The value of original research, aside from what may be discovered, consists in the opportunity which it affords for the natural course of curiosity, problem, proposed solution, and test. And, in this connection, it ought to be added that, from the psychologist's point of view, all actual research is original, and that the best instances of it are to be found in the child's free, wide-awake activities.

If one were to ask whether facts may not be learned from others, whether everyone must be restricted to the narrow range of his own first-hand contact with things, the answer would be, properly, "Yes", and "No". I do not wish to lengthen this article by an extended inquiry as to the nature of a fact, but there are a few considerations that we can not afford to over look. A fact for anyone, I take it, is something that is both understood and accepted as true. No one would regard anything as a fact while disbelieving, or, even seriously, questioning it. But what is essential for his understanding of the fact? It must have meaning for him, at least. For example, a child may be told of the battle of Bull Run: the student may read a more detailed account or listen to the story of one who was on the field. For all three there is the fact; yet who can claim that they are actually the same facts? Neither is there any question as to whose fact is the most complete, or which could best understand an account of some other battle; for, in the case of each, the fact is what his basis of experience permits it to be. Similarly in experiment, the fact is most truly a fact for him of whose experience it forms a part. Ultimately, facts for usyoung and old-are all and no more than the meaning which our experience, or our more indirect interpretation based on our experience, enables us to put into them. If we ask how far back our experience must go in order to support our theories, perhaps it would be suggestive to recall an answer which Lincoln is said to have made to the query, “How long should a man's legs be?" He replied that they should be at least long enough to reach the ground. Must not the support for our facts and theories meet somewhat similar requirements?

In the course of this discussion, I have left untouched, except by implication, numerous additional bearings of the

point of view I have endeavored to maintain, and have confined myself to the general place and significance of experiment. In concluding, I wish to say that I have no desire to charge the educational world with wholesale ignorance of what I have tried to present, or with complete neglect of scientific method. Nevertheless we are as yet far from perfection or consistency and, if I shall have succeeded in calling more serious attention to those needs of the pupil which experimental methods do much to meet, I shall be satisfied.

Department of Psychology
Chicago Normal School

M. L. ASHLEY.

Psychic Polarities

ECAUSE of certain antagonistic antitheses between psychology and pedagogy, it has been claimed that the

Bchology and pedagogy, it has been claimed that sye

study of the former brings little, if any, help to the teacher. It has been claimed that psychology as a natural science is analytic in purpose and method, seeks the elements of consciousness, deals with comparatively simple data more or less divorced from life in its wholeness; whereas pedagogy, as an art, is synthetic in its work, deals with the whole of life in all its complexity: that psychology considers matters of the senses and the intellect, rarely or only incidentally reaching conduct; whereas pedagogy deals at every point with the entire mental act of which conduct is the beginning and the end. Thus it has been claimed that the trite trinity of head, heart, and hand is torn asunder by psychology, whereas pedagogy can succeed in its work only in the measure in which it respects their oneness.

The inadequacy of such a view appears at once, wheneven under admission of the claim that psychology deals with the conscious phases of life-we consider that deliberate synthesis depends for extensive and intensive success in a large measure on previous analysis, that art can be lifted out of mere empiricism only with the help of science; that, consequently, at least in so far as both touch conscious life, psychology is an indispensable factor in a pedagogy worthy of the name.

Indeed, modern psychology, when viewed in all its various sub-divisions of interest, is fully aware of this. It has learned to realize that the trite trinity of head, heart, and hand fails to tell the complete story of the process of developing consciousness. It sees clearly enough that in life the three members of this trinity stand in different relationship; that consciousness begins in experience wherein the hand, as the seat of the sense of touch, of which the other senses are specialized modifications, takes the lead and stimulates head and heart, intellect and feeling, in the predominantly analytic process of exploration and discovery; that

this process, in its turn, induces in heart and hand predominantly synthetic currents of activity in which heart and head dictate and control attitude and purpose, and guide the doing hand in outward achievement and conduct.

Thus we see the flash of the conscious mental act in its wholeness in this order: hand-head-heart-head-hand; from exploring and discovering to adjusting and achieving motor activity, which again becomes a source of further discovery, and so on indefinitely in ever-deepening insight, in everbroadening purpose, in ever closer adjustment, in ever higher achievement in the onward movement that constitutes individual, social, and general human progress.

Further analysis of this process reveals a number of contrasts which in their mutual relation still are frequently looked upon as antagonistic and even hostile. In reality, however, they are polar members of an inseparable unity, subject to the laws of mutual attraction and induction, universally valid for polar forces; they are distinct only in thought, not in life. Prominent among these are the contrasts of analysis and synthesis, of exploration and achievement, of knowledge and purpose, of thought and action, of interest and effort, of potential and actual, of motor and mental life.

Thus by way of illustration, interest and effort are not hostile, but mutually sustaining factors of developing life. Interest stimulates effort, dies in its absence; and effort can enter the pupil's life only through avenues opened by interest,-natural or artificial, positive or negative. Fundamentally, interest as a state of the emotional side of feeling, as a feeling of worth while, holds the mind more or less firmly engaged in a given direction. This, of necessity, involves, in a process akin to induction, the will side of feeling in de sires and efforts of adjustment, seeking establishment of the conditions implied, and the inhibition of nascent disturbing impulse. Interest, stirring every activity of the mind, gives direction to effort, sustains it, shields it from weariness. Effort reveals or establishes what interest seeks; and interest grows, is enriched, expands, deepens with the gains of effort. Interest finds content in instinctive needs and in the unfolding lessons of experience, and, in turn, furnishes content to

volition, which directs effort toward the attainment of the burden of interest. Effort, on the other hand, builds the ladder by which interest rises from caprice to prudence, from prudence to duty, from duty to aspiration.

The art of the teacher consists in guiding the two in such a way that they may continuously serve the needs of unfolding, enlarging life, and in correlating them in such a fashion that they may ever remain in healthy mutual tension, that, as they recede from each other, they may still remain bound together by mutually increasing intensity. To confine the child to unguided interest jeopardizes development; and constrained effort, not held in tension by interest, arrests development.

Similar considerations obtain pari passu with other contrasts current in the pedagogic vocabulary, with analysis and synthesis, with exploration and achievement, with mental and motor life, thought and action, theory and practice, the potential and the actual, subject and object, etc. In all of these, each member is in polar unity with its mate, stimulates its mate and is stimulated by it, is indispensable to its mate and cannot live without it. If it were possible to separate them in life as we separate them in thought, both must vanish, must cease to be.

Since the dethronement of faculty psychology, these facts have come to be fairly well established in pedagogic theory; and, consequently, there is growing up an educational practice more and more consistently guided by the new insight into the oneness of life, a new truly vital education that respects vital processes in its work and is steadfastly overcoming the sluggish conservatism of the worshipers of the past in school and community.

Perhaps, this is most evident in the gradual abrogation of the bitter contest between the respective defenders of the developing and didactic methods. To the new vital education, the two are no longer antagonistic. They are supplementary of each other as warp and woof, polar members of the same, one vital method, dealing with the same subjects and the same children in continuous interpenetration.

The vital method, on its developing side, appeals to natural interest, furnishes opportunity for personal experi