UNIVERSITY REFORMS 65 



At present there is only a very vague realisation even among those 

 who call themselves teachers that the first duty in imparting instruc- 

 tion is to give pupils some idea of the proper methods of study. Mc- 

 Murry in the preface to his excellent book " How to Study and Teach- 

 ing how to Study " confesses that for many years he has made this 

 subject his hobby and adds that, after careful search, he has only been 

 able to find two books in English and none in German on the " Art of 

 Study." Few instructors ever give any serious attention to the de- 

 velopment of a normal thought-mechanism in their students. Informa- 

 tion is imparted together with a great many bad mental habits and the 

 store of knowledge acquired is considered to be the test of the individ- 

 ual's mental capacity. So firmly rooted in our mind is the idea that the 

 amount of information and not the acquisition of good mental habits 

 is the chief end of an education, that we fail to recognize the depend- 

 ence of our thoughts and actions upon the reactions of the nervous 

 system. The tentative attitude of one person and the ready acceptance 

 by another of articles of belief are conditions created by the responses 

 of the nervous system to the needs of the individual. The mental 

 traits, functional expressions of the capacity of the nervous system that 

 make it easy for one person to believe, may in another tend to the de- 

 velopment of an habit of mind which makes it difficult for the believer 

 to realize that, even in matters of belief, no one is altogether right. 



According to Professor William James old fogeyism begins at an 

 earlier age than the majority of persons believe to be the case. The 

 symptoms may appear at twenty-five. In spite of the general existence 

 of this presenile form of deterioration, we still clamor about the neces- 

 sity of a broader and more general culture, as if it were possible to 

 correct one bad habit by substituting others. Much good would un- 

 doubtedly be accomplished by the application of the methods of modern 

 clinical psychiatry to the study of the sources of the prejudices and 

 various forms of intellectual intolerance which have resulted in the 

 painfully slow progress of the human race. In the examination of 

 patients in the clinic, a careful study of their powers of sense-percep- 

 tion is conducted before proceeding to an estimation of the capacity 

 for originating and associating ideas, or for forming intellectual judg- 

 ments. Our universities sanction the perversion of the normal mental 

 activities of students by encouraging them to debate, to have a ready 

 opinion upon many subjects, and to talk glibly in public, before they 

 have shown any capacity to gather the data presented to consciousness 

 by the medium of the sensory tracts (touch, taste, smell, sight, hear- 

 ing) and to arrange and compare them so as to form independent 

 judgments. Eosen in an interesting book 2 has shown us that the great- 

 ness of the old masters was due to the acuteness and accuracy of their 



2 " Die Natur in der Kunst," Leipzig, B. G. Teubner, 1903. 

 vol. Lxxvni. — 5. 



