56 EDUCATIONAL THEORY 



man's inner nature. We start from the assumption that in the con- 

 stitution of the psychical process there can exist no cause that acts 

 one way at one time, and another at another time. The laws accord- 

 ing to which ideas enter into varied associations in our consciousness, 

 developing in those associations all the remarkable phenomena of 

 our widely ramifying soul-life, are natural laws, as rigid and unvary- 

 ing as those under which the heavenly bodies describe their mighty 

 oibits. But, while the latter continually unfold their secrets to the 

 inquiring eye of man, the peculiarities of human personality still 

 veil themselves in mystery. 



Psychology would bring the light of knowledge into this obscurity. 

 It would reveal within the rise and the development of psychical life 

 those uniform processes from which result the inner life of the indi- 

 vidual, as each moment it is manifested, a unity characteristic of 

 him alone. 



Psychology, then, is conceived as a theory of self-knowledge. But 

 not in the sense that man brings to light therein, out of peaceful 

 seclusion, his most secret thoughts and desires, in order to line them 

 up before the judgment-seat of conscience; rather in the sense that 

 he turns his eye upon the course of his inner life, upon its pregnant, 

 manifold, and interwoven complexity, that he considers the play 

 of forces, their contending influence, their strife for mastery, that 

 he seeks for those laws that govern the rise of psychical states and 

 their disappearance. 



Now the more clearly psychology apprehends the uniform charac- 

 ter of the mental life, and the more manifest its expositions of 

 particular occurrences become, the more precise and the more cer- 

 tain are those measures which pedagogy can adopt for its ends. 

 Therefore, the bond between psychology and pedagogy is so close 

 that progress in the latter depends upon the advances made by the 

 former. The fate of pedagogy is bound up with that of psychology. 

 Pedagogy is, in respect of the means it employs, applied psychology. 

 Every advance in psychology must have its effects on the progress 

 of pedagogy. 



In Herbart we have a good example of this. His reform in psych- 

 ology originated in the pedagogical necessity of treating ideas like 

 forces, and of deducing the phenomena of mental life from the uni- 

 form relations of these forces to each other. Since that time peda- 

 gogy has preserved its close connection with psychology; but it is 

 in our own times that this connection has become still closer owing 

 to the discovery of new methods in the field of physiological psycho- 

 logy and in the study of the infant mind. 



It is from psychology that pedagogy learns how particular events 

 in mental life affect one another. In consequence we are enabled to 

 influence that causal nexus through precise methods which have a 



