THE PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION. 109 
which is hurt, to repair the damages of bad usage and 
disease, but so to train the growing tissues, and to guide 
the grown ones as that the best use may be made of them 
for the purposes of life. She not only heals, she governs and 
educates.” Surely the poetic spirit could not idealize a 
science further; with the effect, however, for those who do 
not turn it into prose, that the real agent—the unconscious 
mind—is unrecognized. 
“Nor,” he continues, “does she do otherwise when she 
comes to deal with the nervous tissues. Nay, it is the very 
prerogative of these nervous tissues, that their life is above 
that of all the other tissues, contingent on the environment 
and susceptibility of education.” 
To return to Arnold. “Education is an atmosphere ’— 
what the mind breathes. The air that we breathe is the 
medium that surrounds us; the atmosphere our spirits 
breathe is the medium that surround them; in short, it is 
our environment. 
The surroundings of a man are those influences, material 
or immaterial, which form the atmosphere in which he lives ; 
which gives colour to his daily life; and, often themselves 
unseen, are present with him for good or evil throughout the 
whole term of his existence. They affect and alter his 
nature and his happiness.* 
A little child is fluid, plastic, receptive. There are two 
ways of imprinting upon him the shape and outlines you 
desire as the result of your education. The one a conscious 
and perceptual, the other unconscious and atmospheric. If 
I wish to cast a bronze statue, I do not trouble about the 
bronze; all my care is about the mould. Every line, every 
curve I wish to see on the statue must be traced there, and 
it is on the perfection of the mould that the beauty of the 
statue depends. I pour in the liquid bronze. The mould is 
its environment. Left in there long enough it fills every 
curve, every line, and reproduces all its features. I break 
the mould, and there is the statue—the outcome of its sur- 
roundings. Again, I wish to mould the child. Education 
is an atmosphere, an environment—that is,an education of 
the unconscious mind. This then is my first great educa- 
tional force; and this shall overcome the lines of hereditary 
evil or defect. I spend all my time in perfecting my mould; 
in other words, in seeing that the child’s surroundings are 
* Dr. Jas. Pollock Book of Health, pp. 519, 520, 
