Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/8

iv degree, compensate for the unquestionable advantages that attach to schools; but also include the means for improving to the utmost, those peculiar and inestimable opportunities of moral and mental advancement which are to be found at home, and there only. Not to do this, would be to place ourselves in a position in which private education could not at all sustain comparison with the more usual method. Now, not to mention some incidental and yet important recommendations of the plan which we have at present in view, the chief and the most decisive one, (moral considerations apart,) is the facilities afforded, at home, for bestowing a well-considered culture upon each of the several faculties of the mind; and for doing this in the order of their natural development. This point may then be named, as the leading characteristic of the system which it is the intention of the present volume to explain.

But a scheme of intellectual culture, conformed to the principle of a careful adherence to the order of nature, in expanding the several faculties, is not to be comprised within very narrow limits. Indeed it is evident, that an elaborate operation, extended through ten or twelve years, (the five or six years of infancy