Excerpt from The Riddle of the Sphinx: An Essay

For over twenty years the writer has studied, as an amateur, the subject of education and read during this time much of the work of Pestalozzi, Froebel, Spencer, Herbart, Newman, James, and many books, reports and papers of later date. During these years it has been one of his constant aims to search for and learn a real psychological definition of the word - a definition which should be at once brief and comprehensive, and yet sufficiently definite and concrete to be a really practical guide to every teacher. Not succeeding during many years in finding what he wanted he has been driven to try and gradually formulate for himself what he seemed to be in need of. The following pages may bring to the mind of the reader something of his thoughts on the subject - thoughts spread over many years and summarised in a single sentence. This sentence is also the growth of many years, built up slowly and laboriously, little by little, bit by bit, with a hint from here, an idea from there, until it now seems to have assumed something at any rate of the shape that he has been in search of for so long.

Incidentally the work has led to the formation of what at the moment seems to the writer a more or less coherent theory of the way in which the conceptual or cognitive dispositions of the mind become gradually organised as the result of that part of experience which is acquired through the medium of sense-perception.

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