Mental Discipline in Education. 417 



notion of mental gymnastics was borrowed from that of 

 bodily gymnastics. In early times, useful labor being re- 

 garded as menial and degrading, the superior classes sought 

 the activity needed for health in various artificial exercises. 

 The old Greek gymnastics was a system of athletic exer- 

 cises cultivated for the attainment of physical development, 

 and had no reference to the preparation of men for the oc- 

 cupations of industry. The ancient philosophers held that 

 it was as degrading to seek useful knowledge as to practice 

 useful arts; hence, subjects of study were chosen as intel- 

 lectual gymnastics and to acquire mental discipline, and 

 this, not as a preparation for valuable mental labor, but as 

 an end in itself. Not the game, but the excitement of the 

 chase ; not the truth, but the exhilaration of its pursuit, 

 were the mottoes of culture. Under these circumstances 

 no vulgar question of economy could arise ; mental power 

 was ostentatiously wasted, and with the necessary conse- 

 quences — truth unsought was not found ; the ends of cul- 

 ture being ignored, there was neither conquest of nature 

 nor progress of society. 



Not only does the principle of vicarious discipline in- 

 volve enormous mental waste, but the system of studies 

 employed to secure it grossly violates the great law of ac- 

 quisition, which should become the basis of education. 

 That system is neither an outgrowth of the proper educa- 

 tion of childhood, nor does it flow on into the intellectual 

 life of manhood : it is a foreign body of thought, uncon- 

 genial and unaffiliated, thrust into the academic pei'od, and 

 destroying the unity and continuity of the mental career. 

 The young student is xletached from all his early mental 

 connections, expatriated to Greece and Rome for a course 

 of years, becomes charged with antiquated ideas, and then 

 returns to resume his relation with the onflowing current 

 of events in his own age. The radical defect of the tra- 

 ditional system is, that it fails to recognize and grasp the 



