Cornell IHniversit^ OF THE IRewl^orh State CoWcqc of agriculture %.oM 'ikn'.!. 3778 Cornell University Library LB 1051.B4 The mind and its education iim Cornell University Library The original of tliis bool< is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013397553 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION BY GEORGE HERBERT BETTS, Ph.D. HEAD OP DEPARTMENT OP PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION IN COENBLL COLLESB NEW YORK D APPLETON AND COMPANY & .Lf5lo5l COPTKIGHT, 1906, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPA]StT PREFACE This book is intended as an introduction to psychology for teachers, both in their private study and their Reading Circle classes, for students in secondary schools, normal schools or colleges, and for general readers. Its appearance is an immediate outgrowth of various courses of lectures on psychology and education given to classes of teachers and elementary students in education. More remotely, it owes its origin to a suggestion received from Prof. John Dewey when the writer was a student in his classes. Said Professor Dewey: " The teacher is equally under the ne- cessity of knowing each of the two factors in the educational process — culture and the child; that is, suiject-matter and psychology — not the technicalities and controversial points of psychology, but its broad and fundamental truths, upon which practically all are agreed, and which, fortunately, are simple and easily understood." This statement fur- nishes the standpoint, in the following pages, for both subject-matter and method of treatment. First, the attempt has been made to present only funda- mental truths, which, let us be thankful, are but little sub- ject to controversy. No space has been devoted to the con- troversial, speculative, or hypothetical questions which are vi PREFACE vexing the soul of the advanced student of psychology. Considerable emphasis has been placed on the physiological processes which accompany our mental life, but always for the purpose of throwing light on our mental processes and without losing sight of the fact that the discussion has to do primarily with psychology rather than with physiology. Second, the aim has been to state these fundamental truths simply, that the student may clearly understand them; and also to state them attractively, that he may cul- tivate the desire for reading them. These two considera- tions have had much to do with determining the style and method of treatment. The more popular, if less literary, lecture style has been used in preference to the essay style. This was done because of the eagerness with which young students, who are afraid of the average work on psychology, will seize upon the very same subject-matter when it is •stripped of all unnecessary abstruseness, and presented with a sufficient amount of illustration to clothe the skele- ton of dry facts with something of vitality. Third, it is recognized that if the student is really to make use of the psychology he learns, he must have prac- tical and useful truths presented to him, and must be led to a comprehension of these truths through their relation to his own actual experience. This criterion dictates that the subject-matter presented shall be of such a nature that its counterpart can be found in the experience of the student, and discovered by him through the process of introspec- tion ; that the psychological truths and laws discovered must find application in acquiring new experience — ^that is, in PREFACE VU education ; that the psychology must be applied, or better, it must be studied with the individual student himself as its center and subject, so that the application is never sepa- rated from the process of its discovery. The foregoing views account for the fact that the text is much more descriptive than explanatory; that a con- stant appeal is made to the experience of the student to verify the statements of the text ; that the matter presented is so largely concrete and so little abstract; that the appli- cation of psychological truths and laws is continually made to development and education. The various exercises suggested at the ends of the chap- ters will be found useful not because they outline the re- spective chapters in any systematic way, but because they- will encourage introspection, without which psychology may be committed to memory but can never become a. directive factor in education. The reading references will be serviceable to the student who desires to pursue the sub- ject beyond the scope of this book. My colleague, Prof. John E. Stout, has rendered valu- able assistance in the preparation of the manuscript for this book, for which grateful acknowledgment is given. Cornell College, Mount Vernon, Iowa, February, 1906. CONTENTS CHAPTER I THE MIND, 'or CONSCIOUSNESS PAOB How we may come to know the mind. — ^The personal character of consciousness. — Where the mind resides. — ^The means by which each may study his own mind ; introspection. — ^The mental processes revealed by introspection. — Consciousness likened to a stream ; points of resemblance. — ^The wave in the stream ; attention. — ^The contents of the stream. — The three modes of activity in which consciousness manifests itself : knowing, feeling, willing ...... 1 CHAPTER II ATTENTION The nature of attention. — Some degree of attention present at all times. — The effects of attention ; increase of eiBoiency through concentration. — How we attend. — Types of inattention. — Cultivation of attention. — How attention is secured ; involun- tary attention, nonvoluntary attention, voluntary attention. — Interest and nonvoluntary attention. — ^The will and vol- untary attention. — Interrelation of the two types of attention. — ^The habit of attention ....... 12 CHAPTER III THE BRAIN AND NERVOUS SYSTEM The mind and the brain. — The nervous system the machine through which the mind works. — The structure of the nervous system. — ^The neuron. — The central nervous system ; brain and cord. — The peripheral nervous system ; end organs. — X CONTENTS PAes Division of labor in the nervous system ; sensory and motor functions. — ^The end organs and the external world. — Depend- ence of the mind on the senses for its material . . .25 CHAPTER IV SENSORY AND MOTOR TRAINING Education dependent on both body and mind. — Efficiency of nerv- ous system resting largely on development and nutrition. — Undeveloped potentialities of our nervous systems. — Develop- tnent through varied stimuli and untrammeled response. — The factors involved in a simple act.— Application to educEt- tion. — ^The effect of fatigue and malnutrition. — Factors in- volved in good nutrition. — Necessity for sleep and freedom from worry and overfatigue ...... 43 CHAPTER V The part which habit plays in our life. — Habit a method of economy. — ^Physical habits. — Mental habits. — Our powerless- ness to prevent habits from forming. — ^The physical basis of habit ; our nervous system an automatic register of our acts. — Control of our habits through our acts. — ^The part of habit in education. — ^Youth the time of habit-forming. — ^The value of certain habits. — Danger even in good habits. — Maxims for habi1>forming . . ..... 56 CHAPTER VI SENSATION AND PERCEPTION The constant appeal made to the mind by our environment. — The mind constructing its world of material objects from these stimuli. — How thought reaches beyond the knowledge of the senses. — The senses working together in a copartnership. — The sensory processes ; interaction of stimulus and nervous mechanism. — ^The qualities which we usually ascribe to objects really existent in the mind. — The problem which confronts the child ; how he proceeds. — Our problem and process the same. CONTENTS xi PAGE — How perception of objects and of space is accomplished. — Sensation and perception the basis for our thought structure. ■ — Necessity of entering largely into the world of our material environment . ■ . . . . . . . .70 CHAPTER VII MENTAL IMAGERY All present thinking dependent on past experience. — How the past interprets the present and future. — How past experience is conserved : on the physical side by habit, on the mental side in images. — ^The study of our mental images through intro- spection. — Galton's test of imagery. — The value of a wide range of imagery. — ^The use of imagery in the interpretation of literature and other studies. — Development of the power of imagery. — ^Application to education . . . . .90 CHAPTER VIII MEMORY The nature of memory. — Its physical basis. — Retention and recall dependent on neural plasticity and activity. — Individual differ- ences in brains. — Images the material of memory. — ^Types of memory. — The laws of memory. — Association ; its laws inex- orable. — The necessity for right thinking. — What constitutes a good memory. — Improvement of the memory ; physiological conditions ; methods of recording facts. — ^The misuse of mne- monic devices ......... 107 CHAPTER IX IMAGINATION The test of a good imagination ; various standards. — Necessity for different types of imagination. — The use of imagination in interpreting the thought of others ; in our own thinking. — Some practical applications : in science ; in the arts ; in the humdrum of every-day life ; in conduct ; in building ideals. — Imagination limited (1) by material available in form of images, (2) by constructive ability, (3) by definite purpose. — Abuse of the imagination. — Cultivation of the imagination . 128 Xii CONTENTS CHAPTER X THINKING FAGB Interdependence of physical and mental objects. — ^The function of thinking, to discover relations. — The thioliing of the child and that of the adult. — ^The necessity for classification in our knowledge. — How this is accomplished through thinking. — The nature and formation of the concept. — ^The necessity for good concepts. — Judgment, its forms and uses. — Reasoning. — How we proceed in reasoning. — Its types, and how they are related. — ^The necessity for broad inductions. — ^The syllogism and its use. — Cultivation of thinking ..... 143 CHAPTER XI INSTINCT The influence of heredity in our lives. — Instinct the result of race experience. — ^The function of instinct. — ^Through instinct the habits of the ra?e inherited by the iadividual. — How instincts are modified through education and made into individual hab- its. — ^The ripening of instincts. — ^Transitoriness of instincts. — • The human instincts of imitation, fear, and play . . 16J CHAPTER XII FEELING AND ITS FUNCTION The importance of feeling as a motive. — Definition.- — Feeling an accompaniment of all mental processes. — ^The qualities of feel- ing. — Feeling tone, or mood ; how produced, and its influence. — How our dispositions are formed ; the part played by tem- perament. — The nature and growth of our sentiments ; their force as motives ....... 182 CHAPTER XIII INTEREST Interest a selective agency among our activities. — ^Its influence in directing our stream of thought. — ^The nature of interest ; re- lation to a subjective scale of values. — Objective side of inter- est. — The dynamic phase of interest. — Immediate and remote interests, and the part they play as motives. — ^Transitory in- CONTENTS XIU PAGE terests. — The necessity for making a selection among our inter- ests. — Danger of early specialization in our interests. — Interest and the will. — Interest and character 195 CHAPTER XIV THE EMOTIONS The relation of instinct and emotion. — ^Emotion and the physical response. — ^Physiological explanation of emotion. — ^The con- trol of our emotions. — Dependence of emotion on expression. — Growing tendency toward emotional control. — A desirable emotional balance. — ^The emotions and enjoyment. — The emo- tions as motives. — Cultivation of the emotions. — Danger from overwrought emotions, and from arousing the emotions with- out giving opportunity for expression. — Emotional habits . 212 CHAPTER XV THE WILL The function of the will : concerning itself wholly with causing or inhibiting acts. — Various types of action ; physiological re- flexes ; instinctive acts ; ideo-motor acts ; deliberative acts. — Volitional acts preceded by nonvolitional. — The image and the act. — ^The process of deliberation. — ^The emotional factor in decision. — ^Types of decision. — 1 lie final test of power measured in attention. — Types of will. — ^Training of the will in the common duties of daily hfe. — ^The freedom of the will . 226 CHAPTER XVI SELF-EXPHESSION AXD DEVELOPMENT Interrelation of impression and expression. — ^The many sources of impressions. — ^The various forms of expression. — The necessity for cultivating expression.— The intellectual value of expres- sion. — The moral value. — ^The religious value. — ^The social value. — ^The educational value. — Expression in the home and in the schools. — Expression as related to character . . 246 INDEX 259 CHAPTER I THE MIND, OR CONSCIOUSNESS The mind and its education. But how are we to discover the nature of the mind, or know the proc- esses by which it works? For miad is not some- thing that can be seen or felt or weighed. You and I may look into each other's face and there read something of the mind's activity, but neither can discover the real you of the other. I may learn to recognize your features, to know your voice, to re- spond to the clasp of your hand; but the mind, or consciousness, which does your thinking, and feels your joys and sorrows, I can never know completely — indeed can never know at all except through your various acts and bodily expressions. Nor can you in any way reveal yourself to me except through these means. Between your consciousness and mine there exists a wide gap, which cannot be bridged no matter how well we become acquainted with each other. We may work together, live together, come to love or hate each other even, and yet our inmost selves forever stand apart. Only you can ever know you, and only I can ever know / in any intimate and first-hand way. When I consider how you must think or feel or act under certain circumstances, I am really but inter- preting my own thoughts and feelings and actions under similar circumstances, and attributing them to 1 Howiaind is to be known. The per- sonal char- acter of conscious- ness. THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION Where the mind re- sides. Introspec- tion the means of studying our own .ninds. you. I must always judge you in terms of myself or else not at all. I dwell somewhere 'in this' body, but where 1 When my finger tips touch the object I wish to examine, I seem to be in them. When the brain grows weary from overstudy, I seem to be in it. When the heart throbs, the breath comes quick, and the muscles grow tense from noble resolve or strong emotion, I seem to be in them all. When, filled with the buoyant life of vigorous youth, every fiber and nerve is a-tingle with health and enthusiasm, I live in every part of my marvelous body. Small wonder that the ancients located the soul at one time in the heart, at another in the pineal gland of the brain, and at another made it coextensive with the body ! Later science has taught that the mind resides in and works through the nervous system, which has its central office in the brain. And the reason why I seem to be in every part of my body is because the nervous system extends to every part, carrying mes- sages of sight or sound or touch to the brain, and bearing in return orders for movements, which set the feet a-dancing or the fingers a-tinglirg. But more of this later. What is the mind? What is that which we call consciousness ? No definition can ever make it clearer than it is now to each one of us. And, indeed, if I were to attempt to define mind or consciousness, from any immediate knowledge of it, I should have to de- fine my mind and not mind. The only mind which I have ever known, or can know, is my own ; and the only one which you have ever known, or can know, is yours. It is true that I may judge something of the working of your mind from the fact that you THE MIND, 0^ CONSCIOUSNESS 3 seem to act, think, love and hate, deliberate and de- cide, much as I do ; but yet I judge these things con- cerning your mind because I have experienced them in my own. Thus it follows that the only way to know what mind is, is to look in upon our own con- sciousness and observe what is transpiring there, or, in the language of the psychologist, to introspect. ^ For you can never come to understand the workings of your mind from listening to lectures or studying books alone. These may show you what to look for and expect, but every statement must be tested by your own experience before you can understand its meaning. In order to introspect you must catch yourself in the act of thinking, of remembering, of loving, of deciding, and all the rest, and observe what it is that is going on. This is not so easy as it appears ; for the moment we turn to look in upon the mind, that moment it changes, and the thing we meant to examine is gone, -and something else has taken its place. All that is left to us then is to view the men- tal object while it is still fresh in the memory, or to catch it again when it returns. Nor are we to be discouraged if, even by introspec- introspec- tion, we cannot discover precisely what the mind is. reveal No one knows what electricity is, though nearly every- ^V^^ ?J^ one uses it in one form or another. We study the dynamo, the motor, and the conductors through which electricity manifests itself. "We observe its effects in light, heat, and mechanical power, and so learn the laws which govern its operations. But we are almost as far from understanding its true nature as were the ancients who knew nothing of its uses. The dy- namo does not create the electricity, but only fur- nishes the conditions which make it possible for elec- 2 nuna is, 4 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION But it can discover the process of its working. Nature o? the proc- ess — a stream. tricity to manifest itself in doing the world's work. Likewise the brain or nervous system does not create the mind, but it furnishes the machine through whici the mind works. We may study the nervous system and learn something of the conditions and limitations under which the mind operates, but this is not study- ing the mind itself. As in the case of electricity, what we know about the mind we must learn through the activities in which it manifests itself — these we can know, for they are in the experience of all. It is, then, only by studying these processes of con- sciousness that we come to know the laws which gov- ern the mind and its development. What it is that thinks and feels and wills in us is too hard a problem for us here — indeed, has been too hard a problem for the philosophers through the ages. But the thinking and feeling and willing we can watch as they occur, and hence come to know. In looking in upon the mind we must expect to dis- cover, then, not a thing, but a process. The thing forever eludes us, but the process is always present. Consciousness is like a stream, which, so far as we are concerned with it in a psychological discussion, has its rise at the cradle and its end at the grave. It begins with the babe's first faint gropings after light in his new world as he enters it, and ends with the man's last blind gropings after light in his old world as he leaves it. The stream is very narrow at first, only as wide as the few sensations which come to the babe when it sees the light or hears the sound; it grows wider as the mind develops, and is at last measured by the grand sum total of life's experience. This mental stream is irresistible. No power outside of us can stop it while life lasts. We cannot stop it THE MIND, OR CONSCIOUSNESS 5 ourselves. When we try to stop thinking, the stream but changes its direction and flows on. While we wake and while we sleep, while we are unconscious under an anfesthetie, even, some sort of mental proc- ess continues. Sometimes the stream flows slowly, and our thoughts lag— we " feel slow "; again the stream flows faster, and we are lively and our thoughts come with a rush; or a fever seizes us and delirium comes on ; then the stream runs wildly onward, defy- ing our control, and a mad jargon of thoughts takes the place of our usual orderly array. In different persons, also, the mental stream moves at different rates, some minds being naturally slow moving and some naturally quick in their operations. Consciousness resembles a stream also in other par- Points ol ticulars. A stream is an unbroken whole from its bian™eto source to its mouth, and an observer stationed at one a stream, point cannot see all of it at once. He sees but the one little section which happens to be passing his sta- tion point at the time. The current may look much the same from moinent to moment, but the component particles which constitute the stream are constantly changing. So it is with our thought. Its stream is continuous from birth till death, but we cannot see any considerable portion of it at one time. When we turn about quickly and look in upon our minds, we see but the little section of consciousness which occu- pies the present moment. That of a few seconds ago is gone and will never return. The thought which occupied us a moment since can no more be recalled, just as it was, than can the particles composing a stream be re-collected and made to pass a given point in its course in precisely the same order and relation to one another as before. This means, then, that we THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION The wave in the stream of conscious- can never have precisely the same mental state twice ; that the same thought never comes to us a second time with just the same associates that it had the first time ; that the thought of this moment will never be ours again ; that all we can know of our minds at any one time is the part of the process present in conscious- ness at that moment. The surface of our mental stream is not level, but is broken by a wave which stands above the rest; which is but another way of saying that some one thing is always more prominent in our thought than the rest. Only when we are in a sleepy reverie, or not thinking about much of anything, does the stream approximate a level. At all other times some one object occupies the highest point in our thought, to /Yam^; seTR'ia^tt&.^^^vM Fig. 1. the more or less complete exclusion of other things which we might think about. A thousand and one objects are possible to our thought at any moment, but all except the one thing occupy a secondary place, or are not present to our consciousness at all. They exist on the margin, or else are clear off the edge of consciousness, while the one thing occupies the center. "We may be reading a fascinating book late at night in a cold room. The charm of the writer, the beauty of the heroine, or the bravery of the hero so occupies the mind that the weary eyes and chattering teeth are unnoticed. Consciousness has piled up in a high wave on the points of interest in the book, and the THE MIND, OR CONSCIOUSNESS 7 bodily sensations are for the moment on a much lower level. But let the book grow dull for a moment, and the make-up of the stream changes in a flash. Hero, ■■.■ani-^Wro\«e:.;' Fig. 2. heroine, or literary style no longer occupies the wave. They forfeit their place,' the wave is taken by the bodily sensations, and we are conscious of the smart- ing eyes and shivering body, while these in turn give FiQ. 3. way to. the next object which occupies the wave. Figs. 1-3 illustrate these changes. The consciousness of any moment has been less hap- pily likened to a field, in the center of which there is an elevation higher than the surrounding level. This Center is where consciousness is piled up on the object which is for the moment foremost in our thought. The other objects of our consciousness are on the mar- gin of the field for the time being, but any of them may the next moment claim the center and drive the former object to the margin, or it may drop entirely out of consciousness. This moment a noble resolve Conscious- ness lik- ened to a field. 8 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION The "piling up " of con- sciousness is atten- tion. The con- tents of our mental stream. may occupy the center of the field, while a trouble- some tooth begets sensations of discomfort which lin- ger dimly on the outskirts of our consciousness; but a shooting pain from the tooth or a random thought crossing the mind, and lo ! the tooth holds sway, and the resolve dimly fades away to the margin of our conscioiasness and is gone. This figure is not so true as the one which likens our mind to a stream with its ever onward current answering to the flow of our thought; but whichever figure we employ, the truth remains the same. Con- sciousness is always piled up higher at some one point than at others. Either because our interest leads us, or because the will dictates, the mind is withdrawn from the thousand and one things which we might think about, and directed to this one thing, which for the time occupies chief place. In other words, we attend, for this piling up of consciousness is nothing, after all, but attention. We have seen that our mental life may be likened to a stream flowing now faster, now slower, ever shift- ing, never ceasing. "We have yet to inquire what con- stitutes the mass of the stream, or, in popular phrase, what is the " stuff " which makes up the current of our thought, what are the contents of our minds. This cannot be answered completely at this point, but can best be understood by each referring to his own experience to verify the description of the text. If we are sitting at our study table puzzling over a dif- ficult problem in geometry, reasoning forms the wave in the stream of consciousness — the center of the field. It is the chief thing in our thinking. The fringe of our consciousness is made up of various sensations of the light from the lamp, the contact of our clothing, the THE MIND, OR CONSCIOUSNESS 9 sounds going on in the next room, some bit of memory seeking recognition, a ' ' tramp ' ' thought which comes along, and a dozen other experiences not strong enough to occupy the center of the field. But instead of the study table and the problem, give us a bright fireside, an easy-chair, and nothing to do. If we are aged, memories — images from out the past, will probably come thronging in and occupy the field to such extent that the fire burns low and the room grows cold; but still the forms from the past hold sway. If we are young, visions of the future may crowd everything else to the margin of the field, while the " castles in Spain " occupy the center. Our memories may also be accompanied by emo- tions — sorrow, love, anger, hate, envy, joy. And, in- deed, these emotions may so completely occupy the field that the images themselves are for the time driven to the margin, and the mind is occupied with its sorrow, its love, or its joy. Once more, instead of the problem or the memories or the " castles in Spain," give us the necessity of making some decision, great or small, where con- tending motives are pulling us now in this direction, now in that, so that the question finally has to be settled by a supreme effort summed up in the words, I will. This is the struggle of the will which each one knows for himself, for who has not had a raging battle of motives occupy the center of the field while all else, even the sense of time, place, and existence, gave way in the face of this conflict ! This struggle continues until the decision is made, when suddenly all the stress and strain drop out and other objects may again have their place in consciousness. Thus we see that if we could cut the stream of con- 10 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION A three- sciousness across as we might cut a stream of water — knowtagf from bank to bank with a huge knife, and then look at *^^d™fii ^^'^ cut-off section, we should find very different con- ing, stituents in the stream at different times. "We should at one time find the mind manifesting itself in per- ceiving, remembering, imagining, discriminating, com,- paring, judging, reasoning, or the acts by which we gain our knowledge; at another in fearing, loving, hating, sorrowing, enjoying, or the acts of feeling; at still another in choosing, or the act of the will. These processes would make up the stream, or, in other words, these are the acts which the mind per- forms in doing its work. "We should never find a time when the stream consists of but one of the proc- esses, or when all these modes of mental activity are not represented. They will be found in varying pro- portions, now more of knowing, now of feeling, and now of willing, but some of each is always present in our consciousness. The nature of these different ele- ments in our mental stream, their relation to each other, and the manner fn which they all work together in amazing perplexity yet in perfect harmony to produce the wonderful mind, will constitute the sub- ject-matter we shall consider together in the pages which follow. EXERCISES Think of your home as you last left it. Can you see vividly just how it looked, the color of the paint on the out- side, with the familiar form of the roof and all; can you recall the perfimie in some old drawer, the taste of a favorite dish, the sound of a familiar voice in farewell? When you say that you remember a circumstance which occurred yesterday, how do you remember it? That is, do THE MIND, OR CONSCIOUSNESS 11 you see in your mind things just as they were, and hear again sounds which occurred, or feel again movements which you performed? Do you experience once more the emo- tion you then felt? Try occasionally during the next twenty-four hours to turn quickly about mentally and see whether you can observe your thinking, feehng, or willing in the very act of taking place. What becomes of our mind or consciousness while we are asleep? How are we able to wake up at a certain hour previously determined? Can a person have absolutely nothing in his mind? SUGGESTED READINGS James, " Psychology," Briefer Course, Chapter XI. James, " Principles of Psychology," Chapter IX. Baldwin, " The Story of the Mind," Chapters II-IV. Morgan, " Introduction to Comparative Psychology," Chap- ter I. Dewey, " Psychology," Chapter II. Royce, " OutUnes of Psychology!, " Chapter TV, sees. 34r-36. CHAPTER II ATTENTION The nature of attea- tion. Some de- gree of at- tention al- ways pres- mt. In the last chapter the concentration of conscious- ness on one object was described as constituting a state of attention. Everyone knows what it is to at- tend. The story so fascinating that we cannot leave it, the critical points in a game, the interesting ser- mon or lecture, the sparkling conversation, the absorb- ing lesson or recitation — ^these all compel our atten- tion. We live in them, and are almost unaware of what is going on about us. It is easier to attend to them than not. But what about the dull story, the slow game, the lecture or sermon which drags, the conversation which is a bore, the lesson without life or interest? These may likewise all receive attention, but in this case we attend with effort. A thousand things from outside entice us away from them. It requires the frequent " mental jerk " with which each is familiar to bring ourselves back to them ; and when brought back, we feel the constant " tug " of the mind to be free again. But this very effort of the mind to free itself from one object of thought that it may busy itself with another, is because the attention is solicited by this other. That is, attention of some sort is present at all times when we are thinking, which is only equiva- lent to saying that some one object of thought is always more prominent than the remainder of the ATTENTION 13 The effects of atten- tion. objects in consciousness at that moment. Indeed, without this condition it is doubtful whether we can think at all; and, roughly speaking, the efficiency of our thinking is directly proportional to our ability to attend to one object of thought to the exclusion of all others. I say " to the exclusion of all others " because, when we are attending to a certain object, the mind must be withdrawn from a multitude of other objects upon which it might rest, and be focused on this one thing. Attention is, after all, as much attending away from unnecessary or irrelevant thoughts as it is attending to necessary and relevant ones. A state of attention gives us the " wave " in the stream of consciousness piled up high above the com- mon level of the surface. It gives us the " center " of the field rising vivid and clear above the remainder of consciousness. And whatever the wave or center may be, whether it be a bit of a memory, an air castle, a sensation from an aching tooth, the reason- ing on an algebraic formula, a choice which we are . making, the setting of an emotion — ^whatever be the object to which we are attending, that object is illumined and made to stand out from its fellows as the one prominent thing in the mind's eye while the attention rests on it. It is like the one building which the search light picks out among a city full of build- ings and lights up, while the remainder are left in the semilight or in darkness. In a state of attention the mind may be likened Only con- to the rays of the sun which have been passed through ^u brina"^ a burning glass. You may let all the rays which can results, pass through your window pane fall hour after hour upon the paper lying on your desk, and no marked 14 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION Geometric- al increase of effi- ciency. effects follow. But let the same amount ' of sun- light be passed through a lens and converged to a point the size of your pencil point, and the paper will at 'once burst into flame. What the diffused rays could not do in hours or in ages is now accomplished in seconds. Likewise the mind, allowed to scatter over many objects, can accomplish but little. We may sit and dream away an hour or a day over a page or a problem without securing results. But let us call in our wits from their woolgathering and " buckle down to it " with all our might, withdrawing our thoughts from everything else but this one thing, and concentrating our mind on it. More can now be accomplished in minutes than before in hours. Nay, things which could not be accomplished at all before now become possible. Again, the mind may be compared to a steam engine which is constructed to run at a certain pressure of steam, say one hundred and fifty pounds to the square inch of boiler surface. Once I ran such an engine; and well I remember a morning during my early apprenticeship when the foreman called for power to run some of the lighter machinery, while my steam gauge registered but seventy-five pounds. ' ' Surely, ' ' I thought, " if one hundred and fifty pounds will run all this machinery, seventy-five pounds should run half of it, " so I opened the valve. But the power- ful engine could do but little more than turn its own wheels, and refused to do the required work. Not until the pressure had risen above one hundred pounds could the engine perform half the work which it could at one hundred and fifty pounds. And so with our mind. If it is meant to do its best work under a certain degree of concentration, it cannot ATTENTION 15 in a given time do half the work with half the atten- tion. Further, there will be much which it cannot do at all unless working under full pressure. We shall not be overstating the case if we say that as attention increases in arithmetical ratio, mental efficiency in- creases in geometrical ratio. It is in large measure a difference in the power of attention which makes one man a master in thought and achievement and another his humble follower. One often hears it said that " genius is but the power of sustained attention," and this statement possesses a large element of truth. Some one has said that if our attention is properly Howtss trained we should be able " to look at the point of a ^ ™ cambric needle for half an hour without winking." But this is a false idea of attention. The ability to look at the point of a cambric needle for half an hour might indicate a very laudable power of concentra- tion; but the process, instead of enlightening us con- cerning the point of the needle, would result in our passing into an hypnotic state. Voluntary attention to any one object can be sustained for but a brief time — a few seconds at best. It is essential that the object change, that we turn it over and over inces- santly, and consider its various aspects and relations. Sustained voluntary attention is thus a repetition of successive efforts to bring back the object to the mind. Then the subject grows and develops — it is living, not dead. It is largely in their power of sustained attention that geniuses excel common men. When we are attending strongly to one object of thought it does not mean that consciousness sits star- ing vacantly at this one object, but rather that it uses it as a central core of thought, and thinks into relation with this object the things which belong with 16 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION it. In working out some mathematical solution the central core is the principle upon which the solution is based, and concentration in this case consists in thinking the various conditions of the problem in relation to this underlying principle. In the accom- panying diagram (Fig. 4) let A be the central core of some object of thought, say a patch of eloud in a ,.