4. What concepts have you now which you are aware are very meager? What is your concept of mountain? How many have you seen? Have you any concepts which you are working very hard to enrich?
5. Recall some judgment which you have made and which proved to be false, and see whether you can now discover what was wrong with it. Do you find the trouble to be an inadequate concept? What constitutes "good judgment"? "poor judgment"? Did you ever make a mistake in an example in, say, percentage, by saying "This is the base," when it proved not to be? What was the cause of the error?
6. Can you recall any instance in which you made too hasty a generalization when you had observed but few cases upon which to base your premise? What of your reasoning which followed?
7. See whether you can show that validity of reasoning rests ultimately on correct perceptions. What are you doing at present to increase your power of thinking?
8. How ought this chapter to help one in making a better teacher? A better student?
CHAPTER XIII
INSTINCT
Nothing is more wonderful than nature's method of endowing each individual at the beginning with all the impulses, tendencies and capacities that are to control and determine the outcome of the life. The acorn has the perfect oak tree in its heart; the complete butterfly exists in the grub; and man at his highest powers is present in the babe at birth. Education adds nothing to what heredity supplies, but only develops what is present from the first.
We are a part of a great unbroken procession of life, which began at the beginning and will go on till the end. Each generation receives, through heredity, the products of the long experience through which the race has passed. The generation receiving the gift today lives its own brief life, makes its own little contribution to the sum total and then passes on as millions have done before. Through heredity, the achievements, the passions, the fears, and the tragedies of generations long since moldered to dust stir our blood and tone our nerves for the conflict of today.