educational methods. Not very much success in this line of investigation can be expected, however, from those enthusiasts in child-study who do not as yet know the alphabet of rational psychology. Those who can not discriminate the three kinds of thinking are not likely to recognise them in their study of children. Those who have no idea of arrested development will not be likely to undertake the careful and delicate observations which explain why certain children stop growing at various points in different studies, and require patient and persevering effort on the part of the teacher to help them over their mental difficulties. The neglected child who lives the life of a street Arab has become cunning and selfhelpful, but at the expense of intellect and morals. Childstudy should take up his case and make a thorough inventory of his capacities and limitations, and learn the processes by which these have developed. Child-study in this way will furnish us more valuable information for the conduct of our schools than any other fields of investigation have yet done. § 6. In rational psychology we learn that there are three stages of the development of the thinking power. The first stage is that of sense-perception; its form of thinking conceives all objects as having independent being and as existing apart from all relation to other objects. It would set up an atomic theory of the universe if it were questioned closely. The second stage of knowing is that which sees everything as depending upon the environment. Everything is relative, and can not exist apart from its relations to other things. The theory of the universe from this stage of thinking is pantheistic. There is one absolute unity of all things, and this unity alone is independent, and all else is dependent. Things are phenomenal and the unity is the absolute. Pantheism conceives the universe as one vast sea of being, in which the particular waves lose their individuality after a brief manifestation. The third stage of thinking arrives at the insight that true being is self-active or self-determined. True being is therefore self-conscious being, and exists as intellect and will; all else is phenomenal being. On this insight depend the doctrines of God, freedom, and immortality. They may be held, it is true, by a kind of blind faith, when one's thinking is in the first or second stage, but such faith is unstable, because it is contradicted by its mental conviction. The most important end of intellectual education is to take the pupil safely through the world theory of the first and second stages—namely, sense-perception and the relativity doctrine-up to the insight into the personal nature of the absolute. All parts and pieces of school education and all other education should have in view this development of the intellect. The two attitudes of mind in observation spoken of in § 4 correspond roughly to the second and third stages of thinking here described and more fully discussed in Chapter IV. The negative conditions of mental unfolding will But be discovered and defined by empirical psychology. that which is an original energy can not be explained by its environment because it is independent; nor is it, strictly speaking, correlated to the body, although it uses it in sense-perception and in volition as an instrument of communication with the outer world. |