

EDUCATION. 



governed by a strong wilL He must be taught 

 to have faith in his educator. He must learn 

 obedience. But the educator must take care to 

 act justly. His business is much more to put the 

 child right than to punish him for doing wrong. 

 There should be as few prohibitory enactments as 

 possible ; and the positive commands should be 

 limited in number, and such that the child can 

 understand and fulfil them without any serious 

 difficulty. And the educator must be cautious 

 in determining whether the child has done wrong. 

 For instance, we have seen that the power of 

 imagination is great. The power of expres- 

 sion is, on the other hand, small. It is, there- 

 fore, not to be expected that the child will state 

 facts exactly as they are. He does not see 

 them as they are, and he could not express 

 his impressions exactly, even if he had seen 

 them. Moreover, it is a well-known fact, that 

 many children cannot well distinguish what they 

 have seen in dreams and what they have seen in 

 reality. And it is easy to see that they must 

 sometimes confound their day-dreams with the 

 realities of life. All these considerations should 

 make the educator hesitate before he accuse 

 a child of lying. In very many cases the supposed 

 lie is a mere effort of imagination, mistaken for 

 reality, or a failure to express exactly what the 

 child knows. 



We have lingered long enough, however, on 

 this stage, and we must proceed now to the more 

 general question of the formation of character by 

 the educator. 



In character there are three main constituent 

 elements. It is essential that the person should 

 have noble ends in view, that he should know 

 what are the best means to accomplish these 

 ends, and that he should have a strong desire to 

 accomplish them. This statement of the case 

 shews that enlightenment is absolutely necessary 

 to a high morality. The person must know for 

 what purposes life is given, and this implies 

 insight into the complex constitution of man. 

 For at every moment man has to be active. 

 Some portions of his nature must be carrying on 

 their functions. Occasionally it may be only his 

 vegetative powers ; often it is his whole intellec- 

 tual and emotional nature. There are, as we 

 have seen, gradations in these powers. The 

 spiritual is superior to the animal. But the ani- 

 mal powers demand a due share of attention ; 

 and with the healthy exercise of any of the 

 powers of man comes pleasure. Accordingly, a 

 man who wishes to carry out the full exercise of 

 his functions, has to value the activity of each 

 function, and to put it in its proper place. And 

 as these activities have often for their material 

 the outward circumstances by which the man is 

 surrounded, he must be able to take an accurate 

 estimate of these circumstances, of his own powers 

 in relation to them, and of the appropriate times 

 for acting on them. This leads us to the second 

 feature of character the proper employment of 

 means. If the person did not believe that the 

 means were within reach, and that his aim could 

 be accomplished, he would not will to act. A 

 belief in the means is therefore an essential con- 

 stituent of all volition and all action. But right 

 action consists in the adoption of the right means ; 

 and, therefore, the man who is to have a noble 

 character must observe carefully what are the 



best means to be employed in every special occa- 

 sion. But he must also have a desire for the 

 accomplishment of these noble ends. This desire 

 is the mainspring of his actions, the power that 

 impels to them ; and it is in this department 

 that the educator has to exert himself. For the 

 desires are peculiar in their method of growth. 

 A child does an action, which, by calling into play 

 his faculties, gives him pleasure. After the action 

 is over, he begins another and another. But a 

 time comes when he recollects the first with its 

 feeling of pleasure, and he wishes to do it again. 

 Accordingly, he does it again with renewed 

 pleasure, possibly with intensified pleasure. And 

 if this action is thus renewed again and again 

 with pleasure, the pleasure-representations in the 

 mind unite with and strengthen each other. At 

 length, the person thus affected likes to do the 

 action, and if the same process go on, he may 

 become passionately fond of doing it If he adds 

 to this pleasure-sensation the consciousness that 

 the action is higher and worthier than some other 

 actions, he will prefer to do the higher, when all 

 the other actions are possible to him. And ulti- 

 mately, he may deliberately choose the higher, 

 knowing it to be higher, although he will have to 

 keep under subjection, at considerable pain, some 

 of the lower desires which are craving attention 

 from him. But it is plain that this state can be 

 reached only after a lapse of many years. The 

 child passes through various stages of morality, 

 as he must pass through various stages of enlight- 

 enment ; and the educator has to remember that 

 actions which at a later stage would justly create 

 alarm, are at an earlier stage of no great import- 

 ance, except as symptoms of what is going on in 

 the mind of the child. As we have already seen, 

 the first stage of the child's morality is accom- 

 plished when he has learned to prefer the gratifi- 

 cation of his higher senses to the gratification of 

 the lower. No sooner does he attain a conscious 

 life, than by a necessity of the case he is very 

 much absorbed in his own concerns. His atten- 

 tion is directed to himself. But this state of 

 mind must be displaced by his affection for 

 father and mother, brother and sister; and this 

 affection must shew itself in actions of self-denial 

 for their comfort and pleasure. His nature, how- 

 ever, must not rest contented here. His affections 

 must expand, and gradually extend to all his 

 fellow-countrymen, and finally to all his fellow- 

 men. 



Now, for the production of all this, the first and 

 most powerful instrument is the educator's own 

 life. It is action that produces action ; it is love 

 that produces love. The mother's smiles and 

 tenderness breathe sweetness into the very soul of 

 the child, and subsequently, the teacher's justice, 

 energy, devotedness, and desires sway the young 

 mind with a power which words, however eloquent 

 or well chosen, can never equal. The education 

 of the child into desires is thus, to the child at 

 least, an unconscious education. And the edu- 

 cator himself must also often remain unconscious 

 of it. The most unguarded of his acts, those which 

 come from the depth of his nature uncalled for 

 and unbidden, are the actions which have the 

 most powerful influence. 



At the same time, the guardian can do a great 

 deal to put the child in the right course. There 

 are unfortunately endless deviations from the 



565 



