VOL. XXI.

No. 10.

1. Mental digestion or apperception. It is a common habit to describe things and processes by figures of speech. Many of the results of education are described in terms of biology. I have myself often used a biological figure of speech to explain the Herbartian doctrine of apperception. The Pestalozzian, or senseperception, standpoint believes in observation and the memorizing, but the Herbartian believes rather in explaining and understanding what is seen or memorized. It believes not so much in eating as in digesting what one eats. Not what we eat but what we digest nourishes and strengthens us. This figure of speech is of great aid to start one on the road to insight into the merits of two very different theories of education. But the usefulness of the trope is soon exhausted. There are very few symbolic or figurative expressions which remain useful beyond the first steps of inquiry.

The digestion of food, for example, ends with assimilation of foreign matter introduced as food and the selection and distribution of the assimilated particles to the parts of the body to which they are to perform the office of restoration. They supply the place of worn out organic matter and these new particles will pass through the process of waste incident on fulfilling their bodily functions. and then they must be removed and replaced by newly assimilated food. But this is not the case with the spiritual process of learning. The waste process and the restoration process do not belong

The biological

to the spiritual process. analogy does not hold good except so far as to indicate that the raw material of knowledge is assimilated to the body of knowledge already in possession. What is new is explained by what is old and the old store receives an accession or supplement from the newly assimilated knowledge.

In the case of new knowledge the old knowledge is not destroyed. But there is an assent on the part of the mind to a new unity or aggregate which contains the old explained in part by the new and the new explained in part by the old. The explanation is clearer and gives us more insight. When we study this carefully we see that the including totality which contains the old and the new reveals a deeper principle of causality than the principle which organized the old knowledge. Hence the new principle is better able to explain what we already knew before by reason of the fact that we explain with this principle both the old and the new. Hence instead of a waste of matter which needs the addition of new matter to restore the loss we have to admit that the matter of the old knowledge as well as the matter of the new knowledge is better explained than it was before the act of apperception. Hence there is less waste of the material of knowledge. There were some phases of the old knowledge which were not so well explained or understood before as after the act of apperception, hence in apperception considered as mental diges

tion there is not only no waste but a considerable change of what was superfluous and unorganized matter of knowledge into more thoroughly organized and digested matter. The spiritual digests without waste and hence it is not a process of restoration like the biological process.

All figurative language may stimulate the first stages of apprehension but it retards the final stages of apprehension. The symbolic knowing has always in it this defect. Starting with the idea that sense-perception has its analogy in the seizing of facts and following up the analogy with the supposition that apperception has an analogy to digestion, this biological view may go on to assume further steps of analogy which do not aid psychology but on the contrary mislead the student. For example, the particles of food that have been converted into animal or vegetable cells by the plant or animal are preserved in the organism for a time as occupying space and as mutually excluding. This affords a materialistic conception of stored up facts in the mind. But the act of mental assimilation does not leave the fact as a space occupying cell; it explains it as an act of causality which has produced it, and a million products of a causality would not occupy any more space than a single fact. The mind in the apperception process slips over to the thought of the producing energy and drops out all of the dead results as summed up in one class-word, a common noun or general name. The process is capable of producing an infinite number of dead results.

The student who is beginning his study of botany takes some particular plant and commences its analysis, inquiring into the use and function of each particular which he inventories. The roots, the trunk, the branches, the leaves, the flowers, the fruit-all of them dead results in his first inventory-are to become vital or

living by having their causal relations unfolded; each must be seen in its process as causing a new result and being itself the result of a cause lying back of it.

At first the dead results are separate items without unity. But when they have been interpreted by placing them in the causal process they get a unity through that process and the mind thinks them all in one inclusive thought. When we think things in their causes we think multiplicity into unity-many into on. Therefore in what we have called mental digestion, each fact is enlarged into a process and not any of the fact gets wasted but all of it is preserved and elevated into a higher form of reality.

2. Should pedagogy include medical and surgical pathology?

There is a movement in cities towards the appointment of examining or supervising physicians who are to inspect the schools periodically with a view to prevent the spread of contagious diseases. This movement is undoubtedly in the interest of public health and every city should consider its adoption. But there is another movement which looks towards the conversion of the teacher into a practicing physician or surgeon, and this is not to be commended. It is not well for the influence of the teacher that he become a specialist in diagnosing diseases. There is a psychological reaction upon the mind in the study of pathology. The successful physician trains his powers of observation into the narrow field of morbid bodily condition. He trains himself to see symptoms of disease. And so nature and man come to be looked upon by a pathologist teacher as objects in a hospital or sick room. It is evident that no such habit can be formed in the mind of a teacher or a clergyman without diminishing his power in the school or the church. To cultivate one's observation

The assignment of lessons in composition brings its own questions to be met. Even though the cultivation of the writing habit be the end in view, and the letterform be fixed upon as a means toward that end, the subject matter remains to be selected. Emerson has told us that the influences which go to the making of the scholar are; nature, and the mind of the past through books, and action. Nature and the mind of the past can be used together by socializing natural objects and the processes of nature; by investing them with the personality indicated by Wordsworth when he speaks of the flower as enjoying the air it breathes; by learning what the poets have said about nature in its varied aspects; and by seeing how the ancient world connected nature with its religious accounts which we now call myths. Human experiences must also receive a proportionate share of attention and here it is that the re-living of recorded events of heroism and noble daring educate on *All rights reserved by the author.

the doing side, till the student is himself ready to "re-enact Thermopylae."

The conditions essential to successful letter-writing and the delicacy required in dealing with it satisfactorily, make the assignment of lessons of great importance. No one can write a letter mechanically as he can solve a problem. A letter without spontaneity and the qualities already set forth in a preceding article, has been compared to a "ship without a sail, a blue-book without dates, or a romance without love." It is the purpose of the rest of this section of the paper to show that right conditions for successful letter-writing can be furnished by the school. The teacher has only to summon to her aid the elements of motive, good will, sympathy, and whatever goes to the making of character and combine them to illustrate her subject, as the science teacher uses the elements of

physical nature to illustrate his subject. When the composition lesson has been properly assigned the conditions of sue