270 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



tion too, consultation of legal and perhaps other authorities as well 

 — than a good night's sleep, a clear week-end, perhaps even a whole 

 vacation! A sudden solution may, of course, come at other times: 

 one says and hears "It strikes me!" at any hour of day; yet surely 

 for most normally living and thinking people oftenest in the morn- 

 ing. Normal sleeping, too, seems needed, and that is (at any rate 

 seems) dreamless; for while admitting that dreams too are sometimes 

 helpful, we incline to think of such as but pre- waking forecasts 

 towards the solutions; and of the more ordinary dreams, despite 

 Freud's marvellous interpretations of so many of them, as over- 

 mingled with vaguer thought-wanderings, such as we all know in 

 moods of reverie and moments of phantasy even by day, and which 

 so largely pass and are forgotten, as they mostly deserve, since 

 unadapted to oiu- real activities of life. No doubt the poet and the 

 artist make more of these than do the rest of us; yet does not the 

 great rise of dream-interpretation with Freud and his disciples go 

 in the main to indicate the abnormality of such conscious dreaming; 

 for is it not just their distressed patients that they have first 

 and best interpreted? And though they have come also to con- 

 tribute interpretations, and these often acute, of those higher 

 dreamers to whom the world's progress has been so largely due, 

 are they not still more or less biased by their pathological 

 approach? For is not the safer approach the developmental one, 

 that of beginning with the normal and happy sleep of infancy and 

 childhood ? 



Starting here, and listening to one of the most sympathetic— and 

 thus wisest— of educationalists, Margaret McMillan, to our mind 

 on lines even surpassing those of Montessori, we have heard her 

 discourse on her ideal training college for teachers. In this her 

 many counsels of perfection culminated in selecting the very finest 

 of all her applied psychologists to what she claimed as the most 

 important of all educational tasks — that of putting the children to 

 sleep -thus happily inspired! And must not those of us who have 

 had such vital experience through childhood agree with her? Do 

 we not here find the mother-instinct at its best as well as simplest, 

 and even fatherly wisdom too? 



Is it objected that most students prefer to study late rather than 

 early? Yes; but two fresh considerations here arise: first, that 

 human life, throughout its rise, its pre-history, and history up to 

 the present, is far more spent in activities than in thought, and that 

 the brain —of youth especially — is thus above all concerned with 

 the direction of individual movements, far more than with the 

 interpretation of other and more general ones. So it is but natural 

 that it should have its main day's work well over (though not to 

 positive fatigue) before settling down to face at all, or, still more 

 seriously, share the recorded activities of maturer minds. Secondly, 



