too. But not, — and this is my point, — not the most intellectually capable subjects, as tested by the results of what Mr. Romanes rightly names 'genuine' intellectual work; for he tried the ex- periment with several highly distinguished men in science and literature, and most of them turned out to be slow readers.
In the light of all such facts one may well be- lieve that the total impression which a perceptive teacher will get of the pupil's condition, as indi- cated by his general temper and manner, by the listlessness or alertness, by the ease or painfulness with which his school work is done, will be of much more value than those unreal experimental tests, those pedantic elementary measurements of fatigue, memory, association, and attention, etc., which are urged upon us as the only basis of a genuinely scientific pedagogy. Such measure- ments can give us useful information only when we combine them with observations made without brass instruments, upon the total demeanor of the measured individual, by teachers with eyes in their heads and common sense, and some feeling for the concrete facts of human nature in their hearts.
Depend upon it, no one need be too much cast VAUIOUS TYPES OF IMAGINATION 137 down by the discovery of his deficiency in any ele- mentary faculty of the mind. What tells in life is the whole mind working together, and the de- ficiencies of any one faculty can be compensated by the efforts of the rest. You can be an artist without visual images, a reader without eyes, a mass of erudition with a bad elementary memory. In almost any subject your passion for the subject will save you. If you only care enough for a result, you will almost certainly attain it. If you wish to be rich, you will be rich; if you wish to be learned, you will be learned; if you wish to be good, you will be good. Only you must, then, really wish these things, and wish them with ex- clusiveness, and not wish at the same time a hun- dred other incompatible things just as strongly.
One of the most important discoveries of the 'scientific' sort that have recently been made in psychology is that of ]\Ir. Galton and others con- cerning the great variations among individuals in the tj^e of their imagination. Every one is now familiar with the fact that human beings vary enormously in the brilliancy, completeness, defi- niteness, and extent of their visual images. These are singularly perfect in a large number of indi- viduals, and in a few are so rudimentary as hardly 138 TALKS TO TEACHERS to exist. The same is true of the auditory and motor images, and probably of those of every kind; and the recent discovery of distinct brain- areas for the various orders of sensation would seem to provide a physical basis for such varia- tions and discrepancies. The facts, as I said, are nowadays so popularly known that I need only remind you of their existence. They might seem at first sight of practical importance to the teacher; and, indeed, teachers have been recom- mended to sort their pupils in this way, and treat them as the result falls out. You should inter- rogate them as to their imagery, it is said, or exhibit lists of written words to their eyes, and then sound similar lists in their ears, and see by which channel a child retains most words. Then, in dealing with that child, make your appeals predominantly through that channel. If the class were very small, results of some distinct- ness might doubtless thus be obtained by a pains- taking teacher. But it is obvious that in the usual school-room no such differentiation of appeal is possible; and the only really useful practical lesson that emerges from this analytic psychology in the conduct of large schools is the lesson al- ready reached in a purely empirical way, that SENSE-IMPRESSIONS SHOULD BE VARIED 139 the teacher ought always to impress the class through as many sensible channels as he can. Talk and write and draw on blackboard, permit the pupils to talk, and make them write and draw, exhibit pictures, plans, and curves, have your dia- grams colored differently in their different parts, etc.; and out of the whole variety of impressions the individual child will find the most lasting ones for himself. In all primary school work this principle of multiple impressions is well recog- nized, so I need say no more about it here.
This principle of multiplying channels and varying associations and appeals is important, not only for teaching pupils to remember, but for teaching them to understand. It runs, in fact, through the whole teaching art.
One word about the unconscious and unrepro- ducible part of our acquisitions, and I shall have done with the topic of memory.
Professor Ebbinghaus, in a heroic little investi- gation into the laws of memory which he per- formed a dozen or more years ago by the method of learning lists of nonsense syllables, devised a method of measuring the rate of our forgetfulness, which lays bare an important law of the mind.
140 TALKS TO TEACHERS His method was to read over his list until he could repeat it once by heart unhesitatingly. The number of repetitions required for this was a measure of the difficulty of the learning in each particular case. Now, after having once learned a piece in this way, if we wait five minutes, we find it impossible to repeat it again in the same unhes- itating manner. We must read it over again to revive some of the syllables, which have already dropped out or got transposed. Ebbinghaus now systematically studied the number of readings- over which were necessary to revive the unhesi- tating recollection of the piece after five minutes, half an hour, an hour, a day, a week, a month, had elapsed. The number of rereadings required he took to be a measure of the amount of for- getting that had occurred in the elapsed interval. And he found some remarkable facts. The proc- ess of forgetting, namely, is vastly more rapid at first than later on. Thus full half of the piece seems to be forgotten within the first half-hour, two-thirds of it are forgotten at the end of eight hours, but only four-fifths at the end of a month. He made no trials beyond one month of interval; but, if we ourselves prolong ideally the curve of remembrance, whose beginning his experiments THE RATE OF FORGETTING 141 thus obtain, it is natural to suppose that, no matter how long a time might elapse, the curve would never descend quite so low as to touch the zero-line. In other words, no matter how long ago we may have learned a poem, and no matter how complete our inability to reproduce it now may be, yet the first learning will still show its lingering effects in the abridgment of the time required for learning it again. In short, Profes- sor Ebbinghaus's experiments show that things which we are quite unable definitely to recall have nevertheless impressed themselves, in some way, upon the structure of the mind. We are different for having once learned them. The resistances in our systems of brain-paths are altered. Our ap- prehensions are quickened. Our conclusions from certain premises are probably not just what they would be if those modifications were not there. The latter influence the whole margin of our con- sciousness, even though their products, not being distinctly reproducible, do not directly figure at the focus of the field.
The teacher should draw a lesson from these facts. We are all too apt to measure the gains of our pupils by their proficiency in directly repro- ducing in a recitation or an examination such 142 TALKS TO TEACHERS matters as they may have learned, and inarticu- late power in them is something of which we always underestimate the value. The boy who tells us, "I know the answer, but I can't say what it is," we treat as practically identical with him who knows absolutely nothing about the answer at all. But this is a great mistake. It is but a small part of our experience in life that we are ever able articulately to recall. And yet the whole of it has had its influence in shaping our character and defining our tendencies to judge and act. Although the ready memory is a great blessing to its possessor, the vaguer memory of a subject, of having once had to do with it, of its neighborhood, and of where we may go to recover it again, constitutes in most men and women the chief fruit of their education. This is true even in professional education. The doctor, the lawyer, are seldom able to decide upon a case off-hand. They differ from other men only through the fact that they know how to get at the materials for decision in five minutes or half an hour: whereas the layman is unable to get at the materials at all, not knowing in what books and indexes to look or not understanding the technical terms. Be patient, then, and sympathetic with the type THE FORGOTTEN MAY STILL COUNT 143 of mind that cuts a poor figure in examinations. It may, in the long examination which life sets us, come out in the end in better shape than the ghb and ready reproducer, its passions being deeper, its purposes more worthy, its combining power less commonplace, and its total mental output consequently more important.
Such are the chief points which it has seemed worth while for me to call to your notice under the head of memory. We can sum them up for practical purposes by sa>ang that the art of re- membering is the art of thinking; and by adding, with Dr. Pick, that, when we wish to fix a new thing in either our owti mind or a pupil's, our conscious effort should not be so much to im- press and retain it as to connect it with some- thing else already there. The connecting is the thinking; and, if we attend clearly to the con- nection, the connected thing will certainly be likely to remain within recall.
I shall next ask you to consider the process by which we acquire new knowledge, — the process of 'Apperception,' as it is called, by which we re- ceive and deal with new experiences, and revise our stock of ideas so as to form new or improved conceptions.
XIII.
THE ACQUISITION OF IDEAS The images of our past experiences, of what- ever nature they may be, visual or verbal, blurred and dim, vivid and distinct, abstract or concrete, need not be memory images, in the strict sense of the word. That is, they need not rise before the mind in a marginal fringe or context of concomi- tant circumstances, which mean for us their date. They may be mere conceptions, floating pictures of an object, or of its type or class. In this un- dated condition, we call them products of 'im- agination' or 'conception.' Imagination is the term commonly used where the object represent- ed is thought of as an individual thing. Concep- tion is the term where we think of it as a type or class. For our ' present purpose the distinction is not important; and I will permit myself to use either the word 'conception,' or the still vaguer word 'idea,' to designate the inner objects of con- templation, whether these be individual things, like 'the sun' or 'Juhus Csesar,' or classes of THE STOCK OF IDEAS 145 things, like 'animal kingdom/ or, finally, entirely abstract attributes, like 'rationality' or 'rect- itude.'
