children's minds and observation of their successive instinctive interests and tendencies as determining the time for specific teaching and training, and 2) from the establishment of right relations between different subjects and parts of the same subject taught.

VI. It is perhaps going too far to press the question, should anything be taught in schools that is not to be remembered?

Yet the only consistent answer psychologically is, No. Herbert Spencer showed in his chapter on "What Knowledge is of Most Worth?" the great value, necessity, even, in daily life, of the facts of many sciences, mathematics, and, in a measure, of history. An estimate of the wonderful value of the facts of history from a different standpoint is presented by the Herbartians.

Contrasted with all this wealth of knowledge for pleasure, guidance, and inspiration, the barren results of the formal book training for examinations common to some schools seem barren indeed.

It is often thought too much to require that one should be able to recall at any time for pleasure or use particular facts, "to pass an examination" on all one has learned in schools. Yet the daily requirements of life are our "examinations," the opportunities that we improve or miss depending on the availability of our wisdom,-these are the tests of memory and consequent power.

CHAPTER V
APPERCEPTION

LESSON I

DEFINITION OF APPERCEPTION

PREPARATION STEP.-I. Look through a kaleidoscope. What is the explanation of the figures that you see?

The instrument is usually a hollow prism lined with reflectors. Small pieces of glass are so confined at one end against a translucent disc as to move freely. The eye of the observer looks through the other end at these pieces of glass and their reflections. As the prism is turned or jarred slightly, with the constant rearrangement of perhaps only ten pieces of glass, figures of an almost infinite variety are formed.

II. Still think of the stream of thought, consciousness, as made up of sensations all the same in kind, some of which form the outer order (the first, or primary members of trains of associations), the rest of which form the inner order (the other members of trains of associations).

III. Think, also, of the sensations not as carried about in "memory," but as always a present result in mind of the stimulus of brain-cells,-the sensations primary when the stimulus is from the end organs, secondary when by the law of habit.

IV. The stream of thought is an individual matter. Ask several persons to sketch quickly the front of the building in which you are. Compare the drawings: Why should they be so different?

Pronounce to several persons the words Empire State, 2b, cobblestones, West Point: then ask each person what he thought when he heard each word. Why did not all think

of the same thing, the 2b, for example, that was in your mind?

Each one, you answer, gave the associations established by his past experience. If two of these persons had had the same past experiences, could they then have made exactly similar drawings, or would they have had the same associations? If they were brothers brought up always in the same family, would both think the same thought, have the same opinions?

It does not take much reflection to show you that to have thoughts that are really alike two persons must be more nearly similar than even brothers.

V. Let your imagination play for a moment on the problem under what circumstances two persons could have exactly similar thoughts, the same associations:

These persons must have had not only the same individual past, but also the same heredity; they must be the same as to their bodies, atom for atom and must have been always in the same place at the same time-but the conditions are getting beyond even imagination! And there are perhaps other factors not physical and not now calculable, that would still contribute to the difference in response that any two people make to apparently the same stimulus.

The present conditions, physical and mental, of each person are a resultant of his past, and the past for each individual is necessarily different from that of all others. Therefore the stream of thought is for each person an individual matter, and it is inconceivable that any two persons should have exactly similar associations and perceptions.

PRESENTATION STEP.-I. But if each person's present is the resultant of his past you will ask, do we never have an experience that is wholly new?

Think of something that seemed a wholly new experience and analyze it. Think, for example, of the last new book you read: you say you gained new thoughts from the bookdid mental states fly through the air from the page to your mind? Surely not! In what sense is it, then, that you gained new thoughts?

Suppose you read the sentence, "For several years there has been an unmistakable diminution of the public interest in oratorio." All these words were known to you before, but not in just these relations. As you perceived each word or group of words it was followed by trains of association, and the sentence had meaning to you depending on the nature of these associations and their present relations. All you gained from the book, then, was what you brought to it somewhat rearranged.

Analysis of all so-called new experience will show that the content is invariably "old" or secondary, and that what is new is as invariably the arrangement.

II. But, you will ask, is there not in the beginning of life some wholly new experience? Suppose, in answer, that a person who has been totally blind to the age of twenty years suddenly receives his sight. He can see at first only what the structure of his eyes, optic nerve, and brain as determined by heredity and individual growth enables him to see.

There is never a time, moreover, when it is thinkable that something comes from without to within the mind, when something the elements of which at least were not potentially in the mind before is introduced.

And the colors and touches, even the primary ones that you make into the print of the book and the book itself; those, also, that the man formerly blind, or the little child makes into objects about him, instead of being something added to the mind from without it,-all are only those sen

sations that the past of each, individual and racial, enables him to make out of components potentially there.

According to the theory of evolution an individual life cannot be isolated from parental and ancestral lives. As cell life in each organism develops, it is thinkable that constant readjustments of elemental mental conditions make possible in the course of time the stream of thought as we know it.

III. Think of the action of the mind as somewhat like that of the kaleidoscope, with the sensations corresponding to the pieces of glass. As the kaleidoscope is turned, new designs are formed that are the rearrangements of the same pieces of glass. Somewhat thus with each new stimulus, sensations created anew, yet secondary, for each moment of the present, take new relations, and these newly arranged groups make up the stream of thought at every moment. The mind, however, seems almost limitless in the number of its possible elements. Its possible combinations, also, seem infinite, and each new combination, because of memory, becomes a possibility, an added potentiality for future thought. The gain at each rearrangement, moreover, is not only in the complexity of material, the content, but also in the nature of the relations established. This last matter, however, is another story which you will study about from the standpoint of Thought.

IV. When we look at the stream of thought under the aspect of the rearrangement of secondary mental material into higher forms of relation, the standpoint is that of Apperception.

APPLICATION STEP.-I. With the idea in mind that each one's stream of thought from moment to moment is the progressive rearrangement of his own secondary mental material, think over again the conditions that would make