THE PHILOSOPHY OF MANUAL TRAINING. 645 



hundred boys, and over periods ranging from a few months to as 

 many years, and one can not know them and be interested in them 

 without reaching a number of generalizations about them. I have 

 come to be very fearful of the development of any boy who is mark- 

 edly clumsy, and I have come as the result of experience to mistrust 

 the reliability of his mental processes. 



I am not fond of Calvin. I think he did little to set free the 

 spii'it of man. But I find in the limitations imposed by the bodily 

 organism a predestination as real and as bitter as any that Calvin 

 taught. 



If we go one step further toward the extreme of acknowledged 

 deficiency, we shall meet still more striking testimony. This patho- 

 logical region is a most depressing one and to be entered unwillingly, 

 but health has undoubtedly gained much by a study of disease. The 

 localization of brain action has been established for psychologists by 

 the study of abnormal cases and by accidents. Where death or the 

 necessity for some surgical operation has made it possible to examine 

 into the brain structure, the most intimate connection has always been 

 found between function and organ, and between special function and 

 special organ. A failure in the power of speech, or the loss of any 

 special faculty brought about by sudden accident, can always be 

 traced to the injury of some part of the brain tissue. Sometimes the 

 injury is so vital that the tissue is completely impaired, and in that 

 case I believe there is no hope of recovering the lost faculty. But 

 sometimes an operation can restore the normal order. A clot of 

 blood has perhaps been formed and presses against some center. 

 "When the clot is removed, and with it the undue pressure, the lost 

 faculty is restored. You will find many such instances recorded in 

 the pages of experimental psychologies. But the application for us, 

 in studying the results of manual training, lies in the thought that the 

 poor, undeveloped brain centers in the deficient might be strength- 

 ened by exercise brought about at the extremities. It is a logical 

 suggestion. The bodily faculties are peripheral, the brain central. 

 As a matter of experience, and as a necessary inference from our 

 philosophy, the interaction between them is complete. The health of 

 one means the health of the other. 



Following this thought, manual training has been introduced as a 

 therapeutic agent in the treatment of feeble-minded and deficient 

 children, as at Elwyn, Pennsylvania, and in the treatment of the 

 morally oblique, as at the Elmira Reformatory, New York. The 

 results are now matters of statistics, and are probably in part known to 

 you all. l^othing has been found quite so effective in concentrating 

 the wandering attention of the feeble-minded and in co-ordinating 

 their mental and bodily movements as just this manual activity. In 