The result of our education is to fill the mind little by little, as experiences accrete, with a stock of such ideas. In the illustration I used at our first meeting, of the child snatching the toy and getting slapped, the vestiges left by the first experi- ence answered to so many ideas which he acquired thereby, — ideas that remained with him associ- ated in a certain order, and from the last one of which the child eventually proceeded to act. The sciences of grammar and of logic are little more than attempts methodically to classify all such acquired ideas and to trace certain laws of relation- ship among them. The forms of relation between them, becoming themselves in turn noticed by the mind, are treated as conceptions of a higher and more abstract order, as when we speak of a 'syl- logistic relation' between propositions, or of four quantities making a 'proportion,' or of the 'incon- sistency' of two conceptions, or the 'implication' of one in the other.
So you see that the process of education, taken in a large way, may be described as nothing but the process of acquiring ideas or conceptions, 146 TALKS TO TEACHERS the best educated mind being the niind which has the largest stock of them, ready to meet the largest possible variety of the emergencies of life. The lack of education means only the failure to have acquired them, and the consequent liability to be 'floored' and 'rattled' in the vicissitudes of experience.
In all this process of acquiring conceptions, a certain instinctive order is followed. There is a native tendency to assimilate certain kinds of con- ception at one age, and other kinds of conception at a later age. During the first seven or eight years of childhood the mind is most interested in the sensible properties of material things. Constructiveness is the instinct most active; and by the incessant hanmiering and sawing, and dressing and undressing dolls, putting of things together and taking them apart, the child not only trains the muscles to co-ordinate action, but accumulates a store of physical conceptions which are the basis of his knowledge of the material world through life. Object-teaching and manual training wisely extend the sphere of this order of acquisition. Clay, wood, metals, and the vari- ous kinds of tools are made to contribute to the store. A youth brought up with a sufficiently IDEAS OF PHYSICAL THINGS 147 broad basis of this kind is always at home in the world. He stands within the pale. He is ac- quainted with Nature, and Nature in a certain sense is acquainted with him. Whereas the youth brought up alone at home, with no ac- quaintance with anything but the printed page, is always afficted with a certain remoteness from the material facts of life, and a correlative inse- curity of consciousness which make of him a kind of alien on the earth in which he ought to feel himself perfectly at home.
I already said something of this in speaking of the constructive impulse, and I must not re- peat myself. Moreover, you fully realize, I am sure, how important for life, — for the moral tone of life, quite apart from definite practical pur- suits,— is this sense of readiness for emergencies which a man gains through early famiUarity and acquaintance with the world of material things. To have grown up on a farm, to have haunted a carpenter's and blacksmith's shop, to have handled horses and cows and boats and guns, and to have ideas and abilities connected with such objects are an inestimable part of youthful ac- quisition. After adolescence it is rare to be able to get into familiar touch with any of these 148 TALKS TO TEACHERS primitive things. The instinctive propensions have faded, and the habits are hard to acquire.
Accordingly, one of the best fruits of the 'child- study' movement has been to reinstate all these activities to their proper place in a sound system of education. Feed the growing human being, feed him with the sort of experience for which from year to year he shows a natural craving, and he will develop in adult life a sounder sort of mental tissue, even though he may seem to be 'wasting' a great deal of his growing time, in the eyes of those for whom the only channels of learning are books and verbally communicated information.
It is not till adolescence is reached that the mind grows able to take in the more abstract as- pects of experience, the hidden similarities and distinctions between things, and especially their causal sequences. Rational knowledge of such things as mathematics, mechanics, chemistry, and biology, is now possible; and the acquisition of conceptions of this order form the next phase of education. Later still, not till adolescence is well advanced, does the mind awaken to a systematic interest in abstract human relations — moral rela- tions, properly so called, — to sociological ideas and to metaphysical abstractions.
NATURAL ORDER OF ACQUISITION 149 This general order of sequence is followed tra- ditionally of course in the schoolroom. It is for- eign to my purpose to do more than indicate that general psychological principle of the successive order of awakening of the faculties on which the whole thing rests. I have spoken of it already, apropos of the transitoriness of instincts. Just as many a youth has to go permanently without an adequate stock of conceptions of a certain order, because experiences of that order were not yielded at the time when new curiosity was most acute, so it will conversely happen that many another youth is spoiled for a certain subject of study (although he would have enjoyed it well if led into it at a later age) through having had it thrust upon him so prematurely that disgust was created, and the bloom quite taken off from future trials. I think I have seen college students un- fitted forever for 'philosophy' from having taken that study up a year too soon.
