William James

Chapter I. 9 PSYCHOLOGY AND THE TEACHING ART The American educational organization, -What teachers may expect from psychology, -Teaching methods must agree with psychology, but cannot be immediately deduced therefrom, -The science of teaching and the science of war, -The educational uses of psychology defined, -The teacher's duty toward child-study. Chapter II. 15 THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS Our mental life is a succession of conscious 'fields, '-They have a focus and a margin, -This description contrasted with the theory of 'ideas, '-Wundt's conclusions, note. Chapter III. 19 THE CHILD AS A BEHAVING ORGANISM Mind as pure reason and mind as practical guide, -The latter view the more fashionable one to-day, -It will be adopted in this work, -Why so?-The teacher's function is to train pupils to behavior. Chapter IV. 23 EDUCATION AND BEHAVIOR Education defined, -Conduct is always its outcome, -Different national ideals: Germany and England. Chapter V. 25 THE NECESSITY OF REACTIONS No impression without expression, -Verbal reproduction, -Manual training, -Pupils should know their 'marks'. Chapter VI. 28 NATIVE REACTIONS AND ACQUIRED REACTIONS The acquired reactions must be preceded by native ones, -Illustration: teaching child to ask instead of snatching, -Man has more instincts than other mammals. Chapter VII. 31 WHAT THE NATIVE REACTIONS ARE Fear and love, -Curiosity, -Imitation, -Emulation, -Forbidden by Rousseau, -His error, -Ambition, pugnacity, and pride. Soft pedagogics and the fighting impulse, -Ownership, -Its educational uses, -Constructiveness, -Manual teaching, -Transitoriness in instincts, -Their order of succession. Chapter VIII. 40 THE LAWS OF HABIT Good and bad habits, -Habit due to plasticity of organic tissues, -The aim of education is to make useful habits automatic, -Maxims relative to habit-forming: 1. Strong initiative, -2. No exception, -3. Seize first opportunity to act, -4. Don't preach, -Darwin and poetry: without exercise our capacities decay, -The habit of mental and muscular relaxation, -Fifth maxim, keep the faculty of effort trained, -Sudden conversions compatible with laws of habit, -Momentous influence of habits on character. Chapter IX. 48 THE ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS A case of habit, -The two laws, contiguity and similarity, -The teacher has to build up useful systems of association, -Habitual associations determine character, -Indeterminateness of our trains of association, -We can trace them backward, but not foretell them, -Interest deflects, -Prepotent parts of the field, -In teaching, multiply cues. Chapter X. 54 INTEREST The child's native interests, -How uninteresting things acquire an interest, -Rules for the teacher, -'Preparation' of the mind for the lesson: the pupil must have something to attend with, -All later interests are borrowed from original ones. Chapter XI. 59 ATTENTION Interest and attention are two aspects of one fact, -Voluntary attention comes in beats, -Genius and attention, -The subject must change to win attention, -Mechanical aids, -The physiological process, -The new in the old is what excites interest, -Interest and effort are compatible, -Mind-wandering, -No

William Kingdon Clifford's excellent treatise The Ethics of Belief is in this edition united with The Will to Believe; the spirited response by William James. This book brings together the two essays which comprise the famous philosophical exchange between the mathematician William Kingdon Clifford and William James, a psychologist and philosopher. Famous for articulating the arguments and morality surrounding belief, these two papers are united in a single compact edition for the consideration and study of the reader. The chief difference in opinion between Clifford and James, surrounds the matter of evidence. Clifford argued that belief in anything without supporting evidence is folly; individuals should hold an intellectual duty as well as a moral duty in what they believe. Wishful thinking, supposition, assumptions, or blind faith are therefore unacceptable and can act to damage one's intellect and ability to reason. William James, in opposition to Clifford's view, states that the formation of beliefs is justifiable. He uses the athlete as one example; self-belief in one's abilities or capacity for achievement can provision a psychological edge that results in such beliefs being realized. James then proceeds to outline a number of conditions which seek to justify the phenomena of religious belief as an intellectual and moral occurrence. That the issue of whether God exists is intellectually undecidable is central to James's thesis: a person can, without impinging on their intellect or morals, choose to believe or not to believe in a deity. Both Clifford and James draw upon the established epistemic norms of philosophy, these being the principles which seekers of knowledge and truth should hold when acquiring a belief. Their exchange served to refine the norms in scholarly circles, ushering in a renewed and sustained interest in belief morality. A total of almost two decades elapsed between Clifford and James papers, and Clifford himself died in 1879. However the succinctness of James' reply - which acts as an effective summary for the arguments within many of his lengthier works - brought both his paper and the paper of Clifford to prominence in academic circles.