitctie Studien, x. 111-124. The whole passage should be read. As I interpret it, it amounts to a complete espousal of the vaguer conception of the stream of thought, and a complete renunciation of the whole business, still so industriously carried on in text-books, of chopping up 'the mind ' into distinct units of composition or function, numbering these off, and labelling them by technical names. III. THE CHILD AS A BEHAVING ORGANISM I WISH now to continue the description of the peculiarities of the stream of consciousness by asking whether we can in any intelligible way assign its functions. It has two functions that are obvious : it leads to knowledge, and it leads to action. Can we say which of these functions is the more essential? An old historic divergence of opinion comes in here. Popular belief has always tended to esti- mate the worth of a man's mental processes by their effects upon his practical life. But philo- sophers have usually cherished a different view. " Man's supreme glory," they have said, " is to be a rational being, to know absolute and eternal and universal truth. The uses of his intellect for practical affairs are therefore subordinate matters. 'The theoretic life ' is his soul's genuine concern." Nothing can be more different in its results for our personal attitude than to take sides with one THE TWO VIEWS OF OUR MIND 23 or the other of these views, and emphasize the practical or the theoretical ideal. In the latter case, abstraction from the emotions and passions and withdrawal from the strife of human affairs would be not only pardonable, but praiseworthy ; and all that makes for quiet and contemplation should be regarded as conducive to the highest human perfection. In the former, the man of con- templation would be treated as only half a human being, passion and practical resource would be- come once more glories of our race, a concrete victory over this earth's outward powers of dark- ness would appear an equivalent for any amount of passive spiritual culture, and conduct would remain as the test of every education worthy of the name. It is impossible to disguise the fact that in the psychology of our own day the emphasis is trans- ferred from the mind's purely rational function, where Plato and Aristotle, and what one may call the whole classic tradition in philosophy had placed it, to the so long neglected practical side. The theory of evolution is mainly responsible for this. Man, we now have reason to believe, has been evolved from infra-human ancestors, in whom pure reason hardly existed, if at all, and whose 24 TALKS TO TEACHERS mind, so far as it can have had any function, would appear to have been an organ for adapting their movements to the impressions received from the environment, so as to escape the better from destruction. Consciousness would thus seem in the first instance to be nothing but a sort of super- added biological perfection, useless unless it prompted to useful conduct, and inexplicable apart from that consideration. Deep in our own nature the biological founda- tions of our consciousness persist, undisguised and undiminished. Our sensations are here to attract us or to deter us, our memories to warn or encour- age us, our feelings to impel, and our thoughts to restrain our behavior, so that on the whole we may prosper and our days be long in the land. Whatever of transmundane metaphysical insight or of practically inapplicable aesthetic perception or ethical sentiment we may carry in our interiors might at this rate be regarded as only part of the incidental excess of function that necessarily ac- companies the working of every complex machine. I shall ask you now not meaning at all thereby to close the theoretic question, but merely because it seems to me the point of view likely to be of greatest practical use to you as teachers THE BIOLOGICAL VIEW 25 to adopt with me, in this course of lectures, the biological conception, as thus expressed, and to lay your own emphasis on the fact that man, whatever else he may be, is primarily a practical being, whose mind is given him to aid in adapting him to this world's life. In the learning of all matters, we have to start with some one deep aspect of the question, ab- stracting it as if it were the only aspect ; and then we gradually correct ourselves by adding those neglected other features which complete the case. No one believes more strongly than I do that what our senses know as ' this world ' is only one portion of our mind's total environment and ob- ject. Yet, because it is the primal portion, it is the sine qua non of all the rest. If you grasp the facts about it firmly, you may proceed to higher regions undisturbed. As our time must be so short together, I prefer being elementary and fundamental to being complete, so I propose to you to hold fast to the ultra-simple point of view. The reasons why I call it so fundamental can be easily told. First, human and animal psychology thereby become less discontinuous. I know that to some 26 TALKS TO TEACHERS of you this will hardly seem an attractive reason, but there are others whom it will affect. Second, mental action is conditioned by brain action, and runs parallel therewith. But the brain, so far as we understand it, is given us for practical behavior. Every current that runs into it from skin or eye or ear runs out again into muscles, glands, or viscera, and helps to adapt the animal to the environment from which the current came. It therefore generalizes and simplifies our view to treat the brain life and the mental life as having one fundamental kind of purpose. Third, those very functions of the mind that do not refer directly to this world's environment, the ethical Utopias, aesthetic visions, insights into eternal truth, and fanciful logical combinations, could never be carried on at all by a human indi- vidual, unless the mind that produced them in him were also able to produce more practically useful products. The latter are thus the more essential, or at least the more primordial results. Fourth, the inessential ' unpractical ' activities are themselves far more connected with our be- havior and our adaptation to the environment than at first sight might appear. No truth, however abstract, is ever perceived, that will not probably ALL CONSCIOUSNESS LEADS TO ACTION 27 at some time influence our earthly action. You must remember that, when I talk of action here, I mean action in the widest sense. I mean speech, I mean writing, I mean yeses and noes, and ten- dencies ' from ' things and tendencies * toward * things, and emotional determinations ; and I mean them in the future as well as in the immediate present. As I talk here, and you listen, it might seem as if no action followed. You might call it a purely theoretic process, with no practical result. But it must have a practical result. It cannot take place at all and leave your conduct unaffected. If not to-day, then on some far future day, you will answer some question differently by reason of what you are thinking now. Some of you will be led by my words into new veins of inquiry, into reading special books. These will develop your opinion, whether for or against. That opinion will in turn be expressed, will re- ceive criticism from others in your environment, and will affect your standing in their eyes. We cannot escape our destiny, which is practical ; and even our most theoretic faculties contribute to its working out. 28 TALKS TO TEACHERS These few reasons will perhaps smooth the way for you to acquiescence in my proposal. As teachers, I sincerely think it will be a sufficient conception for you to adopt of the youthful psy- chological phenomena handed over to your inspec- tion if you consider them from the point of view of their relation to the future conduct of their possessor. Sufficient at any rate as a first con- ception and as a main conception. You should regard your professional task as if it consisted chiefly and essentially in training the pupil to be- havior ; taking behavior, not in the narrow sense of his manners, but in the very widest possible sense, as including every possible sort of fit re- action on the circumstances into which he may find himself brought by the vicissitudes of life. The reaction may, indeed, often be a negative reaction. Not to speak, not to move, is one of the most important of our duties, in certain practical emergencies. " Thou shalt refrain, renounce, ab- stain ! " This often requires a great effort of will power, and, physiologically considered, is just as positive a nerve function as is motor discharge. IV. EDUCATION AND BEHAVIOR IN our foregoing talk we were led to frame a very simple conception of what an education means. In the last analysis it consists in the organizing of resources in the human being, of powers of conduct which shall fit him to his social and physical world. An 4 uneducated ' person is one who is nonplussed by all but the most habitual situations. On the contrary, one who is educated is able practically to extricate himself, by means of the examples with which his memory is stored and of the abstract conceptions which he has acquired, from circumstances in which he never was placed before. Education, in short, cannot be better described than by calling it the organiza- tion of acquired habits of conduct and tendencies to behavior. To illustrate. You and I are each and all of us educated, in our several ways ; and we show our education at this present moment by different conduct. It would be quite impossible for me, 80 TALKS TO TEACHERS with my mind technically and professionally or- ganized as it is, and with the optical stimulus which your presence affords, to remain sitting here entirely silent and inactive. Something tells me that I am expected to speak, and must speak; something forces me to keep on speaking. My organs of articulation are continuously innervated by outgoing currents, which the currents passing inward at my eyes and through my educated brain have set in motion ; and the particular movements which they make have their form and order deter- mined altogether by the training of all my past years of lecturing and reading. Your conduct, on the other hand, might seem at first sight purely receptive and inactive, leaving out those among you who happen to be taking notes. But the very listening which you are carrying on is itself a determinate kind of conduct. All the muscular tensions of your body are distributed in a peculiar way as you listen. Your head, your eyes, are fixed characteristically. And, when the lecture is over, it will inevitably eventuate in some stroke of behavior, as I said on the previous occasion: you may be guided differently in some special emergency in the schoolroom by words which I now let fall. So it is with the impressions you GERMAN AND ENGLISH IDEALS 31 will make there on your pupil. You should get into the habit of regarding them all as leading to the acquisition by him of capacities for behavior, emotional, social, bodily, vocal, technical, or what not. And, this being the case, you ought to feel willing, in a general way, and without hair-splitting or farther ado, to take up for the purposes of these lectures with the biological con- ception of the mind, as of something given us for practical use. That conception will certainly cover the greater part of your own educational work. If we reflect upon the various ideals of educa- tion that are prevalent in the different countries, we see that what they all aim at is to organize capacities for conduct. This is most immediately obvious in Germany, where the explicitly avowed aim of the higher education is to turn the student into an instrument for advancing scientific discov- ery. The German universities are proud of the number of young specialists whom they turn out every year, not necessarily men of any original force of intellect, but men so trained to research that when their professor gives them an historical or philological thesis to prepare, or a bit of labora- tory work to do, with a general indication as to the best method, they can go off by themselves 32 TALKS TO TEACHERS and use apparatus and consult sources in such a way as to grind out in the requisite number of months some little pepper-corn of new truth worthy of being added to the store of extant hu- man information on that subject. Little else is recognized in Germany as a man's title to academic advancement than his ability thus to show himself an efficient instrument of research. In England, it might seem at first sight as if the higher education of the universities aimed at the production of certain static types of character rather than at the development of what one may call this dynamic scientific efficiency. Professor Jowett, when asked what Oxford could do for its students, is said to have replied, " Oxford can teach an English gentleman how to be an English gentleman." But, if you ask what it means to ' be ' an English gentleman, the only reply is in terms of conduct and behavior. An English gentleman is a bundle of specifically qualified reactions, a creature who for all the emergencies of life has his line of behavior distinctly marked out for him in advance. Here, as elsewhere, England expects every man to do his duty. THE NECESSITY OF REACTIONS IF all this be true, then immediately one general aphorism emerges which ought by logical right to dominate the entire conduct of the teacher in the classroom. No reception without reaction, no impression with- out correlative expression, this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to forget. An impression which simply flows in at the pupil's eyes or ears, and in no way modifies his active life, is an impression gone to waste. It is physiologically incomplete. It leaves no fruits behind it in the way of capacity acquired. Even as mere impression, it fails to produce its proper ef- fect upon the memory ; for, to remain fully among the acquisitions of this latter faculty, it must be wrought into the whole cycle of our operations. Its motor consequences are what clinch it. Some effect due to it in the way of an activity must re- turn to the mind in the form of the sensation of having acted, and connect itself with the impres- sion. The most durable impressions are those on 34 TALKS TO TEACHERS account of which we speak or act, or else are in- wardly convulsed. The older pedagogic method of learning things by rote, and reciting them parrot-like in the schoolroom, rested on the truth that a thing merely read or heard, and never verbally repro- duced, contracts the weakest possible adhesion in the mind. Verbal recitation or reproduction is thus a highly important kind of reactive behavior on our impressions ; and it is to be feared that, in the reaction against the old parrot-recitations as the beginning and end of instruction, the extreme value of verbal recitation as an element of com- plete training may nowadays be too much for- gotten. When we turn to modern pedagogics, we see how enormously the field of reactive conduct has been extended by the introduction of all those methods of concrete object teaching which are the glory of our contemporary schools. Verbal reac- tions, useful as they are, are insufficient. The pupil's words may be right, but the conceptions corresponding to them are often direfully wrong. In a modern school, therefore, they