itself a determinate kind of conduct.  All the muscular tensions of your body are distributed in a peculiar way as you listen.  Your head, your eyes, are fixed characteristically.  And, when the lecture is over, it will inevitably eventuate in some stroke of behavior, as I said on the previous occasion:  you may be guided differently in some special emergency in the schoolroom by words which I now let fall.—­So it is with the impressions you will make there on your pupil.  You should get into the habit of regarding them all as leading to the acquisition by him of capacities for behavior,—­emotional, social, bodily, vocal, technical, or what not.  And, this being the case, you ought to feel willing, in a general way, and without hair-splitting or farther ado, to take up for the purposes of these lectures with the biological conception of the mind, as of something given us for practical use.  That conception will certainly cover the greater part of your own educational work.

If we reflect upon the various ideals of education that are prevalent in the different countries, we see that what they all aim at is to organize capacities for conduct.  This is most immediately obvious in Germany, where the explicitly avowed aim of the higher education is to turn the student into an instrument for advancing scientific discovery.  The German universities are proud of the number of young specialists whom they turn out every year,—­not necessarily men of any original force of intellect, but men so trained to research that when their professor gives them an historical or philological thesis to prepare, or a bit of laboratory work to do, with a general indication as to the best method, they can go off by themselves and use apparatus and consult sources in such a way as to grind out in the requisite number of months some little pepper-corn of new truth worthy of being added to the store of extant human information on that subject.  Little else is recognized in Germany as a man’s title to academic advancement than his ability thus to show himself an efficient instrument of research.

In England, it might seem at first sight as if the higher education of the universities aimed at the production of certain static types of character rather than at the development of what one may call this dynamic scientific efficiency.  Professor Jowett, when asked what Oxford could do for its students, is said to have replied, “Oxford can teach an English gentleman how to be an English gentleman.”  But, if you ask what it means to ‘be’ an English gentleman, the only reply is in terms of conduct and behavior.  An English gentleman is a bundle of specifically qualified reactions, a creature who for all the emergencies of life has his line of behavior distinctly marked out for him in advance.  Here, as elsewhere, England expects every man to do his duty.

V. THE NECESSITY OF REACTIONS

If all this be true, then immediately one general aphorism emerges which ought by logical right to dominate the entire conduct of the teacher in the classroom.