in general be defined as those nervous disorders whose dominant primary symptoms are to be found in the psychical region of our life; such symptoms giving evidence of deeply defective habitual functions of the highest nervous centers. Nervous diseases involving lower centers may exist, and may run their whole fatal course, without seriously affecting the mental processes until the very end. Even some brain diseases may show their presence by symptoms that remain to the end predominantly physical, rather than mental. But on the other hand, there is no mental disease that is not also a nervous disease.

A brain disease, functional or organic in origin, and sufficiently pronounced to be attended with very grave mental derangements, constitutes an insanity in the proper sense; and the types of pronounced insanity fall into certain generally recognizable groups, whose minuter classification indeed is a matter about which experts differ widely, but whose better known and more frequent types have received familiar names. If the dominant and primary mental symptoms belong to the field of the feelings and the emotions, as happens in a very great number of cases, then you have such comparatively frequent disorders as Melancholia and Mania. If the dominant and primary symptoms are found in the intellectual sphere of mental life, and so appear as hallucinations and morbidly false opinions, then you have the groups of the so-called "Delusional Insanities," and of the various forms of Delirium. When the mental disease has, as its context, some recognizable nervous disease with marked physical symptoms, then these physical symptoms are often made use of to classify and to aid in characterizing the type of insanity in question, and so we are told of an "Epileptic Insanity," or hear of the important type of disease described under the name of "General Paralysis of the Insane." But the asylum in

sanities concern us here, of course, no further. In their pronounced forms, the teacher will not see them, except by accident.

But now there are numerous more or less disordered mental

conditions that are remote enough from what it is practically worth while to call insanity. We must never forget the vastly significant fact that the borderland, the doubtful or intermediate land between sanity and insanity, is a very wide region indeed. A recent habit of popular speech has led many to call the persons whom they conceive as dwelling in this borderland by the general name of "cranks." Well, as we have all of us found since we learned to use the word, this current popular term "crank" is one of a very extended application. One in about every five or six hundred of our population is an insane person, in the sense of being in an asylum or of needing some equivalent care. Were a census taken of all persons who have been called by somebody at some time, and with considerable justice, "cranks," who would venture to estimate the proportion that would result? Nay, when one chances to remember the endless oddities and inconveniences of our common human nature, the burdens of heart, of conscience, of defective purpose, of halting intelligence, of over-confident blundering, of morbid and cowardly shrinking from dutyburdens that we all in some measure carry or have carrieddoes one not find one's self occasionally reflecting: "I said in my haste, all men are cranks?"

Seriously, of course, the lesson here is that the term normal is a relative term; that absolute normality of mind, as of body, is an ideal by which to regulate our conduct, rather than a fixed possession to boast of, and that by the phrase "disordered man," in the practical sense, we mean one sufficiently disordered to need any sort of consideration or treatment as such. Now of those who are mentally disordered enough to deserve our sympathy, and to need more or less care and advice as suffering persons, there are a great number who are very remote indeed from being insane, in the sense in which the word is used in the asylums. My plea in this place is therefore not for any loose use of words, but for an openminded recognition of the signs of any mental disorder, even the least, whenever, under given circumstances, it is more humane to recognize and to deal with them as morbid symp

toms than to treat them as we do when we fail to take into account their morbid quality.

Having completed our introductory definitions, we have now to proceed to some illustration of the borderland cases, of the more or less mildly and mentally disordered individuals, such as may easily come under any teacher's notice. And these cases at once admit of a general classification, into the cases that occur in Childhood, and those that occur in Youth.

JOSIAH ROYCE

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

II

DIFFERENT METHODS OF ADMISSION TO

COLLEGE

The higher educational work of this country is roughly classed under two heads: secondary or academic, and higher or collegiate. In theory these classes ought to maintain the most intimate relationship; the college finds its constituency in the school, and the school looks to the college as the goal of its work. The welfare of each, to a certain extent, depends on the closeness of the bond uniting them. But while this is true and each acknowledges its dependence on the other, there is a wide gulf between them. In their mutual association, if each bears the olive branch in one hand, the battle ax is held in the other. While the attempt is everywhere made to break down the old barrier between student and instructor, that between college and school has scarcely been assailed. At every meeting of college instructors the deficiencies of the schools are pointed out, and in schoolmasters' associations the unreasonableness of the college is not unjustly discussed. Yet twice a year the two classes of instructors come into closest contact as thousands of boys and girls cross the dividing line between school and college.

At present three ways of crossing this line exist. The college may be entered, first, by examination conducted by its own officers; second, on presentation of a certificate from the school accorded the privilege; or third, on the presentation of a diploma from an accredited school. The first method prevails in the majority of the large universities in the East; the second, in a few large institutions and nearly all of the smaller colleges in the East; the third is universal among the great State universities of the West.

It is the purpose of this paper to examine somewhat these

three systems, considering the advantages and disadvantages of each and also possible remedies for present tendencies.

The advantages of admission by examination are many. College and school are thus brought into contact with each other through the presentation to the school of the educational ideals of the college. Educational reforms, like all others, must begin at the top and work downward. The college professor, if indeed he does not consider that a college is endowed primarily as a place for research and despise those who "have acquired a vulgar taste for teaching," has it in his power to raise the standard of work and set new ideals before every school where his special subject is taught. He has more time and opportunity than has the school instructor to consider educational tendencies, to try new methods, to study educational questions, to visit other institutions, to compare experiences. These things will show themselves everywhere in his work, and especially in the examinations he prepares for his classes and for entering students. The teaching of some subject has at times been almost revolutionized through the examination questions sent out by a college professor.

A second advantage of entrance by examinations, President Eliot states to be that "an examination in school or college is a good test of acquired power, while a certificate that a boy has been over so many books is no test of power, but a very inferior sort of evidence."

The disadvantages of the examination system are also many. The first is inherent in the system and is one that no modification of it can entirely remove. An examination may be used for two purposes: first, as a means of education; second, as a test of knowledge. Considered in the first aspect, the examination has the same relation to the review as has the review to the daily work. One is just as essential an educational factor as the other, neither can be omitted without loss to the pupil. The relation that each sustains to the other in a general scheme of work may be illustrated by the following lines: