THE

History of Education.

BY

GABRIEL COMPAYRÉ,

Deputy, Doctor of Letters, and Professor in the Normal School
of Fontenay-aux-Roses.

TRANSLATED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION,
NOTES, AND AN INDEX,

BY

W. H. PAYNE, A.M.,

Chancellor of the University of Nashville, and President of the
State Normal College; late Professor of the Science and the
Art of Teaching in the University of Michigan.

BOSTON:

D. C. HEATH & COMPANY.

1889.

Copyright, Sept. 30, 1885,

By W. H. PAYNE.

J. S. Cushing & Co., Printers, Boston.

[Pg iii]

[v]

[viii]
[ix]

[xxiii]

THE HISTORY OF PEDAGOGY.

[Pg 1]

THE

HISTORY OF PEDAGOGY.

1. Preliminary Considerations.—A German historian of philosophy begins his work by asking this question: “Was Adam a philosopher?” In the same way certain historians of pedagogy begin by learned researches upon the education of savages. We shall not carry our investigations so far back. Doubtless from the day when a human family began its existence, from the day when a father and a mother began to love their children, education had an existence. But there is very little practical interest in studying these obscure beginnings of pedagogy. It is a matter of erudition and curi[2]osity.[6] Besides the difficulty of gathering up the faint traces of primitive education, there would be but little profit in painfully following the slow gropings of primeval man. In truth, the history of pedagogy dates but from the period relatively recent, when human thought, in the matter of education, substituted reflection for instinct, art for blind nature. So we shall hasten to begin the study of pedagogy among the classical peoples, the Greeks and the Romans, after having thrown a rapid glance over some Eastern nations considered either in their birthplace and remote origin, or in their more recent development.

2. The Pedagogy of the Hindoos.—It would not be worth our while to enter into details respecting a civilization so different from our own as that of the Hindoos. But we should not forget that we are in part the descendants of that people, and that we belong to the same ethnic group, and that the European languages are derived from theirs.

3. Political Caste and Religious Pantheism.—The spirit of caste, from the social point of view, and pantheism, from the religious point of view, are the characteristics of Hindoo society. The Indian castes constituted hereditary[3] classes where social rank and special vocation were determined, not by free choice, but by the accident of birth. The consequence of this was an endless routine, with no care either for the individuality, or the personal talents, or the inclination of children, and without the possibility of rising by personal effort above one’s rank in life.[7] On the other hand, religious ideas came to restrict, within the limits where it was already imprisoned, the activity of the young Hindoo. God is everywhere present; he manifests himself in all the phenomena of heaven and earth, in the sun and in the stars, in the Himalayas and in the Ganges; he penetrates and animates everything; the things of sense are but the changing and ephemeral vestments of the unchangeable being. “With this pantheistic conception of the world and of life, the thought and the will of the Hindoo perished in the mystic contemplation of the soul. To become master of one’s inclinations; to abandon every terrestrial thought; after this life to lose one’s identity, and to be annihilated by absorption in the divine nature; to prepare one’s self by macerations and expiations for complete submersion in the original principle of all being,—this is the highest wisdom, the true happiness of the Hindoo, the ideal of all serious education.”[8]

[4]

4. Effects on Education.—It is easy to predict what education would become under the weight of these double chains, social and religious. While the ideal in our modern societies is more and more to enfranchise the individual, and to create for him personal freedom and self-consciousness, the effort of the Hindoo Brahmins consisted above all in crushing out all spontaneity, in abolishing individual predilections, by preaching the doctrine of absolute self-renunciation, of voluntary abasement, and of contempt for life. Man was thus born doubly a slave,—by his social condition, which predestinated him to the routine apprenticeship of his ancestral caste, and by his mysterious dependence on the divine being who absorbed in himself all real activity, and left to human beings only the deceptive and frail appearance of it.

5. Buddhist Reform.—The Buddhist reform, which so profoundly affected Brahmanism at about the sixth century B.C., did not sensibly modify, from the educational point of view, the ideas of the Hindoos. Buddha also taught that the cause of evil resides in the passions of men, and that in order to attain moral peace, there is no other means to be employed than that of self-abnegation and of the renouncement of everything selfish and personal.

6. Conversation of Buddha and Purna.—One of the traditions which permit us the better to appreciate the original character, at once affecting and ingenuous, of Indian thought, is the conversation of Buddha with his disciple Purna about a journey the latter was going to undertake to the barbarians for the purpose of teaching them the new religion:—

“They are men,” said Buddha, “who are fiery in temper, passionate, cruel, furious, insolent. If they openly address[5] you in words which are malicious and coarse, and become angry with you, what will you think?”

“If they address me to my face in coarse and insolent terms, this is what I shall think: they are certainly good men who openly address me in malicious terms, but they will neither strike me with their hands nor stone me.”

“But should they strike you with their hands and stone you, what will you think?”

“I shall think that they are good men, gentle men, who strike me with their hands and stone me, but do not beat me with a club nor with a sword.”

“But if they beat you with a club and with a sword?”

“They are good men, gentle men, who beat me with a club and with a sword, but they do not completely kill me.”

“But if they were really to kill you?”

“They are good men, gentle men, who deliver me with so little pain from this body encumbered with defilements.”

“Very good, Purna! You may live in the country of those barbarians. Go, Purna! Being liberated, liberate; being consoled, console; having reached Nirvâna thus made perfect, cause others to go there.”[9]

Whatever there is to admire in such a strange system of morals should not blind us to the vices which resulted from its practical consequences: such as the abuse of passive resignation, the complete absence of the idea of right and of justice, and no active virtues.

