Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/258

252 minds become full of impulses, of tendencies to action, of passions, and of concerns for what we take to be our welfare. All these impulses or concerns get woven by the laws of habit into systems of ruling motives which express themselves in our regular fashions of conduct. The whole of our inner life viewed in this aspect appears as the purposive side of our consciousness, or as the will, in the wider sense." We even need to put new interpretation upon the meaning of the freedom of will. Freedom means power of choice, power of desire, but not necessarily power of execution. The life-long habits of every individual chain him down to certain types of action and it often takes long practise to break up fixed customs and habits of activities. This has its sad side and also its advantageous side. Were it not that we willed with all previous acts of willing, and were it not true that all our habits hold us to certain types of action, it would be impossible to predict what the individual might do on a given occasion. When we analyze the meaning of character, we find that it implies nothing more or less than the accumulated tendencies toward action in particular directions. The man who has habitually acted in a righteous direction has built up tendencies toward righteousness. On the other hand, one who has sown a generous supply of wild oats in youth is sure to reap in old age an abundant harvest of viciousness. It could not be otherwise. We are enjoined in the Scriptures that 'whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.' A prose-poet has stated that "we sow a thought and reap an act; we sow an act and reap a habit; sow a habit and reap a character; sow a character and reap a destiny." Professor Fullerton says that the old interpretation of absolute freedom would make this a melancholy world. In such a world of freedom no man could count upon himself and no man could persuade his neighbor.

We should be powerless to lead one another into evil, but we should be also powerless to influence one another for good. It would be a lawless world with each man cut off from the great whole and given a lawless little world all to himself. He said, "To-morrow I am to face nearly one hundred students in logic. It is a new class. I know little about its members, save that they are students. I have assumed that they will act as students usually do and that I shall escape with my life. If they are endowed with free will in the old interpretation, what might I expect? What does free will care for the terror of the dean's office, the long green table, and the committee of discipline? Is it disinterested in logic and does it have a personal respect for me? The picture is a harrowing one and I drop the curtain upon it."

Hence, from a pedagogical point of view, how important to fortify the child by habits against that which is undesirable in conduct by developing in him impulses and tendencies through experience in right conduct. Right conduct in children there must be if we expect right conduct in adult years. The man who has to reflect to keep his hands