There is an excellent though condensed account of the Port-Royalists under “Jansenists” in Sonnenschein’sCyclopædia of Education. In vol. ij, of Charles Beard’s Port-Royal, (2 vols., 1861) there is a chapter on the Little Schools. The most pleasing account I have seen in English of the Port-Royalists (without reference to education) is in Sir Jas. Stephen’sEssays on Ecclesiastical Biography. In French the great work on the subject is Sainte-Beuve’sPort-Royal, 5 vols. (71 ed., 6 vols.) The account of the Schools is in 4th bk., in vol. iij, of 1st ed. Very useful for studying the pedagogy of Port-Royal areL’Education à Port-Royalby Félix Cadet (Hachette, 1887) andLes Pédagogues de Port-Royal, by I. Carré (Delagrave, 1887). These last give extracts from the main writings on education by Arnauld, Nicole, Lancelot, Coustel, &c. The article,Port-Royal, in Buisson’sD., is the “Introduction” to Carré’s book. A 3-vol. ed. of Rollin’sTraitéwas published (Paris, Didot) in 1872. The more interesting parts of this book are containedin F. Cadet’sRollin: Traité des Études(Delagrave, 1882). Rollin’s work was at one time well-known in the English trans., and copies of it are often to be found “second-hand.” The best part comes last; which may account for the neglect into which the book has fallen. The accounts of Port-Royal and of Rollin in G. Compayré’sHistoire Critiqueare very good parts of a very good book. Vérin’sÉtude sur LancelotI have not seen, and it is only too probable that I have not given to Lancelot the attention due to him.
There is an excellent though condensed account of the Port-Royalists under “Jansenists” in Sonnenschein’sCyclopædia of Education. In vol. ij, of Charles Beard’s Port-Royal, (2 vols., 1861) there is a chapter on the Little Schools. The most pleasing account I have seen in English of the Port-Royalists (without reference to education) is in Sir Jas. Stephen’sEssays on Ecclesiastical Biography. In French the great work on the subject is Sainte-Beuve’sPort-Royal, 5 vols. (71 ed., 6 vols.) The account of the Schools is in 4th bk., in vol. iij, of 1st ed. Very useful for studying the pedagogy of Port-Royal areL’Education à Port-Royalby Félix Cadet (Hachette, 1887) andLes Pédagogues de Port-Royal, by I. Carré (Delagrave, 1887). These last give extracts from the main writings on education by Arnauld, Nicole, Lancelot, Coustel, &c. The article,Port-Royal, in Buisson’sD., is the “Introduction” to Carré’s book. A 3-vol. ed. of Rollin’sTraitéwas published (Paris, Didot) in 1872. The more interesting parts of this book are containedin F. Cadet’sRollin: Traité des Études(Delagrave, 1882). Rollin’s work was at one time well-known in the English trans., and copies of it are often to be found “second-hand.” The best part comes last; which may account for the neglect into which the book has fallen. The accounts of Port-Royal and of Rollin in G. Compayré’sHistoire Critiqueare very good parts of a very good book. Vérin’sÉtude sur LancelotI have not seen, and it is only too probable that I have not given to Lancelot the attention due to him.
§ 1. The beginning of the 17th century brought with it a change in the main direction of thought and interest. As we have seen, the 16th century adored literature and was thrown back on the remote past. Some of the great scholars like Sturm had indeed visions of literary works to be written, that would rival the old models on which they were fashioned; but whether they hoped or not to bring back the Golden Age all the scholars of the Renascence thought of it ashaving been. With the change of century, however, a new conception came into men’s minds. Might not this worship of the old writers after all be somewhat of a superstition? The languages in which they wrote were beautiful languages, no doubt, but they were ill adapted to express the ideas and wants of the modern world. As for the substance of these old writings, this did not satisfy the cravings of men’s minds. It left unsolved all the main problems of existence, and offered for knowledge mere speculations or poetic fancies or polished rhetoric. Man needed to understand his position with regard to God and to Nature; but on both of these topics the classics were either silent or misleading. Revelation had supplied whatthe classics could not give concerning man’s relation to God; but nothing had as yet thrown light on his relation to Nature. And yet with his material body and animal life he could not but see how close that relation was, and could not but wish that something about it might beknown, not simply guessed or feigned. Hence the demand forrealknowledge, that is, a knowledge of the facts of the universe as distinct from the knowledge of what men have thought and said. We have heard of the mathematician who put down Paradise Lost with the remark that it seemed to him a poor book, for it did not prove anything; and it was just in this spirit that the new school of thinkers, the Realists, looked upon the classics. They wanted to know Nature’s laws: and words which did not convey such knowledge seemed to them of little value.
§ 2. Here was a tremendous revolution from the mode of thought prevalent in the Renascence. No longer was the Golden Age in the past. In science the Golden Age must always be in the future. Scientific men start with what has been discovered and add to it. Every discovery passes into the common stock of knowledge, and becomes the property of everyone who knows it just as much as of the discoverer. Harvey had no more property in the circulation of the blood, Newton and Leibnitz no more property in the Differential Calculus than Columbus in the Continent of America; indeed not so much, for Columbus gained some exclusive rights in America, but Harvey gained none over the blood.
So we see that whereas the literary spirit made the dominant minds reverence the past, the scientific spirit led them to despise the past; and whereas the literary spirit raised the value of words and led to the study of celebratedwritings, the scientific spirit was totally careless about words and prized only physical truths which were entirely independent of words. Again, the literary spirit naturally favoured the principle of authority, for its oracles had already spoken: the scientific spirit set aside all authority and accepted nothing that did not of itself satisfy the reason. (Compare Comenius,suprap. 152.)
§ 3. The first great leader in this revolution was an Englishman, Francis Bacon. But the school-room felt his influence only through those who learnt from him; and among educational reformers, the chief advocates of realism have been found on the Continent,e.g., Ratke and Comenius.[99]But the desire to learn by “things, not words” affected the minds of many English writers on education, and we find this spirit showing itself even in Milton and Locke, and far more clearly in some writers less known to fame.
§ 4. There is a wide distinction in educational writers between those who were schoolmasters and those who were not. Schoolmasters have to come to terms with what exists and to make a livelihood by it. So they are conservatives by position, and rarely get beyond an attempt at showing how that which is now done badly might be done well. Suggestions of radical change usually come from those who never belonged to the class of teachers, or who, not without disgust, have left it.
Among English schoolmasters of the olden times the chief writers I have met with besides Mulcaster are John Brinsley the elder, and Charles Hoole.
