=Herbartian Psychology.=—I have only space to glance at one more ‘psychology,’ that which is, curiously enough, dividing the American mind with the school which regards psychology as a ‘natural science,’ and at which English teachers are beginning to snatch as a drowning man snatches at a straw. This is the psychology of Herbart, another German philosopher of the beginning of the last century, contemporary with both Pestalozzi and Froebel during the best years of his life. His theory of man is wide as the poles apart from either of those we have already considered; and there is no denying that it affords a tempting working basis for education. It is only when we come to examine the Herbartian psychology in connection with the two or three great thoughts upon which, as we have seen, the world is being educated, that it is found wanting. Herbart begins to account for man minus what I have called the _person_.[3] He allows a soul, but he says, “The soul has no capacity nor faculty whatever either to receive or to produce anything. It has originally neither ideas nor feelings nor desires. It knows nothing of itself and nothing of other things. Further, within it lie no forms of intuition or thought, no laws of willing and acting, nor any sort of predisposition, however remote, to all this.”[4] There remain two possibilities for the soul: an effective _vis inertiæ_, and what Herbart describes as the power of reacting on an idea; that is to say, the soul itself is no longer quite as it was after it has thus reacted. =The Person, an Effect and not a Cause.=—The problem is simplified anyway. All our complex notions of intellect, will, feeling and so on, disappear. The soul is thrown open to ideas—a fair field and no favour; and ideas, each of them a living entity, according to the familiar Platonic notion, crowd and jostle one another for admission, and for the best places, and for the most important and valuable coalitions, once they have entered. They lie below the ‘threshold’ watching a chance to slip in. They hurry to join their friends and allies upon admission, they ‘vault’ and they ‘taper,’ they form themselves into powerful ‘apperception masses’ which occupy a more or less permanent place in the soul; and the soul—what does it do? It is not evident otherwise than as it affords a stage for this drama of ideas; and the self, the soul or the _person_, however we choose to call him, is an effect and not a cause, a result, and not an original fact. A philosopher who emphasises the potency of ideas does good work in the cause of education. We get glimpses of a perfect theory—how our function shall be, to supply the child always with fit ideas, and with the best ideas; how we shall take care so to select and arrange these ideas that they shall naturally fly to one another and make strong ‘apperception masses’ once they have got beyond the ‘threshold’ in the child’s soul.