6o Education and Innervation. 



blended, and so presently a complex idea is conceived and the 

 mind developed, and this development, like all others, is an 

 advance from the indefinite to the definite. In common with 

 the rest of the organism, the brain only reaches its finished 

 structure at maturity, and in proportion as its structure is 

 incomplete, so its actions are wanting in precision. So it has 

 been put " like the first movements and attempts at speech, the 

 first perceptions are extremely vague, as from a rudimentary 

 eye, discerning only the difference between light and darkness, 

 the progress is to an eye that distinguishes kinds and gradations 

 of colour and details of form with the greatest exactness, so the 

 intellect, as a whole, and in each faculty, beginning with the 

 rudest discriminations among objects and actions advances 

 towards discriminations of increasing nicety and distinction. 

 To this general law our educational course and methods must 

 conform. So the perfection of intellectual education is the 

 utilisation of all the senses in the acquisition of knowledge, 

 the transmission of impressions from these portals to the central 

 office — the brain — and, as a consequence, the broadening and 

 deepening of the powers of the mind. 



We have now to consider the connection between moral 

 education and innervation, and as to moral education, I 

 must ask you to understand and interpret the expression 

 in the broadest possible way — viz., that the best way to the 

 highest moral training is that indicated by Nature herself; 

 and that is, that effect follows cause, and hence that the 

 consequences of conduct cannot be ignored, intensified, or 

 avoided. Moral education, therefore, appeals directly to 

 the common sense or intelligence of the individual, so in 

 the first place there is an information, conveyed by means of 

 verbal instruction, and in the second, an appeal to the 

 mind — the affective impressionability by means of rewards and 

 punishments. Now, the fundamental element of an instruction 

 consists in a commandment, a precept, and we find that there 

 exists in man a corresponding element, which is the faculty to 

 act or abstain from action — that is, the power to will to do, or 