§ 5. John Brinsley the elder, a Puritan schoolmaster at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, a brother-in-law of Bishop Hall’s, and father of John Brinsley the younger who became a leading Puritan minister and author, was a veritable reformer, but only with reference to methods. His most interesting books areLudus Literarius or the Grammar Schoole, 1612 (written after 20 years’ experience in teaching, as we learn from theConsolation, p. 45), andA Consolation for our Grammar Schooles: or a faithfull and most comfortable incouragement for laying of a sure foundation of all good learning in our schooles and for prosperous building thereupon, 1622. The first of these, when reprinted, as it is sure to be, will always secure for its author the notice and the gratitude of students of the history of our education; for in this book he tells us not only what should be done in the school-room, but also what was done. In a dialogue with the ordinary schoolmaster the reformer draws to light the usual practice, criticizes it, and suggests improvements.
§ 6. In Brinsley we get no hint of realism; but by the middle of the sixteen hundreds we find the realistic spirit is felt even by a schoolmaster, Charles Hoole,[100]who was a kinsman of Bishop Sanderson, the Casuist, and was master first of the Grammar School at Rotherham, then of a private Grammar School in London, published besides a number of school books, a translation of theOrbis Pictus(date of preface, January, 1658), and also “A New Discovery of the old art of teaching schoole ... published for the generalprofit, especially of young Schoolemasters” (date of preface, December, 1659). In these books we find that Hoole succeeded even in the school-room in keeping his mind open. He complains of the neglect of English, and evidently in theory at least went a long way with the realistic reformers. “Comenius,” he says, “hath proceeded (as Nature itself doth) in an orderly way, first to exercise the senses well by presenting their objects to them, and then to fasten upon the intellect by impressing the first notions of things upon it and linking them one to another by a rational discourse; whereas indeed we generally, missing this way, do teach children as we do parrots to speak they know not what, nay, which is worse, we taking the way of teaching little ones by grammar only, at the first do puzzle their imaginations with abstractive terms and secondary intentions, which, till they be somewhat acquainted with things, and the words belonging to them in the language which they learn, they cannot apprehend what they mean. And this I guess to be the reason why many greater persons do resolve sometimes not to put a child to school till he be at least eleven or twelve years of age.... You then, that have the care of little children, do not too much trouble their thoughts and clog their memories with bare grammar rudiments, which to them are harsh in getting, and fluid in retaining; because indeed to them they signifie nothing but a meer swimming notion of a general term, which they know not what it meaneth till they comprehend all particulars: but by this [i.e., theOrbis P.] or the like subsidiarie inform them first with some knowledge of things and words wherewith to express them; and then their rules of speaking will be better understood and more firmly kept in mind. Else how should a child conceive what a rule meaneth when he neitherknoweth what the Latine word importeth, nor what manner of thing it is which is signified to him in his own native language which is given him thereby to understand the rule? for rules consisting of generalities are delivered (as I may say) at a third hand, presuming first the things and then the words to be already apprehended touching which they are made.” This subject Hoole wisely commends to the consideration of teachers, “it beingthe very basis of our profession to search into the way of children’s taking hold by little and little of what we teach them, that so we may apply ourselves to their reach.” (Preface to trans. ofOrbis Pictus.)
§ 7. “Good Lord! how many good and clear wits of children be now-a-days perished by ignorant schoolmasters!” So said Sir Thomas Elyot in hisGovernorin 1531, and the complaint would not have been out of date in the 17th century, possibly not in the 19th. In the sixteen hundreds we certainly find little advance in practice, though in theory many bold projects were advanced, some of which pointed to the study of things, to the training of the hand, and even to observation of the “educands.”
§ 8. The poet Cowley’s “proposition for the advancement of experimental philosophy” is a scheme of a college near London to which is to be attached a school of 200 boys. “And because it is deplorable to consider the loss which children make of their time at most schools, employing or rather casting away six or seven years in the learning of words only, and that too very imperfectly; that a method be here established for the infusing knowledge and language at the same time, [Is this an echo of Comenius?] and that this may be their apprenticeship in Natural Philosophy.”[101]
§ 9. Rarely indeed have those who either theoretically or practically have made a study of education ever acquired sufficient literary skill to catch the ear of the public or (what is at least as difficult) the ear of the teaching body. And among the eminent writers who have spoken on education, as Rabelais, Montaigne, Milton, Locke, Rousseau, Herbert Spencer, we cannot find one who has given to it more than passing, if not accidental, attention. Schoolmasters are, as I said, conservative, at least in the school-room; and moreover, they seldom find the necessary time, money, or inclination for publishing on the work of their calling. The current thought at any period must then be gathered from books only to be found in our great libraries, books in which writers now long forgotten give hints of what was wanted out of the school-room and grumble at what went on in it.
§ 10. One of the most original of these writers that have come in my way is John Dury, a Puritan, who was at one time Chaplain to the English Company of Merchants at Elbing, and laboured with Comenius and Hartlib to promote unity among the various Christian bodies of the reformed faith (see Masson’sLife of Milton, vol. iii). About 1649 Dury publishedThe Reformed Schoolewhich gives the scheme of an association for the purpose of educating a number of boys and girls “in a Christian way.”
§ 11. That Dury was not himself a schoolmaster is plain from the first of his “rules of education.” “The chief rule of the whole work is that nothing be made tedious and grievous to the children, but all the toilsomeness of their businessthe Governor and Ushers are to take upon themselves; that by diligence and industry all things may be so prepared, methodized and ordered for their apprehension, that this work may unto them be as a delightful recreation by the variety and easiness thereof.”
§ 12. “The things to be looked unto in the care of their education,” he enumerates in the order of importance: “1. Their advancement in piety; 2. The preservation of their health; 3. The forming of their manners; 4. Their proficiency in learning” (p. 24). “Godliness and bodily health are absolutely necessary,” says Dury; “the one for spiritual and the other for their temporal felicitie” (p. 31): so great care is to be taken in “exercising their bodies in husbandry or manufactures or military employments.”[102]
§ 13. About instruction we find the usual complaints which like “mother’s truth keep constant youth.” “Children,” says Dury, “are taught to read authors and learn words and sentences before they can have any notion of the things signified by those words and sentences or of the author’s strain and wit in setting them together; and they are made to learn by heart the generall rules, sentences and precepts of Arts before they are furnished with any matter whereunto to apply those rules and precepts” (p. 38). Dury would entirely sweep away the old routine, and in all instruction he would keep in view the following end: “the true end of all human learning is to supply in ourselves and others the defects which proceed from our ignorance of the nature anduse of the creatures, and the disorderliness of our natural faculties in using them and reflecting upon them” (p. 41).
