128 HEREDITY AND CHRISTIAN PROBLEMS 



teach them ; and what we succeed in teaching, at 

 least beyond the merest rudiments, will always be 

 proportionate to the knowledge we have the wit 

 to get from and about them." ^ 



So, too, a child who has never had home disci- 

 pline, or anything to awaken aspiration, needs 

 a special form of training ; his education is not 

 complete until he has learned obedience and his 

 eyes have been opened to higher things. The 

 child who is all imagination should, by proper 

 methods, be brought to understand that he is 

 human ; and I know no better way to teach a boy 

 that he is not to live by imagination alone than to 

 set him to the study of mathematics. On the 

 other hand, the pupil who is commonplace and 

 prosaic should have his life illuminated and ex- 

 panded by familiarity with imaginative literature, 

 especially poetry. 



Room for spontaneity should be left in all sys- 

 tems of education. Genius flowers in most unex- 

 pected places. Not always do children of fine 

 and quick aptitudes come from homes of culture. 

 Log-cabins produced Lincoln and Garfield. It is 

 the teacher with his eyes on the child-life, rather 

 than on so many pages of arithmetic or geogra- 

 phy, who will be able to detect the unique intellect 



1 North American Review, February, 1885. 



