OUR STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS 17 even though in some directions of inquiry there may be promising speculations to be found. For our present purposes I shall therefore dismiss them entirely, and turn to mere description. This state of things was what I had in mind when, a moment ago, I said there was no 'new psychology' worthy of the name.
We have thus fields of consciousness, — that is the first general fact; and the second general fact is that the concrete fields are always complex. They contain sensations of our bodies and of the ob- jects around us, memories of past experiences and thoughts of distant things, feelings of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, desires and aversions, and other emotional conditions, together with determinations of the will, in every variety of permutation and combination.
In most of our concrete states of consciousness all these different classes of ingredients are found simultaneously present to some degree, though the relative proportion they bear to one another is very shifting. One state will seem to be com- posed of hardly anything but sensations, another of hardly anything but memories, etc. But around the sensation, if one consider carefully, there will always be some fringe of thought or will, and 18 TALKS TO TEACHERS around the memory some margin or penumbra of emotion or sensation..
In most of our fields of consciousness there is a core of sensation that is very pronounced. You, for example, now, although you are also thinking and feeling, are getting through your eyes sensa- tions of my face and figure, and through your ears sensations of my voice. The sensations are the centre or focus, the thoughts and feelings the mar- gin, of your actually present conscious field.
On the other hand, some object of thought, some distant image, may have become the focus of your mental attention even while I am speak- ing,— your mind, in short, may have wandered from the lecture; and, in that case, the sensations of my face and voice, although not absolutely vanishing from your conscious field, may have taken up there a very faint and marginal place.
Again, to take another sort of variation, some feeling connected with your own body may have passed from a marginal to a focal place, even while I speak.
The expressions 'focal object' and 'marginal object,' which we owe to Mr. Lloyd Morgan, re- quire, I think, no further explanation. The dis- tinction they embody is a very important one, and THE FIELDS OF CONSCIOUSNESS 19 they are the first technical terms which I shall ask you to remember.
In the successive mutations of our fields of con- sciousness, the process by which one dissolves into another is often very gradual, and all sorts of inner rearrangements of contents occur. Some- times the focus remains but little changed, while the margin alters rapidly. Sometimes the focus alters, and the margin stays. Sometimes focus and margin change places. Sometimes, again, abrupt alterations of the whole field occur. There can seldom be a sharp description. All we know is that, for the most part, each field has a sort of practical unity for its possessor, and that from this practical point of view Ave can class a field with other fields similar to it, by calling it a state of emotion, of perplexity, of sensation, of abstract thought, of volition, and the like.
Vague and hazy as such an account of our stream of consciousness may be, it is at least se- cure from positive error and free from admixture of conjecture or hypothesis. An influential school of psychology, seeking to avoid haziness of out- line, has tried to make things appear more exact and scientific by making the analysis more sharp.
20 TALKS TO TEACHERS The various fields of consciousness, according to this school, result from a definite number of per- fectly definite elementary mental states, mechani- cally associated into a mosaic or chemically com- bined. According to some thinkers, — Spencer, for example, or Taine, — these resolve themselves at last into little elementary psychic particles or atoms of 'mind-stuflf,' out of which all the more immediately known mental states are said to be built up. Locke introduced this theory in a somewhat vague form. Simple 'ideas' of sensa- tion and reflection, as he called them, were for him the bricks of which our mental architecture is built up. If I ever have to refer to this theory again, I shall refer to it as the theory of 'ideas.' But I shall try to steer clear of it altogether. Whether it be true or false, it is at any rate only conjectural; and, for your practical purposes as teachers, the more unpretending conception of the stream of consciousness, with its total waves or fields incessantly changing, will amply suffice.* * In the light of some of the expectations that are abroad concern- ing the ' new psychology,' it is instructive to read the unusually can- did confession of its founder Wundt, after his thirty years of labora- tory-experience: "The service which it [the experimental method] can yield consists essentially in perfecting our inner observation, or rather, as I believe.
