spite of all the
plausible good names with which his thirsty fancy so copiously furnishes
him, he unwaveringly clings to the truer bad name, and apperceives the
case as that of "being a drunkard, being a drunkard, being a drunkard,"
his feet are planted on the road to salvation. He saves himself by
thinking rightly.

Thus are your pupils to be saved: first, by the stock of ideas with
which you furnish them; second, by the amount of voluntary attention
that they can exert in holding to the right ones, however unpalatable;
and, third, by the several habits of acting definitely on these latter
to which they have been successfully trained.

In all this the power of voluntarily attending is the point of the whole
procedure. Just as a balance turns on its knife-edges, so on it our
moral destiny turns. You remember that, when we were talking of the
subject of attention, we discovered how much more intermittent and
brief our acts of voluntary attention are than is commonly supposed. If
they were all summed together, the time that they occupy would cover an
almost incredibly small portion of our lives. But I also said, you will
remember, that their brevity was not in proportion to their
significance, and that I should return to the subject again. So I return
to it now. It is not the mere size of a thing which, constitutes its
importance: it is its position in the organism to which it belongs. Our
acts of voluntary attention, brief and fitful as they are, are
nevertheless momentous and critical, determining us, as they do, to
higher or lower destinies. The exercise of voluntary attention in the
schoolroom must therefore be counted one of the most important points of
training that take place there; and the first-rate teacher, by the
keenness of the remoter interests which he is able to awaken, will
provide abundant opportunities for its occurrence. I hope that you
appreciate this now without any further explanation.

I have been accused of holding up before you, in the course of these
talks, a mechanical and even a materialistic view of the mind. I have
called it an organism and a machine. I have spoken of its reaction on
the environment as the essential thing about it; and I have referred
this, either openly or implicitly, to the construction of the nervous
system. I have, in consequence, received notes from some of you, begging
me to be more explicit on this point; and to let you know frankly
whether I am a complete materiali