consists in trying to apperceive the case succes- sively 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 im- mediately. If, on the other hand, it be an idea which carries inaction as its habitual result, if it ally itself with prohibition, then you unhesitat- ingly 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 sit- uation, into which I should now like you to look with me a little nearer.
The proper conception, the true head of clas- sification, 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 186 TALKS TO TEACHEES 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 cen- tre of the field of consciousness, and held there, the reasonable idea will exert these effects inevi- tably; 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 ad consist when reduced to its simplest and most TO THINK IS THE MORAL ACT 187 elementar}' form?" you can make only one reply. You can say that it consists in the effort of atten- tion hy 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 per- sons who find themselves confronted by the sin- fulness 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 tempta- tion. He has made a resolve to reform, but he is now solicited again by the bottle. His moral tri- umph 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 188 TALKS TO TEACHEKS 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; sec- ond, by the amount of voluntary attention that they can exert in holding to the right ones, how- ever 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 WILL IS ATTENTION TO AN IDEAL 189 how much more intermittent and brief our acts of voluntary attention are than is commonly sup- posed. 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 pro- portion to their significance, and that I should re- turn 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 atten- tion, 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 there- fore 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 in- terests 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 190 TALKS TO TEACHERS 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, re- ceived 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 prac- tical and useful, and to keep free from all specu- lative complications. Nevertheless, I do not wish to leave any ambiguity about my own position; and I will therefore say, in order to avoid all mis- understanding, 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 ma- chine'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 pos- sible stock of ideas which a man's free spirit would THE 'freedom' of THE WILL 191 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 voHtion, — 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 indeter- minate. We feel as if we could make it really more or less, and as if our free action in this re- gard 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 appear- ance to be a reality: the determinist believes that it is an illusion. I myself hold with the free-will- ists, — not because I cannot conceive the fatalist 192 TALKS TO TEACHERS 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 con- sciences, 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 im- portant subject and these lectures.
There are two types of will. There are also two types of inhibition. We may call them inhibi- tion by repression or by negation, and inhibition by substitution, respectively. The difference be- tween them is that, in the case of inhibition by TWO TYPES OF INHIBITION 193 repression, both the inhibited idea and the inhi- biting idea, the impulsive idea and the idea that negates it, remain along with each other in con- sciousness, producing a certain inward strain or tension there: whereas, in inhibition by substitu- tion, 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 win- dow, which presently grows interesting enough to claim all their attention. You can call the lat- ter 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 saj-ing. 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 at- tractive disturbance, always there soliciting their curiosity, will overpower them, and they will be just as they were before: whereas, if, without say- ing 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 194 TALKS TO TEACHERS 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 gentle- man is certainly, for this world's purposes, a more valuable being than your "Crump, with his grunt- ing resistance to his native devils," even though in God's sight the latter may, as the CathoUc theologians say, be rolling up great stores of 'merit.'
Spinoza long ago wrote in his Ethics that any- thing that a man can avoid under the notion that it is bad he may also avoid under the notion that SPINOZA ON SLAVES AND FREEMEN 195 something else is good. He who habitually acts sub specie mali, under the negative notion, the no- tion 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 ani- mal'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 bless- ings of having an organism kept in lifelong pos- session 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 power- ful intoxicants.
196 CONCLUSION 196 CONCLUSION I have now ended these talks. K 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 school- room 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 intelUgence of all his ways. Understand him, then, as such a subtle httle piece of machinery. And if, in addition, you can also see him sub specie honi, and love him as well, you will be in the best possible position for becoming perfect teachers.
TALKS TO STUDENTS I.
THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION I WISH in the foUowdng hour to take certain psychological doctrines and show their practical apphcations to mental hygiene, — to the hygiene of our American life more particularly. Our people, especially in academic circles, are turn- ing towards psychology nowadays with great ex- pectations; and, if psychology is to justify them, it must be by showing fruits in the pedagogic and therapeutic lines.
The reader may possibly have heard of a pecu- liar theory of the emotions, cormnonly referred to in psychological hterature as the Lange-James theory. According to this theory, our emotions are mainly due to those organic stirrings that are aroused in us in a reflex way by the stimulus of the exciting object or situation. An emotion of fear, for example, or surprise, is not a direct effect of the object's presence on the mind, but an effect of that still earlier effect, the bodily commotion which the object suddenly excites; so that, were 200 TALKS TO STUDENTS this bodily commotion suppressed, we should not so much feel fear as call the situation fearful; we should not feel surprise, but coldly recognize that the object was indeed astonishing. One enthusi- ast has even gone so far as to say that when we feel sorry it is because we weep, when we feel afraid it is because we run away, and not con- versely. Some of you may perhaps be acquainted with the paradoxical formula. Now, whatever exaggeration may possibly lurk in this account of our emotions (and I doubt myself whether the ex- aggeration be very great), it is certain that the main core of it is true, and that the mere giving way to tears, for example, or to the outward ex- pression of an anger-fit, will result for the moment in making the inner grief or anger more acutely felt. There is, accordingly, no better known or more generally useful precept in the moral train- ing of youth, or in one's personal self-discipline, than that which bids us pay primary attention to what we do and express, and not to care too much for what we feel. If we only check a cowardly impulse in time, for example, or if we only donH strike the blow or rip out with the complaining or insulting word that we shall regret as long as we live, our feelings themselves will presently be the REFLEX-THEORY OF EMOTION 201 calmer and better, with no particular guidance from us on their own account. Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.
Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerful- ness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can. So to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end, and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear. Again, in order to feel kindly toward a person to whom we have been inimical, the only way is more or less de- liberately to smile, to make sympathetic inquiries, and to force ourselves to say genial things. One hearty laugh together will bring enemies into a closer conununion of heart than hours spent on both sides in inward wrestling with the mental demon of uncharitable feeling. To wrestle with a bad feeling only pins our attention on it, and keeps it still fastened in the mind: whereas, if we act as if from some better feeling, the old bad feel- 202 TALKS TO STUDENTS ing soon folds its tent like an Arab, and silently steals away.
The best manuals of religious devotion accord- ingly reiterate the maxim that we must let our feelings go, and pay no regard to them whatever. In an admirable and widely successful little book called 'The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life,' by Mrs. Hannah Whitall Smith, I find this lesson on almost every page. Act faithfully, and you really have faith, no matter how cold and even how dubious you may feel. "It is your purpose God looks at," writes Mrs. Smith, "not your feel- ings about that purpose; and your purpose, or will, is therefore the only thing you need attend to...Let your emotions come or let them go, just as God pleases, and make no account of them either way...They really have nothing to do with the matter. They are not the indicators of your spiritual state, but are merely the indicators of your temperament or of your present physical condition."
But you all know these facts already, so I need no longer press them on your attention. From our acts and from our attitudes ceaseless inpour- ing currents of sensation come, which help to de- termine from moment to moment what our inner THE INNER LIFE OF INVALIDS 203 states shall be: that is a fundamental law of psy- chology which I will therefore proceed to assume.
A Viennese neurologist of considerable reputa- tion has recently written about the Binnenlehen, as he terms it, or buried life of human beings. No doctor, this writer says, can get into really profitable relations with a nervous patient until he gets some sense of what the patient's Bin- nenlehen is, of the sort of unuttered inner atmos- phere in which his consciousness dwells alone with the secrets of its prison-house. This inner personal tone is what we can't communicate or describe articulately to others; but the wTaith and ghost of it, so to speak, are often what our friends and intimates feel as our most character- istic quality. In the unhealthy-minded, apart from all sorts of old regrets, ambitions checked by shames and aspirations obstructed by timidi- ties, it consists mainly of bodily discomforts not distinctly localized by the sufferer, but breeding a general self-mistrust and sense that things are not as they should be with him. Half the thirst for alcohol that exists in the world exists simply because alcohol acts as a temporary anaesthetic and effacer to all these morbid feelings that never 204 TALKS TO STUDENTS ought to be in a human being at all. In the healthy-minded, on the contrary, there are no fears or shames to discover; and the sensations that pour in from the organism only help to swell the general vital sense of security and readiness for anything that may turn up.
Consider, for example, the effects of a well- toned motor-apparatus, nervous and muscular, on our general personal self-consciousness, the sense of elasticity and efficiency that results. They tell us that in Norway the life of the women has lately been entirely revolutionized by the new order of muscular feelings with which the use of the ski, or long snow-shoes, as a sport for both sexes, has made the women acquainted. Fifteen years ago the Norwegian women were even more than the women of other lands votaries of the old-fashioned ideal of femininity, 'the domestic angel,' the 'gentle and refining influence' sort of thing. Now these sedentary fireside tabby-cats of Norway have been trained, they say, by the snow-shoes into lithe and audacious creatures, for whom no night is too dark or height too giddy, and who are not only saying good-bye to the tradi- tional feminine pallor and delicacy of constitution, but actually taking the lead in every educational MUSCULAR TONE AND INNER MOOD 205 and social reform. I cannot but think that the tennis and tramping and skating habits and the bicycle-craze which are so rapidly extending among om" dear sisters and daughters in this countrj^ are going also to lead to a sounder and heartier moral tone, which will send its tonic breath through all our American life.
