“ These strange hysterics of the intelligence, which make us pass from weeping to laughter, and from laughter back again to weeping, must be familiar to every impressible nature; and all is as automatic, involuntary, as entirely self-evolved by a hidden organic process, as are the changing moods of the laughing and crying woman. The poet always recognizes a dictation from without, and we hardly think it a figure of speech when we talk of his inspiration. ”

“ The page of modern literature is, indeed, a monument of our child-love and our child-admiration.
Nor is it merely as to a pure untarnished nature that we go back admiringly to childhood. The æsthetic charm of the infant which draws us so potently to its side and compels us to watch its words and actions is, like everything else which moves the modern mind, highly complex. ”

“ Thus, then, every course of intellectual and moral self-discipline, steadily and honestly pursued, tends not merely to clear the mental vision of the individual, but to ennoble the race; by helping to develop that intuitive power, which arises in the first instance from the embodiment in the human constitution of the general resultants of antecedent experience, but which, in its highest form, far transcends the experience that has furnished the materials for its evolution,—just as the creative power of imagination shapes out conceptions which no merely constructive skill could devise. ”

“ The unskilled observer of children is apt to send scraps, fragments of facts, which have not their natural setting. The value of psychological training is that it makes one as jealously mindful of wholeness in facts as a housewife of wholeness in her porcelain. It is, indeed, only when the whole fact is before us, in well-defined contour, that we can begin to deal with its meaning. Thus although those ignorant of psychology may assist us in this region of fact-finding, they can never accomplish that completer and exacter kind of observation which we dignify by the name of Science. ”

“ Yet the very instinct of childhood to be glad in its self-created world, an instinct which with consummate art Victor Hugo keeps warm and quick in the breast of the half-starved ill-used child Cosette, secures for it a peculiar blessedness. The true nature-child, [Pg 24] who has not become used-up, is happy, untroubled with the future, knowing nothing of the misery of disillusion. As, with hearts chastened by many experiences, we take a peep over the wall of his fancy-built pleasance, we seem to be taken back to a real golden age. ”

“ To every one of us the world was once as fresh and new as to Adam. And then, long before we were susceptible of any other modes of instruction, Nature took us in hand, and every minute of waking life brought its educational influence, shaping our actions into rough accordance with Nature's laws, so that we might not be ended untimely by too gross disobedience. Nor should I speak of this process of education as past for any one, be he as old as he may. ”

“ All kinds of shy reticences hamper them: they feel unskilled in using our cumbrous language; they soon find out that their thoughts are not as ours, but often make us laugh. And how carefully are they wont to hide from our sight their nameless terrors, physical and moral. Much of the deeper childish experience can only reach us, if at all, years after it is over, through the faulty medium of adult memory—faulty even when it is the memory of a Goethe, a George Sand, a Robert Louis Stevenson. ”

“ Ask the man who is investigating any question profoundly and thoroughly—be it historical, philosophical, philological, physical, literary, or theological; who is trying to make himself master of any abstract subject (except, perhaps, political economy and geology, both of which are intensely Anglican sciences) , whether he is not compelled to read half a dozen times as many German as English books? And whether, of these English books, more than one in ten is the work of a fellow of a college, or a professor of an English university? ”

“ What wonder, then, if very recently an appeal has been made to statistics for the profoundly foolish purpose of showing that education is of no good—that it diminishes neither misery nor crime among the masses of mankind? I reply, why should the thing which is called education do either the one or the other? If I am a knave or a fool, teaching me to read or write won't make me less of either one or the other—unless somebody shows me how to put my reading and writing to wise and good purposes. ”

“ In other words, [Pg 153] education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely things and their forces, but men and their ways; and the fashioning of the affections and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move in harmony with those laws. For me, education means neither more nor less than this. Anything which professes to call itself education must be tried by this standard, and if it fails to stand the test, I will not call it education, whatever may be the force of authority, or of numbers, upon the other side. ”

“ Rude, inchoate, vague enough, no doubt, are these first groping movements of a human mind: yet of supreme value to the psychologist just because they are the first. If, reflects the psychologist, he can only get at this baby's consciousness so as to understand what is passing there, he will be in an infinitely better position to find his way through the intricacies of the adult consciousness. It may be, as we shall see by-and-by, that the baby's mind is not so perfectly simple, so absolutely primitive as it at first looks. ”

“ A glance at some of the best memoirs will show how enormously difficult it is to be sure of a right interpretation of these early and comparatively simple manifestations of mind.
Things grow a great deal worse when we try to throw our scientific lasso about the elusive spirit of a child of four or six, and to catch the exact meaning of its swiftly changing movements. Children are, no doubt, at this age frank before the eye of love, and their minds are vastly more accessible than that of the dumb dog that can only look his ardent thoughts. ”

