away. _Soft_ pedagogics have taken the
place of the old steep and rocky path to learning. But from this
lukewarm air the bracing oxygen of effort is left out. It is nonsense
to suppose that every step in education _can_ be interesting. The
fighting impulse must often be appealed to. Make the pupil feel ashamed
of being scared at fractions, of being 'downed' by the law of falling
bodies; rouse his pugnacity and pride, and he will rush at the difficult
places with a sort of inner wrath at himself that is one of his best
moral faculties. A victory scored under such conditions becomes a
turning-point and crisis of his character. It represents the high-water
mark of his powers, and serves thereafter as an ideal pattern for his
self-imitation. The teacher who never rouses this sort of pugnacious
excitement in his pupils falls short of one of his best forms of
usefulness.

The next instinct which I shall mention is that of _Ownership_, also one
of the radical endowments of the race. It often is the antagonist of
imitation. Whether social progress is due more to the passion for
keeping old things and habits or to the passion of imitating and
acquiring new ones may in some cases be a difficult thing to decide. The
sense of ownership begins in the second year of life. Among the first
words which an infant learns to utter are the words 'my' and 'mine,'
and woe to the parents of twins who fail to provide their gifts in
duplicate. The depth and primitiveness of this instinct would seem to
cast a sort of psychological discredit in advance upon all radical forms
of communistic utopia. Private proprietorship cannot be practically
abolished until human nature is changed. It seems essential to mental
health that the individual should have something beyond the bare clothes
on his back to which he can assert exclusive possession, and which he
may defend adversely against the world. Even those religious orders who
make the most stringent vows of poverty have found it necessary to relax
the rule a little in favor of the human heart made unhappy by reduction
to too disinterested terms. The monk must have his books: the nun must
have her little garden, and the images and pictures in her room.

In education, the instinct of ownership is fundamental, and can be
appealed to in many ways. In the house, training in order and neatness
begins with the arrangement of the child's own personal possessions. In
the school, ownership is particularly impor