The Herbartian psychology applied to education : being a series of essays applying the psychology of Johann Friedrich Herbart / by John Adams.

  • Adams, John, 1857-1934.
Date:
[1900?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The Herbartian psychology applied to education : being a series of essays applying the psychology of Johann Friedrich Herbart / by John Adams. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    Mr. Stelling, in The Mill on the Floss,^ concluded that Tom's brain, being peculiarly impervious to etymol- ogy and demonstration, was peculiarly in need of being ploughed and harrowed by these patent implements. It was his favourite metaphor, that the classics and geom- etry constituted that culture of the mind which pre- pared it for the reception of any subsequent crop. In criticising this view, George Eliot proceeds to say: I only know it turned out as uncomfortably for Tom Tulliver as if he had been plied with cheese in order to remedy a gastric weakness which prevented him from digesting it. It is astonishing what a different result one gets by changing the metaphor! Once call the brain an intellectual stomach, and one's ingenious con- ception of the classics and geometry as ploughs and harrows seems to settle nothing. But then it is open to someone else to follow great authorities, and call the mind a sheet of white paper or a mirror, in which case one's knowledge of the digestive process becomes quite irrelevant. It was doubtless an ingenious idea to call the camel the ship of the desert, but it would hardly lead one far in training that useful beast. O Aristotle! If you had had the advantage of being 'the freshest modern,' instead of the greatest ancient, would you not have mingled your praise of metaphorical speech, as a sign of high intelligence, with a lamentation that intel- ligence so rarely shows itself in speech without meta- phor — that we can so seldom declare what a thing is, except by saying it is something else ? When the above was written, the greatest metaphor 1 Page 126, Stereotyped Edition.