the period of infancy?" This may be answered in a word. It is a commonplace of our thinking that what a thing is cannot be known unless one knows what it was like formerly, what were the conditions which preceded and from which it arose. So of the mental processes of the child at school: in order to know what they are like now, we must know what they were like primitively, in their rudimentary forms. And since it is impossible for the teacher to know the infancy of all her pupils, the next best thing is to know the leading traits of the infant mind in general, its native tendencies, impulses, capacities, activities. To change slightly James’ well known definition of teaching—"The teacher's art consists in grafting complications on native reactions, or in bringing about a change in the nature of the reaction which given situations originally tend to provoke. And success in the art presupposes a sympathetic acquaintance with the reactive tendencies natively there." … "The first thing then for the teacher to understand," James writes in a later paragraph of the same work, "is the native reactive tendencies—the impulses and instincts of childhood—so as to be able to substitute one for another, and turn them on to artificial objects."[1] Dewey expresses the same thought as follows:—"All conduct springs ultimately and radically out of native instincts and impulses. We
- ↑ Talks on Psychology, New York, 1899, pp. 38, 43.
