Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/72

60 be must be led into the world of religion. Brought up as he has been by the sense-world, the abstract scarcely finds entrance. God withdraws himself from our senses. The word Spirit has meaning only for the philosophers. In his fifteenth year Émile does not know whether he has a soul or not. If I wished to represent stupidity symbolically, I would paint a pedant teaching children out of a catechism. They say a child should be reared in the religion of his father, and prove this is the only true one, the others absurd. But suppose the strength of the argument depends upon the district where they use it, or upon authority, to which Émile pays no attention. How then? In what religion shall we educate him? The answer is plain—in none. We will place him in condition to choose that which the best use of his reason may approve."

The time, the thought, and the style of Rousseau's "Émile" combined to make it the most powerful word yet spoken for the true development of education. "It was a vigorous blow against the science of mere words, against the pitiable omniscience of children, against books as means of instruction. Never before had the natural methods for education been so forcibly thrust into the places of the miserable middle-age apparatus."

We need not delay for any extended criticism of Rousseau's thought. Its radical deficiency has been often stated and acknowledged. We phrased it as the personification of an abstraction. Believing in the total degeneration of humanity, believing that there was nothing natural in the historic development, Rousseau would call men back to Nature. How back to Nature? Where was Nature? Not in society—in Rousseau? Certainly here, if anywhere, and with this the entire thought fails, so far as respects its efficiency for a scientific principle in education. Émile, separated from his unnatural fellow-beings, must be guarded against the possibility of doing as they did; and yet he must be taught according to Nature. Rousseau was all the nature Émile could have, and he would be educated naturally, therefore, only so far as Rousseau corresponded to Nature.

To break away from artificial restraints and to find Nature has fascinated men from earliest times. One of the most beautiful illustrations of this impossible undertaking is the Arabian romance, "Hai Ebn Yokdahn" ("The Nature-Man"). This was written by Tophail, who died in the year 1190, and is mentioned here merely as a reference for those specially interested in these endeavors.

It is among the Germans that we find a serious attempt to apply the new ideas to the actual work of instruction. The philanthropists attempted to realize the educational ideas of Rousseau. Their leading principles, both negative and positive, are as follows: "The universal condition of the world is infinitely bad. Church and state, school and family, are marked by folly and wickedness. Above all, the school is thoroughly defective in its very foundation.