The first duty of the disciplinarian is to make clear the necessity for, and the righteousness of, the condign measure.
Appeal to reason put in words that flow from the heart, is never totally lost.
Not all of compulsory discipline is negative, and not all of educative discipline can be made purely voluntary.
Pain is Nature’s mentor and monitor. The moment man essays to eliminate all of pain, he miscues.
The long arm of discipline should reach at one and the same time for the serviceable tool, and for precept to keep the gaze of lads fixed on the stars: and so, keep the balance in their minds established as between the finite and the infinite.
Reams could be written as to what discipline should do and leave undone, agreeably here with individual exactions, and there with first regard for the protection of the mass.
It remains with the disciplinarian neither to cross values, nor to confound magnitudes. Doing that, he will, if he is wise, examine as closely as he may the sum of human experience; then rely on plumb plain horse sense.
As to psycho-analysis, the latest wonder worker: practically the same thing has been called by several names; but it has its positive uses in deeper diving for disturbing impulses, and in a more enlightened method of passing healing suggestion. Pressed to the exclusion of palpable exactions easily read and met, it can be rendered a nugatory nuisance.
For several decades, advanced criminologists have been delving very close to the manner in which psycho-analysts delve to-day; indeed, the difference in the mode of operating as between the two is not sufficient to demarcate them fundamentally. Both aim at change of habit of thought and action, primarily through removing obsessions from, and establishing actual values in, the mind; and secondarily, through so reordering the entire environment of the subject as to reinforce the primary process.
However, those who look for such as psychoanalysis to carry the burden of the quiring for reformation, are destined for disappointment. They are, for the very simple reason that an individual is, at a given moment, the sum of countless impressions, thousands of which were not sufficiently engraved on his memory to abide there; but which, to the last impression, pyramided upon either his good, or bad, or doubtful character. Therefore, mental research must be comparative, as is every thing else on earth; and therefore, the results accruing from mental research will be comparative results, as are all results on earth.