7. Effects on Education.—Little is known of the actual state of educational practice among the Hindoos. It may be said, however, that the Brahmins, the priests, had the exclusive charge of education. Woman, in absolute subjection to man, had no share whatever in instruction.

[6]

As to boys, it seems that in India there were always schools for their benefit; schools which were held in the open country under the shade of trees, or, in case of bad weather, under sheds. Mutual instruction has been practised in India from the remotest antiquity; it is from here, in fact, that Andrew Bell, at the close of the eighteenth century, borrowed the idea of this mode of instruction. Exercises in writing were performed first upon the sand with a stick, then upon palm leaves with an iron style, and finally upon the dry leaves of the plane-tree with ink. In discipline there was a resort to corporal punishment; besides the rod the teacher employed other original means of correction; for example, he threw cold water on the offender. The teacher, moreover, was treated with a religious respect; the child must respect him as he would Buddha himself.

The higher studies were reserved for the priestly class, who, long before the Christian era, successfully cultivated rhetoric and logic, astronomy and the mathematics.

8. Education among the Israelites.—“If ever a people has demonstrated the power of education, it is the people of Israel.”[10] In fact, what a singular spectacle is offered us by that people, which, dispossessed of its own country for eighteen hundred years, has been dispersed among the nations without losing its identity, and has maintained its existence without a country, without a government, and without a ruler, preserving with perennial energy its habits, its manners, and its faith! Without losing sight of the part of that extraordinary vitality of the Jewish people, which is due to the natural endowments of the race, its tenacity of temperament, and its wonderful activity of intelligence, it is just to attribute another part of it to the sound education,[7] at once religious and national, which the ancient Hebrews have transmitted by tradition to their descendants.

9. Education, Religious and National, during the Primitive Period.—The chief characteristic of the education of the Hebrews in the earliest period of their history is that it was essentially domestic. During the whole Biblical period there is no trace of public schools, at least for young children. Family life is the origin of that primitive society where the notion of the state is almost unknown, and where God is the real king.

The child was to become the faithful servant of Jehovah. To this end it was not needful that he should be learned. It was only necessary that he should learn through language and the instructive example of his parents the moral precepts and the religious beliefs of the nation. It has been very justly said[11] that “among all nations the direction impressed on education depends on the idea which they form of the perfect man. Among the Romans it is the brave soldier, inured to fatigue, and readily yielding to discipline; among the Athenians it is the man who unites in himself the happy harmony of moral and physical perfection; among the Hebrews the perfect man is the pious, virtuous man, who is capable of attaining the ideal traced by God himself in these terms: ‘Ye shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy!’”[12]

The discipline was harsh, as is proved by many passages in the Bible: “He that spareth his rod, hateth his son,” say the Proverbs; “but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.”[13] “Withhold not correction from the child, for if[8] thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell.”[14] And still more significant: “Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying.”[15]

Only boys, it seems, learned to read and write. As to girls, they were taught to spin, to weave, to prepare food for the table, to superintend the work of the household, and also to sing and to dance.

In a word, intellectual culture was but an incident in the primitive education of the Hebrews; the great thing, in their eyes, was moral and religious instruction, and education in love of country. Fathers taught their children the nation’s history, and the great events that had marked the destiny of the people of God. That series of events celebrated by the great feasts which were often renewed, and in which the children participated, served at once to fill their hearts with gratitude to God and with love for their country.

10. Progress of Popular Instruction.—It is not easy to conceive to what extent the zeal for instruction was developed among the ancient Jews in the years that followed the advent of Christianity. From being domestic, as it had been up to that time, Jewish education became public. Besides, it was no longer sufficient to indoctrinate children with good principles and wholesome moral habits; they must also be instructed. From the first centuries of the Christian era, the Israelites approached our modern ideal, with respect to making education obligatory and universal. Like every brave nation that has been vanquished, whose energy has survived defeat, like the Prussians after Jena, or the French after 1870, the Jews sought to defend themselves against the effects of conquest by a great intellectual effort,[9] and to regain their lost ground by the development of popular instruction.

11. Organization of Schools.—In the year 64, the high priest, Joshua Ben Gamala, imposed on each town, under pain of excommunication, the obligation to support a school. If the town is cut in two by a river, and there is no means of transit by a safe bridge, a school must be established on each side. Even to-day we are far from having realized, as regards the number of schools and of teachers, this rule stated in the Talmud: If the number of children does not exceed twenty-five, the school shall be conducted by a single teacher; for more than twenty-five, the town shall employ an assistant; if the number exceeds forty, there shall be two masters.

12. Respect for Teachers.—In that ancient time, what an exalted and noble conception men had of teachers, “those true guardians of the city”! Even then, how exacting were the requirements made of them! But, on the other hand, how they were esteemed and respected! The Rabbins required that the schoolmaster should be married; they mistrusted teachers who were not at the same time heads of families. Is it possible to enforce the advantages of maturity and experience more delicately than in this beautiful language? “He who learns of a young master is like a man who eats green grapes, and drinks wine fresh from the press; but he who has a master of mature years is like a man who eats ripe and delicious grapes, and drinks old wine.” Mildness, patience, and unselfishness were recommended as the ruling virtues of the teacher. “If your teacher and your father,” says the Talmud, “have need of your assistance, help your teacher before helping your father, for the latter has given you only the life of this[10] world, while the former has secured for you the life of the world to come.”[16]

13. Method and Discipline.—The child entered school at the age of six. “If a child below the age of six is brought to your school,” says the Talmud, “you need not receive him”; and to indicate that after that age it is proper to regain the lost time, the Talmud adds, “After the age of six, receive the child, and load him like an ox.” On the contrary, other authorities of the same period, more judicious and far-seeing, recommend moderation in tasks, and say that it is necessary to treat “the young according to their strength, and the grown-up according to theirs.”