^o^ "°y Fig. 4. picture, and let o, &, c, d, etc., be the related facts, or the shape, size, color, etc., of the cloud. The arrows indicate the passing of our thought from cloud to related fact, or from related fact to eloud, and from related fact to related fact. As long as these related facts lead back to the cloud each time, that long we are attending to the cloud and thinking about it. It is when our thought fails to go back that we " wan- der " in our attention. Then we leave a, b, c, d, etc., which are related to the cloud, and, flying off to x, y, and z, finally bring up heaven knows where. Lack of I'he two chief types of inattention have already ^ion. " been mentioned. First, we may be thinking about the right things, but not thinking hard enough. We lack mental pressure. Outside thoughts which have no relation to the subject in hand may not trouble us much, but we do not attack our problem with vim. The current in our stream of consciousness is moving ATTENTION 17 too slowly. We do not gather up all our mental forces and mass them on the subject before us in a way that means victory. Our thoughts may be suf- ficiently focused, but they fail to " set fire." It is like focusing the sun's rays while an eclipse is on. They lack energy. They will not kindle the paper after they have passed through the lens. This kind of attention means mental dawdling. It means in- efficiency. For the individual it means defeat in life 's battles ; for the nation it means mediocrity and stagnation. A college professor said to his faithful but poorly prepared class, " Judging from your worn and tired appearance, young people, you are putting in twice too many hours on study." At this commendation the class brightened up visibly. " But," he con- tinued, " judging from your preparation, you do not study quite half hard enough." Happy is the student who, starting in on his lesson rested and fresh, can study with such concentration that an hour of steady application will leave him mentally exhausted and limp. That is one hour of triumph for him, no matter what else he may have accomplished or failed to accomplish during the time. He can afford an occasional pause for rest, for dif- ficulties will melt rapidly away before him. He pos- sesses one key to successful achievement. Second, we may have good mental power and be Mental - able to think hard and efficiently on any one point, ^^° ^nng. but lack the power to think in a straight line. Every stray thought that comes along is a " will-o'-the- wisp " to lead lis away from the subject in hand and into lines of thought not related to it. "Who has not started in to think on some problem, and, after a 18 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION few momeuts, been surprised to |ind himself miles away from the topic upon which he started ! Or who has not read down a page and, turning to the next, found that he did not kaow a word on the preceding ■ page, his thoughts having wandered away, his eyes only going through the process of reading! Instead of sticking to the a, b, c, d, etc., of our topic and re- lating them all up to A, thereby reaching a solution of the problem, we often jump at once to x, y, z, and find ourselves far afield with all possibility of a solu- tion gone. We may have brilliant thoughts about X, y, z; but they are not related to anything in par- ticular, and so they pass from us and are gone — ^lost in oblivion because they are not attached to some- thing permanent. Such a thinker is at the mercy of circumstances, following blindly the leadings of trains of thought which are his master instead of his servant, and which lead him anywhere or nowhere without let or hindrance from him. His consciousness moves rapidly enough and with enough force, but it is like a ship without a helm. Starting for the intellectual port A by way of a, i, c, d, he is mentally shipwrecked at last on the rocks x, y, z, and never reaches harbor. Fortunate is he who can shut out intruding thoughts- and think in a straight line. Even with mediocre- ability he may accomplish more by his thinking than the brilliant thinker who is constantly having his men- tal train wrecked by stray thoughts which slip in on his right of way. Cultivation While attention is no doubt partly a natural gift, tion. ' yet there is probably no power of the mind more sus- ceptible to training than is attention. And with at- tention, as with every other power of body and mindj. ATTENTION 19 the secret of its development lies in its use. Stated briefly, the only way to train attention is by attend- ing. No amount of theorizing or resolving can take the place of practice in the actual process of attending. Attention may be secured in three ways: Either (1) it is demanded by some sudden or intense sen- sory stimulus or insistent idea, or (2) it follows in- terest, or (3) it is compelled by the will. If it comes in the first way, as from a thunderelnp or a flash of light, or from the persistent attempt of some un- sought idea to secure entrance into the mind, it is called involuntary attention. This form of attention is of so little importance, comparatively, in our men- tal life that we shall not discuss it further. If attention comes in the second way, following interest, it is called nonvoluntary or spontaneous at- tention ; if in the third, compelled by the will, volun- tary or active attention. Nonvoluntary attention has its motive iu some object external to consciousness, or else follows a more or less uncontrolled current of thought which interests us; voluntary attention is controlled from within — we decide what we shall at- tend to instead of letting interesting objects of thought determine it for us. In nonvoluntary attention the environment largely determines what we shall attend to. All that we have to do with directing this kind of attention is in developing certain lines of interest, and then the interesting things attract attention. The things we see and hear and touch and taste and smell, the things we like, the things we do and hope to do — these are the determining factors in our mental life so long as we are giving nonvoluntary attention. Our attention follows the beckoning of these things as the 3 How at- tention is secured. Interest tind non- voluntary attention. 20 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION Nonvolun- tary atten- tion takes the line of least resistance. needle the magnet. It is no effort to attend to them, but rather the effort would be to keep from attend- ing to them. Who does not remember reading a story, perhaps a forbidden one, so interesting that when mother called up the stairs for us to come down to attend to some duty, we replied, " Yes, in a minute," and then went on reading! We simply could not stop at that place. The minute lengthens into ten, and another call startles us. " Yes, I'm coming "; we turn just one more leaf, and are lost again. At last comes a third call in tones so imperative that it cannot be longer ignored, and we lay the book down, but open to the place, where we left off, and where we hope soon to begin further to unravel the delightful mystery. Was it an effort to attend to the reading? Ah, no ! it took the combined force of our will and of mother's authority to drag the attention away. This is nonvoluntary attention. Left to itself, then, attention simply obeys natural laws and follows the line of least resistance. By far the larger portion of our attention is of this type. Thought often runs on hour after hour when we are not conscious of effort or struggle to compel us to cease thinking about this thing and begin thinking about that. Indeed, it may be doubted whether this is not the case with some persons for days at a time, instead of hours. The things that present themselves to the mind are the things which occupy it ; the character of the thought is determined by the character of our interests. It is this fact which makes it so vitally neeessary that our interests shall be broad and pure if our thoughts are to be of this type. It is not enough that we have the strength to drive from our minds a wrong or impure thought which seeks en- ATTENTION 21 trance. To stand guard as a policeman over our thoughts to see that no unworthy one enters, requires too much time and energy. Our interests must be of such a nature as to lead us away from the field of un- worthy thoughts if we are to be free from their tyranny. In voluntary attention there is a conflict either between the will and interest or between the will and the mental inertia or laziness which has to be over- come before we can think with any degree of con- centration. Interest says, " Follow this line, which is easy and attractive, or which requires but little effort — follow the line of least resistance." Will says, " Quit that line of dalliance and ease, and take this harder way which I direct — cease the line of least resistance and take the one of greatest resistance." When day dreams and " castles in Spain " attempt to lure you from your lessons, refuse to follow; shut out these vagabond thoughts and stick to your task. When intellectual inertia deadens your thought and clogs your mental stream, throw it off and court force- ful effort. If wrong or impure thoughts seek entrance to your mind, close and lock your mental doors to them. If thoughts of desire try to drive out thoughts of duty, be heroic and insist that thoughts of duty shall have right of way. In short, be you the master of your thinking, and do not let it always be directed without your consent by influences outside of your- self. It is just at this point that the strong will wins victory and the weak will breaks down. Between the ability to control one's thoughts and the inability to control them lies all the difference between right ac- tions and wrong actions ; between withstanding temp- The will and volun- tary atten- tion. Value of the power to control attention. 22 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION tation and yielding to it ; between an inefficient, pur- poseless life and a life of purpose and endeavor; between success and failure. For we act in accord- ance with those things which our thought rests upon. Suppose two lines of thought represented by A and B, respectively, lie before you; that A leads to a course of action difficult or unpleasant, but necessary to suc- cess or duty, and that B leads to a course of action easy or pleasant, but fatal to success or duty. Which course will you follow — ^the rugged path of duty or the easier one of pleasure? The answer depends almost wholly, if not entirely, on your power of atten- tion. If your will is strong enough to pull your thoughts away from the fatal but attractive B and hold them resolutely on the less attractive A, then A will dictate your course of action, and you will re- spond to the call for endeavor, self-denial, and duty; but if your thoughts break away from the domination of your wiU and follow the beckoning of your inter- ests alone, then B will dictate your course of action, and you will follow the leading of ease and pleasure. For our actions are finally and irrevocably dictated by the things we think about.. Not really It is not to be Understood, however, from what has kin^^of been said, that there are really different kinds of at- attention. tention. All attention denotes an active or djmamic phase of consciousness. The difference is rather in the way we secure attention; whether it is demanded by sudden stimulus, coaxed from us by interesting objects of thought without effort on our part, or com- pelled by force of will to desert the more interesting and take the direction which we dictate. A very close relationship and interdependence exists between nonvoluntary and voluntary attention. It ATTENTION 23 would be impossible to hold our attention by sheer Interrela- force of will on objects which were forever devoid of forms of interest ; likewise the blind following of our interests attention, and desires would finally lead to shipwreck in all our lives. Each kind of attention must support and reen- f orce the other. The lessons, the sermons, the lectures, and the books in which we are most interested, and hence to which we attend nonvoluntarily and with the least effort and fatigue, are the ones out of which, other things being equal, we get the most and remem- ber the best and longest. On the other hand, there are sometimes lessons and lectures and books, and many things besides, which are not intensely inter- esting, but which should be attended to nevertheless. It is at this point that the will must step in and take command. If it has not the strength to do this, it is in so far a weak will, and steps should be taken to develop it. "We are to " keep the faculty of effort alive in us by a little gratuitous exercise every day." We are to be systematically heroic in the little points of everyday life and experience. We are not to shrink from tasks because they are difficult or un- pleasant. Then, when the test comes, we shall not find ourselves unnerved and untrained, but shall be able to stand in the evil day. Finally, one of the chief things in training the The habit attention is to form the haiif of attending. This "ion. ^^' habit is to be formed only by attending whenever and wherever the proper thing to do is to attend, whether " in work, in play, in making fishing flies, in preparing for an examination, in courting a sweet- heart, in reading a book." The lesson, or the sermon, or the lecture, may not be very interesting; but if they are to be attended to at all, our rule should be 24 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION to attend to them completely and absolutely. Not by fits and starts, now drifting away and now jerking our- selves back, but all the time. And, furthermore, the one who will deliberately do this will often find the dull and uninteresting task become more interesting; but if it never becomes interesting, he is at least form- ing a habit which will be invaluable to him through life. On the other hand, the one who fails to attend except when his interest is captured, who never exerts effort to compel attention, is forming a habit which will be the bane of his thinking until his stream of thought shall end. EXERCISES Look in upon your thought occasionally and discover what constitutes the "wave." Did your attention follow your interest, or was it com- pelled by your wiU? Which type of attention can you sus- tain the longer? Which gives you the better immediate results? If you find it impossible to hold your mind down to study, where does the difficulty lie? Is it possible that some things may be iminteresting to us only because we do not know enough about them? Are you improving in your power of attention? SUGGESTED READINGS Angell, "Psychology," Chapter IV. James, "Psychology," Briefer Course, Chapter XIII. James, "Principles of Psychology," Chapter XI. Sully, "The Human Mind," vol. i., pp. 74-79. Dewey, " Psychology," Chapter IV, sec. 5. Stout, "The Groundwork of Psychology," Chapter VI. Royce, "Outlines of Psychology," pp. 257-268. Oppenheim, "Mental Growth and Control," Chapter III. CHAPTER III THE BRAIN AND NERVOUS SYSTEM A PINE brain, or a good mind. These terms are Mind and often used interchangeably, as if they were synono- ''^^' mous. Yet the one stands for a material thing — so many cells and fibers combined iq a soft, pulpy mass of gray and white, weighing some three pounds, and shut away from the outside world in a closed casket of bone; the other stands for a spiritual thing — for the sum of the processes by which we think and feel and will, and which have made man the master of his environment and given him the magnificent sum total of human culture and attainment. How, then, came these so widely different facts, the mind and the brain, ever to be confused in our speech ? How came we to use the terms interchangeably? It is because the mind and the brain are so vitally related and so inseparably connected in their work. "We have never known a mind except in connection with some brain, and a brain without a mind becomes but a mass of dead matter, of no more value than so much clay. Each has grown up and developed into its present state of efficiency by working in conjunction with the other, not only in each individual from birth to matu- rity, but also in the race, through the countless ages of its history. The brain of the babe is as much inferior to that of the adult as its mind is below the adult mind; likewise the same law holds if we compare primitive men with civilized. 25 26 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION The brain as the mind's machine. Relation of nervous system to mind. In the first chapter we saw that the brain does not create the mind, but that the mind works through the brain. No one can believe that the brain secretes mind as the liver secretes bile, or that it grinds it out as a mill does flour. Indeed, just what their exact relation is has not yet been settled. Yet it is easy to see that if the mind must use the brain as a machine and work through it, then the mind must be subject to the limitations of its machine, or, in other words, the mind cannot be better than the brain through which it operates. A brain and nervous system that are poorly developed or insufficiently nourished mean a low grade of efficiency in our mental processes, just as a poorly constructed or wrongly adjusted motor means loss of power in applying the electric current to its work. We' will, then, look upon the mind and the brain as counterparts of each other, each perform- ing activities which correspond to activities in the other, both inextricably bound together at least so far as this life is concerned, and each getting its signifi- cance by its union with the other. This view will lend interest to a brief study of the brain and nervous system. But can we first see how in a general way the brain and nervous system are primarily related to our think- ing? Let us go back to the beginning and consider the babe when it first opens its eyes on the'scenes of its new existence. What is in its mind ? What does it think about ? Nothing. Imagine, if you can, a per- son born blind and deaf, and without the sense of touch, taste, or smell. Let such a person live on for a year, for five years, for a lifetime. What would he know? What ray of intelligence would enter his mind ? What would he think about 1 All would be THE BRAJN AND NERVOUS SYSTEM 27 r dark to his eyes, all silent to his ears, all tasteless to his mouth, all odorless to his nostrils, all touchless to his skin! His mind would be a blank. He would have no mind. He could not get started to think. He could not get started to act. He would belong to a lower scale of life than the tiny animal that floats with the waves and the tide in the ocean without power to direct its own course. He would be but an inert mass of flesh without sense or soul. Yet this is the condition of the babe at birth It The mind is born blind and deaf, without the sense of taste or smell. Born without anything to think about, and no way to get anything to think about until the senses wake up and furnish some material from the outside world. Born with all the mechanism of muscle and nerve ready to perform the countless com- plex movements of arms and legs and body which characterize every child, he could not even start on these activities without a message from the senses to set them going. At birth the child probably has only the senses of contact and temperature present; taste soon follows; sight in a few days; hearing about the same time, and smell a little later. The senses are waking up and beginning their acquaintance with the outside world. And what a problem the senses have to solve ! On The work the one hand the great universe of sights and sounds, senses. of tastes and smells, of contacts and temperatures, and whatever else may belong to the material world in which we live; and on the other hand the little shapeless mass of gray and white pulpy matter in- capable of sustaining its own shape, and shut away in the darkness of a bony case with no possibility of contact with the outside world, and no means of com- 28 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION municating with it except through the senses. And yet this universe of external things must be brought into communication with the seemingly insignificant but really wonderful thing we call the brain, else the mind could never be. Here we discover, then, the twa "FlQ. 5.— -A neuron from a human spinal cord. The central portion represents the cell body; N, the nucleus; P, a pigmented or colored spot; D, a dendrite, or relatively short fiber, which branches freely; A, an axon, or long fiber, which branches but little. great factors which first require our study if we would understand the growth of the mind — the material world without and the brain within. For it is the action and interaction of these which lie at the bot- tom of the mind's development. Let us first look a lit- tle more closely at the brain and the accompanying nervous system. The struc- The nervous system, including the brain, is made up nervous of nerve cells and their outgrowing fibers. Each sep- syatem. arate cell body, with its filamentous elongations, is called a neuron. The cell may be thought of as the original or fundamental part of the neuron, for the fibers are in all cases formed by an outgrowth from THE BRAIN AND NERVOUS SYSTEM 29 cells. The cells are of various shapes, gray in color, and are found for the most part in the brain and spinal cord, and little masses of them called ganglia are found distributed at intervals along the nerves which lead to the periphery of the body. The cells form that part of the brain and cord usually called the " gray matter." They vary from ^^ to jg\(, of an inch in diameter. In man's brain and spinal cord alone there are some three thousand millions of neurons. Like the battery cells in an electrical apparatus, the Ntrve cell3 nerve cells are generators of energy, supplying the ^" ^'^^ force which governs our movements, interprets our Fig. 6. — Neurons in different stages of development, from a to e. In a, the elementary cell body alone is present; in c, a dendrite is shown projecting upward, and an axone downward. — After Donaldson. sensations, and does our thinking ; for these things re- quire the expenditure of energy quite as much as does the running of wheels and pulleys or the lifting of weights. The fibers, which, as said above, are but elon- gations of the cells, are, like the wires in an electrical 30 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION apparatus, the conductors of energy. They carry the force supplied by the cells, serving to connect the dif- ferent parts of the nervous system with each other functionally so that they may work in harmony. They bear the messages from the outside world to the brain and spinal cord, and finally connect all with the muscles, thus making possible the harmonious move- FiG. 7. — Longitudinal (A) and transverse (B) sections of nerve fibers. The heavy border represents the medullary, or envelop- ing, sheath, which becomes thicker in the larger fibers. Sciatic nerve. Hiunan X 400 diameters. — After Donaldson. Central and peripheral systems- The spinal cord. ments of the body. Something may be guessed of the number and size of the fibers from the fact that more than two and a half millions of sensory fibers alone terminate in the brain. The nervous system may, for the purpose of descrip- tion, conveniently be divided into two parts: (1) The central nervous system, consisting of the brain and spinal cord, and (2) the peripheral system, consisting of the afferent or in-bearing and efferent or out-bear- ing branches which connect the central system with the periphery of the body. A brief description of each of these parts will help us to understand better how they all work together in so wonderful a way to accomplish their great result. The spinal cord proceeds from the base of the brain downward about eighteen inches through a canal pro- vided for it in the vertebrae of the spinal column. It is composed of white matter, or fibers, on the outside, and gray matter, or cells, within. A deep fissure on THE BRAIN AND NERVOUS SYSTEM 31 the anterior side and another on the posterior cleave the cord nearly in twain, resembling the brain in this particular. The gray matter on the interior is in the form of two crescents connected by a narrow bar. In the brain we easily distinguish three major divi- sions — ^the medulla oblongata, the cerebellum, and the cerebrum. The medulla is but an enlargement of the upper part of the cord where it connects with the brain. It is about an inch and a quarter long, and is composed of both white and gray matter, but not regularly arranged as in the cord. For here the gray, which is on the inside in the cord, is passing to the outside, which is its location in the cerebrum ; and the The brain Fig. 8. — Different aspects of sections of the spinal cord and of the roots of the spinal nerves from the cervical region : 1, different views of anterior median fissure; 2, posterior fissure; J, anterior lateral depression for anterior roots; A, posterior lateral depres- sion for 'posterior roots; 5 and 6, anterior and posterior roots, respectively; 7, complete spinal nerve, formed by the union of the anterior and posterior roots. white is passing inward, where it is found in the cere- brum. Here also the fibers are crossing or changing sides, so that those which pass up the right side of the cord finally connect with the left side of the brain. 32 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION The cere- bellum. Lying just back of the medulla and at the rear part of the base of the cerebrum is the cerebellum, or ' ' little brain, ' ' approximately as large as the fist, and composed of a complex arrangement of white and gray matter. Fibers from the spinal cord enter this The cere- brum. Fig. 9. — View of the under side of the brain. B, basis of the crura; P, pons; Mo, medulla oblongata; Ce, cerebellum; Sc, spinal cord. mass, and others emerge and pass on into the cere- brum, while its two halves also are connected with each other by means of cross fibers. The cerebrum occupies all the upper part of the skull from the front to the rear. It is divided sym- metrically into two hemispheres, the right and the left. These hemispheres are connected with each other by a small bridge of fibei-s called the corpus callosum. Each hemisphere is furrowed and ridged with convolutions, THE BRAIN AND NERVOUS SYSTEM 33 an arrangement which allows greater surface for the distribution of the gray cellular matter over it. Be- sides these irregularities of surface, each hemisphere is marked also by two deep clefts or fissures — ^the fis- sure of Eolando, extending from the middle upper part of the hemisphere downward and forward, passing a little in front of the ear and stopping on a level with the upper part of it ; and the fissure of Syl- vius, beginning at the base of the brain somewhat in Fics. 10. — Diagrammatic side view of brain, showing cerebellmn (CE) and medulla oblongata (MO). F' F" F'" are placed on the first, second, and third frontal convolutions; AF, on the ascending frontal; AP, on the ascending parietal; M, on the marginal; A, on the angular. T' T" T'" are placed on the first, second, and third temporal convolutions. R-R marks the fissure of Rolando; S-S, the fissure of Sylvius; PO, the parieto-oocipital fissure. — After Angell. front of the ear and extending upward and back- ward at an acute angle with the base of the hemi- sphere. The surface of each hemisphere may be thought of as mapped out into four lobes : The frontal lobe, which 34 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION The lobes of the hemi- lipheres. The cortex. includes the front part of the hemisphere and extends back to the fissure of Rolando and down to the fissure of Sylvius; the parietal lobe, which lies back of the fissure of Rolando and above that of Sylvius and ex- '/ .7^. Fig. 11. — The projection fibers of the bradn. pairs of cranial nerves. I-IX, the first nine tends back to the occipital lobe; the occipital lobe, which includes the extreme rear portion of the hemi- sphere; and the temporal lobe, which lies below the fissure of Sylvius and extends back to the occipital lobe. The gray or cellular matter in the hemispheres, un- like that in the cord, lies on the surface. This rind of gray matter is called the cortex, and it varies from one-twelfth to one-eighth of an inch in thickness. (See Figs. 11 and 12.) The greater part of the mass of the hemispheres is formed by the white matter or fibers. THE BRAIN AND NERVOUS SYSTEM 35 These fibers are of three kinds: (1) Projection The fibers, which are the fibers from the spinal cord and which spread out fanlike to all parts of the hemi- spheres, bringing sensory impulses in and carrying motor impulses back to the muscles; (2) association fibers, which connect the different convolutions of the same hemisphere with each other, and thus make it possible for the different senses to work together, as when some object we see calls lip in the mind a sound, or taste, or smell, or touch which was at a former time associated with it; and (3) commissural fibers, which connect the corresponding parts of the two hemi- spheres with each other, and thus make it possible for the two sides of the body to work in harmony. Fig. 12. — Schematic diagram showing association fibers connecting cortical centers with each other. — ^After James and Stakb. The peripheral nervous system consists of thirty- Thepe- one pairs of nerves branching off from the spinal system. cord, a sensory nerve root from the posterior and a motor from the anterior part of the cord at the same 4 organs. 36 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION level. (See Fig. 8.) Soon after their emergence from the cord, these nerves are wrapped together in the same sheath and proceed in this way to the periphery of the body, where the sensory nerve usually ends in a specialized end organ fitted to respond to some cer- tain stimulus from the outside world. The motor nerve ends in minute filaments in the muscular organ which it governs. Both sensory and motor nerves con- nect with fibers of like kind in the cord and these in turn with the cortex, thus giving every part of the periphery direct connection with the cortex. Twelve pairs of nerves arise from the brain itself, and extend either to the periphery of the body or else to certain of the visceral organs. The end The end organs of the sensory nerves are all alike in one particular : namely, that each is fitted for its own particular work, and can do no other. Thus the eye is the end organ of sight, and is a wonderfully complex arrangement of nerve structure combined with re- fracting media, and arranged to respond to the rapid ether waves of light. The ear has for its essential part the specialized endings of the auditory nerve, and is fitted to respond to the waves carried to it in the air, giving the sensation of sound. The end organs of touch, found in greatest perfection in the finger tips, are of several kinds, all very complicated in structure. And so on with each of the senses. Each has some form of end organ specially adapted to re- spond to the kind of stimulus upon which its sensation depends, and each is insensible to the stimuli of the others, much as the receiver of a telephone will re- spond to the tones of our voice, but not to the touch of our fingers as will the telegraph instrument, and vice versa. Thus the eye is not affected by sounds, nor THE BRAIN AND NERVOUS SYSTEM 37 touch by light ; yet by the means of all the senses we are able to come in contact with the material world in a variety of ways. Division of labor is the law in the organic worlcj as Division of in the industrial. Animals of the lowest type, such as Iwerv- the amcEba, do not have separate organs for respira- °^^^^®' tion, digestion, assimilation, elimination, etc., the one tissue performing all of these functions. But in the higher forms each organ not only has its own specific work, but even within the same organ each part has its own particular work assigned. Thus we have seen that the two parts of the neuron perform different functions, the cells generating energy and the fibers transmitting it. It will not seem strange, then, that there is also a division of labor in the cellular matter itself in the nervous system. For example, the little masses of ganglia which are distributed at intervals along the nerves are probably for the purpose of reen- forcing the nerve current, much as the battery cells in the local telegraph office reenf orce the current from the central office; the cellular matter in the spinal cord and lower parts of the brain has a very impor- tant work to perform in receiving messages from the senses and responding to them in directing the simpler reflex acts and movements which we learn to execute without our consciousness being called upon, thus leaving the mind free from these petty things to busy itself in higher ways; the cellular matter of the cor- tex performs the highest functions of all, for through its activity we have consciousness — ^thought, feeling, and will. The gray matter of the cerebellum, the me- dulla, and the cord may receive impressions from the senses and respond to them with movements, but their response is in all eases wholly automatic and uncon- 38 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION scions. A person whose hemispheres had been injured in such a way as to interfere with the activity of the cortex might still continue to perform most if not all of the habitual movements of his life, but they would be mechanical and not intelligent. He would lack all higher consciousness. It is through the activ- Zi7i6 indicates fissura of Rolando {frontdt lobe OcclpitcH lobe Fisswrd of Sylvius Fig. 13. — Side view of left hemisphere of human brain, showing the principal localized areas. Division of labor in the cortex. ity of this thin covering of cellular matter of the cerebrinn that our miads operate; here are received stimuli from the different senses, and here sensatioils are experienced. Here all our movements which are consciously directed have their origin. And here all our thinking, feeling, and willing are done. Nor does the division of labor in the neivous sys- tem end with this assignment of work. The cortex itself probably works essentially as a unit, yet it is through a shifting of tensions from one area to an- other that it acts, now giving us a sensation, now di- THE BRAIN AND NERVOUS SYSTEM 39 recting a movement, and now thinking a thought or feeling an emotion. Localization of function is the rule here also. Certain areas of the cortex are de- voted chiefly to sensations, others to motor impulses, and others to higher thought activities, yet in such a way that all work together in perfect harmony, each reenf orcing the other and making its work significant. Thus the front portion of the cortex seems to be de^ voted to the higher thought activities; the region on both sides of the fissure of Eolando, to motor activ- ities; and the rear and lower parts to sensory activ- ities; and all are bound together and made to work together by the association fibers of the brain. In the ease of the higher thought activities, it is not probable that one section of the frontal lobes of the cortex is set apart for thinking, one for feeling, and one for willing, etc., but rather that the whole fron- tal part of the cortex is concerned in each. In the motor and sensory areas, however, the case is dif- ferent; for here a still further division of labor occurs. For example, in the motor region one small area seems connected with movements of the head, one with the arm, one with the leg, one with the face, and another with the organs of speech; likewise in the sensory region, one area is devoted to vision, one to hearing, one to taste and smell, and one to touch, etc. "We must bear in mind, however, that these regions are not mapped out as accurately as are the boundaries of our States — that no part of the brain is restricted wholly to either sensory or motor nerves, and that no part works by itself independently of the rest of the brain. "We name a tract from the predomi- nance of nerves which end there, or from the chief functions which the area performs. The motor locali- 40 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION The nerv- ous sys- tem and the outside world. 