LECTURE V. Instincts, Feelings and Emotions or Mind Before It Becomes Mind. Instincts: They are hungers leading to unconscious action; they are animal or racial memories embedded in the organism; as successive nerve centers ripen, new impulses to action arise. Hungers of infancy: For food, sucking, biting, swallowing; for action: orderless movement, clasping, holding head up, sitting, locomotion; for communication: crying, gesture, vocalization, speech. Education can detect these hungers and feed them; uselessness and danger of anticipating them. So of later hungers, naming, collecting, arranging, reasoning, worshipping, sex-admiration; premature awakening of these hungers is dangerous. Bearing of this upon subjects of study, number, physiology, civics. Emotions: Like the more rudimentary feelings, they are due to physical changes. Two theories: impression, emotion, action; impression, action, emotion. Special study on fear: Its instinctive nature as seen in infancy; results of investigations by Darwin, Hall, Mosso; things feared; effects upon action; best means of control. Stages in development of the emotions: In infancy, due to objective causes, intense, narrowly egoistic, changeable; in youth, due to subjective causes, more altruistic, brooding; in adult life, inhibited by experience. Influences modifying emotions: Inheritance; nervous conditions; contagion; ideas; ignorance. Effects of emotions: On physical system; on ideas; on action. Educational considerations: Normal activity of feelings and emotions prepares the way for thinking and living; humanities are strong in emotional stimuli; sciences are weak. For small children, simple, quickly changing emotions connected with external things and people are needed; for youth, large, altruistic, outgoing emotions are natural. Excessive appeal to emotions is always bad; influence of women teachers. All emotions should lead to action. TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION. 1. How can the emotions be educated? 2. What harm may come from anticipating the natural hunger for number? 3. Is Professor James' theory of the emotions materialistic? 4. How far does the drama develop the emotional nature ? READING. Darwin, Charles. The Expression of the Emotions in Men and Animals. Appleton: New York. 1896. Romanes, George J. Mental Evolution in Man. Appleton: New York. 1893. James, William. Principles of Psychology. Holt: New York. 1896. Stanley, Hiram M. Studies in the Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling. Macmillan: New York. 1895. Ribot, Thomas. The Psychology of the Emotions. Scribner: New York. 1897. Hall, G. Stanley. A Study of Fears. American Journal of Psychology. January, 1897. Vol. VIII, pp. 147-249. Holbrook, Agnes. Fear in Childhood. tion. Vol. I, p. 18. Barnes' Studies in Educa SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY. Write out carefully your own earliest memories of fears. Have children write compositions on: Things of Which I Used to be Afraid. Bring results into comparison with the studies made by Holbrook and Hall. LECTURE VI. Sensation, Observation and Selection or The Beginnings of Knowledge. General sensibility: In the lowest forms of animal life there are no special sense organs, yet the organism responds to light, heat or cold, food, etc. The organism behaves as we do when we feel sensations and perceive things; gradually sense organs develop; even with man there remains a great body of undifferentiated sense impressions, due to general contact, muscular exertion, digestion and other vital functions. This general sensibility remains one of our greatest sources of knowledge. Man's special senses: Sensibility in pre-natal period; the rush of sensations at birth; taste, best developed of an infant's senses. Sight: lower animals born blind; infants but slowly master mechanism of the eyes so that they can see. Hearing: lower animals born deaf; children also born deaf. Smell, one of the least valuable of the special senses. Other special senses: temperature, digestive senses, etc. Touch and muscular sense; great value of the latter for knowledge. Sense training: Educational value of sense training overestimated; large, composite states of sensibility furnish us much of our knowledge and happiness: what the training of the eye really means. What observation implies: Interest with accompanying attention, sensation, perception, comparison and judgment; qualities of an object that interest children; studies by Binet, Barnes, Shaw. Qualities of a child's observation: Hasty, fragmentary, utilitarian, interested in action. Educational considerations: Objects for educational work should be common to the child's life; live things better than dead; subjects should be varied; expression should always follow experience in gesture, manual work, oral and written language. TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION. 1. What changes in our special senses will probably take place in coming generations? 2. In looking at a tree what do we really see and what do we infer? 3. Why does not impressionist art appeal to the majority of people? 4. What discounts must be applied to Binet's study on interest? READING. Preyer, William. Mental Development in the Child. Appleton : New York. 1900. The Senses and the Will. Appleton: New York. 1892. Moore, Kathleen Carter. The Mental Development of the Child. Macmillan: New York. 1896. Compayré, Gabriel. The Intellectual and Moral Development of the Child. Part I. Appleton: New York. 1896. Barnes, Earl. Children's Interests. In Barnes' Studies in Education. Vol. I, pp. 203-212. SUGGESTIONS FOR STUDY. Observe and record a child's activities along the lines indicated by Mrs. Moore. Repeat Barnes' adaptation of Binet's investigation with children. Compare your results with those reached by other students. Paper, each 40c., cloth 75c. Berlioz, Chopin, Rossini, Cherubini and Meyerbeer, Various. Paper 75c., boards $1.00 66 2.40 Beethoven and His Nine Symphonies, by Grove, Cloth, price $2.40 Stainer, . Paper, price 750. A Dictionary of Musical Terms, by Stainer & Barrett, . Cloth, price $3.00 A Handbook of Examinations in Music, containing 600 Cloth, price $1.50 The Rudiments of Music, by Cummings, Compositions of Thomas Whitney Surette. Complete, $25.00 "The Eve of St. Agnes," dramatic ballad for Soli, Chorus Vocal Score 75c. Arietta from "The Eve of St. Agnes," for Violin and Piano, . . $1.00 "Portraits," five pieces for the Pianotorte, Two pieces from "Portraits" for Cello and Piano, "Let God Arise," Two Anthems "How Amiable," "The Pilgrims' Song," Send for Catalogue, NOVELLO, EWER & CO., 21 East Seventeenth Street, New York City. |