of education is in sight and almost within the grasp of the inquirer.

Interference, however, implies preliminary structure and action. To be proper, the interference must be determined, not in an a priori fashion, but in light of the actual empirical facts to which it must be adjusted. To speak facetiously, this conception of education as interference is in full accord with the wit contained in the old-time notion of the pedagogue. But there is also the serious side to it, and, as we believe, a valid side. This interference must always be particular. We must not demand, nor expect, a rule which shall enable us to adapt the specific interference to any given individual. On the other hand, there are universal grounds for the particular interference, and it is in the establishment of these grounds that we are to look for the reputable character of education.

Every educational effort must quickly make reference to the fact that human nature is primarily chaotic in character and impulsive in expression. Education in its resultant forms produces organized results. This is central in all the conceptions which may be held of education. Infancy presents and consists of a series of impulses. Each impulse is useful for itself alone. The mechanical reflexes and the instinctive expressions are not co-ordinated in their functional ends. In other words, none of these early impulses has any immediate utility for the other impulses. The educator must establish the relation between the natural history of these impulses and their possible history under any given scheme of interference. He must, furthermore, in order to get at the practical aspects, enumerate the qualitative variations of these impulses according to the conditions of particular time, nation, climate, family, and child. In short, the teacher should be a "loving" naturalist of children; but he should be no less a man, or a woman, of rational ideals, knowing what he wants to realize in the life of the child, and just why these ideals, rather than others, have worth or value.

This brings us to a recognition of certain logical, objective aspects of the work of the teacher. The foregoing analysis is truthful only in so far as all teaching is empty formalism. In

the child there are other demands than those which can be satisfied by the expression of his impulses. The interposition of the teacher is the one way of supplying these demands. The content of education must be derived from human experience in some of its typical forms, and this it is which possesses a logical character. The educational scholar is not merely the anthropologist or the logician. He must know the qualitative aspects of human experience and their interrelations, objectively regarded, before he can rationally interfere with the expression of the child's impulses. There are also certain facts about education as such, in so far as it represents a continuous side of human activity and a certain object of our intellectual interests, which he should know. The two sets of problems thus appearing represent a vast field of objective experience and subjective processes, into which it is impossible for us to proceed any farther.

In conclusion, we may notice one or two features of the pedagogical world, and their relations to the possible scientific attitudes that may be developed. In American education there is a hopeful aspect which offers much promise. The freedom of school development and the thinking which lies behind it in this country are very great. We have, it is true, passed through the catechetical stage, the "three R" stage, the object-lesson stage; and we are now in the nature-study stage, quite as eager as ever to ask for what is new. At the same time, our American teachers are most submissive. Suggestion, rather than conviction, is the source of their impulses. There also obtains. a certain weak limitation to our pedagogical traditions. Most of these traditions have been imported, and thus are not readily and permanently assimilated by the teacher developing under our civic and national institutions.

Another feature is less encouraging. The inexperienced teacher is quite unable to see the connection between the careful study of educational factors and processes and the detailed work of the schoolroom. On the other hand, the scientifically untrained teacher is confused when assured that what is being done in the schoolroom can, is, and must be, reduced to the terms of description and explanation. Too often "the prac

tical" is steadfastly and dogmatically entertained as the criterion of educational truth. Thinking and doing, however, do not stand so related in this world of physical events and human experience. The so-called "practical" may thus be regarded as standing most stoutly in the way of progress in pedagogical science rather than the scientists themselves. And, indeed, it is notorious that teachers usually approach their vocation as young men invariably approach marriage,-from an unscientific point of view! The rational conclusions from general experience are ruthlessly set aside..

In the Fall

The eddies of the north wind sweep
Through dead leaves rustling low;
Its breath is from the freshened deep
And woods with frost aglow.
Thin, blue, the waving tree-shades lie
Across the gray road winding by,
And high on rocky steeps, and higher,
Glows the red sumach's fire.

Each loosened leaf writes on the air
A poem in its fall;

It beckons me its dream to share

And binds me in its thrall.
Through the still sunset, amber clear,
I hear some far-off chanticleer

From out the farmyard call.

The azure fire that fills the sky
Is cold, but full of love.

Rocked on its breast the cedars lie

Crowning the cliffs above.

And, running down yon chain of hills,

Color with praise the autumn fills,

Knowing 'tis joy to die.

HELEN CARY CHADWICK.

The Imagination as a "Practical” Faculty

CAROLINE SHELDON, MILLS COLLEGE, CALIFORNIA

MAGINATION is often understood as meaning the act of calling up in the mind objects, incidents, chains of events totally different from anything the imaginer has ever heard of or seen. Not many months ago a student surprised me by saying, in perfect good faith, that "Tennyson was less remarkable for his intellectual powers than for his imagination." Further questioning revealed the fact that the student regarded the imagination as the exercise of an entirely trivial force, totally unrelated to any of the higher qualities of intellect. Since that time, observation and investigation have convinced me that this student is not alone in his opinion that the imagination is a vagrant, gypsy-like, and wholly superfluous faculty.

Far from being such a fantastic painter of non-existent unessentials, it is the power to re-combine, in such a way as to produce new forms, incidents, or stories, certain things, persons or happenings, already learned through the sense-perceptions and preserved by the warder memory. It is a sort of intellectual and spiritual chemistry whereby old material is transmuted into new, a kind of embroidery in which the shreds and patches of every-day life are wrought into patterns whose colors no dyer can outvie, whose golden threads shine with the glory of the gold of Ophir.

The imagination, we are sometimes told, is a dangerous faculty; it leads to dreaminess, to idleness, to longings after the unattainable, to neglect of the every-day duties. True, like all other faculties, it is dangerous if left untrained; memory is also dangerous when it responds to the stimulus of evil; and reason is especially dangerous when not taught care in the choice of its materials.

Seriously, what can be accomplished without aid from the imagination? The most practical of men, priding himself upon

his practicality, and scorning dreams and dreamers, must use this faculty in forming the simplest and most ordinary business plan. The "bulls" and "bears" of commerce, the wreckers of railways, afford perhaps some of the best examples of perversion of imaginative power.

All intellectual development is dependent upon trained imagination. Much of the difficulty experienced by students in mastering, not literature only, but history, geography, chemistry, physics, arithmetic, astronomy, even geometry, is due to a dead or dormant imagination.

We are forced to admit that the higher forms of literature make their appeal to this faculty; and it has become commonplace to say that he who reads Milton with pleasure and profit must have an imagination similar in kind, even though less in degree, to that of the great poet. In the teaching of history we are hampered by our failure to realize that students are all too often memorizing meaningless dates, terms, and names from a book, and in no wise exercising "that noble faculty whereby a man is enabled to live in the past and the future, the distant and the unreal" (a historian's definition, by the way). Still less do we note the draught made upon the imagination by true scientific study. What prosaic mind can have any genuine appreciation of the atomic theory, the nebular hypothesis, the vast numbers, and far-stretching spaces marshalled by the calculations of the astronomer? The careful teacher of geometry finds it very difficult to communicate to his pupils the thought of a point as mere position, of a line as direction only. He is a geometer, indeed, who can follow a demonstration wherein. lines and angles do not take shape in his mind as diagrams on the blackboard. Educators make their great plea for geometry as a discipline for the reasoning powers, but it has also its value as training for the imagination; and without imagination there is no geometry.

Man is born not for work only, but also for play. The relaxation of the mind is as important a factor in its growth as the tension thereof. Statistics tell us that one of the principal causes of insanity is monotony of life. The vast majority of mankind must earn their bread by some kind of hard work;