Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/271

Rh to have been born later, and to share the more enlightened instruction that awaits the next generation?

If I were to take exception to anything in the scientific aspect of this book, it would be chiefly to the treatment of conception, judgment, and reasoning, which seems to me too much under the influence of ordinary logic. But even here what seems to me questionable lies more in the expression than in the thought; and there is, after all, in this part of the exposition some advantage in availing one's self of the terms and distinctions of logic: since many readers will partly understand them to begin with, and will thereby be more readily familiarized with the abstruser ideas of psychology. Still, this advantage may be bought too dear. In the practical aspect of the book, I am inclined to say that it lays too much stress upon the importance of authority in moral training. But probably few of those for whom the book is intended will think the author's doctrine of discipline overstrict. His treatment of the emotions and sentiments in relation to education, a particularly difficult and important part of the work, seems to me especially good.

It is a striking fact, the sudden turning of so many first-rate minds to the subject of education; and a great revolution in scholastic affairs, however gradual, will certainly result from it. No subject ought to be so universally interesting. If none seem so tedious to us, it may be because our own education was so bad; or that we have reflected so little about it that new suggestions find in our minds no soil to strike root in; or that the complexity and practical difficulties of it paralyze our faculties: in any case, the more reason for spurring ourselves to the study. There is no subject more beset with popular errors, none in which science is more useful, explanatory, and suggestive. Not only every professional educator, but every father and mother (amateur educators!), ought to have some acquaintance with psychology. However absurd this seems, I defend it on the ground that nothing else enables one to interpret the faint and fragmentary recollections of having been one's self a child: without which how can other children be known, and, if unknown, how trained? At school I often used to wonder whether the masters had ever been to school, they knew so little of what we boys were thinking, feeling, and about to do. I have heard an educated woman say of her baby, squalling of course at six months old, "I believe he knows he's doing wrong." Heautomorphism, in default of science, is ever the first resource of explanation; i. e., we judge of others by ourselves. Discipline without knowledge, and therefore without sympathy, an outside wooden machinery, hampering and crushing, is the same in schools, in homes, and in prisons.

Science is certainly useful; yet it may be perverted by an ingenious mind. It has been urged that, according to the theory of evolution, education must with each generation become less necessary: I suppose, because the amount of inherited faculty grows greater. But