PROFESSOR "WTTNDT's VIEWS 21 in making this really possible, in any exact sense. Well, has our experimental self-observation, so understood, already accomplished aught of importance? No general answer to this question can be given, because in the unfinished state of our science, there is, even inside of the experimental lines of inquiry, no universally accepted body of psychologic doctrine...
" In such a discord of opinions (comprehensible enough at a time of uncertain and groping development), the individual inquirer can only tell for what views and insights he himself has to thank tho newer methods. And if I were asked in what for me the worth of ex- perimental observation in psychology has consisted, and still consists, I should say that it has given me an entirely new idea of the nature and connection of our inner processes. I learned in the achievements of the sense of sight to apprehend the fact of creative mental synthe- sis...From my inquiry into time-relations, etc.,...I attained an insight into the close union of all those psychic functions usually sepa- rated by artificial abstractions and names, such as ideation, feeling, will; and I saw the indivisibility and inner homogeneity, in all its phases, of the mental life. The chronometric study of association- processes finally showed me that the notion of distinct mental 'images' [reproducirten Vorslellungen] was one of those numerous self-decep- tions which are no sooner stamped in a verbal term than they forth- with thrust non-existent fictions into the place of the reality. I learned to understand an 'idea* as a process no less melting and fleeting than an act of feeling or of will, and I comprehended the older doctrine of association of 'ideas' to be no longer tenable...Besides all this, experimental observation yielded much other information about the span of consciousness, the rapidity of certain processes, the exact numerical value of certain psycho-physical data, and the like. But I hold all these more special results to be relatively insignificant by-products, and by no means the important thing." — Philosophische Studien, x. 121-124. The whole passage should be read. As I interpret it, it amounts to a complete espousal of the vaguer conception of the stream of thought, and a complete renunciation of the whole business, still 80 industriously carried on in text-books, of chopping up ' tho mind' into distinct units of composition or function, numbering these oCf, and labelling them by technical names.
III.
THE CHILD AS A BEHAVING ORGANISM I WISH now to continue the description of the peculiarities of the stream of consciousness by asking whether we can in any intelHgible way assign its functions.
It has two functions that are obvious: it leads to knowledge, and it leads to action.
Can we say which of these functions is the more essential?
An old historic divergence of opinion comes in here. Popular belief has always tended to esti- mate the worth of a man's mental processes by their effects upon his practical life. But philo- sophers have usually cherished a different view. "Man's supreme glory," they have said, "is to be a rational being, to know absolute and eternal and universal truth. The uses of his intellect for practical affairs are therefore subordinate matters. 'The theoretic hfe' is his soul's genuine concern." Nothing can be more different in its results for our personal attitude than to take sides with one THE TWO VIEWS OF OUR RHND 23 or the other of these views, and emphasize the practical or the theoretical ideal. In the latter case, abstraction from the emotions and passions and withdrawal from the strife of hmnan affairs would be not only pardonable, but praiseworthy; and all that makes for quiet and contemplation should be regarded as conducive to the highest human perfection. In the former, the man of con- templation would be treated as only half a human being, passion and practical resource would be- come once more glories of our race, a concrete victory over this earth's outward powers of dark- ness would appear an equivalent for any amount of passive spiritual culture, and conduct would remain as the test of every education worthy of the name.
It is impossible to disguise the fact that in the psychology of our own day the emphasis is trans- ferred from the mind's purely rational function, where Plato and Aristotle, and what one may call the whole classic tradition in philosophy had placed it, to the so long neglected practical side. The theory of evolution is mainly responsible for this. Man, we now have reason to believe, has been evolved from infra-human ancestors, in whom pure reason hardly existed, if at all, and whose 24 TALKS TO TEACHERS mind, so far as it can have had any function, would appear to have been an organ for adapting their movements to the impressions received from the environment, so as to escape the better from destruction. Consciousness would thus seem in the first instance to be nothing but a sort of super- added biological perfection, — useless unless it prompted to useful conduct, and inexplicable apart from that consideration.
