464 



SCIJJJN'CE. 



[Vol. IX., No. 223 



tially explained by the teacher's better knowledge, 

 and with an increase of the power of seeing and 

 know^ing and correlating. 



Such, I think, is the function of the primary 

 school as the nurse of feeling and the home of train- 

 ing, but not, as I have said, wholly without dis- 

 cipline. The voice of authority must always be 

 heard. The child must learn that he lives and 

 must live under law. The merely intellectual 

 discipline is sufficiently insured by the acquisition 

 of the subsidiary attainments of reading, writing, 

 drawing, arithmetic, etc. 



II. At the age of approaching puberty (about 

 fourteen) we pass into a new sphere. At this age 

 the boy tends to become boisterous, and the girl 

 skittish. Our work now is mainly governed by 

 the purpose of discipline. Law now meets and 

 controls the turbulence of the phase through 

 which the human spirit is passing. Nutrition, it 

 is true, is never to be absent — nutrition which is 

 possible alone through the real of inner feeling, 

 and the real of outer nature ; but if the founda- 

 tions of the real have not been laid in the primary 

 period, I doubt our success now. Opportunity is 

 offered once to all. It may never be offered a 

 second time. The teacher, at least, must assume 

 this. The nutrition to be given now is the nutri- 

 tion of law and duty. 



Nature seems now to yearn for activity. The 

 boy is no longer so ready to receive impressions as 

 to make them. His will, or what he mistakes for 

 his will, comes to the front, and in bodily and 

 mental matters alike he loves to do. He cannot 

 bear being talked to or talked at. He has opinions 

 now. He judges with imbecile self-complacency 

 things and men. He wants to show what he is, 

 and what he can do. How are we to meet this ? 

 ReaUy a difficult question. For we have, above 

 all things, to let him grow, and growth is not 

 possible with suppression : nay, suppression at this 

 stage enslaves and converts the less bold into 

 skulks and sneaks, and the more bold into eva- 

 sive dodgers paltering with the truth, and both 

 into contemners of the pure and good. Here the 

 boy himself points the way to the teacher. Work 

 is what he needs, and wants. Let him have it. 

 Let him be brought to face difficulties in learning, 

 and, though some of the subjects want the at- 

 traction of the real, let him learn to master them 

 by sheer force. Formal studies, — languages and 

 mathematics, — with the rudiments of which he 

 has been conversant in the latter portion of 

 his primary stage, must now occupy more than 

 one-half of his time. His specific moral life, 

 again, can now no longer be stimulated or fos- 

 tered by sentiment, as when he was a child, but 

 only indirectly, and that by intercourse with 



moral ideals in conduct. This is the age which can 

 appreciate heroism, and understand the sterner 

 and heroic virtues. So with ideals in the things of 

 intellect and literary imagination. Art in literature 

 will unconsciously impress him and mould him. 

 We must not always improve upon the lessons : 

 we must let him draw his own inferences. I be- 

 lieve much in literature at this stage as the 

 chief real or nutritive element, in its silent influ- 

 ence on character, much more than I believe in 

 the real of nature as presented in elementary 

 science, because the concrete idea is not in it. 

 This last too, however, must have its due and 

 daily place. The order observable in the external 

 world may possibly help to bring order into the 

 internal chaos, which at present constitutes the 

 boy, spite of all his pretentiousness and conceit. 



But not only is his rampant will to be brought 

 in contact with the hardships of intellectual work 

 that it may face and overpower ; his body also 

 must be allowed its full activity. In gymnastic, 

 and, above all, in organized games, he should find 

 an outlet, and also a discipline, — the discipline 

 of difficulties overcorqe and of law obeyed. 



Thus between fourteen and eighteen we grad- 

 ually subject the boy to law, and give him the 

 priceless possession of concrete ideals in conduct 



— great personalities — and of art in literature. 

 He is thus tamed, if not subjugated ; and, when he 

 approaches the gates of the university, his brave 

 show of self-importance, were he dissected thor- 

 oughly, would be found to be hollow at the heart, 

 and to mean little more than the walking-canes, 

 neckties, and general masherdom by means of 

 which he harmlessly works it off to the admira- 

 tion of that other half of humanity, whom, for- 

 merly despised with all a boy's contempt, he now 

 desires above aU to attract. Desires to attract, I 

 say ; for it is not the fairer half of creation he is 

 yet t Bin king of, but of himself alone as an irre- 

 sistible object of admiration to that fairer half, 



— an excellent arrangement of nature, for thereby 

 he forms an ideal of what he ought to be by see- 

 ing himself through the rapt eyes of imaginary 

 admirers. 



HI. He is within the academic gates, and we 

 have now to ask what is the function of the 

 university in regard of him. I may be heretical, 

 but I do not believe the university forms char- 

 acter. Character, in all its essential features, is 

 already formed in the young matriculant. The 

 home and the school have done this. The univer- 

 sity may supplement their work : it cannot do it. 



The function of the university has more close 

 relation to that of the primary school than to 

 that of the secondary school. Its aim is like that 

 of the primary school, chiefly nutrition, but no 



