which trains the will in the intellectual field, which is becoming more and more
the field of its activity, counts for character and makes instruction really
educating. This makes mental work a series of acts, or living thoughts, and not
merely words. Real education, that we can really teach, and that which is really
most examinable, is what we do, while those who acquire without effort may be
extremely instructed without being truly educated.
It is those who have been trained to put forth mental power that come to the front
later, while it is only those whose acquisitions are not transpeciated into power
who are in danger of early collapse.
It is because of this imperfect appropriation through lack of volitional reaction
that mental training is so often dangerous, especially in its higher grades.
Especially wherever good precepts are allowed to rest peacefully beside
undiscarded bad habits, moral weakness is directly cultivated. Volitional
recollection, or forcing the mind to reproduce a train of impressions, strengthens
what we may call the mental will; while if multifarious impressions which excite
at the time are left to take their chances, at best, fragmentary reproduction,
incipient amnesia, the prelude of mental decay, may be soon detected. Few can
endure the long working over of ideas, especially if at all fundamental, which is
needful to full maturity of mind, without grave moral danger. New standpoints
and ideas require new combinations of the mental elements, with constant risk
that during the process, what was already secured will fall back into its lower
components. Even oar immigrants suffer morally from the change of manners
and customs and ideas, and yet education menus change; the more training the
more change, as a rule, and the more danger during the critical transition period
while we oscillate between control by old habits, or association within the old
circle of thought, and by the new insights, as a medical student often suffers
from trying to bring the regulation of his physical functions under new and
imperfect hygienic insights. Thus most especially if old questions, concerning
which we have long since ceased to trust ourselves to give reasons, need to be
reopened, there is especial danger that the new equilibrium about which the
dynamic is to be re-resolved into static power will be established, if at all, with
loss instead of with gain. Indeed, it is a question not of schools but of
civilization, whether mental training, from the three R's to science and
philosophy, shall really make men better, as the theory of popular education
assumes, and whether the genius and talent of the few who can receive and bear
it can be brought to the full maturity of a knowledge fully facultized—a question
paramount, even in a republic, to the general education of the many.