tional thoughtful variation characterizes the range of activities. For, as Rousseau long ago said: "He who has lived most is not he who has numbered the most years, but he who has been most truly conscious of what life is. A man may have himself buried at the age of a hundred years, who died from the hour of his birth. He would have gained something by going to his grave in youth, if up to that time he had only lived."

Measuring up to our possibilities is a troublesome matter, not because of lack of desire for the vast majority of people are anxious to do so-but because of the difficulty of realizing on our abilities, of turning them into achievement. Man, like his forebears, was made on the plan of adaptation, and adaptation means fitting into conditions. It does not lead to progress, unless external conditions force such a change. Habit is a preservative. It conserves and fixes those types of behavior which help the individual to fit into his environment. But habit is satisfied with the lowest level of "fitness." It must, therefore, be controlled and directed, else it does not serve us well.

We have found that habit eliminates attention. Only those matters, therefore, which finally require no attention should be intrusted to it. Consequently, selection is necessary. Acts of muscular skill, ethical and social behavior should be reduced to habit; and then no deviation should be tolerated. But even here it must be remembered that there is always a tendency to form habits before a high degree of muscular dexterity or of ethical and social attainment has been reached. This makes the difference between poor workmen and skilful artisans, as well as between mediocre tennis and golf players, and those who can qualify for tournaments; and the same distinction exists in behavior in general.

The elimination of attention from habitual processes reveals the activities from which habit should be barred. It is a distinct advantage to relieve the higher brain cen

tres of the supervision of skilful movements which have been acquired during the preliminary apprenticeship in work or games; and one should not need to wait to decide on acts of courtesy. It is disastrous, however, to free these higher centres from control of matters that require intelligence. For habit is a treacherous ally. It takes us off our guard and registers all our acts. Its subtlety is seen in our ignorance of the fact that it possesses us. Those who condemned the discoveries of the men to whom we have referred did not know that their minds had become inflexible. They believed that they were thinking and that they were doing a social service. Freedom from habituation is relative; thoughts, opinions, and beliefs are largely fixed by social groups, and we adjust ourselves to them involuntarily and unintelligently. Then they become fixed as mental habits of which we are no more aware than we are conscious of our professional and family mannerisms. We believe that we see the reason for them, so gentle and insinuating is their mastery.

CHAPTER IV

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LEARNING

LEARNING in its widest sense is profiting from experience. Education is sometimes said to consist of habit formation, but we have seen that habits mean repetition, and that only those acts should be repeated which can best be performed when automatized. Even these acts should not be reduced to habit until they have been perfected and, as has been said, the tendency always exists to mechanize at a low level of attainment. Ability to continue learning-to improve upon what one has already done, to see more meaning in experience-measures intelligence.

The higher animals stand in the evolutional scale the more prominent is the rôle that learning plays in their lives. In man it is the method of development. There are, however, certain general aspects of learning which may be set apart from its narrower applications as manifested in acquiring facility in some act of manual skill, and it may be well, first, to consider some of these larger phases of the subject.

Human activities may be roughly divided into the mental and physical. To be sure, the one never exists without the other, and, consequently, such a classification only indicates somewhat freely the dominating feature. Now, there is a rather wide-spread belief that these two sorts of activities differ essentially in their origin. The physical activities, including as they do the manual arts and trades, are generally admitted to be improved by instruction. Skill in certain mental arts, however, is commonly thought to be an exception to this rule. They are believed to be

above the slow, laborious process of acquisition, and to emerge from innate qualities of the mind.

This attitude prevails not only regarding literary ability, but also in the various branches of business, as in advertising and salesmanship. "Start into the work and if you have aptitude for it your ability will soon show itself," is the advice often given to young men. Recently one of the editors of a large city daily said to the writer that in his opinion young men should be taken directly from the high school into a newspaper office. If within a short time they give promise they should be retained. Otherwise it would be better to dismiss them and try others until the right ones are found.

Certainly, no one will deny special aptitudes. Nevertheless, this contempt for instruction reduces learning to its crudest, least intelligent expression. It is the animal method of blundering along, trying one device after another until a mode of action has been hit upon that by chance secures the desired result. Little intelligence can be used in the selection of methods of procedure because the learner is not sufficiently acquainted with the work to judge their worth. He is like a traveller wandering around in the underbrush of a forest. He cannot see whither the many trails lead. Consequently, if he gets into the right path it is largely accidental. And this is exactly what happens to an uninstructed learner. He is confused by the underbrush of details. He cannot get a bird's-eye view. His methods of meeting difficulties are therefore fallen upon accidentally. If they accomplish the desired end they are adopted. In this way uneconomical and comparatively unproductive methods become habits.

Charles Francis Adams is a splendid illustration of this confusion. His Autobiography1 is a painful history of opportunities unutilized because of incompetent guidance— a round peg always trying to get into a square hole, as he 1 Boston and New York, 1916.

himself phrases it. That is just what the animal method of meeting problems and situations does. The only difference is that animals in the wilds must remedy their serious mistakes or pay the penalty with their lives. Boys are protected, and thus their errors are continued. I do not remember having read so bitter an arraignment of unintelligent direction as Mr. Adams' enumeration of the mistakes of his childhood and youth. Probably his chief misfortune was that his family had money and social standing. He was kept in pedagogical preserving fluids. "I should now respect myself a great deal more," he writes, "if I had then rebelled and run away from home, to sea, or to the devil. Indeed, if I had had in me any element of real badness, or even recklessness of temperament, it would have been fatally developed. But I wasn't bad or a daredevil; and I was born with a decided sense of obligation to myself and to others." Most of us would not rank Mr. Adams as low as he estimates himself. He certainly did not achieve that of which he was capable, and for this the unintelligent guidance to which he was subjected was responsible; but he was a distinguished failure. His mistakes seem to have been caused by unwise advice and direction, which, of course, produce the same errors as lack of instruction.

It is in the "self-made" men, however, that the animal method of making progress is most clearly discernible. With them, except so far as advice puts them in the instructed class, experience is gained by uncontrolled, and largely uncriticised, trial and error; and it is this absence of intelligent criticism that distinguishes the lower use of the trial-and-error method from the higher. Deficient knowledge because of a lack of preliminary study and instruction leaves a weakened substructure for judgment. Under these conditions interpretation of situations is inadequate, and experience is reduced to stereotyped opinion. A brief reference to the learning process of lower animals