[32.] Of equal importance with the inner organization of the pupil’s ideas are, for the teacher, the degree of ease or difficulty with which a given mass of ideas is called into consciousness, and its relatively long or brief persistence in consciousness. Here we are face to face with the conditions of efficient instruction and training. The most necessary statements relative to this subject will be made under the head of interest and character-building.

[33.] The capacity for education, therefore, is determined not by the relationship in which various originally distinct mental faculties stand to one another, but by the relations of ideas already acquired to one another, and to the physical organism. Every pupil must be studied with reference to both.

Note.—In the minds of those whose early training has been in the hands of several persons, whose early life has, perhaps, even been spent in different households or has been tossed about by changes of fortune, there are usually formed thought masses that are heterogeneous and poorly correlated. Nor is it easy to win the single-hearted devotion of such boys. They cherish secret wishes, they feel contrasts, the nature of which it is difficult to get at, and soon strike out in directions which education can frequently not encourage. Far more susceptible of educative influences are pupils that have been, for a long time, under the guidance of only one person,—of the mother especially,—who has had their full confidence. It now remains to base their further training on what already exists and to refrain from demanding sudden leaps.

[34.] Now, in order to gain an adequate knowledge of each pupil’s capacity for education, observation is necessary—observation both of his thought masses and of his physical nature. The study of the latter includes that of temperament, especially with reference to emotional susceptibility. With some, fear is the first natural impulse, with others, anger; some laugh and cry easily, others do not. In some cases a very slight stimulus suffices to excite the vascular system. We need to note furthermore:—

Such observations will take account also of the rhythm of the pupil’s mental life as well as of the character of his store of thoughts. The insight thus obtained determines the matter and method of instruction.

The reader will not fail to notice that much of modern child study is anticipated in the foregoing paragraphs. Further important contributions to the same subject are made in paragraphs [294]–[329].

[35.] Instruction in the sense of mere information-giving contains no guarantee whatever that it will materially counteract faults and influence existing groups of ideas that are independent of the imparted information. But it is these ideas that education must reach; for the kind and extent of assistance that instruction may render to conduct depend upon the hold it has upon them.

Facts, at least, must serve as material for methodical treatment, otherwise they do not enlarge even the scope of mental activity. They rise in value when they become instinct with life and acquire mobility so as to enrich the imagination. But their ethical effect always remains questionable so long as they do not help to correct or modify the ethical judgment, or desire and action, or both.

This point calls for a few additional distinctions. Generally speaking, rudeness decreases in proportion to the expansion of the mental horizon by instruction. The mere diffusion of desires over the enlarged thought area causes them to lose something of their one-sided energy. Moreover, if instruction presents ethical subjects of some kind in a comprehensible way, the pupil’s disposition undergoes a refining process so that it at least approximates a correct estimate of the will, that is, the creation of ethical ideas.