Since mentality terminates naturally in outward conduct, the final
chapter in psychology has to be the chapter on the will. But the word
'will' can be used in a broader and in a narrower sense. In the broader
sense, it designates our entire capacity for impulsive and active life,
including our instinctive reactions and those forms of behavior that
have become secondarily automatic and semi-unconscious through frequent
repetition. In the narrower sense, acts of will are such acts only as
cannot be inattentively performed. A distinct idea of what they are, and
a deliberate _fiat_ on the mind's part, must precede their execution.
Such acts are often characterized by hesitation, and accompanied by a
feeling, altogether peculiar, of resolve, a feeling which may or may not
carry with it a further feeling of effort. In my earlier talks, I said
so much of our impulsive tendencies that I will restrict myself in what
follows to volition in this narrower sense of the term.
All our deeds were considered by the early psychologists to be due to a
peculiar faculty called the will, without whose fiat action could not
occur. Thoughts and impressions, being intrinsically inactive, were
supposed to produce conduct only through the intermediation of this
superior agent. Until they twitched its coat-tails, so to speak, no
outward behavior could occur. This doctrine was long ago exploded by the
discovery of the phenomena of reflex action, in which sensible
impressions, as you know, produce movement immediately and of
themselves. The doctrine may also be considered exploded as far as ideas
go.
The fact is that there is no sort of consciousness whatever, be it
sensation, feeling, or idea, which does not directly and of itself tend
to discharge into some motor effect. The motor effect need not always be
an outward stroke of behavior. It may be only an alteration of the
heart-beats or breathing, or a modification in the distribution of
blood, such as blushing or turning pale; or else a secretion of tears,
or what not. But, in any case, it is there in some shape when any
consciousness is there; and a belief as fundamental as any in modern
psychology is the belief at last attained that conscious processes of
any sort, conscious processes merely as such, _must_ pass over into
motion, open or concealed.
The least complicated case of this tendency is the case of a mind
possessed by only a single idea. If that idea be of an object connected
with a native impulse, the impulse will immediately proceed to
discharge. If it be the idea of a movement, the movement will occur.
Such a case of action from a single idea has been distinguished from
more complex cases by the name of 'ideo-motor' action, meaning action
without express decision or effort. Most of the habitual actions to
which we are trained are of this ideo-motor sort. We perceive, for
instance, that the door is open, and we rise and shut it; we perceive
some raisins in a dish before us, and extend our hand and carry one of
them to our mouth without interrupting the conversation; or, when lying
in bed, we suddenly think that we shall be late for breakfast, and
instantly we get up with no particular exertion or resolve. All the
ingrained procedures by which life is carried on--the manners and
customs, dressing and undressing, acts of salutation, etc.--are executed
in this semi-automatic way unhesitatingly and efficiently, the very
outermost margin of consciousness seeming to be concerned in them,
while the focus may be occupied with widely different things.
But now turn to a more complicated case. Suppose two thoughts to be in
the mind together, of which one, A, taken alone, would discharge itself
in a certain action, but of which the other, B, suggests an action of a
different sort, or a consequence of the first action calculated to make
us shrink. The psychologists now say that the second idea, B, will
probably arrest or _inhibit_ the motor effects of the first idea, A. One
word, then, about 'inhibition' in general, to make this particular case
more clear.
One of the most interesting discoveries of physiology was the discovery,
made simultaneously in France and Germany fifty years ago, that nerve
currents do not only start muscles into action, but may check action
already going on or keep it from occurring as it otherwise might.
_Nerves of arrest_ were thus distinguished alongside of motor nerves.
The pneumogastric nerve, for example, if stimulated, arrests the
movements of the heart: the splanchnic nerve arrests those of the
intestines, if already begun. But it soon appeared that this was too
narrow a way of looking at the matter, and that arrest is not so much
the specific function of certain nerves as a general function which any
part of the nervous system may exert upon other parts under the
appropriate conditions. The higher centres, for example, seem to exert a
constant inhibitive influence on the excitability of those below. The
reflexes of an animal with its hemispheres wholly or in part removed
become exaggerated. You all know that common reflex in dogs, whereby, if
you scratch the animal's side, the corresponding hind leg will begin to
make scratching movements, usually in the air. Now in dogs with
mutilated hemispheres this scratching reflex is so incessant that, as
Goltz first described them, the hair gets all worn off their sides. In
idiots, the functions of the hemispheres being largely in abeyance, the
lower impulses, not inhibited, as they would be in normal human beings,
often express themselves in most odious ways. You know also how any
higher emotional tendency will quench a lower one. Fear arrests
appetite, maternal love annuls fear, respect checks sensuality, and the
like; and in the more subtile manifestations of the moral life, whenever
an ideal stirring is suddenly quickened into intensity, it is as if the
whole scale of values of our motives changed its equilibrium. The force
of old temptations vanishes, and what a moment ago was impossible is now
not only possible, but easy, because of their inhibition. This has been
well called the 'expulsive power of the higher emotion.'