There was taught in the Jewish schools, along with reading and writing,[17] a little of natural history, and a great deal of geometry and astronomy. Naturally, the Bible was the first book put in the hands of children. The master interspersed moral lessons with the teaching of reading. He made a special effort to secure a correct pronunciation, and multiplied his explanations in order to make sure of being understood, repeating his comments even to the four-hundredth time if it were necessary. It seems that the methods were suggestive and attractive, and the discipline relatively mild. There were but few marks of the proverbial severity of the ancient times. “Children,” says the Talmud, “should be punished with one hand, and caressed with two.” The Christian spirit, the spirit of him who had said “suffer the[11] little children to come unto me,” had affected the Jews themselves. However, corporal punishment was tolerated to a certain extent, but, strange to say, only for children above the age of eleven. In case of disobedience, a pupil above that age might be deprived of food, and even struck with a strap of shoe-leather.

14. Exclusive and Jealous Spirit.—Some reservation must accompany the encomiums justly due Jewish education. With respect to the rest of the human race, the Jewish spirit was mean, narrow, and malevolent. The Israelites of this day have retained something of these jealous and exclusive tendencies. At the beginning of the Christian era, the fierce and haughty patriotism of the Jews led them to proscribe whatever was of Gentile origin, whatever had not the sanction of the national tradition. Nothing of Greek or Roman culture penetrated this closed world.[18] The Jewish doctors covered with the same contempt him who raises hogs and him who teaches his son Greek science.

15. Education among the Chinese.—We have attempted to throw into relief the educational practices of two Eastern nations to which the civilization of the West is most intimately related. A few words will suffice for the other primitive societies whose history is too little known, and whose civilization is too remote from our own, to make their plans of education anything more than an object of curiosity.

[12]

China has been civilized from time immemorial, and at every period of her long history she has preserved her national characteristics. For more than three thousand years an absolute uniformity has characterized this immobile people. Everything is regulated by tradition. Education is mechanical and formal. The preoccupation of teachers is to cause their pupils to acquire a mechanical ability, a regular and sure routine. They care more for appearances, for a decorous manner of conduct, than for a searching and profound morality. Life is but a ceremonial, minutely determined and punctually followed. There is no liberty, no glow of spontaneity. Their art is characterized by conventional refinement and by a prettiness that seems mean; there is nothing of the grand and imposing. By their formalism, the Chinese educators are the Jesuits of the East.

16. Lâo-tsze and Khung-tsze.—Towards the sixth century B.C. two reformers appeared in China, Lâo-tsze and Khung-tsze. The first represents the spirit of emancipation, of progress, of the pursuit of the ideal, of protest against routine. He failed. The second, on the contrary, who became celebrated under the name of Confucius, and to whom tradition ascribes more than three thousand personal disciples, secured the triumph of his ideas of practical, utilitarian morality, founded upon the authority of the State and that of the family, as well as upon the interest of the individual.

A quotation from Lâo-tsze will prove that human thought, in the sixth century B.C., had reached a high mark in China:—

“Certain bad rulers would have us believe that the heart and the spirit of man should be left empty, but[13] that instead his stomach should be filled; that his bones should be strengthened rather than the power of his will; that we should always desire to have the people remain in a state of ignorance, for then their demands would be few. It is difficult, they say, to govern a people that are too wise.

“These doctrines are directly opposed to what is due to humanity. Those in authority should come to the aid of the people by means of oral and written instruction; so far from oppressing them and treating them as slaves, they should do them good in every possible way.”

In other words, it is by enlightening the people, and by an honest devotion to their interests, that one becomes worthy to govern them.

If the Chinese have not fully profited by these wise and exalted counsels, it appears that at least they have attempted to make instruction general. Hue, a Chinese missionary, boldly declares that China is the country of all countries where primary instruction is most widely diffused. To the same effect, a German writer affirms that in China there is not a village so miserable, nor a hamlet so unpretending, as not to be provided with a school of some kind.[19] In a country of tradition, like China, we can infer what once existed from what exists to-day. But that instruction which is so widely diffused is wholly superficial and tends merely to an exterior culture. As Dittes says, the educational method of the Chinese consists, not in developing, but in communicating.[20]

[14]

17. Education among the Other Nations of the East.—Of all the oriental nations, Egypt is the one in which intellectual culture seems to have reached the highest point, but only among men of a privileged class. Here, as in India, the priestly class monopolized the learning of the day; it jealously guarded the depository of mysterious knowledge which it communicated only to the kings. The common people, divided into working classes, which were destined from father to son to the same social status, learned scarcely more than was necessary in order to practise their hereditary trades and to be initiated into the religious beliefs.

In the more military but less theocratic nation, the Persian, efforts were made in favor of a general education. The religious dualism which distinguished Ormuzd, the principle of good, from Ahriman, the principle of evil, and which promised the victory to the former, made it the duty of each man to contribute to this final victory by devoting himself to a life of virtue. Hence arose noble efforts to attain physical and moral perfection. The education of the Persians in temperance and frugality has excited the admiration of certain Greek writers, especially Xenophon, and there will be found in his Cyropædia a thrilling picture of the brave and noble manners of the ancient Persians.[21]

[15]

On the whole, the history of pedagogy among the people of the East offers us but few examples to follow. That which, in different degrees, characterizes primitive education is that it is the privilege of certain classes; that woman is most generally excluded from its benefits; that in respect of the common people it is scarcely more than the question of an apprenticeship to a trade, or of the art of war, or of a preparation for the future life; that no appeal is made to the free energy of individuals, but that the great masses of the people in antiquity have generally lived under the harassing oppression of religious conceptions, of fixed traditions, and of political despotism.

