Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 72.djvu/320

 He does not seem to see that psychology will become more complete and more able to furnish the solution so earnestly desired by all, the more it is studied as applied psychology in history as well as applied psychology in the individual. The two are mutually complementary; by neither method alone can we hope to reach as deep an insight into the meaning of history and the growth of the individual as we can if we use both methods, and continue to work till the results obtained from the two are in substantial accord.

An appreciation of this symbolic relationship, analogy, or correspondence between the whole and the part, the individual and the nation, opens up to the teacher who yearns for the opportunity of carrying on research work a comparatively new, unfilled, almost unexplored region for fascinating investigation. The complexity of the problems to be solved, the great value to humanity of the solutions when scientific, and the magnificent opportunities for self-development, for broadening of the personal outlook and for obtaining a clearer understanding of present conditions all offer alluring inducements to every growing man or woman to take part in this new enterprise. By such labor—painstaking, patient, unprejudiced, in a word, scientific—every one may help in gaining for all a better and more adequate interpretation of the past of our civilization and of the present nature of the individual than any hitherto acquired.

In addition, all such study, leading as it inevitably must do to a deeper insight into the realities of the life of mankind and of man, can not fail to inspire the open-minded and earnestly seeking soul with an ever keener appreciation of the majesty, the mystery and the final beauty of humanity. As Lamprecht, after outlining some of the problems of universal history, fitly says:

On entering the limitless field of universal history, the speaker feels it incumbent upon him to declare that he does it with the greatest diffidence. Whoever thinks along historical lines and has a fair knowledge of some period of universal history, e. g., of the history of a single nation, will be overcome with a feeling of awe at the prodigious many-sidedness and the endless significance of human activities. And, as a result of this feeling, gentle stirrings of the mind are aroused, which take form in sacred admiration of the achievements of mankind; a noble yet dangerous devotion to the grandeur of the human race takes possession of us. ... We can not enter into problems of universal history, unless we do it with the earnestness of religious feeling, else the standard of the methods which may be used will be completely obsolete and will consequently fail in the application.

This second point may be most fitly summed up in the words of Froebel:

Every human being who is attentive to his own development may thus recognize and study in himself the history and the development of the race to