It is easy to apply this notion of inhibition to the case of our
ideational processes. I am lying in bed, for example, and think it is
time to get up; but alongside of this thought there is present to my
mind a realization of the extreme coldness of the morning and the
pleasantness of the warm bed. In such a situation the motor consequences
of the first idea are blocked; and I may remain for half an hour or more
with the two ideas oscillating before me in a kind of deadlock, which is
what we call the state of hesitation or deliberation. In a case like
this the deliberation can be resolved and the decision reached in either
of two ways:--
(1) I may forget for a moment the thermometric conditions, and then the
idea of getting up will immediately discharge into act: I shall suddenly
find that I have got up--or
(2) Still mindful of the freezing temperature, the thought of the duty
of rising may become so pungent that it determines action in spite of
inhibition. In the latter case, I have a sense of energetic moral
effort, and consider that I have done a virtuous act.
All cases of wilful action properly so called, of choice after
hesitation and deliberation, may be conceived after one of these latter
patterns. So you see that volition, in the narrower sense, takes place
only when there are a number of conflicting systems of ideas, and
depends on our having a complex field of consciousness. The interesting
thing to note is the extreme delicacy of the inhibitive machinery. A
strong and urgent motor idea in the focus may be neutralized and made
inoperative by the presence of the very faintest contradictory idea in
the margin. For instance, I hold out my forefinger, and with closed eyes
try to realize as vividly as possible that I hold a revolver in my hand
and am pulling the trigger. I can even now fairly feel my finger
quivering with the tendency to contract; and, if it were hitched to a
recording apparatus, it would certainly betray its state of tension by
registering incipient movements. Yet it does not actually crook, and the
movement of pulling the trigger is not performed. Why not?
Simply because, all concentrated though I am upon the idea of the
movement, I nevertheless also realize the total conditions of the
experiment, and in the back of my mind, so to speak, or in its fringe
and margin, have the simultaneous idea that the movement is not to take
place. The mere presence of that marginal intention, without effort,
urgency, or emphasis, or any special reinforcement from my attention,
suffices to the inhibitive effect.
And this is why so few of the ideas that flit through our minds do, in
point of fact, produce their motor consequences. Life would be a curse
and a care for us if every fleeting fancy were to do so. Abstractly, the
law of ideo-motor action is true; but in the concrete our fields of
consciousness are always so complex that the inhibiting margin keeps the
centre inoperative most of the time. In all this, you see, I speak as if
ideas by their mere presence or absence determined behavior, and as if
between the ideas themselves on the one hand and the conduct on the
other there were no room for any third intermediate principle of
activity, like that called 'the will.'
If you are struck by the materialistic or fatalistic doctrines which
seem to follow this conception, I beg you to suspend your judgment for a
moment, as I shall soon have something more to say about the matter.
But, meanwhile yielding one's self to the mechanical conception of the
psychophysical organism, nothing is easier than to indulge in a picture
of the fatalistic character of human life. Man's conduct appears as the
mere resultant of all his various impulsions and inhibitions. One
object, by its presence, makes us act: another object checks our action.
Feelings aroused and ideas suggested by objects sway us one way and
another: emotions complicate the game by their mutual inhibitive
effects, the higher abolishing the lower or perhaps being itself swept
away. The life in all this becomes prudential and moral; but the
psychologic agents in the drama may be described, you see, as nothing
but the 'ideas' themselves,--ideas for the whole system of which what we
call the 'soul' or character' or 'will' of the person is nothing but a
collective name. As Hume said, the ideas are themselves the actors, the
stage, the theatre, the spectators, and the play. This is the so-called
'associationist' psychology, brought down to its radical expression: it
is useless to ignore its power as a conception. Like all conceptions,
when they become clear and lively enough, this conception has a strong
tendency to impose itself upon belief; and psychologists trained on
biological lines usually adopt it as the last word of science on the
subject. No one can have an adequate notion of modern psychological
theory unless he has at some time apprehended this view in the full
force of its simplicity.
