inhibited condition lasts.  Such children are usually treated as sinful, and are punished; or else the teacher pits his or her will against the child’s will, considering that the latter must be ‘broken.’  “Break your child’s will, in order that it may not perish,” wrote John Wesley.  “Break its will as soon as it can speak plainly—­or even before it can speak at all.  It should be forced to do as it is told, even if you have to whip it ten times running.  Break its will, in order that its soul may live.”  Such will-breaking is always a scene with a great deal of nervous wear and tear on both sides, a bad state of feeling left behind it, and the victory not always with the would-be will-breaker.

When a situation of the kind is once fairly developed, and the child is all tense and excited inwardly, nineteen times out of twenty it is best for the teacher to apperceive the case as one of neural pathology rather than as one of moral culpability.  So long as the inhibiting sense of impossibility remains in the child’s mind, he will continue unable to get beyond the obstacle.  The aim of the teacher should then be to make him simply forget.  Drop the subject for the time, divert the mind to something else:  then, leading the pupil back by some circuitous line of association, spring it on him again before he has time to recognize it, and as likely as not he will go over it now without any difficulty.  It is in no other way that we overcome balkiness in a horse:  we divert his attention, do something to his nose or ear, lead him round in a circle, and thus get him over a place where flogging would only have made him more invincible.  A tactful teacher will never let these strained situations come up at all.

You perceive now, my friends, what your general or abstract duty is as teachers.  Although you have to generate in your pupils a large stock of ideas, any one of which may be inhibitory, yet you must also see to it that no habitual hesitancy or paralysis of the will ensues, and that the pupil still retains his power of vigorous action.  Psychology can state your problem in these terms, but you see how impotent she is to furnish the elements of its practical solution.  When all is said and done, and your best efforts are made, it will probably remain true that the result will depend more on a certain native tone or temper in the pupil’s psychological constitution than on anything else.  Some persons appear to have a naturally poor focalization of the field of consciousness; and in such persons actions hang slack, and inhibitions seem to exert peculiarly easy sway.

But let us now close in a little more closely on this matter of the education of the will.  Your task is to build up a character in your pupils; and a character, as I have so often said, consists in an organized set of habits of reaction.  Now of what do such habits of reaction themselves consist?  They consist of tendencies to act characteristically when certain ideas possess us, and to refrain characteristically when possessed by other ideas.