UP SLUGGARD!

It ought to be a great comfort to every college student whose life-work is still a mystery to him to learn that success is a simple matter of training. If one would be a Shakespeare, a Bismarck, or a Newton, let him forget the "bete noire" of special gifts, of adverse talents and misapplied genius, and go through the necessary ritual of preparation. That is all there is to it--at least, according to Professor John B. Watson, formerly professor of psychology at Johns Hopkins University.

With one grand slash of the pen, the professor reduces all mankind to a single dead level. "There is no such thing," says he, "as an inheritance of capacity, talent, temperament, mental constitution and characteristics. These things depend on training." It has always been thought that environment and training are important, but it has also been suspected that if a child's father was a moron and his mother an imbecile, the chances were strongly against his becoming a Plato, a Carlyle, or even a Dr. Frank Crane. It is reassuring to have Professor Watson's statement that every new-born babe starts life with an equal endowment of nothing at all.

One can foresee in this principle, which places all importance upon training, the seeds of revolution in college methods. If young Oswald of the future would become a poet, he will enter college for a four-year treatment in courses especially chosen for the making of that peculiar product. At graduation the college will turn him loose on the world labeled "poet", with a written guarantee of so many sonnets an hour or money back. Such a plan has all the advantages of simplicity and certainty which present methods so signally lack.

In short, Professor Watson's thesis's the last word in democratic development. The theory of democracy demands that all men be born "free and equal", and the professor claims to have the facts of life to fit the theory. Unequalities there undoubtedly are at present, but they are explained as Rousseau explained them, by the corrupting influence of society and training. Rousseau and this most democratic of professors will be genial spirits in the next world, and the professor runs the risk of being branded, along with the amiable Jean-Jacques, "un fou enrage" in this.