Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/544

530 been so bad that the child is started on its journey with an organism full of twists and irregularities. Mirabeau was once asked when he would commence the education of a child. "Twenty years before it is born" was the philosophic answer. The prenatal influences of heredity can not be overestimated. An unhealthy, depraved, immoral, and vicious parentage tells its sad tale through the offspring. Tennyson is as correct to science as he was poetical when he said:

 'Tis the blot upon the brain That will show itself without."

It matters nothing whether the views of Darwin shall stand the test of future investigation, that acquired characteristics can be inherited; or the views of Weissman, that they can not. The fact remains that a weak and diseased nervous organism is much more liable to take on a perverted growth and development than one that is ushered into the world free from such blemishes. One of the prime objects in every system of education ought therefore to be the studious care given to the health of the scholars, so as to avoid damaging those who are as yet sound, and in order to remove as far as possible the blots that have already been made upon the nervous mechanism of others, and that must show themselves without.

"Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu (There is nothing in the intellect that has not first come through the senses)." Philosophy and experience alike confirm the truth of the above. When the child is born, its mind is like a sheet of white paper, as Locke expresses it; but soon there begin to be impressions made upon it, as characters may be inscribed upon the paper. It is now some two hundred and seventy-five years since Comenius recognized that children gain their knowledge through the senses, and that these should be properly educated on suitable objects. He strongly urged that matter, and not form, should be presented to children. We should "cease to persuade, and begin to demonstrate; cease to dispute, and begin to look." An old Latin writer puts it thus: "Iter longum est per precepta; breve et efficax per exempla (The way is long by precept; short and effective by example)."

With Kant and Green I agree that there are certain a priori intuitions, such as those of time and space. But I also agree with Kant, Locke, Reid, Spencer, and others, that our knowledge comes through experience. It is of the utmost importance that the experiences to which a child is subjected should be of a proper kind; that they should be of such a kind as to develop the mind in wise directions, and store it with ideas of a useful and ennobling nature. The teachers under whom a child is placed, the