Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 10.djvu/436

420 in bodily or mental training, but the trainer does not take upon himself to lay down the rules of hygiene.

The inadvertence, for so I regard it, of coupling the art of health with education is easily disposed of, and does not land us in any arduous controversies. Very different is another aspect of these definitions: that wherein the end of education is propounded as the promotion of human happiness, human virtue, human perfection. Probably the qualification will at once be conceded, that education is but one of the means, a single contributing agency, to the all-including end. Nevertheless, the openings for difference of opinion as to what constitutes happiness, virtue, or perfection, are very wide. Moreover, the discussion has its proper place in ethics and in theology, and, if brought into the field of education, should be received under protest.

Before entering upon the consideration of this difficulty, the greatest of all, I will advert to some of the other views of education that seem to err on the side of taking in too much. Here, I may quote from the younger Mill, who, like his father, and unlike the generality of theorists, starts more scientifico with a definition. Education, according to him, "includes whatever we do for ourselves, and whatever is done for us by others, for the express purpose of bringing us nearer to the perfection of our nature; in its largest acceptation, it comprehends even the indirect effects produced on character and on the human faculties by things of which the direct purposes are different; by laws, by forms of government, by the industrial arts, by modes of social life; nay, even by physical facts not dependent on the human will; by climate, soil, and local position." He admits, however, that this is a very wide view of the subject, and for his own immediate purpose advances a narrower view, namely: "the culture which each generation purposely gives to those who are to be its successors, in order to qualify them for at least keeping up, and, if possible, for raising, the improvement which has been attained."—("Inaugural Address at St. Andrews," p. 4.)

Besides involving the dispute as to what constitutes "perfection," the first and larger statement is, I think, too wide for the most comprehensive philosophy of education. The influences exerted on the human character by climate and geographical position, by arts, laws, government, and modes of social life, constitute a very interesting department of sociology, and have their place there and nowhere else. What we do for ourselves, and what others do for us, to bring; us nearer to the perfection of our nature, may be education in the precise sense of the word, and it may not. I do not see the propriety of including under the subject the direct operation of rewards and punishments. No doubt we do something to educate ourselves, and society does something to educate us, in a sufficiently proper acceptation of the word; but the ordinary influence of society, in the dispensing of punishment and reward, is not the essential fact of education, as I