facility in movement and expression, and also some degree of personal and social confidence. But for the same reasons the kindergarten over- stimulates the motor scholars at the correspond- ing age. There should really be two kindergarten methods — one based on the idea of deliberation, the other on that of expression.
The task of the educator here, it is evident, is to help nature correct a tendency to one-sided development; just as the task is this also in the former case; but here the variation is on the side of idiosyncrasy ultimately, and of genius imme- diately. For genius, I think, is the more often developed from the contemplative mind, with the relatively dammed-up brain, of this child, than from the smooth-working machine of the motor one. But just for this reason, if the damming- up be liberated, not in the channels of healthy assimilation, and duly correlated growth, but in the forced discharges of violent emotion, fol- lowed by conditions of melancholy and by certain unsocial tendencies, then the promise of genius ripens into eccentricity, and the blame is possi- bly ours.
It seems true — although great caution is neces- sary in drawing inferences — that here a certain dis- tinction may be found to hold also between the sexes. It is possible that the apparent precocious alertness of girls in their school years, and earlier, may be simply a predominance among them of the motor individuals. This is borne out by the examination of the kinds of performance in which they seem to be more forward than boys. It re- solves itself, so far as my observation goes, into greater quickness of response and greater agility in performance; not greater constructiveness, nor THE TRAINING OF THE MIND. 177 greater power of concentrated attention. The boys se,em to need more instruction because they do not learn as much for themselves by acting upon what they already know. In later years, the distinction gets levelled off by the common agen- cies of education, and by the setting of tasks re- quiring more thought than the mere spontaneities of either type avail to furnish. Yet all the way through, I think there is something in the ordi- nary belief that woman is relatively more impul- sive and more prone to the less reflective forms of action.
What has now been said may be sufficient to give some concrete force to the common opinion that education should take account of the individ- ual character at this earliest stage. The general distinction between sensory and motor has, how- ever, a higher application in the matter of memory and imagination at later stages of growth, to which we may now turn.
Second Period. — The research is of course more difficult as the pupil grows older, since the influ- ences of heredity tend to become blurred by the more constant elements of the child's home, school, and general social environment. The child whom I described just above as sensory in his type is constantly open to influences from the stimulat- ing behaviour of his motor companion, as well as from the direct measures which parent and teacher take to overcome his too-decided tendencies and to prevent one-sided development. So, too, the motor child tends to find correctives in his envi- ronment.
The analogy, however, between the more or- ganic and hereditary differences in individuals, and the intellectual and moral variations which they 178 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
tend to develop with advance in school age, is very marked; and we find a similar series of dis- tinctions in the later period. The reason that there is a correspondence between the variations given in heredity and those due in the main to the edu- cative influences of the single child's social envi- ronment is in itself very suggestive, but space does not permit its exposition here.
The fact is this: the child tends, under the in- fluence of his home, school, social surroundings, etc., to develop a marked character either in the sensory or in the motor direction, in his memory, imagination, and general type of mind.
Taking up the " motor " child first, as before, we find that his psychological growth tends to con- firm him in his hereditary type. In all his social dealing with other children he is more or less dom- ineering and self-assertive; or at least his conduct leads one to form that opinion of him. He seems to be constantly impelled to act so as to show himself off. He " performs " before people, shows less modesty than may be thought desirable in one of his tender years, impresses the forms of his own activity upon the other children, who come to stand about him with minds constrained to follow him. He is an object lesson in both the advan- tages and the risks of an aggressive life policy. He has a suggestion to make in every emergency, a line of conduct for each of his company, all marked out or supplied on the spur of the mo- ment by his own quick sense of appropriate ac- tion; and for him, as for no one else, to hesitate is to be lost.
