So, if we could visualise the reality of the school--the institution--what we should see would be an identical connection running through a number of minds, various and variously conditioned. But within each mind the connection would take a particular shape, such as to play into the connections with all other minds, as a cogwheel plays into the other cogwheels of a machine. The pupil must be prepared to learn in his particular way and the teacher to teach in his particular way. The parents and the public also have their {172} own relations to the work of teaching, and whether for good or for evil they take up some attitude to it, and their attitude modifies it. Thus the connection, as it is within any one mind, is useless and meaningless if you take it wholly apart from what corresponds to it in the others. It is like a wheel without an axle or a pump handle without a pump. And it is because of this nature of the elements which make up the institution that it is possible for the institution itself to be an identity, or connection, or meeting point, by which many minds are bound together in a single system. It may seem as if this way of analysing an institution was reducing a solid fact into mere thoughts. But it is not really so. Taking the ideas of all concerned as they really are, we have the facts in space and time--buildings, appliances, hours of work and attendance, and so on--included in them. It is impossible to state the idea fully and correctly without including the environment on which it rests, and the activities in which it is realised. We are not to omit the facts in space and time from what we mean by an institution; the only thing is that we have not known them as they really are till we have known them as bound into unity by the mental systems of which they are the context or the expression. The child and the teacher alike must think of their work with reference to particular times and places, or they would not do it at those times and places; and it is only in actually doing it at those times and places that the idea, or point of view, which stands for the school in each of their minds, is able to assert itself without frustration. {173} Thus we may fairly say that every social group, or institution, is the aspect in space and time of a set of corresponding mental systems in individual minds. We may draw corollaries from this conception, both as to the nature of the individual will, or active mind, and as to the nature of the social and political whole.