'i ue ena organs and their re- sponse to stimuli. zation seems to be the most perfect. Indeed, experi- mentation on the brains of monkeys has been success- ful in mapping out motor areas so accurately that such small centers as those connected with the bend- ing of one particular leg or the flexing of a thumb have been located. Yet each area of the cortex is so connected with every other area by the millions of association fibers that the whole brain is capable of working together as a unit, thus unifying and har- monizing our thoughts, emotions, and acts. Let us next inquire how this mechanism of the nerv- ous system is acted upon in such a way as to give us sensations. In order to understand this, we must first know that all forms of matter are composed of minute atoms which are in constant motion, and by impart- ing this motion to the air or the ether which surrounds them, are constantly radiating energy in the form of minute waves throughout space. These waves, or radi- ations, are incredibly rapid in some instances and rather slow in others. In sending out its energy in the form of these waves, the physical world is doing its part to permit us to form its acquaintance. The end organs of the sensory nerves must meet this advance halfway, and be so constructed as to be affected by the different forms of energy which are constantly beating upon them. Thus the radiations of ether from the sun, our chief source of light, are so rapid that bilUons of them enter the eye in a second of time, and the retina is of such a nature that its nerve cells are thrown into ac- tivity by these waves ; the impulse is carried over the optic nerve to the occipital lobe of the cortex, and the sensation of sight is the result. The different colors also, from the red of the spectrum to the violet, are THE BRAIN AND NERVOUS SYSTEM 41 the result of different vibration rates in the waves of ether which strike the retina ; and in order to perceive color, the retina must be able to respond to the par- ticular vibration rate which represents each color. Likewise in the sense of touch the end organs are fitted to respond to very rapid vibrations, and it is ACom|30site I =g y^^-^-^ ."^VibraHons ] Ultra RedHay* Beam of < ^^ ^Sy^-O-^ of 400 Tomberature Ether waves | g $$^RRSS>^ ..j ,„. 5Hmuli Vibrations of400 and less 450 Red 472 Orange 526 Yellow 589 Green 640 Blue 722 Indigo 730 Violet Vibrations of 800 and more LlgtiV rH>y& ' Ctiemical Stimuli Ultra VioletRay* Cliemical Stimuli Fig. 14. — The prism's analysis of a bundle of light rays. On the right are shown the relation of vibration rates to temperature stimuli, to light, and to chemical stimuli. The rates are in bil- lions per second. — After Witmeh. possible that the different qualities of touch are pro- duced by different vibration rates iti the atoms of the object we are touching. When we reach the ear, we have the organ which responds to the lowest vibration rate of all, for we can detect a sound made by an ob- ject which is vibrating from twenty to thirty times a second. The highest vibration rate which will affect the ear is some forty or fifty thousand per second. Thus it is seen that there are great gaps in the dif- ferent rates to which our senses are fitted to respond — a sudden drop from billions in the case of the eye to millions in touch, and to thousands or even tens 42 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION in hearing. This makes one wonder whether there are not many things in nature which man has never discovered simply because he has not the sense mech- anism enabling him to become conscious of their exist- ence. There are undoubtedly more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. Depend- Only as the senses bring in the material, has the mi°nd°on^^ mind anything with which to build. Thus have the the senses, senses to act as messengers between the great outside world and the brain; to be the servants who shall stand at the doorways of the body — the eyes, the ears, the finger tips — ready to receive each its particular kind of impulse from nature and send it along the right path to the part of the cortex where it belongs, so that the mind can say, "A sight," "A sound," or "A touch." Thus does the mind come to know the universe of the senses. Thus does it get the material out of which memory, imagination, and thought begin. Thus and only thus does the mind secure the crude material from which the finished superstructure is finally built. SUGGESTED READINGS Halleck, "Education of the Central Nervous System," Chapter I. Baldwin, " The Story of the Mind," Chapter V. Royce, " Outlines of Psychology," Chapter III. Thomdike, " Elements of Psychology," Chapters IX-Xl Stout, " Groundwork of Psychology," Chapter IV. James, " Psychology," Briefer Course, Chapter VIII. Angell, " Psychologs^," Chapter 11. CHAPTER IV SENSORY AND MOTOR TRAINING Education was long looked upon as affecting the Education mind only. If what we have been saying about the bofhmind dependence of the mind on the nervous system is true, ^'"^ body, however, it is evident that the mind cannot be trained except as the nervous system is trained and developed. For not sensation and movement alone, but memory, imagination, judgment, reasoning, and every other act of the mind, are dependent on the nervous system finally for their efficiency. The mind and the nervous system are so wedded in their growth and develop- ment, as well as in their activities, that it is impossible to educate the one without performing a like office for the other; and it is likewise impossible to neglect the one without causing the other to suffer. Ignoring the native differences in nervous systems Efficiency through the influence of heredity, the efficiency of a system d?- nervous system is largely dependent on two factors: P^ndson (l)The development of the cells and fibers of which mentand it is composed, and (2) its general tone of health and vigor. The actual number of cells in the nervous sys- tem increases but little if at all after birth. Indeed, it is doubtful whether Edison 's brain and nervous sysj- tem has a greater number of cells in it than yours or mine. The difference between the brain of a genius and that of an ordinary man is not in the number of cells which it contains, but rather in the development 43 44 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION of the cells and fibers which are present, potentially, at least, in every nervous system. The histologist tells us that in the nervous system of every child there are tens of thousands of cells which are so immature and undeveloped that they are useless; indeed, this is the case to some degree in every adult person's nervous system as well. Thus each individual has inherent ia his nervous system potentialities of which he has never taken advantage, the utiliziag of which may make him a genius and the neglecting of which will certainly leave him on the plane of mediocrity. The first prob- lem in education, then, is to take the unripe and ineffi- cient nervous systems, and so develop them in connec- tion with the growing mind that the possibilities which nature has stored in them shall become actu- alities. Undevel- Professor Donaldson tells us on this point that: ope ce s. i/j^^ birth, and for a long time after, many (nervous) systems contain cell elements which are more or less immature, not forming a functional part of the tissue, and yet under some conditions capable of further de- velopment. . . . For the cells which are continually appearing in the developing cortex no other source is known than the nuclei or granules found there in its earliest stages. These elements are metamorphosed neuroblasts — ^that is, elementary cells out of which the nervous matter is developed — ^whieh have shrunken to a volume less than that which they had at first, and which remain small until, in the subsequent process of enlargement necessary for their full development, they expand into well-marked cells. Elements intermediate between these granules and the fully developed cells are always found, even in mature brains, and therefore it is inferred that the latter are derived from the for- SENSORY AND MOTOR TRAINING 45 mer. The appearances there also lead to the conclu- sions that many elements which might possibly de- velop in any given case is far beyond the number that actually does so. . . . The possible number of cells latent and functional in the central system is early fixed. At any age this number is accordingly repre- sented by the granules as well as by the cells which have already undergone further development. During growth the proportion of developed cells increases, and sometimes, owing to the failure to recognize po- tential nerve cells in the granules, the impression is carried away that this increase implies the formation of new elements. As has been shown, such is not the case."j) The nerve fibers, no less than the cells, must go Develop- through a process of development. It has already ^rve° been shown that the fibers are the result of a branch- fibers, ing of cells. At birth many of the cells have not yet thrown out branches, and hence the fibers are lack- ing ; while many of those which are already grown out are not sufficiently developed to transmit impulses accurately. Thus it has been found that most chil- dren at birth are able to support the weight of the body for several seconds by clasping the fingers around a small rod, but it takes about a year for the child to become able to stand. It is evident that it requires more actual strength to cling to a rod than to stand ; hence the conclusion is that the difference is in the earlier development of the nerve centers which have to do with clasping than of those concerned in standing. Likewise the child's first attempts to feed himself or do any one of the thousand little things about which he is so awkward, are partial failures not I Donaldson, "The Growth of the Brain," pp. 74, 238. 46 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION SO much because he has not had practice as because his nervous machinery connected with those move- ments is not yet developed suiHciently to enable him to be accurate. His brain is in a condition which Flech- sig calls " unripe." How, then, shall the nervous system ripen? How shall the undeveloped cells and fibers grow to full maturity and efficiency? Develop- Like all other tissues of the body, the nerve cells and nervous fibers are developed by judicious use. The sensory cells tffourfi require the constant stimulus of nerve currents run- "se. Jing in from the various end organs, and the motor cells require the constant stimulus of currents run- ning from them out to the muscles. In other words, the conditions upon which both motor and sensory development depend are: (1) A rich environment of sights and sounds and tastes and smells, and every- thing else which serves as proper stimuli to the sense organs ; and (2) no less important, an opportunity for the freest and most complete motor activity. An illus- tration of the effects of the lack of sensory stimuli on the cortex is well shown in the case of Laura Bridg- man, whose brain was studied by Professor Donaldson after her death. Laura Bridgman was born a normal child, and developed as other children do up to the age of nearly three years. At this time, through an attack of scarlet fever, she lost her hearing completely and also the sight of her left eye. Her right eye was so badly affected that she could see but little ; and it, too, became entirely blind when she was eight. She lived in this condition until she Was sixty years old, when she died. Professor Donaldson submitted the cortex of her brain to a most careful examination, also comparing the corresponding areas on the two hemispheres with each other. He found that as a SENSORY AND MOTOR TRAINING 47 whole the cortex was thinner than in the case of nor- mal individuals. He found also that the cortical area connected with the left eye — namely, the right occip- ital region — was much thinner than that for the right eye, which iiad retained its sight longer than the other. He says: "It is interesting to notice that those parts of the cortex which, according to the cur- rent view, were associated with the defective sense or- gans were also particularly thin. The cause of this thinness was found to be due, at least in part, to the small size of the nerve cells there present. Not only were the large and medium-sized cells smaller, but the impression made on the observer was that they were also less numerous than in the normal cortex. ' ' No doubt if we could examine the brain of a per- Effect of son who has grown up in an environment rich in stSa^. stimuli to the eye, where nature, earth, and sky have presented a changing panorama of color and form to attract the eye ; where all the sounds of nature, from the chirp of the insect to the roar of the waves and the murmur of the breeze, and from the softest tones of the voice to the mightiest sweep of the great orchestra, have challenged the ear ; where many and varied odors and perfumes have assailed the nostrils ; where a great range of tastes have tempted the palate ; where many varieties of touch and temperature sensations have been experienced — no doubt if we could examine such a brain we should find the sensory areas of the cortex excelling in thickness because its cells were well de- veloped and full sized from the currents which had been pouring into them from the outside world. On the other hand, if we could examine a cortex which had lacked "any one of these stimuli, we should find some area in it undeveloped because of this deficiency. THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION Necessity for motor activity. Its owner would therefore possess but the fraction of a brain, and would in a corresponding degree find his mind incomplete. Likewise in the case of the motor areas. Pity the boy or the girl who has been deprived of the oppor- tunity to use every muscle to the fullest extent in the unrestricted plays and games of childhood. For Lea teg Fia. 15. — Schematic transverse section of the human brain showing the projection of the motor fibers, their crossing in the neighbor- hood of the medulla, and their termination in the' different areas of locaUzed function in the cortex.' S, fissure of Sylvius; M, the medulla; VII, the roots of the facial nerves. — After Anqell. SENSORY AND MOTOR TRAINING 49 where such activities are not wide in their scope, there some areas of the cortex will remain undeveloped, be- cause unused, and the person will be handicapped later in his life from lack of skill in the activities de- pending on these centers. Halleck says in this con- nection : " If we could examine the developing motor region with a microscope of sufficient magnifying power, it is conceivable that we might learn wherein the modification due to exercise consists. We might also, under such conditions, be able to say, ' This is the motor region of a piano player ; the modifications here correspond precisely to those necessary for controlling such movements of the hand.' Or, ' This is the motor tract of a blacksmith; this, of an engraver; and these must be the cells which- govern the vocal organs of an orator.' " Whether or not the microscope will ever reveal such things to us, there is no doubt that the conditions suggested exist, and that back of every in- efficient and awkward attempt at physical control lies a motor area with its cells undeveloped by use. No wonder that our processes of learning physical ad- justment and control are slow, for they are a growth "~ in the brain rather than a simple ' ' learning how. ' ' V The training of the nervous system consists finally. Coordinate then, in the development of the neurons of which aSdmotor it is composed. We have seen that the sensory cells ^^ent°P" are to be developed by the sensory stimuli pouring in upon them, and the motor cells by the motor im- pulses which they send out to the muscles. The sen- sory and the motor fibers likewise, being an outgrowth of their respective cells, find their development in carrying the impulses which result in sensation and movement. Thus it is seen that the neuron is, in its development as in its work, a unit. J*p>v 50 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION Develop- ment from thought processes. To this simpler type of sensory and motor develop- ment which we have been considering, we must add that which comes from the more complex mental proc- esses, such as memory, thought, and imagination. For it is in connection with these that the association fibers are developed, and the brain areas so connected that they can work together as a unit. A simple il- lUustration of simple sensory- motor action. S6 ^M FiQ. 16. — Diagram illustrating the paths of association. lustration will enable us to see more clearly how the nervous mechanism acts to bring this about. Suppose that I am walking along a country road deeply engaged in meditation, and that I come lo a puddle of water in my pathway. I may turn aside and avoid the obstruction without my attention being called to it, and without interruption of my train of thought. The act has been automatic. In this case the nerve current has passed from the eye (S) over an afferent fiber to a sensory center (s) in the nervous system below the cortex; from there it has been for- SENSORY AND MOTOR TRAINING 51 warded to a motor center (m) in the same region, and on out over a motor fiber to the proper muscles (M), which are to execute the required act. The act hav- ing been completed, the sensory nerves connected with the muscles employed report the fact back that the work is done, thus completing the circuit. This event may be taken as an illustration of literal thou- sands of acts which we perform daily without the in- tervention of consciousness, and hence without involv- ing the hemispheres. If, however, instead of avoiding the puddle uncon- More com- sciously, I do so from considerations of the danger of wet feet and the disagreeableness of soiled shoes and the ridiculous appearance I shall make, then the current cannot take the short circuit, but must pass on up to the cortex. Here it awakens consciousness to take notice of the obstruction, and calls forth the images which aid in directing the necessary move- ments. This simple illustration may be greatly com- plicated, substituting for it one of the more complex ' problems which are continually presenting themselves i to us for solution. But the truth of the illustration still holds. Whether in the simple or the complex act, there is always a forward passing of the nerve current through the sensory and thought centers, and on out through the motor centers to the organs which are to be concerned in the motor response. Thus it will be seen that in the simplest act which Thefactow can be considered there are the following factors: inanaet (1) The stimulus which acts on the end organ; (2) the ingoing current over an afferent nerve; (3) the sen- sory or interpreting cells; (4) the fibers connecting the sensory with a motor center; (5) the motor cells; (6) the efferent nerve to carry the direction for the 5 52 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION Application to educa- •fcion. i^^utrition an impor- tant factor in brain .efficiency. movement outward to the muscle; (7) the motor re^ sponse; and, finally, (8) the report back that the act has been performed. With this in mind it fairly be- wilders one to think of the marvelous complexity of the work that is going on in our nervous mechanisn? every moment of our life, even without considering the higher thought processes at all. How, with these added, the resulting complexity all works out into beautiful harmony is indeed beyond comprehension. The great problem of education is, on the physical side, it would seem, then, to provide for ourselves and those we seek to educate as rich an environment of sensory stimuli as possible; one whose impressions will be full of suggestions to motor activity and to the higher thought processes ; and then to give oppor- tunity for thought and expression in the largest pos- sible number of lines. And added to this must be frequent and clear sensory and motor recall, a living over again of the sights and sounds and odors and the motor activities we have once experienced. For in this way the nerve cells and fibers which were concerned in the original sensation or thought or movement are again brought into exercise, and their development continued. Through recall we are able not only greatly to multiply the effects of the immediate sen- sory and motor stimuli which come to us, but also to improve our power of thinking by getting a fund of images upon which the mind can draw. As stated before, the second factor concerned in the efficiency of the nervous system is vigor, and this is largely dependent on nutrition. No amount of exer- cise, no matter how favorable the stimuli, can result in an efficient brain if the cells are starved for want of nourishment. No other tissue of the body is so SENSORY AND MOTOR TRAINING 53 susceptible to fatigue and nutrition as are the nerve cells. Histologists find that the nuclei of nerve cells are shrunk as much as fifty per cent by extreme fatigue. For rapid and complete recuperation the cells must have not only the best of nourishment but opportunity for rest as well. Reasonable fatigue fol- lowed by proper recuperation is not harmful, but even necessary if the best development is to be at- tained; but fatigue without proper nourishment and rest is fatal to all mental operations, and indeed finally to the nervous system itself, leaving it per- manently in a condition of low tone, and incapable of rallying to strong effort. For the best nutrition there is necessary first of The factors all plenty of nourishing and healthful food. Science trition. '^^' and experience have both disproved the supposition that students should be scantily fed. O'Shea claims that many brain workers are far short of their highest grade of efficiency because of starving their brains from poor diet. And not only must the food be of the right quality, but the body must be in good health. Little good to eat the best of food unless it is being properly digested and assimilated. And little good if all the rest is as it should be, and the right amount of oxidation does not go on in the brain so as to remove the worn out cells and make place for new ones. This warns us that pure air and a strong circulation are indispensable to the best working of our brains. No doubt many students who find their work too hard for them might locate the trouble in their stomachs or their lungs or the poor food they eat, rather than in their minds. There is, perhaps, no greater foe to brain growth and efficiency than the nervous and worn out condi- 54 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION tion which comes from loss of sleep or from worry. Experiments in the psychological laboratories have shown that nerve cells shrivel up and lose their vital- ity imder loss of sleep. Let this go on for any con- siderable length of time, and the loss is irreparable; for the cells can never recuperate. This is especially true in the case of children or young people. Many school boys and girls, indeed many college students, are making slow progress in their studies not because they are mentally slow or inefficient, not even chiefly because they lose time that should be put on their les- sons, but because they are incapacitating their brains for good service through loss of sleep and the conse- quent late hours. Add to this condition that of worry, which often accompanies it from the fact of failure in lessons, and a naturally good and well-organized nervous system is sure to fail. Worry, from whatever cause, should be avoided as one would avoid poison, if we would bring ourselves to the highest degree of efficiency. Not only does worry temporarily " unfit the mind for its best work," but its evil results are permanent, siace the mind is left with a poorly de- veloped or undone nervous system through which to work, even after the cause for worry has been removed and the worry itself has ceased. EXEECISES What different sensory stimuli can be obtained from a summer excursion to the woods? Does everyone who takes such an excursion receive all ihese stimuli? Will a sensory stimulus like that coming from the song of a bird produce the same effect on the cortex whether we SENSORY AND MOTOR TRAINING 55 consciously hoai' the song or not? Consider also the ques- tion of sensory recall. Have you ever triod to discover how many different colors and shades are discernible in some vaiiegated landscape? How many different sounds you can detect on a summer eveninp;? How many different qualities of touch you can datei'mino by passing your flugcrs over various leaves? What mentiil effects have you noticed from loss of sleep? from worry? from impure air? from insufficient exercise? SUGGESTED EEADINGS Halleck, " Education of the Central Nervous System," Chapters VII and XI. Rowe, " The Physical Nature of the Child," Chapters IV-V. James, " Talks to Teachers," Chapters V-VII. Hall, " Adokvscence," Chapter III. Stratton, " I'^xperimental Psychology and Cultm-e," Chap- ter XII. Croos, "The Play of Man," Part I, Chapters I and II. CHAPTER V HABIT The in- fluence of habit. Habit a method of economy. " Habit is second nature? Habit is ten times na- ture! " said Wellington. Habit is the " bane or the blessing " of our lives; our " best friend or our worst enemy "; the " cable which we cannot break." "We are but " bundles of habits." So testify the wise men. Our lives are largely a daily round of activities dictated by our habits. Most of our movements and acts are habitual; we think as we have formed the habit of thinking ; our moral judgments and decisions are tinged by habit ; our religious exercises, even, may become largely a matter of habit. And all this has its good side as well as its bad. If we could not form habits, we could improve but little in our ways of doing things, no matter how many times we did them over and over. We should have to go through the same bungling process of dressing ourselves as when we first learned it as children. Now the dressing does itself, and the mind is left free to deal with more important things. Were it not for habit, we should never find it possible to attend to some disagreeable task or follow an undesirable line of work without a severe and exhausting struggle over each separate case; we could never become able almost automatically to choose the right and shun the wrong without a battle. Every act that we per- form would be a new act, and the wear and tear of 56 HABIT 57 deciding afresh each time how this and that thing should be done would speedily exhaust our powers, and life would not be worth living; in fact, life ex- cept on the lowest plane would be impossible. Without habit, personality could not exist; for we could never do a thing twice alike, and hence would be a new person each succeeding moment. The acts which give us our own peculiar individuality are our habitual acts — the little things which do themselves moment by moment without care or attention, and are the truest and best expression of our real selves. Probably no one of us could be very sure which arm he puts into the sleeve, or which foot he puts into the shoe, first; and yet each of us certainly formed the habit long ago of doing these things in a certain way. We might not be able to describe just how we hold knife and fork and spoon, and yet each has his own characteristic and habitual way of handling them. We sit down and get up in some characteristic way, and the very poise of our heads and attitudes of our bodies are the result of habit. We get sleepy and wake up, become hungry and thirsty at certain hours, through force of habit. We form the habit of lik- ing a certain chair, or nook, or corner, or path, or desk, and then seek this to the exclusion of all others. We habitually use a particular pitch of voice and type of enunciation in speaking, and this becomes one of our characteristic marks; or we form the habit of using barbarisms or solecisms of language in youth, and these cling to us and become an inseparable part of us later in life. On the mental side the case is no different. Our thinking is as characteristic as our physical acts. We may form the habit of thinking things out logically, or Physical habits. Mental habits. 58 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION WemTist form habits. Habit has a physical basis. of jumping to conclusions ; of thinking critically and independently, or of taking things unquestioningly on the authority of others. We may form the habit of carefully reading good, sensible books, or of skimming sentimental and trashy ones; of choosing elevating, ennobling companions, or the opposite; of being a good conversationalist and doing our part in a social group, or of being a drag on the conversation, and needing to be entertained. "We may form the habit of observing the things about us and enjoying the beautiful in our environment, or of failing to observe or to enjoy. We may form the habit of obeying the voice of conscience or of weakly yielding to tempta- tion without a struggle ; of taking a reverent attitude of prayer in our devotions, or of merely saying our prayers. I have said that we may form habits in all these lines, but that is not the way to put it ; we must form habits in these and all other lines. It is not in our power to say whether we will form habits or not ; for, once started, they go on forming themselves by day and night, steadily and relentlessly. Habit is, -then, one of the great factors to be reckoned with in our lives, and the question becomes not Shall we form habits ? but wJiat habits we shall form. And we have the determining of this question largely in our own power, for habits do not just happen, nor do they come to us ready made. We ourselves make them from day to day through the acts we perform, and in so far as we have control over our acts, in that far we can determine our habits. Habit is to be explained from the standpoint of its physical basis. Habits are formed because the tissues of our bodies are capable of being modified by use, and HABIT 59 ©f SO retaining the effects of this modification that the same act is easier of performance each succeeding time. This results in the old act being repeated in- stead of a new one being selected, and hence the old act is perpetuated. Even dead and inert matter obeys the same prin- ciples in this regard as does living matter. Says M. Leon Dumont : ' ' Everyone knows how a garment, having been worn a certain time, clings to the shape of the body better than when it was new ; there has been a change in the tissue, and this change is a new habit of cohesion; a lock works better after having been ■used some time ; at the outset more force was required to overcome certain roughness in the mechanism. The overcoming of their resistance is a phenomenon of habituation. It costs less trouble to fold a paper when it has been folded already. This saving of trouble is due to the essential nature of habit, which brings it about that, to reproduce the effect, a less amount of the outward cause is required. The sounds of a violin improve by use in the hands of an able artist, because the fibers of the wood at last contract habits of vibration conformed to harmonic relations. This is what gives such inestimable value to instru- ments that have belonged to great masters. "Water, in flowing, hollows out for itself a channel, which grows broader and deeper ; and, after having ceased to flow, it resumes when it flows again the path traced for itself before. Just so, the impressions of outer objects fashion for themselves in the nervous system more and more appropriate paths, and these vital phe- nomena recur under similar excitements from without, when they have been interrupted for a certain time." ^ ' Quoted by James, " Psychology," Briefer Course, p. 135. 