§ 14. “Our natural faculties”—here Dury struck a new note, which has now become the keynote in the science of education. He enforces his point with the following ingenious illustration:—“As in a watch one wheel rightly set doth with its teeth take hold of another and sets that a-work towards a third; and so all move one by another when they are in their right places for the end for which the watch is made; so is it with the faculties of the human nature being rightly ordered to the ends for which God hath created them. But contrariwise, if the wheels be not rightly set, or the watch not duly wound up, it is useless to him that hath it. And so it is with the faculties of Man; if his wheels be not rightly ordered and wound up by the ends of sciences in their subordination leading him to employ the same according to his capacity to make use of the creatures for that whereunto God hath made them, he becomes not only useless, but even a burthen and hurtful unto himself and others by the misusing of them” (p. 43).
§ 15. “As in Nature sense is the servant of imagination; imagination of memory; memory of reason; so in teaching arts and sciences we must set these faculties a-work in this order towards their proper objects in everything which is to be taught. Whence this will follow, that as the faculties of Man’s soul naturally perfect each other by their mutual subordination; so the Arts which perfect those faculties should be gradually suggested: and the objects wherewith the faculties are to be conversant according to the rules of Art should be offered in that order which is answerable to their proper ends and uses and not otherwise.”
§ 16. In this and much else that Dury says we see a firmgrasp of the principle that the instruction given should be regulated by the gradual development of the learner’s faculties. The three sources of our knowledge, says he, are—1. Sense; 2. Tradition; 3. Reason; and Sense comes first. “Art or sciences which may be learnt by mere sense should not be learnt any other way.” “As children’s faculties break forth in them by degrees to be vigorous with their years and the growth of their bodies, so they are to be filled with objects whereof they are capable, and plied with arts; whence followeth that while children are not capable of the acts of reasoning, the method of filling their senses and imaginations with outward objects should be plied. Nor is their memory at this time to be charged further with any objects than their imagination rightly ordered and fixed doth of itself impress the same upon them.” After speaking of the common abuse of general rules, he says: “So far as those faculties (viz., sense, imagination, and memory) are started with matters of observation, so far rules may be given to direct the mind in the use of the same, and no further.” “The arts and sciences which lead us to reflect upon the use of our own faculties are not to be taught till we are fully acquainted with their proper objects, and the direct acts of the faculties about them.” So “it is a very absurd and preposterous course to teach Logick and Metaphysicks before or with other Humane Sciences which depend more upon Sense and Imagination than reasoning” (p. 46).
§ 17. In all this it seems to me that the worthy Puritan, of whom nobody but Dr. Barnard and Professor Masson has ever heard, has truly done more to lay a foundation for the art of teaching than his famous contemporaries Milton and Locke.
§ 18. Another writer of that day better known than Dury and with far more power of expression was Sir William Petty. He is the “W.P.,” who in an Epistle “to his honoured friend Master Samuel Hartlib,” set down his “thoughts concerning the advancement of real learning” (1647). This letter is to be shown only “to those few that are Reall Friends to the Designe of Realities.”[103]
§ 19. Petty sees the need of intercommunication of those who wish to advance any art or science. He complains that “the wits and endeavours of the world are as so many scattered coals or fire-brands, which for want of union are soon quenched, whereas being but laid together they would yield a comfortable light and heat.” This is a thought which may well be applied to the bringing up of the young; and the following passage might have been written to secure a training for teachers: “Methinks the present condition of men is like a field where a battle hath been lately fought, where we may see many legs and arms and eyes lying here and there, which for want of a union and a soul to quicken and enliven them are good for nothing but to feed ravens and infect the air. So we see many wits and ingenuities lying scattered up and down theworld, whereof some are now labouring to do what is already done, and puzzling themselves to re-invent what is already invented. Others we see quite stuck fast in difficulties for want of a few directions which some other man (might he be met withal) both could and would most easily give him.” I wonder how many young teachers are now wasting their own and their pupils’ time in this awkward predicament.
§ 20. “As for ... education,” says Petty, “we cannot but hope that those who make it their trade will supply it and render the idea thereof much more perfect.” His own contributions to the more perfect idea consist mainly in making the study of “realities” precede literature, and thus announcing the principle which in later times has led to the introduction of “object lessons.” The Baconians thought that the good time was at hand, and that they had found the right road at last. By experiments they would learn to interpret Nature. After scheming a “Gymnasium, Mechanicum, or College of Tradesmen,” Petty says, “What experiments and stuff would all those shops and operations afford to active and philosophical heads, out of which to extract that interpretation of nature whereof there is so little, and that so bad, as yet extant in the world!”[104]And this study of things was to affect the work of the school-room, and redeem it from the dismal state into which it was fallen. “As for the studies to which children are now-a-days put,” says Petty, “they are altogether unfit for want of judgment which is but weak in them, and also for want of will, which is sufficiently seen ... by the difficultyof keeping them at schools and the punishment they will endure rather than be altogether debarred from the pleasure which they take in things.”
§ 21. The grand reform required is thus set forth; “Since few children have need of reading before they know or can be acquainted with the things they read of; or of writing before their thoughts are worth the recording or they are able to put them into any form (which we call inditing); much less of learning languages when there be books enough for their present use in their own mother-tongue; our opinion is that those things being withal somewhat above their capacity (as being to be attained by judgment which is weakest in children) be deferred awhile, and others more needful for them, such as are in the order of Nature before those afore-mentioned, and are attainable by the help of memory which is either most strong or unpreoccupied in children, be studied before them. We wish, therefore, that the educands be taught to observe and remember all sensible objects and actions, whether they be natural or artificial, which the educators must upon all occasions expound unto them.”
§ 22. In proposing this great change Petty was influenced not merely by his own delight in the study of things but by something far more important for education, by observation of the children themselves. This study of things instead of “a rabble of words” would be “more easy and pleasant to the young as the more suitable to the natural propensions we observe in them. For we see children do delight in drums, pipes, fiddles, guns made of elder sticks, and bellows’ noses, piped keys, &c., painting flags and ensigns with elderberries and cornpoppy, making ships with paper, and setting even nut-shells a-swimming,handling the tools of workmen as soon as they turn their backs and trying to work themselves; fishing, fowling, hunting, setting springes and traps for birds and other animals, making pictures in their writing-books, making tops, gigs and whirligigs, gilting balls, practising divers juggling tricks upon the cards, &c., with a million more besides. And for the females they will be making pies with clay, making their babies’ clothes and dressing them therewith; they will spit leaves on sticks as if they were roasting meat; they will imitate all the talk and actions which they observe in their mother and her gossips, and punctually act the comedy or the tragedy (I know not whether to call it) of a woman’s lying-in. By all which it is most evident that children do most naturally delight in things and are most capable of learning them, having quick senses to receive them and unpreoccupied memories to retain them” (ad f.).
