Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/309

 certain series of ideas; and along with this power, it feels, in greater or less degrees, an active desire to do so. Hence comes effort and labour, directed to particular ends, and to means fit for the achievement of those ends; and hence all those fruits of intellectual enterprise which constitute the immeasurable odds between the savage and the civilized condition of human life; or between the child and the man.

The process of education naturally divides itself there-fore into two portions, corresponding with this partition of our mental existence, into the Intuitive, and the Active: or, in other words, education should be made to accord with the distinction between Perception, and Powerbetween the Accumulative and the Operative faculties; the former being the earliest expanded, and the latter the latest; yet the development of the one going on long after that of the others has come into full course.

To the first, that is the accumulative, or intuitive faculties, we have already given some attention, while suggesting hints for the culture of the Conceptive faculty, and of the Sense of Resemblance, and Analogy. Next should come the training of those faculties, which imply more or less of conscious effort, and which, by their different degrees of activity, quickly render conspicuous the original difference between mind and mind, as to Power. These faculties of labour are, as I have enumerated them alreadythe Memory, the faculty of Abstraction, and the ratiocinative faculty.

But, anxious as I am to insure the reader's attention to the broad, and very important distinction, above stated, I have thought it best to conclude the present volume at the point where the one process of culture should be succeeded by the other:the ends aimed at in the two, and the methods of procedure, being, for the most part, very dissimilar. What now remains, and which is the subject of