form only a small part of what the pupil is required to do. He must keep notebooks, make drawings, plans, THE MANUAL TRAINING METHODS 35 and maps, take measurements, enter the labora- tory and perform experiments, consult authorities, and write essays. He must do in his fashion what is often laughed at by outsiders when it ap- pears in prospectuses under the title of * original work,' but what is really the only possible train- ing for the doing of original work thereafter. The most colossal improvement which recent years have seen in secondary education lies in the in- troduction of the manual training schools; not because they will give us a people more handy and practical for domestic life and better skilled in trades, but because they will give us citizens with an entirely different intellectual fibre. La- boratory work and shop work engender a habit of observation, a knowledge of the difference be- tween accuracy and vagueness, and an insight into nature's complexity and into the inadequacy of all abstract verbal accounts of real phenomena, which, once wrought into the mind, remain there as lifelong possessions. They confer precision ; because, if you are doing a thing, you must do it definitely right or definitely wrong. They give honesty ; for, when you express yourself by mak- ing things, and not by using words, it becomes impossible to dissimulate your vagueness or igno- 36 TALKS TO TEACHEES ranee by ambiguity. They beget a habit of self- reliance ; they keep the interest and attention always cheerfully engaged, and reduce the teach- er's disciplinary functions to a minimum. Of the various systems of manual training, so far as woodwork is concerned, the Swedish Sloyd system, if I may have an opinion on such matters, seems to me by far the best, psychologically con- sidered. Manual training methods, fortunately, are being slowly but surely introduced into all our large cities. But there is still an immense distance to traverse before they shall have gained the extension which they are destined ultimately to possess. No impression without expression, then, that is the first pedagogic fruit of our evolutionary conception of the mind as something instrumental to adaptive behavior. But a word may be said in continuation. The expression itself comes back to us, as I intimated a moment ago, in the form of a still farther impression, the impression, namely, of what we have done. We thus receive sensible news of our behavior and its results. We hear the words we have spoken, feel our own blow as we give it, or read in the bystander's eyes the success or failure of our conduct. Now this re- MARKS AND STANDING 37 turn wave of impression pertains to the complete- ness of the whole experience, and a word about its importance in the schoolroom may not be out of place. It would seem only natural to say that, since after acting we normally get some return impres- sion of result, it must be well to let the pupil get such a return impression in every possible case. Nevertheless, in schools where examination marks and ' standing ' and other returns of result are concealed, the pupil is frustrated of this natural termination of the cycle of his activities, and often suffers from the sense of incompleteness and un- certainty ; and there are persons who defend this system as encouraging the pupil to work for the work's sake, and not for extraneous reward. Of course, here as elsewhere, concrete experience must prevail over psychological deduction. But, so far as our psychological deduction goes, it would suggest that the pupil's eagerness to know how well he does is in the line of his normal completeness of function, and should never be balked except for very definite reasons indeed. Acquaint them, therefore, with their marks and standing and prospects, unless in the individual case you have some special practical reason for not so doing. VI. NATIVE REACTIONS AND ACQUIRED RE- ACTIONS fc WE are by this time fully launched upon the biological conception. Man is an organism for reacting on impressions: his mind is there to help determine his reactions, and the purpose of his education is to make them numerous and per- fect. Our education means, in short, little more than a mass of possibilities of reaction, acquired at home, at school, or in the training of affairs. The teacher's task is that of supervising the acquiring process. This being the case, I will immediately state a principle which underlies the whole process of acquisition and governs the entire activity of the teacher. It is this : Every acquired reaction is, as a rule, either a complication grafted on a native reaction, or a sub- stitute for a native reaction, which the same object originally tended to provoke. The teacher's art consists in bringing about the NATIVE AND ACQUIRED REACTIONS 39 substitution or complication, and success in the art presupposes a sympathetic acquaintance with the reactive tendencies natively there. Without an equipment of native reactions on the child's part, the teacher would have no hold whatever upon the child's attention or conduct. You may take a horse to the water, but you can- not make him drink ; and so you may take a child to the schoolroom, but you cannot make him learn the new things you wish to impart, except by soliciting him in the first instance by something which natively makes him react. He must take the first step himself. He must do something before you can get your purchase on him. That something may be something good or something bad. A bad reaction is better than no reaction at all ; for, if bad, you can couple it with conse- quences which awake him to its badness. But imagine a child so lifeless as to react in no way to the teacher's first appeals, and how can you possibly take the first step in his education? To make this abstract conception more con- crete, assume the case of a young child's training in good manners. The child has a native ten- dency to snatch with his hands at anything that attracts his curiosity ; also to draw back his hands 40 TALKS TO TEACHERS when slapped, to cry under these latter conditions, to smile when gently spoken to, and to imitate one's gestures. Suppose now you appear before the child with a new toy intended as a present for him. No sooner does he see the toy than he seeks to snatch it. You slap the hand; it is withdrawn, and the child cries. You then hold up the toy, smiling and saying, " Beg for it nicely, so ! " The child stops crying, imitates you, receives the toy, and crows with pleasure ; and that little cycle of train- ing is complete. You have substituted the new reaction of 'begging' for the native reaction of snatching, when that kind of impression comes. Now, if the child had no memory, the process would not be educative. No matter how often you came in with a toy, the same series of reac- tions would fatally occur, each called forth by its own impression : see, snatch ; slap, cry ; hear, ask; receive, smile But, with memory there, the child, at the very instant of snatching, recalls the rest of the earlier experience, thinks of the slap and the frustration, recollects the begging and the reward, inhibits the snatching impulse, substitutes the ' nice ' reaction for it, and gets the toy immedi- ately, by eliminating all the intermediary steps. If NATIVE AND ACQUIRED REACTIONS 41 a child's first snatching impulse be excessive or his memory poor, many repetitions of the discipline may be needed before the acquired reaction comes to be an ingrained habit; but in an eminently educable child a single experience will suffice. One can easily represent the whole process by a brain-diagram. Such a diagram can be little more than a symbolic translation of the immediate ex- perience into spatial terms ; yet it may be useful, so I subjoin it. CENTRES OF MEMORY AND WILL. See snatch Slap cry Listen beg Get smile FIGURE L THE BRAIN-PROCESSES BEFORE EDUCATION. Figure 1 shows the paths of the four successive reflexes executed by the lower or instinctive centres. The dotted lines that lead from them to the higher centres and connect the latter to- 42 TALKS TO TBACHEES gether, represent the processes of memory and as- sociation which the reactions impress upon the higher centres as they take place. CENTRES OF MEMORY AND WILL. See beg smile FIGURE 2. THE BRAIN-PROCESS AFTER EDUCATION. In Figure 2 we have the final result. The im- pression see awakens the chain of memories, and the only reactions that take place are the beg and smile. The thought of the slap, connected with the activity of Centre 2, inhibits the snatch, and makes it abortive, so it is represented only by a dotted line of discharge not reaching the termi- nus. Ditto of the cry reaction. These are, as it were, short-circuited by the current sweeping through the higher centres from see to smile. Beg and smile, thus substituted for the original MAN'S NUMEROUS INSTINCTS 43 reaction snatch, become at last the immediate re- sponses when the child sees a snatchable object in some one's hands. The first thing, then, for the teacher to under- stand is the native reactive tendencies, the im- pulses and instincts of childhood, so aa to be able to substitute one for another, and turn them on to artificial objects. It is often said that man is distinguished from the lower animals by having a much smaller as- sortment of native instincts and impulses than they, but this is a great mistake. Man, of course, has not the marvellous egg-laying instincts which some articulates have; but, if we compare him with the mammalia, we are forced to confess that he is appealed to by a much larger array of objects than any other mammal, that his reactions on these objects are characteristic and determinate in a very high degree. The monkeys, and especially the anthropoids, are the only beings that approach him in their analytic curiosity and width of imi- tativeness. His instinctive impulses, it is true, get overlaid by the secondary reactions due to his superior reasoning power ; and thus man loses the simply instinctive demeanor. But the life of in- 44 TALKS TO TEACHERS stinct is only disguised in him, not lost; and when the higher brain-functions are in abeyance, as happens in imbecility or dementia, his instincts sometimes show their presence in truly brutish ways. I will therefore say a few words about those instinctive tendencies which are the most impor- tant from the teacher's point of view. VII. WHAT THE NATIVE REACTIONS ARE FIRST of all, Fear. Fear of punishment has always been the great weapon of the teacher, and will always, of course, retain some place in the conditions of the schoolroom. The subject is so familiar that nothing more need be said about it. The same is true of Love, and the instinctive desire to please those whom we love. The teacher who succeeds in getting herself loved by the pupils will obtain results which one of a more forbidding temperament finds it impossible to secure. Next, a word might be said about Curiosity. This is perhaps a rather poor term by which to designate the impulse toward better cognition in its full extent ; but you will readily understand what I mean. Novelties in the way of sensible objects, especially if their sensational quality is bright, vivid, startling, invariably arrest the attention of the young and hold it until the desire to know more about the object is assuaged. In its higher, 46 TALKS TO TEACHERS more intellectual form, the impulse toward com- pleter knowledge takes the character of scientific or philosophic curiosity. In both its sensational and its intellectual form the instinct is more vivacious during childhood and youth than in after life. Young children are possessed by curiosity about every new impression that assails them. It would be quite impossible for a young child to listen to a lecture for more than a few minutes, as you are now listening to me. The outside sights and sounds would inevitably carry his attention off. And, for most people in middle life, the sort of intellectual effort required of the average school- boy in mastering his Greek or Latin lesson, his algebra or physics, would be out of the question. The middle-aged citizen attends exclusively to the routine details of his business ; and new truths, especially when they require involved trains of close reasoning, are no longer within the scope of his capacity. The sensational curiosity of childhood is ap- pealed to more particularly by certain determinate kinds of objects. Material things, things that move, living things, human actions and accounts of human action, will win the attention better than anything that is more abstract. Here again comes CURIOSITY 47 in the advantage of the object-teaching and manual- training methods. The pupil's attention is spon- taneously held by any problem that involves the presentation of a new material object or of an activity on any one's part. The teacher's earliest appeals, therefore, must be through objects shown or acts performed or described. Theoretic curios- ity, curiosity about the rational relations between things, can hardly be said to awake at all until adolescence is reached. The sporadic metaphysical inquiries of children as to who made God, and why they have five fingers, need hardly be counted here. But, when the theoretic instinct is once alive in the pupil, an entirely new order of peda- gogic relations begins for him. Reasons, causes, abstract conceptions, suddenly grow full of zest, a fact with which all teachers are familiar. And, both in its sensible and in its rational developments, disinterested curiosity may be successfully appealed to in the child with much more certainty than in the adult, in whom this intellectual instinct has grown so torpid as usually never to awake unless it enters into association with some selfish personal interest. Of this latter point I will say more anon. 48 TALKS TO TEACHERS Imitation. Man has always been recognized as the imitative animal par excellence. And there is hardly a book on psycholog} r , however old, which has not devoted at least one paragraph to this fact. It is strange, however, that the full scope and pregnancy of the imitative impulse in man has had to wait till the last dozen years to become adequately recognized. M. Tarde led the way in his admirably original work, " Les Lois de Tlmita- tion " ; and in our own country Professors Royce and Baldwin have kept the ball rolling with all the energy that could be desired. Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitativeness. We become conscious of what we ourselves are by imitating others the con- sciousness of what the others are precedes the sense of self grows by the sense of pattern. The entire accumulated wealth of mankind languages, arts, institutions, and sciences is passed on from one generation to another by what Baldwin has called social heredity, each genera- tion simply imitating the last. Into the particu- lars of this most fascinating chapter of psychology I have no time to go. The moment one hears Tarde's proposition uttered, however, one feels how supremely true it is. Invention, using the IMITATION AND EMULATION 49 term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked. Imitation shades imperceptibly into Emulation. Emulation is the impulse to imitate what you see another doing, in order not to appear inferior; and it is hard to draw a sharp line between the mani- festations of the two impulses, so inextricably do they mix their effects. Emulation is the very nerve of human society. "Why are you, my hear- ers, sitting here before me ? If no one whom you ever heard of had attended a ' summer school ' or teachers' institute, would it have occurred to any one of you to break out independently and do a thing so unprescribed by fashion ? Probably not. Nor would your pupils come to you unless the children of their parents' neighbors were all simul- taneously being sent to school. We wish not to be lonely or eccentric, and we wish not to be cut off from our share in things which to our neigh- bors seem desirable privileges. In the schoolroom, imitation and emulation play absolutely vital parts. Every teacher knows the advantage of having certain things performed by whole bands of children at a time. The teacher who meets with most success is the teacher whose 50 TALKS TO TEACHEES own ways are the most imitable. A teacher should never try to make the pupils do a thing which she cannot do herself. " Come and let me show you how " is an incomparably better stimu- lus than "Go and do it as the book directs." Children admire a teacher who has skill. What he does seems easy, and they wish to emulate it. It is useless for a dull and devitalized teacher to exhort her pupils to wake up and take an interest. She must first take one herself; then her example is effective as no exhortation can possibly be. Every school has its tone, moral and intellect- ual. And this tone is a mere tradition kept up by imitation, due in the first instance to the example set by teachers and by previous pupils of an ag- gressive and dominating type, copied by the others, and passed on from year to year, so that the new pupils take the cue almost immediately. Such a tone changes very slowly, if at all; and then always under the modifying influence of new personalities aggressive enough in character to set new patterns and not merely to copy the old. The classic example of this sort of tone is the often quoted case of Rugby under Dr. Arnold's administration. He impressed his own character as a model on the imagination of the oldest boys, EMULATION 1 51 who in turn were expected and required to im- press theirs upon the younger set. The conta- giousness of Arnold's genius was such that a Rugby man was said to be recognizable all through life by a peculiar turn of character which he acquired at school. It is obvious that psychol- ogy as such can give in this field no precepts of detail. As in so many other fields of teaching, success depends mainly on the native genius of the teacher, the sympathy, tact, and perception which enable him to seize the right moment and to set the right example. Among the recent modern reforms of teaching methods, a certain disparagement of emulation, as a laudable spring of action in the schoolroom, has often made itself heard. More than a century ago, Rousseau, in his ' Emile,' branded rivalry be- tween one pupil and another as too base a pas- sion to play a part in an ideal education. " Let Emile," he said, " never be led to compare himself to other children. No rivalries, not even in run- ning, as soon as he begins to have the power of reason. It were a hundred times better that he should not learn at all what he could only learn through jealousy or vanity. But I would mark out every year the progress he may have made, 52 TALKS TO TEACHEKS and I would compare it with the progress of the following years. I would say to him : ' You are now grown so many inches taller; there is the ditch which you jumped over, there is the burden which you raised. There is the distance to which you could throw a pebble, there the distance you could run over without losing breath. See how much more you can do now ! ' Thus I should ex- cite him without making him jealous of any one. He would wish to surpass himself. I can see no inconvenience in this emulation with his former self." Unquestionably, emulation with one's former self is a noble form of the passion of rivalry, and has a wide scope in the training of the young. But to veto and taboo all possible rivalry of one youth with another, because such rivalry may degenerate into greedy and selfish excess, does seem to savor somewhat of sentimentality, or even of fanaticism. The feeling of rivalry lies at the very basis of our being, all social improvement being largely due to it. There is a noble and generous kind of rivalry, as well as a spiteful and greedy kind ; and the noble and generous form is particularly common in childhood. All games owe the zest which they bring with them to the fact ITS USEFULNESS IN THE SCHOOLROOM 53 that they are rooted in the emulous passion, yet they are the chief means of training in fairness and magnanimity. Can the teacher afford to throw such an ally away ? Ought we seriously to hope that marks, distinctions, prizes, and other goals of effort, based on the pursuit of recognized superior- ity, should be forever banished from our schools ? As a psychologist, obliged to notice the deep and pervasive character of the emulous passion, I must confess my doubts. The wise teacher will use this instinct as he uses others, reaping its advantages, and appealing to it in such a way as to reap a maximum of benefit with a minimum of harm; for, after all, we must confess, with a French critic of Rousseau's doctrine, that the deepest spring of action in us is the sight of action in another. The spectacle of effort is what awakens and sustains our own ef- fort. No runner running all alone on a race-track will find in his own will the power of stimulation which his rivalry with other runners incites, when he feels them at his heels, about to pass. When a trotting horse is ' speeded,' a running horse must go beside him to keep him to the pace. 54 TALKS TO TEACHERS As imitation slides into emulation, so emulation slides into Ambition ; and ambition connects itself closely with Pugnacity and Pride. Consequently, these five instinctive tendencies form an inter- connected group of factors, hard to separate in the determination of a great deal of our conduct. The Ambitious Impulses would perhaps be the best name for the whole group. Pride and pugnacity have often been considered unworthy passions to appeal to in the young. But in their more refined and noble forms they play a great part in the schoolroom and in educa- tion generally, being in some characters most po- tent spurs to effort. Pugnacity need not be thought of merely in the form of physical com- bativeness. It can be taken in the sense of a gen- eral unwillingness to be beaten by any kind of difficulty. It is what makes us feel 'stumped' and challenged by arduous achievements, and is essential to a spirited and enterprising character. We have of late been hearing much of the philosophy of tenderness in education ; ' interest ' must be assiduously awakened in everything, diffi- culties must be smoothed away. Soft pedagogics have taken the place of the old steep and rocky path to learning. But from this lukewarm air the OWNERSHIP 55 bracing oxygen of effort is left out. It is nonsense to suppose that every step in education can be in- teresting. The fighting impulse must often be ap- pealed to. Make the pupil feel ashamed of being scared at fractions, of being * downed ' by the law of falling bodies ; rouse his pugnacity and pride, and he will rush at the "difficult places with a sort of inner wrath at himself that is one of his best moral faculties. A victory scored under such con- ditions becomes a turning-point and crisis of his character. It represents the high-water mark of his powers, and serves thereafter as an ideal pat- tern for his self-imitation. The teacher who never rouses this sort of pugnacious excitement in his pupils falls short of one of his best forms of use- fulness. The next instinct which I shall mention is that of Ownership, also one of the radical endowments of the race. It often is the antagonist of imita- tion. Whether social progress is due more to the passion for keeping old things and habits or to the passion of imitating and acquiring new ones may in some cases be a difficult thing to decide. The sense of ownership begins in the second year of life. Among the first words which an infant 56 TALKS TO TEACHEES learns to utter are the words 'my' and 'mine,' and woe to the parents of twins who fail to pro- vide their gifts in duplicate. The depth and primitiveness of this instinct would seem to cast a sort of psychological discredit in advance upon all radical forms of communistic Utopia. Private proprietorship cannot be practically abolished un- til human nature is changed. It seems essential to mental health that the individual should have something beyond the bare clothes on his back to which he can assert exclusive possession, and which he may defend adversely against the world. Even those religious orders who make the most stringent vows of poverty have found it necessary to relax the rule a little in favor of the human heart made unhappy by reduction to too disinter- ested terms. The monk must have his books: the nun must have her little garden, and the images and pictures in her room. In education, the instinct of ownership is fun- damental, and can be appealed to in many ways. In the house, training in order and neatness be- gins with the arrangement of the child's own personal possessions. In the school, ownership is particularly important in connection with one of its special forms of activity, the collecting im- UTILITY OF THE COLLECTING IMPULSE 57 pulse. An object possibly not very interesting in itself, like a shell, a postage stamp, or a single map or drawing, will acquire an interest if it fills a gap in a collection or helps to complete a series. Much of the scholarly work of the world, so far as it is mere bibliography, memory, and erudition (and this lies at the basis of all our human scholar- ship), would seem to owe its interest rather to the way in which it gratifies the accumulating and col- lecting instinct than to any special appeal which it makes to our cravings after rationality. A man wishes a complete collection of information, wishes to know more about a subject than any- body else, much as another may wish to own more dollars or more early editions or more en- gravings before the letter than anybody else. The teacher who can work this impulse into the school tasks is fortunate. Almost all children collect something. A tactful teacher may get them to take pleasure in collecting books; in keeping a neat and orderly collection of notes ; in starting, when they are mature enough, a card catalogue; in preserving every drawing or map which they may make. Neatness, order, and method are thus instinctively gained, along with the other benefits which the possession of the 58 TALKS TO TEACHERS collection entails. Even such a noisome thing as a collection of postage stamps may be used by the teacher as an inciter of interest in the geographi- cal and historical information which she desires to impart. Sloyd successfully avails itself of this instinct in causing the pupil to make a collection of wooden implements fit for his own private use at home. Collecting is, of course, the basis of all natural history study; and probably nobody ever became a good naturalist who was not an unusu- ally active collector when a boy. Constructiveness is another great instinctive ten- dency with which the schoolroom has to contract an alliance. Up to the eighth or ninth year of childhood one may say that the child does hardly anything else than handle objects, explore things with his hands, doing and undoing, setting up and knocking down, putting together and pulling apart ; for, from the psychological point of view, construction and destruction are two names for the same manual activity. Both signify the pro- duction of change, and the working of effects, in outward things. The result of all this is that in- timate familiarity with the physical environment, that acquaintance with the properties of material CONSTEUCTIVENESS 59 things, which is really the foundation of human, consciousness. To the very last, in most of us, the conceptions of objects and their properties are limited to the notion of what we can do with them. A ' stick ' means something we can lean upon or strike with ; ' fire,' something to cook, or warm ourselves, or burn things up withal; 'string,' something with which to tie things to- gether. For most people these objects have no other meaning. In geometry, the cylinder, circle, sphere, are defined as what you get by going through certain processes of construction, revolv- ing a parallelogram upon one of its sides, etc. The more different kinds of things a child thus gets to know by treating and handling them, the more confident grows his sense of kinship with the world in which he lives. An unsympathetic adult will wonder at the fascinated hours which a child will spend in putting his blocks together and rearranging them. But the wise education takes the tide at the flood, and from the kinder- garten upward devotes the first years of educa- tion to training in construction and to object- teaching. I need not recapitulate here what I said awhile back about the superiority of the objective and experimental methods. They oc- 60 TALKS TO TEACHERS cupy the pupil in a way most congruous with the spontaneous interests of his age. They absorb him, and leave impressions durable and profound. Compared with the youth taught by these methods, one brought up exclusively by books carries through life a certain remoteness from reality: he stands, as it were, out of the pale, and feels that he stands so ; and often suffers a kind of melancholy from which he might have been res- cued by a more real education. There are other impulses, such as love of appro- bation or vanity, shyness and secretiveness, of which a word might be said; but they are too familiar to need it. You can easily pursue the subject by your own reflection. There is one general law, however, that relates to many of our instinctive tendencies, and that has no little impor- tance in education ; and I must refer to it briefly before I leave the subject. It has been called the law of transitoriness in instincts. Many of our impulsive tendencies ripen at a certain period; and, if the appropriate objects be then and there provided, habits of conduct toward them are ac- quired which last. But, if the objects be not forth- coming then, the impulse may die out before a THE TEANSITORIKESS OF INSTINCTS 61 habit is formed ; and later it may be hard to teach the creature to react appropriately in those direc- tions. The sucking instincts in mammals, the following instinct in certain birds and quadrupeds, are examples of this : they fade away shortly after birth. In children we observe a ripening of impulses and interests in a certain determinate order. Creeping, walking, climbing, imitating vocal sounds, constructing, drawing, calculating, pos- sess the child in succession; and in some chil- dren the possession, while it lasts, may be of a semi-frantic and exclusive sort. Later, the inter- est in any one of these things may wholly fade away. Of course, the proper pedagogic moment to work skill in, and to clench the useful habit, is when the native impulse is most acutely present. Crowd on the athletic opportunities, the mental arithmetic, the verse-learning, the drawing, the botany, or what not, the moment you have reason to think the hour is ripe. The hour may not last long, and while it continues you may safely let all the child's other occupations take a second place. In this way you economize time and deepen skill; for many an infant prodigy, artis- tic or mathematical, has a flowering epoch of but a few months. 