“There can, however, be no doubt as to the utility of the visualizing faculty when it is duly subordinated to the higher intellectual operations. A visual image is the most perfect form of mental representation wherever the shape, position, and relations of objects in space are concerned. It is of importance in every handicraft and profession where design is required. The best workmen are those who visualize the whole of what they propose to do before they take a tool in their hands. The village smith and the carpenter who are employed on odd jobs employ it no less for their work than the mechanician, the engineer, and the architect. The lady’s maid who arranges a new dress requires it for the same reason as the decorator employed on a palace, or the agent who lays out great estates. Strategists, artists of all denominations, physicists who contrive new experiments, and, in short, all who do not follow routine, have need of it. The pleasure its use can afford is immense. I have many correspondents who say that the delight of recalling beautiful scenery and great works of art is the highest that they know; they carry whole picture-galleries in their minds. Our bookish and wordy education tends to repress this valuable gift of nature. A faculty that is of importance in all technical and artistic occupations, that gives accuracy to our perceptions, and justness to our generalizations is starved by lazy disuse instead of being cultivated judiciously in such a way as will, on the whole, bring the best return. I believe that a serious study of the best method of developing and utilizing this faculty, without prejudice to the practice of abstract thought in symbols, is one of the many pressing desiderata in the yet unformed science of education.”[30]
What is meant by the process of unselfing the will? If the maxim is interpreted to mean that education must eliminate the selfishness of the individual, and teach him to will and act for the good of humanity, especially of all with whom he comes in contact, the maxim points out an important end of education. If, on the other hand, the maxim is made to mean that the self, with its peculiarities, is to be sacrificed in the educative process, it carries a contradiction on its face. The lower self may have to be sacrificed in order that the higher self may be conserved. He that loseth his life shall save it; he that saveth his life shall lose it, is the teaching of Holy Writ.