wish, the underlying
desires determine the main course of thought, the deeper emotional
responses. The mind wanders from the nominal subject and devotes
itself to what is intrinsically more desirable. A systematized divided
attention expressing the duplicity of the state of desire is the result.
One has only to recall his own experiences in school or at the present
time when outwardly employed in actions which do not engage one's
desires and purposes, to realize how prevalent is this attitude of
divided attention--double-mindedness. We are so used to it that we take
it for granted that a considerable amount of it is necessary. It may be;
if so, it is the more important to face its bad intellectual effects.
Obvious is the loss of energy of thought immediately available when
one is consciously trying (or trying to seem to try) to attend to one
matter, while unconsciously one's imagination is spontaneously going out
to more congenial affairs. More subtle and more permanently crippling
to efficiency of intellectual activity is a fostering of habitual
self-deception, with the confused sense of reality which accompanies it.
A double standard of reality, one for our own private and more or less
concealed interests, and another for public and acknowledged concerns,
hampers, in most of us, integrity and completeness of mental action.
Equally serious is the fact that a split is set up between conscious
thought and attention and impulsive blind affection and desire.
Reflective dealings with the material of instruction is constrained
and half-hearted; attention wanders. The topics to which it wanders are
unavowed and hence intellectually illicit; transactions with them
are furtive. The discipline that comes from regulating response by
deliberate inquiry having a purpose fails; worse than that, the deepest
concern and most congenial enterprises of the imagination (since they
center about the things dearest to desire) are casual, concealed. They
enter into action in ways which are unacknowledged. Not subject to
rectification by consideration of consequences, they are demoralizing.

School conditions favorable to this division of mind between
avowed, public, and socially responsible undertakings, and private,
ill-regulated, and suppressed indulgences of thought are not hard
to find. What is sometimes called "stern discipline," i.e., external
coercive pressure, has this tendency. Motivation through rewards
extraneous to the thing to be