hose
among you who happen to be taking notes. But the very listening which
you are carrying on is itself a determinate kind of conduct. All the
muscular tensions of your body are distributed in a peculiar way as you
listen. Your head, your eyes, are fixed characteristically. And, when
the lecture is over, it will inevitably eventuate in some stroke of
behavior, as I said on the previous occasion: you may be guided
differently in some special emergency in the schoolroom by words
which I now let fall.--So it is with the impressions you will make
there on your pupil. You should get into the habit of regarding them
all as leading to the acquisition by him of capacities for
behavior,--emotional, social, bodily, vocal, technical, or what not.
And, this being the case, you ought to feel willing, in a general way,
and without hair-splitting or farther ado, to take up for the purposes
of these lectures with the biological conception of the mind, as of
something given us for practical use. That conception will certainly
cover the greater part of your own educational work.
If we reflect upon the various ideals of education that are prevalent in
the different countries, we see that what they all aim at is to organize
capacities for conduct. This is most immediately obvious in Germany,
where the explicitly avowed aim of the higher education is to turn the
student into an instrument for advancing scientific discovery. The
German universities are proud of the number of young specialists whom
they turn out every year,--not necessarily men of any original force of
intellect, but men so trained to research that when their professor
gives them an historical or philological thesis to prepare, or a bit of
laboratory work to do, with a general indication as to the best method,
they can go off by themselves and use apparatus and consult sources in
such a way as to grind out in the requisite number of months some little
pepper-corn of new truth worthy of being added to the store of extant
human information on that subject. Little else is recognized in Germany
as a man's title to academic advancement than his ability thus to show
himself an efficient instrument of research.
In England, it might seem at first sight as if the higher education of
the universities aimed at the production of certain static types of
character rather than at the development of what one may call this
dynamic scientific efficiency. Professor Jowett, when asked what O
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