Now what this general policy or method of growth means to his consciousness is becoming more and more clear in the light of the theory of THE TRAINING OF THE MIND. 179 mental types. The reason a person is motor is that his mind tends always to be filled up most easily with memories or revived images of the twitchings, tensions, contractions, expansions, of the activities of the muscular system. He is a motor because the means of his thought generally, the mental coins which pass current in his thought exchange, are muscular sensations or the traces which such sensations have left in his memory. The very means by which he thinks of a situation, an event, a duty, is not the way it looked, or the way it sounded, or the way it smelt, tasted, or felt to the touch — in any of the experiences to which these senses are involved — but the means, the representatives, the instruments of his thought, are the feelings of the way he has acted. He has a tendency — and he comes to have it more and more — to get a muscular representation of every- thing; and his gauge of the value of this or that is this muscular measure of it, in terms of the ac- tion which it is calculated to draw out.
It is then this preference for one particular kind of mental imagery, and that the motor, or muscular kind, which gives this type of child his peculiarity in this more psychological period. When we pass from the mere outward and organic description of his peculiarities, attempted above in the case of very young children, and aim to ascertain the mental peculiarity which accom- panies it and carries on the type through the in- dividual's maturer years, we see our way to its meaning. The fact is that a peculiar kind of mental imagery tends to swell up in consciousness and monopolize the theatre of thought. This is only another way of saying that the attention is more or less educated in the direction represented 180 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
by this sort of imagery. Every time a movement is thought of, in preference to a sound or a sight which is also available, the habit of giving the at- tention to the muscular equivalents of things be- comes more firmly fixed. This continues until the motor habit of attention becomes the only easy and normal way of attending; and then the person is fixed in his type for one, many, or all of his activities of thinking and action.
So now it is no longer difficult to see, I trust, why it is that the child or youth of this sort has the characteristics which he has. It is a familiar principle that attention to the thought of a move- ment tends to start that very movement. I defy any of my readers to think hard and long of wink- ing the left eye and not have an almost irresisti- ble impulse to wink that eye. There is no better way to make it difficult for a child to sit still than to tell him to sit still; for your words fill up his attention, as I had occasion to say above, with the thought of movements, and these thoughts bring on the movements, despite the best intentions of the child in the way of obedience. Watch an au- dience of little children — and children of an older growth will also do — when an excited speaker harangues them with many gestures, and see the comical reproduction of the gestures by the chil- dren's hands. They picture the movements, the attention is fixed on them, and appropriate actions follow.
It is only the generalizing of these phenomena that we find realized in the boy or girl of the mo- tor type. Such a child is constantly thinking of things by their movement equivalents. Muscular sensations throng up in consciousness at every possible signal and by every train of association; THE TRAINING OF THE MIND. 181 so it is not at all surprising that all informations, instructions, warnings, reproofs, suggestions, pass right through such a child's consciousness and ex- press themselves by the channels of movement. Hence the impulsive, restless, domineering, un- meditative character of the child. We may now endeavour to describe a little more closely his higher mental traits.
1. In the first place the motor mind tends to very quick generalization. Every teacher knows the boys in school who anticipate their conclusions, on the basis of a single illustration. They reach the general notion which is most broad in extent, in application, but most shallow in intent, in rich- ness, in real explaining or descriptive meaning. For example, such a boy will hear the story of Napoleon, proceed to define heroism in terms of military success, and then go out and try the Na- poleon act upon his playfellows. This tendency to generalize is the mental counterpart of the tend- ency to act seen in his conduct. The reason he generalizes is that the brain energies are not held back in the channels of perception, but pour them- selves right out toward the motor equivalents of former perceptions which were in any way simi- lar; then the present perceptions are lost in the old ones toward which attention is held by habit, and action follows. To the child all heroes are Napoleons because Napoleon was the first hero, and the channels of action inspired by him suffice now for the appropriate conduct.
2. Such a scholar is \ try poor at noting and re- membering distinctions. This follows naturally from the hasty generalizations which he makes. Hav- ing once identified a new fact as the same as an old one, and having so reached a defective sense 1 82 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
of the general class, it is then more and more hard for him to retrace his steps and sort out the expe- riences more carefully. Even when he discovers his mistake, his old impulse to act seizes him again, and he rushes to some new generalization where- with to replace the old, again falling into error by his stumbling haste to act. The teacher is oftener perhaps brought to the verge of impatience by scholars of this class than by any others.