60 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION Living tis- sue readily forms babits. Nerve tis- sue most susceptible to ha iptit bit. What is true of inanimate matter is doubly true of living tissue. The tissues of the human body can be molded into almost any form you choose if taken in time. A child may be placed on his feet at too early an age, and the bones of his legs form the habit of remaining bent. The Flathead Indian binds a board on the skull of his child, and its head forms the habit of remaining flat on the top. Wrong bodily postures produce curvature of the spine, and per- nicious modes of dress deform the bones of the chest. The muscles may be trained into the habit of keeping the shoulders straight or letting them droop ; those of the back, to keep the body well up on the hips, or to let it sag; those of locomotion, to give us a light, springy step, or to allow a shuffling carriage; those of speech, to give us a clear-cut, accurate articula- tion, or a careless, halting one ; and those of the face, to give us a cheerful cast of countenance, or a glum and morose expression. But the nervous tissue is the most sensitive and easily molded of all the bodily tissues. So delicate is the organization of the brain structure and so un- stable its molecules, that even the perfume of the flower, which assails the nose of a child, the song of a bird, which strikes his ear, or the fleeting dream, which lingers but for a second in his sleep, has so modified his brain that it will never again be as if these things had not been experienced. Every sen- sory current which runs in from the outside world; every motor current which rims out to command a muscle ; every thought which we think, has so modified the nerve structure through which it acts, that a tend- ency remains for a like act to be repeated. Our brain and nervous system is daily being molded into fixed HABIT 61 habits of acting by our thoughts and deeds, and thus becomes the automatic register of all we do. The old Chinese fairy story hits upon a fundamental and vital truth. These celestials tell their children that each child is accompanied by day and by night, every moment of his life, by an invisible fairy, who is provided with a pencil and tablet. It is the duty of this fairy to put down every deed of the child both good and evil, in an indelible record which will one day rise as a witness against him. So it is in very truth with our brains. The wrong act may have been performed in secret, no living being may ever know that we per- formed it, and a merciful Providence may forgive it ; but the inexorable monitor of our deeds was all the time beside us -writing the record, and the history of that act is inscribed forever in the tissues of our brain. It may be repented of bitterly in sackcloth and ashes and be discontinued, but its effects can never be quite effaced; they will remain with us as a handicap till our dying day, and in some critical moment in a great emergency we shall be in danger of defeat from the effects of that long past and forgot- ten act. Education consists in large part in " making our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy." And any youth who is forming a large number of useful habits is receiving no mean education, no matter if his knowledge of books may be limited; on the other hand, no one who is forming a large number of bad habits is being well educated, no matter how brilliant his knowledge may be. Childhood and youth is the great time for habit- forming. Then the brain is plastic and easily molded, and it retains its impressions more indelibly; later Our nerv- ous sys- tems keep an indelible record of our acts. Hence the importance of training them aright. Youth the time for habit-form- ing. 62 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION it is haBd to modify, and the impressions made are less permanent. It is hard to teach an old dog new tricks; nor would he remember them if you could teach them to him, nor be able to perform them well even if he could remember them. The young child will, within the first few weeks of its life, form habits of sleeping and feeding. It may in a few days be led into the habit of sleeping in the dark, or of requiring a light ; of going to sleep lying quietly, or of insisting upon being rocked; of getting hungry by the clock, or of wanting its food at all times when it finds noth- ing else to do, and so on. It is wholly outside the power of the mother or the nurse to determine whether the child shall form habits, but largely within their power to say what. habits shall be formed, since they control his acts. As the child grows older, the range of his habits increases ; and by the time he has reached his middle teens, the greater number of his personal habits are formed. It is very doubtful whether a boy who has not formed habits of punctuality before the age of fifteen will ever be entirely trustworthy in mat- ters requiring precision in this line. The girl who has not, before this age, formed habits of neatness and order will hardly make a tidy housekeeper later in her life. Those who in youth have no opportunity to habituate themselves to the usages of society may study books on etiquette and employ private instruct- ors in the art of polite behavior all they please later in life, but they will never cease to be awkward and ill at ease. None are at a greater disadvantage than the suddenly-grown-rich who attempt late in life to surround themselves with articles of art and luxury though their habits were all formed amid barrenness and want during their earlier years. HABIT 63 What youth, does not dream of being great, or noble, or a celebrated scholar ! And how few there are who finally achieve their ideals ! "Where does the cause of failure lie? Surely not in the lack of high ideals. Multitudes of young people have " Excelsior! " as their motto, and yet never get started up the moun- tain slope, let alone toiling on to its top. They have put in hours dreaming of the glory farther up, and have never begun to climh. The difficulty comes in not realizing that the only way to become what we wish or dream that we may become is to form the habit of being that thing. To form the habit of achieve- ment, of effort, of self-sacrifice, if need be. To form the habit of deeds along with dreams; to form the habit of doing. Who of us has not at this moment lying in wait for his convenience in the dim future a number of things which he means to do just as soon as this term of school is finished, or this job of work is completed, or when he is not so busy as now? And how seldom does he ever get to these things at all! Darwin tells that in his youth he loved poetry, art, and music, but was so busy with his scientific work that he could ill spare the time to indulge these tastes. So he prom- ised himself that he would devote his time to scien- tific work and make his mark in this. Then he would have time for the things that he loved, and would cul- tivate his taste for the fine arts. He made his mark in the field of science, and then turned again to poetry, to music, to art. But alas ! they were all dead and dry bones to him, without life or interest. He had passed the time when he could ever form the taste for them. He had formed his habits in an- other direction, and now it was forever too late to Value of the habit of achieve* ment. We must daily be what we would become. 64 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION Habit economizes effort. And rea- ders us more efficient. form the new habits anew. His own conclusion is, that if he had his life to live over again, he would each week listen to some musical concert and visit some art gallery, and that each day he would read some poetry, and thereby keep alive and active the love for them. Habit is a means by which we may economize effort. To hBve to decide each time the question comes up whether we will attend to this lecture or sermon or lesson; whether we will persevere and go on through this piece of disagreeable work which we have begun ; whether we will go to the trouble of being courteous and kind to this or that poor or imlovely or dirty fellow-mortal ; whether we will take this road because it looks easy, or that one because we know it to be the one we ought to take ; whether we will be strictly fair and honest when we might just as well be the opposite ; whether we will resist the temptation which dares us ; whether we will do this duty, hard though it is, which confronts us — ^to have to decide each of these questions every time it presents itself is to put too large a pro- portion of our thought and energy on things which should take care of themselves. For all these things should early become so nearly habitual that they can be settled with the very minimum of expenditure of energy when they arise. It is a noble thing to be able to attend by sheer force of will when the interest lags, or some more attractive thing appears, but far better is it to have so formed the habit of attention that we naturally fall into that attitude when this is the desirable thing. To under- stand what I mean, you have but to look over a class or an audience and note the different ways which peo- ple have of finally settling down to listening. > Some HABIT 65 with an attitude which says, " Now here I am, ready to listen to you if you will interest me, otherwise not. ' ' Others with a manner which says, ' ' Now I did not really come here expecting to listen, and you will have a large task if you interest me ; I never listen unless I am compelled to, and the responsibility rests on you." Others plainly say, " I really mean to lis- ten, but I have hard work to control my thoughts, and if I wander I shall not blame you altogether; it is just my way." And still others say, " "When I am expected to listen, I always listen whether there is anything much to listen to or not. I have formed that habit, and so have no quarrel with myself about it. You can depend on me to be attentive, for I can- not afford to weaken my habit of attention whether you do well or not." Every speaker will clasp these last listeners to his heart and feed them on the choicest thoughts of his soul; they are the ones to whom he speaks and to whom his address will appeal. To be able to persevere in the face of difficulties and hardships and carry through the disagreeable thing in spite of the protests of our natures against the sacrifice which it requires, is a creditable thing; but it is more creditable to have so formed the habit of perseverance that the disagreeable duty shall be done without a struggle, or protest, or question. Horace Mann testifies of himself that whatever suc- cess he was able to attain was made possible through the early habit which he formed of never stopping to inquire whether he liked to do anything which needed doing, but of doing everything equally well and without question, both the pleasant and the un- pleasant. The youth who can fight out a moral battle and win Habit en- ables us to meet the disagree- able, 66 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION And may be used to place us on safer moral ground. Even good habits need to be modified. This is to be accoiB\ plished through attentian. against the allurements of some attractive temptation is worthy the highest honor and praise; but so long as he has to fight the same battle over and over again, he is on dangerous ground morally. For good morals must finally become habits, so ingrained in us that the right decision comes largely without effort and without struggle. Otherwise the strain is too great, and defeat will occasionally come; and defeat means weakness and at last disaster, after the spirit has tired of the constant conflict. And so on in a hundred lines. Good habits are more to be coveted than individual victories in special cases, much as these are to be desired. For good habits mean vic- tories all along the line. But even in good habits there is a danger. Habit is the opposite of attention. Habit relieves attention of unnecessary strain. Every habitual act was at one time, either in the history of the race or of the in- dividual, a voluntary act; that is, it was performed under active attention. As the habit grew, attention was gradually rendered unnecessary, until finally it dropped entirely out. And herein lies the danger. Habit once formed has no way of being modified un- less in some way attention is called to it, for a habit left to itself becomes more and more firmly fi:xed. The rut grows deeper. In very few, if any, of our actions can we afford to have this the case. Our habits need to be progressive, they need to grow, to be modified, to be improved. Otherwise they will be- come an incrustiag shell, fixed and unyielding, which wiU limit our growth. It is necessary, then, to keep our habitual acts un- der some surveillance of attention, to pass them in review for inspection every now and then, that we; HABIT 67 may discover possible modifications whidi will make them more serviceable. We need to be inventive, to find out constantly better ways of doing things, to avoid ruts. A good illustration of what I mean is found in the way some play tennis. At first every act is a volun- tary act directed by the mind. The playing is awkward and ineffective. Finally, the drives, the lobs, and the cuts become more or less habitual, and can be performed much better without conscious at- tention to every move than with it. And thus far habit is necessary and desirable. But here the multi- tude of tennis players stop. Only the few go on, and these last are the champions. They are the ones who make use of habit just as others do, but who constantly direct their attention to improving their drives and lobs and cuts, and so do not fall into a rut and continue playing season after season no better this than last. Mere repetition will form habit, but the habit formed will not be an intelligent habit, and hence will lead to stagnation. On the forming of new habits and the leaving James's off of old ones, I know of no better statement than maxims foi that of James, based on Bain's chapter on " Moral ^(f^m^iig Habits." I quote this statement at some length: ' ' In the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves i. Decided with as strong and decided an initiative as possible. Accumulate all the possible circumstances which shall reenforce right motives; put yourself assiduously in conditions that encourage the new way ; make engage- ments incompatible with the old ; take a public pledge, if the case allows; in short, develop your resolution with every aid you know. This will give your new 6 initiative. 68 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION 2. No ex- ception to be allowed. 3. Act in the new line. The value of our habits de- pends on the charac- ter of our acts. beginning such a momentum that the temptation to break down will not occur as soon as it otherwise might; and every day during which a breakdown is postponed adds to the chances of its not occurring at all. ' ' The second maxim is : Never suffer an exception to occur until the new habit is securely rooted in your life. Each lapse is like letting fall a ball of string which one is carefully winding up ; a single slip un- does more than a great many turns will wind again. Continuity of training is the great means of making the nervous system act infallibly right. . . . The need of securing success nerves one to future vigor. "A third maxim may be added to the preceding pair: Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain. It is not in the moment of their forming, but in the moment of their producing motor effects, that resolves and aspirations communi- cate the new ' set ' to the brain. ' ' ^ And finally, let no one be disturbed or afraid because in a little time you become a " walking bundle of habits. ' ' For in so far as your good actions predominate over your bad ones, that much will your good habits outweigh your bad habits. Silently, mo- ment by moment, efficiency is growing out of all worthy acts well done. Every bit of heroic self-sac- rifice, every battle fought and won, every good deed performed, is being irradicably credited to you in your nervous system, and will finally add its mite to- ward achieving the success of your ambitions. 145. ' Psychology," vol. i, pp. 123, 124; also, " Briefer Course," p. HABIT 69 EXEECISES IN INTEOSPECTION Select some act which you have recently begun to perform and watch it grow more and more habitual. Notice care- fully for a week and see whether you do not discover some habits which you did not know you had. Make a catalogue of your bad habits ; of the most important of your good ones. Set out to form some new habit which you desire to possess; also to break some undesirable habit, watching carefully what takes place in both cases, and how long it requires. If habits have a tendency to keep on growing stronger, how does it come that we ever break them? Is it better to break a bad habit abruptly or by degrees? Why are habits formed in youth so much harder to break than those formed later in life? How important a part do you think habit plays in deter- mining a man's success or failure in life? Can you distinguish between mental and physical habits? SUGGESTED READINGS Royce, " Outlines of Psychology," Chapter VIII. James, " Psychology," Briefer Course, Chapter X. James, " Talks to Teachers," Chapter VIII. Angell, " Psychology," Chapter III. Oppenheim, " Mental Growth and Control," Chapter VII. Eowe, " The Physical Nature of the Child," Chapters X and XI. CHAPTER VI SENSATION AND PERCEPTION The con- stant ap- peal to our senses from external stimuli. From these stimuli the mind con- structs its world of objects. The great world of nature without and the mind within, our material environment on the one hand and the means of knowing it on the other, how is the introduction brought about and the acquaintance continued? The diversified landscape of field and wood, our companions who sit about us, the familiar objects in the room, the pictures on the walls, the statuary, the books lying open before us; the twitter of the birds, the ringing of a distant bell, the roar of a traia, the chatter of voices outside, the drone of in- sects, and a host of other familiar sounds; the touch of the soft breeze upon the cheek, the silken ribbon stroked with the fingers, the contact of seat and cloth- ing, the feel of some rough or hard object in the hand ; the warmth of the room, the coldness of the metal on the seat; the sour of the apple, the sweet of the candy; the delicate perfume of the bouquet; the or- ganic sensations from our own bodies — all these are an appeal to the mind to be known by it. And we come by this knowledge so gradually and unconsciously that the most marvelous appears to us as commonplace, and we take for granted many things which it would puzzle us to explain. We say, " Of course I see yonder green tree: it is about ten rods distant." But why " of course "? "Why should objects at a distance from us and with no evident con- nection between us and them be known to us at all 70 SENSATION AND PERCEPTION 71 merely by turning our eyes in their direction when there is light ? "Why not rather say with the blind son of Professor Puiseaux, of Paris, who, when asked if he would like to be restored to sight, answered: " If it were not for curiosity I would rstther have long arms. It seems to me that my hands would teach me better what is passing in the moon than your eyes or tele- scopes. ' ' We listen and then say, ' ' Yes, that is a certain bell iiiustra- ringing in the neighboring village," as if this were the various the most simple thing in the world. But why should ^^'^^^s- one piece of metal striking against another a mile or two away make us aware that there is a bell there at all, let alone that it is a certain bell whose tone we recognize? Or we pass our fingers over a piece of cloth and decide, " That is silk." But why, merely by placing our skin in contact with a bit of material, should we be able to know its quality, much less that it is cloth and that its threads were originally spun by an insect ? Or we take a sip of liquid and say, ' ' This milk is sour. ' ' But why should we be able by taking the liquid into the mouth and bringing it into contact with the mucous membrane be able to tell that it is milk, and that it possesses the quality which we call sourf Or, once more, we get a whifE of air through the open window in the springtime and say, " There is a lilac bush in bloom on the lawn." Yet why, from inhaling air containing particles of lilac, should we be able to know that there is anything out- side, much less that it is a flower and of a particular variety which we call lilac? Or, finally, we hold a heated flatiron up near the cheek and say, " This is too hot ! it will burn the cloth. ' ' But why by holding this object a foot away from the face do we know 72 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION The senses are aided by reason. Knowledge obtained through the various senses is unified. that it is there, let alone knowing its temperature? Let us seek an answer. Some of the outside world we know only as we come into immediate and direct contact with it, as in the case of taste and smell and touch. Other parts of it we can know at a distance, as in sight and hearing and temperature. Nor is the one fact more wonderful than the other. The marvel first of all is that the great world outside of the mind is knowable to it through the gateways of the body which we call the senses. And further that, after we come to know a sufficient part of the world by means of the senses, and have come to see the relation existing between the known parts, we can then go on through thought to discover still other parts of it without the use of the senses at all. The astronomer La Verrier could sit in his study and, after a long series of computations and calcula- tions, write to his brother astronomers who had bet- ter telescopes than he, " If you will turn your tele- scopes to a certain spot in the heavens on the night I shall tell you, you will there discover a new planet which has never yet been seen by man." And sure enough it was there, unerringly located by man's reason where his senses could not reach. Further, our senses come through experience to have the power of trading knowledge, by which each puts its knowledge at the disposal of the others. Thus we take a glance out of the window and say that the day looks cold, although we well know that we can- not see cold. Or we say that the melon sounds green, or the bell sounds cracked, although a crack or green- ness cannot be heard. Or we say that the box feels empty, although emptiness cannot be felt. We have come to associate cold, originally experienced with SENSATION AND PERCEPTION 73 days which look like the one we now see, with this par- ticular appearance, and so we say we see the cold; sounds like the one coming from the bell we have come to associate with cracked bells, and that coming from the melon with gre'en melons, until we say un- hesitatingly that the bell sounds cracked and the melon sounds green. And so with the various senses. Each gleans from the world its own particular bit of knowledge, but all are finally in a partnership, and what is each one's knowledge belongs to every other one in so far as the other can use it. The explanation of the ultimate nature of knowl- The sensory edge, and how we reach it through contact with our p™"^®^*^- material environment, we will leave to the philoso- phers. And battles enough they have over the ques- tion, and still others they will have before the matter is settled. The easier and more important problem for us is to describe the processes by which the mind comes to know its environment, and to see how it uses this knowledge in thinking. This much we shall be able to do, for it is often possible to describe a proc- ess and discover its laws even when we cannot fully explain its nature and origin. "We know the process of digestion and assimilation, and the laws which govern them, although we do not understand the ulti- mate nature and origin of life which makes these pos- sible. Yet even in the relatively simple description which Thequai- we have proposed many puzzles will confront us, and jects'exist one of them appears at the very outset. This is that j^A® the qualities which we usually ascribe to objects really exist in our own minds and not in the objects at all. Take, for instance, the common qualities of light and color. The physicist tells us that what we see as 74 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION light is occasioned by an incredibly rapid beating of ether waves on the retina of the eye. All space is filled with this ether; and when it is light — that is, when some object like the sun or other light-giving body is present — ^the ether is set in motion by the vibrating molecules of the body that is the source of light, its waves strike the retina, a current is pro- duced and carried to the brain, and we see light. This Light and means, then, that space, the medium in which we see objects, is not filled with light, but with very rapid waves of ether, and that the light which we see really exists but in our own minds as the mental response to the physical stimulus of ether waves. Likewise with color. Color is produced by ether waves of dif- ferent lengths and degrees of rapidity. Thus ether waves at the rate of 450 billions a second give us the sensation of red ; of 472 billions a second, orange ; of 526 billions a second, yellow; of 589 billions a second, green; of 640 billions a second, blue; of 722 billions a second, indigo ; of 790 billions a second, violet. What exists outside of us, then, is these ether waves of different rates, and not the colors themselves. The beautiful yellow and crimson of a sunset, the variegated colors of a landscape, the delicate pink in the cheek of a child, the blush of a rose, the shim- mering green of the lake-^these reside not in the objects themselves, but in the consciousness of the one who sees them. The objects possess but the quality of refiecting back to the eye ether waves of the par- ticular rate corresponding to the color which we as- cribe to them. Thus " red " objects reflect back ether waves of a rate of 450 billions a second, and no others; " white " objects reflect all rates; " black " objects reflect none. SENSATION AND PERCEPTION 75 The case is no different with regard to sound. Sound, When we speak of a sound coming from a bell, what ^*°" we really mean is that the vibrations of the bell have set up waves in the air between it and our ear, which have produced corresponding vibrations in the ear; that a nerve current was thereby produced ; and that a sound was heard. But the sound is a mental thing, and exists only in our own consciousness. What passed between the sounding object and ourselves was not sound, but waves in the intervening air, ready to be transferred through the machinery of nerves and brain into the beautiful tones and melodies and har- monies of the mind. And so with all other sensations. What exists outside of us is a stimulus of a kind suitable to excite to activity a certain end organ of taste, or touch, or smell, or sight, or hearing; what exists within us is the nervous machinery capable of converting this stimulus into a nerve current which shall produce an activity in the cortex of the brain; what results is the mental object which we call a sen- sation of taste, smell, touch, sight, or hearing. Nor ought these facts to make nature seem the less wonderful to us. For it is certainly no less marvel- ous for nature to be able so to act on the nervous system that sensations shall result in the mind than it would be for the objects to possess such qualities as color themselves instead of these existing in our con- sciousness. On the other hand, a certain dignity is added to the 'mind when we think that it is not merely able to know light and color and sound and all the rest belonging to objects external to itself, but is able even to interpret vibrations of energy coming from these objects, and translate them into va,rious sensa- tions. 76 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION Sensation the sim- plest form of knowl- edge. Sensations give us not objects but qualities. The simplest bit of knowledge which the mind can get is a sensation. Yet it is impossible to define a sensation in any exact way; and in actual life a sen- sation is never experienced by itself, but is always merged in some perception in which it plays a part. To quote James: "All we can say on this point is that what we mean hy sensations are first things in the way of consciousness. They are the immediate results upon consciousness of nerve currents as they enter the brain, and before they have awakened any suggestions or associations with past experience. But it is obvious that such immediate sensations can ie realized only in the earliest days of life." Very soon memories and associations become coupled with the sensations, and after that all succeeding sensations awaken ves- tiges of former impressions, and perception is begin- ning to develop. Indeed, unrelated sensations by themselves would be wholly inadequate to give us either a continuous consciousness or a knowledge of the material world about us. I might see an orange and get its color ; smell it and get its odor; put it into my mouth and get its taste; touch it with my hands and get a sensation of contact, pressure, and temperature ; lift it and get its weight; drop it and get its sound as it falls. But if this were all, I should never know the orange at all. If each one of these separate bits of Imowledge had to remain forever separate from the others, I should know a list of qualities, but have no knowledge of the thing to which they belonged. It is only by getting all the qualities of an object through as many different sensations as possible and then knowing them all to- gether in relation to this object that we can ever come to know it as an object. It is in this way, through SENSATION AND PERCEPTION 77 a multiplicity of unified experiences, that we build up the material world of our environment. And all such experience, once gained, assists in still further ac- quisition. The uncertainty of knowledge gained through sen- Meager sation unaided by experience is shown in the case of fronTsfg^ persons born blind and Ia later years restored to sight. »l°°®- Murray tells of the case of a boy born with a cata- ract of so opaque a quality that he could detect no objects of sight. "When he was fourteen years old the cataract was removed by Cheselden. At first he " thought that all objects he saw touched his eyes as those he felt did his skin." Pictures appeared to him ' ' only parti-colored plains, or surfaces diversified with a variety of paints. ' ' For several months he had no information that they represented solid bodies. Then he expected them to feel solid to his hand as they looked to his eye, and was much amazed that they felt flat when he passed his hand over them. He asked which was the lying sense, feeling or seeing. Another youth, blind from birth, was cured at eighteen. "When the patient first acquired the fac- ulty of sight all objects appeared so near that he was sometimes afraid of coming in contact with them, though they were in reality a great distance from him. . . . AH objects appeared to him perfectly flat. Thus, although he very well knew by his touch that the nose was prominent and the eyes sunk deeper in the head, he saw a hinnan face as a plane. . . . And he was continually obliged to have recourse to the sense of touch. " It is a matter of common experience for persons of normal vision to find themselves unable to judge of distance when the object lacks some of its usual associates, as when a mountain is seen across 78 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION Sight alone gives us only light and color. Hearing gives us tones and a wide plain, or an object appears on the horizon at sea. In the ease of hearing, most of us have at some time been deceived into thinking that some faiat sound near at hand was a louder one farther away, like mistaking the hum of a mosquito for the whistle of a distant locomotive. And probably none of us, if we are careful to exclude all odors by plugging the nostrils with cotton,, can by taste distinguish be- tween scraped apple, potato, turnip, or beet, or can tell hot milk from tea or coffee of the same temper- ature. The sensation of sight, left unaided, gives us but two qualities, light and color. The eye can distinguish many grades of light from purest white on through the various grays to the densest black. The range is greater still in color. We speak of the seven colors of the spectrum, violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red; but if we count all the color tones lying between these colors, the number is multiplied immensely. Hersehel estimated that the workers on the mosaics at Rome must have distinguished 30,000 different color tones. But having given us this large number of qualities in color and light, the eye gives us nothing else through pure sensation. Knowledge of distance, size, and form, which seems so natural to the eye, had to be acquired through experience and borrowing from the other senses. The sensation of sound likewise gives us two qual- ities : namely, tones with their accompanying pitch and timbre, and noises. Tones, or musical sounds, are produced by isochronous or equal-timed vibrations; thus, C of the first octave is produced by 256 vibra- tions a second, and if this tone is prolonged the vibra- tion rate will continue uniformly the same. Noises, SENSATION AND PERCEPTION 79 on the other hand, are produced by vibrations which have no uniformity of vibration rate. The ear's sensi- bility to pitch extends over about seven octaves. The seven-octave piano goes down to 27^ vibrations, and reaches up to 3,500 vibrations. Notes of about 50,000 can be heard by an average ear, however; but these are too painfully shrill to be musical. Taking into account this upper limit, the range of the ear is about eleven octaves. The ear, having given us loudness, which depends on the amplitude of the vibrations, pitch, which depends on the rapidity of the vibrations, and timbre, or quality, which depends on the com- plexity of the tones, has no further information through sensation alone. The sense of taste recognizes the four qualities of sour, siveet, salt, and bitter. Many of the qualities which we improperly call tastes are in reality a com- plex of taste, smell, touch, and temperature. Smell contributes so largely to the sense of taste that many articles of food become " tasteless " when we have a catarrh, and many nauseating doses of medicine can be taken without discomfort if the nose is held. The sensations of smell have not been classified so well as those of taste, and we have no distinct names for them. The only definite classification is that based on their pleasantness or the opposite. We also borrow a few terms and speak of sweet or fragrant perfumes, and fresh or close smells. It is perfectly evident when we observe animals, or even primitive men, that the human race has been evolving greater sensibility to odor, while a,t the same time there has been a loss of keenness of scent. Cutaneous or skin sensation may arise from either mechanical stimulation, such as pressure, a blow, or The four taste quali* ties. Sensation of smell. 