could without training: "better" signifying greater ease, efficiency,
economy, promptness, etc. That this is an outcome of education was
indicated in what was said about habits as the product of educative
development. But the theory in question takes, as it were, a short
cut; it regards some powers (to be presently named) as the direct and
conscious aims of instruction, and not simply as the results of growth.
There is a definite number of powers to be trained, as one might
enumerate the kinds of strokes which a golfer has to master.
Consequently education should get directly at the business of training
them. But this implies that they are already there in some untrained
form; otherwise their creation would have to be an indirect product of
other activities and agencies. Being there already in some crude form,
all that remains is to exercise them in constant and graded repetitions,
and they will inevitably be refined and perfected. In the phrase "formal
discipline" as applied to this conception, "discipline" refers both
to the outcome of trained power and to the method of training through
repeated exercise.

The forms of powers in question are such things as the faculties of
perceiving, retaining, recalling, associating, attending, willing,
feeling, imagining, thinking, etc., which are then shaped by exercise
upon material presented. In its classic form, this theory was expressed
by Locke. On the one hand, the outer world presents the material or
content of knowledge through passively received sensations. On the
other hand, the mind has certain ready powers, attention, observation,
retention, comparison, abstraction, compounding, etc. Knowledge results
if the mind discriminates and combines things as they are united and
divided in nature itself. But the important thing for education is
the exercise or practice of the faculties of the mind till they become
thoroughly established habitudes. The analogy constantly employed is
that of a billiard player or gymnast, who by repeated use of certain
muscles in a uniform way at last secures automatic skill. Even the
faculty of thinking was to be formed into a trained habit by repeated
exercises in making and combining simple distinctions, for which, Locke
thought, mathematics affords unrivaled opportunity.

Locke's statements fitted well into the dualism of his day. It seemed to
do justice to both mind and matter, the individual and the world. One of
the two supplied the matte