“ From the time that the first suggestion to introduce physical science into ordinary education was timidly whispered, until now, the advocates of scientific education have met with opposition of two kinds. On the one hand, they have been pooh-poohed by the men of business who pride themselves on being the representatives of practicality; while, on the other hand, they have been excommunicated by the classical scholars in their capacity of Levites in charge of the ark of culture and monopolists of liberal education. ”

“ Is this from any lack of power in the English as compared with the German mind? The countrymen of Grote and of Mill, of Faraday, of Robert Brown, of Lyell and of Darwin, to go no further back than the contemporaries of men of middle age, can afford to smile at such a suggestion. England can show now, as she has been able to show in every generation since civilization spread over the West, individual men who hold their own against the world, and keep alive the old tradition of her intellectual eminence. ”

“ So with every new idea that is planted in a real thinker's mind: it will be growing when he is least conscious of it. An idea in the brain is not a legend carved on a marble slab: it is an impression made on a living tissue, which is the seat of active nutritive processes. ”

“ We know very little of the contents of our minds until some sudden jar brings them to light, as an earthquake that shakes down a miser's house brings out the old stockings full of gold and all the hoards that have been hidden away in holes and crannies.
We not rarely find our personality doubled in our dreams and do battle with ourselves, unconscious that we are our own antagonists. ”

“ It is even more certain that nature is the expression of a definite order with which nothing interferes, and that the chief business of mankind is to learn that order and govern themselves accordingly. Moreover this scientific “criticism of life” presents itself to us with different credentials from any other. It appeals not to authority, nor to what anybody may have thought or said, but to nature. It admits that all our interpretations of natural fact are more or less imperfect and symbolic, and bids the learner seek for truth not among words but among things. ”

“ What happens when one idea brings up another? Some internal movement, of which we are wholly unconscious and which we only know by its effect. What is this action, which in Dame Quickly agglutinates contiguous circumstances by their surfaces; in men of wit and fancy, connects remote ideas by partial resemblances; in men of imagination, by the vital identity which underlies phenomenal diversity; in the man of science, groups the objects of thought in sequences of maximum resemblance? ”

“ Imagine how much success would be likely to attend the attempt to persuade such men that the education which leads to perfection in such elegances is alone to be called culture; while the facts of history, the process of thought, the conditions of moral and social existence and the laws of physical nature are left to be dealt with as they may by outside barbarians! ”

“ But a great idea thrown out by a mind in advance of its age, takes root and germinates in secret, shapes the unconscious thought of a few individuals of the next generation, is by them diffused still more widely, and thus silently matures itself in the womb of time, until it comes forth, like Minerva, in full panoply of power. ”

“ Ignorance is visited as sharply as wilful disobedience—incapacity meets with the same punishment as crime. Nature's discipline is not even a word and a blow, and the blow first; but the blow without the word. It is left to you to find out why your ears are boxed.
The object of what we commonly call education—that education in which man intervenes and which I shall distinguish as artificial education—is to make good these defects in Nature's methods; to prepare the child to receive Nature's education, neither incapably nor ignorantly, nor with wilful disobedience ”

“ What science can present greater attractions than philology? How can a lover of literary excellence fail to rejoice in the ancient masterpieces? And with what consistency could I, whose business lies so much in the attempt to decipher the past and to build up intelligible forms out of the scattered fragments of long-extinct beings, fail to take a sympathetic, though an unlearned, interest in the labours of a Niebuhr, a Gibbon, or a Grote? Classical history is a great section of the palæontology of man ”

“ In this genetic tracing back of the complexities of man's mental life to their primitive elements in the child's consciousness, questions of peculiar interest will arise. A problem which though having a venerable antiquity is still full of meaning concerns the precise relation of the higher forms of intelligence and of sentiment to the elementary facts of the individual's life-experience. Are we to regard all our ideas, even those of God, as woven by the mind out of its experiences, as Locke thought, or have we certain “innate ideas” from the first? ”

“ For every man the world is as fresh as it was at the first day, and as full of untold novelties for him who has the eyes to see them. And Nature is still continuing her patient education of us in that great university, the universe, of which we are all members.
Those who take honours in Nature's university, who learn the laws which govern men and things and obey them, are the really great and successful men in this world. The great mass of mankind are the “Poll,” who pick up just enough to get through without much discredit. Those who won't learn at all are plucked ”

“ The common sense of the best part of mankind has come to be ashamed of ever having put any faith in things whose absurdity now appears self-evident; no discussion of evidence once regarded as convincing is any longer needed; and it is only among those of our hereditarily uneducated population, whose general intelligence is about on a par with that of a Hottentot or an Esquimaux, that we any longer find such faith entertained. ”