[17]

19. Greek Pedagogy.—Upon that privileged soil of Greece, in that brilliant Athens abounding in artists, poets, historians, and philosophers, in that rude Sparta celebrated for its discipline and manly virtues, education was rather the spontaneous fruit of nature, the natural product of diverse manners, characters, and races, than the premeditated result of a reflective movement of the human will. Greece, however, had its pedagogy, because it had its legislators and its philosophers, the first directing education in its practical details, the second making theoretical inquiries into the essential principles underlying the development of the human[18] soul. In respect of education, as of everything else, the higher spiritual life of modern nations has been developed under the influence of Grecian antiquity.[22]

20. Athenian and Spartan Education.—In the spectacle presented to us by ancient Greece, the first fact that strikes us by its contrast with the immobility and unity of the primitive societies of the East, is a freer unfolding of the human faculties, and consequently a diversity in tendencies and manners. Doubtless, in the Greek republics, the individual is always subordinate to the State. Even in Athens, little regard is paid to the essential dignity of the human person. But the Athenian State differs profoundly from the Spartan, and consequently the individual life is differently understood and differently directed in these two great cities. At Athens, while not neglecting the body, the chief preoccupation is the training of the mind; intellectual culture is pushed to an extreme, even to over-refinement; there is such a taste for fine speaking that it develops an abuse of language and reasoning which merits the disreputable name of sophistry. At Sparta, mind is sacrificed to body; physical strength and military skill are the qualities most desired; the sole care is the training of athletes and soldiers. Sobriety and courage are the results of this one-sided education, but so are ignorance and brutality. Montaigne has thrown into relief, not without some partiality for Sparta, these two contrasted plans of education.

“Men went to the other cities of Greece,” he says, “to find rhetoricians, painters, and musicians, but to Lacedæmon for legislators, magistrates, and captains; at Athens fine speaking was taught; but here, brave acting; there, one[19] learned to unravel a sophistical argument and to abate the imposture of insidiously twisted words; here, to extricate one’s self from the enticements of pleasure and to overcome the menaces of fortune and death by a manly courage. The Athenians busied themselves with words, but the Spartans with things; with the former, there was a continual activity of the tongue; with the latter, a continual activity of the soul.”[23]

The last remark is not just. The daily exercises of the young Spartans,—jumping, running, wrestling, playing with lances and at quoits,—could not be regarded as intellectual occupations. On the other hand, in learning to talk, the young Athenians learned also to feel and to think.

21. The Schools of Athens.—The Athenian legislator, Solon, had placed physical and intellectual training upon the same footing. Children, he said, ought, above everything else, to learn “to swim and to read.” It seems that the education of the body was the chief preoccupation of the Athenian republic. While the organization of schools for grammar and music was left to private enterprise, the State took a part in the direction of the gymnasia. The director of the gymnasium, or the gymnasiarch, was elected each year by the assembly of the people. Nevertheless, Athenian education became more and more a course in literary training, especially towards the sixth century B.C.

The Athenian child remained in the charge of a nurse and an attendant up to his sixth or seventh year. At the age of seven, a pedagogue, that is, a “conductor of children,” usually a slave, was charged with the oversight of the child. Conducted by his pedagogue, the pupil attended by turns the school for grammar, the palestra,[24] or school for gymnastics,[20] and the school for music. The grammarian, who sometimes gave his lessons in the open air, in the streets and on the public squares, taught reading, writing, and mythology. Homer was the boy’s reading-book. Instruction in gymnastics was given in connection with instruction in grammar. It was begun in the palestra and continued in the gymnasium. Instruction in music succeeded the training in grammar and gymnastics. The music-master, or citharist, first taught his pupils to sing, and then to play upon the stringed instruments, the lyre and the cithara. We know what value the Athenians attributed to music. Plato and Aristotle agree in thinking that the rhythm and harmony of music inspire the soul with the love of order, with harmoniousness, regularity, and a soothing of the passions. We must recollect, moreover, that music held a large place in the actual life of the Greeks. The laws were promulgated in song. It was necessary to sing in order to fulfil one’s religious duties. It was held that the education of Themistocles had been neglected because he had not learned music. “We must regard the Greeks,” says Montesquieu, “as a race of athletes and fighters. Now those exercises, so proper to make men hardy and fierce, had need of being tempered by others which could soften the manners. Music, which affected the soul through the organs of the body, was exactly adapted to this purpose.”[25]

In the elementary schools of Athens, at least at the first, the current discipline was severe. Aristophanes, bewailing the degeneracy of his time, recalls in these terms the good order that reigned in the olden school:[26]—

“I will relate what was the ancient education in the happy time when I taught (it is Justice who speaks) and when modesty was the rule. Then the boys came out of each[21] street with bare heads and feet, and, regardless of rain and snow, went together in the most perfect order towards the school for music. There they were seated quietly and modestly. They were not permitted to cross their legs, and they learned some good songs. The master sang the song for them slowly and with gravity. If some one took a notion to sing with soft and studied inflections, he was severely flogged.”

22. The Schools of Rhetoric and Philosophy.—Grammar, gymnastics, and music proper, represented the elementary instruction of the young Athenian. But this instruction was reserved for citizens in easy circumstances. The poor, according to the intentions of Solon, were to learn only reading, swimming, and a trade. The privilege of instruction became still more exclusive in the case of the schools of rhetoric and philosophy frequented by those of adult years.

