No attempt is made to ridicule the arm-chair psychologists, or the advocates of child study, or those patient and painstaking workers who are honestly seeking to establish the facts of mind through experiments in the laboratory. He who has carefully reflected upon the art of making pupils think will not hesitate to admit that thus far he has received more light from the standard psychology than from the labors of those who claim to be the exponents of the new psychology. The latter can hardly write or talk without using the terms coined by the older students of mind; this shows their indebtedness to those who taught and speculated before laboratories of psychology were established. Sometimes the experiments have only served to test and give a reason for what was already accepted. Often they have brought to our knowledge facts of mind which could never have been discovered by the method of introspection. In either case the experiments have resulted in clear gain. Let the facts of brain and mind, of nervous and mental action, of human growth, maturity, and decay be gathered, questioned, tested, and classified; let their bearing upon educational practice be set forth in the clearest possible light: every resulting step of progress and reform will be hailed with delight by all who have no pet theories to defend.
The lecturer is limited by time, by the kind of audience which he addresses, and by circumstances largely beyond his control. These limitations drop out when he reduces his thoughts to writing, and a rearrangement at many points becomes possible as well as desirable. The expedients for relieving the strain of attention and winning back the listless can be omitted; and omissions that become necessary through the exigencies of the programme must be supplied for the sake of logical sequence. Moreover, the aims which those who engage the lecturer set before him frequently require a modification of the line of discussion, so that a course of lectures on a specific theme cannot always follow the same order of treatment, although substantially the same in content and scope. Hence the division into chapters has been adopted as preferable to the original sequence of lectures. Nevertheless, the style of the rostrum has not been altogether eliminated, because when oral discourse is thrown into new forms, and the phraseology is changed for the sake of publication, the loss in vividness, directness, and simplicity is greater than the gain in diction and fulness of statement.