in the thing itself, but in the
eye of the beholder, and the eye is but the interpreter of the ideal.
One person rhapsodizes over a picture that another turns away from,
because the latter has absorbed an ideal that is unknown to the former.

=Education by absorption.=--This subject of absorption has not received
the careful attention that its importance warrants. In the social
consciousness education has been so long associated with books, and
formal processes, that we find it difficult to conceive of education
outside of or beyond books. If, as we so confidently assert, education
is a spiritual process, then whatever stimulates the spirit must be
education, whether a landscape, a flower, a picture, or a person. The
traveler who sits enrapt before the Jungfrau for an hour or a day is
becoming more highly educated, even in the absence of books and
formalities. The beauty of the mountain touches his spirit, and there is
a consequent reaction that fulfills all the claims of the educational
processes. In short, he is lifted to a higher plane of appreciation, and
that is what the books and the schools are striving to achieve.

=The principle illustrated.=--In the presence of this mountain the
tourist gains an ideal of grandeur which becomes his standard of
estimating scenery throughout life. A boy once heard "The Dead March"
played by an artist, and when he was grown to manhood that was still his
ideal of majestic music. A traveler asserts that no man can stand for an
hour on the summit of Mt. Rigi and not become a better and a stronger
man for the experience. A writer on art says that it is worth a trip
across the ocean to see the painting of the bull by Paul Potter; but
that, of course, depends upon the ideals of the beholder. All these
illustrations conform to and are in harmony with the psychological
dictum that in the educational process the spirit reacts to its
environment.

=The teacher as environment.=--But the environment may include people as
well as inanimate objects, mountains, rivers, flowers, and pictures.
And, as a part of the child's environment, the teacher takes her place
in the process of education by absorption. A city superintendent avers
that there is one teacher in his corps who would be worth more to his
school than the salary she receives even if she did no teaching. This
means that her presence in the school is a wholesome influence, and that
she is the sort of environment to which the pupils rea