These few reasons will perhaps smooth the way for you to acquiescence in my proposal.  As teachers, I sincerely think it will be a sufficient conception for you to adopt of the youthful psychological phenomena handed over to your inspection if you consider them from the point of view of their relation to the future conduct of their possessor.  Sufficient at any rate as a first conception and as a main conception.  You should regard your professional task as if it consisted chiefly and essentially in training the pupil to behavior; taking behavior, not in the narrow sense of his manners, but in the very widest possible sense, as including every possible sort of fit reaction on the circumstances into which he may find himself brought by the vicissitudes of life.

The reaction may, indeed, often be a negative reaction. Not to speak, not to move, is one of the most important of our duties, in certain practical emergencies.  “Thou shalt refrain, renounce, abstain”!  This often requires a great effort of will power, and, physiologically considered, is just as positive a nerve function as is motor discharge.

IV.  EDUCATION AND BEHAVIOR

In our foregoing talk we were led to frame a very simple conception of what an education means.  In the last analysis it consists in the organizing of resources in the human being, of powers of conduct which shall fit him to his social and physical world.  An ‘uneducated’ person is one who is nonplussed by all but the most habitual situations.  On the contrary, one who is educated is able practically to extricate himself, by means of the examples with which his memory is stored and of the abstract conceptions which he has acquired, from circumstances in which he never was placed before.  Education, in short, cannot be better described than by calling it the organization of acquired habits of conduct and tendencies to behavior.

To illustrate.  You and I are each and all of us educated, in our several ways; and we show our education at this present moment by different conduct.  It would be quite impossible for me, with my mind technically and professionally organized as it is, and with the optical stimulus which your presence affords, to remain sitting here entirely silent and inactive.  Something tells me that I am expected to speak, and must speak; something forces me to keep on speaking.  My organs of articulation are continuously innervated by outgoing currents, which the currents passing inward at my eyes and through my educated brain have set in motion; and the particular movements which they make have their form and order determined altogether by the training of all my past years of lecturing and reading.  Your conduct, on the other hand, might seem at first sight purely receptive and inactive,—­leaving out those among you who happen to be taking notes.  But the very listening which you are carrying on is