Only a short time ago, looking through some scientific works bearing on a complicated educational problem, I was greatly struck by two pronouncements concerning laziness. On the one hand I found an eminent physiologist declaring unreservedly, “The love of work and activity is an acquired characteristic rather than a natural one; for the human tendency is toward the line of least effort.” And opposed to this another authority asserted with equal emphasis, “There never was a child born into this world who was born into it lazy.” To reconcile these statements is a manifest impossibility. Yet it is certain that each of them finds in facts of everyday observation a strong body of evidence to support it. The average child of tender years, as every parent knows, is supremely active and energetic. He is always in motion, always busying himself about something, his mind alert and inquiring, his hands ceaselessly occupied in testing, exploring, putting together, and taking to pieces. Left to himself, he often will display an amazing tenacity of purpose and vigour of performance. Of one child, less than a year old, a close observer has recorded, “He would over and over again seem to be trying to solve the problem of the hinge to his nursery door, patiently and with riveted attention opening and shutting the door. Day after day saw him at his self-appointed task.” Another, fourteen months old, while playing with a tin can, was seen to put the cover on and off “not less than seventy-nine times without stopping for a moment.” The incessant questioning with which children bombard their parents is another impressive indication of their exuberant, irrepressible activity and energy. But, for that matter, the whole life of the average child goes to corroborate the dictum that the people of this world come into it free from the taint of laziness. When, however, we look at the same child grown to manhood, or even a few years removed from early youth, more often than not his behaviour seems to bear out the contrary view that man is naturally lazy and acquires love of work, if at all, only under strong compulsion. “To get results from my boys, to induce them to apply themselves to their books and their studies,” many a despairing school-teacher has lamented, “I have to be forever watching and driving them.” In college, office, factory, workshop, and store, one hears the same complaint. There is perpetual waste of time, dawdling, loitering, gossiping—a seeming passion for the ways of slothful ease and aversion from sustained endeavour. To a large extent, too, the history even of those who have won distinction as leaders of thought and action seemingly justifies the doctrine that mankind is naturally prone to idleness rather than to productive activity, and that any tendency in the latter direction is invariably a characteristic acquired in the course of individual development.