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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    fifty who can reason synthetically for one who can reason analytically.' ' I confess/ said I, * that I do not quite follow you.' ' I hardly expected that you would. Let me see if I can make it clearer. Most people, if you describe a train of events to them, will tell you what the result would be. They can put those events together in their minds, and argue from them that something will come to pass. There are few people, however, who, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that resultc This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning backwards, or analytically.' From our point of view this passage is the most im- portant in the Holmes Memoirs. If it be true, our educational system is at fault. If the power of syn- thetic reasoning is fifty times better trained than that of analytic reasoning, there is something radically wrong. But can it be fairly charged to our training that we are weaker in analytical than in synthetical reasoning? Is reasoning backwards really a very easy thing? Is there nothing in the conditions of the two cases that makes reasoning backwards more difficult than reasoning forwards ? He is, indeed, a dull novel-reader who cannot ring the marriage bells for himself without finishing the final chapter of the third volume of an old-fashioned novel; but even Sherlock Holmes would find it difficult to accurately reconstruct the troublous scenes of the second and first volumes from the given result that they lived happy ever after.