Educators, until recently, have, in emphasizing the paramount importance of mental training, lost sight of the needs of the body. Their classical ideals and formal methods made dead languages, mathematics, philosophy etc., the school diet of boys whose normal hunger was for action, and for learning by doing. Sir William Hamilton, who wrote fairy tales in metaphysics for a generation of Scotchmen, placed these lines over the doorway of his lecture room. In earth there 's nothing great but Man; In Man there 's nothing great but Mind. This sounds well, but it is poor philosophy. There is much in earth that is great besides man and much in man that is great besides his mind. The older type of metaphysician with his staggering vocabulary and his bag of "categories" has now chiefly a historic interest. In the modern view the interdependence of mind and body is a fundamental fact of life. As science reveals the physiologic marvels of the once despised body, the latter grows in our respect, for we find that its seeming humble functions are intimately related to our highest powers. Sir William's couplet gives a hint of the dominance of the classical method of his day. It overemphasized the importance of reason and too often converted the youthful mind into a rag bag of useless information. The educators of that time and since have thought more highly of human reason than experience justifies. With their medieval bias for a world of will and reason, they drove the young with the whip and spur of emulation toward what to them seemed the one possible goal, intellectual achievement. We exaggerate the share that reason has in conduct. In the history of the race, which is epitomized in the life of every individual, reason was a late outgrowth of feeling, passion, impulse, instinct. It was these older faculties that ruled the life of the primitive man who made the race, and it was through them that the race gradually rose to reason by what Emerson would call the "spiral stairway of development." These functions of impulse and instinct dominate the life of the child and they are only a little less potent in the conduct of us grownups. Much of what we call reason is feeling, and much of our life activities are due to desire, sentiment, instinct and habit, which, under the illusion of reason, determine our decisions and conduct. Some one has said that reason is the light that nature has placed at the tip of instinct, and it is certainly true that without these earlier, basal faculties reason would be a feeble light. During the growing period these are specially strong, and the important thing is that they be guided and organized in relation to the needs of maturity. In combining mental and physical training we are in some measure furnishing this guidance, doing intentionally what nature did originally without design.