Sensation The place in the soul. Let us follow its trail. It comes within the range of our special senses. These special senses are the scouts of the soul. They seize upon the fact. They report it through the nervous system to the brain. Think of the innumerable multitude of these incoming reports. Each one is called a sensation. brain may be likened to a central office in a telephone system, the wires of which are the nerves reaching to the body's surface and, in the power to detect facts, far beyond the range of the body. Make a rough chart of the range of their operations. Think of the many, many calls they make upon the central office. Consider how busy the central office is. At times the rush of calls is so great that all the calls cannot be attended to. Some of these sensations are in some manner miraculously changed. The soul takes notice of them. They appear in consciousness, the same and yet not the same. Ponder well this process. The sensation is suddenly transformed into a fact in the soul. It is a percept. This is only a name for the product of the soul's action upon a sensation. What was simply a physical force is now a spiritual thing, one simple element with. which the soul is enabled to work in rearing within itself the temple of knowledge. The character of that temple is determined by these ele ments. It cannot build with what it does not have. Consider carefully what this temple of knowledge should be like; ask and answer the question: What does God want a human soul to contain? You will then understand the value of placing the right things in the soul, and of keeping out such things as will mar the temple. Is it too much to say that what we most desire that soul to become is achieved only by placing in it the materials with which alone it is able to make itself so? Illustration For example: God evidently wants every human soul to be beautiful in his sight. How can it become so? What perceptions will result in such a soul-quality? We cannot attach too much importance to an understanding of this point. I urge you at this point to read Hawthorne's "Great Stone Face." Read it carefully. See how Ernest actually became the man he longed to discover. He alone had for years received the materials out of which by God's laws the soul could grow to the ideal he longed for. The law is: We grow upon what we feed. Choose then, the right nutrition for a soul. "Evil communications corrupt good manners" is as true to-day in America as it was in the long ago in Corinth. Do not lightly regard the significance of the things you place in the soul of your pupil. Pestalozzi was accustomed to point to a hole in the wall of his dilapidated school-room at Stanz, and say to his class, "What do you see?" They answered, "We see a hole in the wall." Then he would say, "But what do you see?" And they replied, "We see a large hole in the wall." Then, with increased emphasis, "But what do you see?" They said, "We see a large jagged hole in the wall." And thus he continued the process of stimulating their vision until he was assured that they really saw the object, until it became a clear percept in their minds. I use the term percept as a name for the mental product of a sensation. The power of the soul to create these percepts from sensations is called perception. Clear perception is, therefore, the first step in clear knowing. Pestalozzi's Let us now consider another aspect of the process by which a sensation becomes a percept. The percept is in the soul. It is a fact of the spiritual life. Every fact of the spiritual life is known as such by the soul. The power of the soul to know its own products is called consciousness. The soul, not the body, creates the elements of knowledge from the crudest percept to the highest generalization of reason. It has the power to know its own products. How it does this is again a mystery. Let us be content to understand that it does know its products. Consciousness is the revelator to the soul of its own possessions. Facts of knowledge are facts in consciousness. The soul, through consciousness, has noted them. It has been said that consciousness rings the rising bell in the dormitories of the soul. Its powers are by Consciousness it awakened, or, better still, are directed to the incoming sensations, and the soul sees them as they become in it elements of spiritual activity. To understand this is to understand a vital fact in the equipment. of the teacher. Knowledge must be so occasioned in the learner that he is conscious of it, that he knows it. Thus it is apparent that mere telling is not teaching. It will be well at this point in your study to read thoughtfully chapter I, section 2, of Dr. H. Clay Trumbull's "Teaching and Teachers." 1 No amount of preparation on the part of the teacher, no amount of skill in presenting data to the consciousness, no amount of exposition on the part of the teacher, will answer here. These are all good. They are all necessary. But they must be used with that rare insight that enables the teacher to know that the pupil is for himself consciously entertaining the facts im 1 The price of this book is $1.25. It can be ordered from The Sunday School Times Co., as can all others mentioned here. parted. By participation in the lesson the pupil reveals what is in his consciousness. All good teaching seeks for expression from the pupil. It is what the pupil thinks, what he says, what The Pupil's he gives expression to in words, in actions, in deeds, that reveals what is really taught. Mechanical repetition from memory of formulated answers is not the result the true teacher seeks. I once knew a teacher who was so much concerned in having the exact text of the lesson repeated by the pupil that it was said of him that he actually cut the grade of a pupil for failure to insert a comma at the place it occurred in the text-book. This teacher, like some of those whom Jesus knew, was more concerned for the technical details than for the weightier matters of the law. Be sure that the emphasis of your teaching and of your concern rests upon the essentials of the teaching process. If now it is reasonably clear to us how sensations become percepts, and how the soul through consciousness is aware of its own content, we may profitably ask under what conditions, Physical both physical and psychical, consciousness best entertains the facts of knowledge. The physical conditions comprise all the agencies that surround the child in learning, and the psychical |