3. Following, again, from these characteristics, there is a third remark to be made about the youth of this type; and it bears upon a peculiarity which it is very hard for the teacher to estimate and con- trol. These motor boys and girls have what I may characterize as fluidity of the attention. By this is meant a peculiar quality of mind which all expe- rienced teachers are in some degree familiar with, and which they find baffling and unmanageable.
By "fluidity" of the attention I mean the state of hurry, rush, inadequate inspection, quick transi- tion, all-too-ready-assimilation, hear-but-not-heed, in-one-ear-and-out-the-other habit of mind. The best way to get an adequate sense of the state is to recall the pupil who has it to the most marked degree, and picture his mode of dealing with your instructions. Such a pupil hears your words, says " yes," even acts appropriately so far as your im- mediate instructions go; but when he comes to the same situation again, he is as virginly inno- cent of your lesson as if his teacher had never been born. Psychologically, the state differs from preoccupation, which characterizes quite a differ- ent type of mind. The motor boy is not preoccu- pied. Far from that, he is quite ready to attend to you. But when he attends, it is with a momentary concentration — with a rush like the flow of a THE TRAINING OF THE MIND. 183 mountain stream past the point of the bank on which you sit. His attention is flowing, always in transition, leaping from " it to that," with su- perb agility and restlessness. But the exercise it gains from its movements is its only reward. Its acquisitions are slender in the extreme. It illus- trates, on the mental plane, the truth of the " roll- ing stone." It corresponds, as a mental charac- ter, to the muscular restlessness which the same type of child shows in the earlier period previously spoken of.
The psychological explanation of this " fluid attention " is more or less plain, but I can not take space to expound it. Suffice it to say that the attention is itself, probably, in its brain seat, a matter of the motor centres; its physical seat both "gives and takes" in co-operation with the pro- cesses which shed energy out into the muscles. So it follows that, in the ready muscular revivals, discharges, transitions, which we have seen to be prominent in the motor temperament the atten- tion is carried along, and its " fluidity " is only an incident to the fluidity of the motor symbols of which this sort of a mind continually makes use.
Coming a little closer to the pedagogical prob- lems which this type of pupil raises before us, we find, in the first place, that it is excessively diffi- cult for this scholar to give continuous or ade- quate attention to anything of any complexity. The movements of attention are so easy, the out- lets of energy, to use the physical figure, so large and well used, that the minor relationships of the thing are passed over. The variations of the ob- ject from its class are swept away in the onrush of his motor tendencies. He assumes the facts which he does not understand, and goes right on 184 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
to express himself in action on these assumptions. So while he seems to take in what is told him, with an intuition that is surprisingly swift, and a personal adaptation no less surprising, the disap- pointment is only the more keen when the in- structor finds the next day that he has not pene- trated at all into the inner current of this scholar's mental processes.
Again, as marked as this is in its early stages, the continuance of it leads to results which are nothing short of deplorable. When such a stu- dent has gone through a preparatory school with- out overcoming this tendency to "fluid atten- tion " and comes to college, the instructors in the higher institutions are practically helpless before him. We say of him that " he has never learned to study," that he does not know "how to apply himself," that he has no "power of assimilation." All of which simply means that his channels of reaction are so formed already that no instruc- tion can get sufficient lodgment in him to bring about any modification of his " apperceptive sys- tems." The embarrassment is the more marked because such a youth, all through his educa- tion period, is willing, ready, evidently receptive, prompt, and punctual in all his tasks.
Now what shall be done with such a student in his early school years? This is a question for the secondary teacher especially, apart from the more primary measures recommended above. It is in the years between eight and fifteen that this type of mind has its rapid development; before that the treatment is mainly preventive, and con- sists largely in suggestions which aim to make the muscular discharges more deliberate and the general tone less explosive. But when the boy THE TRAINING OF THE MIND. 185 or girl comes to school with the dawning capa- city for independent self-direction and personal application, then it is that the problem of the mo- tor scholar becomes critical. The " let-alone " method puts a premium upon the development of his tendencies and the eventual playing out of his mental possibilities in mere motion. Certain positive ways of giving some indirect discipline to the mind of this type may be suggested.
