tary organization implies, and which characterizes the whole of a society framed for military action, there naturally go forms of address not expressing submission, and if, conversely, he should say that along with the active exchanging of produce, money, services, etc., freely carried on, which characterizes the life of an industrial society, there naturally go exaggerated eulogies of others and servile depreciations of self, his proposition would be manifestly absurd; and the absurdity of this hypothetical proposition serves to bring into view the truth of the actual proposition opposed to it.
| EDUCATION AS A SCIENCE.[1] |
By ALEXANDER BAIN, LL.D.,
PROFESSOR IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN.
IV.
IN education there has to be encountered at every turn the play of motives. Now, the theory of motives is the theory of sensation, emotion, and will; in other words, it is the psychology of the sensitive and the active powers.
1. The Senses.—The pleasures, the pains, and the privations of the senses, are the earliest and the most unfailing, if not also the strongest, of motives. Besides their bearings on self-preservation, they are a principal standing dish in life's feast.
It is when the senses are looked at on the side of feeling, or as pleasure and pain, that the defectiveness of the current classification into five is most evident. For, although, in the point of view of knowledge or intellect, the five senses are the really important approaches to the mind, yet, in the view of feeling or pleasure and pain, the omission of the varied organic susceptibility leaves a wide gap in the handling of the subject. Some of our very strongest pleasures and pains grow out of the region of organic life—the digestion, circulation, respiration, muscular and nervous integrity or derangement.
In exerting influence over human beings this department of sensibility is a first resource. It can be counted on with more certainty than perhaps any other. Indeed, almost all the punishments of a purely physical kind fall within the domain of the organic sensations. What is it that makes punishment formidable, but its threatening the very vitals of the system? It is the lower degree of what, in a higher degree, takes away life.
For example, the muscular system is the seat of a mass of sensibility, pleasurable and painful: the pleasures of healthy exercise, the
- ↑ Continued from The Popular Science Monthly of August, 1877.
