36 Blaisdell—Suggestions for Psychological Study. 
ingly, Plato excluded from his esoteric classes men who had not studied 
the mathematics. He will very likely require for safe conclusion an 
older student at his side to hold the object of investigation in the focus 
of view, and help him spell out the unfamiliar objects in those invisible 
regions. So Plato needed Socrates—Plato, the teacher of the ages. It 
may be done in the class room, which you may call a laboratory; but it 
is a laboratory, where results are reached—under any good teacher —by 
laboring them out by the use of a cutting and coming again process as 
truly as corresponding things are laborated in chemistry or biology. In 
fact the ancient method of recitation by memory—and it had its ex¬ 
cellencies, which in the new days will be altogether lost to very 
great damage —is everywhere modified, and there is no good teacher, nor 
was there ever a good teacher in any department of instruction, whose 
recitation room is not a laboratory. So Gorgias thought when he sat in 
the laboratory of the great typical teacher, Socrates. So Polus thought 
when he was dealt with by the great teacher as Marsyts was dealt with 
when he thought to excel Apollo in the use of the lyre. 
Indeed, to say one of the many things which one would like to sqy in 
caution about this laboratory work, there is less likelihood at present of 
one danger from the use of laboratory methods in psychology than iu 
the material sciences, from this very need of the presence of a teacher 
to superin‘-end laberation. It is coming to be more than suspected by 
thoughtful observers that what may be said to amount to a fad of labor 
atory practice is, in the hands of a multitude of teachers, only the 
turning of the student into a laboratory supplied at a great cost with 
the requisite implements, to find out,by tardy and unmilitant processes, 
the less or more significant facts in a department of things, without 
seeing to it that in the student’s mind these facts are properly coordi¬ 
nated and reduced to a whole of scientific structure and import. The 
truth is, that no body of facts in any science can properly be left, as 
found by the student of whatever perceptive sagacity, without being 
constructed into the wholeness of their scientific relation by a teacher’s 
broader and maturer comprehension of them, and interpreted into the 
student’s mind in all their mighty and living import out of the 
heated furnace of an endowed teacher’s aroused heart. All good teach¬ 
ing is interpretative empowerment—whatever the thing taught, and 
not in the way of mere intellectual stimulation in order that they may 
study, as Prof. Moses Stuart used to say, “ like a tiger, ” but in the way 
of making the perfect concept elaborated mighty to the volume and 
momentum of living. And any good teacher of psychology is all the 
better circumstanced, by his necessity of holding his mind close to the 
student’s mind, for a laboratory practice which will minister to the 
highest ends of teaching and study. That teaching is everywhere the 
best—and none other is good—which makes thoroughly scientific con¬ 
cepts generative in the pupil’s mind of most productive momentum 
in manhood and womanhood. 
