field work on nature at first hand, so far as we are concerned, really is research and discovery no matter if the facts have been discovered by others before us.

Notes nearly always should be in our own words. Otherwise they are "cribs" for the mind's use and properly not notes at all. A good lecture is explanation and not dictation of a set of cribs ; not description but explanation. In some schools there is far too much lecturing and far too little studied review of textbooks by means of recitation. The same is equally true of books as of lectures. Notes are of no real educative use unless or until they have been sufficiently worked over in our minds as to be expressed readily in our own words. Therefore, the importance of using our own English. There is no rule for this better, perhaps, than taking notes "just as we would talk them to a little sister seven years old at home" simple and direct and explicit.

The subconscious mind fuses and retains the facts on the principles of symbolic action, and continually elaborates them. That is one of the important reasons for taking adequate notes. Each note should serve as a symbol by which the mind (and nervous system) can get hold of it

and connect it for use with other facts and other principles already secured.

We should keep our notes always posted up. I do not mean summarized daily in writing, but I do mean posted up in the brain. Notes which are not reviewed become dead notes (rests) in a few days! It is not really necessary to summarize notes in writing in the notebook, but in keeping them mentally posted up we train the mind always to be abstracting. We should make notes as we would like our minds to be: First, abundant; second, accurate; third, logical; and, fourth, free.

Another thing worth considering, perhaps, is the importance and practical value of preserving notebooks (the same being true of textbooks). In the first place, they often are practically useful later on in our careers. Many of the courses given by students soon after leaving school are practically the reproduction of the lectures which they have had in school! Second, good notes are part of the mind just as our mothers and our sweethearts and our childhood-homes are parts of our personality (see James's "Me"). More than that, our sons and daughters may, and probably will, value them at some future time. In a later

discussion we shall consider our notebooks in relation to examinations.

Another important thing in the taking and the learning of notes is the forgetting of things which should be forgotten. It has been said by some psychologist that forgetting is only less important than remembering. By glancing over our notes we may select the important things and neglect the dead and adynamic things which are to be forgotten passively. Nothing once impressed, it seems, ever leaves the brain, save by gross loss of cerebral tissue; the impression in some form continues during life. What we actually have in our recallable working minds is, then, only a small fraction of what in some mysterious manner is impressed in our brains. So it is true that only a relatively small portion of the notes can be remembered properly; the rest may be forgotten. Some things are quick, and become active agents in our education; but some, too, are wholly dead for us, and are (and should be) lost out of our effective minds.

CHAPTER III

EDUCATIVE IMAGINATION

In the previous chapter we ran over some of the practical considerations of observation and of taking notes, both on the tablets of our memories (observation) and on tablets of paper, -notebooks. How, practically, we can further the use of these notes, both cerebral and manuscript, in the learning-process, is our next inquiry. This process in practice may be analyzed and understood, and thus improved materially, in any given mind.

Imagination, as we shall discuss it, may not be easily defined except by suggesting what it is not: It is not falsehood and untruth, but a most essential form of mental truth; and educationally it is of great practical use and importance. We may wonder how imagination, as we think of it, can be important in learning at all. The reason for this doubt is that a wrong meaning of the term "imagination" has crept into general un

technical use, namely, that it is delusion, a false idea, an error of thinking, the seeing of something that is not there; false perception-in other words, error and falsehood rather than something which is true and real and in every educational way important. Imagination, on the other hand, is one of the most productive mental processes in the whole educative procedure. It is "the representative power" of the mind, but this, as we shall see, involves much, since in a broad sense it includes many of the active constructive operations of the mental life. Dean J. R. Angell, the eminent psychologist of the University of Chicago, emphasizes the two leading features of imagination when he writes that it "is to be viewed not only as the process whereby the ordinary practical affairs of life are guided, in so far as they require foresight, but also the medium through which most of the world's finer types of happi

Surely a thing which

ness are brought to pass." at once guides our lives and gives us happiness is of much account; and in the learning-procedure it is not of less account than elsewhere. Imagination may be denoted as the use of the mind backwards or forwards, turning the mind into the past or into the future but not directly into