THE PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION. 111 
nature means heredity. Here again, therefore, we have 
another power in education to overcome inherited evil. If 
environment is the mould in which the mind may be cast, 
habit is the track along which it has to travel. Sow an act, 
reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character ; sow a character, 
reap a destiny. 
Observe again, habit is unconscious education. You say 
“Do this or that,” and you address consciousness; with the 
usual result that when your back is turned, the thing is not 
done, and there is continual friction and punishment. You 
form the habit in the unconscious mind of doing this or 
that, and, lo and behold, you have laid down a track along 
which the mind finds it easier and smoother to move than in 
any other directicn ; you have provided a physiological basis 
for the psychic action ; henceforth all is easy. 
Habit, therefore, is the second great force that acts on and 
educates the unconscious mind. 
The third and last is “ Education is a life.’ We do not 
know exactly what Matthew Arnold originally meant by 
this. Probably that education was a vital force. We take 
it here in another way. Just as the ‘atmosphere ” is the 
environment or mould, as “discipline” is the habit or rail- 
road, so “life” is the inspiration or ideal before the child. 
The atmos sphere moulds the mind, the discipline directs 
its course, and the life before it is its goal and ideal. By the 
life we mean the parents’ life, not the child’s. It is the 
parent that is the child’s unconscious (sometimes conscious) 
ideal, the child’s inspirer and model. “The unconscious 
action of example shapes those feelings which give the tone 
to the character.”’* 
We have, therefore, in the education of the unconscious, 
to vonsider these three things: the moulding or forming of 
the mind by environment; the action of the mind as dis- 
ciplned by habit; and lastly, looking on the mind as a 
living entity—the goal or ideal before it rather than around it. 
And now, leaving our three-fold text we would like, before 
finally saying good-bye to our subject, to give one or two 
hints respecting education more or less conscious; and the 
way in which the unconscious mind may be formed through 
the conscious. 
Herbert Spencer remarks, “We are on the highway to- 
wards the doctrine long ago enunciated by Pestalozzi, that 
* W. B. Carpenter, Mental Physiology, 4th edit., p. 353 