62 TALKS TO TEACHERS One can draw no specific rules for all this. It depends on close observation in the particular case, and parents here have a great advantage over teachers. In fact, the law of transitoriness has little chance of individualized application in the schools. Such is the little interested and impulsive psy- chophysical organism whose springs of action the teacher must divine, and to whose ways he must become accustomed. He must start with the na- tive tendencies, and enlarge the pupil's entire pas- sive and active experience. He must ply him with new objects and stimuli, and make him taste the fruits of his behavior, so that now that whole context of remembered experience is what shall determine his conduct when he gets the stimulus, and not the bare immediate impression. As the pupil's life thus, enlarges, it gets fuller and fuller of all sorts of memories and associations and sub- stitutions ; but the eye accustomed to psychologi- cal analysis will discern, underneath it all, the outlines of our simple psychophysical scheme. Respect then, I beg y6u, always the original reactions, even when you are seeking to overcome their connection with certain objects, and to sup- BAD AND GOOD BEHAVIOR 63 plant them with others that you wish to make the rule. Bad behavior, from the point of view of the teacher's art, is as good a starting-point as good behavior. In fact, paradoxical as it may sound to say so, it is often a. better starting-point than good behavior would be. The acquired reactions must be made habitual whenever they are appropriate. Therefore Habit is the next subject to which your attention is invited. VIII. THE LAWS OF HABIT IT is very important that teachers should realize the importance of habit, and psychology helps us greatly at this point. We speak, it is true, of good habits and of bad habits ; but, when people use the word ' habit,' in the majority of instances it is a bad habit which they have in mind. They talk of the smoking-habit and the swearing-habit and the drinking-habit, but not of the abstention- habit or the moderation-habit or the courage- habit. But the fact is that our virtues are habits as much as our vices. All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits, prac- tical, emotional, and intellectual, systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the lat- ter may be. Since pupils can understand this at a compara- tively early age, and since to understand it con- tributes in no small measure to their feeling of responsibility, it would be well if the teacher were HABIT A SECOND NATURE 65 able himself to talk to them of the philosophy of habit in some such abstract terms as I am now about to talk of it to you. I believe that we are subject to the law of habit in consequence of the fact that we have bodies. The plasticity of the living matter of our nervous system, in short, is the reason why we do a thing with difficulty the first time, but soon do it more and more easily, and finally, with sufficient prac- tice, do it semi-mechanically, or with hardly any consciousness at all. Our nervous systems have (in Dr. Carpenter's words) grown to the way in which they have been exercised, just as a sheet of paper or a coat, once creased or folded, tends to fall forever afterward into the same identical folds. Habit is thus a second nature, or rather, as the Duke of Wellington said, it is ' ten times nature,' at any rate as regards its importance in adult life ; for the acquired habits of our training have by that time inhibited or strangled most of the natural impulsive tendencies which were origi- nally there. Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each 66 TALKS TO TEACHEES night. Our dressing and undressing, our eating and drinking, our greetings and partings, our hat- raisings and giving way for ladies to precede, nay, even most of the forms of our common speech, are things of a type so fixed by repetition as almost to be classed as reflex actions. To each sort of im- pression we have an automatic, ready-made re- sponse. My very words to you now are an exam- ple of what I mean ; for having already lectured upon habit and printed a chapter about it in a book, and read the latter when in print, I find my tongue inevitably falling into its old phrases and repeating almost literally what I said before. So far as we are thus mere bundles of habit, we are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves. And since this, under any cir- cumstances, is what we always tend to become, it follows first of all that the teacher's prime con- cern should be to ingrain into the pupil that as- sortment of habits that shall be most useful to him throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists. To quote my earlier book directly, the great thing in all education is to make our nervous sys- tem our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease VALUE OF GOOD HABITS 57 upon the interest of the fund. 'For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and as carefully guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habit- ual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cap, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work are subjects of express volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding or regretting of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. If there be such daily duties not yet in- grained in any one of my hearers, let him begin this very hour to set the matter right. In Professor Bain's chapter on 'The Moral Habits ' there are some admirable practical re- marks laid down. Two great maxims emerge from the treatment. The first is that in the ac- quisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an 68 TALKS TO TEACHERS old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible. Accumulate all the possible circumstances which shall reinforce the right motives; put yourself assiduously in conditions that encourage the new way; make engagements incompatible with the old; take a public pledge, if the case allows; in short, envelope your resolution with every aid you know. This will give your new beginning such a momentum that the temptation to break down will not occur as soon as it otherwise might ; and every day during which a breakdown is post- poned adds to the chances of its not occurring at all. I remember long ago reading in an Austrian paper the advertisement of a certain Rudolph Somebody, who promised fifty gulden reward to any one who after that date should find him at the wine-shop of Ambrosius So-and-so. ' This I do,' the advertisement continued, ' in consequence of a promise which I have made my wife.' With such a wife, and such an understanding of the way in which to start new habits, it would be safe to stake one's money on Rudolph's ultimate success. The second maxim is, Never suffer an exception MAXIMS FOR HABIT-FORMING 69 to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up : a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again. Continuity of training is the great means of making the nervous system act infallibly right. As Professor Bain says : " The peculiarity of the moral habits, contradis- tinguishing them from the intellectual acquisi- tions, is the presence of two hostile powers, one to be gradually raised into the ascendant over the other. It is necessary above all things, in such a situation, never to lose a battle. Every gain on the wrong side undoes the effect of many con- quests on the right. The essential precaution, therefore, is so to regulate the two opposing powers that the one may have a series of unin- terrupted successes, until repetition has fortified it to such a degree as to enable it to cope with the opposition, under any circumstances. This is the theoretically best career of mental progress." A third maxim may be added to the preceding pair : Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emo- tional prompting you may experience in the direc* tion of the habits you aspire to gain. It is not in 70 TALKS TO TEACHEBS the moment of their forming, but in the moment of their producing motor effects, that resolves and aspirations communicate the new 'set' to the brain. No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's senti- ments may be, if one have not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better. With good intentions, hell proverbially is paved. This is an obvious consequence of the principles I have laid down. A ' character,' as J. S. Mill says, * is a completely fashioned will ' ; and a will, in the sense in which he means it, is an aggregate of tendencies to act in a firm and prompt and defi- nite way upon all the principal emergencies of life. A tendency to act only becomes effectively ingrained in us in proportion to the uninterrupted frequency with which the actions actually occur, and the brain ' grows ' to their use. When a re- solve or a fine glow of feeling is allowed to evap- orate without bearing practical fruit, it is worse than a chance lost: it works so as positively to hinder future resolutions and emotions from tak- ing the normal path of discharge. There is no more contemptible type of human character than MAXTMR FOB HABIT-FOBMING 71 that of the nerveless sentimentalist and dreamer, who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibil- ity, but never does a concrete manly deed. This leads to a fourth maxim. Don't preach too much to your pupils or abound in good talk in the abstract. Lie in wait rather for the practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do. The strokes of behavior are what give the new set to the charac- ter, and work the good habits into its organic tissue. Preaching and talking too soon become an ineffectual bore. There is a passage in Darwin's short auto- biography which has been often quoted, and which, for the sake of its bearing on our subject of habit, I must now quote again. Darwin says : " Up to the age of thirty or beyond it, poetry of many kinds gave me great pleasure ; and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that pictures formerly gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry. I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so 72 TALKS TO TEACHEKS intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. . . . My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts ; but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. ... If I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept alive through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature." We all intend when young to be all that may become a man, before the destroyer cuts us down. We wish and expect to enjoy poetry always, to grow more and more intelligent about pictures and music, to keep in touch with spiritual and religious ideas, and even not to let the greater philosophic thoughts of our time develop quite beyond our view. We mean all this in youth, I say ; and yet in how many middle-aged men and women is such an honest and sanguine expectation DABWIN'S CASE AS A WARNING 73 fulfilled ? Surely, in comparatively few ; and the laws of habit show us why. Some interest in each of these things arises in everybody at the proper age ; but, if not persistently fed with the appropri- ate matter, instead of growing into a powerful and necessary habit, it atrophies and dies, choked by the rival interests to which the daily food is given. "We make ourselves into Darwins in this negative respect by persistently ignoring the es- sential practical conditions of our case. We say abstractly : " I mean to enjoy poetry, and to ab- sorb a lot of it, of course. I fully intend to keep up my love of music, to read the books that shall give new turns to the thought of my time, to keep my higher spiritual side alive, etc." But we do not attack these things concretely, and we do not begin to-day. We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone, until those smiling possibilities are dead. Whereas ten minutes a day of poetry, of spiritual reading or meditation, and an hour or two a week at music, pictures, or philosophy, provided we began now and suffered no remission, would infallibly give us in due time the fulness of all we desire. By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing 74 TALKS TO TEACHEES ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of our higher possibilities. This is a point concerning which you teachers might well give a little timely information to your older and more aspiring pupils. According as a function receives daily exercise or not, the man becomes a different kind of being in later life. We have lately had a number of accomplished Hindoo visitors at Cambridge, who talked freely of life and philosophy. More than one of them has confided to me that the sight of our faces, all contracted as they are with the habit- ual American over-intensity and anxiety of expres- sion, and our ungraceful and distorted attitudes when sitting, made on him a very painful impres- sion. " I do not see," said one, " how it is possible for you to live as you do, without a single minute in your day deliberately given to tranquillity and meditation. It is an invariable part of our Hindoo life to retire for at least half an hour daily into silence, to relax our muscles, govern our breathing, and meditate on eternal things. Every Hindoo child is trained to this from a very early age." The good fruits of such a discipline were obvious in the physical repose and lack of tension, and the wonderful smoothness and calmness of facial THE HABIT OF EELAXATION 75 expression, and imperturbability of manner of these Orientals. I felt that my countrymen were depriving themselves of an essential grace of char- acter. How many American children ever hear it said, by parent or teacher, that they should moder- ate their piercing voices, that they should relax their unused muscles, and as far as possible, when sitting, sit quite still? Not one in a thousand, not one in five thousand ! Yet, from its reflex influence on the inner mental states, this ceaseless over-tension, over-motion, and over-expression are working on us grievous national harm. I beg you teachers to think a little seriously of this matter. Perhaps you can help our rising gen- eration of Americans toward the beginning of a better set of personal ideals.* To go back now to our general maxims, I may at last, as a fifth and final practical maxim about habits, offer something like this : Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it * See the Address on the Gospel of Relaxation, later in this volume. 