nterest unites knowledge,
feeling, and will. The culture epochs supply the nucleus of materials
for moral-educative purposes. Apperception assimilates new ideas by
bringing each into the bond of its kindred and friends, spinning
threads of connection in every direction. The inductive process
collects, classifies, and organizes knowledge, everywhere tending
toward unity.

CHAPTER VIII.

HERBART AND HIS DISCIPLES.

"Then, only, can a person be said to draw education under his control,
when he has the wisdom to bring forth in the youthful soul a great
circle or body of ideas, well knit together in its inmost parts--a body
of ideas which is able to outweigh what is unfavorable in environment
and to absorb and combine with itself the favorable elements of the
same." (Herbart.)

Herbart was an empirical psychologist, and believed that the mind grows
with what it feeds upon; that is, that it develops its powers slowly by
experience. We are dependent not only upon our habits, upon the
established trends of mental action produced by exercise and
discipline, but also upon our acquired ideas, upon the thought
materials stored up and organized in the mind. These thought-materials
seem to possess a kind of vitality, an energy, an attractive or
repulsive power. When ideas once gain real significance in the mind,
they become active agents. They are not the blocks with which the mind
builds. They are a part of the mind itself. They are the conscious
reaction of the mind upon external things. The conscious ego itself is
a product of experience. In thus referring all mental action and
growth to experience, in the narrow limits he draws for the original
powers of the mind, Herbart stands opposed to the older and to many
more recent psychologists. He has been called the father of empirical
psychology.

Kant, with many other psychologists, gives greater prominence to the
original powers of the mind, to the _innate ideas_, by means of which
it receives and works over the crude materials furnished by the senses.
The difference between Kant and Herbart in interpreting the process of
apperception is an index of a radical difference in their pedagogical
standpoints. With Kant, apperception is the assimilation of the raw
materials of knowledge through the fundamental categories of thought
(quality, quantity, relation, modality, etc.) Kant's categories of
thought are original properties of the mind; they receive the cru