Narrowness and Breadth in Teaching, Concerning. By B. A. Hinsdale........505 School Expositions. By Henry G. Will- 319, 491, 533, 581, 627 Selection of Teachers, The........... 180 While in this life the soul, whose powers as the primary condition of its development were considered briefly in a former article, communicates with the outer world through a physical organism called the body. As far, then, as such communication is necessary to psychical development, the body is indespensable, for no other means has the soul of receiving impressions from the world or of acting thereupon or therein. And such experience is absolutely necessary to the development of a conscious life in any such form as we now know. No matter what may be the unconscious activities of the soul, those that are conscious as we know them in psychical life do not even begin until aroused by sensations-visual, tactual, auditory, etc.-received through the senses. That this is true is evident from the limited development attained or attainable by those deprived of many of these avenues of communication. If the soul were deprived of all the senses, as it would be without the body, there could be no development in any form known to human experience. Through the body, its activities are awakened and its food for development furnished, but when once it is aroused to a conscious state and has begun to unfold its powers it maintains a relative independence of the body. It develops, indeed, by laws of its own and in a great degree independently of the body, but that its development in this life is through the sensations and their reproduced images must be admitted. When the soul has been thus aroused and its stock of ideas accumulated, the body is no longer a necessity and no reason exists why the psychical life may not continue in independence of its physical organism; but in this life it has the world as a necessary physical environment, and the more perfectly the body performs its functions as a means of communication there with the greater are the possibilities of the soul, not only as to what it may receive and become but also as to what it can do while here. Plato and Paul, and even Jesus, could never have done for this world what they did had they not had bodies to give expression to their souls. Moreover the soul is greatly aided in its intellectual operations by physical helps. By use of diagrams and figures it can solve problems otherwise impossible. In fact all thinking is aided in some such way, as appears from the connection of thought with language and physical images. If, then, certain nervous states greatly assist the soul in its operations, it follows that any disturbance of the brain whereby it should affect the soul less sensitively or whereby it should in turn become less sensitive to the soul's activities would hinder its operations as much as it would a mathematician to take away his paper and pencil. But this leads further, and the fact that until death there is no escape from this prison and that every act of the soul implies nervous action brings out even more clearly the profound significance that the body has for psychical life and development. No matter how the soul may act after it escapes, its every activity in this life is through the nervous system and involves more or less of physical activity. In such work as reading or talking this is very evident. It is clearly seen also in the tiresome demand made upon the organs of sense when in use. But beyond all this, there is nervous action and hence nervous waste involved in all thinking. Just as a given nervous state tends to produce a specific sensation, so the thought of that sensation tends to produce the corresponding physical state, as is seen in the so-called watering of the mouth at the thought of savory food. Since, then, until freed by the Angel of Life, we are thus bound to a physical organism upon whose action and energy our very thoughts and feelings depend, it is of momentous concern to us what kind of a |