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 CHAPTER

CULTURE OF THE CONCEPTIVE FACULTY.

Tue phrase adopted in the present instance is, as I have said, far from being unexceptionable; nevertheless, it has the sanction as well of colloquial as of philosophical usage, and the objections to which it may be liable will be of little importance, if, in the end, the reader understands what is here meant by it, and in what way the faculty, however it might be designated, should be treated in the business of education.

Too little regard has, I think, been paid to that leading and early developed element of the mental constitution of which we are now to speak; nor does the fact seem to have been distinctly noticed, that it is the chief characteristic of the first years of life; nor do I know that the culture of it has ever been systematically treated of, or attempted. And yet there is hardly any intellectual energy, more susceptible of improvement by discipline and exercise, or more likely to repay the pains bestowed upon it as conducive to ulterior mental operations.

Nature, for purposes which it is not very difficult to divine, has allowed an absolute predominance to the conceptive faculty during the season of infancy, and has granted it a principal share in the mental economy during the succeeding years of childhood. In saying this, I am by no means thinking of unusual instances of imaginative development; but of human nature at large.