68 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. IX., No. 207 



employed, and also on keeping the emotions under 

 due control. Judgments should be clear, accurate, 

 prompt, stable, independent. Clear and sound 

 reasoning depends on clear and sound judgments ; 

 on the clear understanding of the relations be- 

 tween judgments and the terms employed ; and 

 on clear attention and imagination (involving dis- 

 crimination), which keep vividly present the rela- 

 tions of the ideas and the objects with which we 

 are concerned. Fallacies arise mainly from mis- 

 taken ideas of identity or similarity. 



Here I should like to quote the whole of Mr. 

 Sully's section on the training of the powers of 

 judgment and reasoning, the subject is so difficult, 

 and what he says is so clear and sound. Children, 

 as we know, delight in exaggeration : nothing is 

 so attractive to them as vividness and picturesque- 

 ness of statement. Their fancies are active. Their 

 curiosity, except as to what directly helps fancy, 

 is fluctuating and easily satisfied. The anthropo- 

 morphic nature of many of their views about 

 nature is startling to those who have forgotten 

 their own childood. To step in, and seek to- re- 

 press and change and destroy all this, is to act in 

 distinct opposition to the teaching of nature, — a 

 proceeding which some teachers already recognize 

 as ill-advised and unsafe. Surely a teacher who 

 would destroy a child's delight in fairyland, or its 

 happy belief that its pet dog understood every 

 thing said to it, and the like unjustifiable ideas, 

 would deserve a punishment but little less than 

 that of old inflicted on traitors. Again : unless 

 the child himself forms the judgments ajid does 

 the reasoning, there is no exercise of his faculties, 

 and therefore no development. But his experi- 

 ence is very small, and his conclusions can seldom 

 be justifiable, even when correct. It cannot be 

 right to encourage him to generalize from insuffi- 

 cient data, and to reason without clear discrimina- 

 tion. In the face of these difiiculties, I should 

 advise that we be not in too great a hurry to give 

 a systematic training to the reasoning faculty. 

 The eleventh or twelfth year would be quite early 

 enough, I think, to begin. Meanwhile there is 

 much work to be done in exercising the senses, 

 attention, memory, imagination, and conception ; 

 while the exercise of judgment, which the later 

 stages of this work will introduce, will be quite 

 enough, at first, for our needs, ^y all means, let 

 us encourage the child's curiosity by affording 

 him the means of feeding and satisfying it. If 

 rightly treated, it will grow by what it feeds 

 upon. When the child cannot, of himself, attain 

 to the knowledge requisite, let us, using a wise 

 discretion, give him an explanation such as he can 

 understand. In this way we shall not interfere 

 with his fancies, though they, in some cases, when 



too vagrant and emotional, must be gently 

 checked. Difference in the temi^erament of chil- 

 dren should make a difference in their treatment. 

 " But " — and here Mr. Sully speaks — " the train- 

 ing of the reasoning powers includes more than 

 the answering of the spontaneous questionings of 

 children. The learners must be questioned, in their 

 turn, as to the causes of what happens about them. 

 A child cannot be too soon familiarized with the 

 truth that every thing has its cause and its explana- 

 tion. The mother, or teacher, should aim at fixing 

 a habit of inquiry in the young mind, by repeatedly 

 directing his attention to occurrences, and encour- 

 aging him to find out how they take place. He 

 must be induced to go back to his past experiences, 

 to search for analogies, in order to explain the 

 new event. The systematic training of the 

 reasoning-powers must aim at avoiding the errors 

 incident to the processes of induction and deduc- 

 tion. Thus, children must be warned against 

 hasty induction, against taking a mere accidental 

 accompaniment for a condition or cause, against 

 overlooking this plurality of causes. This sys- 

 tematic guidance of the child's inductive processes 

 will be much better carried on by one who has 

 studied the rules of inductive logic. In like man- 

 ner the teacher should seek to direct the young 

 reasoner in drawing conclusions from principles, 

 by pointing out to him the limits of a rule, by 

 helping him to distinguish between cases that do, 

 and those that do not, fall under it, and by famil- 

 iarizing him with the dangers that lurk in ambig- 

 uous language ; and here some of the rules of 

 deductive logic will be found useful." Finally, 

 the best subject-matter on which to exercise the 

 child at first will be that connected with common 

 every-day knowledge. Speaking broadly, physi- 

 cal science will best supply us with inductive ex- 

 ercises, and mathematics with deductive exer- 

 cises. In some subjects of the former, such as 

 botany, chemistry, and physiology, his work will 

 be almost wholly inductive : in some of the 

 latter, such as arithmetic and algebra, his work 

 will be almost wholly deductive. 



H, COURTHOPE BOWEN. 



THE NATURAL METHOD OF TEACHING 

 LANGUAGES. 



The article on "The 'natural method' of lan- 

 guage-teaching," in Science and education for Dec. 

 24, closes with the remark that conservatism is 

 not always to be decried, and all innovation is not 

 necessarily good. This thought is so correct that 

 nobody could justly object to it ; and, if all other 

 observations made by the opponents of the natural 

 method be of equal soundness, the cause of this 



