Our school youth today suffer from just this defect. If their psychic operations can be called thought it is of that elementary and half animal kind that consists imagery. Their talk with each other is of things of present and immediate interest. They lack even the elements of imagination, which makes new combinations and is creative, because they are dominated by mental pictures of the sensory. Large views that take them afield away from the persons and things and acts they know do not appeal to them. Attempts to think rigorously are too hard. The teacher feels that all the content of mind must come in through the senses, and that if these are well fed, inferences and generalizations will come of themselves later. Many pupils have never in their lives talked five minutes before others on any subject whatever that can properly be called intellectual. It irks them to occupy themselves with purely mental processes, so enslaved are they by what is near and personal, and thus they are impoverished in the best elements of language. It is as if what are sometimes called the associative fibers, both ends of which are in the brain, were dwarfed in comparison with the afferent and efferent fibers that mediate sense and motion. That the soul of language as an instrument of thought consists in this non-presentative element, so often lacking, is conclusively shown in the facts of speech diseases. In the slowly progressive aphasias, of late so carefully studied, the words first lost are those of things and acts most familiar to the patient, while the words that persist longest in the wreckage of the speech-centers are generally words that do not designate the things of sense. A tailor loses the power to name his chalk, measure, shears, although he can long talk fluently of what little he may chance to know of God, beauty, truth, virtue, happiness, prosperity, etc. The farmer is unable to name the cattle in his yard or his own occupations, although he can reason as well as ever about politics; can not discuss coin or bills, but can talk of financial policies and securities, or about health and wealth generally. The reason obvious. It is because concrete thinking has two forms, the word and the image, and the latter so tends to take the place of the former that it can be lost to both sense and articulation without great impairment, whereas conceptual thinking lacks imagery and depends upon words alone, and hence these must persist because they have no alternate form which vicariates for them.