§ 23. In these writers, Dury and Petty, we find a wonderful advance in the theory of instruction. Children are to be taught aboutthingsand this because their inward constitution determines them towards things. Moreover the subjects of instruction are to be graduated to accord with the development of the learner’s faculties. The giving of rules and incomprehensible statements that will come in useful at a future stage is entirely forbidden. All this is excellent, and greatly have children suffered, greatly do they suffer still, from their teachers’ neglect of it. There seems to me to have been no important advance on the thought of these men till Pestalozzi and Froebel fixed their attention on the mind of the child, and valued things not in themselves but simply as the means best fitted for drawing out the child’s self-activity.
§ 24. In several other matters we find Sir WilliamPetty’s recommendations in advance of the practice of his own time and ours. He advises “that the business of education be not (as now) committed to the worst and unworthiest of men [here at least we have improved] but that it be seriously studied and practised by the best and abler persons.” To this standard we have not yet attained.
§ 25. Handwork is to be practised, but its educational value is not clearly perceived. “All children, though of the highest rank, are to be taught some gentle manufacture in their minority.”Ergastula Literaria, literary workhouses, are to be instituted where children may be taught as well to do something towards their living as to read and write.[105]
§ 26. Education was to be universal, but chiefly with the object of bringing to the front the clever sons of poor parents. The rule he would lay down is “that all children of above seven years old may be presented to this kind of education, none being to be excluded by reason of the poverty and unability of their parents, for hereby it hath come to pass that many are now holding the plough which might have been made fit to steer the state.”[106]
§ 27. From these enthusiasts for realities we find a change when we turn to their contemporary, a schoolmaster and author of a Latin Accidence, who was perhaps the most notable Englishman who ever kept a school or published a school-book.
§ 28. Milton was not only a great poet: he was also a great scholar. Everything he said or wrote bore traces of his learning. The world of books then rather than the world of the senses is his world. He has benefited as he says “among old renowned authors” and “his inclination leads him not” to read modernJanuasandDidactics, or apparently the writings of any of his contemporaries including those of his great countryman, Bacon. But, as Professor Laurie reminds us, no man, not even a Milton, however he may ignore the originators of ideas can keep himself outside the influence of the ideas themselves when they are in the air; and so we find Milton using hisincomparable power of expression in the service of the Realists.
§ 29. But brief he endeavours to be, and paying the Horatian penalty he becomes obscure. In the “few observations which flowered off and were the burnishing of many studious and contemplative years,” Milton touches only on the bringing up of gentlemen’s sons between the ages of 12 and 21, and his suggestions do not, like those of Comenius, deal with the education of the people, or of both sexes.[107]This limit of age, sex, and station deprives Milton’s plan of much of its interest, as the absence of detail deprives it of much of its value.
§ 30. Still, we find in theTractatea very great advance on the ideas current at the Renascence. Learning is no longer the aim of education but is regarded simply as a means. No finer expression has been given in our literature to the main thesis of the Christian and of the Realist and to the Realist’s contempt of verbalism, than this: “The end of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love Him, to imitate Him, to be like Him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection. But because our understanding cannot in this body found itself but on sensible things, nor arrive so clearly to the knowledge of God and things invisible, as by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature, the same method is necessarily to be followed in all discreet teaching. And seeing every Nation affords not experience and traditionenough for all kind of learning, therefore we are chiefly taught the languages of those people who have at any time been most industrious after wisdom; so that language is but the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known. And though a linguist should pride himself to have all the tongues that Babel cleft the world into, yet, if he have not studied the solid things in them as well as the words and lexicons, he were nothing so much to be esteemed a learned man as any yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his mother-dialect only.”
§ 31. The several propositions here implied have thus been “disentangled” by Professor Laurie (John MiltoninAddresses, &c., p. 167).
1. The aim of education is theknowledgeof God andlikenessto God.
2.Likenessto God we attain by possessing our souls of true virtue and by the Heavenly Grace of Faith.
3.Knowledgeof God we attain by the study of the visible things of God.
4. Teaching then has for its aimthisknowledge.
5. Language is merely an instrument or vehicle for the knowledge of things.
6. The linguist may be lesslearned(i.e., educated) in the true sense than a man who can make good use of his mother-tongue though he knows no other.
§ 32. Elsewhere, Milton gives his idea of “a complete and generous education;” it “fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices both private and public of Peace and War.” (Browning’s edition, p. 8.) Here and indeed in all that Milton says we feel that “the noble moral glow that pervades theTractate on Education, the mood of magnanimity in which it is conceived and written,and the faith it inculcates in the powers of the young human spirit, if rightly nurtured and directed, are merits everlasting.” (Masson iij, p. 252.)
§ 33. But in this moral glow and in an intense hatred of verbalism lie as it seems to me the chief merits of the Tractate. The practical suggestions are either incomprehensible or of doubtful wisdom. The reforming of education was, as Milton says, one of the greatest and noblest designs that could be thought on, but he does not take the right road when he proposes for every city in England a joint school and university for about 120 boarders. The advice to keep boys between 12 and 21 in this barrack life I consider, with Professor Laurie, to be “fundamentally unsound;” and the project of uniting the military training of Sparta with the humanistic training of Athens seems to me a pure chimæra.
§ 34. When we come to instruction we find that Milton after announcing the distinctive principle of the Realists proves to be himself the last survivor of the Verbal Realists. (Seesupra, p. 25.) No doubt
“His daily teachers had been woods and rills,”
“His daily teachers had been woods and rills,”
“His daily teachers had been woods and rills,”
but his thoughts had been even more in his books; and for the young he sketches out a purely bookish curriculum. The young are to learn about things, but they are to learn through books; and the only books to which Milton attaches importance are written in Latin, Greek, or Hebrew. He held, probably with good reason, that far too much time “is now bestowed in pure trifling at grammar and sophistry.” “We do amiss,” he says, “to spend 7 or 8 years merely in scraping together so much miserable Latin and Greek as might be learned otherwise easily and delightfullyin one year.” Without an explanation of the “otherwise” this statement is a truism, and what Milton says further hardly amounts to an explanation. His plan, if plan it can be called, is as follows: “If after some preparatory grounds of speech by their certain forms got into memory, the boys were led to the praxis thereof in some chosen short book lessoned thoroughly to them, they might then proceed to learn the substance of good things and arts in due order, which would bring the whole language quickly into their power. This,” adds Milton, “I take to be the most rational and most profitable way of learning languages.” It is, however, not the most intelligible.