Give this student relatively difficult and com- plex tasks. There is no way to hinder his ex- uberant self-discharges except by measures which embarrass and baffle him. We can not " lead him into all truth"; we have to drive him back from all error. The lessons of psychology are to the effect that the normal way to teach caution and deliberation is the way of failure, repulse, and unfortunate, even painful, consequences. Per- sonal appeals to him do little good, since it is a part of his complaint that he is too ready to hear all appeals; and also, since he is not aware of his own lack nor able to carry what he hears into ef- fect. So keep him in company of scholars a lit- tle more advanced than he is. Keep him out of the concert recitations, where his tendency to haste would work both personal and social harm. Refrain from giving him assistance in his tasks until he has learned from them something of the real lesson of discouragement, and then help him only by degrees, and by showing him one step at a time, with constant renewals of his own efforts. Shield him with the greatest pains from distrac- tions of all kinds, tor even the things and events about him may carry his attention off at the most critical moments. Give him usually the secondary parts in the games of the school, except when 1 86 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
real planning, complex execution, and more or less generalship are required; then give him the leading parts: they exercise his activities in new ways not covered by habit, and if he do not rise to their complexity, then the other party to the sport will, and his haste will have its own punish- ment, and so be a lesson to him.
Besides these general checks and regulations, there remains the very important question as to what studies are most available for this type of mind. I have intimated already the general an- swer that ought to be given to this question. The aim of the studies of the motor student should be discipline in the direction of correct generaliza- tion, and, as helpful to this, discipline in careful observation of concrete facts. On the other hand, the studies which involve principles simply of a descriptive kind should have little place in his daily study. They call out largely the more me- chanical operations of memory, and their com- mand can be secured for the most part by mere repetition of details all similar in character and of equal value. The measure of the utility to him of the different studies of the schoolroom is found in the relative demand they make upon him to modify his hasty personal reactions, to suspend his thoughtless rush to general results, and back of it all, to hold the attention long enough upon the facts as they arise to get some sense of the logical relationships which bind them togeth- er. Studies which do not afford any logical rela- tionships, and which tend, on the contrary, to fos- ter the habit of learning by repetition, only tend to fix the student in the quality of attention which I have called " fluidity."
In particular, therefore: give this student all THE TRAINING OF THE MIND. 187 the mathematics he can absorb, and pass him from arithmetic into geometry, leaving his algebra till later. Give him plenty of grammar, taught in- ductively. Start him early in the elements of physics and chemistry. And as opposed to this, keep him out of the classes of descriptive botany and zoology. Rather let him join exploring par- ties for the study of plants, stones, and animals. A few pet animals are a valuable adjunct to any school museum. If there be an industrial school or machine shop near at hand, try to get him in- terested in the way things are made, and encour- age him to join in such employments. A false generalization in the wheels of a cart supplies its own corrective very quickly, or in the rigging and sails of a toy boat. Drawing from models is a fine exercise for such a youth, and drawing from life, as soon as he gets a little advanced in the control of his pencil. All this, it is easy to see, trains his impulsive movements into some degree of subjection to the deliberative processes.
With this general line of treatment in mind, the details of which the reader will work out in the light of the boy's type, space allows me only two more points before I pass to the sensory scholar.
First, in all the teaching of the type of mind now in question, pursue a method which proceeds from the particular to the general. The discus- sion of pedagogical method with all its ins and outs needs to take cognizance of the differences of students in their type. The motor student should never, in normal cases, be given a general formula and told to work out particular instances; that is too much his tendency already — to ap- proach facts from the point of view of their re- 1 88 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
semblances. What he needs rather is a sense of the dignity of the single fact, and of the neces- sity of giving it its separate place, before hasten- ing on to lose it in the flow of a general state- ment. So whether the teacher have in hand math- ematics, grammar, or science, let him disclose the principles only gradually, and always only so far as they are justified by the observations which the boy has been led to make for himself. For the reason that such a method is practically im- possible in the descriptive sciences, and some other branches, as taught in the schoolbooks — botany, zoology, and, worse than all, history and geography — we should restrict their part in the discipline studies of such a youth. They require simple memory, without observation, and put a premium on hasty and temporary acquisition.
