We will print you a perfectly bound paperback of your selected title and send it to you at your nominated address

TALKS TO TEACHERS

ON PSYCHOLOGY:

AND TO STUDENTS ON SOME OF LIFE'S IDEALS,

By WILLIAM JAMES

NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1925

COPYRIGHT, 1899, 1900

BY WILLIAM JAMES

PRESS OF GEO. H. ELLIS CO. (INC.) BOSTON

PREFACE.

In 1892 I was asked by the Harvard Corporation to give a fewpublic lectures on psychology to the Cambridge teachers. The talksnow printed form the substance of that course, which has since thenbeen delivered at various places to various teacher-audiences. Ihave found by experience that what my hearers seem least to relishis analytical technicality, and what they most care for is concretepractical application. So I have gradually weeded out the former,and left the latter unreduced; and now, that I have at last writtenout the lectures, they contain a minimum of what is deemed'scientific' in psychology, and are practical and popular in theextreme.

Some of my colleagues may possibly shake their heads at this;but in taking my cue from what has seemed to me to be the feelingof the audiences I believe that I am shaping my book so as tosatisfy the more genuine public need.

Teachers, of course, will miss the minute divisions,subdivisions, and definitions, the lettered and numbered headings,the variations of type, and all the other mechanical artifices onwhich they are accustomed to prop their minds. But my main desirehas been to make them conceive, and, if possible, reproducesympathetically in their imagination, the mental life of theirpupil as the sort of active unity which he himself feels it to be.He doesn't chop himself into distinct processes andcompartments; and it would have frustrated this deeper purpose ofmy book to make it look, when printed, like a Baedeker's handbookof travel or a text-book of arithmetic. So far as books printedlike this book force the fluidity of the facts upon the youngteacher's attention, so far I am sure they tend to do his intellecta service, even though they may leave unsatisfied a craving (notaltogether without its legitimate grounds) for more nomenclature,head-lines, and subdivisions.

Readers acquainted with my larger books on Psychology will meetmuch familiar phraseology. In the chapters on habit and memory Ihave even copied several pages verbatim, but I do not know thatapology is needed for such plagiarism as this.

The talks to students, which conclude the volume, were writtenin response to invitations to deliver 'addresses' to students atwomen's colleges. The first one was to the graduating class of theBoston Normal School of Gymnastics. Properly, it continues theseries of talks to teachers. The second and the third addressbelong together, and continue another line of thought.

I wish I were able to make the second, 'On a Certain Blindnessin Human Beings,' more impressive. It is more than the mere pieceof sentimentalism which it may seem to some readers. It connectsitself with a definite view of the world and of our moral relationsto the same. Those who have done me the honor of reading my volumeof philosophic essays will recognize that I mean the pluralistic orindividualistic philosophy. According to that philosophy, the truthis too great for any one actual mind, even though that mind bedubbed 'the Absolute,' to know the whole of it. The facts andworths of life need many cognizers to take them in. There is nopoint of view absolutely public and universal. Private anduncommunicable perceptions always remain over, and the worst of itis that those who look for them from the outside never knowwhere.

The practical consequence of such a philosophy is the well-knowndemocratic respect for the sacredness of individuality,—is,at any rate, the outward tolerance of whatever is not itselfintolerant. These phrases are so familiar that they sound nowrather dead in our ears. Once they had a passionate inner meaning.Such a passionate inner meaning they may easily acquire again if