Page:The Great Didactic of John Amos Comenius (1896).pdf/230

 Young children, especially, are always more easily led and ruled by example than by precept. If you give them a precept, it makes but little impression; if you point out that others are doing something, they imitate without being told to do so.

8. (iv) Again, nature is always showing us by examples that whatever is to be produced in abundance must be produced in some one place. Thus, for instance, wood is produced in quantities in forests, grass in fields, fish in lakes, and metals in the bowels of the earth.

Specialisation, too, is carried to such an extent, that the forest which produces pines, cedars, or oaks, produces them in abundance, although other kinds of trees may be unable to grow there; and, in the same way, land that produces gold does not produce other metals in like quantity. This truth can be seen much more plainly in our own bodies. It is very important that each limb share in the nourishment that is assimilated by the body. Its share, however, is not transmitted to each in its raw state, to be there digested and adapted; but there are certain fixed members, designed as workshops for the performance of this function, namely, to receive food for the use of the whole body, to heat it, to digest it, and, at length, to distribute nourishment to the other members. Thus, chyle is produced by the stomach, blood by the liver, vital spirit by the heart, and mental spirit by the brain and these elements, when prepared, are properly diffused throughout all the limbs and preserve life in the whole body. And therefore, as workshops supply manufactured goods, churches supply piety, and law courts justice, why should not schools produce, purify, and multiply the light of wisdom, and distribute it to the whole body of the human community?

9. (v) And, finally, we see the same tendency in the arts, if a rational procedure be used. When a tree cultivator, in his walks through woods and thickets, finds a sapling suitable for transplanting, he does not plant it in the same place where he finds it, but digs it out and places it in an orchard, where he cares for it in company with a hundred