Page:The Great Didactic of John Amos Comenius (1896).pdf/165

 belief that at sixteen a boy might be subjected to much the same educational discipline as a child of six that led Comenius so entirely to overlook the great gulf that exists between the two ages, and made him so absolutely certain that he had, once and for all, solved the problem of education.

Into this train of thought he was to a large extent led by his habit of appealing to nature as a standard and of taking natural processes as models. It is true that to him Nature and the Deity are almost synonymous terms. “By the voice of Nature we understand the universal providence of God, which never ceases to work all in all things; that is to say, which continually developes each creature for the end to which it has been destined.” But, in practice, Nature comes to mean the external processes that are to be seen in the growth of a tree or of an animal, and here it is that the fatal error is introduced, the error into which other writers on education have fallen, as well as Comenius. As long as the child is in the stage of “nutrition and growth,” as long as his education consists of the training of organs of sense-perception, so long the appeal to nature is justified. But when a higher stage is reached, when the child becomes thoroughly self-conscious, a very different element is introduced. The work of the true educationist, far from furthering natural tendencies, frequently consists in counteracting them, in making a careful selection of qualities, in developing some and in hindering the growth of others, and this in accordance with an ideal to be found nowhere but in the mind, and to which Nature, in the ordinary sense of the word, has nothing to say. Here again we may reasonably excuse Comenius for going astray, when so recent a writer as Mr. Herbert Spencer has committed himself to the statement that “Nature illustrates to us in the simplest way the true theory and practice of moral discipline!”

For the rest, it is to practical schoolmasters that Comenius, writing as a practical schoolmaster, particularly recommends himself. If his work is not overloaded