Let us humor it for a while, for it has advantages in the way of
exposition.
_Voluntary action, then, is at all times a resultant of the compounding
of our impulsions with our inhibitions._
From this it immediately follows that there will be two types of will,
in one of which impulsions will predominate, in the other inhibitions.
We may speak of them, if you like, as the precipitate and the obstructed
will, respectively. When fully pronounced, they are familiar to
everybody. The extreme example of the precipitate will is the maniac:
his ideas discharge into action so rapidly, his associative processes
are so extravagantly lively, that inhibitions have no time to arrive,
and he says and does whatever pops into his head without a moment of
hesitation.
Certain melancholiacs furnish the extreme example of the over-inhibited
type. Their minds are cramped in a fixed emotion of fear or
helplessness, their ideas confined to the one thought that for them life
is impossible. So they show a condition of perfect 'abulia,' or
inability to will or act. They cannot change their posture or speech or
execute the simplest command.
The different races of men show different temperaments in this regard.
The Southern races are commonly accounted the more impulsive and
precipitate: the English race, especially our New England branch of it,
is supposed to be all sicklied over with repressive forms of
self-consciousness, and condemned to express itself through a jungle of
scruples and checks.
The highest form of character, however, abstractly considered, must be
full of scruples and inhibitions. But action, in such a character, far
from being paralyzed, will succeed in energetically keeping on its way,
sometimes overpowering the resistances, sometimes steering along the
line where they lie thinnest.
Just as our extensor muscles act most truly when a simultaneous
contraction of the flexors guides and steadies them; so the mind of him
whose fields of consciousness are complex, and who, with the reasons for
the action, sees the reasons against it, and yet, instead of being
palsied, acts in the way that takes the whole field into
consideration,--so, I say, is such a mind the ideal sort of mind that we
should seek to reproduce in our pupils. Purely impulsive action, or
action that proceeds to extremities regardless of consequences, on the
other hand, is the easiest action in the world, and the lowest in type.
Any one can show energy, when made quite reckless. An Oriental despot
requires but little ability: as long as he lives, he succeeds, for he
has absolutely his own way; and, when the world can no longer endure the
horror of him, he is assassinated. But not to proceed immediately to
extremities, to be still able to act energetically under an array of
inhibitions,--that indeed is rare and difficult. Cavour, when urged to
proclaim martial law in 1859, refused to do so, saying: "Any one can
govern in that way. I will be constitutional." Your parliamentary
rulers, your Lincoln, your Gladstone, are the strongest type of man,
because they accomplish results under the most intricate possible
conditions. We think of Napoleon Bonaparte as a colossal monster of
will-power, and truly enough he was so. But, from the point of view of
the psychological machinery, it would be hard to say whether he or
Gladstone was the larger volitional quantity; for Napoleon disregarded
all the usual inhibitions, and Gladstone, passionate as he was,
scrupulously considered them in his statesmanship.
A familiar example of the paralyzing power of scruples is the inhibitive
effect of conscientiousness upon conversation. Nowhere does conversation
seem to have flourished as brilliantly as in France during the last
century. But, if we read old French memoirs, we see how many brakes of
scrupulosity which tie our tongues to-day were then removed. Where
mendacity, treachery, obscenity, and malignity find unhampered
expression, talk can be brilliant indeed. But its flame waxes dim where
the mind is stitched all over with conscientious fear of violating the
moral and social proprieties.
The teacher often is confronted in the schoolroom with an abnormal type
of will, which we may call the 'balky will.' Certain children, if they
do not succeed in doing a thing immediately, remain completely
inhibited in regard to it: it becomes literally impossible for them to
understand it if it be an intellectual problem, or to do it if it be an
outward operation, as long as this particular inhibited condition lasts.
Such children are usually treated as sinful, and are punished; or else
the teacher pits his or her will against the child's will, considering
that the latter must be 'broken.' "Break your child's will, in order
that it may not perish," wrote John Wesley. "Break its will as soon as
it can speak plainly--or even before it can speak at all. It should be
forced to do as it is told, even if you have to whip it ten times
running. Break its will, in order that its soul may live." Such
will-breaking is always a scene with a great deal of nervous wear and
tear on both sides, a bad state of feeling left behind it, and the
victory not always with the would-be will-breaker.
