166 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 
thrown on the scrap-heap like a cheap car. In the long run it will 
successfully resist such treatment. In self-preservation one of its reactions 
is to turn to schemes of adult education. It is only in exceptional circum- 
stances, when the fight becomes too unequal, that a whole community 
sinks into listless apathy as at Marienthal. 
But the main motive for adult education is not self-preservation ; 
rather is it an enhanced idea of the self as an enduring entity, as a per- 
sonality conscious of powers unexercised and unrealised, striving steadily 
towards its own goals. However excellent primary education may be, 
there must remain many lessons which an adult can only learn when the 
need arises. ‘The gardener cannot train his tree while yet a seedling : he 
must wait till its branches begin to shoot, and he tends it until it ceases to 
grow. At present, however, the salvaging of adults of mature age has not 
been systematically taken in hand, partly owing to the pressing need of 
finding employment for adolescents. Here, again, age as a variable has 
to be taken into consideration. What should be the age allowance for 
scholarship candidates for secondary schools or for the universities ? 
What should be the school-leaving age? Is the break from school to 
industry too abrupt ? There are indications of stagnation, if not actual 
retrogression, to be found in the duller half of the child population for the 
years immediately following this break if extent of vocabulary and richness 
of concepts be taken as criteria. It is true that vocabulary and concepts 
cannot be divorced from real life, but the question here is whether 
such individuals have made sufficient initial progress before the break 
to enable them later on effectively to discharge their responsibilities as 
citizens in the modern world. 
‘THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS. 
A most important development in modern psychology is the search for 
innate, basic, unitary traits of personality. ‘There is accumulative evidence 
in favour of the existence of a number of unitary traits or factors, and it has 
been found convenient to denote them provisionally by letters of the 
alphabet, analogous to a practice of physics and other sciences. ‘This does 
not in the least imply that their functional interpretation is necessarily less 
clear than that of concepts such as introversion and the like. It is true 
that polysyllabic words have sometimes only to undergo a very cursory 
censorship, but this practice leads to abuses of the language mechanism 
which may retard individual cerebral evolution. Besides, the less popular 
use of letters to denote new concepts is not likely to proceed indefinitely, 
if only for the fact that the introduction of such a letter is preceded by 
many thousand hours of laborious work. 
Closely connected with the study of traits is the difficult question of 
the effectiveness of past experiences. Spearman’s researches show that 
retentivity is independent of g, and there is evidence that the old tend 
to deteriorate in tests of immediate memory. How far is the balance 
redressed when the extent and variety of all their previous experiences as 
well as their integration are taken into account? It is hardly necessary to 
illustrate the dire effects of lack of experience. Thus the brilliant young 
debater is often pulverised by one who is dull but elderly. My second 
