Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/465

Rh interest of metaphysicians. The explanation in philosophical terms of thought and reality has usurped, in his opinion, the larger, more fruitful as well as more hopeful interest in the functional manifestations of the deeper, more universal and significant aspects of mind.

An analagous emphasis must be placed upon action as opposed to thought. The study of motor impulses becomes as fundamental in psychology, and motor training as fundamental in education, as any analysis of how we think, or any teachable wisdom in the guidance of thought. The motor response is as vital to the psychological mode of manifestation as the ability to defend policy by argument or to analyze results into processes. In all these several aspects the position of woman has remained closer and truer to nature than that of man. And to this, the specific trait of feminine psychology, Dr. Hall traces her peculiar distribution and emphasis of brain, heart and hand—a distribution that represents an older, more typical as well as more natural set of relations. The educational application of these several principles lies close at hand. Indeed, to some readers the volumes, as a whole, will appeal more strongly on their practical side as a guide to education than on their analytic side as a guide to a perspective of importance of the several contributory factors of modern psychology. These educational applications are stated with considerable elaboration, at times with distinct and exaggerated oratorical appeal, and as frequently with suggestive and earnest reformatory programs. No one of these practise-guiding principles is more convincingly dealt with than that which leads to the appeal for the proper representation in the educational scheme, of the training of the hand and the will. The dignity and rights of motor education receive an unusually strong and comprehensive recognition. And here as elsewhere, we are reminded in general and in detail that the order of control over muscles and the apparatus of the will is indicated by its natural growth in the child and in the race. The value of the discovery of the natural order in this as in other series of evolutions is that the natural order is the right order; that our efforts should go to encourage for the several periods the conditions and stimuli that nature provides, to avoid at least the most serious of the antagonisms to that sequence of growth, which the needs of civilization (or our imperfect means of preparing for them) seem to demand.

The crowning application of these several precepts and practices is to those special phases of growth which find their joint issue in adolescence. Here more than anywhere else must the natural sequence of evolution determine the variety of occupation that shall prepare for the adult life; and here too, according to Dr. Hall, have our transgressions against the order of nature been most serious. We have imposed upon the adolescent endowment the interests of mature individuals, have invited them to share our adult consciousness, not even taking care