§ 35. “I doubt not but ye shall have more ado to drive our dullest and laziest youth, our stocks and stubbs, from the infinite desire of such a happy nurture than we have now to hale and drag our choicest and hopefullest wits to that asinine feast of sow thistles and brambles which is commonly set before them as all the food and entertainment of their tenderest and most docible age.” We cannot but wonder whether this belief survived the experience of “the pretty garden-house in Aldersgate.” From the little we are told by his nephew and old pupil Edward Phillips we should infer that Milton was not unsuccessful as a schoolmaster. In this we have a striking proof how much more important is the teacher than the teaching. A character such as Milton’s in which we find the noblest aims united with untiring energy in pursuit of them could not but dominate the impressionable minds of young people brought under its influence. But whatever success he met with could not have been due to the things he taught nor to his method in teaching them. In spite of the “moral glow” about his recommendations they are “not a bow forevery [or any] man to shoot in that counts himself a teacher.”
§ 36. Nor did he do much for the science of education. His scheme is vitiated, as Mark Pattison says, by “the information fallacy.” In the literary instruction there is no thought of training the faculties of all or the special faculties of the individual. “It requires much observation of young minds to discover that the rapid inculcation of unassimilable information stupefies the faculties instead of training them,” says Pattison; and Milton absorbed by his own thoughts and the thoughts of the ancients did not observe the minds of the young, and knew little of the powers of any mind but his own.
For information the youths are not required to observe for themselves but are to be taught “a general compact of physicks.” “Also in course might be read to them out of some not tedious writer the Institution of Physick; that they may know the tempers, the humours, the seasons, and how to manage a crudity.”
§ 37. Even the study of the classics is advocated by Milton on false grounds. If, like the Port-Royalists, he had recommended the study of the classical authors for the sake of pure Latin and Greek or as models of literary style, the means would have been suited to the end; but it was very different when he directed boys to study Virgil and Columella in order to learn about bees and farming. In after-life they would find these authorities a little out of date; and if they ever attempted to improve tillage, “to recover the bad soil and to remedy the waste that is made of good, which was one of Hercules’s praises,” they would have found a knowledge of the methods of Hercules about as useful as of the methods of the Romans.
§ 38. Milton was then a reformer “for his own hand;” and notwithstanding his moral and intellectual elevation and his superb power of rhetoric, he seems to me a less useful writer on education than the humble Puritans whom he probably would not deign to read. In his haughty self-reliance, he, like Carlyle with whom Seeley has well compared him (Lectures and Addresses: Milton), addressed his contemporariesde haut en bas, and though ready to teach could learn only among the old renowned authors with whom he associated himself and we associate him.
§ 39. Judged from our present standpoint the Tractate is found with many weaknesses to be strong in this, that it co-ordinates physical, moral, mental and æsthetic training.
§ 40. But nothing of Milton’s can be judged by our ordinary canons. He soars far above them and raises us with him “to mysterious altitudes above the earth” (supra, p. 153,note). Whatever we little people may say about the suggestions of the Tractate, Milton will remain one of the great educators of mankind.[108]
§ 1. When an English University established an examination for future teachers,[109]the “special subjects” first set were “Locke and Dr. Arnold.” The selection seems to me a very happy one. Arnold greatly affected the spirit and even the organization of our public schools at a time when the old schools were about to have new life infused into them, and when new schools were to be started on the model of the old. He is perhaps the greatest educator of the English type,i.e., the greatest educator who had accepted the system handed down to him and tried to make the best of it. Locke on the other hand, whose reputation is more European than English, belongs rather to the continental type. Like his disciple Rousseau and like Rousseau’s disciples the French Revolutionists, Locke refused the traditional system and appealed from tradition and authority to reason. We English revere Arnold, but so long as the history of education continues to be written, as it has been written hitherto, on the Continent, the only Englishman celebrated in it will be as now not the great schoolmaster but the great philosopher.
§ 2. In order to understand Locke we must always bear in mind what I may call his two main characteristics; 1st, his craving to know and to speak the truth and the whole truth in everything, truth not for a purpose but for itself[110]; 2nd, his perfect trust in the reason as the guide, the only guide, to truth.[111]
§ 3. 1st. Those who have not reflected much on the subject will naturally suppose that the desire to know the truth is common to all men, and the desire to speak the truth common to most. But this is very far from being the case. If we had any earnest desire for truth we should examine things carefully before we admitted them as truths; in other words our opinions would be the growth of long and energetic thought. But instead of this they are formed for the most part quite carelessly and at haphazard, and we value them not on account of their supposed agreement with fact but because though “poor things” they are “our own” or those of our sect or party. Locke on the otherhand was always endeavouring to get at the truth for its own sake. This separated him from men in general. And he brought great powers of mind to bear on the investigation. This raised him above them.
§ 4. 2nd. Locke’s second characteristic was his entire reliance on the guidance of reason. “The faculty of reasoning,” says he, “seldom or never deceives those who trust to it.” Elsewhere, borrowing a metaphor from Solomon (Prov. xx, 27), he speaks of this faculty as “the candle of the Lord set up by Himself in men’s minds.” (F. B. ij., 129). In a fine passage in theConduct of the Understandinghe calls it “the touchstone of truth” (§ iij, Fowler’s edition, p. 10). He even goes so far in his correspondence with Molyneux as to maintain that intelligent honest men cannot possibly differ.[112]
But if we consider it from one point of view the treatise on theConduct of the Understandingis itself a witness that human reason is a compass liable to incalculable variations and likely enough to shipwreck those who steer by it alone. In this book Locke shows us that to come to a true result the understanding (1) must be perfectly trained, (2) must not be affected by any feeling in favour of or against anyparticular result, and (3) must have before it all the data necessary for forming a judgment. In practice these conditions are seldom (if ever) fulfilled; and Locke himself, when he wants an instance of a mind that can acquiesce in the certainty of its conclusions, takes it from “angels and separate spirits who may be endowed with more comprehensive faculties” than we are (C. of U. § iij, 3).
§ 5. It seems to me then that Locke much exaggerates the power of the individual reason for getting at the truth. And to exaggerate the importance of one function of the mind is to unduly diminish the importance of the rest. Thus we find that in Locke’s scheme of education little thought is taken for the play of the affections and feelings; and as for the imagination it is treated merely as a source of mischief.