80 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION Sensations tickling, or from thermal stimulation from hot or cold ^J^**"® objects. Stimulated mechanically, the skin gives us but two sensation qualities, pressure and pain. Many of the qualities which we commonly ascribe to the skin sensations are really a complex of cutaneous and muscular sensations. Contact is light pressure. Hardness and softness depend on the intensity of the pressure. Roughness and smoothness arise from in- terrupted and continuous pressure, respectively, and require movement over the rough or smooth surface. •• • ••••S • • • t • • C H VlG. 17. — Diagram showing distribution of hot and cold spots on the back of the hand. C, cold spots; H, hot spots. Touch depends on pressure accompanied by the mus- cular sensations involved in the movements connected with the act. Pain is clearly a different sensation from pressure; but any of the cutaneous or muscular sensations may, by excessive stimulation, be made to pass over into pain. All parts of the skin are sensi- tive to pressure and pain; but certain parts, like the finger tips and the tip of the tongue, are more highly sensitive than others. The skin varies also in its sen- sitivity to heat and cold. If we take a hot or a very cold pencil point and pass it rather lightly and slowly over the skin, it is easy to discover certain spots from which a sensation of warmth or of cold flashes out. In this way it is possible to locate the end organs of SENSATION AND PERCEPTION 81 temperature almost as accurately as those of hearing or of sight. The muscles, tendons, and joints also give rise to perfectly definite sensations, but they have not been named as have the sensations from most of the other end organs. Weight is the most clearly marked of these sensations. It is through the sensations con- nected with movements of muscles, tendons, and joints that we come to judge form, size, and distance. Finally, to the sensations mentioned so far must be added those which come from the internal organs of the body. From the alimentary canal we get the sensations of hunger, thirst, and nausea; from the heart, lungs, and certain other organs come numerous well-defined but unnamed sensations which play an important part in making up the feeling-tone of our daily lives. Thus we see that the senses may be looked upon as the sentries of the body, standing at the outposts where nature and ourselves meet. They discover the qualities of the various objects with which we come in contact and hand them over to the mind in the form of sensations. And these sensations are the raw ma- terial out of which we begin to construct the wonder- ful world of our material environment. This world which we enter through the gateways of the senses is more marvelous by far than any fairy world created by the fancy of story-tellers. For it contains the elements of all they have conceived and much more besides. It is more marvelous than any structure planned and executed by the mind of man, for all the wonders and beauties of the Coliseum or of St. Peter's existed in nature before they were discovered by the architect and thrown together in Muscle and joint sen- sations. Organic sensations. The raw material of knowledge furnished by the senses. The rich- ness and complexity of our material environ- ment. 82 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION those magnificent structures. The material advance- ment of civilization has been but the discovery of the objects, forces, and laws of nature, and their use in inventions serviceable to men. And these forces and laws of nature were discovered only as they were made manifest through objects in the material world. Its _ The problem lying before each individual who aofiaumg. -^^rould enter fully into this rich world of environment, then, is to discover just as large a part of the material world about him as possible. In the most humble environment of the most uneventful life is to be found the material for discoveries and inventions yet un- dreamed of. Lying in the shade of an apple tree under the open sky, Newton read from a falling apple the fundamental principles of the laws of gravitation which have revolutionized science ; sitting at a humble tea table, Watt watched the gurgling of the steam escaping from the kettle, and evolved the steam en- gine therefrom; with his simple kite, Franklin drew down the lightning from the clouds, and started the science of electricity; through studying a ball, the ancient scholars conceived the earth to be a sphere, and Columbus discovered America. Theprob- Well it is that the child, starting his life's journey, cimfronts cannot see the magnitude of the task before him. the child. Qg^^ amid a world of objects of whose very existence he is ignorant, and whose meaning and uses have to be learned by slow and often painful experience, he \ proceeds step by step through the senses in his dis- covery of the objects about him. Yet, considered again, we ourselves are after all but a step in advance of the child. Though we are somewhat more familiar with the use of our senses than he, and know a few more objects about us, yet the knowledge of the wisest SENSATION AND PERCEPTION 83 of us is at best pitifully meager compared with the richness of nature. So impossible is it for us to know all our material environment, that men have taken to becoming specialists. One man will spend his life in the study of a certain variety of plants, while there are hundreds of thousands of varieties all about him; another will study a particular kind of animal life, perhaps too minute to be seen with the naked eye, while the world is teeming with animal forms which he has not time in his short day of life to stop to examine ; another will study the land forms and read the earth's history from the rocks and geological strata, but here again nature 's volume is so large that he has time to read but a small fraction of the whole. Another studies the human body and learns to read from its expressions the signs of health and sickness, and to prescribe remedies for its ills ; but in this field also he has found it necessary to divide the work, and so we have specialists for almost every organ of the body. How, then, do we proceed to the discovery of this How the world of objects? Let us watch the child and learn ceeds.^"^**" the secret from him. Give the babe a ball, and he applies every sense to it to discover its qualities. He stares at it, he takes it in his hands and turns it over and aroimd, he lifts it, he strokes it, he punches and jabs it, he puts it to his mouth and bites it, he drops it, he throws it and creeps after it. He leaves no stone unturned to find out what that thing really is. By Through means of the qualities which come to him through the ^^objects. avenues of sense, he constructs the object. And not only does he come to know the ball as a material object, but he comes to know also its uses. He is form- ing his own best definition of a ball in terms of the 7 ■84 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION sensations which he gets from it and the uses to which he puts it, and all this even before he can name it or is able to recognize its name when he hears it. How much better his method than the one he will have to follow a little later when he goes to school and learns that "A ball is a spherical body of any sub- stance or size, used to play with, as by throwing, kicking, or knocking, etc ! " We proceed Nor is the case in the least different with ourselves. aa_^oes e -y^jjgjj ^g wish to learn about a new object or discover new facts about an old one, we do precisely as the child does if we are wise. We apply to it every sense to which it will afford a stimulus, and finally arrive at the object through its various qualities. And just in so far as we have failed to use in connection with it every sense to which it can minister, just in that degree will we have an incomplete perception of it. Indeed, just so far as we have failed finally to per- ceive it in terms of its functions or uses, in that far also have we failed to know it completely. Tomatoes were for many years grown as an ornamental garden plant before it was discovered that tomatoes could minister also to the taste as well as to the sight. The clothing of civilized man gives the same sensation of texture and color to the savage that it does to its owner, but he is so far from perceiving it in the same way that he packs it away and continues to go naked. The Orientals, who disdain the use of chairs and pre- • fer to sit cross-legged on the floor, can never perceive a chair just as we do who use them daily, and to whom chairs are so saturated with social suggestions and associations. Also, like the child, we must perceive objects through our motor response to them as well as in SENSATION AND PERCEPTION 85 terms of sensations. The boy who has his knowledge of a tennis racket from looking at one in a store win- dow, or indeed from handling one and looking it over in his room, can never know a tennis racket as does the boy who plays with it on the court. Objects get their significance not alone from their qualities, but even more from their use as related to our own ac- tivities. Again, like the child, we must get our knowledge of an object, if we are to get it well, from the objects themselves at first hand, and not second hand through descriptions of them by others. The fact that there is so much of the material world about us that we can never hope to learn it all, has inade it necessary to put down in books many of the things which have been discovered concerning nature. This necessity has, I fear, led many away from nature itself to books — away from the living reality of things to the dead embalming cases of words, in whose empty forms we see so little of the significance which resides in the things themselves. We are in danger of being satis- fied with the forms of knowledge without its sub- stance — ^with definitions contained in words instead of in qualities and uses. In like manner we come to know distance, form, and size. If we have never become acquainted with a mile by actually walking a mile, running a mile, rid- ing a bicycle a mile, driving a horse a mile, or travel- ing a mile on a train, we might listen for a long time to some one tell how far a mile is, or state the dis- tance from Chicago to Denver, without knowing much about it in any way except word definitions. In order to understand a mile, we must come to know it in as many ways as possible through sense activities of our The part played by the motor response. First-hand contact with ob- jects neces- sary. Space re- lations known through actual ex- perience. 86 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION own. Althougli many children have learned that it is 25,000 miles around the earth, probably no one who has not encircled the globe has any reasonably accurate notion just how far this is. For words can- not take the place of perceptions in giving us knowl- edge. In the case of shorter distances, the same rule holds. The eye must be assisted by experience of the muscles and tendons and joints iu actually covering distance, and learn to associate these sensations with those of the eye before the eye alone can be able to say, " That tree is ten rods distant." Form and size are to be learned in the same way. The hands must actually touch and handle the object, experiencing its hardness or smoothness, the way this curve and that angle feels, the amount of muscular energy it takes to pass the hand over this surface and along that line, the eye taking note all the while, before the eye can tell at a glance that yonder object is a sphere, and that this surface is two feet on the edge. This association of the senses in working together obviates the necessity of having all the sensations suggeste^"* from an object present before we can perceive the all the rest, object, providing we have once known it through the varioxis senses. We have become so accustomed when we see the object hooh to experience certain other sensations along with that of sight that a mere glance at the book seems to start the train of othet habitual accompaniments; and size, weight, contact, the asso- ciations of the reading from it, and all the rest that goes to make up hook fall into line at once, merely on the suggestion received from the visual sensation. While we may not have thought of size, form, weight, etc., it is perfectly evident that former experiences of these kinds now enter into our perception of this Through association one phase SENSATION AND PERCEPTION 87 book ; else why are we so astonished to find that a cer- tain object which looks like a book turns out to be only a box made to imitate a book, and that it is full of bonbons instead of leaves covered with print? Or, seeing the head of a familiar cow projecting above a fence which hides the rest of the body from view, we unhesitatingly say, " There is my old cow," the remainder of the body being supplied from former acquaintance. That this former experience really does supply what is lacking in the part actually seen can be believed from the surprise one would feel if, instead of the familiar body of the cow, we should find, on going around the fence, that the head was now fastened to the body of a whale. Thus sensation and perception constantly work to- gether to give us our ' ' world of the senses " ; or, rather, they are the two phases of the process by which this mental world is constructed. Sensation gives to the mind its world of qualities, which percep- tion uses in constructing the world of objects, and these, finally, as existing in certain relations of space and time. And it is precisely on this basis that the mind must build all that comes after. On this foun- dation must rest all our systems of thought and phi- losophy. For while thinking may rise above the things of the senses, yet here are found the images, the " thought stuff," the terms for all thinking. And only as we build a broad and thorough foundation in sensation and perception can we hope to rear a worthy thought structure upon it. Sensation and percep- tion furnish the basis for our thought structure. THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION EXERCISES Seat yourself with eyes closed and try to tell the direction of some sound, like that made by snapping the finger nail against the edge of the thumb nail, the experimenter pro- ducing the sound from various directions and at a distance of about eighteen inches from the head. Look at some complex color, and see if you can determine the different colors which enter into it; e. g., what colors can you detect in pm-ple? in brown? While listening to an orchestra try to select out one instru- ment and listen to that alone, or listen to one voice in a chorus. How many different shades can you detect in the land- scape spread before you? How many colors? Apply a piece of ice to your tongue, to your lips, to your forehead, to the back of your hand, to your arm. Does the temperature seem the same? Explain. Take a large iron nail, cool it in snow or cold water, then pass the point slowly over the skin on the back of the hand. Do you detect certain points which are distinctly cold? Now heat the nail as warm as is comfortable to the skin, and repeat the experiment. Do you find spots which are dis- tinctly hot? After you have taken a glance at a stranger try to recall as many items of his dress and appearance as possible. Have some one place a miscellaneous collection of comimon objects on a table and cover them with a cloth. Have the cloth lifted for five seconds while you look at the collection. How many objects can you name? Glance out of a window at a landscape or a street and then see how many of the visible objects you can name. Have you the habit of perceiving accurately and widely? How can this habit be improved? SENSATION AND PERCEPTION 89 SUGGESTED KEADINGS Royce, " Outlines of Psychology," Chapters V and IX. Angell, " Psychology," Chapters V and VI. Dewey, " Psychology," Chapter III, Sec. 1, andShapter V. Thorndike, " Elements of Psychology," Chapter II. James, " Psychology," Briefer Course, Chapter XX. Schaeffer, "Thinking and Learning to Think," Chapters II and III. CHAPTER VII MENTAL IMAGERY Present thinking depends on past ex- perience. As you sit thinking, a company of you together, your thoughts run in many diverse lines. Yet with all this diversity, your minds possess this common characteristic: Though your thinking all takes place in what we call the present moment, yet^ik every case it goes on largely in images of past experiences. Im- ages of things you have seen or heard or felt ; of things you have thought out before and which now recur to you; of things you remember, such as names, dates, places, events; of things which you do not remember as a part of your past at all, but which belong to it and come from it nevertheless — ^these are the things which form a large part of your mental stream, and which give content to your thinking. You may think of a thing which is actually going on now, or &f one which is to occur in the future ; but, after all, you are dependent on your past experience for the material which you put into your thinking of the present mo- ment for your thought stuff. Indeed, nothing can enter your present thinking which does not link itself to something in your past experience. The savage In- dian in the primeval forest never thought about kill- ing a deer with a rifle merely by pulling a trigger, or of turning a battery of machine guns on his ene- mies to annihilate them — none of these things were 90 MENTAL IMAGERY 91 related to his past experience; hence he could not think in such terms. Not only can we not think at all except in terms of our past experience, but even if we could, the pres- ent would be meaningless to us; for the present is interpreted in the light of the past. The sedate man of affairs who decries athletic sports, and has never taken part in them, cannot understand the wild en- thusiasm which prevails between rival teams in a hotly contested event. The fine work of art is to the one who has never experienced the appeal which comes through beauty, only so much of canvas and varie- gated patches of color. Paul says that Jesus was " unto the Greeks, foolishness." He was foolishness to them because nothing in their experience with their own gods had been enough like the character of Jesus to enable them to interpret Him. To the mind incapable of using past experience, the future also would be impossible ; for we can look for- ward into the future only by placing in it experiences the elements of which we have already known. The savage who has never seen the shining yellow metal does not dream of a heaven whose streets are paved with gold, but rather of a " happy hunting ground." If you will analyze your own dreams of the future you will see in them familiar images, perhaps grouped together in new forms, but coming in their elements from your past experience nevertheless. All that would remain to a mind devoid of a past would be the little bridge of time which we call the " present moment," a series of unconnected nows. Thought would be impossible, for the mind would have nothing to compare and relate. Personality would not exist; for personality requires continuity of experience, else The present interpreted by the past The futuM also de- pends on the past. 92 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION Rank de- termined by ability to utilize past ex- perience. Past ex- perience conserved in both mental and physical terms. we should be a new person each succeeding moment, without memory and without plans. Such a mind would be no mind at all. So important is past experience in determining our present thinking and guiding our future actions, that the place of an individual in the scale of creation is determined largely by the ability to profit by past experience. The scientist tells us of many species of animals now extinct, which lost their lives and suf- fered their race to die out because when, long ago, the climate began to change and grow much colder, they were unable to use the experience of suifering in the last cold season as an incentive to provide shelter, or move to a warmer climate against the coming of the next and more rigorous one. Man was able to make the adjustment; and, providing himself with clothing and shelter and food, he survived, while myriads of the lower forms perished. The singed moth again and again dares the flame which tortures it, and at last gives its life a sacrifice to its folly; the burned child fears the fire, and does not the second time tempt the lesson. So also can the efficiency of an individual or a nation, as compared with other individuals or nations, be determined. The inefficient are those who repeat the same error or useless act over and over, or else fail to repeat a chance useful act whose repe- tition might lead to success. They are unable to learn their lesson and be guided by experience. Their past does not sufficiently minister to their present, and through it direct their future. If past experience plays so important a part in our welfare, how, then, is it to be conserved so that we may secure its benefits? Here, as elsewhere, we find the mind and body working in perfect unison and bar- MENTAL IMAGERY 93 mony, each doing its part to further the interests of both. The results of our past experience may be read in both our mental and our physical nature. On the physical ^ide past experience is recorded in physical modified structure through the law of habit working ofpast°° on the tissues of the body, and particularly on the experience delicate tissues 'of the brain and nervous system. This is easily seen in its outward aspects. The stooped shoulders and bent form of the workman tells a tale of physical toil and exposure; the bloodless lips and pale face of the victim of the city sweat shop tell of foul air, long hours, and insufficient food; the rosy cheek and bounding step of childhood, of fresh' air, good food, and happy play. The modification of the nervous system by experience is not so easy to see at the first glance; but it is here that the effects are the most marked, for nerve cells are the most unstable and easily modified of all. Some motor activity large or small is performed, in consequence of an activity in the nerves and brain, which leaves the cells and fibers so modified that the act is repeated more easily the second and each succeeding time. Or it may be that the act is one of hearing, or seeing, or tasting; here as in the other case the cortical activity accom- panies the act, and the act is more easily performed thereafter. If the external stimulus occurs again as it did to produce the act in the first instance, the same cortical activity will follow, and the original percep- tion will again be repeated. If, however, the cortical activity is produced indirectly by means of a nerve current coming iy the way of some other cortical cen- ter, an image is produced ; as when the sound of a per- son 's name spoken calls up a visual picture of the per- son in the mind, or the sight of a certain person calls Mental re- tention in images. 94 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION All our past experience is poten- tially at our com- mand. up the taste of ice cream which we ate together last week. In the first case the visual area of the cortex, once active at the same time with the auditory area connected with the person's name, is easily excited again by a current coming by way of the auditory center when the name is pronounced; in the second case the visual center was active together with the taste center, and the excitation of the visual center connected with seeing the person easily sets up a corresponding activity in the center connected with taste. Thus we can again experience sights, sounds, tastes, and smells which we have known before, without hav- ing the stimuli actually present to the senses. In this way all our past experience is potentially available to the present. All the objects we have seen, it is poten- tially possible again to see in the mind's eye without being obliged to have the objects before us; all the sounds we have heard, all the tastes and smells and temperatures we have experienced, we may again have presented to our minds in the form of mental images without the various stimuli being present to the end organs of the various senses. In this way the total number of objects in our experience is infinitely mul- tiplied ; for many of the things we have seen, or heard, or smelled, or tasted, we cannot again have present to the senses, and without this power we would never get them again. And besides this fact, it would be in- convenient to have to go and secure afresh each sen- sation or perception every time we need to use it in our thought. While habit, then, conserves our past experience on the physical side, the image does the same thing on the mental side, and each works to sup- port and strengthen the other. MENTAL IMAGERY 95 ■ Tlie remainder of the description of images will be Images to easier to understand, for each of you can know just bylntro- what is meant in every ease by appealing to your own spection. mind. I beg of you not to think that I am presenting something new and strange, a curiosity connected with our thinking which has been discovered by scholars who have delved more deeply into the matter than we can hope to do. Every day — ^no, more than that, every hour and every moment — ^these images are flitting through our minds, forming the large part of our stream of consciousness. Says Royce, " The sensory experience and the imagery of any moment, when taken together with the state of feeling of that mo- ment, constitute the mental material of the moment; and that, too, whether we are thinking of the loftiest or of the most trivial matters." Let us see whether we can turn our attention within and discover some of our images in their flight. Let us introspect. I know of no better way to proceed than that A simple adopted by Francis Galton years ago, when he asked the English men of letters and science to think of their breakfast tables, and then describe the images which appeared. I am about to ask each one of you to do the same thing, but I want to warn you before- hand that the images will not be so vivid as the sen- sory experiences themselves. They will be much fainter and more vague, and less clear and definite; they will be fleeting, and must be caught on the wing. Let each one now recall the dining table as you last left it, and then answer questions concerning it like the following: Can I see clearly in my " mind's eye " the whole The varied table as it stood spread before me? Can I see all sugge^sted. parts of it equally clearly ? Do I get the snowy white 96 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION ^^sual. Auditory. Gustatory. Olfactory. TaotUe. Tempera- ture. Kinses- thetio. and gloss of the linen? The delicate coloring of the china, so that I can see where the pink shades off into the white? The graeeftil lines and curves of the dishes ? The sheen of the silver ? The brown of the toast? The yellow of the cream? The rich red and dark green of the bouquet of roses? The sparkle of the glassware? Can I agairi hear the rattle of the dishes ? The clink of the spoon against the cup ? The moving up of the chairs? The chatter of the voices, each with its own peculiar pitch and quality? The twitter of a bird outside the window ? The tinkle of a distant bell ? The chirp of a neighborly cricket ? Can I taste clearly the milk? The coffee? The eggs? The bacon? The rolls? The butter? The jelly? The fruit? Can I get the appetizing odor of the coffee? Of the meat? The oranges and bananas? The perfume of the lilac bush outside the door ? The perfume from a handkerchief newly treated to a spray of heliotrope? Can I recall the touch of my fingers on the velvety peach ? On the smooth skin of an apple? On the fretted glassware? The feel of the fresh linen? The contact of leather-covered or cane-seated chair? Of the freshly donned garment? Can I get clearly the temperature of the hot coffee in the mouth ? Of the hot dish on the hand ? Of the ice water? Of the gratuful coolness of the breeze wafted in through the open window? Can I feel again the straiu of muscle and joint in passing the heavy dish? Can I feel the movement of the jaws in chewing the beefsteak? Of the throat and lips in talking? Of the chest and diaphragm in laughing? Of the muscles in sitting and rising? In hand and arm in using knife and fork and spoon? Can I get again the sensation of pain which accompanied biting MENTAL IMAGERY 97 on a tender tooth ? From the shooting of a drop of Pain. acid from the rind of the orange into the eye? The chance ache in the head? The pleasant feeling con- nected with the exhilaration of a beautiful morning? The feeling of perfect health? The pleasure con- nected with partaking of a favorite food? It is more than probable that some of you cannot Power at get perfectly clear images in all these lines, certainly ™rils m not with equal facility; for the imagery from any '*eo^i|'^* one sense varies greatly from person to person. A celebrated painter was able, after placing his sub- ject in a chair and looking at him attentively for a few minutes, to dismiss the subject and paint a per- fect likeness of him from the visual image which recurred to the artist every time he turned his eyes to the chair where the sitter had been placed. On the other hand, a young lady, a student in my psy- chology class, tells me that she is never able to recall the looks of her mother when she is absent, even if the separation has been only for a few moments. She could get an image of the form, with the color and cut of the dress, but never the features. One person may be able to recall a large part of a con- cert through his auditory imagery, and another al- most none. When Mozart was fourteen years old he listened to Allegri's " Miserere," given in St. Peter's at Rome. So jealously had this piece of music been guarded to prevent its becoming public property, that never a line of it had been written out, on pain of excommunication. Young Mozart listened, silently went home and retired, and as silently arose after the family had fallen asleep, and then through the night reproduced, note for note, all of the wonderful and intricate- piece of music, and this without an error. 98 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION Some types of imagery more marked than others. On the other hand, a well-known pastor tells me that he is unable to recall the difference between " Old Hundred " and " Yankee Doodle," and almost un- able to distinguish the difference when they are played. Likewise, the imagery from the different senses varies greatly in the same person. This would natu- rally be the case ; for not all types of experience enter equally into our minds, since the consciousness is se- lective in the objects of its attention. A high degree of attention means, on the physical side, great tension in the nerve cells connected with the object of atten- tion, and this high degree of activity in the cells ren- ders them doubly ready to perform a like activity again. But this is only a physiological statement of the fact that the particular type oi imagery connected with this cortical center will be easily produced. Probably all of us have at some time had some experi- ence, some crisis in our life, which stands out vividly above any other experience which we can recall. Even little irrelevant details were so impressed upon us that they stick in our mind now, after the lapse of years, as if they had occurred but yesterday. The experience, whatever it was, which gives us this vivid imagery, occurred under a state of extremely high tension in the nerve centers — or, in other words, of a high degree of attention. Our perceptions were par- ticularly clear and pronounced. Moreover, the ex- perience was of such a type, and so closely related to our life and its interests, that we have often recalled the circumstances since, and lived the occurrences over again, until every phase of it has been dwelt upon a thousand times. This illustration, thea, gives us the clew to the types MENTAL IMAGERY 99 of imagery which will prevail in our thinking. Those Predomi- who most easily attend to the visual in their experi- typesf ence, and who oftenest recall the visual in their thought, will find the visual predominating in their imagery; those who are most prone to dwell upon the auditory and who use it most will find auditory imagery prevailing, while those who are accustomed to many delicate adjustments and live a life of motor activity will find their imagery running to the motor etc. Now it happens that more of our experience on the sensory side is connected with vision than with any of the other sensations ; hence, most people have a predominance of visual imagery, although some are clearly of the audile or the motor type. This is no reason, however, why those who may be Value pf a strong in one type should neglect the other types, of cfear"^^ Binet well says that the man who has not every type '^^e^ry. of imagery almost equally well developed is only the fraction of a man. The one who lacks the ability to recall his sensory experiences readily and clearly in the form of visual, auditory, tactual, taste, smell, and all the other kinds of images, in this far lacks the materials for thinking; and the one who lacks the images connected with a large variety of movements lacks the power to put his thoughts into acts. And, indeed, not only shall we be unable to think well our- selves without a good stock of images from all the senses, but we shall even be unable to interpret the thought of others who employ imagery in their speak- ing or writing. Halleck shows clearly, in his " Edu- cation of the Central Nervous System," from which I shall make several quotations, how freely the great writers use all possible types of imagery in their writings. 