In all these later studies, verbal material is the vehicle by which the mind thinks. The abstract conceptions of physics and sociology may, it is true, be embodied in visual or other images of phenomena, but they need not be so; and the truth remains that, after adolescence has begun, 150 TALKS TO TEACHERS "words, words, words," must constitute a large part, and an always larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn. This is so even in the natural sciences, so far as these are causal and rational, and not merely confined to description. So I go back to what I said awhile ago apropos of verbal memorizing. The more ac- curately words are learned, the better, if only the teacher make sure that what they signify is also understood. It is the failure of this latter condi- tion, in so much of the old-fashioned recitation, that has caused that reaction against 'parrot-like reproduction' that we are so familiar with to-day. A friend of mine, visiting a school, was asked to examine a young class in geography. Glancing at the book, she said: "Suppose you should dig a hole in the ground, hundreds of feet deep, how should you find it at the bottom, — warmer or colder than on top?" None of the class replying, the teacher said: "I'm sure they know, but I think you don't ask the question quite rightly. Let me try." So, taking the book, she asked: "In what condition is the inter'^r of the globe?" and re- ceived the immediate answer from half the class at once: "The interior of the globe is in a condition of igneous fusion." Better exclusive ohiect-teach- EACH AGE CAN APPREHEND ABSTRACTIONS 151 ing than such verbal recitations as that; and yet verbal reproduction, intelligently connected with more objective work, must always play a leading, and surely the leading, part in education. Our modern reformers, in their books, write too ex- clusively of the earliest years of the pupil. These lend themselves better to expHcit treatment; and I myself, in dwelling so much upon the native impulses, and object-teaching, and anecdotes, and all that, have paid my tribute to the line of least resistance in describing. Yet away back in childhood we find the beginnings of purely intel- lectual curiosity, and the intelligence of abstract terms. The object-teaching is mainly to launch the pupils, with some concrete conceptions of the facts concerned, upon the more abstract ideas.
To hear some authorities on teaching, however, you would suppose that geography not only began, but ended with the school-yard and neighboring hill, that physics was one endless round of repeat- ing the same sort of tedious weighing and meas- uring operation: whereas a very few examples are usually sufficient to set the imagination free on genuine fines, and then what the mind craves is more rapid, general, and abstract treatment. I heard a lady say that she had taken her child to 152 TALKS TO TEACHERS the kindergarten, "but he is so bright that he saw through it immediately." Too many school children 'see' as immediately 'through' the namby-pamby attempts of the softer pedagogy to lubricate things for them, and make them in- teresting. Even they can enjoy abstractions, pro- vided they be of the proper order; and it is a poor compliment to their rational appetite to think that anecdotes about little Tommies and little Jennies are the only kind of things their minds can digest. But here, as elsewhere, it is a matter of more or less; and, in the last resort, the teacher's own tact is the only thing that can bring out the right effect. The great difficulty with abstractions is that of knowing just what meaning the pupil at- taches to the terms he uses. The words may sound all right, but the meaning remains the child's own secret. So varied forms of words must be insisted on, to bring the secret out. And a strange secret does it often prove. A relative of mine was trying to explain to a little girl what was meant by 'the passive voice': "Suppose that you kill me: you who do the killing are in the active voice, and I, who am killed, am in the passive voice." "But how can you speak if you're killed?" said the child. "Oh, well, AMBIGUITY OF VERBAL ABSTRACTIONS 153 you may suppose that I am not j^et quite dead!" The next day the child was asked, in class, to ex- plain the passive voice, and said, "It's the kind of voice you speak with when you ain't quite dead." In such a case as this the illustration ought to have been more varied. Every one's memory will probably furnish examples of the fantastic mean- ing which their childhood attached to certain verbal statements (in poetry often), and which their elders, not having any reason to suspect, never corrected. I remember being greatly moved emotionally at the age of eight by the ballad of Lord UUin's Daughter. Yet I thought that the staining of the heather by the blood was the evil chiefly dreaded, and that, when the boatman said, "I'll row you o'er the ferry. It is not for your silver bright, But for your winsome lady," he was to receive the lady for his pay. Similarly, I recently found that one of my own children was reading (and accepting) a verse of Tennyson's In Memoriam as "Ring out the food of rich and poor, Ring in redness to all mankind," and finding no inward difficulty.
154 TALKS TO TEACHERS The only safeguard against this sort of miscon- ceiving is to insist on varied statement, and to bring the child's conceptions, wherever it be pos- sible, to some sort of practical test.
Let us next pass to the subject of Appercep- tion.
XIV.