§ 6. Locke, as it has often been pointed out, differs from the schoolmaster in making small account of the knowledge to be acquired by those under education. But it has not been so often remarked that the fundamental difference is much deeper than this and lies in the conception of knowledge itself. With the ordinary schoolmaster the test of knowledge is the power of reproduction. Whatever pupils can reproduce with difficulty they know imperfectly; whatever they can reproduce with ease they know thoroughly. But Locke’s definition of knowledge confines it to a much smaller area. According to him knowledge is “the internal perception of the mind” (Locke to Stillingfleetv.F. B. ij, 432). “Knowing is seeing; and if it be so, it is madness to persuade ourselves we do so by another man’s eyes, let him use never so many words to tell us that what he asserts is very visible. Till we ourselves see it with our own eyes, and perceive it by our own understandings, we are as muchin the dark and as void of knowledge as before, let us believe any learned authors as much as we will” (C. of U. § 24).[113]
§ 7. Here Locke makes no distinction between different classes of truths. But surely very important differences exist.
About some physical facts our knowledge is at once most certain and most definite when we derive it through the evidence of our own senses. “Seeing is believing,” says the proverb. It may be believing, but it is not knowing. That certainty which we call knowledge we often arrive at better by the testimony of others than by that of our own senses.
Miss Martineau in her Autobiography tells us that as a child of ten she entirely and unaccountably failed to see a comet which was visible to all other people; but, although her own senses were at fault, the evidence for the comet was so conclusive that she may be said to haveknownthere was a comet in the sky.
On sufficient evidence we can know anything, just as we know there is a great water-fall at Niagara though we may never have crossed the Atlantic. But we cannot be so certain simply on the evidence of our senses. If we trusted entirely to them we might take the earth for a plane and “know” that the sun moved round it.
§ 8. But Locke probably considers as the subject of knowledge not so much physical facts as the great body of truths which are ascertained by the intellect. It is the eye of the mind by which alone knowledge is to be gained. Of these truths the purest specimens are the truths of geometry. It may be said that only those who have followed the proofsknowthat the area of the square on the side opposite the right angle in a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other sides. But even in pure reasoning like this, the tiro often seems to see what he does not really see; and where his own reason brings him to a conclusion different from the one established heknowsonly that he is mistaken.
§ 9. It must be admitted then that first-hand knowledge, knowledge derived from the vision of the eye or of the mind, is not the only knowledge the young require. Every learner must take things on trust, as even Lord Bacon admits.Discentem credere oportet.To use Locke’s own words:—“I do not say, to be a good geographer that a man should visit every mountain, river, promontory, and creek upon the face of the earth, view the buildings and survey the land everywhere as if he were going to make a purchase” (C. of U., iij,ad f.). So that even according to Locke’s own shewing we must use the eyes of others as well as our own, and this is true not in geography only, but in all other branches of knowledge.
§ 10. But are we driven to the alternative of agreeing either with Locke or with the schoolmaster? I do not see that we are. The thought which underlies Locke’s system of education is this: true knowledge can be acquired only by the exercise of the reason: in childhood the reasoning power is not strong enough for the pursuit of knowledge: knowledge, therefore, is out of the question at that age, and the only thing to be thought of is the formation of habits. Opposed to this we have the schoolmaster’s ideal which is governed by examinations. According to this ideal the object of the school course is to give certain “knowledge,” linguistic and other, and to fix it in the memory in such a manner that it can be displayed on the day of examination. “Knowledge” of this kind often makes no demand whatever on the reasoning faculty, or indeed on any faculty but that of remembering and reproducing what the learner has been told; in extreme cases the memory of mere sounds or symbols suffices.
But after all we are not compelled to choose between these two theories. Take,e.g., the subject which Locke has mentioned, geography. The schoolmasters of the olden time began with the use of the globes, a plan which, by the way, Locke himself seems to have winked at. His disciple Molyneux tells him of the performances of the small Molyneux. When he was but just turned five he could read perfectly well, and on the globe could have traced out and pointed at all the noted ports, countries, and cities of the world, both land and sea; by five and a half could perform many of the plainest problems on the globe, as the longitude and latitude, the Antipodes, the time with them and other countries, &c. (Molyneux to L., 24th August, 1695.) Here we find a child brought up, without anyprotest from Locke, on mere examination knowledge, which according to Locke himself is not knowledge at all. It is strange that Locke did not at once point out to Molyneux that the child was not really learning what the father supposed him to be learning. When the child turned over the plaster ball and found the word “Paris,” the father no doubt attributed to the child much that was in his own mind only. To the child “the Globe” (as Rousseau afterwards said), was nothing but a plaster ball; “Paris” was nothing but some letters marked on that ball. Comenius had already got a notion how children may be given some knowledge of geography. “Children begin geography,” said he, “when they get to understand what a hill, a valley, a field, a river, a village, a town is.” (Supra, p. 145.) When this beginning has been made, geographical knowledge is at once possible to the child, and not before.
Perfect knowledge in geography, as in most other things, is out of every one’s reach. Nobody knows,e.g., all that could be known about Paris. The knowledge its inhabitants have of it is very various, but in all cases this knowledge is far greater than that of a visitor. The visitor’s knowledge again is far greater than that of strangers who have never seen Paris. Nobody, then, can know everything even about Paris; but a child who knows what a large town is, and can fancy to himself a big town called Paris, which is the biggest and most important town in France has some knowledge about it. This must be maintained against Locke. Against the schoolmaster it may be pointed out that making an Eskimo say the words:—“Paris is the capital of France,” would not be giving him any knowledge at all; and the same may be said of many “lessons” inthe school-room. If a common sailor were to teach an Eskimo English, he would very likely suppose that when he had taught the sounds “Paris is the capital of France,” he had conveyed to his pupil all the ideas which those sounds suggested to his own mind. A common schoolmaster may fall into a similar error.
§ 11. In the most celebrated work which has been affected by theThoughtsof Locke, Rousseau’sEmile, we find childhood treated in a manner altogether different from youth: the child’s education is mainly physical, and instruction is not given till the age of twelve. Locke’s system on first sight seems very different to this, but there is a deeper connection between the two than is usually observed. We have seen that Locke allowed nothing to be knowledge that was not acquired by the perception of the intellect. But in children the intellectual power is not yet developed; so according to Locke knowledge properly so-called is not within their reach. What then can the educator do for them? He can prepare them for the age of reason in two ways, by caring first for their physical health, second for the formation of good habits.
