LB 1051 COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED PREFACE. IN offering this book to the educational public, I feel it necessary to explain its point of view. Psy chology is too frequently only an inventory of certain so-called "faculties of the mind," such as the five senses, imagination, conception, reasoning, etc. 2 And teachers have been offered such an inventory under the name of "educational psychology." It has been assumed that education has to do with "cultivating the faculties." Perhaps the analogy of the body has been taken as valid for the soul, and, inasmuch as we can train this or that muscle, it is inferred that we can cultivate this or that faculty. The defect of this mode of view is that it leaves out of sight the genesis of the higher faculties from the lower ones. Muscles are not consecutive, the one growing out of another and taking its place, but they are co-ordinate and side by side in space, whereas in mind the higher 129296 V faculties take the place of the lower faculties and in some sort absorb them. Conception, instead of existing side by side with perception, like the wheels of a clock, contains the latter in a more complete form of activity. Sense-perception, according to the definition, should apprehend individual things, and conception should take note of classes or species. But conception really transforms perception into a seeing of each object as a member of a class, so that the line between perception and conception has vanished, and we can not find in consciousness a mere perception of an individual object, but only that kind of perception which sees the object in its process of production. Moreover, this inventory-psychology misapprehends the nature of classification and generalization. It believes it to be a result of analysis and abstraction, whereas it is really a synthesis; to the object there is added its cause; the idea of the individual is enlarged by thinking it in the process that has produced it and others like it. For we connect one object with another by going back to the common process that originated both. This is the most radical error of the inventory-psychology. It is the source of a long train of other evils, for it arrests the investigation at the stage of isolated details, and makes impossible any insight into the genesis of the higher faculties of the mind. The doctrine of nominalism-and the socalled conceptualism of Hamilton and others is practically nominalism-is the only logical result from its theory of generalization. Universals are only flatus vocis-mere names or mouthfuls of spoken wind: only individuals exist. It has never occurred to such psychologists to inquire whether the processes in which individuals are generated are not real too, and real in a higher sense than the individual things and events that they originate, modify, and destroy. Education has use for psychology only in so far as it shows the development of mind into higher activities and the method of such development. What if the psychologist happens to know and recognise only the lower faculties, and to be ignorant of all but the names of the higher ones? It is evident that he will conceive under those names only the lower activities with which he is acquainted. This has, in fact, happened often. Perception of individuals is all that inventory-psychology thinks under conception and generalization. The understanding with its relativity doctrine is all that some followers of Kant think under the name reason. Again, it has happened that psychology recommended for teachers has been mostly of an individual istic character, the principle of participation* in spiritual life being ignored. Hence all allusion to the psychology of society, of nations, of institutions, and especially of art and religion, has been omitted. Education can not be wisely administered except from the high ground of the spirit of civilization. The child is to be brought most expeditiously into a correct understanding of his relation to the race, and into a helpful activity within civilization. Unless the psychology of civilization is understood by the teacher, he will quite likely be harmed by learning a list of the so-called faculties. He will suppose, for example, that his business is to bring about a "harmony among these faculties," and develop them all symmetrically. Being ignorant of the way in which higher faculties re-enforce the lower, he will attempt to cultivate them isolatedly, and he will generally produce arrested development of the mind in the lower stages of its activities or faculties, and prevent the further intellectual growth of his pupils during their lives; for it happens that the fundamental categories of the different faculties or activities are radically opposed, and to harmonize them is to stultify *There is lately much activity among the deeper sort of thinkers on psychology in this province of social participation. See Chapter XXXV for some mention of it. |