Deep in our own nature the biological founda- tions of our consciousness persist, undisguised and undiminished. Our sensations are here to attract us or to deter us, our memories to warn or encour- age us, our feelings to impel, and our thoughts to restrain our behavior, so that on the whole we may prosper and our days be long in the land. Whatever of transmundane metaphysical insight or of practically inapplicable aesthetic perception or ethical sentiment we may carry in our interiors might at this rate be regarded as only part of the incidental excess of function that necessarily ac- companies the working of every complex machine.
I shall ask you now — not meaning at all thereby to close the theoretic question, but merely because it seems to me the point of view likely to be of greatest practical use to you as teachers — THE BIOLOGICAL VIEW 25 to adopt with me, in this course of lectures, the biological conception, as thus expressed, and to lay your own emphasis on the fact that man, whatever else he may be, is primarily a practical being, whose mind is given him to aid in adapting him to this world's life.
In the learning of all matters, we have to start with some one deep aspect of the question, ab- stracting it as if it were the only aspect; and then we gradually correct ourselves by adding those neglected other features which complete the case. No one beheves more strongly than I do that what our senses know as 'this world' is only one portion of our mind's total environment and ob- ject. Yet, because it is the primal portion, it is the sine qua non of all the rest. If you grasp the facts about it firmly, you may proceed to higher regions undisturbed. As our time must be so short together, I prefer being elementary and fundamental to being complete, so I propose to you to hold fast to the ultra-simple point of view.
The reasons why I call it so fundamental can be easily told.
First, human and animal psychology thereby become less discontinuous. I know that to some 26 TALKS TO TEACHERS of you this will hardly seem an attractive reason, but there are others whom it will affect.
Second, mental action is conditioned by brain action, and runs parallel therewith. But the brain, so far as we understand it, is given us for practical behavior. Every current that runs into it from skin or eye or ear runs out again into muscles, glands, or viscera, and helps to adapt the animal to the environment from which the current came. It therefore generalizes and simplifies our view to treat the brain life and the mental life as having one fundamental kind of purpose.
Third, those very functions of the mind that do not refer directly to this world's environment, the ethical Utopias, sesthetic visions, insights into eternal truth, and fanciful logical combinations, could never be carried on at all by a human indi- vidual, unless the mind that produced them in him were also able to i^roduce more practically useful products. The latter are thus the more essential, or at least the more primordial results.
Fourth, the inessential 'unpractical' activities are themselves far more connected with our be- havior and our adaptation to the environment than at first sight might appear. No truth, however abstract, is ever perceived, that will not probably ALL CONSCIOUSNESS LEADS TO ACTION 27 at some time influence our earthly action. You must remember that, when I talk of action here, I mean action in the widest sense. I mean speech, I mean writing, I mean yeses and noes, and ten- dencies 'from' things and tendencies 'toward' things, and emotional determinations; and I mean them in the future as well as in the immediate present. As I talk here, and you listen, it might seem as if no action followed. You might call it a purely theoretic process, with no practical result. But it must have a practical result. It cannot take place at all and leave your conduct unaffected. If not to-day, then on some far future day, you will answer some question differently by reason of what you are thinking now. Some of you will be led by my words into new veins of inquiry, into reading special books. These will develop your opinion, whether for or against. That opinion will in turn be expressed, will re- ceive criticism from others in your environment, and will affect your standing in their eyes. We cannot escape our destiny, which is practical; and even our most theoretic faculties contribute to its working out.
28 TALKS TO TEACHERS These few reasons will perhaps smooth the way for you to acquiescence in my proposal. As teachers, I sincerely think it will be a sufficient conception for you to adopt of the youthful psy- chological phenomena handed over to your inspec- tion if you consider them from the point of view of their relation to the future conduct of their possessor. Sufficient at any rate as a first con- ception and as a main conception. You should regard your professional task as if it consisted chiefly and essentially in training the pupil to be- havior; taking behavior, not in the narrow sense of his manners, but in the very widest possible sense, as including every possible sort of fit re- action on the circumstances into which he may find himself brought by the vicissitudes of life.
