is that punctuality can, through training, be made into a personal demand and can be made to appear as a thoroughly established individual trait. Indeed, after a person has cultivated the habit of punctuality under the guidance of society, he becomes a center for the propagation of the demand that every one shall be prompt. There is no instinctive demand which is more insistent than the acquired demand for promptness. Witness the behavior of a man who is waiting for a belated meal or a train that is behind schedule.

The history of the training which society has given itself in reckoning time and in adjusting its routine to time measurement is as interesting a romance as has ever been written. The way in which the observations of the movements of celestial bodies were gradually systematized, the way in which mechanical devices which facilitate uninterrupted marking of time intervals were substituted for the observations of heavenly bodies, show how far man has made himself and his civilized life superior to the crude facts of primitive and instinctive nature.

All of this historical development is focused on the school child. He is required, without regard for his personal disposition, to move promptly and regularly with the group to which he belongs. He suffers all sorts of penalties if he fails to be on time. There is nothing more in opposition to individual nature than the punishment which is meted out to pupils for failure to be prompt. Such punishment is an expression of a demand of society, not an expression of a demand of unorganized individual human nature.

After a child has been duly trained to conform to this social demand, he will be in possession of a new personal habit and attitude. The important fact for educational psychology is that acquired habits of punctuality not only conform to social demands but become dominant methods of individual life. A punctual person is a new kind of a person. His methods of life are transformed, and what is more important, his methods of thinking are transformed. Not only so, but he transfers the new attitude to all of the activities which he performs. His recreations become routinized; sleep and waking are no longer governed by the coming of darkness and light.

Other examples can be added to those which have been discussed. The customs of civility are good examples of the transformations which civilization has worked in individual human nature. Let us consider one such custom which has been established so firmly that it has finally become a law. It is now

required by statute in the United States that all persons shall pass on the right any one whom they meet on the highway. An offender against this law is made to suffer material and personal penalties and has heaped on him violent reproof. Of course, it is evident at once that there is nothing natural about turning to the right. In some parts of the world society defends with equal vigor the rule that one shall pass on the left. Also, it is evident that the present practice is the outgrowth of a long evolution and not one which arose spontaneously in the minds of all men and commanded at once their approval and their willingness to bring to its defense the power of the group.

The convention of passing on the right grew out of social necessity. Two men who met on a narrow path, such as a mountain trail, had to devise some way of sharing the road. The man of superior rank, which at first meant the man of superior strength, pushed the weaker man aside. When two men of equal rank met in such a case, they sometimes decided who should have the path by trial of strength. In either case, the natural tendency manifested itself for the weak to defer to the strong. The psychology of the situation is obvious. Indeed, all that we describe in later social situations by such terms as prestige and rank was in the making when men met on the path, not because the path itself conveyed the idea of prestige but because the social relations created a certain type of expectation and a consequent effort to meet this expectation.

As roads multiplied and social situations of the kind under discussion became increasingly frequent, the necessity of arriving at a form of expectation that could be more readily and safely acted upon led to the device of passing regularly in a fixed way. The growth of democratic ideas operated also to equalize the demands on all who use the road. The tendency to defer to rank, however, has not entirely given way even under modern conditions; the city street is closed to ordinary traffic to make way for a procession or for some highly honored individual; but, in the main, social convenience has reached the point where it dictates that an equal and clearly defined share of the road shall be given to each traveler.

If one notes one's own reactions in going along the highway, one finds that the drill through which society has put one results in a tendency to turn to the right even when no immediate social necessity is present. If a driver of an automobile finds that he must turn out of the road to avoid some physical obstacle,

he will turn to the right by preference, because his training has fixed his direction of action. The tendency to carry out this acquired habit is so strong that if by any chance one is prevented from doing what training demands, one finds one's self aroused to anger and giving vent to vigorous demands that convention be respected.

Besides being recorded in individual habits, social conventions in some cases come to the kind of explicit formulation, which has been referred to in this case, where laws grow out of convention. We shall pass over the fact that society has found it necessary to set up in its law-making bodies a variety of special agencies to formulate pronouncements of its decisions and other agencies to enforce these pronouncements. It is enough for our present purpose to point out that law is an explicitly formulated demand that individual habits shall be developed in compliance with the social will. All goes well when the law and habits of individuals can be made to move in the same direction. Even where disagreements between individual habits and law are sporadic, society gets on fairly well. Sometimes it requires time to translate law into individual modes of behavior. Where there is a deep-seated opposition between law and individual habits, the clash sometimes becomes so serious that society suffers an upheaval.

