Talks To Teachers On Psychology

the more fashionable one today — It will be adopted in this work

rities of the stream of consciousness by asking wheth

e obvious: it leads to knowl

these functions is

The theoretic life’ is his soul’s genuine concern.” Nothing can be more different in its results for our personal attitude than to take sides with one or the other of these views, and emphasize the practical or the theoretical ideal. In the latter case, abstraction from the emotions and passions and withdrawal from the strife of human affairs would be not only pardonable, but praiseworthy; and all that makes for quiet and contemplati

ory of evolution is mainly responsible for this. Man, we now have reason to believe, has been evolved from infra-human ancestors, in whom pure reason hardly existed, if at all, and whose mind, so far as it can have had any function, would appear to have been an organ for adapting their movements to

ngs to impel, and our thoughts to restrain our behavior, so that on the whole we may prosper and our days be long in the land. Whatever of transmundane metaphysical insight or of practically inapplicable ?stheti

test practical use to you as teachers — to adopt with me, in this course of lectures, the biological conception, as thus expressed, and to lay your own em

e. No one believes more strongly than I do that what our senses know as ‘this world’ is only one portion of our mind’s total environment and object. Yet, because it is the primal portion, it is the sine qua non of all the rest. If you grasp

ll it so fundamental

ntinuous. I know that to some of you this will hardly seem a

. Every current that runs into it from skin or eye or ear runs out again into muscles, glands, or viscera, and helps to adapt the animal to the environment from

nto eternal truth, and fanciful logical combinations, could never be carried on at all by a human individual, unless the mind that produced them

gs and tendencies ‘toward’ things, and emotional determinations; and I mean them in the future as well as in the immediate present. As I talk here, and you listen, it might seem as if no action followed. You might call it a purely theoretic process, with no practical result. But it must have a practical result. It cannot take place at all and leave your conduct unaffected. If not today, then on some far future day, you will answer some question diff

them from the point of view of their relation to the future conduct of their possessor. Sufficient at any rate as a first conception and as a main conception. You should regard your professional task as if it consisted chiefly and essentially in training

uties, in certain practical emergencies. “Thou shalt refrain, renounce, abstain”! This often requires a great effort of