76 TALKS TO TEACHERS may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insur- ance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possi- bly may never bring him a return. But, if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, ener- getic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him, and his softer fellow-mortals are win- nowed like chaff in the blast. I have been accused, when talking of the sub- ject of habit, of making old habits appear so strong that the acquiring of new ones, and partic- ularly anything like a sudden reform or conver- sion, would be made impossible by my doctrine. Of course, this would sufiice to condemn the lat- ter; for sudden conversions, however infrequent they may be, unquestionably do occur. But there is no incompatibility between the general laws I have laid down and the most startling sudden alterations in the way of character. New habits can be launched, I have expressly said, on condi- tion of there being new stimuli and new excite- THE SCOPE OF HABIT'S EFFECTS 77 ments. Now life abounds in these, and sometimes they are such critical and revolutionary experi- ences that they change a man's whole scale of values and system of ideas. In such cases, the old order of his habits will be ruptured ; and, if the new motives are lasting, new habits will be formed, and build up in him a new or regener- ate 'nature.' All this kind of fact I fully allow. But the general laws of habit are no wise altered thereby, and the physiological study of mental conditions still remains on the whole the most powerful ally of hortatory ethics. The hell to be endured here- after, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habit- ually fashioning our characters in the wrong way. Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never-so-little scar. The drunken Rip Van Win- kle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, "I won't count this time ! " Well, he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it ; but it is being counted 78 TALKS TO TEACHERS none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes. Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out. Of course, this has its good side as well as its bad one. As we become permanent drunkards by so many separate drinks, so we become saints in the moral, and authorities and experts in the practical and scientific spheres, by so many sepa- rate acts and hours of work. Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faith- fully busy each hour of the working day, he may safely leave the final result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation, in whatever pursuit he may have singled out. Silently, between all the details of his business, the power of judging in all that class of matter will have built itself up within him as a possession that will never pass away. Young people should know this truth in advance. The ignorance of it has probably en- gendered more discouragement and faint-hearted- ness in youths embarking on arduous careers than all other causes put together. IX. THE ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS IN my last talk, in treating of Habit, I chiefly had in mind our motor habits, habits of external conduct. But our thinking and feeling processes are also largely subject to the law of habit, and one result of this is a phenomenon which you all know under the name of ' the association of ideas.' To that phenomenon I ask you now to turn. You remember that consciousness is an ever- flowing stream of objects, feelings, and impulsive tendencies. We saw already that its phases or pulses are like so many fields or waves, each field or wave having usually its central point of liveliest attention, in the shape of the most promi- nent object in our thought, while all around this lies a margin of other objects more dimly realized, together with the margin of emotional and active tendencies which the whole entails. De- scribing the mind thus in fluid terms, we cling as close as possible to nature. At first sight, it might seem as if, in the fluidity of these successive waves, 80 TALKS TO TEACHERS everything is indeterminate. But inspection shows that each wave has a constitution which can be to some degree explained by the constitu- tion of the waves just passed away. And this relation of the wave to its predecessors is expressed by the two fundamental ' laws of association,' so- called, of which the first is named the Law of Contiguity, the second that of Similarity. The Law of Contiguity tells us that objects thought of in the coming wave are such as in some previous experience were next to the objects repre- sented in the wave that is passing away. The vanishing objects were once formerly their neigh- bors in the mind. When you recite the alphabet or your prayers, or when the sight of an object reminds you of its name, or the name reminds you of the object, it is through the law of contiguity that the terms are suggested to the mind. The Law of Similarity says that, when contigu- ity fails to describe what happens, the coming objects will prove to resemble the going objects, even though the two were never experienced together before. In our ' flights of fancy,' this is frequently the case. If, arresting ourselves in the flow of reverie, we ask the question, " How came we to be think- THE TWO LAWS OF ASSOCIATION 81 ing of just this object now ? " we can almost al- ways trace its presence to some previous object which has introduced it to the mind, according to one or the other of these laws. The entire rou- tine of our memorized acquisitions, for example, is a consequence of nothing but the Law of Con- tiguity. The words of a poem, the formulas of trigonometry, the facts of history, the properties of material things, are all known to us as definite systems or groups of objects which cohere in an order fixed by innumerable iterations, and of which any one part reminds us of the others. In dry and prosaic minds, almost all the mental se- quences flow along these lines of habitual rou- tine repetition and suggestion. In witty, imaginative minds, on the other hand, the routine is broken through with ease at any moment ; and one field of mental objects will sug- gest another with which perhaps in the whole his- tory of human thinking it had never once before been coupled. The link here is usually some anal- ogy between the objects successively thought of, an analogy often so subtle that, although we feel it, we can with difficulty analyze its ground ; as where, for example, we find something masculine in the color red and something feminine in the 82 TALKS TO TEACHERS color pale blue, or where, of three human beings' characters, one will remind us of a cat, another of a dog, the third perhaps of a cow. Psychologists have of course gone very deeply into the question of what the causes of association may be ; and some of them have tried to show that contiguity and similarity are not two radically diverse laws, but that either presupposes the pres- ence of the other. I myself am disposed to think that the phenomena of association depend on our cerebral constitution, and are not immediate con- sequences of our being rational beings. In other words, when we shall have become disembodied spirits, it may be that our trains of consciousness will follow different laws. These questions are discussed in the books on psychology, and I hope that some of you will be interested in following them there. But I will, on the present occasion, ignore them entirely ; for, as teachers, it is the fact of association that practically concerns you, let its grounds be spiritual or cerebral or what they may, and let its laws be reducible, or non-reduci- ble, to one. Your pupils, whatever else they are, are at any rate little pieces of associating machin- ery. Their education consists in the organizing THEIR GREAT SCOPE 83 within them of determinate tendencies to associate one thing with another, impressions with conse- quences, these with reactions, those with results, and so on indefinitely. The more copious the associative systems, the completer the individual's adaptations to the world. The teacher can formulate his function to him- self therefore in terms of ' association ' as well as in terms of * native and acquired reaction.' It is mainly that of building up useful systems of asso- ciation in the pupil's mind. This description sounds wider than the one I began by giving. But, when one thinks that our trains of associa- tion, whatever they may be, normally issue in ac- quired reactions or behavior, one sees that in a general way the same mass of facts is covered by both formulas. It is astonishing how many mental operations we can explain when we have once grasped the principles of association. The great problem which association undertakes to solve is, Why does just this particular field of consciousness, constituted in this particular way, now appear before my mind? It may be a field of objects imagined ; it may be of objects remembered or of objects perceived ; it may include an action resolved on. In either case, 84 TALKS TO TEACHERS when the field is analyzed into its parts, those parts can be shown to have proceeded from parts of fields previously before consciousness, in con- sequence of one or other of the laws of association just laid down. Those laws run the mind : inter- est, shifting hither and thither, deflects it; and attention, as we shall later see, steers it and keeps it from too zigzag a course. To grasp these factors clearly gives one a solid and simple understanding of the psychological machinery. The 'nature,' the 'character,' of an individual means really nothing but the habitual form of his associations. To break up bad associa- tions or wrong ones, to build others in, to guide the associative tendencies into the most fruitful channels, is the educator's principal task. But here, as with all other simple principles, the dif- ficulty lies in the application. Psychology can state the laws : concrete tact and talent alone can work them to useful results. Meanwhile it is a matter of the commonest expe- rience that our minds may pass from one object to another by various intermediary fields of conscious- ness. The indeterminateness of our paths of asso- ciation in concrete is thus almost as striking a feat- ure of them as the uniformity of their abstract INDETERMINATENESS OF ASSOCIATIONS 85 form. Start from any idea whatever, and the entire range of your ideas is potentially at your disposal. If we take as the associative starting- point, or cue, some simple word which I pronounce before you, there is no limit to the possible diver- sity of suggestions which it may set up in your minds. Suppose I say ' blue,' for example : some of you may think of the blue sky and hot weather from which we now are suffering, then go off on thoughts of summer clothing, or possibly of meteo- rology at large ; others may think of the spectrum and the physiology of color-vision, and glide into X-rays and recent physical speculations; others may think of blue ribbons, or of the blue flowers on a friend's hat, and proceed on lines of personal reminiscence. To others, again, etymology and linguistic thoughts may be suggested; or blue may be ' apperceived ' as a synonym for melan- choly, and a train of associates connected with morbid psychology may proceed to unroll them- selves. In the same person, the same word heard at different times will provoke, in consequence of the varying marginal preoccupations, either one of a number of diverse possible associative sequences. Professor Miinsterberg performed this experiment 86 TALKS TO TEACHERS methodically, using the same words four times over, at three-month intervals, as ' cues ' for four different persons who were the subjects of obser- vation. He found almost no constancy in their associations taken at these different times. In short, the entire potential content of one's con- sciousness is accessible from any one of its points. This is why we can never work the laws of asso- ciation forward: starting from the present field as a cue, we can never cipher out in advance just what the person will be thinking of five minutes later. The elements which may become prepo- tent in the process, the parts of each successive field round which the associations shall chiefly turn, the possible bifurcations of suggestion, are so numerous and ambiguous as to be indetermina- ble before the fact. But, although we cannot work the laws of association forward, we can always work them backwards. We cannot say now what we shall find ourselves thinking of five minutes hence ; but, whatever it may be, we shall then be able to trace it through intermediary links of contiguity or similarity to what we are thinking now. What so baffles our prevision is the shifting part played by the margin and focus in fact, by each element by itself of the margin or focus in calling up the next ideas. SOME CUES ABE PREPOTENT 87 For example, I am reciting * Locksley Hall,' in order to divert my mind from a state of suspense that I am in concerning the will of a relative that is dead. The will still remains in the mental background as an extremely marginal or ultra- marginal portion of my field of consciousness ; but the poem fairly keeps my attention from it, until I come to the line, " I, the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time." The words 'I, the heir,' immediately make an electric connection with the marginal thought of the will; that, in turn, makes my heart beat with anticipation of my possible legacy, so that I throw down the book and pace the floor excitedly with visions of my future fortune pouring through my mind. Any portion of the field of consciousness that has more potentialities of emotional excitement than an- other may thus be roused to predominant activ- ity ; and the shifting play of interest now in one portion, now in another, deflects the currents in all sorts of zigzag ways, the mental activity run- ning hither and thither as the sparks run in burnt-up paper. One more point, and I shall have said as much to you as seems necessary about the process of association. 88 TALKS TO TEACHERS You just saw how a single exciting word may call up its own associates prepotently, and deflect our whole train of thinking from the previous track. The fact is that every portion of the field tends to call up its own associates ; but, if these associates be severally different, there is rivalry, and as soon as one or a few begin to be effective the others seem to get siphoned out, as it were, and left behind. Seldom, however, as in our ex- ample, does the process seem to torn round a single item in the mental field, or even round the entire field that is immediately in the act of pass- ing. It is a matter of constellation, into which portions of fields that are already past especially seem to enter and have their say. Thus, to go back to * Locksley Hall,' each word as I recite it in its due order is suggested not solely by the previous word now expiring on my lips, but it is rather the effect of all the previous words, taken together, of the verse. " Ages," for example, calls up " in the foremost files of time," when preceded by " I, the heir of all the " ; but, when preceded by, "for I doubt not through the," it calls up "one increasing purpose runs." Similarly, if I write on the blackboard the letters ABODE F, . . . they probably suggest to you G H I. . . . THE PUPIL AN ASSOCIATING MACHINE 89 But, if I write A B A D D E F, if they suggest anything, they suggest as their complement E C T orEFICIENCY. The result depending on the total constellation, even though most of the single items be the same. My practical reason for mentioning this law is this, that it follows from it that, in working asso- ciations into your pupils' minds, you must not rely on single cues, but multiply the cues as much as possible. Couple the desired reaction with numer- ous constellations of antecedents, don't always ask the question, for example, in the same way ; don't use the same kind of data in numerical problems ; vary your illustrations, etc., as much as you can. When we come to the subject of mem- ory, we shall learn still more about this. So much, then, for the general subject of asso- ciation. In leaving it for other topics (in which, however, we shall abundantly find it involved again), I cannot too strongly urge you to acquire a habit of thinking of your pupils in associative terms. All governors of mankind, from doctors and jail-wardens to demagogues and statesmen, instinctively come so to conceive their charges. If you do the same, thinking of them (however else you may think of them besides) as so many 90 TALKS TO TEACHERS little systems of associating machinery, you will be astonished at the intimacy of insight into their operations and at the practicality of the results which you will gain. We think of our acquain- tances, for example, as characterized by certain 'tendencies.' These tendencies will in almost every instance prove to be tendencies to associa- tion. Certain ideas in them are always followed by certain other ideas, these by certain feelings and impulses to approve or disapprove, assent or decline. If the topic arouse one of those first ideas, the practical outcome can be pretty well foreseen. 