The reaction may, indeed, often be a negative reaction. Not to speak, not to move, is one of the most important of our duties, in certain practical emergencies. "Thou shalt refrain, renounce, ab- stain!" This often requires a great effort of will power, and, physiologically considered, is just as positive a nerve function as is motor discharge.
IV.
EDUCATION AND BEHAVIOR In our foregoing talk we were led to frame a very simple conception of what an education means. In the last analysis it consists in the organizing of resources in the human being, of powers of conduct which shall fit him to his social and physical world. An 'uneducated' person is one who is nonplussed by all but the most habitual situations. On the contrary, one who is educated is able practically to extricate himself, by means of the examples with which his memory is stored and of the abstract conceptions which he has acquired, from circumstances in which he never was placed before. Education, in short, cannot be better described than by calling it the organiza- tion of acquired habits of conduct and tendencies to behavior.
To illustrate. You and I are each and all of us educated, in our several ways; and we show our education at this present moment by different conduct. It would be quite impossible for me, 30 TALKS TO TEACHERS with my mind technically and professionally or- ganized as it is, and with the optical stimulus which your presence affords, to remain sitting here entirely silent and inactive. Something tells me that I am expected to speak, and must speak; something forces me to keep on speaking. My organs of articulation are continuously innervated by outgoing currents, which the currents passing inward at my eyes and through my educated brain have set in motion; and the particular movements which they make have their form and order deter- mined altogether by the training of all my past years of lecturing and reading. Your conduct, on the other hand, might seem at first sight purely receptive and inactive, — leaving out those among you who happen to be taking notes. But the very listening which you are carrying on is itself a determinate kind of conduct. All the muscular tensions of your body are distributed in a peculiar way as you listen. Your head, your eyes, are fixed characteristically. And, when the lecture is over, it will inevitably eventuate in some stroke of behavior, as I said on the previous occasion: you may be guided differently in some special emergency in the schoolroom by words v/hich I now let fall. — So it is with the impressions you GERMAN AND ENGLISH IDEALS 31 will make there on your pupil. You should get into the habit of regarding them all as leading to the acquisition by him of capacities for behavior, — emotional, social, bodily, vocal, technical, or what not. And, this being the case, you ought to feel udlling, in a general way, and without hair-splitting or farther ado, to take up for the purposes of these lectures with the biological con- ception of the mind, as of something given us for practical use. That conception will certainly cover the greater part of your own educational work.
If we reflect upon the various ideals of educa- tion that are prevalent in the different countries, we see that what they all aim at is to organize capacities for conduct. This is most immediately obvious in Germany, where the explicitly avowed aim of the higher education is to turn the student into an instrument for advancing scientific discov- ery. The German universities are proud of the number of young specialists whom they turn out every year, — not necessarily men of any original force of intellect, but men so trained to research that when their professor gives them an historical or philological thesis to prepare, or a bit of labora- tory work to do, with a general indication as to the best method, they can go off by themselves 32 TALKS TO TEACHERS and use apparatus and consult sources in such a way as to grind out in the requisite number of months some little pepper-corn of new truth worthy of being added to the store of extant hu- man information on that subject. Little else is recognized in Germany as a man's title to academic advancement than his ability thus to show himself an efficient instrument of research.
In England, it might seem at first sight as if the higher education of the universities aimed at the production of certain static types of character rather than at the development of what one may call this dynamic scientific efficiency. Professor Jowett, when asked what Oxford could do for its students, is said to have replied, "Oxford can teach an English gentleman how to he an English gentleman." But, if you ask what it means to 'be' an English gentleman, the only reply is in terms of conduct and behavior. An English gentleman is a bundle of specifically qualified reactions, a creature who for all the emergencies of life has his line of behavior distinctly' marked out for him in advance. Here, as elsewhere, England expects every man to do his duty.
V.