100 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION The use of images in the inter- pretation of litera- ture. Shakespeare, describing certain beautiful music, ap- peals to the sense of smeU to make himself understood : ... it came o'er my ear like the sweet somid That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odor! Lady Macbeth cries: Here's the smell of the blood still: All the perfumes of Arabia wiU not sweeten this little hand. Milton has Eve say of her dream of the fatal apple : . . . The pleasant sav'ry smell So quickened appetite, that I, methought, Could not but taste. How utterly impossible for one who has not a deli- cate sense of smell and a large stock of images from this sense to interpret these lines ! They will be to him but a jumble of words, and he is likely to decide that poetry is nothing but foolishness. Likewise with the sense of touch : ... I take thy hand, this hand As soft as dove's down, and as White as it. Or from Comus: Thus I set my printless feet O'er the cowslip's velvet head. That bends not as I tread. Imagine a person devoid of delicate tactile imagery, with senseless finger tips and leaden footsteps, under- taking to interpret these exquisite lines ! MENTAL IMAGERY 101 Shakespeare thus appeals to the muscular imagery : At last, a little shaking of mine arm And thrice his head thus waving up and down, He raised a sigh so piteous and profound As it did seem to shatter all his bulk And end his being. Many passages like the following appeal to the temperature images: Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky, Thou dost not bite so nigh As benefits forgot ! To one whose auditory imagery is meager, the fol- lowing beautiful lines are nothing but a senseless jingle of words: How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! Here we will sit and let the sounds of music Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night Become the touches of sweet harmony. While the plowman near at hand Whistles o'er the furrow'd land And the milkmaid singeth blithe And the mower whets his scythe. Who that has not stood under the open sky and watched the stars come out, and retained a vivid impression of the experience, can understand when Longfellow says: Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven, Blossomed the lovely stars ; the forget-me-nots of the angels! All literature is so full of visual imagery that one can hardly find a couplet that is not filled with it. 102 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION Now Morn her rosy steps in th' eastern clime Advancing, sow'd the earth with orient pearl. The cowsUps tall her pensioners be; In their gold coats spots you see — These be rubies, fairy favours. In those freckles live their savours. I must go seek some dewdrops here, And hang a pearl in every cowsUp's ear. And so one might go on quoting, not only from poetry, but from prose as well, and take in history, geography, science, mathematics, philosophy, and all the rest, and the result would be the same, only dif- fering in degree. In them all, the points grasped by our thought and held by our memory, or used by our imagination, are precisely these images of which we have been speaking. Motor Nor are images less important on the motor side. Movements do not just happen. No muscle acts ex- cept under the compulsion of a motor-nerve current. But the only way to secure these motor-nerve currents is either directly from sensory stimuli or else indi- rectly from sensory centers by means of images. Were it not for images serving as stimuli for motor acts, these could never be more complex than our im- mediate sensory experiences or the habits growing out of them. Manifestly this would give us so circum- scribed a range of activities that any progress in liv- ing would be impossible. The part of sensory expe- rience coming from the immediately present objects could no more serve as the stimulus to efficient acts than it alone can give us efficient thinking. In both cases mental imagery must lend its aid to bring our past experience to the help of the present. images. MENTAL IMAGERY 103 It is evident, then, that the youth who seeks to de- velop a good mind, capable of well-balanced thought, ready memory, and good imagination, must have first of all a good stock of imagery ready at his command ; and if he is to be efficient in his motor acts as well as his mental, he must meet the same requirement. A word on the means of developing our imagery will, consequently, not be out of place. In the first place, we may put down as an absolute requisite such an environment of sensory stimuli as will tempt every sense to he awake and at its best, that we may be led into a large acquaintance with the objects of our material environment. No one's stock of sensory images is greater than the sum total of his sensory experiences. No one ever has images of sights, or soimds, or tastes, or smells which he has never ex- perienced. Likewise, he must have had the fullest and freest possible liberty in motor activities. For not only is the motor act itself made possible through the office of imagery, but the motor act clarifies and makes useful the images themselves. The boy who has actually made a table, or a desk, or a box has ever afterward a different and a better image of one of these objects than before ; so also when he has owned and ridden a bicycle, his image of thi5 machine will have a different significance from that of the image founded upon the visual perception alone of the wheel he longingly looked at through the store window or in the other boy's dooryard. But sensory experiences and motor responses alone are not enough, though they are the basis of good imagery. There must he frequent recall. The sunset may have been never so brilliant, and the music never so entrancing; but if they are never thought of and A good stock of images fun- damental to all de- velopment Develop- ment of images. The in- fluence of frequent recall. 104 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION The recon- struction of our images. We com- prehend best in images with which we are famil- iar. dwelt upon after they were first experienced, little will remain of them after a very short time. It is by re- peating them often in experience through imagery that they become fixed, so that they stand ready to do our bidding when we need next to use them. To richness of experience and frequency of the re- call of our images we must add one more factor; namely, that of their reconstruction or working over. Few if any images are exact recalls of former per- cepts of objects. Indeed, such would be neither pos- sible nor desirable. The images which we recall are recalled for a purpose, or in view of some future activity, and hence must be selective, or made up of the elements of several or many former related images. Thus the boy who wishes to construct a box without a pattern to follow recalls the images of numerous boxes he may have seen, and from them all he has a new image made over from many former percepts and images, and this new image serves him as a working model. In this way he not only gets a copy which he can follow to make his box, but he also secures a new product in the form of an image different from any he ever had before, and is therefore by so much the richer. It is this working over of our stock of old images into new and richer and more suggestive ones that constitutes the essence of constructive im- agination. The facts we have just been consideriag are of vital importance in education. No one will- ever know how many children, whose minds are of the audile type, have been wrongly accused of dullness because they could not comprehend the description of a. scene in nature or a construction in geometry which was given in visual terms. It is impossible for one whose MENTAL IMAGERY 105 But the more forms of imagery into which we put our mind is lacking in auditory imagery to appreciate fully a description necessitating a large proportion of images of this type, or one whose images are de- ficient on the motor side to enter fully into the account of an athletic event. To be obliged to deal with im- agery to which we are not accustomed in our daily thinking is like listening to the speaking of a foreign language Avhen we do not know enough of its words to enable us to interpret its thought. On the other hand, the more types of imagery into which we can put our thought, the more fully is it ours. The spelling lesson needs not only to be taken in through the eye, that we may retain a visual image ^f °f'!?^®' of the words, but also to be recited orally, so that the ear may furnish an auditory image, and the organs of speech a motor image of the correct forms ; and it needs also to be written, and thus given into the keep- ing of the hand, which finally needs most of all to know it and retain it. The reading lesson should be taken in through both the eye and the ear, and then expressed by means of voice and gesture in as full and complete a way as possible, that it may be asso- ciated with motor images. The geography lesson needs not only to be read, but to be drawn, or molded, or conr strueted. The history lesson should be made to ap- peal to every possible form of imagery. The arith- metic lesson must be not only computed, but measured, weighed, and pressed into actual service. Thus we might carry the illustration into every line of educa- tion and experience, and the same truth holds. What we desire to comprehend completely and retain well, we must apprehend through all available senses and conserve in every possible type of image and form of expression. 106 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES Imagine a three-inch cube. Paint it. Then saw it up into inch cubes, leaving them all standing in the original form. How many inch cubes have paint on three faces? How many on two faces? How many on one face? How many have no paint on them? Answer aU these questions by referring to your imagery alone. Trj often to recall images in the various sensory lines; determine in what classes of images you are least proficient and try to improve in these lines. How is the singing teacher able, after his class has sung through several scores, to tell that they are flatting? Study your imagery carefully for a few days to see whether you can discover your predominating type of imagery. Devise a test similar to the first one mentioned above, based on connecting the mid-points of an equilateral triangle. Discover how many figures of different kinds result. SUGGESTED READINGS Royce, " Outlines of Psychology," Chapter VI. Stout, "Groundwork of Psychology," Chapter X. Halleck, " The Education of the Central Nervous Sys- tem," Chapter VII. Schaeffer " Thinking and Learning to Think,' ' Chapter XII. Sully, " Studies of Childhood," Chapter II. CHAPTER VIII MEMORY Now that you come to think of it, you can recall What is perfectly well that Columbus discovered America in Jn memory, 1492 ; that your house is painted white ; that it rained a week ago to-day. But where were these once-known facts, now remembered so easily, while they were out of your mind ? Where did they stay while you were not thinking of them? The common answer is, " Stored away in my memory." Yet no one believes that the memory is a warehouse of facts which we pack away there when we for a time have no use for them, as we store away our old furniture. The truth is that the simple question I asked you is by no means an easy one, and I will answer it myself by asking you an easier one : As we sit with the sunlight streaming into our room, where is the darkness which filled it last night ? And where will all this light be at midnight to-night? Answer these questions, and the ones I asked about your remembered facts will be answered. While it is true that, regardless of the conditions in our little room, darkness still exists wherever there is no light, and light still exists wherever there is no darkness, yet for this particular room there is no darkness when the sun shines in, and there is no light when the room is filled with darkness. So in the case of remembered fact. Although the fact that Columbus discovered America some four hundred years ago, that your house 107 108 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION The physi- cal basis of memory. How we remember. is of a white color, that it rained a week ago to-day, exists as a fact regardless of whether your minds think of these things at all, yet the truth remains as be- fore: for the particular mind which remembers these things, the facts did not exist while they were out of the mind. It is not the remembered fact which is retained, BUT THE POWER TO REPRODUCE THE FACT WHEN WE REQUIRE IT. The power to reproduce a once-known fact depends ultimately on the brain. This is not hard to under- stand if we go back a little and consider that brain activity was concerned in every perception we have ever had, and in every fact we have ever known. In- deed, it was through a certain neural activity of the cortex that you were able originally to know that Columbus discovered America, that your house is white, and that it rained on a day in the past. With- out this cortical activity, these facts would have ex- isted just as truly, but you would never have known them. Without this neural activity in the brain there is no consciousness, and to it we must look for the recurrence in consciousness of remembered facts, as well as for those which appear for the first time. Now, if we are to have a once-known fact repeated in consciousness, or in other words remembered, what we must do on the physiological side is to provide for a repetition of the neural activity which was at first responsible for the fact's appearing in consciousness. The mental accompaniment of the repeated activity is the memory. Thus, as memory is the approximate repetition of once-experienced mental states or facts, together with the recognition of their belonging to our past, so it is accomplished by an approximate repeti- MEMORY 109 tion of the once-performed neural process in the cortex which originally accompanied these states or facts. The repetition of the neural activity in the cortex is made possible through the law of habit working in the nervous system. ' Here, as elsewhere, habit makes an activity once performed more easy of per- formance each succeeding time. Through this law a neural activity once performed tends to be repeated ; or, in other words, a fact once known in consciousness tends to be remembered. That so large a part of our past is lost in oblivion, and out of the reach of our memory, is probably much more largely due to a fail- ure to recall than to retain. We say that we have forgotten a fact or a name which we cannot recall, try as hard as we may; yet surely all have had the experience of a long-striven-for fact suddenly appear- ing in our memory when we had given it up and no longer had use for it. It was retained all the time, else it never could have come back at all. An aged man of my acquaintance lay on his death- bed. In his childhood he had first learned to speak German; but, moving with his family when he was eight or nine years of age to an English-speaking com- munity, he had lost his ability to speak German, and had been unable for a third of a century to carry on a conversation in his mother tongue. Yet during the last days of his sickness he lost ■ almost wholly the power to use the English language, and spoke fluently in German. During all these years his brain paths had retained the power to reproduce the forgotten words, even though for so long a time the words could not be recalled. James quotes a still more striking case of a young woman who was seized with a fever, and during her delirious ravings was heard talking The re- peated neural activity depends on law of habit. Retention and re- call. 110 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION in Latin, Hebrew, and Greek. She herself could neither read nor write, and some even said she was possessed of a devil. But a physician unraveled the mystery. When the girl was nine years of age, a pastor, who was a noted scholar, had taken her into his home as a servant, and she had remained there until his death. During this time she had daily heard him read aloud from his books in these languages. Her brain had indelibly retained the record made upon it, although for years she could not have recalled a sentence, if, indeed, she had ever been able to do so. Individual There is, however, a very great difference between ui brains?^ brains as to the actual possibility of recall through them. Some brains are ' ' like wax to receive and like marble to retain ' ' ; with them every little fact which enters experience is kept seemingly without effort and recalled at will. These are the brains in which great possibilities reside in the way of an efficient memory, and which, if rightly used in remembering, will prove a priceless boon to their owners. Other brains receive impressions much more slowly, but retain well what has once been fully given into their keeping. Much study and many repetitions may be necessary in order to get the facts well established; but once completely in the mind, they are there to stay. These brains are of the steady, plodding kind, so far as the memory is concerned, but will do their possessors faithful service if they are well trained. Still other brains receive im- pressions but slowly, and retain them poorly. These brains belong to those who must pore over the lesson for a long time, no matter how faithful the work and efSeient the methods of study, and from whom — more discouraging still — facts slip easily away, even after they have once been mastered. Heroic effort will be MEMORY 111 The factors involved in memory. required to make up for the handicap which such a brain is to its owner. But whichever type of brain be yours, the fact remains that your brain is the auto- matic register of all your thoughts and acts, each of which leaves it so modified that the thought or act tends inevitably to be repeated. With this explanation of retention we may say, then, that what we can actually remember must (1) be retained and (2) be capable of recall. We may also add a third factor, recognition; we must know the recalled fact as an old friend, as having been known before, as having belonged to our past. But what are the forms in which the memory pre- Thema- sents the past to us? What shapes do these forms memory- take as they appear 1 What is the elemental material "^*8««- with which memory deals ? In the light of our discus- sion upon mental imagery, and with the aid of a little introspection the answer is easy. I ask you to remem- ber your home, and at once a visual image of the familiar house, with its well-known rooms and their characteristic furnishings, comes to your mind. I ask you to remember the last concert you attended, or the chorus of birds you heard recently in the woods; and there comes a flood of linages, partly visual, but largely auditory, from the melodies you heard. Or I ask you to remember the feast of which you partook yesterday, and gustatory and olfactory images are prominent among the others which appear. And so I might keep on until I had covered the whole range of your memory ; and, whether I ask you for the simple, trivial experiences of your past, for the tragic or cru- cial experiences, or for the most abstruse and abstract facts which you know and can recall, the case is the same : whatever memory presents to you comes in the 112 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION form of images of the experiences of your past. These are the only stuff which memory has, the only terms which it can command. Images al- Sometimes we are so intent on the meaning of what ways^pres- ^^ remember that we do not notice the image in which memory. j^ comes, just as we often fail to notice the form and stationery of a letter which brings us important news. Or it may be that we have never learned to look for our images, and hence their presence escapes us, or rather we fail to recognize them for what they are. But they are always present. Images We do not all remember what we call the same fact type. in like images. When you remembered that Columbus discovered America in 1492, some of you had an image of Columbus the mariner standing on the deck of his ship, as the old picture shows him ; and accompanying this image was a feeling of ' ' long agoness. ' ' Others, in recalling the same fact, had an image of the coast on which he landed, and perchance felt the rocking of the boat and heard it scraping on the sand as it neared the shore. And still others saw on the printed page the words stating that Columbus discovered America in 1492. And so in an infinite variety of images we may remember what we call the same fact, though of course the fact is not really the same fact to any two of us, nor to any one of us when it comes to us on different occasions in different images. The fact we remember is finally just what the image presents to us, together with our interpretation of it, and noth- ing more nor less. Hence it is very easy to see that our memory is limited by the stock of images which we can command. Let us see whether we can discover how the recall of these images is possible, and what laws they follow MEMORY 113 in their return. "Why does the name or the fact which Reeall eludes us to-day come unbidden to the mind to- °^^ morrow? "Why does a fragment of a trivial expe- rience which occurred a decade ago slip into the mind ahead of the thought which we are pursuing 1 Why, as we dream away an hour, do our memories take some particular direction rather than one of a thou- sand other directions which they might equally well take? Such experiences as these, which are common to every mind, tend to make us think that memory not only fails to follow any law, but, on occasions at least, directly violates all- law. A little closer exami- nation will show that such is not the case, but that the run of images through our mental stream follows laws as fixed and inevitable as those which control the earth in its orbit or the tides in their ebb and flow. Eetention, like recall, rests on the laws of habit. To Laws see that this is the case, it will be necessary for us to go JlJLmory."^ back to the fact that reeall depends on securing a repetition of the original neural activity in the cor- tex. Now, if we can find that the exciting of this activity from center to center in the brain as we pro- ceed from fact to fact in the memory follows some law, then we shall have established the law for se- quence in the memory. The following laws of brain physiology have been well established: 1. Brain areas which are active together at the same time tend to establish associative paths, so that when one of them is again active the other also is thrown into activity. 2. The more frequently a certain cortical activity- occurs, the more easily its repetition is brought about. 3. The more recently certain braia centers have been 114 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION The law of association. How asso- ciation conies about. engaged in activity, the more easily they are thrown into activity. 4. The more intense the activity, the more easily it is repeated. The first of these laws is responsible for what the psychologist calls " association of ideas," or, to put it more simply, for the fact that one image in memory calls up another, and this another, and so on, giving us thus an unbroken series of remembered facts, so that our images flow in a continuous stream. It is as if each image, like a man in a relay race, touched hands with the next ahead before dropping out, and from the momentum gained accompanied the substi- tute a little distance on the way. Each image occupy- ing at a given moment the chief point in our mental stream is selected out of a hundred others which might have been taken, and it will in turn touch hands with another which is to take its place, picking it out of a multitude of available images. Let us see from a very simple illustration how this comes about. Suppose you are passing an orchard and see a tree loaded with tempting apples. You hesi- tate, then climb the fence, pick an apple and eat it, hearing the owner's dog bark as you leave the place. The accompanying diagram will illustrate roughly the centers of the cortex which were involved in the act, and the association fibers which connect them. (See Fig. 16.) Now let us see how you may afterward remember the circumstance through association. Let us suppose that a week later you are seated at your dining table, and that you begin to eat an apple whose flavor reminds you of the one which you plucked from the tree. Prom this start how may the entire circum- stance be recalled? Remembering that the cortical MEMORY 115 centers connected with the sight of the apple tree, with our thoughts about it, with our movements in getting the apple, and with hearing the dog bark, were all active together with the taste center, and hence tend to be thrown into activity again from its activity, it is easy to see that we may (1) get a visual image of the apple tree and its fruit from a current over G-V ; (2) the thoughts, emotions, or deliberations which we Fig. 18. had on the former occasion may again recur to us from a current over G-T; (3) we may get an image of our movements in climbing the fence and picking the apple from a current over G-M; or (4) we may get an auditory image of the barking of the dog from a current over G-A. Indeed, we are sure to get some one or more of these unless the paths are blocked in some way, or our attention leads off in some other direction. Which of these we get first, which of the images the taste image calls to take its place as it drops out of consciousness, will depend, other things being equal, on which center was most keenly active in the original situation. (See the fourth law.) If, at 9 116 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION the time we were eating the stolen fruit, our thoughts were keenly self-accusing for taking the apples with- out permission, then the current will probably dis- charge through the path G-T, and we shall recall these thoughts and their accompanying feelings. But if it chances that the barking of the dog frightened us badly, then more likely the discharge from the taste center will be along the path 0-A, and we shall get the auditory image of the dog's barking, which in turn may call up a visual image of his savage appear- ance over A-Y. It is clear, however, that, given any one of the elements of the entire situation back, the rest are potentially possible to us, and anyone may serve as a " cue " to call up all the rest. Whether, given the starting point, we get them all, depends solely on whether the paths are sufficiently open be- tween them for the current to discharge between them, granting that the first experience made sufficient im- pression to be retained. Association Since this simple illustration may be made infinitely complex by means of the millions of fibers which con- nect every center in the cortex with every other cen- ter, and since, in passing from one experience to an- other in the round of our daily activities, these various areas are all involved in an endless chain of activities so intimately related that each one can finally lead to all the others, we have here the machinery both of retention and of recall— the mechanism by which our past may be made to serve the present through being reproduced in the form of memory images. Through this machinery we are unable to escape our pastj whether it be good or bad ; for both the good and the bad alike are brought back to us through its operations. We are simply " pieces of associating machinery." unifies our experiences MEMORY 117 We are ' ' at the mercy of our associations. ' ' "We may The law of form certain lines of interest to guide our thought, i^exoraWe. and attentibn may in some degree direct it, but one's mental make-up is, after all, largely dependent on the character of his associations. Evil thoughts, evil memories, evil imaginations — ^these all come about through the association of unworthy or impure images along with the good in our stream of thought. "We may try to forget the base deed and banish it forever from our thinking, but lo ! in an unguarded moment the nerve current shoots into the old path, and the impure thought flashes into the mind, unsought and unwelcomed. Every young man who thinks he must indulge in a little sowing of wild oats before he settles down to a correct life, and so deals in unworthy thoughts and deeds, is putting a mortgage on his future; for he will find the inexorable machinery of his nervous system grinding the hated images of such things back into his mind as surely as the mill returns to the sack of the miller what he feeds into the hopper. He may refuse to harbor these thoughts, but he can no more binder their seeking admission to his mind than he can prevent the tramp from knocking at his door. He may drive such images from his mind the moment they are discovered, and indeed is guilty if he does not; but not taking offense at this rebuff, the unwelcome thought again seeks admission. The only protection against the return of the unde- sirable associations is to choose lines of thought as little related to them as possible. But even then, do the best we may, an occasional " connection " will be set up, we know not how, and the unwelcome image stands staring us in the face, as the corpse of Eugene Aram's victim confronted him at every turn though he The neces- sity for right think- ing. 118 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION What con- stitutes a good memory. thought it safely buried. A minister of my acquaint- ance tells me that in the holiest moments of his most exalted thought, images rise in his mind which he loathes, and from which he recoils in horror. Not only does he drive them away at once, but he seeks to lock and bar the door against them by firmly resolving that he will never think of them again. But alas ! that is beyond his control. The tares have been sown among the wheat, and will persist along with it until the end. In his boyhood these images were given into the keeping of his brain cells, and they are only being faithful to their trust. Nor is the inexorableness of our associations to be deplored, for this has its good side as well as its bad. Only through association is memory possible at all. It is not the fact of association which is to be dreaded, but its material. Thus the practical problem for each of us to consider is the character of the stuff which we shall give over to the keeping of our brains. In other words, we are to keep clear of experiences whose images we shall not be willing to confront in later time and make our companions. Paul was illustrating this truth when he wrote to the men of Philippi, ' ' Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, what- soever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report ; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things." For, after all is said and done, noth- ing but right thinking will make possible associations in our thinking which will leave no sting or stain. Let us next inquire what are the qualities which enter into what we call a good memory. The mer- chant or politician will say, " Ability to remember MEMORY 119 well people 's faces and names ' ' ; the teacher of history, " The ability to recall readily dates and events "; the teacher of mathematics, " The power to recall mathematical f ormulfe ' ' ; the hotel waiter, ' ' The ability to keep in .mind half a dozen orders at a time ' ' ; the manager of a corporation, ' ' The ability to recall all the necessary details connected with the running of the concern." While these answers are very divergent, yet they may all be true for the par- ticular person testifying; for out of them all there emerges this common truth, that the best memory is the one which iest serves its possessor. That is, one's memory not only must be ready and exact, but must produce the right kind of material; it must bring to us what we need in our thinking. A very easy cor- ollary at once grows out of this fact ; namely, that in order to have the memory return to us the right kind of matter, we must store it with the right kind of images, for the memory cannot give back to us any- thing which we have not first given into its keeping. The best memory is not necessarily the one which The good impartially repeats the largest number of facts of our dcf^not past experience. Everyone has many experiences which he never needs to have reproduced in memory ; useful enough they may have been at the time, but wholly useless and irrelevant later. They have served their purpose, and should henceforth slumber in oblivion. They would be but so much rubbish and lumber if they could be recalled. Everyone has surely met that particular type of bore whose memory is so faithful to details that no incident in the story he tells, no matter how trivial, is ever omitted in the recounting. His associations work in such a tireless round of minute succession, without ever being able impartially recall every fact of ex- perience. 120 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION to take a jump or a short cut, that he is powerless to separate the wheat from the chaff; so he dumps the whole indiscriminate mass into our long-suffering ears. Dr. Carpenter tells of a member of Parliament who could repeat long legal documents and acts of Parlia- ment after one reading. When he was congratulated on his remarkable gift, he replied that, instead of being an advantage to him it was often a source of great inconvenience, because when he wished to recol- lect anything in a document he had read, he could do it only by repeating the whole from the beginning up to the point which he wished to recall. Maudsley says that the kind of memory which enables a per- son " to read a photographic copy of former impres- sions with his mind's eye is not, indeed, commonly associated with high intellectual power, ' ' and gives as a reason that such a mind is hindered by the very wealth of material furnished by the memory from discerning the relations between separate facts upon which judgment and reasoning depend. It is likewise a common source of surprise among teachers that many of the pupils who could outstrip their class- mates in learning and memory do not turn out to be able men. But this, says Whately, " is as reasonable as to wonder that a cistern if filled should not be a perpetual fountain." It is possible for one to be so lost in a tangle of trees that he cannot see the woods. A good It is not, then, mere re-presentation of facts that SsCThmna- Constitutes a good memory. The pupil who can repro- tive. duee a history lesson by the page has not necessarily so good a memory as the one who remembers fewer facts, but sees the relations between those remembered, and hence is able to choose what he will remember. Memory must be discriminative. A vast part of what MEMORY 121 passes in our thought must be forgotten, needs to be forgotten ; its recall but encumbers the mind and hin- ders thought. The memory must fasten on that which is important for us, and keep that for us. Therefore we can agree that " the art of remembering is the art of thinking." Discrimination must select the impor- tant for us out of our mental stream, and these im- ages must be associated with as' many others as pos- sible which are already well fixed in memory, and hence are sure of recall when needed. In this way the old will always serve as a cue to call up the new. It is for this reason that it pays in studying history to group the events around some well-known date or event which we are sure to remember. In this way we get them associated with a safe cue. And not pnly must memory, if it is to be a good It is also memory, omit the generally worthless, or trivial, or ^p^<"^i^^ irrelevant, and supply the generally useful, signifi- cant, and relevant, but it must in some degree be a specialized memory. It must minister to the par- ticular needs and requirements of its owner. Small consolation to you if you are a Latin teacher, and are able to call up the binomial theorem or the date of the fall of Constantinople when you are in dire need of a conjugation or a declension which eludes you. It is much better for the merchant and politician to have a good memory for names and faces than to be able to repeat the succession of English monarchs from Alfred the Great to Edward VII, and not to be able to tell John Smith from Tom Brown. It is much more desirable for the lawyer to be able to remember the necessary details of his case than to be able to recall all the various athletic records of the year ; and so on. In order to be a good memory for us, our 122 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION Improve- ment of memory. Vividness of impres- sion. memory must be faithful in dealing with the ma- terial which constitutes the needs of our vocations. Our memory may, and should, bring to us many things outside of our immediate vocations, else our lives will be narrow; but its chief concern and most accurate work must be along the path of our everyday require- ments at its hands. And this works out well in con- nection with the physiological laws which were stated a little while since, providing that our vocations are along the line of our interests. For the things with which we work daily, and in which we are interested, will be often thought of together, and hence will become well associated. They will be frequently re- called, and hence more easily remembered; they will be vividly experienced as the inevitable result of in- terest, and this goes far to insure recall. It foUows from our statement, I think, that im- provement in the memory may come both from the side of retention and from that of recall. It may be true, as James says, that our native retentiveness is unchangeable. Our nervous systems are given us through heredity, and we are neither to be blamed nor praised for what they are. But we may, nevertheless, use such methods of recording our facts as to insure their retention or else their fading out. If, at the time the fact is recorded, the nerve cells are in a state of high tension — ^which is but another way of saying, if the mind is in a high degree of con- centration and the impression vivid — ^the retention is relatively secure. It is much more secure than it could be made by many mere repetitions of the fact in a lifeless and inane way. If, further, the fact is re- corded when the nervous system is in good " tone," not exhausted from overfatigue and not