As I have said, algebra should be subordinated to geometry. Algebra has as its distinctive meth- od the principle of substitution, whereby symbols of equal and, for the most part, absolute general- ity are substituted for one another, and the re- sults stand for one fact as well as for another, in disregard of the worth of the particular in the scheme of nature. For the same reason, deduct- ive logic is not a good discipline for these stu- dents; empirical psychology, or political econo- my, is a better introduction to the moral sciences for them when they reach the high school. This explains what was meant above in the remark as to the method of teaching grammar. As to lan- guage study generally, I think the value of it, at this period, and later, is extraordinarily overrated. The proportion of time given to language study in our secondary schools is nothing short of a public crime in its effect upon students of this THE TRAINING OF THE MIND. 189 type — and indeed of any type. This, however, is a matter to which we return below. The average student comes to college with his sense of explo- ration, his inductive capacity, stifled at its birth. He stands appalled when confronted with the un- assimilated details of any science which does not give him a "key " in the shape of general formu- las made up beforehand. Were it not that his enlarging experience of life is all the while running counter to the trend of his so-called education, he would probably graduate ready for the social position in which authority takes the place of evidence, and imitation is the method of life.
Second, the teacher should be on the lookout for a tendency which is very characteristic of a student of this type, the tendency, i. e., to fall into elaborate guessing at results. Take a little child of about seven or eight years of age, espe- cially one who has the marks of motor heredity, and observe the method of his acquisition of new words in reading. First he speaks the word which his habit dictates, and, that being wrong, he rolls his eyes away from the text and makes a guess of the first word that comes into his mind; this he keeps up as long as the teacher persists in ask- ing him to try again. Here is the same tendency that carries him later on in his education to a general conclusion by a short cut. He has not learned to interpret the data of a deliberate judg- ment, and his attention does not dwell on the necessary details. So with him all through his training; he is always ready with a guess. Here, again, the teacher can do him good only by pa- tiently employing the inductive method. Lead him back to the simplest elements of the problem 14 1 90 THE STORY OF THE MIND.
in hand, and help him gradually to build up a re- sult step by step.
I think in this, as in most of the work with these scholars, the association with children of the opposite type is one of the best correctives, provided the companionship is not made altogeth- er one-sided by tne motor boy's perpetual monop- olizing of all the avenues of personal expression. When he fails in the class, the kind of social les- son which is valuable may be taught him by sub- mitting the same question to a pupil of the plod- ding, deliberate kind, and waiting for the latter to work it out. Of course, if the teacher have any supervision over the playground, similar treat- ment can be employed there.
Coming to consider the so-called "sensory" youth of the age between eight, let us say, and sixteen — the age during which the training of the secondary school presents its great problems — we find certain interesting contrasts between this type and that already characterized as " motor." The study of this type of youth is the more press- ing for reasons which I have already hinted in considering the same type in the earlier childhood period. It is necessary, first, to endeavour to get a fairly adequate view of the psychological char- acteristics of this sort of pupil.
The current psychological doctrine of mental " types " rests upon a great mass of facts, drawn in the first instance from the different kinds of mental trouble, especially those which involve derangements of speech — the different kinds of Aphasia. The broadest generalization which is reached from these facts is that which marks the distinction, of which I have already said so much, between the motor and the sensory types. But THE TRAINING OF THE MIND. 191 besides this general distinction there are many finer ones; and in considering the persons of the sensory type, it is necessary to inquire into these finer distinctions. Not only do men and children differ in the matter of the sort of mental material which they find requisite, as to whether it is pic- tures of movements on the one hand, or pictures from the special senses on the other hand; but they differ also in the latter case with respect to which of the special senses it is, in this case or that, which gives the particular individual his necessary cue, and his most perfect function. So we find inside of the general group called " sen- sory " several relatively distinct cases, all of which the teacher is likely to come across in varying num- bers in a class of pupils. Of these the "visual " and the " auditory " are most important.
There are certain aspects of the case which are so common to 'all the cases of sensory minds, whether they be visual, auditory, or other, that I may set them out before proceeding further.