Far be it from me to disclaim for psychology all title to such hopes.  Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help.  And yet I confess that, acquainted as I am with the height of some of your expectations, I feel a little anxious lest, at the end of these simple talks of mine, not a few of you may experience some disappointment at the net results.  In other words, I am not sure that you may not be indulging fancies that are just a shade exaggerated.  That would not be altogether astonishing, for we have been having something like a ‘boom’ in psychology in this country.  Laboratories and professorships have been founded, and reviews established.  The air has been full of rumors.  The editors of educational journals and the arrangers of conventions have had to show themselves enterprising and on a level with the novelties of the day.  Some of the professors have not been unwilling to co-operate, and I am not sure even that the publishers have been entirely inert.  ‘The new psychology’ has thus become a term to conjure up portentous ideas withal; and you teachers, docile and receptive and aspiring as many of you are, have been plunged in an atmosphere of vague talk about our science, which to a great extent has been more mystifying than enlightening.  Altogether it does seem as if there were a certain fatality of mystification laid upon the teachers of our day.  The matter of their profession, compact enough in itself, has to be frothed up for them in journals and institutes, till its outlines often threaten to be lost in a kind of vast uncertainty.  Where the disciples are not independent and critical-minded enough (and I think that, if you teachers in the earlier grades have any defect—­the slightest touch of a defect in the world—­it is that you are a mite too docile), we are pretty sure to miss accuracy and balance and measure in those who get a license to lay down the law to them from above.

As regards this subject of psychology, now, I wish at the very threshold to do what I can to dispel the mystification.  So I say at once that in my humble opinion there is no ‘new psychology’ worthy of the name.  There is nothing but the old psychology which began in Locke’s time, plus a little physiology of the brain and senses and theory of evolution, and a few refinements of introspective detail, for the most part without adaptation to the teacher’s use.  It is only the fundamental conceptions of psychology which are of real value to the teacher; and they, apart from the aforesaid theory of evolution, are very far from being new.—­I trust that you will see better what I mean by this at the end of all these talks.

I say moreover that you make a great, a very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind’s laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use.  Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves.  An intermediary inventive mind must make the application, by using its originality.