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A. DUNCAN YOCUM

TO WHOM I AM INDEBTED FOR THE PEDAGOGICAL VIEWPOINT WHICH GUIDED THE CONSTRUCTION OF THIS BOOK, AND WHO, AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, HAS GIVEN TO SO MANY MEN A NEW VISION OF THE MEANING AND POSSIBILITIES OF EDUCATION

This Volume is Gratefully Dedicated

PREFACE

THIS book represents a venture in a new field. It undertakes to make available for the secondary school and for teachers' reading circles, materials for a course in General Philosophy corresponding to the courses in general science and combined mathematics which have lately won an apparently established, and certainly well-deserved, place in the curriculum. The book attempts to combine into an integrated elementary course materials selected from psychology, logic, ethics, and the psychology and philosophy of religion. The work has been in the making for nearly five years, and was taught from mimeographed copy for two years to the senior classes in the high school at Royersford, Pennsylvania. During this period of construction and experience, the course underwent many modifications, each of which, it is hoped, has resulted in a more perfect adaptation of it to its purpose and to the age of the pupils for whom it is intended.

As no course, even a general course, may be a mere jumble of unrelated facts, the author has attempted to maintain throughout a consistent viewpoint, that of the bearing of the material selected upon the individual's effective control of his own conduct. Whatever did not bear directly upon this was excluded, no matter how attractive in itself. For this reason explanatory psychology has been kept subordinate to the practical and has been brought in only in such way as to reënforce the latter. Topics without direct practical application for the ordinary student, such as Weber's Law or a detailed description of the nervous system, are omitted entirely. Likewise aspects which have to do chiefly with social relationships rather than individual efficiency are omitted. Within the field selected the author was con

tinually guided, too, by the test of relative usefulness of the matter to the ordinary student.

The second distinguishing feature of the work is the effort to emotionalize the instruction. It is not ideas alone, but ideas warmed with emotion, that get carried into action. Hence the author's chief effort was to build up strong impressions and emotionalized attitudes rather than merely to give speculative knowledge. This was attempted partly through the use of such arguments and such relative emphasis as are calculated to arouse feeling, and particularly through the use of literary quotations embodied in the text wherever it seemed that they could contribute toward building up a dynamic attitude. For this reason, too, anything that might tend to break the force of the impression was avoided. Qualifying phrases which strict scientific accuracy would sometimes require have been omitted for the sake of clearness and emphasis.

In conducting this course the teacher should lead in a reaction upon the text. The typical question should not be What does the book say?" but "Is the author right?" "Give examples from your own experience," "How does this principle apply to such and such practical situation ?” etc. A number of such questions, supplementary to the text and calling for reaction upon it, is appended to each chapter.

It will, of course, be obvious how intimately a work such as this bears upon the vexed problem of moral training in the high school. It undertakes to provide the student with principles for the control of conduct and, as such, constitutes moral instruction in the broadest sense. The author believes that moral instruction in the high school must take on a more systematic and intellectual form than in the grades, but a less philosophical form than in the college, and hopes that this book may be of some service in providing a basis for such instruction.

My obligations are so many that it is impossible to acknowledge more than a few of them specifically. I have drawn freely upon the literature in the field and, indeed, claim