I hope that here in America more and more the ideal of the well-trained and vigorous body will be maintained neck by neck with that of the well- trained and vigorous mind as the two coequal halves of the higher education for men and women ahke. The strength of the British Empire lies in the strength of character of the individual Eng- lishman, taken all alone by himself. And that strength, I am persuaded, is perennially nourished and kept up by nothing so much as by the na- tional worship, in which all classes meet, of ath- letic outdoor life and sport.
I recollect, years ago, reading a certain work by an American doctor on hygiene and the laws of Hfe and the type of future humanity. I have forgotten its author's name and its title, but I re- member well an awful prophecy that it contained about the future of our muscular system. Human perfection, the writer said, means ability to cope 206 TALKS TO STUDENTS with the environment; but the environment will more and more require mental power from us, and less and less will ask for bare brute strength. Wars will cease, machines will do all our heavy work, man will become more and more a mere director of nature's energies, and less and less an exerter of energy on his own account. So that, if the homo sapiens of the future can only digest his food and think, what need will he have of well- developed muscles at all? And why, pursued this writer, should we not even now be satisfied with a more delicate and intellectual type of beauty than that which pleased our ancestors? Nay, I have heard a fanciful friend make a still further advance in this 'new-man' direction. With our future food, he says, itself prepared in liquid form from the chemical elements of the atmosphere, pepsinated or half-digested in ad- vance, and sucked up through a glass tube from a tin can, what need shall we have of teeth, or stomachs even? They may go, along with our muscles and our physical courage, while, challeng- ing ever more and more our proper admiration, will grow the gigantic domes of our crania, arch- ing over our spectacled eyes, and animating our flexible little lips to those floods of learned and MUSCULAR TONE AND INNER MOOD 207 ingenious talk which will constitute our most congenial occupation.
I am sure that your flesh creeps at this apoca- lyptic vision. Mine certainly did so; and I can- not believe that our muscular vigor will ever be a superfluity. Even if the day ever dawns in which it will not be needed for fighting the old heavy battles against Nature, it will still always be needed to furnish the background of sanity, seren- ity, and cheerfulness to life, to give moral elastic- ity to our disposition, to round off the wiry edge of our fretfulness, and make us good-humored and easy of approach. Weakness is too apt to be what the doctors call irritable weakness. And that blessed internal peace and confidence, that acguiescentia in seipso, as Spinoza used to call it, that wells up from every part of the body of a muscularly well-trained human being, and soaks the indwelling soul of him with satisfaction, is, quite apart from every consideration of its me- chanical utility, an element of spiritual hygiene of supreme significance.
And now let me go a step deeper into mental hygiene, and try to enlist your insight and sym- pathy in a cause which I believe is one of para- mount patriotic importance to us Yankees. Many 208 TALKS TO STUDENTS years ago a Scottish medical man, Dr. Clouston, a mad-doctor as they call him there, or what we should call an asylum physician (the most emi- nent one in Scotland), visited this country, and said something that has remained in my memory ever since. ''You Americans," he said, "wear too much expression on your faces. You are liv- ing like an army with all its reserves engaged in action. The duller countenances of the British population betoken a better scheme of life. They suggest stores of reserved nervous force to fall back upon, if any occasion should arise that re- quires it. This inexcitability, this presence at all times of power not used, I regard," continued Dr. Clouston, ''as the great safeguard of our British people. The other thing in you gives me a sense of insecurity, and you ought somehow to tone yourselves down. You really do carry too much expression, you take too intensely the trivial moments of life."
Now Dr. Clouston is a trained reader of the secrets of the soul as expressed upon the counte- nance, and the observation of his which I quote seems to me to mean a great deal. And all Americans who stay in Europe long enough to get accustomed to the spirit that reigns and ex- THE OVER-EXPRESSION OF AMERICANS 209 presses itself there, so unexcitable as compared with ours, make a similar observation when they return to their native shores. They find a wild- eyed look upon their compatriots' faces, either of too desperate eagerness and anxiety or of too in- tense responsiveness and good-will. It is hard to say whether the men or the women show it most. It is true that we do not all feel about it as Dr. Clouston felt. jNIany of us, far from deploring it, admire it. We say: "What intelligence it shows! How different from the stolid cheeks, the codfish eyes, the slow, inanimate demeanor we have been seemg in the British Isles!" Intensity, rapidity, vivacity of appearance, are indeed with us some- thing of a nationally accepted ideal; and the medi- cal notion of 'irritable weakness' is not the first thing suggested by them to our mind, as it was to Dr. Clouston's. In a weekly paper not very long ago I remember reading a story in which, after describing the beauty and mterest of the heroine's personality, the author summed up her charms by saying that to all who looked upon her an impression as of 'bottled lightning' was irresistibly conveyed.
Bottled lightning, in truth, is one of our Amer- ican ideals, even of a young girl's character! Now 210 TALKS TO STUDENTS