§ 12. 1st. On the Continent Locke has always been considered one of the first advocates of physical education, and he does, it is true, give physical education the first place, a feature in his system, which we naturally connect with his study of medicine, and also with the trouble he had all his life with his own health. But care of the body, and especially bodily exercises, were always much thought of in this country, and the main writers on education before Locke,e.g., Sir Thos. Elyot, Mulcaster, Milton, were very emphatic about physical training.
In the autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, wemay see what attention was paid in Locke’s own century to this part of education.[114]
§ 13. 2nd. “That, and that only, is educative which moulds forms or modifies the soul or mind.” (Mark Pattison inNew Quarterly Magazine, January, 1880.)
Here we have a proposition which is perhaps seldom denied, but very commonly ignored by those who bring up the young. But Locke seems to have been entirely possessed with this notion, and the greater part of theThoughtsis nothing but a long application of it. The principle which lies at the root of most of his advice, he has himself expressed as follows: “That which I cannot too often inculcate is, that whatever the matter be about which it is conversant whether great or small, the main, I had almost said only thing, to be considered in every action of a child is what influence it will have upon his mind; what habit it tends to, and is likely to settle in him: how it will become him when he is bigger, and if it be encouraged, whither it will lead him when he is grown up.” (Thoughts, § 107, p. 86.)
Here we see that Locke differed widely from the schoolmasters of his time, perhaps of all time. A man must be a philosopher indeed if he can spend his life in teaching boys, and yet always think more about what they willbeand what they willdowhen their schooling is over than what they willknow. And in these days if we stopped to think at all we should be trodden on by the examiner.[115]
In this respect Locke has not been surpassed. Like his predecessor Montaigne he took for his centre not the object, knowledge, but the subject, man.[116]
§ 14. In some other respects he does not seem so happy. He makes little attempt to reach a scientific standpoint and to establish general truths about our common human nature. He thinks not so much of the man as the gentleman, not so much of the common laws of the mind as of the peculiarities of the individual child. He even hints that differences of disposition in children render treatises on education defective if not useless. “There are a thousand other things that may need consideration” he writes “especially if one should take in the various tempers, different inclinations, and particular defaults that are to be found in children and prescribe proper remedies. The variety is so great that it would require a volume, nor would that reach it. Each man’s mind has some peculiarity as well as his face, that distinguishes him from all others; and there are possibly scarce two children who can be conducted by exactly the same method: besides that I think a prince, a nobleman, or an ordinary gentleman’s son should have different ways of breeding. But having had here only some general views in reference to the main end and aims in education, and those designed for a gentleman’s son, whom being then very little I considered only as white paper or wax to be moulded andfashioned as one pleases, I have touched little more than those heads which I judged necessary for the breeding of a young gentleman of his condition in general.” (Thoughts, § 217, p. 187.)
No language could bring out more clearly the inferiority of Locke’s standpoint to that of later thinkers. He makes little account of our common nature and wishes education to be based upon an estimate of the peculiarities of the individual pupil and of his social needs. And no one with an adequate notion of education could ever compare the young child to “white paper or wax.” Perhaps the development of an organism was a conception that could not have been formed without a great advance in physical science. Froebel who makes most of it learnt it from the scientific study of trees and from mineralogy. We need not then be surprised that Locke does not say, as Pestalozzi said a hundred years later, “Education instead of merely considering what is to be imparted to children ought to consider first what they already possess.” But if he had read Comenius he would have been saved from comparing the child to wax or white paper in the hands of the educator. Comenius had said: “Nature has implanted within us the seeds of learning, of virtue, and of piety. The object of education is to bring these seeds to perfection.” (Supra, p. 135.) This seems to me a higher conception than any that I meet with in Locke.
§ 15. But if our philosopher did not learn from Comenius he certainly learnt from Montaigne.[117]Indeed Dr. Arnstädt(v. supra, p. 69) has put him into a series of thinkers who have much in common. This succession is as follows: Rabelais, Montaigne, Locke, Rousseau; and, according to Mr. Browning’s division, they form a school by themselves. “Thinkers on education,” says Mr. Browning,[118]“are 1st those who wish to educate through the study of the classics, or 2nd those who wish to educate through the study of the works of Nature, or 3rd those who aim at an education independent of study and knowledge, and think rather of the training of character and the attaining to the Greek ideal, the man beautiful and good.” To the three schools Mr. Browning gives the names Humanist, Realist, and Naturalist, (“nos autres naturalistes,” Montaigne says). Locke he considers one of the principal writers of the “naturalistic” school, and says, Locke “has given a powerful bias to naturalistic education both in England and on the Continent for the last 200 years.” (Ed. Theories, p. 85.)
This use of the word “naturalistic” seems to me somewhat misleading, or at best vague, and it is a word overworked already: so I should prefer to speak of the “developing” or “training” school. The classification itself certainly has its uses but it must be employed with caution. If caught up by those who have only an elementary acquaintance with the subject a class of persons apt to delight in such arrangements as an aid to memory, these divisions may easily prove a hindrance to light.
§ 16. This subject of classification is so important tostudents that it may be worth while to make a few remarks upon it. The only thoroughly consistent people are the people of fiction. We can know all aboutthem. Directly we understand their central thought or peculiarity we may be sure that everything they say and do will be strictly in accordance with it, will indeed be explainable by it. To take a bald and simple instance, directly we know that Mrs. Jellaby inBleak Houseis absorbed by her interest in an African Mission, we know all that is to be known about her; and everything she does or omits to do has some reference to Borrioboola Ghar. But in real life not only are people much less easily understood, but when we actually have seized their main idea or peculiarity or interest we must not expect to find them always consistent: and they will say and do much which if not inconsistent with the main idea or peculiarity or interest has at least no connection with it. Suppose,e.g., you can make out with some certainty that Locke belonged to the developing school, you must not expect him to pay little heed to instruction as such. Again, suppose you find that his philosophy was utilitarian; you must not suppose that in everything he says he will be thinking of utility.
Now the historian is tempted to treat real men and women as the writer of fiction treats his puppets. Having fastened, quite correctly let us suppose, on their main peculiarity he considers it necessary to square everything with his theory of them, and whatever will not fall in with it he, if he is unscrupulous, misrepresents, or if he is scrupulous, suppresses.
Again, we are too apt to read into words meanings derived from controversies unknown at the time when the words were uttered. This is a well-known fact in the history of religious thought. We must always consider not merely the words used but the time when they were used.What a man might say quite naturally and orthodoxly at one period would be sufficient to convict him of sympathizing with some terrible heresy if uttered half a century later. We find something like this in the history of education. If anyone nowadays speaks of the pleasure with which as a young man he read Tacitus, he is understood to mean that he is opposed to the introduction of “modern studies” into the school-room. If on the other hand he extols botany, or regrets that he never learned chemistry, this is taken for an assault on classical instruction. But, of course, no such inference could be drawn if we went back to a time when the antithesis between classics and natural science had not been accentuated. In many other instances we have to be on our guard against forcing into language meaning which belongs rather to a later date.
