r of knowledge and the object upon which mind
should work. The other supplied definite mental powers, which were few
in number and which might be trained by specific exercises. The scheme
appeared to give due weight to the subject matter of knowledge, and
yet it insisted that the end of education is not the bare reception
and storage of information, but the formation of personal powers of
attention, memory, observation, abstraction, and generalization. It
was realistic in its emphatic assertion that all material whatever is
received from without; it was idealistic in that final stress fell upon
the formation of intellectual powers. It was objective and impersonal
in its assertion that the individual cannot possess or generate any true
ideas on his own account; it was individualistic in placing the end of
education in the perfecting of certain faculties possessed at the outset
by the individual. This kind of distribution of values expressed with
nicety the state of opinion in the generations following upon Locke.
It became, without explicit reference to Locke, a common-place of
educational theory and of psychology. Practically, it seemed to provide
the educator with definite, instead of vague, tasks. It made the
elaboration of a technique of instruction relatively easy. All that was
necessary was to provide for sufficient practice of each of the powers.
This practice consists in repeated acts of attending, observing,
memorizing, etc. By grading the difficulty of the acts, making each set
of repetitions somewhat more difficult than the set which preceded it,
a complete scheme of instruction is evolved. There are various ways,
equally conclusive, of criticizing this conception, in both its alleged
foundations and in its educational application. (1) Perhaps the most
direct mode of attack consists in pointing out that the supposed
original faculties of observation, recollection, willing, thinking,
etc., are purely mythological. There are no such ready-made powers
waiting to be exercised and thereby trained. There are, indeed, a great
number of original native tendencies, instinctive modes of action, based
on the original connections of neurones in the central nervous system.
There are impulsive tendencies of the eyes to follow and fixate light;
of the neck muscles to turn toward light and sound; of the hands to
reach and grasp; and turn and twist and thump; of the vocal apparatus to
make sounds; of the mouth to spew out unplea