Produced by David Newman, Dave Macfarlane and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
#TALKS TO TEACHERS#
ON PSYCHOLOGY: AND TO
STUDENTS ON SOME OF LIFE'S
IDEALS, By WILLIAM JAMES
#NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY#
#1925#
#COPYRIGHT, 1899, 1900#
#BY WILLIAM JAMES#
#PRESS OF GEO. H. ELLIS CO. (INC.) BOSTON#
PREFACE.
In 1892 I was asked by the Harvard Corporation to give a few public
lectures on psychology to the Cambridge teachers. The talks now printed
form the substance of that course, which has since then been delivered
at various places to various teacher-audiences. I have found by
experience that what my hearers seem least to relish is analytical
technicality, and what they most care for is concrete practical
application. So I have gradually weeded out the former, and left the
latter unreduced; and now, that I have at last written out the lectures,
they contain a minimum of what is deemed 'scientific' in psychology, and
are practical and popular in the extreme.
Some of my colleagues may possibly shake their heads at this; but in
taking my cue from what has seemed to me to be the feeling of the
audiences I believe that I am shaping my book so as to satisfy the more
genuine public need.
Teachers, of course, will miss the minute divisions, subdivisions, and
definitions, the lettered and numbered headings, the variations of type,
and all the other mechanical artifices on which they are accustomed to
prop their minds. But my main desire has been to make them conceive,
and, if possible, reproduce sympathetically in their imagination, the
mental life of their pupil as the sort of active unity which he himself
feels it to be. _He_ doesn't chop himself into distinct processes and
compartments; and it would have frustrated this deeper purpose of my
book to make it look, when printed, like a Baedeker's handbook of travel
or a text-book of arithmetic. So far as books printed like this book
force the fluidity of the facts upon the young teacher's attention, so
far I am sure they tend to do his intellect a service, even though they
may leave unsatisfied a craving (not altogether without its legitimate
grounds) for more nomenclature, head-lines, and subdivisions.
Readers acquainted with my larger books on Psychology will meet much
familiar phraseology. In the chapters on habit and memory I have even
copied several pages verbatim, but I do not know that apology is needed
for such plagiarism as this.
The talks to students, which conclude the volume, were written in
response to invitations to deliver 'addresses' to students at women's
colleges. The first one was to the graduating class of the Boston Normal
School of Gymnastics. Properly, it continues the series of talks to
teachers. The second and the third address belong together, and continue
another line of thought.
I wish I were able to make the second, 'On a Certain Blindness in Human
Beings,' more impressive. It is more than the mere piece of
sentimentalism which it may seem to some readers. It connects itself
with a definite view of the world and of our moral relations to the
same. Those who have done me the honor of reading my volume of
philosophic essays will recognize that I mean the pluralistic or
individualistic philosophy. According to that philosophy, the truth is
too great for any one actual mind, even though that mind be dubbed 'the
Absolute,' to know the whole of it. The facts and worths of life need
many cognizers to take them in. There is no point of view absolutely
public and universal. Private and uncommunicable perceptions always
remain over, and the worst of it is that those who look for them from
the outside never know _where_.
The practical consequence of such a philosophy is the well-known
democratic respect for the sacredness of individuality,--is, at any
rate, the outward tolerance of whatever is not itself intolerant. These
phrases are so familiar that they sound now rather dead in our ears.
Once they had a passionate inner meaning. Such a passionate inner
meaning they may easily acquire again if the pretension of our nation
to inflict its own inner ideals and institutions _vi et armis_ upon
Orientals should meet with a resistance as obdurate as so far it has
been gallant and spirited. Religiously and philosophically, our ancient
national doctrine of live and let live may prove to have a far deeper
meaning than our people now seem to imagine it to possess.
CAMBRIDGE, MASS., March, 1899.