It would be beside our purpose to speak in this place of the courses in literature, or to make known the methods of those teachers of rhetoric who taught eloquence to all who presented themselves for instruction, either in the public squares or in the gymnasia. The sophists, those itinerant philosophers who went from city to city offering courses at high rates of tuition, and teaching the art of speaking on every subject, and of making a plea for error and injustice just as skilfully as for justice and truth, at the same time made illustrious and disgraceful the teaching of eloquence.[27] The philosophers were more worthy of their task. Socrates,[22] Plato, and Aristotle were illustrious professors of ethics. Socrates had no regular school, but he grouped about him distinguished young men and initiated them into learning and virtue. The Academy of Plato and the Lyceum of Aristotle were great schools of philosophy, real private universities, each directed by a single man. The teaching given in these schools has traversed the ages, and has been preserved in imperishable books. Moreover, those illustrious spirits of Greece have transmitted to us either methods or general ideas which the history of pedagogy should reverently collect, as the first serious efforts of human reflection on the art of education.

23. Socrates: the Socratic Method.—Socrates spent his life in teaching, and in teaching according to an original method, which has preserved his name. He had the genius of interrogation. To question all whom he met, either at the gymnasium or in the streets; to question the sophists in order to convince them of their errors and to confound their arrogance, and presumptuous young men in order to teach them the truth of which they were ignorant; to question great and small, statesmen and masons, now Pericles and now a shopkeeper; to question always and everywhere in order to compel every one to form clear ideas; such was the constant occupation and passion of his life. When he allowed himself to dream of the future life, he said smilingly that he hoped to continue in the Elysian Fields the habits of the Athenian Agora, and still to interrogate the shades of the mighty dead. With Socrates, conversation became an art, and the dialogue a method. He scarcely ever employed the didactic form, or that of direct teaching. He addressed himself to his interlocutor, urged him to set forth his ideas, harassed him with questions often somewhat subtile, skilfully led him to recognize the truth which he himself had in[23] mind, or the rather permitted him to go off on a false route in order finally to discover to him his error and to sport with his confusion; and all this with an art of wonderful analysis, with a subtilty of reasoning pushed almost to an extreme, and also with a great simplicity of language, and with examples borrowed from common life, such as we are accustomed to call intuitive examples.

24. The Socratic Irony.—To form an intelligible account of the Socratic method, it is necessary to distinguish its two essential phases. Socrates followed a double method and sought a double end.

In the first case, he wished to make war against error and to refute false opinions. Then he resorted to what has been called the Socratic irony.[28] He raised a question as one who simply desired to be instructed. If there was the statement of an error in the reply of the respondent, Socrates made no objection to it, but pretended to espouse the ideas and sentiments of his interlocutor. Then, by questions which were adroit and sometimes insidious, he forced him to develop his opinions, and to display, so to speak, the whole extent of his folly, and the next instant slyly brought him face to face with the consequences, which were so absurd and contradictory that he ended in losing confidence, in becoming involved in his conclusions, and finally in making confession of his errors.

25. Maieutics, or the Art of giving Birth to Ideas.—Analogous processes constituted the other part of the Socratic method, that which he himself called maieutics, or the art of giving birth to ideas.

[24]

Socrates was convinced that the human mind in its normal condition discovers certain truths through its own energies, provided one knows how to lead it and stimulate it; and so he here appealed to the spontaneity of his auditor, to his innate powers, and thus gently led him on his way by easy transitions to the opinion which he wished to make him admit. However, he applied this method only to the search for truths which could either be suggested by the intuitions of reason and common sense, or determined by a natural induction, that is, psychological, ethical, and religious truths.[29]

26. Examples of Irony and Maieutics.—We can best give an exact idea of the Socratic method by means of examples. These examples are to be found in the writings of the disciples of Socrates, as in the Dialogues of Plato, such as the Gorgias, the Euthydemus, etc., and still better in the Memorabilia of Xenophon, where the thought of the master and his manner of teaching are more faithfully reproduced than in the bold and original compositions of Plato. While recognizing the insufficiency of these extracts, we shall here make two quotations, in which is displayed either his incisive, critical spirit, or his suggestive and fruitful method: “The thirty tyrants had put many of the most distinguished citizens to death, and had encouraged others to acts of injustice. ‘It would surprise me,’ said Socrates one day, ‘if the keeper of a flock, who had killed one part of it and had made the[25] other part poor, would not confess that he was a bad herdsman; but it would surprise me still more if a man standing at the head of his fellow-citizens should destroy a part of them and corrupt the rest, and were not to blush at his conduct and confess himself a bad magistrate.’ This remark having come to the ears of the Thirty, Critias and Charicles sent for Socrates, showed him the law, and forbade him to hold conversation with the young.

“Socrates inquired of them if he might be permitted to ask questions touching what might seem obscure to him in this prohibition. Upon their granting this permission: ‘I am prepared,’ he said, ‘to obey the laws, but that I may not violate them through ignorance, I would have you clearly inform me whether you interdict the art of speaking because it belongs to the number of things which are good, or because it belongs to the number of things which are bad. In the first case, one ought henceforth to abstain from speaking what is good; in the second, it is clear that the effort should be to speak what is right.’

“Thereupon Charicles became angry, and said: ‘Since you do not understand us, we will give you something easier to comprehend: we forbid you absolutely to hold conversation with the young.’ ‘In order that it may be clearly seen,’ said Socrates, ‘whether I depart from what is enjoined, tell me at what age a youth becomes a man.’ ‘At the time when he is eligible to the senate, for he has not acquired prudence till then; so do not speak to young men who are below the age of thirty.’