§ 17. With these cautions in mind let us see how far Locke may be said (1) to be a trainer, and (2) how far a utilitarian.
§ 18. I. Mr. Browning attributes to Rabelais, Montaigne, and Locke the desire to bring up a well-developed man rather than a good scholar. But Rabelais certainly craved for the knowledge ofthings; and if he is to be classed at all I should put him rather with the Realists, albeit he lived before the realistic spirit became powerful. Montaigne went more on the lines of developing rather than teaching, and, shrewd man of the world as he was, he thought a great deal about the art of living. But his ideal was not so much the man as the gentleman. This was true also of Locke; and here we see some explanation why both Montaigne and Locke do not value classical learning.[119]On the Continent classical learning has never been associated with the character of an accomplished gentleman; and, as far as I know, the conception that the highest type of excellence is found in the union of “the scholar and the gentleman” is peculiar to this country. In the society of Locke’s day this union does not seem to have been recognized, and Locke observes: “A great part of the learning now in fashion in the schools of Europe, and that goes ordinarily into the round of education, a gentleman may in a good measure be unfurnished with, without any great disparagement to himself or prejudice to his affairs.” (Thoughts, § 94, p. 74.) So Locke sought as the true essential for the young gentleman “prudence and good breeding.” He puts his requisites in the following order of importance:—1, virtue; 2, wisdom; 3, manners; 4, learning; and so “places learning last and least.” Here he shews himself far ahead of those who still held to the learned ideal; but his notions of development were cramped by his thinking only of the gentleman and what was requisite for him.
§ 19. II. Was Locke a utilitarian in education? It is the fashion (and in history as in other things fashion is a powerful force), it is the fashion to treat of Locke as a great champion of utilitarianism. We might expect this in the ordinary historians, for “when they do agree their unanimity is” not perhaps very wonderful. But there is one great English authority quite uninfluenced by them who has saidthe same thing, viz.—Cardinal Newman. The Cardinal, as the champion of authority, is perhaps prejudiced against Locke, who holds that “the faculty of reasoning seldom or never deceived those who trusted to it.” Be this as it may, Newman asserts that “the tone of Locke’s remarks is condemnatory of any teaching which tends to the general cultivation of the mind.” (Idea of a University.Discourse vij., § 4; see also § 6.) A very interesting point for us to consider is then, Is this reputation of Locke’s for utilitarianism well deserved?
§ 20. First let us be quite certain of our definition.
In learning anything there are two points to be considered; 1st, the advantage we shall find from knowing that subject or having that skill, and 2nd, the effect which the study of that subject or practising for that skill will have on the mind or the body.
These two points are in themselves distinct, though it is open to anyone to maintain that they need not be considered separately. Nature has provided that the bodies of most animals should get the exercise best for them in procuring food. So Mr. Herbert Spencer has come to the conclusion that it would be contrary to “the economy of nature” if one set of occupations were needed as gymnastics and another for utility. In other words he considers that it is in learning the most useful things we get the best training.
The utilitarian view of instruction is that we should teach things useful in themselves and either neglect the result on the mind and body of the learner or assume Mr. Spencer’s law of “the economy of nature.”
Again, when the subjects are settled the utilitarian thinks how the knowledge or skill may be most speedily acquired,and not how this method or that method of acquisition will affect the faculties.
§ 21. This being utilitarianism in education the question is how far was Locke the utilitarian he is generally considered?
If we take by itself what he says under the head of “Learning” in theThoughts concerning Educationno doubt we should pronounce him a utilitarian. He considers each subject of instruction and pronounces for or against it according as it seems likely or unlikely to be useful to a gentleman. And in the methods he suggests he simply points out the quickest route, as if the knowledge were the only thing to be thought of. Hence his utilitarian reputation.
But two very important considerations have been lost sight of.
1st. Learning is with him “the last and least part” in education.
2nd. Intellectual education was not for childhood but for the age when we can teach ourselves. “When a man has got an entrance into any of the sciences,” says he, “it will be time then to depend on himself and rely upon his own understanding and exercise his own faculties, which is the only way to improvement and mastery.” (L. to Peterborough, quoted in Camb. edition ofThoughts, p. 229.) “So,” he says, “the business of education is not, as I think, to make the young perfect in any one of the sciences but so to open and dispose their minds as may best make them capable of any when they shall apply themselves to it.” The studies he proposes in theConduct of the Understanding(which is his treatise on intellectual education) have for their object “an increase of the powers and activity of themind, not an enlargement of its possessions” (C. of U.§ 19,ad f.).
Thus strange to say the supposed leader of the Utilitarians has actually propounded in so many words the doctrine of their opponents.
§ 22. When Locke is more studied it will be found that theThoughtsare misleading if we neglect his other works, more particularly theConduct of the Understanding.
§ 23. Towards the end of his days, Locke was conscious of gleams of the “untravelled world” which lay before the generations to come. With great pathos he writes to a friend: “When I consider how much of my life has been trifled away in beaten tracks where I vamped on with others only to follow those who went before me, I cannot but think I have just as much reason to be proud as if I had travelled all England and, if you will, all France too, only to acquaint myself with the roads, and be able to tell how the highways lie wherein those of equipage, and even the common herd too, travel. Now, methinks—and these are often old men’s dreams—I see openings to truth and direct paths leading to it, wherein a little application and industry would settle one’s mind with satisfaction and leave no darkness or doubt. But this is the end of my day when my sun is setting: and though the prospect it has given me be what I would not for anything be without—there is so much truth, beauty, and consistency in it—yet it is for one of your age, I think I ought to say for yourself, to set about” (L. to Bolde, quoted by Fowler,Locke, p. 120). But another 200 years have not sufficed to put us in possession of the Promised Land of which Locke had these Pisgah visions. We still “vamp on,” following those who went before us and getting small help from expounders of “Educationas a Science.” But as it would seem the days of vamping on blindly in the beaten track are drawing to a close. We cannot doubt that if Locke had known the wonderful advance which various sciences have made since his day he would have seen in them “openings to truth and direct paths leading to it” for many purposes, certainly for education. It is for our age and ages to come to set about applying our scientific knowledge to the bringing up of children; and thinkers such as Froebel will shew us how.