getting them to put down on paper a list of definite objects which
they had imagined. The process could be infinitely extended; but if it
were done with some regularity, it would certainly b possible to train
boys to concentrate themselves in reflection and recollected
observation. Or again a quality might be propounded, such as
generosity or spitefulness, and the boys required to construct an
imaginary anecdote of the simplest kind to illustrate it. This would
have the effect of training the mind at all events to focus itself,
and this is just what drudgery pure and simple will not do. The aim is
not to train mere memory or logical accuracy, but to strengthen that
great faculty which we loosely call imagination, which is the power of
evoking mental images, and of migrating from the present into the past
or the future.

I believe it to be a very notable lack in our theory of education that
so little attempt is made to bring the will to bear upon what may be
called the subconscious mind. It is that strange undercurrent of
thought which is so imprudently neglected which throws up on its
banks, without any apparent purpose or aim, the ideas and images which
lurk within it. I do not say that such a training would immediately
give self-control, but most peoples' worst sufferings are caused by
what is called "having something on their mind"; and yet, so far as I
know, in the process of education, no attempt whatever is made, except
quite incidentally, to dispossess the strong man armed by the stronger
victor, or to help immature minds to hold an unpleasant or a pleasant
thought at arm's length, or to train them in the power of resolutely
substituting a current of more wholesome images. The subconscious mind
is too often treated as a thing beyond control, and yet the
pathological power of suggestion, by which a thought is implanted like
a seed in the mind, which presently appears to be rooted and