of education is to make useful habits automatic,—Maxims relative to habit-forming: 1. Strong initiative,—2. No exception,—3. Seize first opportunity to act,—4. Don't preach,—Darwin and poetry: without exercise our capacities decay,—The habit of mental and muscular relaxation,—Fifth maxim, keep the faculty of effort trained,—Sudden conversions compatible with laws of habit,—Momentous influence of habits on character.

IX. THE ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS

A case of habit,—The two laws, contiguity and similarity,—The teacher has to build up useful systems of association,—Habitual associations determine character,—Indeterminateness of our trains of association,—We can trace them backward, but not foretell them,—Interest deflects,—Prepotent parts of the field,—In teaching, multiply cues.

X. INTEREST

The child's native interests,—How uninteresting things acquire an interest,—Rules for the teacher,—'Preparation' of the mind for the lesson: the pupil must have something to attend with,—All later interests are borrowed from original ones.

XI. ATTENTION

Interest and attention are two aspects of one fact,—Voluntary attention comes in beats,—Genius and attention,—The subject must change to win attention,—Mechanical aids,—The physiological process,—The new in the old is what excites interest,—Interest and effort are compatible,—Mind-wandering,—Not fatal to mental efficiency.

XII. MEMORY

Due to association,—No recall without a cue,—Memory is due to brain-plasticity,—Native retentiveness,—Number of associations may practically be its equivalent,—Retentiveness is a fixed property of the individual,—Memory versus memories,—Scientific system as help to memory,—Technical memories,—Cramming,—Elementary memory unimprovable,—Utility of verbal memorizing,—Measurements of immediate memory,—They throw little light,—Passion is the important factor in human efficiency,—Eye-memory, ear-memory, etc.,—The rate of forgetting, Ebbinghaus's results,—Influence of the unreproducible,—To remember, one must think and connect.

XIII. THE ACQUISITION OF IDEAS

Education gives a stock of conceptions,—The order of their acquisition,—Value of verbal material,—Abstractions of different orders: when are they assimilable,—False conceptions of children.

XIV. APPERCEPTION

Often a mystifying idea,—The process defined,—The law of economy,—Old-fogyism,—How many types of apperception?—New heads of classification must continually be invented,—Alteration of the apperceiving mass,—Class names are what we work by,—Few new fundamental conceptions acquired after twenty-five.

XV. THE WILL

The word defined,—All consciousness tends to action,—Ideo-motor action,—Inhibition,—The process of deliberation,—Why so few of our ideas result in acts,—The associationist account of the will,—A balance of impulses and inhibitions,—The over-impulsive and the over-obstructed type,—The perfect type,—The balky will,—What character building consists in,—Right action depends on right apperception of the case,—Effort of will is effort of attention: the drunkard's dilemma,—Vital importance of voluntary attention,—Its amount may be indeterminate,—Affirmation of free-will,—Two types of inhibition,—Spinoza on inhibition by a higher good,—Conclusion.

TALKS TO STUDENTS

I. THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION
II. ON A CERTAIN BLINDNESS IN HUMAN BEINGS
III. WHAT MAKES A LIFE SIGNIFICANT

TALKS TO TEACHERS

I. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE TEACHING ART

In the general activity and uprising of ideal interests which every one with an eye for fact can discern all about us in American life, there is perhaps no more promising feature than the fermentation which for a dozen years or more has been going on among the teachers. In whatever sphere of education their functions may lie, there is to be seen among them a really inspiring amount of searching of the heart about the highest concerns of their profession. The renovation of nations begins always at the top, among the reflective members of the State, and spreads slowly outward and downward. The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands. The earnestness which they at present show in striving to enlighten and strengthen themselves is an index of the nation's probabilities of advance in all ideal directions. The outward organization of education which we have in our United States is perhaps, on the whole, the best organization that exists in any country. The State school systems give a diversity and flexibility, an opportunity for experiment and keenness of competition, nowhere else to be found on such an important scale. The independence of so many of the colleges and universities; the give and take of students and instructors between them all; their emulation, and their happy organic relations to the lower schools; the traditions of instruction in them, evolved from the older American recitation-method (and so avoiding on the one hand the pure lecture-system prevalent in Germany and Scotland, which considers too little the individual student, and yet not involving the sacrifice of the instructor to the individual student, which the English tutorial system would seem too often to entail),—all these things (to say nothing of that coeducation of the sexes in whose benefits so many of us heartily believe), all these things, I say, are most happy features of our scholastic life, and from them the most sanguine auguries may be drawn.

Having so favorable an organization, all we need is to impregnate it with geniuses, to get superior men and women working more and more abundantly in it and for it and at it, and in a generation or two America may well lead the education of the world. I must say that I look forward with no little confidence to the day when that shall be an accomplished fact.

No one has profited more by the fermentation of which I speak, in pedagogical circles,