When a situation of the kind is once fairly developed, and the child is
all tense and excited inwardly, nineteen times out of twenty it is best
for the teacher to apperceive the case as one of neural pathology rather
than as one of moral culpability. So long as the inhibiting sense of
impossibility remains in the child's mind, he will continue unable to
get beyond the obstacle. The aim of the teacher should then be to make
him simply forget. Drop the subject for the time, divert the mind to
something else: then, leading the pupil back by some circuitous line of
association, spring it on him again before he has time to recognize it,
and as likely as not he will go over it now without any difficulty. It
is in no other way that we overcome balkiness in a horse: we divert his
attention, do something to his nose or ear, lead him round in a circle,
and thus get him over a place where flogging would only have made him
more invincible. A tactful teacher will never let these strained
situations come up at all.
You perceive now, my friends, what your general or abstract duty is as
teachers. Although you have to generate in your pupils a large stock of
ideas, any one of which may be inhibitory, yet you must also see to it
that no habitual hesitancy or paralysis of the will ensues, and that the
pupil still retains his power of vigorous action. Psychology can state
your problem in these terms, but you see how impotent she is to furnish
the elements of its practical solution. When all is said and done, and
your best efforts are made, it will probably remain true that the
result will depend more on a certain native tone or temper in the
pupil's psychological constitution than on anything else. Some persons
appear to have a naturally poor focalization of the field of
consciousness; and in such persons actions hang slack, and inhibitions
seem to exert peculiarly easy sway.
But let us now close in a little more closely on this matter of the
education of the will. Your task is to build up a _character_ in your
pupils; and a character, as I have so often said, consists in an
organized set of habits of reaction. Now of what do such habits of
reaction themselves consist? They consist of tendencies to act
characteristically when certain ideas possess us, and to refrain
characteristically when possessed by other ideas.
Our volitional habits depend, then, first, on what the stock of ideas is
which we have; and, second, on the habitual coupling of the several
ideas with action or inaction respectively. How is it when an
alternative is presented to you for choice, and you are uncertain what
you ought to do? You first hesitate, and then you deliberate. And in
what does your deliberation consist? It consists in trying to
apperceive the ease successively by a number of different ideas, which
seem to fit it more or less, until at last you hit on one which seems to
fit it exactly. If that be an idea which is a customary forerunner of
action in you, which enters into one of your maxims of positive
behavior, your hesitation ceases, and you act immediately. If, on the
other hand, it be an idea which carries inaction as its habitual result,
if it ally itself with _prohibition_, then you unhesitatingly refrain.
The problem is, you see, to find the right idea or conception for the
case. This search for the right conception may take days or weeks.
I spoke as if the action were easy when the conception once is found.
Often it is so, but it may be otherwise; and, when it is otherwise, we
find ourselves at the very centre of a moral situation, into which I
should now like you to look with me a little nearer.
The proper conception, the true head of classification, may be hard to
attain; or it may be one with which we have contracted no settled habits
of action. Or, again, the action to which it would prompt may be
dangerous and difficult; or else inaction may appear deadly cold and
negative when our impulsive feeling is hot. In either of these latter
cases it is hard to hold the right idea steadily enough before the
attention to let it exert its adequate effects. Whether it be
stimulative or inhibitive, it is _too reasonable_ for us; and the more
instinctive passional propensity then tends to extrude it from our
consideration. We shy away from the thought of it. It twinkles and goes
out the moment it appears in the margin of our consciousness; and we
need a resolute effort of voluntary attention to drag it into the focus
of the field, and to keep it there long enough for its associative and
motor effects to be exerted. Every one knows only too well how the mind
flinches from looking at considerations hostile to the reigning mood of
feeling.
Once brought, however, in this way to the centre of the field of
consciousness, and held there, the reasonable idea will exert these
effects inevitably; for the laws of connection between our consciousness
and our nervous system provide for the action then taking place. Our
moral effort, properly so called, terminates in our holding fast to the
appropriate idea.
If, then, you are asked, "_In what does a moral act consist_ when
reduced to its simplest and most elementary form?" you can make only
one reply. You can say that _it consists in the effort of attention by
which we hold fast to an idea_ which but for that effort of attention
would be driven out of the mind by the other psychological tendencies
that are there. _To think_, in short, is the secret of will, just as it
is the secret of memory.
