and determine to
some extent the selection of materials in reading and language lessons.

The _center_ for concentrating efforts in education is not so much the
knowledge given in any school course as the _child's mind_ itself. We
do not desire to find in the school studies a new center for a child's
life so much as the means for fortifying that original stronghold of
character which rests upon native mental characteristics and early home
influences. We have in mind not the objective unity of different
studies considered as complete and related sciences, nor any general
model to which each mind is to be conformed, but the practical union of
all the experiences and knowledge that find entrance into a particular
mind.

The _unity of the personality_ as gradually developed in a child by
wise education is essential to strength of character. Ackerman says on
this point, ("Ueber Concentration," p. 20.) "In behalf of character
development, which is the ultimate aim of all educative effort,
pedagogy requires of instruction that it aid in forming the _unity of
the personality_, the most primitive basis of character. In requiring
that the unity of the personality be formed it is presupposed that this
unity is not some original quality, but something to be first
developed. It remains for psychology to prove this and to indicate in
what manner the unity of the personality originates. Now, psychology
teaches that the personality, the ego, is not something original, but
something that must be first developed and is also changeable and
variable. The ego is nothing else than a psychological phenomenon,
namely, the consciousness of an interchange between the parts of an
extensive complex of ideas, or the reference of all our ideas and of
the other psychical states springing out of them to each other.
Experience teaches this. In infancy the ego, the personality, is
consciously realized in one person sooner, in another later. In the
different ages of life, also, the personality possesses a different
content. The deeper cause for the mutual reference of all our manifold
ideas to each other and for their union in a single point, as it were,
may be found in the _simplicity of the soul_, which constrains into
unity all things that are not dissociated by hindrance or
contradiction. The soul, therefore, in the face of the varied
influences produced by contact with nature and society, is active in
concentrating its ideas, so that w