The Function of Method 8i 



ness to them that abstracted lectures on theory do not possess. In 

 the same way in the religious life of many individuals there is, 

 perhaps unconsciously in many cases, this separation between 

 the thoughts that they have about conduct, about ideals, about the 

 things that they ought to do, on the one hand, and the this and 

 the that of the daily round and common task, with its manifold 

 of petty commissions and omissions. 



If we attempt to discuss this dualism between theory and prac- 

 tice we find two general attitudes among men. 



There is in the first place one common among men who are 

 engaged in work which deals largely with the materials of the 

 earth and which requires little thought save that involved in tradi- 

 tion, inherited custom, and the performance of a series of annual 

 habits that together approximate a personality. These are they 

 who are content to toil, without asking why or how. Their 

 fathers have done so ; why should they do otherwise ? Thus they 

 were taught ; why should they better the instruction ? It is harder 

 for the mind of one of these to entertain the new idea than for 

 the nerves and muscles of the body to go regularly through the 

 accustomed occupations of the circling year. The mechanics of 

 habit have become to them all in all. They have a mental inertia 

 and a momentum of bodily habit neither of which can be changed. 

 There are teachers of this type, who teach as they have been 

 taught and who feel uncomfortable and in strange places and 

 unfamiliar ways if circumstances oblige them to take up new 

 material or to use old material in new ways. They are those who 

 always come back. " Fresh fields and pastures new " have no 

 attractions for them. The practice of the good old days in the 

 good old-fashioned way is their very life, and any theory which 

 would cause a break in the regular course of long-standing habits 

 is not taken kindly to. 



In addition to the class of people and teachers who dislike any 

 modifications of practice and who leave theory as an unconscious 

 part of their experience, there are those who believe that theory 

 is something that is acquired " en bloc," and is put into the mind 

 much as a Lockean idea, by being written upon a tabula rasa. 

 Theory from this point of view is a certain mass of precepts, rules 

 and recipes for behaviour, for the condvict of classes, for teach- 

 ing lessons, and for rightly and duly administering all the details 

 of school life. This view is perhaps more prevalent among those 



