taken the place of the old steep and rocky path to learning.  But from this lukewarm air the bracing oxygen of effort is left out.  It is nonsense to suppose that every step in education can be interesting.  The fighting impulse must often be appealed to.  Make the pupil feel ashamed of being scared at fractions, of being ‘downed’ by the law of falling bodies; rouse his pugnacity and pride, and he will rush at the difficult places with a sort of inner wrath at himself that is one of his best moral faculties.  A victory scored under such conditions becomes a turning-point and crisis of his character.  It represents the high-water mark of his powers, and serves thereafter as an ideal pattern for his self-imitation.  The teacher who never rouses this sort of pugnacious excitement in his pupils falls short of one of his best forms of usefulness.

The next instinct which I shall mention is that of Ownership, also one of the radical endowments of the race.  It often is the antagonist of imitation.  Whether social progress is due more to the passion for keeping old things and habits or to the passion of imitating and acquiring new ones may in some cases be a difficult thing to decide.  The sense of ownership begins in the second year of life.  Among the first words which an infant learns to utter are the words ‘my’ and ‘mine,’ and woe to the parents of twins who fail to provide their gifts in duplicate.  The depth and primitiveness of this instinct would seem to cast a sort of psychological discredit in advance upon all radical forms of communistic utopia.  Private proprietorship cannot be practically abolished until human nature is changed.  It seems essential to mental health that the individual should have something beyond the bare clothes on his back to which he can assert exclusive possession, and which he may defend adversely against the world.  Even those religious orders who make the most stringent vows of poverty have found it necessary to relax the rule a little in favor of the human heart made unhappy by reduction to too disinterested terms.  The monk must have his books:  the nun must have her little garden, and the images and pictures in her room.

In education, the instinct of ownership is fundamental, and can be appealed to in many ways.  In the house, training in order and neatness begins with the arrangement of the child’s own personal possessions.  In the school, ownership is particularly important in connection with one of its special forms of activity, the collecting impulse.  An object possibly not very interesting in itself, like a shell, a postage stamp, or a single map or drawing, will acquire an interest if it fills a gap in a collection or helps to complete a series.  Much of the scholarly work of the world, so far as it is mere bibliography, memory, and erudition (and this lies at the basis of all our human scholarship), would seem to owe its interest rather to the way in which it gratifies the accumulating and collecting instinct than to any special appeal which it makes to our cravings after rationality.  A man wishes a complete collection of information, wishes to know more about a subject than anybody else, much as another may wish to own more dollars or more early editions or more engravings before the letter than anybody else.