“‘But if I wish to buy something of a merchant who is below the age of thirty, may I ask him at what price he sells it?’

“‘Certainly you may ask such a question; but you are accustomed to raise inquiries about multitudes of things[26] which are perfectly well known to you; it is this which is forbidden.’

“‘So I must not reply to a young man who asks me where Charicles lives, or where Critias is.’ ‘You may reply to such questions,’ said Charicles. ‘But recollect, Socrates,’ added Critias, ‘you must let alone the shoemakers, and smiths, and other artisans, for I think they must already be very much worn out by being so often in your mouth.’

“‘I must, therefore,’ said Socrates, ‘forego the illustrations I draw from these occupations relative to justice, piety, and all the virtues.’”[30]

In the final passage of this cutting dialogue, observe the elevation of tone and the gravity of thought. So Socrates had marvellous skill in allying enthusiasm with irony.

Here is an extract in which Socrates applies the maieutic art to the establishment of a moral truth, the belief in God:

“I will mention a conversation he once had in my presence with Aristodemus, surnamed the Little, concerning the gods. He knew that Aristodemus neither sacrificed to the gods, nor consulted the oracles, but ridiculed those who took part in these religious observances. ‘Tell me, Aristodemus,’ said he, ‘are there men whose talents you admire?’ ‘There are,’ he replied. ‘Then tell us their names,’ said Socrates. ‘In epic poetry I especially admire Homer; in dithyrambic, Melanippides; in tragedy, Sophocles; in statuary, Polycletus; in painting, Zeuxis.’ ‘But what artists do you think most worthy of admiration, those who form images destitute of sense and movement, or those who produce animated beings, endowed with the faculty of thinking and acting?’ ‘Those who form animated beings, for these are the work of intelligence and not of chance.’ ‘And which do you regard[27] as the creation of intelligence, and which the product of chance, those works whose purpose cannot be recognized, or those whose utility is manifest?’ ‘It is reasonable to attribute to an intelligence the works which have some useful purpose.’”[31]

Socrates then points out to Aristodemus how admirably the different organs of the human body are adapted to the functions of life and to the use of man. And so proceeding from example to example, from induction to induction, always keeping the mind of his auditor alert by the questions he raises, and the answers that he suggests, forcing him to do his share of the work, and giving him an equal share in the train of reasoning, he finally brings him to the goal which is to make him recognize the existence of God.

27. The Republic of Plato.—“Would you form,” said J. J. Rousseau, “an idea of public education? read the Republic of Plato. It is the finest treatise on education ever written.” For truth’s sake we must discount the enthusiasm of Rousseau. The Republic doubtless contains some elements of a wise and practical scheme of education; but, on the whole, it is but an ideal creation, a compound of paradoxes and chimeras. In Plato’s ideal commonwealth, the individual and the family itself are sacrificed to the State. Woman becomes so much like man as to be subjected to the same gymnastic exercises; she too must be a soldier as he is. Children know neither father nor mother. From the day of their birth they are given in charge of common nurses, veritable public functionaries. In that common fold, “care shall be taken that no mother recognize her offspring.” We may guess that in making this pompous eulogy of the Republic, the paradoxical author of the Émile hoped to prepare[28] the reader for giving a complaisant welcome to his own dreams.

28. The Education of Warriors and Magistrates.—Plato, by some unexplained recollection of the social constitution of the Hindoos, established three castes in his ideal State,—laborers and artisans, warriors, and magistrates. There was no education for laborers and artisans; it was sufficient for men of this caste to learn a trade. In politics, Plato is an aristocrat; he feels a disdain for the people, “that robust and indocile animal.” It should be observed, however, that the barriers which he set up between these three social orders are not insuperable. If a child of the inferior class gives evidence of exceptional qualities, he must be admitted to the superior class; and so if the son of a warrior or of a magistrate is notably incompetent and unworthy of his rank, he must suffer forfeiture, and become artisan or laborer.

As to the education which he designs for the warriors and the magistrates, Plato is minutely careful in regulating it. The education of the warriors comprises two parts,—music and gymnastics. The education of the magistrates consists of a training in philosophy of a high grade; they are initiated into all the sciences and into metaphysics. Plato’s statesmen must be, not priests, as in the East, but scholars and philosophers.

29. Music and Gymnastics.—Although Plato attaches a high value to gymnastics, he gives precedence to music. Before forming the body, Plato, the idealist, would form the soul, because it is the soul, according to him, which, by its own virtue, gives to the body all the perfection of which it is capable. Even in physical exercises, the purpose should be to give increased vigor to the soul: “In the training of[29] the body, our young men shall aim, above everything else, at augmenting moral power.” Note this striking picture of the man who trains only his body: “Let a man apply himself to gymnastics, and become trained, and eat much, and wholly neglect music and philosophy, and at first his body will become strengthened; but if he does nothing else, and holds no converse with the Muses, though his soul have some natural inclination to learn, yet if it remains uncultivated by acquiring knowledge, by inquiry, by discourse, in a word, by some department of music, that is, by intellectual education, it will insensibly become weak, deaf, and blind. Like a wild beast, such a man will live in ignorance and rudeness, with neither grace nor politeness.” However, Plato is far from despising health and physical strength. On the contrary, it is a reproach to him that he has imposed on the citizens of his Republic the obligation of being physically sound, and of having excluded from it all those whose infirmities and feeble constitution condemn them to “drag out a dying life.” The right to live, in Plato’s city, as in the most of ancient societies, belonged only to men of robust health. The weak, the ailing, the wretched, all who are of infirm constitution,—Plato does not go so far as ordering such to be killed, but, what amounts almost to the same thing,—“they shall be exposed,” that is, left to die. The good of the State demands that every man be sacrificed whose health renders him unfit for civil duties. This cruel and implacable doctrine shocks us in the case of him whom Montaigne calls the divine Plato, and shocks us even more when we discover it among contemporary philosophers, whom the inspirations of Christian charity or the feeling of human fraternity should have preserved from such rank heartlessness. Is it not Herbert Spencer who blames modern societies for nourishing the diseased and assisting the infirm?