'Types of character' in short are largely types of association. INTEREST AT our last meeting I treated of the native ten- dencies of the pupil to react in characteristically definite ways upon different stimuli or exciting circumstances. In fact, I treated of the pupil's in- stincts. Now some situations appeal to special instincts from the very outset, and others fail to do so until the proper connections have been or- ganized in the course of the person's training. We say of the former set of objects or situations that they are interesting in themselves and origi- nally. Of the latter we say that they are natively uninteresting, and that interest in them has first to be acquired. No topic has received more attention from peda- gogical writers than that of interest. It is the natural sequel to the instincts we so lately dis- cussed, and it is therefore well fitted to be the next subject which we take up. Since some objects are natively interesting and in others interest is artificially acquired, the 92 TALKS TO TEACHERS teacher must know which the natively interesting ones are ; for, as we shall see immediately, other objects can artificially acquire an interest only through first becoming associated with some of these natively interesting things. The native interests of children lie altogether in the sphere of sensation. Novel things to look at or novel sounds to hear, especially when they in- volve the spectacle of action of a violent sort, will always divert the attention from abstract concep- tions of objects verbally taken in. The grimace that Johnny is making, the spitballs that Tommy is ready to throw, the dog-fight in the street, or the distant firebells ringing, these are the rivals with which the teacher's powers of being inter- esting have incessantly to cope. The child will always attend more to what a teacher does than to what the same teacher says. During the per- formance of experiments or while the teacher is drawing on the blackboard, the children are tran- quil and absorbed. I have seen a roomful of col- lege students suddenly become perfectly still, to look at their professor of physics tie a piece of string around a stick which he was going to use in an experiment, but immediately grow restless when he began to explain the experiment. A NATIVELY INTERESTING THINGS 93 lady told me that one day, during a lesson, she was delighted at having captured so completely the attention of one of her young charges. He did not remove his eyes from her face; but he said to her after the lesson was over, " I looked at you all the time, and your upper jaw did not move once ! " That was the only fact that he had taken in. Living things, then, moving things, or things that savor of danger or of blood, that have a dra- matic quality, these are the objects natively in- teresting to childhood, to the exclusion of almost everything else; and the teacher of young chil- dren, until more artificial interests have grown up, will keep in touch with her pupils by constant appeal to such matters as these. Instruction must be carried on objectively, experimentally, anec- dotally. The blackboard-drawing and story-tell- ing must constantly come in. But of course these methods cover only the first steps, and carry one but a little way. Can we now formulate any general principle by which the later and more artificial interests con- nect themselves with these early ones that the child brings with him to the school? Fortunately, we can : there is a very simple law 94 TALKS TO TEACHERS that relates the acquired and the native interests with each other. Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists. The two associated objects grow, as it were, together : the interesting portion sheds its quality over the whole; and thus things not interesting in their own right borrow an interest which becomes as real and as strong as that of any natively interesting thing. The odd circumstance is that the borrowing does not impoverish the source, the objects taken to- gether being more interesting, perhaps, than the originally interesting portion was by itself. This is one of the most striking proofs of the range of application of the principle of association of ideas in psychology. An idea will infect an- other with its own emotional interest when they have become both associated together into any sort of a mental total. As there is no limit to the various associations into which an interest- ing idea may enter, one sees in how many ways an interest may be derived. You will understand this abstract statement easily if I take the most frequent of concrete ex- amples, the interest which things borrow from HOW INTEREST IS ACQUIRED 90 their connection with our own personal welfare. The most natively interesting object to a man is his own personal self and its fortunes. We ac- cordingly see that the moment a thing becomes connected with the fortunes of the self, it forthwith becomes an interesting thing. Lend the child his books, pencils, and other apparatus: then give them to him, make them his own, and notice the new light with which they instantly shine in his eyes. He takes a new kind of care of them alto- gether. In mature life, all the drudgery of a man's business or profession, intolerable in itself, is shot through with engrossing significance be- cause he knows it to be associated with his per- sonal fortunes. What more deadly uninteresting object can there be than a railroad time-table? Yet where will you find a more interesting object if you are going on a journey, and by its means can find your train ? At such times the time-table will absorb a man's entire attention, its interest being borrowed solely from its relation to his per- sonal life. From all these facts there emerges a very simple abstract programme for the teacher to follow in keeping the attention of the child : Begin with the line of his native interests, and offer him objects that have some immediate connection with 96 TALKS TO TEACHERS these. The kindergarten methods, the object- teaching routine, the blackboard and manual-train- ing work, all recognize this feature. Schools in which these methods preponderate are schools where discipline is easy, and where the voice of the master claiming order and attention in threat- ening tones need never be heard. Next, step by step, connect with these first objects and experiences the later objects and ideas which you wish to instill. Associate the new with the old in some natural and telling way, so that the interest, being shed along from point to point, finally suffuses the entire system of objects of thought. This is the abstract statement ; and, abstractly, nothing can be easier to understand. It is in the fulfilment of the rule that the difficulty lies ; for the difference between an interesting and a tedious teacher consists in little more than the inventive- ness by which the one is able to mediate these associations and connections, and in the dulness in discovering such transitions which the other shows. One teacher's mind will fairly coruscate with points of connection between the new lesson and the circumstances of the children's other experi- ence. Anecdotes and reminiscences will abound in her talk ; and the shuttle of interest will shoot SOMETHING TO ATTEND WITH 97 backward and forward, weaving the new and the old together in a lively and entertaining way. Another teacher has no such inventive fertility, and his lesson will always be a dead and heavy thing. This is the psychological meaning of the Herbartian principle of 'preparation' for each lesson, and of correlating the new with the old. It is the psychological meaning of that whole method of concentration in studies of which you have been recently hearing so much. When the geography and English and history and arithmetic simultaneously make cross-references to one an- other, you get an interesting set of processes all along the line. If, then, you wish to insure the interest of your pupils, there is only one way to do it ; and that is to make certain that they have something in their minds to attend with, when you begin to talk. That something can consist in nothing but a previous lot of ideas already interesting in them- selves, and of such a nature that the incoming novel objects which you present can dovetail into them and form with them some kind of a logically associated or systematic whole. Fortunately, al- most any kind of a connection is sufficient to 98 TALKS TO TEACHERS carry the interest along. What a help is our Philippine war at present in teaching geography ! But before the war you could ask the children if they ate pepper with their eggs, and where they supposed the pepper came from. Or ask them if glass is a stone, and, if not, why not ; and then let them know how stones are formed and glass manu- factured. External links will serve as well as those that are deeper and more logical. But in- terest, once shed upon a subject, is liable to re- main always with that subject. Our acquisitions become in a measure portions of our personal self; and little by little, as cross-associations multiply and habits of familiarity and practice grow, the entire system of our objects of thought consoli- dates, most of it becoming interesting for some purposes and in some degree. An adult man's interests are almost every one of them intensely artificial : they have slowly been built up. The objects of professional interest are most of them, in their original nature, repulsive ; but by their connection with such natively excit- ing objects as one's personal fortune, one's social responsibilities, and especially by the force of in- veterate habit, they grow to be the only things for which in middle life a man profoundly cares. THE SYSTEM OF OUR INTERESTS 99 But in all these the spread and consolidation have followed nothing but the principles first laid down. If we could recall for a moment our whole individual history, we should see that our pro- fessional ideals and the zeal they inspire are due to nothing but the slow accretion of one mental object to another, traceable backward from point to point till we reach the moment when, in the nursery or in the schoolroom, ]some little story told, some little object shown, some little opera- tion witnessed, brought the first new object and new interest within our ken by associating it with some one of those primitively there. The interest now suffusing the whole system took its rise in that little event, so insignificant to us now as to be entirely forgotten. As the bees in swarming cling to one another in layers till the few are reached whose feet grapple the bough from which the swarm depends; so with the objects of our thinking, they hang to each other by associated links, but the original source of interest in all of them is the native interest which the earliest one once possessed. XI. ATTENTION WHOEVEB treats of interest inevitably treats of attention, for to say that an object is interesting is only another way of saying that it excites atten- tion. But in addition to the attention which any object already interesting or just becoming interesting claims passive attention or sponta- neous attention, we may call it there is a more deliberate attention, voluntary attention or atten- tion with effort, as it is called, which we can give to objects less interesting or uninteresting in them- selves. The distinction between active and pas- sive attention is made in all books on psychology, and connects itself with the deeper aspects of the topic. From our present purely practical point of view, however, it is not necessary to be intricate ; and passive attention to natively interesting ma- terial requires no further elucidation on this occa- sion. All that we need explicitly to note is that, the more the passive attention is relied on, by keeping the material interesting ; and the less the ATTENTION AND GENIUS 101 kind of attention requiring effort is appealed to ; the more smoothly and pleasantly the class-room work goes on. I must say a few more words, however, about this latter process of voluntary and deliberate attention. One often hears it said that genius is nothing but a power of sustained attention, and the popu- lar impression probably prevails that men of genius are remarkable for their voluntary powers in this direction. But a little introspective obser- vation will show any one that voluntary attention cannot be continuously sustained, t hat it comes in beats. When we are studying an uninteresting subject, if our mind tends to wander, we have to bring back our attention every now and then by using distinct pulses of effort, which revivify the topic for a moment, the mind then running on for a certain number of seconds or minutes with spon- taneous interest, until again some intercurrent idea captures it and takes it off. Then the proc- esses of volitional recall must be repeated once more. Voluntary attention, in short, is only a momentary affair. The process, whatever it is, exhausts itself in the single act ; and, unless the matter is then taken in hand by some trace of interest inherent in the subject, the mind fails to 102 TALKS TO TEACHERS follow it at all. The sustained attention of the genius, sticking to his subject for hours together, is for the most part of the passive sort. The minds of geniuses are full of copious and original associations. The subject of thought, once started, develops all sorts of fascinating consequences. The attention is led along one of these to another in the most interesting manner, and the attention never once tends to stray away. In a commonplace mind, on the other hand, a subject develops much less numerous associates : it dies out then quickly; and, if the man is to keep up thinking of it at all, he must bring his attention back to it by a violent wrench. In him, therefore, the faculty of voluntary attention re- ceives abundant