that you try to forget for the time the special requirements of trade or profession, even as far as possible of examination and degree, loving knowledge and beauty for their own sakes, remembering withal that your studies here are only the beginning of your true University life, the education which a wide and comprehensive experience alone can give.

I have tried, ineffectively enough, to bring before you to-night the ideal of a liberal education as complete mental development. It is, I think, the modern ideal. Yet the clearest and best expression of it I know comes to us from a teacher in that stronghold of classical learning-that home of lost causes-the University of Oxford. In an essay on Personality 1 the late Professor Wallace, who himself combined in a unique degree the qualities of science, poetry, and philosophy, writes :

"Mental health and wealth do not depend on a mere accumulation of single facts, but on solid ideas of what life is and ought to be, and what the world around us really means it does not lie in confinement to a fragmentary life, limited in its range and view and moving for ever in the same monotonous routine, but in a large and free scope of experience; nor does it lie in the degree of variety and intensity to which we can bring our sensations and aspirations, but in acquiring the proper estimate of values, in calming the turmoil of temper and gaining at once 'sweetness and light,' that gentle reasonableness which, though not less free to receive impressions than in the beginnings of life, is at the same time matured by experience to a wiser judgment of their comparative worth. The true ideal of a fully developed personality does not consist merely in a keen intellectual acumen, nor in an intense but inactive

1 Lectures and Essays.

susceptibility to the moods of happy feeling, nor in a perpetual unresting activity; it involves a balance of all these elements."

The writer adds, with characteristic modesty and self-distrust:

"But few, if any, reach this; and if this be perfect health, 'wir sind,' as Lotze says, 'fast alle krank.'"

Yet, the ideal is before us, and it is for us as individuals, and as a College, to hold to and stand for it.

IX.

PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION.1

S the early part of the nineteenth century was a great epoch for physics, the middle of the century for biology and physiology, it looks as though the latter part of it and the beginning of the new century were likely to be marked by an unprecedented interest in psychology. "No Edison and no Roentgen can make us forget that the great historical time of physics and physiology is gone," writes Professor Münsterberg, himself a distinguished worker in more fields than one, "psychology takes the central place and overflows into all channels of life." One field especially has been inundated and its workers inspired with hopes of an abundant and hitherto undreamt-of harvest.

The idea of a Science of Education is, of course, not a new one. It is as old at least as the publication of Herbart's Algemeine Pädagogik in 1806. But it is only in our own time that it has attracted general attention, and that any organised attempt has been made to apply it to the work of the teacher. This application was rendered possible by the great advance in the basal science of psychology connected with the names of Volkmann and Wundt in Germany, Spencer and Bain in our own country. But it only became an accomplished fact when the adoption of a national system

1 Lecture given to the Birmingham Branch of the British Child Study Association, 1901.

of education forced upon us the task of securing an adequate supply of trained and certificated teachers to administer it. Since then the interest in scientific method has blossomed into a universal system of Kindergarten Schools, and has ended by becoming articulate in a score of pedagogical journals and in a series of admirable monographs on the art of teaching and on the scientific study of childhood.

In this movement America, amply provided with endowments for psychological research and stimulated by the lectures and writings of some of the most distinguished of living psychologists, has taken a leading part. Not only are the ordinary University courses there attended by crowds of eager students, but special courses at the summer schools, largely frequented by men and women actively engaged in the teaching profession, keep alive and extend the interest implanted in their student days. To the ordinary introspective and observational methods of psychology there has, moreover, been added in recent years the excitement of the experimental methods of the laboratory, which has thus become the centre of new and undefined hopes for the future. Here at last there seems a chance of establishing the science of education on a secure foundation of data as precisely measurable and expressible in mathematical formulæ as those of physics and mechanics. In this country, although our Universities as a whole are as yet innocent of this latest development, and from lack of opportunity we have as yet escaped the intoxication of the microscopic methods of the psychological laboratory, yet the circular, the statistical table of observations, the diary of mental history, have become familiar instruments of inquiry, and a large portion of the teaching profession

has conceived the idea of organising itself into Child Study and similar associations for more systematic effort. These societies do not confine themselves to the study of the cut-and-dry results that have found their way into text books; they aim at the collection and arrangement of fresh facts which may in due time blossom into reliable generalisations to extend the science and improve the practice of education. Encouragement from the higher authorities has not been lacking. One of our first psychologists has accepted the presidency of the British Child Study Association, and even so cautious a writer as the wellknown author of Common Sense in Education and Teaching has added his blessing upon the movement. "The study," Mr. Barnett writes, "which seems to be of next importance for the practical teacher is Psychology, and particularly the physio-psychology which is represented by such names among others as Professor James and Professor Lloyd Morgan." He adds that "after interrogating tradition, the teacher's next chief business is to make the best he can of his own opportunities for gaining experience and making experiments. His own honest and original observations and investigations are of more value than the records made by a dozen other people, however acute they may be."

Anyone who has watched this movement from the commencement, recognising its promise, yet unable to shut his eyes to the confusion of mind that underlies some of its most striking phases, must have foreseen that a reaction was bound to follow. It is interesting, and not without its humour, that the first and strongest note of reaction should come from the University which more than any other has given life and direction to this new enthusiasm. Harvard, like Frankenstein,