THE NECESSITY OF REACTIONS If all this be true, then immediately one general aphorism emerges which ought by logical right to dominate the entire conduct of the teacher in the classroom.
No reception without reaction, no impression with- out correlative expression, — this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to forget.
An impression which simply flows in at the pupil's eyes or ears, and in no way modifies his active life, is an impression gone to waste. It is physiologically incomplete. It leaves no fruits behind it in the way of capacity acquired. Even as mere impression, it fails to produce its proper ef- fect upon the memory; for, to remain fully among the acquisitions of this latter faculty, it must be wrought into the whole cycle of our operations. Its motor consequences are what clinch it. Some effect due to it in the way of an activity must re- turn to the mind in the form of the sensation of having acted, and connect itself with the impres- sion. The most durable impressions arc those on 34 TALKS TO TEACHERS account of which we speak or act, or else are in- wardly convulsed.
The older pedagogic method of learning things by rote, and reciting them parrot4ike in the schoolroom, rested on the truth that a thing merely read or heard, and never verbally repro- duced, contracts the weakest possible adhesion in the mind. Verbal recitation or reproduction is thus a highly important kind of reactive behavior on our impressions; and it is to be feared that, in the reaction against the old parrot-recitations as the beginning and end of instruction, the extreme value of verbal recitation as an element of com- plete training may nowadays be too much for- gotten.
When we turn to modern pedagogics, we see how enormously the field of reactive conduct has been extended by the introduction of all those methods of concrete object teaching which are the glory of our contemporary schools. Verbal reac- tions, useful as they are, are insufficient. The pupil's words may be right, but the conceptions corresponding to them are often direfully wrong. In a modern school, therefore, they form only a small part of what the pupil is required to do. He must keep notebooks, make drawings, plans, THE IMANUAL TRAINING METHODS 35 and maps, take measurements, enter the labora- tory and perform experiments, consult authorities, and write essays. He must do in his fashion what is often laughed at by outsiders when it ap- pears in prospectuses under the title of 'original work,' but what is really the only possible train- ing for the doing of original work thereafter. The most colossal improvement which recent years have seen in secondary education lies in the in- troduction of the manual training schools; not because they will give us a people more handy and practical for domestic life and better skilled in trades, but because they will give us citizens with an entirely different intellectual fibre. La- boratory work and shop work engender a habit of observation, a knowledge of the difference be- tween accuracy and vagueness, and an insight into nature's complexity and into the inadequacy of all abstract verbal accounts of real phenomena, which once wrought into the mind, remain there as lifelong possessions. They confer precision; because, if you are doing a thing, you must do it definitely right or definitely wrong. They give honesty; for, when you express yourself by mak- ing things, and not by using words, it becomes impossible to dissimulate your vagueness or igno- 36 TALKS TO TEACHERS ranee by ambiguity. They beget a habit of self- reUance; they keep the interest and attention always cheerfully engaged, and reduce the teach- er's disciplinary functions to a minimum.
Of the various systems of manual training, so far as woodwork is concerned, the Swedish Sloyd system, if I may have an opinion on such matters, seems to me by far the best, psychologically con- sidered. Manual training methods, fortunately, are being slowly but surely introduced into all our large cities. But there is still an immense distance to traverse before they shall have gained the extension which they are destined ultimately to possess.
No impression without expression, then, — that is the first pedagogic fruit of our evolutionary conception of the mind as something instrumental to adaptive behavior. But a word may be said in continuation. The expression itself comes back to us, as I intimated a moment ago, in the form of a still farther impression, — the impression, namely, of what we have done. We thus receive sensible news of our behavior and its results. We hear the words we have spoken, feel our own blow as we give it, or read in the bystander's eyes the success or failure of our conduct. Now this re- MARKS AND STANDING 37 turn wave of impression pertains to the complete- ness of the whole experience, and a word about its importance in the schoolroom may not be out of place.
