Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/101

Rh all men, and special social duties. The selective principle which he adopts for the order in which duties should be presented, is that the moral teaching of any period of life should set out from the special duties of that period, taking its dominant duty as a centre, e.g., with the young child reverence and obedience.

Possibly the most interesting part of the work is that which deals with the selection, arrangement, analysis, and inductive presentation of the means which the author recommends for moral instruction. He would begin with carefully selected fairy tales of the type of the German Märchen, in which are held in solution, as it were, some moral idea which the active imagination of the child is expected, without formal statement, at least to feel and appropriate, even though it may not be very definitely grasped. To fairy tales succeed fables, so selected as to illustrate some one form of evil or some one type of good, which is to be brought into clear view by the child and to be illustrated by facts within his experience. Selected stories from the Bible, arranged in chronological order, follow the fables. These present characters, acts, motives, and the results of acts, more complex ideas thus following the simple ones, and demanding from the growing youth analytic efforts of discrimination. Finally, the taste for the heroic of more advanced pupils is to be gratified to their moral improvement by narrations culled from the Iliad and the Odyssey. In his principles of selection of that which should be presented, the author evidently has in mind Plato's Republic. He candidly admits at the outset that there are opinions at variance with his own as to the use of fairy tales and fables. A quite opposing view is expressed by Dr. Dittes, an eminent German educator. He would exclude from youthful instruction, as foreign to the child's range of thought, all such creations of fancy as "Märchen, fables, myths, legends, and tales of religious miracles" (religiöse Wundergeschichten). Possibly the good doctor forgets that the child may feel rightly and to his benefit many things that at present he does not fully comprehend.

Did space permit, it would be interesting to follow the author in his discussion of the difficulties of religious instruction in schools like ours, and of the plans proposed to obviate these difficulties, of the moral value of various studies, and of the various special forms of duty that grow out of his general scheme of duties. It is sufficient for our purpose to have brought into prominence the general lines on which this work is framed, and to have emphasized its most important points of view in regard to both aim and means. It is no more than just to say that its style is always clear and its illustrations happy, reminding one in some respects of Herbert Spencer in his well-known treatise on Education.

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