Christianity become a part of the more fundamental system of habits. Stimulating the system of habits corresponds to creating an appreciation, and connecting activities of Christianity with it corresponds to associating these activities as means to the appreciated end. If the activities of Christianity are checked, the conscious parallel now becomes that of the value of the whole system of habits; for the check in the activity is a check in the system of which it is now an integral part. This is the parallel of the transference of value.

In the play Hamlet, stimuli are such as to open in a greater or less degree strongly fixed channels of response that would turn one away from suffering and death. On the mental side, this corresponds to inciting certain appreciations of value. Then nervous connections necessary for prompt action are associated with these habits as necessary to their proper functioning. This corresponds to associating prompt action, the opposite of procrastination, with the value as the means of realizing it. Afterwards, when prompt action is checked, the mental accompaniment is that which belongs to the more fundamental system with which it has been connected; for checking this particular reaction now is checking the whole system of which it is a part.

The difference between history and the fine arts is that history gives stimuli connecting only those channels which have been connected at one time or another in organisms of earlier generations, whereas the fine arts may give stimuli which make connections that have not existed in organisms of earlier generations. The fine arts are distinguished one from another by the differences in the kinds of stimuli they give, as words, tones, and colors, and by the consequent differences in the ways in which

they open channels of fundamental habits and connect particular reactions with these channels.

When the fine arts, in modifying the complex automatic switchboard of the brain, do not organize reactions in ways to give better adjustment, but, on the contrary, connect particular channels of reaction and fundamental systems of habits so as to interfere with adjustment, the physical parallel of an immoral influence appears. The reader of an immoral novel or the observer of an immoral moving picture may, through wrong organization of channels of response, react in ways that bring injurious consequences. Because the fine arts are not limited, as is history, to connections that, at one time or another, have actually been made and accepted in social practice, it is easily possible for them to make connections that interfere with adjustment. Because of the fact that stimuli given by some fine arts, as sculpture, painting, and music, may excite, as a result of previous influences, quite different tendencies to response in different organisms, the same work of art may be beneficial to one organism and injurious to another.

REFERENCES

ROBINSON, J. H., The New History, 1912, pp. 132–153. (Shows what kind of history is most valuable to the common man.) JUDD, C. H., Psychology of High-School Subjects, 1915, pp. 370-391. (Discusses history from the point of view of the psychologist.) FAIRCHILD, A. H. R., The Making of Poetry, 1912, pp. 155-184. (Explains the nature of poetry.)

GORDON, K., Esthetics, 1909, Chs. XI-XVII, pp. 195–294. (These chapters are devoted respectively to a discussion of architecture, sculpture, painting, language as an art medium, poetry, the drama, and prose forms.)

DE GARMO, C., Aesthetic Education, 1913, pp. 1-156. (Students especially interested in the fine arts will find valuable material

in this book. Pages 155-156 contain a list of books valuable for collateral study.)

PARKER, DE W. H., The Principles of Esthetics, 1920, Chs. VIXV. (Discusses the underlying criteria by which standards in art are developed.)

PROBLEMS

1. Should the achievements in science and industry have a less important place in our school history than the achievements in war?

2. In a continued story in a magazine, the later instalments are sometimes preceded by a summary of the earlier part of the story. Show that the function of history is analogous to the function of this summary.

3. In the professional training of teachers, what is the value of the history of education?

4. Find in some textbook in history a section that is largely factual. 5. May history appropriately be called "social memory"? Explain.

6. In what important ways do you believe the content of the history courses you studied in the high school could have been improved?

7. How could your study of literature in the high school have been made more profitable to you?

8. Why is it important to develop in children a taste for literature and other fine arts?

9. Having selected three poems and three pictures, show what purpose is enriched by each and how this enrichment is caused.

10. Show that in the Twenty-Third Psalm or in some other work of art the idea to which ideal value is to be transferred is the basis of the unity of the work of art.

11. Do you believe that in addition to training the pupils to sing, the public school should, through courses designed especially for the purpose, develop in them an appreciation of the best music, instrumental as well as vocal? Explain.

12. Criticize the following: "The psychological purpose of aesthetic education . . . is to promote the pure, unselfish joy of life, to enable us to see and appreciate the beautiful wherever it exists, and when possible to produce it where it is not, but should be."

13. Was the moral influence of some "picture show" you attended recently good or bad? Explain.

CHAPTER IX

THE NATURE OF PATTERNS FOR CONTROL

THE SCIENCES

The function of the sciences is to describe and explain in the simplest manner the behavior of things, in order that these things may be used most effectively in control. This description and explanation require the abstracting of things from values, the considering of special aspects of these things, the reducing of them to elements, and the finding, on the basis of efficient causation or logical cogency, of laws descriptive of how these elements behave singly or in combination. The fact that the sciences are outgrowths of ordinary experience accounts for the following: their logical classifications of phenomena are normally also "psychological"; the pure sciences are an intermediate stage in the development of control and are supplemented by the "applied sciences"; the normal approach to the pure sciences begins with practical activities. The classification of the sciences develops slowly and can never be complete. The beliefs that the sciences give insight into reality or speak authoritatively about ultimate values, are erroneous.

I

The function of the sciences is to describe in the simplest manner the behavior of things, in order that these things may be used most effectively in control. Each science (1) considers things apart from all feelings of value;. (2) deals with only one aspect of them; (3) reduces them, from its special point of view, to their simplest parts, or elements; and (4) finds laws which describe how these elements behave, both separately and in combination.

The sciences are the most valuable guides

developing

means of control. They give control in therm of widely

1

useful organized principles rather than in the form of a multiplicity of isolated facts; they increase rapidly man's power over nature by substituting a definite method of investigation for the trial and error method of primitive man. As Karl Pearson says, "In the capacity he has evolved for resuming vast ranges of phenomena in brief scientific formulae in his knowledge of natural law, and the foresight this knowledge gives him, lie the sources of man's victory over other forms of life, from the brute power of the wild beast to the subtle power of the microscopic bacillus of some dread disease." To find more definitely how sciences guide in developing control, is the problem of this chapter.

Things of the world act in ways of their own. They are rigidly stubborn in nature; they always, under the same conditions, act persistently in the same ways. This fact is termed the uniformity of nature. Water expands when it freezes and ice absorbs heat when it melts; light and sound vary in intensity with the square of the distance; a grain of corn in the warm moist earth sprouts into a plant. A congress of nations could not make them do differently.

Man can make things work for him only by finding out just what they do and under what conditions they act. Then he can set to work those which do what he desires done. The farmer must know how seed and soil act; the cook must know how flour and yeast behave; the builder of locomotives must know what steam will do under various conditions; the maker of electrical appliances must understand the behavior of electricity; the debater must know the power of premises to compel conclusions a man who desires to do his duty must know the effects upon life of various kinds of conduct. In