Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/834

810 A fitting conclusion to this presentation of the educative value of children's questioning may be found in a brief mention of the children's own thoughts concerning the subject.

There having been no conversation or suggestions concerning the matter, the pupils who averaged fifteen years of age were asked to give their ideas of the advantages of questioning each other, and they expressed themselves thus: "We don't waste time, because if our teacher is out of the room we can go on with our recitation. Having to decide on the answers to our questions makes us think. We have to know more about our lessons if we ask questions than if we only answered them. We have more questions than if our teacher made them all. We are all of about the same age, and understand and misunderstand things in about the same way, and can help each other out. Questioning helps us to talk and obliges us to depend on ourselves. When thirty-eight children are making questions, some one of them may think of a question that the teacher may not think of. We look forward to conducting our graduating exercises without help from our teacher, and this work trains us for that."

 

N this and my succeeding paper I intend to take up a group of phenomena which involve some of the most perplexing of psychological and metaphysical questions. There is no problem that can be of greater interest to us as human beings than that which concerns the nature of my self, my origin, and my destiny. Of my origin and my destiny exact Science is not yet in a position to say much, and of my nature and constitution she knows little more. The greater interest therefore attaches to those cases in which the consciousness of self seems to be disordered, and, although we are far from a complete comprehension of them, we can go far enough to show that they present phenomena which are closely akin to those which we have been examining.

We may set aside at the outset the notion that the real self is an immaterial, invisible, indestructible something called mind or soul in which my mental states inhere. Whether anything of the kind exists or not I do not know; if it does, we know nothing of it, and it is not of the least significance except as a symbol for the indestructibility of the conscious self. The only self in which I have interest is the self that feels, endures, hopes, and the only self I can know is the self that is manifested in consciousness.

Setting aside, then, this notion of the self as mind or soul