Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/785

Rh him to frank action and the free exercise of his faculties under his own responsibility. It must not be forgotten that, while the inhibition imposed upon him is a means, voluntary inhibition is the end. The purpose is to initiate him into self-restraint and self-government, and he can be prepared for it only by being exercised in it.

Preyer is not quite clear in marking the distinction between not wishing and wishing not. We define two distinct species of inhibition; one voluntary, and the other really willful. The first takes place when a child under restraint and watch abstains against his own inclination from doing what is prohibited—for example, when he stops crying when interrupted by a stranger, or when in the garden he draws back from a trespass he is about to make upon the turf at the sight of the watchman. There is in those acts what may be called a simple non-wishing, for the thing that counteracts the temptation is something outside of the child's will. But when the child, free and alone, finds spontaneously in his own thoughts and feelings a counterpoise to his temptations, there occurs an inhibition of a new kind, which is not simply a non-will but a positive and meritorious will. Moral education consists essentially in gradually substituting this kind of inhibition for the other, the empire of reason for that of constraint.

It does not really begin so long as we only guard, watch, and prevent. Innocence thus obtained has only a provisional and preparatory value with the child, and none with adults. Some young people have been brought up in this way, under conditions of complete surveillance, kept in leading-strings till they were twenty years old. This is better than nothing, in so far as the object is to prevent their making fools of themselves; but their parents are mistaken if they believe they have been well trained; they have not been trained at all. They are like the cat that withholds its paw from the tempting dish as long as it sees the stick, but which is secretly eager to get its chin in.

That person alone is morally trained who can watch and conduct himself; who, as Montaigne says, "has enough in his own eyes to keep him in office." Education ought gradually to lead children to this point, prudently risking a little, loading them from the beginning with as few restraints as possible and loosening these little by little, making only reasonable demands and explaining the reasons for them as fast as they can be comprehended. I do not hesitate to measure the value of an education according to the degree in which it has sought to teach the child from the cradle to help himself and govern himself to make men who shall be characters.—Translated for The Popular Science Monthly from the Revue Scientifique.