=Queries.=—­Was Mr. George Goethals predestined to become the engineer of the Panama Canal from the foundation of the world, or might he have become a farmer, a physician, or a poet?  Could Julius Caesar have turned back from the Rubicon and refrained from saying, “The die is cast”?  Could Abraham Lincoln have withheld his pen from the Emancipation Proclamation and permitted the negro race to continue in slavery?  Could any influence have deterred Walter Scott from writing “Kenilworth”?  Was Robert Fulton’s invention of the steamboat inevitable?  Could Christopher Columbus possibly have done otherwise than discover America?  Does education have anything whatever to do in determining what a man will or will not do?

=Antecedent causes.=—­Here sits a man, let us say, who is writing a musical selection.  He works in a veritable frenzy, and all else seems negligible for the time.  He well-nigh disdains food and sleep in the intensity of his interest.  Is this particular episode in his life merely happening, or does some causative influence lie back of this event somewhere in the years?  Did some influence of home, or school, or playground give him an impulse and an impetus toward this event?  Or, in other words, are the activities of his earlier life functioning on the bit of paper before him?  If this is an effect, what and where was the cause?  In the case of any type of human behavior can we postulate antecedent causes?  If a hundred musicians were writing musical compositions at the same moment, would they offer similar explanations of their behavior?

=Leadership.=—­As a working hypothesis, it may be averred that ability to influence environment betokens leadership.  With such a measuring-rod in hand we may go out into the community and determine, with some degree of accuracy, who are leaders and who are mere followers.  Then we should need to go further and discover degrees of leadership, whether small or large, and, also, the quality of the leadership, whether good or bad, wise or foolish, selfish or altruistic, noisy or serene, and all the many other variations.  Having done all this, we are still only on the threshold of our study, for we must reason back from our accumulated facts to their antecedent causes.  If we score one man’s leadership fifty and another’s eighty, have we any possible warrant for concluding that the influences in their early life that tend to generate leadership were approximately as five to eight?

=Restricted concepts.=—­This question is certain to encounter incredulity, just as it is certain to raise other questions.  Both results will be gratifying as showing an awakening of interest, which is the most and the best that the present discussion can possibly hope to accomplish.  Very many, perhaps most, teachers in the traditional school do their teaching with reference to the next examination.  They remind their pupils daily of the on-coming examination and remind them of the dire consequences following their failure to attain the passing grade of seventy.  They ask what answer the pupil would give to a certain question if it should appear in the examination.  If they can somehow get their pupils to surmount that barrier of seventy at promotion time, they seem quite willing to turn their backs upon them and let the teacher in the next grade make what she can of such unprofitable baggage.