Excerpt from Confessions of a Psychologist, Vol. 1

I have always felt it both a high and large duty as well as a pleasure and a valued discipline to select a few themes best adapted thereto from my class room lectures and work them over for popular delivery. The best and those most often repeated have been changed most radically from their previous form. The public wishes large themes and large relations, so that it is needful to summarize several class lectures for the best results. A few of these I have delivered perhaps several score times; have rewritten them by syllabus and catch word and re planned over and over again with the constant tendency to emphasize the points approved and slight or omit those not appreciated, so that those which fit best the popular audience are those that touch upon the largest ideas and especially emphasize sentimental values. The public has within the last few years drifted far from the old ideas of what constitutes finished delivery and form, typified for instance in G. W. Curtis. They appreciate art and perfection of detail, but there must be no loudness or mechanical exactness about it, little anecdotage, but far more subtlety, hint and inuendo of mean ing. Intellectual brilliancy is sometimes preferred even by woman's clubs to emotional fervor, and never probably in the history of the world has there been such an appetite for novel ties and ideal reconstructions that involve sometimes almost a reversal of many a current consensus of opinion or settled practice. Originality is now the most desiderated and welcome form in which individuality or personality can be expressed. While there is interest in all the best and while our ideas of every part and aspect of it are undergoing radical transforma tion, a great desire of the popular mind is to forecast the future, and even the past is interesting chiefly as it enables us to do this. The world is in love with ideals, and in this country at least, is most plastic to them. How can we so live out our lives that none of the tendencies in us be allowed to degenerate, but the world become plastic to be moulded by the will, is now the ultimate problem.

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