Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/79

Rh principal factor in learning a foreign language is manifold association. The vocabularies in text-books are printed with the English equivalent after each word. The pupil is required to learn and recite those vocabularies and then to apply the knowledge in reading and writing sentences. It must be apparent that this method affords but a narrow ground of association, and difficult recollection is, of course, inevitable. It has been shown that when foreign words are printed and are followed by a picture of the object instead of the equivalent word in the vernacular, memory is largely aided.

Excellent as is this plan, however, it can not be used in connection with all the parts of speech, but must be confined principally to one class of words. When, however, we make use of the motor side, first creating through this means the idea in the mind of the pupil and afterward giving, in the foreign tongue, the expression of this idea without the employment of English as an intermediary, we are not only taking the most direct way to lead the pupil to understand and think according to the idiom of the language he wishes to learn, but we are also economizing mental effort on his part, because the largest acquirement results from the effort expended. In a future article I purpose to discuss more fully this particular topic, and to describe some experiments now being made for the purpose of developing a method of teaching German according to this principle.



EFORE discussing the conception of double personality, it may be as well briefly to review the conceptions of which I have so far made use. I have held that the human mind must be conceived as a complex system of elements which is capable of greater or less degrees of disruption or disordination without the total destruction of its component elements. Disordination often takes place normally while falling asleep; it can be artificially produced by the use of certain drugs, and, in some persons, by concentration of attention; it is also found in some diseases, notably epilepsy and hysteria. In disordination the dissociated elements which remain work out their normal results with more fatal precision than usual; from this fact spring the phenomena of suggestibility, trance, and ecstasy, and some forms of hallucination and automatism. Frequently the dissociated elements recombine in new forms, some of the constituents of the former consciousness being omitted and new ones appearing; this gives