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30. Religion and Art in Education.—Plato had formed a high ideal of the function of art in education, but this did not prevent him from being severe against certain forms of art, particularly comedy and tragedy, and poetry in general. He would have the poets expelled from the city and conducted to the frontier, though paying them homage with perfumes which will continue to be shed upon their heads, and with flowers with which they will ever be crowned. He admits no other poetry than that which reproduces the manners and discourse of a good man, and celebrates the brave deeds of the gods, or chants their glory. As a severe moralist and worshipper of the divine goodness, he condemns the poets of his time, either because they attribute to the divinity the vices and passions of men, or because they invest the imagination with base fears as they speak of Cocytus and the Styx, and portray a frightful hell and gods always mad with desire to persecute the human race. Elsewhere, in the Laws, Plato explains his conception of religion. He says that the religious books placed in the hands of children should be selected with as much care as the milk of a nurse. God is an infinite goodness who watches over men, and he should be honored, not by sacrifices and vain ceremonies, but by lives of justice and virtue.

For making men moral, Plato counts more upon art than upon religious feeling. To love letters, to hold converse with the Muses, to cultivate music and dancing, such, in the opinion of the noble spirits of Athens, is the natural route towards moral perfection. In their view, moral education is above all an education in art. The soul rises to the good through the beautiful. “Beautiful and good” (καλὸς καὶ ἀγαθός) are two words constantly associated in the speech of the Greeks. Even to-day we have much to learn from reflections like these: “We ought,” says Plato, “to seek[31] out artists who by the power of genius can trace out the nature of the fair and the graceful, that our young men, dwelling, as it were, in a healthful region, may drink in good from every quarter, whence any emanation from noble works may strike upon their eye or their ear, like a gale wafting health from salubrious lands, and win them imperceptibly from their earliest years into resemblance, love, and harmony with the true beauty of reason.

“Is it not, then, on these accounts that we attach such supreme importance to a musical education, because rhythm and harmony sink most deeply into the recesses of the soul, bringing gracefulness in their train, and making a man graceful if he be rightly nurtured; but if not, the reverse? and also because he that has been duly nurtured therein will have the keenest eye for defects, whether in the failures of art, or in the misgrowths of nature; and feeling a most just disdain for them, will commend beautiful objects, and gladly receive them into his soul, and feed upon them, and grow to be noble and good; whereas he will rightly censure and hate all repulsive objects, even in his childhood, before he is able to be reasoned with; and when reason comes, he will welcome her most cordially who can recognize her by the instinct of relationship, and because he has been thus nurtured?”[32]

31. High Intellectual Education.—In the Republic of Plato the intellectual education of the warrior class remains exclusively literary and æsthetic. In addition to this, the education of the ruling class is to be scientific and philosophic. The future magistrate, after having received the ordinary instruction up to the age of twenty, is to be initiated into the abstract sciences, mathematics, geometry,[32] and astronomy. To this scientific education, which is to continue for ten years, there will succeed for five years the study of dialectics,[33] or philosophy, which develops the highest faculty of man, the reason, and teaches him to discover, through and beyond the fleeting appearances of the world of sense, the eternal verities and the essence of things. But Plato prolongs the education of his magistrates still further. After having given them the nurture of reason and intellectual insight, he sends them back to the cavern[34] at the age of thirty-five, that is, calls them back to public life, and makes them pass through all kinds of civil and military employments, until finally, at the age of fifty, in possession of all the endowments assured by consummate experience superadded to profound knowledge, they are fitted to be charged with the burdens of office. In the Republic of Plato statesmen are not improvised. And yet in this elaborate system of instruction Plato omits two subjects of great importance. On the one hand, he entirely omits the physical and natural sciences, because, in his mystic idealism, things of sense are delusive and unreal images, and so did not appear to him worthy of arresting the attention of the mind; and on the other, though coming after Herodotus, and though a contemporary[33] of Thucydides, he makes no mention of history, doubtless through a contempt for tradition and the past.

32. The Laws.—In the Laws, the work of his old age, Plato disavows in part the chimeras of the Republic, and qualifies the radicalism of that earlier work. The philosopher descends to the earth and really condescends to the actual state of humanity. He renounces the distinction of social castes, and his very practical and very minute precepts are applied without distinction to children of all classes.[35]

First note this excellent definition of the end of education: “A good education is that which gives to the body and to the soul all the beauty and all the perfection of which they are capable.” As to methods, it seems that Plato hesitates between the doctrine of effort and the doctrine of attractive toil. In fact, he says on the one hand that education is a very skilful discipline which, by way of amusement,[36] leads the mind of the child to love that which is to make it finished. On the other hand, he protests against the weakness of those parents who seek to spare their children every trouble and every pain. “I am persuaded,” he says, “that the inclination to humor the likings of children is the surest of all ways to spoil them. We should not make too much haste in our search after what is pleasurable, especially as we shall never be wholly exempt from what is painful.”

Let us add this definition of a good education: “I call education the virtue which is shown by children when the feelings of joy or of sorrow, of love or of hate, which arise in their souls, are made conformable to order.”