opportunity for cultivation in daily life. It is your despised business man, your common man of affairs, (so looked down on by the literary awarders of fame) whose virtue in this regard is likely to be most developed ; for he has to listen to the concerns of so many uninteresting people, and to transact so much drudging detail, that the faculty in question is always kept in training. A genius on the contrary, is the man in whom you are least likely to find the power of attending to anything insipid or distasteful in CONDITIONS OP VOLUNTARY ATTENTION 103 itself. He breaks his engagements, leaves his letters unanswered, neglects his family duties in- corrigibly, because he is powerless to turn his at- tention down and back from those more interest- ing trains of imagery with which his genius con- stantly occupies his mind. Voluntary attention is thus an essentially in- stantaneous affair. You can claim it, for your purposes in the schoolroom, by commanding it in loud, imperious tones; and you can easily get it in this way. But, unless the subject to which you thus recall their attention has inherent power to interest the pupils, you will have got it for only a brief moment; and their minda will soon be wandering again. To keep them where you have called them, you must make the subject too inter- esting for them to wander again. And for that there is one prescription; but the prescription, like all our prescriptions, is abstract, and, to get practical results from it, you must couple it with mother-wit. The prescription is that the subject must be made to show new aspects of itself ; to prompt new ques- tions ; in a word, to change. From an unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away. You can test this by the simplest possible case of 104 TALKS TO TEACHERS sensorial attention. Try to attend steadfastly to a dot on the paper or on the wall. You pres- ently find that one or the other of two things has happened: either your field of vision has become blurred, so that you now see nothing distinct at all, or else you have involuntarily ceased to look at the dot in question, and are looking at some- thing else. But, if you ask yourself successive questions about the dot, how big it is, how far, of what shape, what shade of color, etc. j in other words, if you turn it over, if you think of it in various ways, and along with various kinds of asso- ciates, you can keep your mind on it for a com- paratively long time. This is what the genius does, in whose hands a given topic coruscates and grows. And this is what the teacher must do for every topic if he wishes to avoid too frequent ap- peals to voluntary attention of the coerced sort. In all respects, reliance upon such attention as this is a wasteful method, bringing bad temper and nervous wear and tear as well as imperfect results. The teacher who can get along by keep- ing spontaneous interest excited must be regarded as the teacher with the greatest skill. There is, however, in all schoolroom work a large mass of material that must be dull and un- MECHANICAL AIDS TO ATTENTION 105 exciting, and to which it is impossible in any con- tinous way to contribute an interest associatively derived. There are, therefore, certain external methods, which every teacher knows, of volun- tarily arousing the attention from time to time and keeping it upon the subject. Mr. Fitch has a lecture on the art of securing attention, and he briefly passes these methods in review : the post- ure must be changed; places can be changed. Questions, after being answered singly, may occa- sionally be answered in concert. Elliptical ques- tions may be asked, the pupil supplying the miss- ing word. The teacher must pounce upon the most listless child, and wake him up. The habit of prompt and ready response must be kept up. Recapitulations, illustrations, examples, novelty of order, and ruptures of routine, all these are means for keeping the attention alive and con- tributing a little interest to a dull subject. Above all, the teacher must himself be alive and ready, and must use the contagion of his own example. But, when all is said and done, the fact remains that some teachers have a naturally inspiring pres- ence and can make their exercises interesting, while others simply cannot. And psychology and general pedagogy here confess their failure, and 106 TALKS TO TEACHERS hand things over to the deeper springs of human personality to conduct the task. A brief reference to the physiological theory of the attentive process may serve still further to elucidate these practical remarks, and confirm them by showing them from a slightly different point of view. What is the attentive process, psychologically considered? Attention to an object is what takes place whenever that object most completely oc- cupies the mind. For simplicity's sake suppose the object to be an object of sensation, a figure approaching us at a distance on the road. It is far off, barely perceptible, and hardly moving : we do not know with certainty whether it is a man or not. Such an object as this, if carelessly looked at, may hardly catch our attention at all The opti- cal impression may affect solely the marginal con- sciousness, while the mental focus keeps engaged with rival things. We may indeed not 'see' it till some one points it out. But, if so, how does he point it out ? By his finger, and by describing its appearance, by creating a premonitory image of where to look and of what to expect to see. This premonitory image is already an excitement ATTENTION, PHYSIOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED 107 of the same nerve-centres that are to be concerned with the impression. The impression comes, and excites them still further ; and now the object en- ters the focus of the field, consciousness being sus- tained both by impression and by preliminary idea. But the maximum of attention to it is not yet reached. Although we see it, we may not care for it; it may suggest nothing important to us; and a rival stream of objects or of thoughts may quickly take our mind away. If, however, our companion defines it in a significant way, arouses in the mind a set of experiences to be apprehended from it, names it an enemy or as a messenger of important tidings, the residual and marginal ideas now aroused, so far from being its rivals, become its associates and allies. They shoot to- gether into one system with it; they converge upon it ; they keep it steadily in focus ; the mind attends to it with maximum power. The attentive process, therefore, at its maximum may be physiologically symbolized by a brain-cell played on in two ways, from without and from within. Incoming currents from the periphery arouse it, and collateral currents from the centres of memory and imagination re-enforce these. In this process the incoming impression is the 108 TALKS TO TEACHERS newer element ; the ideas which re-enforce and sus- tain it are among the older possessions of the mind. And the maximum of attention may then be said to be found whenever we have a systema- tic harmony or unification between the novel and the old. It is an odd circumstance that neither the old nor the new, by itself, is interesting : the absolutely old is insipid ; the absolutely new makes no appeal at all. The old in the new is what claims the attention, the old with a slightly new turn. No one wants to hear a lecture on a subject completely disconnected with his previous knowledge, but we all like lectures on subjects of which we know a little already, just as, in the fashions, every year must bring its slight modifi- cation of last year's suit, but an abrupt jump from the fashion of one decade into another would be distasteful to the eye. The genius of the interesting teacher consists in sympathetic divination of the sort of material with which the pupil's mind is likely to be already spontaneously engaged, and in the ingenuity which discovers paths of connection from that material to the matters to be newly learned. The principle is easy to grasp, but the accomplishment is difficult in the extreme. And a knowledge of INTEREST AND EFFOKT ABE COMPATIBLES 109 such psychology as this which I am recalling can no more make a good teacher than a knowledge of the laws of perspective can make a landscape painter of effective skill. A certain doubt may now occur to some of you. A while ago, apropos of the pugnacious instinct, I spoke of our modern pedagogy as being possibly too ' soft.' You may perhaps here face me with my own words, and ask whether the exclusive effort on the teacher's part to keep the pupil's spontaneous interest going, and to avoid the more strenuous path of voluntary attention to repulsive work, does not savor also of sentimen- talism. The greater part of schoolroom work, you say, must, in the nature of things, always be repul- sive. To face uninteresting drudgery is a good part of life's work. Why seek to eliminate it from the school-room or minimize the sterner law ? A word or two will obviate what might perhaps become a serious misunderstanding here. It is certain that most schoolroom work, till it has become habitual and automatic, is repulsive, and cannot be done without voluntarily jerking back the attention to it every now and then. This is inevitable, let the teacher do what he will 110 TALKS TO TEACHERS It flows from the inherent nature of the subjects and of the learning mind. The repulsive proc- esses of verbal memorizing, of discovering steps of mathematical identity, and the like, must borrow their interest at first from purely external sources, mainly from the personal interests with which success in mastering them is associated, such as gaining of rank, avoiding punishment, not being beaten by a difficulty, and the like. With- out such borrowed interest, the child could not attend to them at all. But in these processes what becomes interesting enough to be attended to is not thereby attended to without effort. Effort always has to go on, derived interest, for the most part, not awakening attention that is easy, however spontaneous it may now have to be called. The interest which the teacher, by his utmost skill, can lend to the subject, proves over and over again to be only an interest sufficient to let loose the effort. The teacher, therefore, need never concern himself about inventing occasions where effort must be called into play. Let him still awaken whatever sources of interest in the subject he can by stirring up connections between it and the pupil's nature, whether in the line of theoretic curiosity, of personal interest, or of pug- INTEREST AND EFFORT ARE COMPATIBLES 111 nacious impulse. The laws of mind will then bring enough pulses of effort into play to keep the pupil exercised in the direction of the subject. There is, in fact, no greater school of effort than the steady struggle to attend to immediately re- pulsive or difficult objects of thought which have grown to interest us through their association as means, with some remote ideal end. The Herbartian doctrine of interest ought not, therefore, in principle to be reproached with mak- ing pedagogy soft. If it do so, it is because it is unintelligently carried on. Do not, then, for the mere sake of discipline, command attention from your pupils in thundering tones. Do not too often beg it from them as a favor, nor claim it as a right, nor try habitually to excite it by preach- ing the importance of the subject. Sometimes, indeed, you must do these things ; but, the more you have to do them, the less skilful teacher you will show yourself to be. Elicit interest from within, by the warmth with which you care for the topic yourself, and by following the laws I have laid down. If the topic be highly abstract, show its nature by concrete examples. If it be unfamiliar, trace some point of analogy in it with the known. If 112 TALKS TO TEACHERS it be inhuman, make it figure as part of a story. If it be difficult, couple its acquisition with some prospect of personal gain. Above all things, make sure that it shall run through certain inner changes, since no unvarying object can possibly hold the mental field for long. Let your pupil wander from one aspect to another of your sub- ject, if you do not wish him to wander from it altogether to something else, variety in unity be- ing the secret of all interesting talk and thought. The relation of all these things to the native genius of the instructor is too obvious to need comment again. One more point, and I am done with the subject of attention. There is unquestionably a great native variety among individuals in the type of their attention. Some of us are naturally scatter- brained, and others follow easily a train of con- nected thoughts without temptation to swerve aside to other subjects. This seems to depend on a difference between individuals in the type of their field of consciousness. In some persons this is highly focalized and concentrated, and the focal ideas predominate in determining association. In others we must suppose the margin to be brighter, CAN MIND-WANDEBDSG BE CURED 113 and to be filled with something like meteoric showers of images, which strike into it at random, displacing the focal ideas, and carrying association in their own direction. Persons of the latter type find their attention wandering every minute, and must bring it back by a voluntary pull. The others sink into a subject of meditation deeply, and, when interrupted, are ' lost ' for a moment before they come back to the outer world. The possession of such a steady faculty of at- tention is unquestionably a great boon. Those who have it can work more rapidly, and with less nervous wear and tear. I am inclined to think that no one who is without it naturally can by any amount of drill or discipline attain it in a very high degree. Its amount is probably a fixed char- acteristic of the individual. But I wish to make a remark here which I shall have occasion to make again in other connections. It is that no one need deplore unduly the inferiority in himself of any one elementary faculty. This concentrated type of attention is an elementary faculty: it is one of the things that might be ascertained and measured by exercises in the laboratory. But, having ascertained it in a number of persons, we could never rank them in a scale of actual and 114 TALKS TO TEACHEES practical mental efficiency based on its degrees. The total mental efficiency of a man is the result- ant of the working together of all his faculties. He is too complex a being for any one of them to have the casting vote. If any one of them do have the casting vote, it is more likely to be the strength of his desire and passion, the strength of the interest he takes in what is proposed. Con- centration, memory, reasoning power, inventive- ness, excellence of the senses, all are subsidiary to this. No matter how scatter-brained the type of a man's successive fields of consciousness may be, if he really care for a subject, he will return to it incessantly from his incessant wanderings, and first and last do more with it, and get more results from it, than another person whose attention may be more continuous during a given interval, but whose passion for the subject is of a more languid and less permanent sort. Some of the most effi- cient workers I know are of the ultra-scatter- brained type. One friend, who does a