764 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



habit ; the great point is to reconcile such vigilance with the lib- 

 erty which its spontaneous development demands. 



The progress of voluntary motions reaches its goal when they 

 are willed, so to speak, in all their parts, going to their clearly 

 conceived end by the simplest ways, with the greatest precision 

 and accuracy. Then there is no more fortuitous or indeter- 

 minate motion, no more expenditure of useless force. Such a 

 triumph of reflective activity may be observed, for example, in 

 the accurate designer. Those know how much time and pains it 

 takes to reach that point who, trying to teach children to write, 

 have seen them at seven or eight, or more, years old, twist them- 

 selves, make faces, stick out their tongue, pucker their lips, and 

 make ten useless movements to one useful one. This brings us 

 back to the important fact that inhibition of noxious or useless 

 acts, of automatic motions having no necessary relation to the 

 willed act, is an essential element of the progress of mobility. 



This is equally the case in the progress of the will generally. 

 In morals, too, when the act consists as much in the inner resolu- 

 tion as in the motion that carries it out, while the will may begin 

 by being a hardly conscious effort of desire tending toward its 

 object, it will end by being to a large extent the contrary or a 

 conscious and intentional restraint, a spontaneous inhibition. I 

 say spontaneous ; but a long time will pass before the child be- 

 comes capable of controlling himself, of spontaneously resisting 

 his impulses and desires ; he will have to be helped in it at first. 



It is the office of education to put the first check upon some of 

 these impulses to the advantage of others, to oppose thought to 

 thought, tendency to tendency, and fear to desire. That is why 

 the subjection of children to a firm discipline is always the begin- 

 ning of education. To resist them is to hold them up. To bend 

 them to a rule, as broad as you please, but inflexible as to what it 

 prohibits, to prevent their doing what ought not to be done, to 

 exact from them only what is necessary, but exact it firmly, is to 

 prepare them to govern themselves. 



But, so far as the inhibition is not the child's own act, it is not 

 an act of the will. It does not become that till after having been 

 imposed often from without, and, having thereby become less pain- 

 ful, it is appreciated by the child itself for its results, and the will 

 becomes the possessor of it. This is the reason that while the 

 earliest discipline should be firm, it must nevertheless be broad 

 and liberal, and become more and more so as the reasoning fac- 

 ulty is developed. I call broad and at the same time firm a 

 discipline which, without yielding anything to caprice, or to 

 the unregulated and tyrannical demands of the child, purposely 

 avoids loading him down with prescriptions and prohibitions, and 

 leaves him as much elbow-room as possible in order to accustom 