The example does not need to be carried farther to make clear the relation between education and law. Civil law is not an expression of natural impulses; it is more often a restraining influence opposed to natural impulses. The theory of education which fails to recognize this fact and the other facts which this article has been emphasizing will in due time be recognized as deficient.

There has been endless sentimental nonsense written in recent years about instincts as the beginnings and goals of education. The authors of these one-sided and misleading statements are in many cases victims of an ill-advised effort to be scientific. They have what they think of as a psychological basis for their system of education. The trouble with them is that they have too little psychology. They have never studied the psychology of civilization.

36. Levels of Conduct

[MCDOUGALL, William, Introduction to Social Psychology, p. 186. Boston, John W. Luce Co., 1923.]

[We may] roughly distinguish four levels of conduct, successive stages, each of which must be traversed by every individual before he can attain the next higher stage. These are (1) the stage of instinctive behavior modified only by the influence of the pains and pleasures that are incidentally experienced in the course of instinctive activities: (2) the stage in which the operation of the instinctive impulse is modified by the influence of rewards and punishments administered more or less systematically by the social environment; (3) the stage in which conduct is controlled in the main by the anticipation of social praise and blame; (4) the highest stage, in which conduct is regulated by an ideal of conduct that enables a man to act in the way that seems to him right regardless of the praise or blame of his immediate social environment.

37. Language and Behavior

[JUDD, C. H., Psychology of High-School Subjects, pp. 150-151. New York, Ginn & Co., 1915.]

Speech a Dominating System of Behavior.-Little by little this one dominant mode of behavior began to draw into itself and associate with itself other forms of human activity. For example, primitive drawing originated in the beginning without any reference whatsoever to spoken language. Men drew pictures of objects, and through these pictures aroused in each other certain ideas. We have ample evidence that the earliest forms of picture-writing had no connection whatsoever with oral communication. In the course of time, however, just as gestures were simplified and gradually came to take on conventional meaning, so the pictures which are drawn by primitive men came to have conventional significance. There are evidences of this to-day in all of the conventional mythological figures which still survive as direct appeals to the visual imagination, in the totem pole of the Indian, and in the idol of the Oriental. These show that the pictures which men drew in the early stages of social life began to have a significance for the group which they could not have had if there had not been a social group to use and interpret them. Certain of the pictures which primitive men drew were ultimately simplified and brought into the closest

relation to words. If one goes to China to-day, he finds that every word has its corresponding picture. The Chinese picturewords undoubtedly originated at first as independent creations; but as soon as it was found that a picture could be related to a word, the picture lost its character as an appeal to the visual imagination and became a part of the abstract system of language. The possibility of using pictures as permanent means of expression and as a means of expression over long distances, both of space and time, gave them an influence on civilization which is in some respects superior to the influence exercised by oral expression. Oral expression, while less permanent and therefore less significant as a means of establishing records, was, however, the controlling system of expression and determined the ideas which should be associated with the written symbol. The written symbol had to express first a word, and through this word the related ideas. Incidentally, this subordination of drawing to oral expression is the strongest possible evidence that words are not psychologically dependent on visual images for their usefulness. Words are substitutes for pictures.

38. Observation and Report

[TURNER, E. M., and BETTS, G. H., Laboratory Studies in Educational Psychology, pp. 1-2. New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1924.]

Disputed theories should, if possible, be excluded from an elementary textbook. Suffice to say that there is no general agreement among psychologists, functional, structural, behavioristic, or dynamic, as to the proper methods of studying psychology. But all psychologists state that psychology is a science, and all sciences involve observation. The material to be observed in psychology, however, causes a division of opinion among students of the subject. (1) We may attempt to observe our mental processes by looking in upon them, that is by introspection. (2) We may simply observe the outward expression or behavior of an individual and neglect conscious phenomena. (3) We may combine both of these methods.

According to Professor Titchener: "

3

There are four reasons why observation should be difficult. (1) In the first place, we are all naturally careless; we like to take things easily and dislike making a sustained effort. Obser

3 From Titchener, A Primer in Psychology, Chap. ii, p. 24. Copy right, 1899, by the Macmillan Co. Reprinted by permission.