prodigious quantity of work, has in fact confessed to me that, if he wants to get ideas on any subject, he sits down to work at something else, his best results coming through his mind-wanderings. This is perhaps an epigrammatic exaggeration on his part ; ATTENTION, CONCLUDED 115 but I seriously think that no one of us need be too much distressed at his own shortcomings in this regard. Our mind may enjoy but little comfort, may be restless and feel confused ; but it may be extremely efficient all the same. XII. MEMORY WE are following a somewhat arbitrary order. Since each and every faculty we possess is either in whole or in part a resultant of the play of our associations, it would have been as natural, after treating of association, to treat of memory as to treat of interest and attention next. But, since we did take the latter operations first, we must take memory now without farther delay ; for the phenomena of memory are among the simplest and most immediate consequences of the fact that our mind is essentially an associating machine. There is no more pre-eminent example for exhib- iting the fertility of the laws of association as principles of psychological analysis. Memory, moreover, is so important a faculty in the school- room that you are probably waiting with some eagerness to know what psychology has to say about it for your help. In old times, if you asked a person to explain why he came to be remembering at that moment SHALL WE CALL MEMORY A FACULTY 117 some particular incident in his previous life, the only reply he could make was that his soul is- endowed with a faculty called memory ; that it is the inalienable function of this faculty to recol- lect; and that, therefore, he necessarily at that moment must have a cognition of that portion of the past. This explanation by a ' faculty ' is one thing which explanation by association has super- seded altogether. If, by saying we have a faculty of memory, you mean nothing more than the fact that we can remember, nothing more than an abstract name for our power inwardly to recall the past, there is no harm done : we do have the- faculty ; for we unquestionably have such a power. But if, by faculty, you mean a principle of expla- nation of our general power to recall, your psychol- ogy is empty. The associationist psychology, on the other hand, gives an explanation of each par- ticular fact of recollection ; and, in so doing, it also gives an explanation of the general faculty- The ' faculty ' of memory is thus no or real ulti- mate explanation ; for it is itself explained as a result of the association of ideas. Nothing is easier than to show you just what I mean by this. Suppose I am silent for a moment, and then say, in commanding accents : " Remem- 118 TALKS TO TEACHERS ber ! Recollect ! " Does your faculty of memory obey the order, and reproduce any definite image from your past? Certainly not. It stands star- ing into vacancy, and asking, " What kind of a thing do you wish me to remember?" It needs, in short, a cue. But, if I say, remember the date of your birth, or remember what you had for breakfast, or remember 'the succession of notes in the musical scale ; then your faculty of memory im- mediately produces the required result : the ' cue ' determines its vast set of potentialities toward a particular point. And if you now look to see how this happens, you immediately perceive that the cue is something contiguously associated with the thing recalled. The words, 'date of my birth,' have an ingrained association with a particular number, month, and year; the words, 'breakfast this morning,' cut off all other lines of recall ex- cept those which lead to coffee and bacon and -eggs; the words, 'musical scale,' are inveterate mental neighbors of do, re*, mi, fa, sol, la, etc. The laws of association govern, in fact, all the trains of our thinking which are not interrupted by sen- sations breaking on us from without. Whatever appears in the mind must be introduced; and, introduced, it is as the associate of some- PHYSIOLOGICAL BASIS OF MEMORY 119 thing already there. This is as true of what you are recollecting as it is of everything else you think of. Reflection will show you that there are peculi- arities in your memory which would be quite whimsical and unaccountable if we were forced to regard them as the product of a purely spir- itual faculty. Were memory such a faculty, granted to us solely for its practical use, we ought to remember easiest whatever we most needed to remember; and frequency of repeti- tion, recency, and the like, would play no part in the matter. That we should best remember frequent things and recent things, and forget things that are ancient or were experienced only once, could only be regarded as an incomprehen- sible anomaly on such a view. But if we remem- ber because of our associations, and if these are, (as the physiological psychologists believe) due to our organized brain-paths, we easily see how the law of recency and repetition should prevail. Paths frequently and recently ploughed are those that lie most open, those which may be expected most easily to lead to results. The laws of our memory, as we find them, therefore, are incidents of our associational constitution; and, when we 120 TALKS TO TEACHERS are emancipated from the flesh, it is conceivable that they may no longer continue to obtain. We may assume, then, that recollection is a resultant of our associative processes, these them- selves in the last analysis being most probably due to the workings of our brain. Descending more particularly into the faculty of memory, we have to distinguish between its potential aspect as a magazine or storehouse and its actual aspect as recollection now of a partic- ular event. Our memory contains all sorts of items which we do not now recall, but which we may recall, provided a sufficient cue be offered. Both the general retention and the special recall are explained by association. An educated mem- ory depends on an organized system of associa- tions; and its goodness depends on two of their peculiarities : first, on the persistency of the asso- ciations ; and, second, on their number. Let us consider each of these points in turn. First, the persistency of the associations. This gives what may be called the quality of native retentiveness to the individual. If, as I think we are forced to, we consider the brain to be the organic condition by which the vestiges of our THE GIFT OF ORGANIC RETENTIVENESS 121 experience are associated with, each other, we may suppose that some brains are * wax to receive and marble to retain.' The slightest impressions made on them abide. Names, dates, prices, an- ecdotes, quotations, are indelibly retained, their several elements fixedly cohering together, so that the individual soon becomes a walking cyclopaedia of information. All this may occur with no philo- sophic tendency in the mind, no impulse to weave the materials acquired into anything like a logical system. In the books of anecdotes, and, more re- cently, in the psychology-books, we find recorded instances of monstrosities, as we may call them, of this desultory memory ; and they are often other- wise very stupid men. It is, of course, by no means incompatible with a philosophic mind ; for mental characteristics have infinite capacities for permutation. And, when both memory and phi- losophy combine together in one person, then in- deed we have the highest sort of intellectual efficiency. Your Walter Scotts, your Leibnitzes, your Gladstones, and your Goethes, all your folio copies of mankind, belong to this type. Effi- ciency on a colossal scale would indeed seem to require it. For, although your philosophic or systematic mind without good desultory memory TALKS TO TEACHERS may know how to work out results and recollect where in the books to find them, the time lost in the searching process handicaps the thinker, and gives to the more ready type of individual the economical advantage. The extreme of the contrasted type, the type with associations of small persistency, is found in those who have almost no desultory memory at all. If they are also deficient in logical and sys- tematizing power, we call them simply feeble in- tellects ; and no more need to be said about them here. Their brain-matter, we may imagine, is like a fluid jelly, in which impressions may be easily made, but are soon closed over again, so that the brain reverts to its original indifferent state. But it may occur here, just as in other gelati- nous substances, that an impression will vibrate throughout the brain, and send waves into other parts of it. In cases of this sort, although the immediate impression may fade out quickly, it does modify the cerebral mass ; for the paths it makes there may remain, and become so many avenues through which the impression may be re- produced if they ever get excited again. And its liability to reproduction will depend of course upon the variety of these paths and upon the fre- THE SECRET OF A GOOD MEMORY 12S quency with which they are used. Each path is in fact an associated process, the number of these associates becoming thus to a great degree a sub- stitute for the independent tenacity of the original impression. As I have elsewhere written: Each of the associates is a hook to which it hangs, a means to fish it up when sunk below the surface. Together they form a network of attachments by which it is woven into the entire tissue of our thought. The ' secret of a good memory ' is thus the secret of forming diverse and multiple associa- tions with every fact we care to retain. But this forming of associations with a fact, what is it but thinking about the fact as much as possible ? Briefly, then, of two men with the same outward experiences, the one who think* over his experiences most, and weaves them into the most systematic relations with each other, will be the one with the best memory. But, if our ability to recollect a thing be so largely a matter of its associations with other things which thus becomes its cues, an important psedagogic consequence follows. There can be no improvement of the general or elementary faculty of memory : there can only be improvement of our mem- ory for special systems of associated things; and 124 TALKS TO TEACHEES this latter improvement is due to the way in which the things in question are woven into asso- ciation with each other in the mind. Intricately or profoundly woven, they are held : disconnected, they tend to drop out just in proportion as the native brain retentiveness is poor. And no amount of training, drilling, repeating, and re- citing employed upon the matter of one system of objects, the history-system, for example, will in the least improve either the facility or the durability with which objects belonging to a wholly disparate system the system of facts of chemistry, for instance tend to be retained. That system must be separately worked into the mind by itself, a chemical fact which is thought about in connection with the other chemical facts, tending then to stay, but otherwise easily drop- ping out. We have, then, not so much a faculty of mem- ory as many faculties of memory. We have as many as we have systems of objects habitually thought of in connection with each other. A given object is held in the memory by the associates it has acquired within its own system exclusively. Learning the facts of another system will in no wise help it to stay in the mind, for the simple MEMOEIES KATHER THAN MEMORY 125 reason that it has no ' cues ' within that other system. We see examples of this on every hand. Most men have a good memory for facts con- nected with their own pursuits. A college ath- lete, who remains a dunce at his books, may amaze you by his knowledge of the ' records ' at various feats and games, and prove himself a walking dictionary of sporting statistics. The reason is that he is constantly going over these things in his mind, and comparing and making series of them. They form for him, not so many odd facts, but a concept-system, so they stick. So the merchant remembers prices, the politician other politicians' speeches and votes, with a copiousness which astonishes outsiders, but which the amount of thinking they bestow on these subjects easily explains. The great memory for facts which a Darwin or a Spencer reveal in their books is not incompati- ble with the possession on their part of a mind with only a middling degree of physiological re- tentiveness. Let a man early in life set himself the task of verifying such a theory as that of evo- lution, and facts will soon cluster and cling to him like grapes to their stem. Their relations to the 126 TALKS TO TEACHERS theory will hold them fast ; and, the more of these the mind is able to discern, the greater the erudi- tion will become. Meanwhile the theorist may have little, if any, desultory memory. Unutiliza- ble facts may be unnoted by him, and forgotten as soon as heard. An ignorance almost as ency- clopedic as his erudition may coexist with the latter, and hide, as it were, within the interstices of its web. Those of you who have had much to do with scholars and savants will readily think of examples of the class of mind I mean. The best possible sort of system into which to weave an object, mentally, is a rational system, or what is called a * science.' Place the thing in its pigeon-hole in a classificatory series; explain it logically by its causes, and deduce from it its necessary effects ; find out of what natural law it is an instance, and you then know it in the best of all possible ways. A ' science ' is thus the greatest of labor-saving contrivances. It relieves the memory of an immense number of details, re- placing, as it does, merely contiguous associations by the logical ones of identity, similarity, or anal- ogy. If you know a 'law,' you may discharge your memory of masses of particular instances, for the law will reproduce them for you whenever TECHNICAL MNEMONICS 127 you require them. The law of refraction, for ex- ample : If you know that, you can with a pencil and a bit of paper immediately discern how a con- vex lens, a concave lens, or a prism, must sever- ally alter the appearance of an object. But, if you don't know the general law, you must charge your memory separately with each of the three kinds of effect. A ' philosophic ' system, in which all things found their rational explanation and were con- nected together as causes and effects, would be the perfect mnemonic system, in which the great- est economy of means would bring about the greatest richness of results. So that, if we have poor desultory memories, we can save ourselves by cultivating the philosophic turn of mind. There are many artificial systems of mnemonics, some public, some sold as secrets. They are all so many devices for training us into certain me- thodical and stereotyped ways of thinking about the facts we seek to retain. Even were I competent, I could not here go into these systems in any de- tail. But a single example, from a popular sys- tem, will show what I mean. I take the number- alphabet, the great mnemonic device for recollect- ing numbers and dates. In this system each digit 128 TALKS TO TEACHBES is represented by a consonant, thus : 1 is t or d ; 2, n; 3, m; 4, r; 5, 1; 6, sh,j, ch, or g ; 7, c, k, g, or qu ; 8, / or v ; 9, 5 or p; 0, ,