Normal Training (Volume 1); The Principles and Methods of Human Culture, a Series of Lectures Addressed to Young Teachers

Book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1860. Excerpt: ... CULTIVATION OF THE REFLECTIVE FACULTIES. Introductory Observations.--In the preceding lectures of this series, we were occupied with the consideration of the perceptive and the expressive faculties, with a view to the plan and purposes of education. Following the historical order of development in the different classes in which the mental powers may, for such purposes, be grouped, we enter now on the study of the various modes of intellectual action which may be classed under the denomination of Reflective Faculties. Here we are met anew by a difficulty inherent in our native language, in the paucity and indefiniteness of the terms which it employs to designate the phenomena of mind. The vagueness of the phrase reflective faculties, is a serious impediment to clearness and distinctness of conception, as regards any attempt at exact definition or satisfactory classification of intellectual acts or conditions. The term reflective, however, if we resort once more to the serviceable aid of etymology, as a key to the interpretation of language, will prove strikingly suggestive of meaning; and, by its figurative force and peculiar significance, will atone, to some extent, for its deficiency in philosophic precision. The term perceptive,1' (literally, taking through, ) suggests the intellectual condition in which the mind is in the act of taking, receiving, or forming, ideas through the medium of the senses. The term expression implies a state in which the mind is undergoing a process of pressing, or being pressed, from within outward. But the term reflection, (bending back, ) suggests, figuratively, that state or act of the mind in which it reflects, repeats, or gives back, inwardly, the images impressed upon itself, --the effects of which it is conscious, --whether produced from wi...