The Herbart school adheres to this view of education, and has transferred its spirit and method to the schools. The Herbartians have the hardihood, in this age of moral skeptics, to believe not only in moral example but also in moral teaching. (By moral skeptics we mean those who believe in morals but not in moral instruction.) They seek first of all historical materials of the richest moral content, in vivid personification, upon which to nourish the moral spirit of children. If properly treated, this subject matter will soon win the children by its power over feeling and judgment. With Crusoe the child goes through every hardship and success; with Abraham he lives in tents, seeks pastures for his flocks, and generously marches out to the rescue of his kinsmen. He should not read Caesar with a slow and toilsome drag (parsing and construing) that would render a bright boy stupid. If he goes with Caesar at all, he must build an agger, fight battles, construct bridges, and approve or condemn Caesar’s acts. But we doubt the moral value of Caesar’s Gallic wars. By reading Plutarch we may see that the Latins and Greeks, before the days of their degeneracy, nourished their rising youth upon the traditions of their ancestry. The education produced a tough and sinewy brood of moral qualities.

In undertaking to treat of Aristotle as the expounder of ancient educational ideas, I might, with Kapp’s Aristoteles’ Staatspaedagogik before me, have made my task an easy one. I might simply have presented in an orderly way and with a little commentary, what is to be found on the subject of education in his various works—Politics, Ethics, Rhetoric, Poetics, etc. I had two reasons, however, for not adopting this course: (1) that this work had been done, better than I could do it, in the treatise referred to, and (2) that a mere restatement of what Aristotle says on education would hardly have shown his relation to ancient pedagogy as a whole. I therefore judged it better, by tracing briefly the whole history of Greek education up to Aristotle and down from Aristotle, to show the past which conditioned his theories and the future which was conditioned by them. Only thus, it seemed to me, could his teachings be seen in their proper light. And I have found that this method has many advantages, of which I may mention one. It has enabled me to show the close connection that existed at all times between Greek education and Greek social and political life, and to present the one as the reflection of the other. And this is no small advantage, since it is just from its relation to the whole of life that Greek education derives its chief interest for us. We can never, indeed, return to the purely political education of the Greeks; they themselves had to abandon that, and, since then,

A boundless hope has passed across the earth—

a hope which gives our education a meaning and a scope far wider than any that the State aims at; but in these days, when the State and the institution which embodies that hope are contending for the right to educate, it cannot but aid us in settling their respective claims, to follow the process by which they came to have distinct claims at all, and to see just what these mean. This process, the method which I have followed has, I hope, enabled me, in some degree, to bring into clearness. This, at all events, has been one of my chief aims.

…

THOMAS DAVIDSON

“Glenmore,”

Keene, Essex Co., N.Y.

October, 1891.

The importance of the study of the emotions in relation to human conduct is well understood. Just how consciousness behaves under the influence of the fundamental human emotions like fear and anger, is one of vital interest to the psychologist and educator. It has always been difficult to study the structural side of our emotions because of an inability to control voluntarily our emotions for purposes of introspection. The structure of emotions is primarily important in so far as structure may allow an interpretation of function. The study of the emotions has for the most part been limited to theoretical discussions based on the observations of normal and abnormal persons and on the casual introspection of individual authors. This work is an attempt to study systematically the emotion of anger in relation to the behavior of consciousness, the ideas and feelings associated in the development of anger, the reactive side of consciousness under the influence of anger, individual differences in behavior, manner of the disappearance and diminution of anger, devices used in the control and facilitation of the emotion, and the conscious after-effects including the inter-relation of anger and other feelings, emotions and attitudes which follow.