APPERCEPTION 'Apperception' is a word which cuts a great figure in the pedagogics of the present day. Read, for example, this advertisement of a certain text-book, which I take from an educational journal: — WHAT IS APPERCEPTION?
For an explanation of Apperception see Blank's PSYCPIOLOGY, Vol. of the Education Series, just published.
The difference between Perception and Apperception is explained for the teacher in the preface to Blank's PSYCHOLOGY.
Many teachers are inquiring, "What is the meaning of Apperception in educational psychology?" Just the book for them is Blank's PSYCHOLOGY in which the idea was first expounded.
The most important idea in educational psychology is Apperception. The teacher may find this expounded in Blank's PSY- CHOLOGY. The idea of Apperception is making a revolution in educational methods in Germany. It is explained in Blank's PSYCHOLOGY, Vol. of the Education Series, just published.
Blank's PSYCHOLOGY will ])e mailed prepaid to any address on receipt of $1.00.
156 TALKS TO TEACHERS Such an advertisement is in sober earnest a disgrace to all concerned; and such talk as it indulges-in is the sort of thing I had in view when I said at our first meeting that the teachers tvere suffering at the present day from a certain Industrious mystification on the part of editors and publishers. Perhaps the word 'appercep- tion' flourished in their eyes and ears as it nowadays often is, embodies as much of this mystification as any other single thing. The conscientious young teacher is led to beheve that it contains a recondite and portentous secret, by losing the true inwardness of which her whole career may be shattered. And yet, when she turns to the books and reads about it, it seems so trivial and commonplace a matter, — meaning nothing more than the manner in which we re- ceive a thing into our minds, — that she fears she must have missed the point through the shallow- ness of her intelligence, and goes about thereafter afflicted with a sense either of uncertainty or of stupidity, and in each case remaining mortified at being so inadequate to her mission.
Now apperception is an extremely useful word in pedagogics, and offers a convenient name for a process to which every teacher must frequently APPERCEPTION DEFINED 157 refer. But it verily means nothing more than the act of taking a thing into the mind. It corre- sponds to nothing pecuUar or elementary in psy- chology', being only one of the innumerable re- sults of the psychological process of association of ideas; and psychology itself can easily dispense with the word, useful as it may be m pedagogics.
The gist of the matter is this: Every impression that comes in from without, be it a sentence which we hear, an object of vision, or an effluvium which assails our nose, no sooner enters our conscious- ness than it is drafted off in some determinate direc- tion or other, making connection with the other materials already there, and finally producing what we call our reaction. The particular connections it strikes into are determined by our past experi- ences and the 'associations' of the present sort of impression with them. If, for instance, you hear me call out A, B, C, it is ten to one that you will react on the impression by inwardly or out- wardly articulating D, E, F. The impression arouses its old associates: they go out to meet it; it is received by them, recognized by the mind as 'the beginning of the alphabet.' It is the fate of every impression thus to fall into a mind pre- 158 TALKS TO TEACHERS occupied with memories, ideas, and interests, and by these it is taken in. Educated as we already are, we never get an experience that remains for us completely nondescript: it always reminds of something similar in quahty, or of some context that might have surrounded it before, and which it now in some way suggests. This mental escort which the mind supplies is drawn, of course, from the mind's ready-made stock. We conceive the impression in some definite way. We dispose of it according to our acquired possibilities, be they few or many, in the way of 'ideas.' This way of taking in the object is the process of ap- perception. The conceptions which meet and assimilate it are called by Herbart the 'apperceiv- ing mass.' The apperceived impression is en- gulfed in this, and the result is a new field of consciousness, of which one part (and often a very small part) comes from the outer world, and another part (sometimes by far the largest) comes from the previous contents of the mind.
I think that you see plainly enough now that the process of apperception is what I called it a moment ago, a resultant of the association of ideas. The product is a sort of fusion of the new with the old, in which it is often impossible to THE LAW OF LEAST DISTURBANCE 159 distinguish the share of the two factors. For example, when we listen to a person speaking or read a page of print, much of what we think we see or hear is supplied from our memory. We overlook misprints, imagining the right letters, though we see the wrong ones; and how little we actually hear, when we Usten to speech, we realize when we go to a foreign theatre; for there what troubles us is not so much that we cannot under- stand what the actors say as that we cannot hear their words. The fact is that we hear quite as Uttle under similar conditions at home, only our mind, being fuller of English verbal associations, supplies the requisite material for comprehension upon a much slighter auditory hint.