The Elements of Mental and Moral Science as Applied to Teaching (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE ELEMENTS MENTAL AND MORAL SCIENCE AS APPLIED TO TEACHING. I.?INTRODUCTION. That the foundation of the science and art of Education must be laid in Psychology is one of those vital truths which obtain only tardy recognition for the reason that an earlier perception of their importance would have been attended by no practical result. The discernment of law in Mind is an achievement of yesterday, and students of this mysterious region are even now but dimly feeling their way through a maze of bewildering complexity. It is not strange, therefore, that theorizers on the methods appropriate to youthful education should have neglected the observation of the mental phenomena, either in the consummate form of a civilized consciousness, or in the historic evolution which has made that form possible. It is only, indeed, within the last fifty years that the thoughts of scientific thinkers have been turned in this direction; and the idea is still so novel that practical teachers in this country can find few aids in literature to deepen their sense of itsimportance, or to familiarize them with the principle in its actual development. A very few words will suffice to show the value of the principle itself. The mind of a human being, no less than the body, is a piece of Nature. It has its antecedents and native tendencies, propensities, and untaught yearnings. It might be pardonable in an age un-accustomed to rigid scientific observation, and unprovided with the results of comparative research, to imagine that, while the stars seemed to hold their fixed courses, and animals appeared to repeat the same monotonous round of fixed habit from generation to generation, the mind of Man rose above the order of the world, and being plastic to a practically indefinite extent, that it lay...