Seeing, then, that the body is but a helper whose function is to execute the mandates of the spirit, and seeing, too, that education is a process of the spirit, it follows that our concern must be primarily and always with the spirit as major.  It is the spirit that reacts, not the mind or the body, and education is, therefore, the process of inducing right reactions of the spirit.  The nature of these reactions depends upon the quality of the external stimuli.  If we provide the right sort of stimuli the reactions will be right.  If, today, the spirit reacts to a beautiful picture, tomorrow, to the tree in bloom, the next day to an alluring landscape, and the next to the glory of a sunrise, in time its reactions to beauty in every form will become habitual.  If we can induce reactions, day by day, to beautiful or sublime passages in literature, in due time the spirit will refuse to react to what is shoddy and commonplace.  By inducing reactions to increasingly better musical compositions, day after day, we finally inculcate the habit of reacting only to high-grade music, and the lower type makes no appeal.  By such a process we shall finally produce an educated, cultivated man or woman, the crowning glory of education.

The measure of our success in this process of education will be the number of reactions we can induce to the right sort of stimuli.  In this, we shall have occasion to make many substitutions.  The boy who has been reacting to ugliness must be lured away by the substitution of beauty.  The beautiful picture will take the place of the bizarre until nothing but such a picture will give pleasure and satisfaction.  Indeed, the substitution of beauty for ugliness will, in time, induce a revolt against what is ugly and stimulate the boy to desire to transform the ugly thing into a thing of beauty.  Many a home shows the effects of reaction in the school to artistic surroundings.  The child reacts to beauty in the school and so yearns for the same sort of stimuli in the home.  When the little girl entreats her mother to provide for her such a ribbon as the teacher wears, we see an exemplification of this principle.  When only the best in literature, in art, in nature, in music, and in conduct avail to produce reactions, we may well proclaim the one who reacts to these stimuli an educated person.  It is well to repeat that these reactions are all spiritual manifestations and that the conduct of mind and body is a resultant.

To casual thinking it may seem a far cry from reactions and external stimuli to loyalty, but not so by any means.  The man or woman who has been led to react to the Madonna of the Chair, the Plow Oxen, or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel will experience a revival and recurrence of the reaction at every sight of the masterpiece, whether the original or a reproduction.  That masterpiece has become this person’s standard of art and neither argument, nor persuasion, nor sophistry can divorce him from his ideal.  The boy’s