32 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



vidual differences. Only in this way will the child come to view the 

 commands and prohibitions of his parent or his teacher as representing 

 and expressing a permanent and unalterable moral law, which is per- 

 fectly impartial in its approvals and disapprovals. 



The effect of any system of discipline in educating and strengthen- 

 ing the moral feelings and judgment will depend on the spirit and 

 temper in which it is enforced. On the one hand, a measure of calm 

 becomes the judicial function, and a parent or teacher carried away by 

 violent feeling is unfit for moral control. Hence everything like petty 

 personal feeling, as vindictiveness, triumph, and so forth, should be 

 rigorously excluded. 



On the other hand, the moral educator must not, in administering 

 discipline, appear as a cold, impersonal abstraction. He must represent 

 the august and rigorously impartial moral law, but in representing it 

 he must prove himself a living personality capable of being deeply 

 pained at the sight of wrong-doing. By so doing he may foster the 

 love of right by enlisting on his side the child's warmer feelings of 

 love and respect for a concrete personality. The child should first be 

 led to feel how base it is to lie, and how cowardly to injure a weak 

 and helpless creature, by witnessing the distress it causes his beloved 

 parent or teacher. In like manner he should be led on to feel the no- 

 bility of generosity and self-sacrifice by witnessing the delight which 

 it brings his moral teacher. 



It is hardly necessary to add, perhaps, that this infusion of morality 

 with a warm sympathetic reflection of the educator's feelings presup- 

 poses the action of that moral atmosphere which surrounds a good per- 

 sonality. The child only fully realizes the repugnance of a lie to his 

 parent or teacher when he comes to regard him as himself a perfect 

 embodiment of truth. The moral educator must appear as the con- 

 sistent respecter of the moral law in all his actions. 



The training of the moral faculty in a self-reliant mode of feeling 

 and judging includes the habitual exercise of the sympathetic feelings, 

 together with the powers of judgment. And here much may be done 

 by the educator in directing the child's attention to the effects of his 

 conduct. The injurious consequences of wrong-doing and the benefi- 

 cent results of right-doing ought to be made clear to the child, and his 

 feelings enlisted against the one and on the side of the other. Not 

 only so, his mind should be exercised in comparing actions so as to dis- 

 cover the common grounds and principles of right and wrong, and also 

 in distinguishing between like actions under different circumstances, so 

 that he may become rational and discriminative in pronouncing moral 

 judgment. 



What is called moral instruction should in the first stages of educa- 

 tion consist largely of presenting to the child's mind examples of duty 

 and virtue, with a view to call forth his moral feelings as well as to 

 exercise his moral judgment. His own little sphere of observation 



