104. The foregoing remarks show plainly enough that in educative instruction some subjects will be found a comparatively easy and sure means of awakening intellectual activity, while others involve a more strenuous effort, which, under certain circumstances, may end in failure. The concrete studies are nearest to the pupil; mathematics requires some apparatus to render it tangible and vivid; to get pupils started properly in modern languages can be but a slow process. But this difference is, after all, not fundamental enough, nor does it affect the whole course of instruction sufficiently, to constitute a serious pedagogical objection to the study of foreign languages, so long as there is time to teach them. Their fruits mature later. CHAPTER VII =The Process of Instruction= 105. Whether or not instruction will begin well and go on properly depends on a combination of three factors,--the teacher, the pupil, and the subject taught. Failure of the subject-matter to excite the pupil’s interest is followed by evil consequences moving in a circle. The pupil seeks to avoid the task set for him; he remains silent or returns wrong answers; the teacher insists on getting a correct answer; the lesson is at a standstill; the pupil’s dislike grows more intense. To conquer dislike and indolence, the teacher now refuses altogether the assistance he could give; as best he may, he compels the pupil to collect his thoughts, to work by himself, to prepare his lesson, to memorize, even to apply in written exercises what he knows but imperfectly, etc. The presentation proper has come to an end; at all events it has ceased to be consecutive. Now the right kind of an example is wanting, which the teacher should set--one of reading, thinking, writing, that implies complete absorption in the subject. And yet it is this example concretely illustrating how to take hold of the subject, how to present it, and how to associate it with related subjects, which effects the best results in good instruction. The teacher must set such an example, the pupil must imitate it as well as he can; the teacher must render him active assistance. 106. Instruction is either synthetic or analytic. In general, the term _synthetic_ may be applied wherever the teacher himself determines directly the sequence and grouping of the parts of the lesson; the term _analytic_, wherever the pupil’s own thoughts are expressed first, and these thoughts, such as they chance to be, are then, with the teacher’s help, analyzed, corrected, and supplemented. But there are many things under this head that need to be defined and discriminated more sharply. There are analyses of experience, of facts learned in school, and of opinions. There is one kind of synthesis which imitates experience; there is another kind which consists in constructing designedly a whole whose component parts have been presented one by one previously.