be kept with children, customers, neighbors, not seven, but seventy times seven times; because the besetting sin must be watched to-day, to-morrow, and the next day; in short, without much matter what our work be, whether this or that, it is because and only because of the rut, plod, grind, humdrum in the work, that we at last get those self-foundations laid (of which I spoke) — attention, promptness, accuracy, firmness, patience, self-denial, and the rest. When I think over that list and seriously ask myself three questions, I have to answer each with No: Are there any qualities in the list which I can afford to spare, to go without, as mere show-qualities? Not one. Can I get these self-foundations laid, save by the weight, year in, year out, of the steady pressures? No; there is no other way. Is there a single one in the list which I cannot get in some degree by undergoing the steady drills and pressures? No, not one. Then, beyond all books, beyond all class-work at the school, beyond all special opportunities of what I call my education,' it is this drill and pressure of my daily task that is my great schoolmaster. My daily task, whatever it is, that is what mainly educates me. All other

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culture is mere luxury compared with what that gives. This gives the indispensables. Yet, fool that I am, this pressure of my daily task is the very thing that I so growl at as my Drudgery'!"

But that which "educates me" makes me more-able to be more, to enjoy more, to count more. And Gannett's words, thus, show how indispensable some useful daily task is to us all and how great is the wrong done the child who is not held daily to some useful service. This is absolutely fundamental. For the full value of work for any of us, is to be found only in activity that seems to us worth while. If we are really made for active selfexpression, we can in idleness gain happiness, as little as character or influence.1

This division of our inquiry ought not to be brought to a conclusion, without the emphatic caution that the insistence on the imperative need of the expression of our best selves in work does not mean any belittling of the value of a wise leisure. Fruitful leisure is rather itself the result of earnest work, and in its turn may contribute greatly to the deepening and broadening of one's work. Significant work requires the thoughtful mind that sees 1 1Cf. King, Personal and Ideal Elements in Education, pp. 119 ff.

things in their true proportions, and this demands the hours of quiet detachment from incessant activity. I should be quite unwilling to have anything that I have written regarded as an exhortation to the common nervous over-activity of Americans; for I am rather of the opinion of one of our foreign critics that "America's greatest need is repose, time to stop and take breath."

THE CONCRETENESS OF THE REALTHE INTER-RELATEDNESS OF ALL

CHAPTER XI

THE CONCRETENESS OF THE REAL-THE PSYCHOLOGICAL EVIDEence, confIRMED BY THE

HISTORY OF THOUGHT

THE last of the four great inferences from modern psychology is but the outcome of the three preceding. The complexity of life, the unity of man, and the importance of action alike emphasize the concrete fullness of reality. They deny that hard and fast lines can be drawn anywhere in reality, that the real can exist or be either fully conceived or stated in the abstract.

I. THE GENERAL TREND IN PSYCHOLOGY TOWARD RECOGNITION OF THIS CONCRETENESS

Not all psychologists are agreed in the individual applications of this principle, but all recognize it at many points, and the trend, I judge, is toward its universal recognition. By this it is not meant that the business of

a strict scientific psychology is to interpret ideally the whole life; but that the modern psychologist, even of the atomistic school, has a wholesome and growing sense that his scientific statements of the mental process fall far short of their entire meaning. The general insistence by psychologists on the unity of the mind, and the unity of man, mind and body, already considered, is but an illustration of this growing recognition of the concreteness of reality-of relatedness everywhere. What Professor James calls the "reinstatement of the vague and inarticulate to its proper place in our mental life" means just this insistence on the relatedness of all consciousness. In our scientific work and thinking we must make use, no doubt, of many abstractions, but we must recognize at the same time, in Münsterberg's language, that they do "not reach the reality of the untransformed life." The reality is always concrete. We can analyze a motion, for example, and separate from it in thought its direction and rate of speed. But there never was a real motion without a certain definite direction and rate of speed. It is interesting to notice that the Encyclopedia Britannica de

1 Op. cit., p. 19.