This comes out very clearly in the kind of excuse which we most
frequently hear from persons who find themselves confronted by the
sinfulness or harmfulness of some part of their behavior. "I never
_thought_," they say. "I never _thought_ how mean the action was, I
never _thought_ of these abominable consequences." And what do we retort
when they say this? We say: "Why _didn't_ you think? What were you there
for but to think?" And we read them a moral lecture on their
irreflectiveness.
The hackneyed example of moral deliberation is the case of an habitual
drunkard under temptation. He has made a resolve to reform, but he is
now solicited again by the bottle. His moral triumph or failure
literally consists in his finding the right _name_ for the case. If he
says that it is a case of not wasting good liquor already poured out, or
a case of not being churlish and unsociable when in the midst of
friends, or a case of learning something at last about a brand of
whiskey which he never met before, or a case of celebrating a public
holiday, or a case of stimulating himself to a more energetic resolve in
favor of abstinence than any he has ever yet made, then he is lost. His
choice of the wrong name seals his doom. But if, in spite of all the
plausible good names with which his thirsty fancy so copiously furnishes
him, he unwaveringly clings to the truer bad name, and apperceives the
case as that of "being a drunkard, being a drunkard, being a drunkard,"
his feet are planted on the road to salvation. He saves himself by
thinking rightly.
Thus are your pupils to be saved: first, by the stock of ideas with
which you furnish them; second, by the amount of voluntary attention
that they can exert in holding to the right ones, however unpalatable;
and, third, by the several habits of acting definitely on these latter
to which they have been successfully trained.
In all this the power of voluntarily attending is the point of the whole
procedure. Just as a balance turns on its knife-edges, so on it our
moral destiny turns. You remember that, when we were talking of the
subject of attention, we discovered how much more intermittent and
brief our acts of voluntary attention are than is commonly supposed. If
they were all summed together, the time that they occupy would cover an
almost incredibly small portion of our lives. But I also said, you will
remember, that their brevity was not in proportion to their
significance, and that I should return to the subject again. So I return
to it now. It is not the mere size of a thing which, constitutes its
importance: it is its position in the organism to which it belongs. Our
acts of voluntary attention, brief and fitful as they are, are
nevertheless momentous and critical, determining us, as they do, to
higher or lower destinies. The exercise of voluntary attention in the
schoolroom must therefore be counted one of the most important points of
training that take place there; and the first-rate teacher, by the
keenness of the remoter interests which he is able to awaken, will
provide abundant opportunities for its occurrence. I hope that you
appreciate this now without any further explanation.
I have been accused of holding up before you, in the course of these
talks, a mechanical and even a materialistic view of the mind. I have
called it an organism and a machine. I have spoken of its reaction on
the environment as the essential thing about it; and I have referred
this, either openly or implicitly, to the construction of the nervous
system. I have, in consequence, received notes from some of you, begging
me to be more explicit on this point; and to let you know frankly
whether I am a complete materialist, or not.
Now in these lectures I wish to be strictly practical and useful, and to
keep free from all speculative complications. Nevertheless, I do not
wish to leave any ambiguity about my own position; and I will therefore
say, in order to avoid all misunderstanding, that in no sense do I count
myself a materialist. I cannot see how such a thing as our consciousness
can possibly be _produced_ by a nervous machinery, though I can
perfectly well see how, if 'ideas' do accompany the workings of the
machinery, the _order_ of the ideas might very well follow exactly the
_order_ of the machine's operations. Our habitual associations of ideas,
trains of thought, and sequences of action, might thus be consequences
of the succession of currents in our nervous systems. And the possible
stock of ideas which a man's free spirit would have to choose from
might depend exclusively on the native and acquired powers of his brain.
If this were all, we might indeed adopt the fatalist conception which I
sketched for you but a short while ago. Our ideas would be determined by
brain currents, and these by purely mechanical laws.
But, after what we have just seen,--namely, the part played by voluntary
attention in volition,--a belief in free will and purely spiritual
causation is still open to us. The duration and amount of this attention
_seem_ within certain limits indeterminate. We _feel_ as if we could
make it really more or less, and as if our free action in this regard
were a genuine critical point in nature,--a point on which our destiny
and that of others might hinge. The whole question of free will
concentrates itself, then, at this same small point: "Is or is not the
appearance of indetermination at this point an illusion?"
It is plain that such a question can be decided only by general
analogies, and not by accurate observations. The free-willist believes
the appearance to be a reality: the determinist believes that it is an
illusion. I myself hold with the free-willists,--not because I cannot
conceive the fatalist theory clearly, or because I fail to understand
its plausibility, but simply because, if free will _were_ true, it would
be absurd to have the belief in it fatally forced on our acceptance.
