Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 56.djvu/612

596 because they develop intellect and ruin character. "What is the use," say they, "of teaching children to read and think if you do not make them honest and truthful? How is it better for the community to educate liars and thieves merely that they may lie and steal successfully in business and politics, where they can not be caught, rather than to leave them in the slums, where the police can get them?" The accusation is bitterly unjust in many ways, but its force can be met by introducing a system of character building based on a careful study of the means of developing truthfulness, honesty, carefulness, persistence, bravery, courage under defeat, and the other qualities that go to make up a true man. The foundation of this system is to be found, I believe, in the principle of character-building by motor activity.

The ladder of cross-education will be slowly climbed by psychological investigators; if they find at the top a principle of such value and wide application, surely the climb will have been worth the time and trouble.



S a fog about a ship removes it from exact relations to surroundings, so, from the standpoint of morbid psychology, we may fancy the mind peering through a more or less misty envelope to the true adjustment to things—the "glass" through which we see "darkly." Were all action and reaction of the mind to surroundings perfectly adapted, there could be such a thing as absolute sanity. So long, however, as evolution with continuous readaptation and the processes of dissolution with attempted adaptations continue, so long can there be but groping, imperfect relations to surroundings, so long must there be defective or morbid mental action, and sanity and insanity therefore but relative terms. Thus many symptoms of the insane appear to be but varying degrees of the morbid mental manifestations of health, and we may assume a priori that they have a common genesis and can be identified for study. If we take, for example, one of the commonest of these—viz., the idea of persecution among the insane—we may safely identify it with the "sense of injury" equally common among the sane.

By this "sense of injury" is meant that vague sense which afflicts many of us at times of being the object of hostile feelings on the part of others. No doubt we often are, for, in the stress of necessary rivalry and conflict upon which progress depends, we