feeling in
sense-perception, and the various forms of representation as the second
phase of intellectual activity--the forms of recollection, fancy,
imagination, attention, and memory. We draw the line between the animals
capable of education and those not capable of it, at the point of memory
defined--not as recollection, but as the faculty of general ideas or
conceptions, to which the significant words of language correspond.

With the arrival at language, we arrive at education in the human sense
of the term; with the arrival at language, we arrive at the view of the
world at which thought as a mental process begins. As sense-perception
has before it a world of _present_ objects, so thought has before it a
world of general concepts, which language has defined and fixed.

It is true that few persons are aware that language stands for a world
of general ideas, and that reflection has to do with this world of
universals. Hence it is, too, that so much of the so-called science of
education is very crude and impractical. Much of it is materialistic,
and does not recognize the self-activity of mind; but makes it out to be
a correlation of physical energies--derived from the transmutation of
food by the process of digestion, and then by the brain converted into
thought.

Let us consider now the psychology of thinking, or reflection, and at
first in its most inadequate forms. As a human process, the knowing is
always a knowing by universals--a re-cognition, and not simple
apprehension, such as the animals, or such as beings have that do not
use language. The process of development of stages of thought begins
with sensuous ideas, which perceive mere individual, concrete, real
objects, as it supposes. In conceiving these, it uses language and
thinks general ideas, but it does not know it, nor is it conscious of
the relations involved in such objects. This is the first stage of
reflection. The world exists for it as an innumerable congeries of
things, each one independent of the other, and possessing
self-existence. It is the stand-point from which atomism would be
adopted as the philosophic system. Ask it what the ultimate principle of
existence is, and it would reply, "Atoms."

But this view of the world is a very unstable one, and requires very
little reflection to overturn it, and bring one to the next basis--that
of _abstract ideas_. When the mind looks carefully at the world of
things, it finds that there is dependenc