Considering the inner fitness of things, one would rather think that the
very first act of a will endowed with freedom should be to sustain the
belief in the freedom itself. I accordingly believe freely in my
freedom; I do so with the best of scientific consciences, knowing that
the predetermination of the amount of my effort of attention can never
receive objective proof, and hoping that, whether you follow my example
in this respect or not, it will at least make you see that such
psychological and psychophysical theories as I hold do not necessarily
force a man to become a fatalist or a materialist.
Let me say one more final word now about the will, and therewith
conclude both that important subject and these lectures.
There are two types of will. There are also two types of inhibition. We
may call them inhibition by repression or by negation, and inhibition by
substitution, respectively. The difference between them is that, in the
case of inhibition by repression, both the inhibited idea and the
inhibiting idea, the impulsive idea and the idea that negates it, remain
along with each other in consciousness, producing a certain inward
strain or tension there: whereas, in inhibition by substitution, the
inhibiting idea supersedes altogether the idea which it inhibits, and
the latter quickly vanishes from the field.
For instance, your pupils are wandering in mind, are listening to a
sound outside the window, which presently grows interesting enough to
claim all their attention. You can call the latter back again by
bellowing at them not to listen to those sounds, but to keep their minds
on their books or on what you are saying. And, by thus keeping them
conscious that your eye is sternly on them, you may produce a good
effect. But it will be a wasteful effect and an inferior effect; for the
moment you relax your supervision the attractive disturbance, always
there soliciting their curiosity, will overpower them, and they will be
just as they were before: whereas, if, without saying anything about the
street disturbances, you open a counter-attraction by starting some very
interesting talk or demonstration yourself, they will altogether forget
the distracting incident, and without any effort follow you along.
There are many interests that can never be inhibited by the way of
negation. To a man in love, for example, it is literally impossible, by
any effort of will, to annul his passion. But let 'some new planet swim
into his ken,' and the former idol will immediately cease to engross his
mind.
It is clear that in general we ought, whenever we can, to employ the
method of inhibition by substitution. He whose life is based upon the
word 'no,' who tells the truth because a lie is wicked, and who has
constantly to grapple with his envious and cowardly and mean
propensities, is in an inferior situation in every respect to what he
would be if the love of truth and magnanimity positively possessed him
from the outset, and he felt no inferior temptations. Your born
gentleman is certainly, for this world's purposes, a more valuable being
than your "Crump, with his grunting resistance to his native devils,"
even though in God's sight the latter may, as the Catholic theologians
say, be rolling up great stores of 'merit.'
Spinoza long ago wrote in his Ethics that anything that a man can avoid
under the notion that it is bad he may also avoid under the notion that
something else is good. He who habitually acts _sub specie mali_, under
the negative notion, the notion of the bad, is called a slave by
Spinoza. To him who acts habitually under the notion of good he gives
the name of freeman. See to it now, I beg you, that you make freemen of
your pupils by habituating them to act, whenever possible, under the
notion of a good. Get them habitually to tell the truth, not so much
through showing them the wickedness of lying as by arousing their
enthusiasm for honor and veracity. Wean them from their native cruelty
by imparting to them some of your own positive sympathy with an animal's
inner springs of joy. And, in the lessons which you may be legally
obliged to conduct upon the bad effects of alcohol, lay less stress than
the books do on the drunkard's stomach, kidneys, nerves, and social
miseries, and more on the blessings of having an organism kept in
lifelong possession of its full youthful elasticity by a sweet, sound
blood, to which stimulants and narcotics are unknown, and to which the
morning sun and air and dew will daily come as sufficiently powerful
intoxicants.
I have now ended these talks. If to some of you the things I have said
seem obvious or trivial, it is possible that they may appear less so
when, in the course of a year or two, you find yourselves noticing and
apperceiving events in the schoolroom a little differently, in
consequence of some of the conceptions I have tried to make more clear.
I cannot but think that to apperceive your pupil as a little sensitive,
impulsive, associative, and reactive organism, partly fated and partly
free, will lead to a better intelligence of all his ways. Understand
him, then, as such a subtle little piece of machinery. And if, in
addition, you can also see him _sub specie boni_, and love him as well,
you will be in the best possible position for becoming perfect teachers.
#TALKS TO STUDENTS#