494 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



thesis of life, the stuff out of which, each earnest, loving soul 

 builds his world. Likewise, they are the last terms in the analy- 

 sis of life, the ulti mates reached by the painstaking, fact-loving 

 man of science. 



Pardon my too persistent iteration. But I am saying this 

 over and over again, hoping to so say it at last that it will seize 

 upon your imagination and carry us both into a new and more 

 rational comprehension of the problem of education. The child 

 is a ii7iit, and neither he nor you can separate his intellectual 

 from his emotional, bodily life. It might be desirable, it would 

 certainly be convenient, if we could present great slices of truth, 

 like a generous help of layer cake, to the minds of our children, 

 and have it thoroughly assimilated by methods prescribed by 

 ourselves in normal schools assembled. But however desirable 

 or convenient, it is not possible. Yet we go on trying — yester- 

 day, to-day— I hope not forever. To do this is to deny causation 

 and invoke the power of magic and the black arts. There is but 

 one avenue of approach to the mind of a child. It is the avenue 

 pointed out in earlier days by loving intuition — that unconscious 

 induction of the untaught spirit — and in later days by the colder 

 scrutiny of science — that conscious induction of the informed 

 spirit. It is the approach to action through feeling, and to 

 thought through sensation. The causal chain is very distinct. 

 It should be well noted : feeling, action, sensation, thought. You 

 see, then, how psychologically impossible it is to reach the last 

 link in this chain without passing through the intermediate 

 links. Yet this is precisely what we attempt to do when we di- 

 vorce the thought life from the bodily life, and assign the one to 

 the school and the other to the home. 



If it were equally agreeable to sit still as to walk, and we hap- 

 pened to be sitting still, we should go on sitting still all the rest of 

 our lives. The balance of pleasure and pain being equal, there 

 would be no motive to action. The absence of desire would be the 

 absence of power. We should be as hopelessly bound to our chair 

 as Prometheus to his rock. In this condition we might be picked 

 up, might even through the application of some external force be 

 made to go through the motion of walking, but it would be an 

 awkward, ungracious act. A better way to get us to walk would 

 be to offer some inducement — in a word, to enlist desire on the 

 side of walking. The internal force is infinitely more eflBcient 

 than the external. No one can make us walk so well as we can 

 walk ourselves, for walking, after all, is a mental act. No action, 

 however simple or complex, can be brought about without an ap- 

 peal to the spring of action, and the spring of all action is a feel- 

 ing, a desire, an emotion. It is perfectly hopeless to ask your 

 apathetic subject, sitting there in the chair, to get up and walk. 



