THE PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION. 107 
cesses of the household, the streets and the fields is becoming 
totally exhausted, only then shall a child be ee to 
new sources of information which books supply.”* 
Anyone reading the above condensed passage will see 
that the self-education which H. Spencer here commends is 
largely, and in its earlier stages, acquired wholly uncon- 
sciously. 
Now let us see the results of a perverted or bad education 
of the unconscious from the same author: “ What kind of 
moral culture is to be expected from a mother who shakes 
her infant because it will not take its food? How much 
sense of justice is likely to be instilled by a father, who, 
hearing his child scream because its finger is jammed 
between the window sash and the sill, begins to beat it?” 
‘Who has not seen a child repeatedly slapped by nurse or 
parent for a fretfulness arising from bodily der ‘angement ? 
Are not the constant and often quite needless thwartings 
that the young experience—the injunctions to sit still, which 
an active child cannot obey without suffering great nervous 
irritation, the command not to look out of the window when 
travelling, ete., signs of a terrible lack of sympathy ? ”T 
There are few of us but could extend these imstances 
almost indefinitely; but enough have been given to show 
what is meant by the bad education of the unconscious mind. 
Here the education is given to the child probably uncon- 
sciously by the parent, and certainly the evil is absorbed 
unconsciously by the child; and when, in later years, it 
turns out a tyrant or a bully, there are few who will see 
that the source of this developed character is this early 
mal-education of the unconscious mind. And yet so it is. 
Is there, then, to be no discipline in education? Certainly 
there is; but not where not needed, and not capricious and 
arbitrary in its character. What it should be we will speak 
of further on. 
Having thus surveyed the ground generally, let us con- 
sider what are the true methods of unconscious education. 
Matthew Arnold himself, perhaps, hardly knew when he 
framed the sentence, “ Education is an atmosphere, a 
discipline, a life,’ how much it contained. ‘To us its essential 
value is that it points out the true methods and principles of 
the education of the unconscious mind, An “ atmosphere” 
* Herbert Spencer, Education, p. 26. 
+ Ibid., p. 98. 