weakened MEMORY 123 from insufficient nourishment, then we have fortified the memory all we can on the retention side. What- ever else is done must be accomplished by making more certain the recall. It is hardly necessary to say that where retention is lacking there can be no recall. On the other hand, there is no doubt that the brain retains many facts which are never recalled, simply because they have formed no associations, and hence have nothing to bring them back. This gives another hint as to our method of recording if we wish to insure recall. The new fact is to be connected with just as many related old facts as possible ; and these, themselves sure of recall, will serve as cues for the new when we require it in memory. In this way our knowledge is formed into a logical chain, the new interlinked with the old, so that the recurrence of one part in the mind makes possible the whole. Indeed, this is the only right way to remember facts which have logical relations, and which we wish to make a part of our permanent body of usable knowledge. Any other method makes the recall depend on artificial or arbitrary cues, and the fact remembered never becomes a vital part of our thinking. It is the truth of this statement which makes " cramming " so poor a method of learning. If this method of study would yield as valuable permanent results, it would be by far the most sensible and eco- nomic method to use ; for under the stress of necessity we often are able to accomplish results much faster than when no pressure is resting upon us. The dif- ficulty is, however, that the results are not permanent ; the facts learned do not have time to seek out and link themselves to well-established associates ; learned in an Right methods of record- ing facts. The effect of cram- ming. 124 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION hour, their retention is as ephemeral as the applica- tion which gave them to us. Facts which are needed but temporarily and which cannot become a part of our body of permanent knowledge may profitably be learned by cramming. The lawyer needs many details for the case which he is trying, which not only are valueless to him as soon as the ease is decided, but would positively be in his way. He may profitably cram such facts. But those facts which are to become a permanent part of his mental equipment, such as the fundamental principles of law, he cannot cram. These he must have in a logical chain which will not leave their recall dependent upon a chance cue. Crammed facts may serve us during a recitation or an examination, but they never really become a part of us. Nothing can take the place of the logical pla- cing of facts if they are to be remembered with facil- ity, and be usable in thinkiag when recalled. Remem- But after all this is taken into consideration there lalSd facts. Still remain a large number of facts which refuse to fit into any connection or logical system. Or, if they do belong with some system, their connection is not very close, and we have more need for the few indi- vidual facts than for the system as a whole. Hence we must have some means of remembering such facts other than by connecting them with their logical asso- ciations. Such facts as may be typified by the multi- plication table, certain dates, events, names, numbers, errands, and engagements of various kinds — all these need to be remembered accurately and quickly when the occasion for them arises. We must be able to re- call them with facility, so that the occasion for them will not have passed by before we can secure them and we not have failed to do our part because of the MEMORY 125 lapse. With facts of this type the means of secur- ing a good memory are the same as in the ease of logical memory, except that we must of necessity fore- go the linking to naturally related associates. "We can, however, take advantage of the three laws which have been given: (1) Until the facts are thoroughly learned they must be recalled frequently, so that (2) they shall always be recent, and (3) they must be recorded under a high state of attention. If these methods are used faithfully, then we have done what we can in the way of insuring the recall of facts of this type, unless we associate them with some artifi- cial cue, such as tying a thread around our finger to remember an errand, or learning the multiplication table by singing it. We are not to be too ready to excuse ourselves, however, if we have forgotten to mail the letter or deliver the message; for our atten- tion may have been very lax when we recorded the direction in the first place, and we may never have taken the trouble to think of the matter between the time it was given into our keeping and the time we were to perform the errand. Many ingenious devices have been invented to assist Mnemonic the memory. No doubt each one of you has some way ^"^'"^^ of your own of remembering certain things committed to you, or some much-needed fact which has a tendency to elude you. You may not tie the traditional string around your finger or place your watch in the wrong pocket; but if not, you have invented some method which suits your convenience better. While many books have been written, and many lectures given exploiting mnemonic systems, they are, however, all founded upon the same general principle: namely, that of association of ideas in the mind. They all 126 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION make use of the same .basis for memory that any of us use every time we remember anything, from the commonest event which occurred last hour to the most abstruse bit of philosophy which we may have in our minds. They all tie the fact to be remembered to some other fact which is sure of recall, and then trust the old fact to bring the new along with it when it again comes into the mind. Artificial devices may be permissible in remember- ing the class of facts which have no logical associates to which we can relate them ; but even then I cannot help feeling that if we should use the same care and ingenuity in carefully recording the seemingly unre- lated facts that we do in working out the device and making the association in it, we should discover hid- den relations for most of the facts we wish to remem- ber, and we should be able to insure their recall as certainly and in a better way than through the device. Then, also, we should not be in danger of handing over to the device various facts for which we should discover relations, thus placing them in the logical body of our -usable knowledge where they belong. EXERCISES Have some one pronounce to you the following syllables, varying the order: ski, bij, col, laj, nol, kej, lun, duj, kel, mij. Now try to repeat them in the order in which they were given. Try a similar test by having them written in different order on a slip of paper at which you are to look for five seconds and then write the syllables in order. Do you find yourself trying to associate the syllables with some cue which will assist in recall? Try the same experiment with ten words which are not so related to each other as to form a sentence. MEMORY 127 Now try the experiment, using this time ten words which together make a sentence. Why do you have no trouble to recall them in order? When you recall a stanza of poetry, do the various images suggested by the words come to you, or only images of the words themselves? Try committing some piece of poetry by realizing clearly all its images and associating then, in order as you commit. Do you find the recall easier than by committing the words alone? Are you seeking to improve your memory by associating your facts better through better thinking? by recording these facts under a high state of attention? Do you ever "cram" for examination? for recitations? Do you read a large amount of light literature which you do not care to remember? Does it pay? SUGGESTED EBADINGS James, " Psychology," Briefer Course, Chapter XVIII. James, " Principles of Psychology," Chapter XVI. Angell, " Psychology," Chapter IX., Dewey, "Psychology," Chapter VI. Thorndike, " Elements of Psychology," Chapter III. Schaeffer, " Thinking and Learning to Think," Chapter XI. ■A CHAPTER xS- IMAGINATIOil / Common standards of imagi- nation. Other standards. If you are asked whether you have a good imagina- tion, you are likely at once to consider whether you are capable of taking wild flights into impossible realms of thought and evolving unrealities out of airy noth- ings. Or else you compare yourself with Bulwer, Stevenson, Poe, or De Quincey in their improbable tales and measure your imagination by their standard. Or you may recall the wonderful tales of ' ' The Ara- bian Nights " or Don Quixote and decide upon the rank of your imagination by your ability to construct such stories. Now, while the foregoing indicate a high degree of imagination of a particular type, I want to protest against this tyjje's standing as the sole, or even the most important, criterion of a, good imagination. A good imagination, like a good memory, is the one which serves its owner best. If De Quincey and Poe and Stevenson and Bulwer foimd the type which led them into such dizzy flights the best for their par- ticular purpose, well and good ; but that is not saying that their type is the best for you, or that you may not rank as high in some other field of imaginative power as they in theirs. "While you may lack in their particular type of imagination, they may have been short in the type which will one day make you famous. The artisan, the architect, the merchant, the artist, the 128 IMAGINATION 129 fanner, the teacher, the professional man — all need imagination in their vocations not less than the writers need it in theirs, but each needs a specialized kind adapted to the particular work which he has to do. Imagination is not a process of thought which must deal chiefly with unrealities and impossibilities, and which has for its chief end our amusement when we have nothing better to do than to follow its wander- ings. It is, rather, a commonplace, necessary process which illumines the way for our everyday thinking and acting — a process without which we think and act by haphazard chance or blind imitation. It is the process by which the images from our past experiences are marshaled, and made to serve our present. Im- agination looks into the future and constructs our patterns and lays our plans. It sets up our ideals and pictures us in the acts of achieving them. It enables us to live our joys and our sorrows, our victories and our defeats before we reach them. It looks into the past and allows us to live with the kings and seers of old, or it goes back to the beginning and we see things in the process of the making. It comes into our pres- ent and plays a part in every act from the simplest to the most complex. It is to the mental stream what the light is to the traveler who carries it as he passes through the darkness, while it easts its beams in all directions around him, lighting up what otherwise would be intolerable gloom. To illustrate what I mean, let us see some of the most common uses of the imagination. Suppose I describe to you the siege which gave Port Arthur to Japan. Unless you can take the images which my words sug- gest and build them into struggling, shouting, bleeding soldiers; into forts and entanglements and breast- The funo. tions of imagina- tion. Imagina- tion in in- terpreting thought of otheis. 130 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION works; into roaring cannon and whistling bullet and screaming shell — imless you can take all these sepa- rate images and out of them get one great unified complex, then my description will be to you only so many words largely without content, and you will lack the power to comprehend the historical event in any complete way. Unless you can read the poem, and out of the images suggested by the words reconstruct the picture which was in the mind of the author as he wrote " The Village Blacksmith " or " Snowbound," the significance will have dropped out, and the throb- bing scenes of life and action become only so many dead words, like the shell of the chrysalis after the butterfly has left its shroud. "Without the power of imagination, the history of Washington's winter at Valley Forge becomes a mere formal recital, and you can never get a view of the snow-covered tents, the wind-swept landscape, the tracks in the snow marked by the telltale drops of blood, or the form of the heartbroken commander as he kneels in the silent wood to pray for his army. Without the power to construct this picture as you read, you may commit the words, and be able to recite them and to pass examination upon them, but the living reality of it will forever escape you. Imagina. Nor is imagination less necessary in other lines of science. study. Without this power of building living, moving pictures out of images, there is small use to study science beyond what is immediately present to our senses ; for some of the most fundamental laws of sci- ence rest upon conceptions which can be grasped only as we have the power of imagination. The student who cannot get a picture of the molecules of matter, infinitely close to each other and yet never touching, IMAGINATION 131 all in vibratory motion, yet each within its own orbit, each a complete tinit in itself, yet capable of still fur- ther division into smaller particles — the student who cannot see all this in a clear visual image can never at best have more than a most hazy notion of the molecular theory of matter. And- this means, finally, that the explanations of light and heat and sound, and much besides, will be to him largely a jumble of words which linger in his memory, perchance, but which never vitally become a possession of his mind. So with the world of the telescope. You may have at your disposal all the magnificent lenses and the accurate machinery owned by modern observatories; but if you have not within yourself the power to build what these reveal to you, and what the books tell you, into the solar system and still larger systems, you can never study astronomy except in a blind and piece- meal sort of way, and all the planets and satellites and suns will never for you form themselves into a system, no matter what the books may say about it. Your power of imagination determines your ability to interpret literature of all kinds; for the interpre- tation of literature is nothing, after all, but the recon- struction on our part of the pictures which were iu the mind of the writer as he penned the words, and the experiencing of the emotions which moved him as he wrote. Small use indeed to read the history of the centuries unless we can see in it living, acting people, and real events occurring in actual environments. Small use to read the world's great books unless their characters are to us real men and women — our brothers and sisters, interpreted to us by the master minds of the ages. Anything less than this, and we are no longer dealing with literature, but with words — 10 The world of the micro- scope. The world of the tele- scope. Imagina- tion in literature and art. 132 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION like musical sounds which deal with no theme, or like picture frames in which no picture has been set. Nor is the case different in listening to a speaker. His words are to you only so many sensations of sounds of such and such pitches and intensities and quality, un- less your mind keeps pace with his and continually builds the pictures which fill his thought as he speaks. Lacking imagination, the sculptures of Mi- chael Angelo and the pictures of Raphael are to you so many pieces of curiously shaped marble and in- geniously colored canvas. What the sculptor and the painter have placed before you must suggest to you images and thoughts from your own experience, to fill out and make alive the marble and the canvas, else to you they are dead. Iniagina- So far I have spoken of imagination only with rela- t hi^id ng tion to its use in interpreting the thought of others through the images suggested to us by their language or their handiwork. Let us also see the part it plays in our own thinking. Suppose that, instead of reading a poem, we are writing one ; instead of listening to a description of a battle, we are describing it ; instead of looking at the picture, we are painting it. Then our object is to make others who may read our language, or listen to our words, or view our handiwork, con- struct the mental images of the situation which fur- nished the material for our thought. Our words and other modes of expression are but the description of the flow of images in our minds, and our problem is to make a similar stream flow through the mind of the listener ; but strange indeea would it be to make others see a situation which we ourselves cannot see ; strange if we could draw a picture without being able to foUow its outlines as we draw. Or, suppose we are IMAGINATION 133 teaching science, and our object is to explain the com- position of matter to some one, and make him under- stand how light, heat, etc., depend on the molecular theory; strange if the listener should get a picture if we ourselves are unable to get it. Or, once more, suppose we are to describe some incident, and our aim is to make its every detail stand out so clearly that no one can miss a single one. Is it not evident that we can never make any of these images more clear to those who listen to us or read our words than they are to ourselves? But we may consider a still more practical phase Someprac of imagination, or at least one which has more to do ofimagi- with the humdrum daily life of most of us. Suppose "**i°''- you go to your milliner and tell her how you want your spring hat shaped and trimmed. And suppose you have never been able to see this hat in toto in your mind, so as to get an idea of how it will look when completed, but have only a general notion, be- cause you like red velvet, white plumes, and a turned- up rim, that this combination will look well together. Suppose you have never been able to see how you would look in this particular hat with your hair done in this or that way. If you are in this helpless state shall you not have to depend finally on the taste of the milliner, or accept the " model," and so fail to reveal any taste or individuality on your own part? How many times have you been disappointed in some article of dress, because when you planned it you were unable to see it all at once so as to get the full effect ; or else you could not see yourself in it, and so be able to judge whether it suited you! How many homes have in them draperies and rugs and wall paper and furniture which are in constant quarrel because 134 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION some one could not see before they were assembled that they were never intended to keep company! How many people who plan their own houses, would build them just the same again after seeing them completed! The man who can see a building com- plete before a brick has been laid or a timber put in place, who can see it not only in its details one by one as he runs them over in his mind, but can see the building in its entirety, is the only one who is safe to plan the structure. And this is the man who is draw- ing a large salary as an architect, for imaginations of this kind are in demand. Only the one who can see in his " mind's eye," before it is begun, the thing he would create, is capable to plan its construction. And who will say that ability to work with images of these kinds is not of just as high a type as that which results in the construction of plots upon which stories are built! Imagina^ Another great field for the imagination is with ref- conduot. erence to conduct and our relations with others. Over and over again the thoughtless person has to say, " I am sorry; I did not think." The " did not think " simply means that he failed to realize through his imagination what would be the consequences of his rash or unkind words. He would not be unkind, but he did not imagine how the other would feel ; he did not put himself in the other's place. Likewise with reference to the effects of our conduct on our- selves. "What youth, taking his first drink of liquor, would continue if he could see a clear picture of him- self in the gutter with bloated face and bloodshot eyes a decade hence? Or what boy, slyly smoking one of his early cigarettes, would proceed if he could see his haggard face and nerveless hand a few years IMAGINATION 135 farther along ? What spendthrift would thro;sv away his money on vanities could he vividly see himself in penury and want in old age? What prodigal any- where who, if he could take a good look at himself sin-stained and broken as he returns to his " father's house " after the years of debauchery in the " far country," would not hesitate long before he entered upon his downward career? Nor is the part of the imagination less marked in Thebuiid- the formation of our life's ideals and plans. Every- ^°pians* one who is not living blindly and aimlessly must have some ideal, some pattern, by which to square his life and guide his actions. At some time in pur life I am sure that each of us has selected the person who filled most nearly our notion of what we should like to become, and measured ourselves by this pattern. But there comes a time when we must idealize even the most perfect individual ; when we invest the char- acter with attributes which we have selected from some other person, and thus worship at a shrine which is partly real and partly ideal. As time goes on, we drop out more and more of the strictly individual element, adding correspondingly more of the ideal, until our pattern is largely a construction of our own imagination, having in it the best we have been able to glean from the many characters we have known. How large a part these ever-changing ideals play in our lives we shall never know, but certainly the part is not an insignificant one. And happy the youth who is able to look into the future and see himself approximating some worthy ideal. He has caught a vision which will never allow him to lag or falter in the pursuit of the flying goal which points the direc- tion of his efforts. 136 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION Images the material of imagina- tion. The con- structive power of unagina- tion. As in the ease of memory, again, tlie material op stuff out of whicli imagination has to build its strue- tlire consists of images. Nothing can ever enter the imagination any more than it can the memory, the ele- ments of which have not first come into our experience, and then been conserved for future use in the form of images. The Indians never dreamed of a heaven whose streets are paved with gold, and in whose cen- ter stands a great white throne. Their experience had given them no knowledge of these things ; and so, per- force, they must build their heaven out of the images which they had at command, namely, those connected with the chase and the forest. So their heaven was the " happy hunting ground,'-' inhabited by game and enemies over whom the blessed forever triumphed. Likewise the valiant soldiers whose deadly arrows and keen-edged swords and battle-axes won on the bloody field of Hastings, did not picture a far-off day when the opposing liaes should kill each other with mighty engines hurling death from behind parapets a dozen miles away. Firearms and the explosive powder were yet unknown, hence ;there were no images out of which to build such a picture. I do not mean that your imagination cannot con- struct an object which has never before been in your experience as a whole, for the work of the imagination is to do precisely this thing. It takes the various im- ages at its disposal and builds them into wholes which may never have existed before, and which may exist now only as a creation of the mind. And yet we have put into this new product not a single element which was not familiar to us in the form of an image of one kind or another. It is the form which is new; the material is old. This is exemplified every time an in- IMAGINATION 137 ventor takes the two fundamental parts of a machine, the lever and the inclined plane, and puts them to- gether in relations new to each other and so evolves a machine whose complexity fairly bewilders us. And with other lines of thinking, as in mechanics, inven- tive power consists in being able to see the old in new relations, and so constantly build new constructions out of old material. It is this power which gives us the daring and original thinker, the Newton whose falling apple suggested to him the planets falling to- ward the sun in their orbits; the Darwin who out of the thigh bone of an animal was able to construct in his imagination the whole animal and the environ- ment in which it must have lived, and so add another page to the earth's history. From the simple facts which we have just been The two considering, the conclusion is plain that our power imagSa" of imagination depends on two factors; namely, *'°"' (1) the materials available in the form of usable images capable of recall, and (2) our constructive ability, or the power to group these images into new wholes, the process being guided by some purpose or end. "Without this last provision, the products of our imagination are daydreams with their " castles in Spain," which may be pleasing and proper enough on occasions, but which as an habitual mode of thought are extremely dangerous. That the mind is limited in its imagination by its Imagina- stock of images may be seen from a simple illustration : by stock ^ Suppose that you own a building made of brick, but of images, that you find the old one ho longer adequate for your, needs, and so purpose to build a neW one; and sup- pose, further, that you have no material for your new building except that contained in the old structure. 138 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION Limited also by our con- structive ability. It is evident that you will be limited in constructing your new building by the material which was in the old. You may be able to build the new structure in any one of a multitude of different forms or styles of architecture, so far as the material at hand will lend itself to that style of building, and providing, further, that you are able to make the plans. But you will always be limited finally by the character and amount of material obtainable from the old structure. So with the mind. The old building is your past expe- rience, and the separate bricks are the images out of which you must build your new structure through the imagination. Here, as before, nothing can enter which was not already on hand. Nothing goes into the new structure so far as its constructive material is concerned except images, and there is nowhere to get images but from the results of our past experience. But not only is our imaginative output limited by the amount of material in the way of images which we have at our command, but also and perhaps not less by our constructive ability. Many persons might own the old pile of bricks fully adequate for the new structure, and then fail to get the new because they were unable to construct it. So, many who have had a rich and varied experience in many lines are yet un- able to muster their images of these experiences in such a way that new products are obtainable from them. These have the heavy, draft-horse kind of intellect which goes plodding on, very possibly doing good service in its own circumscribed' range, but destined after all to service in the narrow field with its low, drooping horizon. They are never able to take a dasb at a two-minute clip among equally swift competitors, or even swing at a good round pace along the pleasant IMAGINATION L6y highways of an experience lying beyond the confines of the narrow here and now. These are the minds which cannot discover relations; which cannot think. Minds of this type can never be architects of their own fate, or even builders, but must content them- selves to be hod carriers. Nor are we to forget that we cannot intelligently The need erect our building until we kuow the purpose for posef" which it is to be used. No matter how much build- ing material we may have on hand, nor how skillful an architect we may be, unless our plans are guided by some definite aim, we shall be likely to end with a structure that is fanciful and useless. Likewise with our thotight structure. Unless our imagination is guided by some aim or purpose, we are in danger of drifting into mere daydreams which not only are useless in furnishing ideals for the guidance of our lives, but often become positively harmful when grown into a habit. The habit of daydreaming is hard to break, and, continuing, holds our thought in thrall and makes it unwilling to deal with the plain, homely things of everyday life. Who) has not had the experience of an hour or a day spent in a fairy- land of dreams, and awakened at the end to find himself rather dissatisfied with the prosaic round of duties which confronted him ! I do not mean to say that we should never dream; but I know of no more pernicious mental habit than that of daydreaming carried to excess, for it ends in our following every will-o'-the-wisp of fancy, and places us at the mercy of every chance suggestion. Theoretically, then, it is not hard to see what we Theculti- must do to cultivate our imagination. In the first hns^n*- place, we must take care to secure a large and usable *'°°- 140 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION stock of images from all fields of perception. It is not enough to have visual images alone or chiefly, for many a time shall we need to build structures involv- ing all the other senses and the motor activities as well. This means that we must have a first-hand contact with just as large an environment as possible — ^large iii the world of Nature with all her varied forms suited to appeal to every avenue of sense ; large in our contact with people in all phases of experience, laughing with those who laugh and weeping with those who weep; large in contact with books, the interpreters of the men and events of the past. We must not only let all these kinds of environment drift in upon us as they may chance to do, but we must deliberately seek to increase our stock of experience ; for, after all, experi- ence lies at the bottom of imagination as of every other mental process. And not only must we thus put ourselves in the way of acquiring new experience, but we must by recall and reconstruction, as we saw iu an earlier discussion, keep our imagery fresh and usable. For whatever serves to improve our images, at the same time is bettering the very foundation of imagination. We must In the second place, we must not fail to huild. For build. it is futile to gather a large supply of images if we let the material lie unused. How many people there are who put in all their time gathering material for their structure, and never take time to do the build- ing ! They look and listen and read, and are so fully occupied in absorbing the immediately present that they have no time to see the wider significance of the things with which they deal. They are like the stu- dents who are too busy studying to have time to think. They are so taken up with receiving tliat they IMAGINATION 141 never perform the higher act of combining. They are the plodding fact gatherers, many of them doing good service, collecting material which the seer and the philosopher, with their constructive power, build together into the greater wholes which make our sys- tems of thought. They are the ones who fondly think that, by reading bookfuls of wild tales and impossible plots, they are training their imagination. For them, sober history, no matter how heroic or tragic in its quiet movements, is too tame. They have not the patience to read solid and thoughtful literature, and works of science and philosophy are a bore. These are the persons who put in all their time in looking at and admiring other people's houses, and never get time to do any building for themselves. The best training for the imagination which I know We should anything about is that to be obtained by taking our own fleakluto material and from it building our own structure. It ^''t'o'^- is true that it will help to look through other people's houses enough to discover their style of building: we should read. But just as it is not necessary for us to put in all the time we devote to looking at houses in inspecting doll houses and Chinese pagodas, so it is not best for us to get all our notions of imaginative structures from the marvelous and unreal : we get good training for the imagination from reading ' ' Hia- watha," but so can we from reading the history of the primitive Indian tribes. The pictures in ' ' Snow- bound " are full of suggestion for the imagination; but so is the history of the Puritans in New England. But even with the best of models before us, it is not enough to follow others' building. We must construct stories for ourselves, must work out plots for our own stories; we must have time to meditate and plan and 142 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION build, not idly in the daydream, but purposefully, and then make our images real by carrying them ov,t in activity, if they are of such a character that this is possible ; we must build our ideals and work to them in the common course of our everyday life ; we must think for ourselves instead of forever following the thinking of others ; we must initiate as well as imitate. EXERCISES 1. Do you ever skip the descriptive parts of a book and read the narrative? 2. As you read the description of a bit of natural scenery, does it rise before you? As you study the description of a battle, can you see the movements of the troops? 3. Have you ever planned a house as you think you would like it? Can you see it from all sides? Can you see aU the rooms in their various finishing and furnishings? 4. What plans and ideals have you formed, and what ones are you at present following? 5. Can you describe the process by which your plans or ideals change? 6. Do you evertry to put yourself in the other person's place? 7. Take some fanciful unreality which your imagination has constructed and see whether you can select from it familiar elements from actual experiences. 8. What use do you make of imagination in the comiPon round of duties in your daily life? 9. What are you doing to improve your imagination? SUGGESTED EEADINGS Royce, "Outlines of Psychology," Chapter VI. Angell, " Psychology," Chapter VIII. James, " Psychology," Briefer Course, Chapter XDL James, " Principles of Psychology," Chapter XVIII, Dewey, "Psychology," Chapter VII. CHAPTER X THINKING Imagine a world in which nothing is related to any- thing else; in which every object perceived, remem- bered, or imagined, stands absolutely by itself, inde- pendent and self-sufScient ! What a chaos it would be! Trees would grow irrespective of soil, animals would live without reference to food and water, no man would have need of any other man. All would be independent of a creator, and no cause would be followed by an effect, nor any effect require a cause. Of course such a world is utterly impossible and un- thinkable. Yet this is just such a world as our world of knowledge would be without the power of thought. We might perceive, remember, and imagine all the various objects we please, but without the power to think them together, they would all be totally unre- lated, and hence have no meaning. To have a rational meaning for us, things must always be defined in terms of other things, or in terms of their uses. Fuel is that which feeds fire. Food is what is eaten for nourishment. A locomotive is a ma- chine for drawing a train. Books are to read, pianos to play, halls to throw, schools to instruct, friends to enjoy, and so on through the whole list of objects which we know or can define. Everything depends for its meaning on its relation to other things ; and the more of these relations we can discover, the more fully 143 Interde- pendence of objects, both phys- ical and mental. Meaning depends on relations. 