The chief thing is to determine the witness’s level and then meet him on it. We certainly can not succeed, in the short time allowed us, to raise him to ours. “The object of instruction” (says Lange[52]) “is to endow the pupil with more apperceptive capacity, i.e., to make him intellectually free. It is therefore necessary to discover his ‘funded thoughts,’ and to beware of expounding too much.” This is not a little true. The development of apperceptive capacity is not so difficult for us, inasmuch as our problem is not to prepare our subject for life, but for one present purpose. If we desire, to this end, to make one more intellectually free, we have only to get him to consider with independence the matter with which we are concerned, to keep him free of all alien suggestions and inferences, and to compel him to see the case as if no influences, personal or circumstantial, had been at work on him. This result does not require merely the setting aside of special influences, nor the setting aside of all that others have said to him on the matter under discussion, nor the elucidation of the effect of fear,[53] of anger, of all such states of mind as might here have been operative,--it requires the establishment of his unbiased vision of the subject from a period antecedent to these above-mentioned influences. Opinions, valuations, prejudices, superstitions, etc., may here be to a high degree factors of disturbance and confusion. Only when the whole Augean stable is swept out may the man be supposed capable of apperception, may the thing he is to tell us be brought to bear upon him and he be permitted to reproduce it.