ts so many
of us heartily believe), all these things, I say, are most happy
features of our scholastic life, and from them the most sanguine
auguries may be drawn.

Having so favorable an organization, all we need is to impregnate it
with geniuses, to get superior men and women working more and more
abundantly in it and for it and at it, and in a generation or two
America may well lead the education of the world. I must say that I look
forward with no little confidence to the day when that shall be an
accomplished fact.

No one has profited more by the fermentation of which I speak, in
pedagogical circles, than we psychologists. The desire of the
schoolteachers for a completer professional training, and their
aspiration toward the 'professional' spirit in their work, have led them
more and more to turn to us for light on fundamental principles. And in
these few hours which we are to spend together you look to me, I am
sure, for information concerning the mind's operations, which may enable
you to labor more easily and effectively in the several schoolrooms over
which you preside.

Far be it from me to disclaim for psychology all title to such hopes.
Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help. And yet I
confess that, acquainted as I am with the height of some of your
expectations, I feel a little anxious lest, at the end of these simple
talks of mine, not a few of you may experience some disappointment at
the net results. In other words, I am not sure that you may not be
indulging fancies that are just a shade exaggerated. That would not be
altogether astonishing, for we have been having something like a 'boom'
in psychology in this country. Laboratories and professorships have been
founded, and reviews established. The air has been full of rumors. The
editors of educational journals and the arrangers of conventions have
had to show themselves enterprising and on a level with the novelties of
the day. Some of the professors have not been unwilling to co-operate,
and I am not sure even that the publishers have been entirely inert.
'The new psychology' has thus become a term to conjure up portentous
ideas withal; and you teachers, docile and receptive and aspiring as
many of you are, have been plunged in an atmosphere of vague talk about
our science, which to a great extent has been more mystifying than
enlightening. Altogether it does seem as if there were a certain
fatality of mystification laid upon