L.—EDUCATION. 225 
and so forth? As my friend, Adam Smith, once said in another con- 
nection, that omission is “ altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers, but 
extremely fit for a nation whose education is influenced by shopkeepers.” 
‘Since I woke up’ Rip Van Winkle continues, ‘I have been studying 
hard the best books from a vast collection of what I find is called 
Psychology, and I have run through dozens of smaller books for teachers 
which profess to boil down—as you call it—scientific research into a 
practical compendium for the course called Pedagogy, or how to teach 
every subject to every kind of person, and this Pedagogy based on 
psychological commandments seems to be compulsory in the training 
of all teachers in State schools, though why it is not compulsory for other 
teachers I do not know. The pupils learn the whole of psychology in a year, 
which shows how clever are your professors of education and the would-be 
teachers, compared with the professors and would-be teachers of my 
generation a century ago. This psychology delights me extremely. For 
it teaches me precisely how I get all my thoughts and feelings and what 
I do with them when I get them: It is explained with lovely diagrams 
that I cannot do with the external stimuli anything but what I actually 
do; and if I seem to do something different from what I ought to do, it 
is either a conditioned reflex in which I have forgotten to obey the con- 
ditions, or it is an unconditioned reflex which means that the conditions 
_were there all the time, or ought to have been there, but that I forgot to 
give the right, or was rattled into giving the wrong, response—and Nature 
_yery properly spanked my Ego. I have, in fact, at last discovered, what 
used to puzzle me a hundred years ago, that I am what I am because I am 
notsomeone else. I learn, too, that I am the sum of all my responses and 
teflexes, together with those that I repress and tuck away in my sub- 
consciousness, because I do not like them or they do not like me, and 
which therefore wait either to pounce out on me unawares or pop up just 
to show me they are there; and then I sublimate them into something 
which I ought to like much better, and if I do not sublimate them, they 
sulk and fester into a complex. But while Iam simply the sum total, I am 
also the unifying something that collects, and labels, and separates, so 
_ that I am at one and the same time the man who gives you the ticket, the 
passenger who uses it on the train by which he must travel, and the 
collector who takes it from the passenger when the journey is done, to 
prove that the passenger has come by that train and not by an illegitimate 
motor-nerve bus. But as I am only a beginner at this modern psychology, 
I have not yet found out whether my mind—if it is my mind and not 
merely a function of the physical stimuli—was there before I had any 
stimuli and responses, or whether the stimuli came first from somewhere 
and created my mind in order that I might recognise that it was a stimulus 
and give it the right label. What comforts me, however, is to be assured 
that I have an Ego which is always different from, and yet the same, as all 
my reflexes and reactions—both those which I have had in the past, am 
having to-day, and those I am going to have presently. 
_ ‘Finally,’ Rip Van Winkle concludes, ‘ I observe with immense interest 
that after a hundred years you are still arguing precisely all the fundamental 
questions that perplexed us. A friend sent me a book called “‘ Education 
at the Cross-Roads,” by a gentleman who had been a Minister of Education, 
1931 2 