144 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION The func- tion of thinJung is to dis- cover re- lations. do we see the meaning. Thus halls may have other uses than to throw, schools other functions than to instruct, and friends mean much more to us than mere enjoyment. And just in the degree in which we have realized these different relations, have we defined the object, or, in other words, have we seen its meaning. Now it is by thinking that these relations are dis- covered. This is the function of thinking. Thinking takes the various separate items of our experience and discovers to us the relations existing among them, and builds them together into a unified, related, and usable body of knowledge, threading each little bit on the string of relationship which runs through the whole. It was, no doubt, this thought which Tennyson had in mind when he wrote : Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower — ^but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is. Near and remote re- lations. Starting in with even so simple a thing as a little flower, if he could discover all the relations which every part bears to every other part and to all other things besides, he would finally reach the meaning of God and man. For each separate thing, be it large or small, forms a link in an unbroken chain of rela- tionships which binds the universe into an ordered whole. The relations discovered through our thinking may be very close and simple ones, as when a child sees the relation between his bottle and his dinner ; or they may be very remote ones, as when Newton saw the THINKING 145 relation between the falling of an apple and the mo- tion of the planets in their orbits. But whether sim- ple or remote, the seeing of the relationships is in both cases alike thinking ; for thinking is nothing, in its last analysis, but the discovering of the relation- ships which exist between the various objects in our mental stream. Thinking passes through all grades of complexity, from the first faint dawnings in the mind of the babe when it sees the relation between the mother and its feeding, on to the mighty grasp of the sage who is able to " think God's thoughts after Him." But it all comes to the same end finally — the bringing to light of new meanings through the discovery of new relations. And whatever does this is thinking. What constitutes the difference in the thinking of Thethink- the child and that of the sage? Let us see whether chfidandof we can discover this difference. In the first place the ^^^ adult, relations seen by the child are immediate relations: they exist between simple percepts or images ; the re- mote and the general are beyond his reach. He has not had sufficient experience to enable him to discover remote relations. He cannot think things which are absent from him, or which he has never known. The child could by no possibility have seen in the falling apple what Newton saw; for the child knew nothing of the planets in their orbits, and hence could not see relations in which these formed one of the terms. I'he sage, on the other hand, is not limited to his im- mediate' pereepts or their images. He can see remote relations. He can go beyond individuals, and think in classes. The falling apple is not a mere falling a.pple to him, but one of a class of falling bodies. Be- sides a rich experience full of valuable facts, the 146 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION trained thinker has acquired also the habit of looking out for relations; he has learned that this is the method par excellence of increasing his store of knowl- edge and of rendering effective the knowledge he has. He has learned how to think. The chief business of the child is the collection of the materials of thought, seeing only the more necessary and obvious relations as he proceeds; his chief business when older grown is to seek out the network of relations which unites this mass of material, and through this process to systematize and give new meanings to the whole. Complex Relations seen between sensations would mean some- tantre- thing, but not much; relations seen between objects musTbe immediately present to the senses would mean much discovered, more; but our thinking must go far beyond the present, and likewise far beyond individual objects. It must be able to annihilate both time and space, and to deal with millions of individuals together in one class. Only in this way can our thinking go beyond that of the lower animals; for a wise rat, even, may come to see the relation between a trap and danger, or a horse the relation between pulling with his teeth at the piece of string on the gate latch, and securing his liberty. But it takes the farther-reaching mind of man to invent the trap and the latch. Perception alone does not go far enough. It is limited to imme- diately present individuals. The perceptual image is likewise subject to similar limitations. "While it en- ables us to dispense with the immediate presence of the object, yet it deals with separate individuals ; and the world is too full of individual objects for us to deal with them separately. Fortunately for our thinking, the great external world, with its millions upon millions of individual THINKING .147 objects, is so ordered that these objects can be grouped into comparatively few great classes; and for many- purposes we can deal with the class as a whole in- stead of with the separate individuals of the class. Thus there are an infinite number of individual ob- jects in the world which are composed of matter. Yet all these myriads of individuals may be classed under the two great heads of inanimate and animate. Tak- ing one of these again: all animate forms may be classed as either plants or animals. And these classes may again be subdivided indefinitely. Animals in- clude mammals, birds, reptiles, insects, mollusks, and many other classes besides, each class of which may be still further separated into its orders, families, genera, species, and individuals. This arrangement economizes our thinking by allowing us to think in large terms. But this somewhat complicated form of classifica- tion did not come to man ready-made. Some one had to see the relationship existing among the myriads of animals of a certain class, and group these together under the general term mammals. Likewise with birds, reptiles, insects, and all the rest. In order to accom- plish this, many individuals of each class had to be observed, the qualities common to all members of the class discriminated from those not common, and the common qualities retained as the measure by which to test the admission of other individuals into this class. The process of classification is made possible by what the psychologist calls the concept. The con- cept enables us to think birds as well as bluebirds, robins, and wrens ; it enables us to think men as well as Tom, Dick, and Harry. In other words, the concept lies at the bottom of all thinking which rises above the 11 Relations existing in theextemaJ world of objects. How classi- fication is accom- plished: The con- cept. 148 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION seeing of the simplest relations between immediately present objects. Nature and We can perhaps best understand the nature of the fSmcept. concept if we watch its growth in the thinking of a child. Let us see how the child forms the concept dog, under which he is able finally to class the several hundred or the several thousand different dogs with which his thinking requires him to deal. The child's first acquaintance with a dog is, let us suppose, with a pet poodle, white in color, and named Gyp. At this stage in the child's experience, dog and Gyp are entirely synonymous, including Gyp's color, size, and all other qualities which the child has discovered. But now let him see another pet poodle which is like Gyp except that it is black in color. Here comes the first cleavage between Gyp and dog as synonyms : dog no longer means white, but may mean Mack. Next let the child see a brown spaniel. Not only will white and black now no longer answer to dog, but the roly- poly poodle form also has been lost; for the spaniel is more slender. Let the child go on from this until he has seen many different dogs of all varieties: poodles, bulldogs, setters, shepherds, cockers, and a host of others. "What has happened to his dog, which at the beginning meant the one particular little in- dividual with which he played? Dog is no longer white or black or brown or gray : color is not an essen- tial quality, so it has dropped out; size is no longer essential except within very broad limits; shagginess or smoothness of coat is a very inconstant quality, so this is dropped ; form varies so much from the fat pug to the slender hound that it is discarded, except within broad limits ; good nature, playfulness, friend- liness, and a dozen other qualities are likewise found THINKING 149 not to belong in common to all dogs, and so have had to go ; and all that is left to his dog is four-footedness, a certain general form, and a few other dog qualities of habit of life and disposition. As the term dog has been gaining in extent, that is, as more individuals have been observed and classed under it, it has corre- spondingly been losing in content, or it has been losing in the specified qualities which belong to it. Yet it must not be thought that the process is altogether one of elimination ; for new qualities which are present in all the individuals of a class, but at first overlooked, are continually being discovered as experience grows, and built into the developing concept. What the concept consists of finally is the common qualities or attributes of the class, which have been abstracted from the dif- ferent individuals of the class and built together into a new image whose function is to enable us to classify our experience, and thus to deal with classes or uni- versals in our thinking. Language comes in and crys- tallizes our concepts in words, so that we are able to understand each others' thoughts in oral or written speech. Words must change in meaning as concepts change, hence the language of a thinking people is constantly growing. It is not hard to see that the validity of our think- Good ing is conditioned in large part by the correctness of caimoTbe our concepts. It is evident that, if the child has ^^^"1°° ^ '^ _ poor con- reached but the " poodle " stage in his concept dog cepts. when he hears the story of a rescue by a St. Bernard of travelers lost on the mountains, he will have trouble to understand how a dog with " poodle " qualities could do the things which the story relates. If our concept of pleasure is limited to the feeling accom- panying the satisfying of sensual appetites, we shall 150 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION have trouble to comprelieiid pleasure as related to in- tellectual achievement, spiritual communion, or es- thetic appreciation. These illustrations also imply that if we are to have good concepts, we must have a broad experience. The child must observe many different kinds of dogs, and we must experience many different kinds of pleasure, if the respective concepts are to be safe ones in our thinking. And not only this, but our observation must be discriminative. We must select out of the different individuals their im- portant or characteristic elements, else our concept will lack some of the essential qualities it should possess and will include others which are imnecessary or accidental. Judgment. But in the building up of any percepts and con- cepts, as well as in making use of them after they are formed, another process of thinking enters; namely, the process of judging. Judging enters more or less into all our thinking, from the simplest to the most complex. The babe lies staring at his bottle, and finally it dawns on his sluggish mind that this is the object from which he gets his dinner. He has per- formed a judgment. That is, he has alternately di- rected his attention to the object before him and to his image of former nursing, discovered the relation existing between the two, and affirmed to himself, " This is what gives me my dinner." " Bottle and what-gives-me-my-dinner " are essentially identical to the child. Judgment is, then, the affirmation or denial of the essential identity of meaning of two objects of thought. Even if the proposition in which we state our judgment has in it a negative, the defini- tion will still hold, for the mental process is the same in either case. It is as much a judgment if we say, THINKING 151 " The day is not cold," as if we say, " The day is cold." How judgment enters into the forming of our per- The process cepts may be seen from the illustration just given. entersTnto The act by which the child perceived his bottle had ""pts^'^' in it a large element of judging. In order that he might perceive the bottle at all, that is, recognize it as a bottle, there had to come to his mind images of former experiences with the thing which looked as this thing looks, and he had to affirm, " Sure enough, this is my old bottle." He had to compare two ob- jects of thought — the one from past experience in the form of images, and the other from the present object, in the form of sensations from the bottle — and then affirm their essential identity. Of course it is not meant that what I have described consciously takes place in the mind of the child ; but some such process lies at the bottom of every perception, whether of the child or of anyone else. Likewise it may be seen that the forming of con- And also cepts depends on judgment. Every time that we concepts, meet a new individual which has to be assigned its place in our classification, judgment is required. Suppose the child, with his immature concept dog, sees for the first time a greyhound. He must com- pare this new specimen with his concept dog, and decide that this is or is not a dog. If he discovers the identity of meaning in the essentials of the two objects of thought, his judgment will be affirmative, and his concept will be modified in whatever extent greyhound will affect it. But judgment goes much further than to assist in building percepts and concepts. It takes our con- cepts after they are formed and discovers and affirms 152 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION Judgment leads from particular to general truths. What de- termines the validity of a judg- ment. relations between them, thus enabling us finally to relate classes as well as individuals. It carries our thinking over into the realm of the universal, where we are not hampered by particulars. Let us see how this is done. Suppose we have the concept man and the concept animal, and that we think of these two concepts in their relation to each other. The mind analyzes each into its elements, compares them, and finds the essential identity of meaning in a sufficient number to warrant the judgment, Man is an animal. This judgment has given a new bit of knowledge, in that it has discovered to us a new relation between two great classes, and hence given both, in so far, a new meaning and a wider definition. And as this new relation does not pertain to any particular man or any particular animal, but includes all individuals in each class, it has carried us over into universals, so that we have a general truth and will not have to test each individual man henceforth to see whether he fits into this relation. Now since every judgment is made up of an affir- mation of relation existing between two terms, it is evident that the validity of the judgment will depend on the thoroughness of our knowledge of the terms compared. If we know but few of the attributes of either term of the judgment, the judgment is clearly unsafe. Imperfect concepts lie at the basis of many of our wrong judgments. A young man complained because his friend had been expelled from college for alleged misbehavior. He said, " Mr. A was the best boy in the institution." It is very evident that some one had made a mistake in judgment. Surely no college would want to expel the best boy in the insti- tution. Either my complainant or the authorities of THINKING 153 the college had failed to understand one of the terms in the judgment. Either " Mr. A " or " the best boy in the institution " had been wrongly interpreted by some one. Likewise, one person will say, " Jones is a good man," while another will say, " Jones is a rascal." Such a discrepancy in judgment must come from a lack of acquaintance with Jones or a lack of knowledge of what constitutes a good man or a rascal. No doubt most of us are prone to make judgments The remedy with too little knowledge of the terms we are com- judgments, paring, and it is usually those who have the least rea- son for confidence in their judgments who are the most certain that they cannot be mistaken. The remedy for faulty judgments is, of course, in making ourselves more certain of the terms involved, and this in turn sends us back for a review of our con- cepts and percepts upon which the terms depend. It is evident that no two persons can have just the same concepts, for all have not had the same experience out of which their concepts came. The concepts may be named the same, and may be nearly enough alike so that we can usually understand each other; but, after all, I have mine and you have yours, and if we could each see the other's in its true light, no doubt we should save many misunderstandings and quarrels. Since thinking rests so fundamentally on concepts, progress in our mental life must depend on a constant growth in the number and character of our concepts. Not only must we keep on adding new concepts, but the old must not remain static. When our concepts stop growing, our minds have ceased to grow — we no longer learn. This arrest of development is often seen in persons who have settled into a life of narrow routine, where the demands are few and of a simple The neceS' sity for growing concepts. 154 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION Reasoning : Discovers relations between judgments. nature. Unless they rise above their routine, they early become " old fogies." Their concepts petrify from lack of use and the constant reconstruction which growth necessitates. On the other hand, the person who has upon him the constant demand to meet new situations or do better in old ones will keep on enriching his old concepts and forming new ones, or else, unable to do this, he will fail in his position. And the person who keeps on steadily enriching his concepts has discovered the secret of perpetual youth so far as his mental life is concerned. For him there is no old age; his thought will be always fresh, his experience always accumulating, and his knowledge growing more valuable and usable. All the mental processes which we have so far de- scribed find their culmination and highest utility in reasoning. Not that reasoning comes last in the list of mental activities, and cannot take place until all the others have been completed, for reasoning is in some degree present almost from the dawn of consciousness. The difference between the reasoning of the child and that of the adult is largely one of degree, of reach. Reasoning goes farther than any of the other processes of cognition, for it takes the relations expressed in judgments and out of these relations evolves still other and more ultimate relations. It is hafd to define reasoning so as to describe the precise process which occurs ; for it is so intermingled with perception, con- ception, and judgment, that one can hardly separate them even for purposes of analysis, much less to sepa- rate them functionally. "We may, however, define reasoning provisionally as thinking with a purpose of arriving at some definite end. What does this mean 1 Professor Angell has stated the matter so clearly that THINKING 155 I will quote his illustration of the case : ' ' Suppose that we are about to make a long journey which necessitates the choice from among a number of pos- sible routes. This is a case of the genuinely prob- lematic kind. It requires reflection, a weighing of the pros and cons, and a giving of the final decision in favor of one or other of. several alternatives. In such a case the procedure of most of us is after this order. "We think of one route as being picturesque and wholly novel, but also as being expensive. "We think of another as less interesting, but also as less expensive. A third is, we discover, the most expedi- ent, but also the most costly of the three. "We find ourselves confronted, then, with the necessity of choosing with regard to the relative merits of cheap- ness, beauty, and speed. "We proceed to consider these points in the light of all our interest?, and the decision more or less makes itself. "We find, for in- stance, that we must, under the circumstances, select the cheapest route. ' ' ^ Such a line of thinking is very common to every- AniUua. one, and one that we carry out in one form or another tho pro^ a thousand times every day we live. "When we come ^^^• to look closely at the steps involved in arriving at a conclusion, we detect a series of judgments. Often not very logically arranged, to be sure, but yet so related that the result is safely reached in the end. "We compare our concept of, say, the first route and our concept of picturesqueness, decide they agree, and affirm the judgment, " This route is picturesque." Likewise we arrive at the judgment, " This route is also expensive, it is interesting, etc." Then we take 1" Psychology, "p. 235. 156 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION the other routes and form our judgments concern- ing them. These judgments are all related to each other in some way, some of them being more inti~ mately related than others. Which ones remain as the significant ones, the ones which are used to solve the problem finally, depends on which concepts are the most vital for us with reference to the ultimate end in view. If time is the chief element, then the form of our reasoning would be something like this: " Two of the routes require more than three days; hence I must take the third route." If economy is the important end, the solution would be as follows: " Two routes cost more than $1,000; I cannot afford to pay more than $800 ; I therefore must patronize the third route. ' ' In both cases it is evident that the con- clusion is reached through a comparison of two judg- ments. This is the essential difference between judg- ment and reasoning. Whereas judgment discovers relations between concepts, reasoning discovers rela- tions between judgments, and from this evolves a new judgment which is the conclusion sought. The exam- ple given well illustrates the ordinary method by which we reason to conclusions. The Logic takes the conclusion, with the judgments on which it is based, and forms the three into what is called a syllogism, of which the following is a classical type: All men are mortal; Socrates is a man, Therefore Socrates is mortal. The first judgment is in the form of a proposition which is called the major premise, because it is general THINKING 157 in its nature, including all men. The second is the minor premise, since it deals with a particular man. The third is the conclusion, in which a new relation is discovered between Socrates and mortality. This form of reasoning is deductive, that is, it pro- Deductioa eeeds from the general to the particular. Much of our reasoning is an abbreviated form of the syllogism, and will readily expand into it. For instance, we say, " It will rain to-night, for there is lightning in the west. ' ' Expanded into the syllogism form it would be, " Lightning in the west is a sure sign of rain; there is lightning in the west this evening ; therefore, it will rain to-night. ' ' This is a valuable form of reasoning, but a moment's reflection will show that something must precede the syllogism in our reasoning. The major premise must be accounted for. How are we able to say that all men are mortal, and that lightning in the west is a sure sign of rain 1 How was this gen- eral truth arrived at 1 There is only one way, namely, through the observation of a large number of particu- lar instances, or through induction. Induction is the method of proceeding from the Induction, particular to the general. Many men are observed, and it is found that all who have been observed have died under a certain age. It is true that not all men have been observed to die, since many are now living, and many more will no doubt come and live in the world whom we cannot observe, since mortality will have overtaken us before their advent. To this it may be answered that the men now living have not yet lived up to the limit of their time, and, besides, they have within them the causes working whose in- evitable effect has always been and always will be death; likewise with the men yet unborn, they will 158 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION The neces- sity for broad in- duction. The "in- ductive leap." possess the same organism as we, whose very nature necessitates mortality. In the case of the premoni- tions of rain, the generalization is not so safe, for there have been exceptions. Lightning in the west at night is not always followed by rain, nor can we find inherent causes as in the other case which necessitates rain as an effect. Thus it is seen that our generalizations, or major premises, are of all degrees of validity. In the ease of some, as the mortality of man, millions of cases have been observed and no exceptions found, but on the contrary, causes discovered whose operation ren- ders the result inevitable. In others, as, for instance, in the generalization once made, " All cloven-footed animals chew their cud, " not only had the examination of individual cases not been carried so far as in the former case when the generalization was made, but there were found no inherent causes residing in cloven- footed animals which make it necessary for them to chew their cud. That is, cloven feet and cud-chewing do not of necessity go together, and the case of the pig disproves the generalization. In practically no instance; however, is it possible for us to examine every case upon which a generali- zation is based; after examining a sufficient number of cases, and particularly if there are supporting causes, we are warranted in making the " inductive leap " or in proceeding at once to state our generali- .zation as a working hypothesis. Of course it is easy to see that if we have a wrong generalization, if our major premise is invalid, all that follows in our chain of reasoning will be worthless. This fact should ren- der us careful in making generalizations on too narrow a basis of induction. We may have observed that cer- THINKING 159 tain red-haired people of our acquaintance are quick- tempered, but we are not justified from this in making the general statement that all red-haired people are quick-tempered. Not only have we not examined a sufficient number of cases to warrant such a conclu- sion, but we have found in the red hair not even a cause of quick temper, but only an occasional con- comitant. Induction and deduction must go hand in hand in building up our world of knowledge. Induction gives us the particular facts out of which our system of knowledge is^ built, furnishes us with the data out of which general truths are formed ; deduction allows us to start with the generalization furnished us by induction, and from this vantage ground to organize and systematize our knowledge, and through the dis- covery of its relations, to unify it and make it usable. Deduction starts with a general truth and aslcs the question, " "What new relations are made necessary among particular facts by this truth? " Induction starts with particulars, and asks the question, " To what general truth do these separate facts lead? " Each method of reasoning needs the other. Deduc- tion must have induction to furnish the facts for its premises; induction must have deduction to organ- ize these separate facts into a unified body of knowl- edge. " He only sees well who sees the whole in the parts, and the parts in the whole." The inter- relation of induction and de- duction. EXERCISES Call you remember how some of your earlier concepts were built up, such as the concept, horse, city, river ? What concepts have you now which you are aware are 160 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION very meager? What is your concept of mountain f How many have you seen? Have you any concepts which you are working very hard to enrich? Recall some judgment which you have made and which proved to be false, and see whether you can now discover what was wrong with it. Do you find the trouble to be an inadequate concept? What constitutes "good judgment"? "poor judgment"? Did you ever make a mistake in an example in, say, per- centage by saying, "This is the base," when it proved not to be? What was the cause of the error? Can you recall any instance in which you made too hasty a generalization when you had observed but few cases upon which to base your premises? What of your reasoning which ' followed? See whether you can show that validity of reasoning rests back ultimately on correct perceptions. What are you doing at present to increase your power of thinking? SUGGESTED READINGS Angell, " Psychology," Chapters X-XII. Royce, " Outlines of Psychology," Chapters XI and XII. Dewey, " Psychology," Chapter VIII. James, " Psychology," Briefer Course, Chapters XIV, XVI, and XXII. HaUeck, " Psychology and Psychic Culture," Chapters VIII and IX. Schaeffer, " Thinking and Learning to Think," Clw- ters XVI and XVII. CHAPTER XI INSTINCT Each individual, busied with his own aiSairs and The in- blinded by his own interests, is likely to take himself herecUty. for granted and forget that he is a part of a great, unbroken procession of life, which began at the be- ginning and will go on till the end. Strange indeed would it be if all the generations who have lived, struggled, and died before us, and whose blood flows in our veins had left no impress upon us. We are a part of all that has gone before, and all that comes after us will be a part of us. Each generation re- ceives, through heredity, the products of the long ex- perience through which the race has passed. The generation receiving the gift to-day lives its own brief life, makes its own little contribution to the sum total and then passes on as millions have done before. Through heredity, the passions, the fears, and the tragedies of generations long since moldered to dust stir our blood and tone our nerves for the conflict of to-day. Every child born into the world has resting upon instinct him an unseen hand reaching out from the past, push- of race'ex. ing him out to meet his environment, and guiding penence. him in the start upon his journey. This impelling and guiding power from the past we call instinct. In the words of Mosso: " Instinct is the voice of past generations reverberating like a distant echo in the 161 162 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION cells of the nervous system. "We feel the breath, the advice, the experience of all men, from those who lived on acorns and struggled like wild beasts, dying naked ia the forest, down to the virtue and toil of our father, the fear and love of our mother." The child is born ignorant and helpless. He has no memory, no reason, no imagination. He has never performed a conscious act, and does not know how to begin. He must get started, but how 1 He has no experience to direct him, and he is unable to under- stand or imitate others of his kind. It is at this point that instinct comes to his rescue. The race has not given the child a mind ready made — ^that must de- velop ; but it has given him a ready-made nervous sys- tem, ready to respond with the proper movements when it receives the touch of its environment through the senses. And this nervous system has been so trained during a limitless past that its responses are the ones which are necessary for the welfare of its owner. It can do a hundred things without having to wait to learn them. Burdette says of the new- born child, " Nobody told him what to do. Nobody taught him. He knew. Placed suddenly on the guest list of this old caravansary, he knew his way at •once to two places in it — ^his bedroom and the dining room." A thousand generations of babies had done the same thing in the same way, and each had made it a little easier for this particular baby to do his part without learning how. Definition Instincts are the tendency to act in certain definite ways, without previous education and without a con- scious end in view. They are a tendency to act; for some movement, or motor adjustment, is the response to an instinct. They do not require previous educa- pf instinct. INSTINCT 163 tion, for none is possible with many instinctive acts: the duck does not have to be taught to swim or the baby to suck. They have no conscious end in view^ for the act follows the pressure of the proper stimu- lus upon the preorganized nervous system as the dis- charge of a gun follows the pressure of the finger upon the trigger. Says James : ' ' The cat runs after the mouse, runs or shows fight before the dog, avoids, falling from walls and trees, shuns fire and water, etc., not because he has any notion either of life or death, or of self, or of preservation. He has prob- ably attained to no one of these conceptions in such a way as to react definitely upon it. He acts in each, case separately, and simply because he cannot help it; being so framed that when that particular run- ning thing called a mouse appears in his field of vision he must pursue; that when that particular barking and obstreperous thing called a dog appears he must retire, if at a distance, and scratch if close by ; that he must withdraw his feet from water and his face from flame, etc. His nervous system is to a great extent a preorganized bundle of such reactions,. They are as fatal as sneezing, and as exactly corre- lated to their special excitants as it to its own. ' ' ^ You ask. Why does the lark rise on the flash of a sun- beam from his meadow to the morning sky leaving a trail of melody to mark his flight? "Why does the. beaver build his dam, and the oriole hang her nest? "Why are myriads of animal forms on the earth to- day doing what they were countless generations ago? Why does the lover seek the maid, and the mother cherish her young? Because the voice of the past- •"Psychology," p. 391. 12 164 THE MIND AND ITS EDUCATION speaks to the present, and the present has no choice hut to obey. Through Instincts are the habits of the race which it be- Sdi'viduai ^ queaths to the individual ; the individual takes these hablti^of*'"' for his start, and then modifies them through educa- therace, tion, and thus adapts himself to his environment. Through his instincts, the individual is enabled to short-cut racial experience, and begin at once on life activities which the race has been ages in acquiring. Instinct preserves to us what the race has achieved in experience, and so starts us out where the race left off. Unmodified Many of the lower animal forms act on instinct SL