By regulative instinct is meant the tendency on the part of every normal human being to conform to custom, reason, principles, law. It includes voluntary obedience to authority imposed upon the individual from without, but it is more than that; it is an inward recognition that such obedience is fitting and obligatory. It impels even further. It leads the individual to _impose upon himself_ laws and standards of action even in the absence of outward authority. It is thus a tacit recognition of moral law and of religious obligation. Not much reflection on the teacher’s part will be needed to convince him that if the outward authority to which the child has been subjected at home has been arbitrary, vacillating, tyrannical, or fitful, the child’s ideals as to what is right and what is wrong will have become sadly jumbled long before he enters school, where the teacher has the difficult task of straightening out the tangles. Or again, if the standards of action, which the child more or less unconsciously imposes upon himself, happen to conflict with the teacher’s ideals of what right conduct on the pupil’s part should be, then, also, is there likelihood of a clash between teacher and pupil. Too often when this occurs the teacher is satisfied to secure outward conformity to regulation without, at the same time, attempting to change the inward ideal. In such a case there is the anomalous condition of apparent obedience to a rule in which the child does not believe. The body yields to coercion but the mind rebels. Half the child obeys, the other half inwardly disobeys. How disintegrating to the real moral life of a child such a double-faced procedure must be, can best be realized by the teacher if he imagines himself placed in a similar position where he is compelled by principal or school board to carry on a course of action which is either highly repugnant to himself or which he believes to be absolutely wrong. Only half-hearted responses at best will result from such coercion in the case of either pupil or teacher. The question, then, of how to secure the obedience of the _whole child_, not merely the physical half, becomes one of great seriousness. Obviously it can never be accomplished by methods which systematically arouse antagonism toward the person who commands. The true method of control must seek to substitute a better ideal for the crude one held by the child. Coercion may sometimes be necessary, but the teacher should not feel that the act of obedience is completed until the mind of the child has been swayed to _voluntary_ submission.