The President of Yale seems to imply that in order to reason men must become passionless.  He would have done better to have gone back to that section of the Republic where Plato teaches that the supreme purpose of the State realises itself in men’s hearts by a ‘harmony’ which strengthens the motive force of passion, because the separate passions no longer war among themselves, but are concentrated on an end discovered by the intellect.[61]

[61] Cf.  Plato’s Republic, Book IV.

In politics, indeed, the preaching of reason as opposed to feeling is peculiarly ineffective, because the feelings of mankind not only provide a motive for political thought but also fix the scale of values which must be used in political judgment.  One finds oneself when trying to realise this, falling back (perhaps because one gets so little help from current language) upon Plato’s favourite metaphor of the arts.  In music the noble and the base composer are not divided by the fact that the one appeals to the intellect and the other to the feelings of his hearers.  Both must make their appeal to feeling, and both must therefore realise intensely the feelings of their audience, and stimulate intensely their own feelings.  The conditions under which they succeed or fail are fixed, for both, by facts in our emotional nature which they cannot change.  One, however, appeals by easy tricks to part only of the nature of his hearers, while the other appeals to their whole nature, requiring of those who would follow him that for the time their intellect should sit enthroned among the strengthened and purified passions.

But what, besides mere preaching, can be done to spread the conception of such a harmony of reason and passion, of thought and impulse, in political motive?  One thinks of education, and particularly of scientific education.  But the imaginative range which is necessary if students are to transfer the conception of intellectual conduct from the laboratory to the public meeting is not common.  It would perhaps more often exist if part of all scientific education were given to such a study of the lives of scientific men as would reveal their mental history as well as their discoveries, if, for instance, the young biologist were set to read the correspondence between Darwin and Lyell, when Lyell was preparing to abandon the conclusions on which his great reputation was based, and suspending his deepest religious convictions, in the cause of a truth not yet made clear.

But most school children, if they are to learn the facts on which the conception of intellectual conduct depends, must learn them even more directly.  I myself believe that a very simple course on the well-ascertained facts of psychology would, if patiently taught, be quite intelligible to any children of thirteen or fourteen who had received some small preliminary training in scientific method.  Mr. William James’s chapter on Habit in his Principles of Psychology