6 ON ELEMENTARY EDUCATION. 



The superior feelings include the moral sentiments by excellence ; 

 those which lead man to love his neighbour, to respect his neigh- 

 bour's rights, and to love, obey, and adore his God ; in terms, bene- 

 volence, justice, and veneration or piety. The exercise of these 

 three feelings constitutes natural ethics. Actions are good or evil 

 according as they agree or disagree with their dictates. It consti- 

 tutes, not less, the ethics of Christianity, which, as Bishop Butler 

 has said^ is a republication of the ethics of Nature — is the law in 

 the mind with which, according to the apostle, the law in the mem- 

 bers wars, but to which is given, both by Nature and Scripture, a 

 supremacy and control, the exercise of which is justice. This, in 

 scriptural language, is " to do justly, to love mercy, and walk 

 humbly with God." Moral education, then, will exercise and im- 

 prove these three high controlling powers, and thereby elevate the 

 character. To the higher feelings likewise belong firmness or 

 endurance of purpose, hope, ideality, for the beautiful and sublime, 

 the ludicrous, and imitation. Both the inferior and superior feel- 

 ings are emotions, and are also desires leading to acts for their gra- 

 tification. 



Intellectually the knowing faculties acquire knowledge. They 

 include the five senses, the power of observing existencies and 

 events, or things that are and things that happen, under one or 

 other of which categories all our knowledge must be found. Intel- 

 lectual education will improve the senses, as the informants of the 

 mind of certain qualities of matter, and cultivate and start the ob- 

 serving powers with the knowledge of the external world and its 

 changes. Lastly, the reflecting powers compare and deduce, or rea- 

 son upon the knowledge with which the knowing faculties are 

 stored. Every human faculty has its relative object in external 

 Nature, to the quality and constitution of which it is beautifully 

 adapted. 



From the sketch now given of man's constitution in body and 

 mind, it will at once appear that the teacher of youth should know 

 and communicate to his pupil a knowledge of the relations which 

 exist between that constitution and the creation in which man is 

 placed. He will find that creation is in the most harmonious rela- 

 tions to man's nature — that as light is related to the structure of 

 the eye, air to the ear, to the lungs, and the blood, so are human 

 appetites and sentiments to their respective objects. The three-fold 

 division of elementary education into physical, moral, and intellec- 

 tual, offers itself at once to the mind when satisfied of the truth of 

 the foregoing observations. The three departments will proceed 



