laboratory or observatory with its one or two skilled observers and recorders. I can conceive of these observations and experiments in every department of education-physical and mental, intellectual and moral, literary and scientific-conducted with all the care of the chemical analyst, with all the safeguards to the children that the anti-vivisectionist could desire, lasting for weeks or months or years, as the case might be. They might then appear in the form of accurate reports to be read before the members of the local association, criticised, recast, and finally sent out through the medium of journals of educational research to fructify perhaps, wherever English is read, in better, more confident methods of teaching.

These may only be dreams. Yet when others are dreaming of what may result to material development from the union of physical science with commerce and industry, we may be permitted to see our own visions and dream our own dreams of what good may come to intellectual and moral development from a closer union between mental science and education.

LOGICAL.

I.

THE PLACE OF THE CONCEPT IN LOGICAL DOCTRINE.

THERE is nothing in which recent logical treatises

contrast more strikingly with the older text books than the complete subordination of the concept to the judgment and the almost total disappearance of the discussions that used to find a place under the head of the doctrine of the term. This change is a natural reaction against the attempt to assign an independent place to the concept as prior to judgment. As against the old view that thought begins with concepts and proceeds to judgment and reasoning, the criticism on which it rests is unanswerable. We may, however, admit this without admitting that the last word has been said on the relation of judgment to concept. It is possible that though the ground on which the older logicians rested their claims for the prior and independent treatment of the concept is untenable, and though there is much that is preposterous in the way in which they developed the doctrine of the term, their order of treatment was yet the result of a true instinct as to the ultimate nature of the movement we call thought and knowledge. This paper offers a few considerations in support of this suggestion. Its conclusions could only be justified by the success which might attend

the attempt to carry them out in a complete system of logic. Short of this, its length will, I hope, admit of a clear statement of the view in question and a few suggestions as to the change it would involve in the current treatment of logical doctrine.

I.

To clear the ground I shall begin by recalling the present state of the controversy. The criticism of the traditional view may be said to have been successful all along the line. According to this view concepts are formed from groups of particulars by the processes of abstraction and generalisation. Common elements are abstracted and constituted by their union into a general notion which is thenceforth taken as representative of the group as a whole and as predicable of any individual within it. Out of a combination of such concepts we have judgments; out of a combination of judgments, reasoning. Logic, therefore, is not only within its rights in treating the concept as a substantive element in thought; it is bound to treat at length of the various kinds of concept that might be united in.a judgment at the risk of leaving the form and content of the judgment itself unexplained.

Of course it is easy to see that this will not do. Before we can abstract" an element from any individual thing, we must already have judged the thing to possess it. And going a step further back, and considering what is meant by the "group" of things from which the concept is said to be abstracted, we see that it could only have been formed by looking at the individuals from some point of view, or as