writer voices the complaint of one such character: "For God's sake,' he began, without preamble, 'can't you, 'mongst all the discoveries you're makin', find something kind o' innocent and excitin' to amuse a man like me?"" "Starved longings," the writer continues, "unrealized desires, overflowing animal spirits without legitimate outlet, unbalanced natures destitute of training in self-control, impoverished aspirations,these are what lie at the foundation of the social problem which the reformer has to solve, and no remedy which does not take all these into consideration will ever be permanently efficacious." And much of all this goes back at once to the body's need for active expression.

The conclusion of Lotze's careful comparison of the human body with animal bodies is that the human body stands at the head of the scale of creatures, when estimated by capacity for work. Some animals are swifter, some are stronger, some longer-lived, but none has such combined advantages in capacity for work." The human body is made for action.

1 Martha Baker Dunn, in Atlantic Monthly, August, 1904.
The Microcosmus, Book IV, Chap. IV.

are

Now, if the modern psychology is at all justified in its assertion of the unity of man, body and mind, if the relation here is onehalf as close as psychology supposes, then these facts about the body of man cannot be without significance for the mind.

The Mind Organized for Action.- And the mind of man does, in truth, furnish a parallel. It, too, in all its experiences, looks to action. The psychologist expresses this by saying that all consciousness is naturally impulsive; that is, that every idea tends to pass into action, and would do so if it were not hindered by the presence of other ideas; that exclusive attention to an idea is quite certain, therefore, to bring about the corresponding action, as it were, of itself. The socalled "ideo-motor action" thus, is not to be regarded as exceptional, but rather as the normal type of all action. Cognition thus becomes, as James says, only the cross-section of a current forward toward action. Only hold the end steadily before you, and you will do it.

The sweep of this principle is, usually, hardly recognized. It means that the doing of a thing follows, from simple concentration of attention upon it. It gives new point to the old

proverb: "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." In both slight and grave matters, the principle seems to hold. Filled with this one idea, we go forward almost as if moved from without, sometimes in a kind of daze, into the performance of the act to which the idea looks. The idea tends of itself to pass into act, and only needs the exclusive field to do so. It is the idea that finds an otherwise vacant mind that gets done; it is the engrossing temptation that conquers. Even the selfregarding desires of the most selfish man, too, Butler long ago pointed out, are necessarily directed outward; they terminate upon things, and call for action.

IV. FOR THE VERY SAKE OF THOUGHT AND
FEELING, ONE MUST ACT

It is not only true that thought and feeling tend to pass into action, but that, because of the unity of man, one must act for the very sake of thought and feeling. The "voluntaristic trend" in psychology, therefore, is not, when properly taken, a new one-sidedness, a needed, but extreme and passing fashion of the hour. Certainly it is in no such one-sided way that I mean to defend

the principle. That would be to deny the mind's real unity. When psychology insists upon the central importance of action, it is not decrying feeling and thinking; but it is saying that not only do thought and feeling tend to pass into action as their end, but that these cannot themselves come to their highest without some form of expression. Of course the new impression so obtained becomes, again, in its turn, stimulus to further action. Even as to our mental imagery, Royce contends: "The most wholesome training of the imagination is properly to be carried out in connection with the training of conduct."1

"Axioms are not axioms until they have been felt upon our pulses," Keats has been quoted as saying. It is still more true to say: Axioms are not axioms until they have been done by our muscles. You will then best feel them and best think them. And it holds in even the most abstract realm-in mathematics. This is the chief justification of the great number of comparatively simple problems and original exercises in all our best modern mathematical text-books. The student must repeatedly express his thought, thoroughly to understand or retain it. A 1 Op. cit., p. 161.

principle applied is a very different thing from a principle held in the abstract. "The idea, the knowledge content, grows out of, as well as leads up to, action," Dewey says. The expression, the application, naturally gives what we call the realizing sense.

The same psychological principle justifies all laboratory and seminar methods. There is no other justification of the large amount of time given to working out in the laboratory, principles and statements that could be learned in themselves in a fraction of the time given. It is justly believed that only as the statements and principles are worked out by the student himself, can they be grasped with full intelligence. One must do, to know. What Kedney says of the artist is true of every man: His idea or ideal "is not his till he has expressed it, and is more completely his the more perfect the expression." "A thing known," says Fremantle, "is a thing incorporated into the human personality and made spiritual."

Wundt's deeply significant principle of the "heterogony of ends," suggests how far-reaching in its effects expressive activity may be. "We

1 Kedney's Hegel's Aesthetics, p. 111; The World, the Subject of Redemption, p. 30.