THE STUDY OF THE RELATIONS OF THINGS. 355 



"First Book" attempts to make a beginning only, yet it claims to 

 be"-in rigbt, and to teach botany as it should be taught, by making the 

 mind thoroughly familiar with the actual characters of plants. Train- 

 ing in observation, for its mental advantages, was an accompanying 

 purpose, because the conditions of the two perfectly coincide. 



Again, in her question, " Why is it so necessary to become familiar 

 with hundreds of specimens «Vi a given time?'''' Mrs. Jacobi would 

 commit me to the worst folly of current education — the time-limit in 

 acquisition, or what may be called " fourteen-weeks" science. From 

 the outset, and constantly, I have resisted this tendency, and have 

 claimed that the fullest time should be taken as the first condition of 

 real and permanent acquisition. As to the fourth proposition, I am 

 quite content to leave it as it was presented in my article in the 

 October Monthly. 



Fifthly, and finally, Mrs. Jacobi ascribes to me as " an axiom that 

 can not be disputed, that mental efi^ort should advance from the simple 

 subject to the more complex " ; and she adds, that this proposition " is 

 the one with which I most decidedly disagree." In arguing the point, 

 Mrs. Jacobi maintains that the historic advance of knowledge has not 

 always conformed to this principle. Very likely ; but I have never 

 said the law is everywhere observed. There are plenty of teachers 

 who have not the slightest idea of it, and plenty of school-books which 

 violate it, by putting the complex first, instead of leading up to it by 

 simple steps. But where ideas are perfectly clear, as with the relations 

 of number, experience enforces the principle ; every arithmetic pro- 

 ceeds from the simple to the complex. All this, however, is aside 

 from the question ; my contention has been simply that the principle 

 should not be violated in the mental cultivation of children. By the 

 title of her first articles, " An Experiment in Primary Education," 

 and the comments which followed, the difference between us related 

 only to the mental conditions of childhood ; but she here commits me 

 to a statement concerning mental effort in general. Had she intro- 

 duced the term juvenile to qualify " mental effort," she would have 

 properly described the case, and made superfluous much that she says 

 on the order of the evolution of knowledge. Assuming that there are 

 stages in the progress of the individual mind, the question is as to the 

 nature and educational significance of these successive stages, and 

 what kind of study is appropriate at one stage and inappropriate at 

 another. I see no way of getting light upon this matter and the prac- 

 tical points in issue, but by referring to the nature and constitution of 

 the mind and the laws of mental growth. Mrs, Jacobi maintains that 

 young children can profitably occupy their mind with things, facts, 

 data, but are mentally unfit for the study of relations in which science 

 consists ; an examination of the part played by relations in mental 

 structure and growth will therefore have an essential bearing upon 

 this discussion. 