It would seem only natural to say that, since after acting we normally get some return impres- sion of result, it must be well to let the pupil get such a return impression in every possible case. Nevertheless, in schools where examination marks and 'standing' and other returns of result are concealed, the pupil is frustrated of this natural termination of the cycle of his activities, and often suffers from the sense of incompleteness and un- certainty; and there are persons who defend this system as encouraging the pupil to work for the work's sake, and not for extraneous reward. Of course, here as elsewhere, concrete experience must prevail over psychological deduction. But, so far as our psychological deduction goes, it would suggest that the pupil's eagerness to know how well he does is in the line of his normal completeness of function, and should never be balked except for very definite reasons indeed.
Acquaint them, therefore, with their marks and standing and prospects, unless in the individual case you have some special practical reason for not so doing.
VI.
NATIVE REACTIONS AND ACQUIRED RE- ACTIONS We are by this time fully launched upon the biological conception. Man is an organism for reacting on impressions: his mind is there to help determine his reactions, and the purpose of his education is to make them numerous and per- fect. Our education means, in short, little more than a mass of possibilities of reaction, acquired at home, at school, or in the training of affairs. The teacher's task is that of supervising the acquiring process.
This being the case, I will immediately state a principle which underlies the whole process of acquisition and governs the entire activity of the teacher. It is this: — Every acquired reaction is, as a rule, either a complication grafted on a native reaction, or a sub- stitute for a native reaction, which the same object originally tended to provoke.
The teacher's art consists in bringing about the \ NATIVE AXD ACQUIRED REACTIONS 39 substitution or complication, and success in the art presupposes a sympathetic acquaintance with the reactive tendencies natively there.
Without an equipment of native reactions on the child's part, the teacher would have no hold whatever upon the child's attention or conduct. You may take a horse to the water, but you can- not make him drink; and so you may take a child to the schoolroom, but you cannot make him learn the new things you wish to impart, except by soliciting him in the first instance by something which natively makes him react. He must take the first step himself. He must do something before you can get your purchase on him. That something may be something good or something bad. A bad reaction is better than no reaction at all; for, if bad, you can couple it with conse- quences which awake him to its badness. But imagine a child so lifeless as to react in no way to the teacher's first appeals, and how can you possibly take the first step in his education?
To make this abstract conception more con- crete, assume the case of a young child's training in good manners. The child has a native ten- dency to snatch with his hands at anything that attracts his curiosity; also to draw back his hands 40 TALKS TO TEACHERS when slapped, to cry under these latter conditions, to smile when gently spoken to, and to imitate one's gestures.
Suppose now you appear before the child with a new toy intended as a present for him. No sooner does he see the toy than he seeks to snatch it. You slap the hand; it is withdrawn, and the child cries. You then hold up the toy, smiling and saying, "Beg for it nicely, — so!" The child stops crying, imitates you, receives the toy, and crows with pleasure; and that little cycle of train- ing is complete. You have substituted the new reaction of 'begging' for the native reaction of snatching, when that kind of impression comes.
Now, if the child had no memory, the process would not be educative. No matter how often you came in with a toy, the same series of reac- tions would fatally occur, each called forth by its own impression: see, snatch; slap, cry; hear, ask; receive, smile. But, with memory there, the child, at the very instant of snatching, recalls the rest of the earlier experience, thinks of the slap and the frustration, recollects the begging and the reward, inhibits the snatching impulse, substitutes the 'nice' reaction for it, and gets the toy immedi- ately, by eliminating all the intermediary steps. If NATIVE AND ACQUIRED REACTIONS 41 a child's first snatching impulse be excessive or his memory poor, many repetitions of the discipline may be needed before the acquired reaction comes to be an ingrained habit; but in an eminently educable child a single experience will suffice.
One can easily represent the whole process by a brain-diagram. Such a diagram can be little more than a symbolic translation of the immediate ex- perience into spatial terms; yet it may be useful, so I subjoin it.
CENTRES OP MEMORY AND WILL.
— snatch Slap — cry Listen — beg Get — smile FIGURE 1. THE BRAIN-rROCESSES BEFORE EDUCATION.