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With the statement of these principles, Plato enters into details. For children up to the age of six, he recommends the use of swaddling-clothes. The habit of rocking, the natural plays which children find out for themselves, the separation of the sexes; swimming, the bow, and the javelin, for boys; wrestling for giving bodily vigor, and dancing, for graceful movement; reading and writing reserved till the tenth year and learned for three years.

It would require too much time to follow the philosopher to the end. In the rules he proposes, he makes a near approach to the practices followed by the Athenians of his day. The Republic was a work of pure imagination. The Laws are scarcely more than a commentary on the actual state of practice. But here we still find what was nearest the soul of Plato, the constant search for a higher morality.

33. Xenophon.—As an educator, Xenophon obeyed two different influences. His master, Socrates, was his good genius. That graceful and charming book, the Economics, was written under the benign and tempered inspiration of the great Athenian sage. But Xenophon also had his evil genius,—the immoderate enthusiasm which he felt for Sparta, her institutions and her laws. The first book of the Cyropædia, which relates the rules of Persian education, is an unfortunate imitation of the laws of Lycurgus.

34. The Economics, and the Education of Woman.—All should read the Economics, that charming sketch of the education of woman. We may say of this little work what Renan has said of the writings of Plutarch on the same subject: “Where shall we find a more charming ideal of family life? What good nature! What sweetness of manners! What chaste and lovable simplicity!” Before her marriage, the Athenian maiden has learned only to spin wool, to be[35] discreet, and to ask no questions,—virtues purely negative. Xenophon assigns to her husband the duty of training her mind and of teaching her the positive duties of family life,—order, economy, kindness to slaves, and tender care of children. As a matter of fact, the Athenian woman was still held in a position of inferiority. Shut up in her own apartments, it was an exception that she learned to read and write; it was very rare that she was instructed in the arts and sciences. The idea of human dignity and of the value of the human person had not yet appeared. Man had value only in proportion to the services which he could render the State, or commonwealth, and woman formed no part of the commonwealth. Xenophon has the merit of rising above the prejudices of his time, and of approaching the ideal of the modern family, in calling woman to participate more intimately in the affairs of the house and in the occupations of the husband.[37]

35. The Cyropædia.—The Cyropædia is not worthy of the same commendation. Under the pretext of describing the organization of the Persian State, Xenophon here traces, after his manner, the plan of an education absolutely uniform and exclusively military. There is no domestic education, no individual liberty, no interest in letters and arts. When the period of infancy is over, the young Persian is made subject to military duty, and must not leave the encampment, even at night. The state is but a camp, and human existence a perpetual military parade. Montaigne praises Xenophon for having said that the Persians taught their children virtue “as other nations do letters.” But it is difficult to form an estimate of the methods which were followed in these schools of justice and temperance, and we[36] may be allowed to suspect the efficiency of the means proposed by Xenophon; for example, that which consisted in transforming the petty quarrels of the scholars into regular trials which were followed by sentences, acquittals, or convictions. The author of the Cyropædia is on surer ground when, recollecting his own studies, he recommends the study of history to those who would become just. He teaches temperance by practice rather than by precept; his pupils have only bread for their food, only cresses for seasoning, and only water for their drink.

Whatever may be the faults and the fancies of the Cyropædia, we must recollect, as a partial excuse for them, that the purpose of the writer in tracing this picture of a simple, frugal, and courageous life, was to induce a reaction against the excesses of the fashionable and formal life of the Athenians. As Rousseau, in the middle of the eighteenth century, protested against the license and the artificial manners of his time by advising an imaginary return to nature, so Xenophon, a contemporary of the sophists, held forth the sturdy virtues of the Persians in opposition to the degenerate manners of the Greeks and the refinements of an advanced civilization.

36. Aristotle: General Character of his Plan of Education.—By his vast attainments, by his encyclopædic knowledge, by the experimental nature of his researches, and by the positive and practical tendencies of his genius, Aristotle was enabled to excel Plato in clearness of insight into pedagogical questions. He had another advantage over Plato in having known and enjoyed the delights of family life, and in having loved and trained his own children, of whom he said, “parents love their children as a part of themselves.” Let us add, finally, that he was a practical teacher, since he was the preceptor of Alexander from 343[37] to 340 B.C. Such opportunities, superadded to the force of the most mighty genius the world has ever seen, give promise of a competent and clear-sighted educator. Unfortunately, we have lost the treatise, On Education (περὶ παιδείας), which on the authority of Diogenes Laërtius, Aristotle is said to have composed; and to form some conception of his ideas on education, we have at our disposal only some imperfect sketches, some portions, and those in an imperfect state, of his treatises on ethics and politics.[38]

Whoever labors to give stability to the family, and to tighten its bond of union, labors also for the promotion of education. Even in this respect, education is under great obligations to Aristotle. In him the communism of Plato finds an able critic. That feeling of affection which we of to-day would call charity or fraternity, he declared to be the guaranty and the foundation of social life. Now, communism weakens this feeling by diluting it, just as a little honey dropped into a large quantity of water thereby loses all its sweetness. “There are two things which materially contribute to the rise of interest and attachment in the hearts of men,—property and the feeling of affection.” It was thus in the name of good sense, and in opposition to the distempered fancies of Plato, that Aristotle vindicated the rights of the family and the individual.

37. Public Education.—But Aristotle does not go so far as his premises would seem to lead him, and relinquish to parents the care of educating their children. In accordance with the general tendencies of antiquity, he declares himself the partisan of an education that is public and common. He commends the Spartans for having ordained that “education should be the same for all.” “As there is one end[38] in view in every city,” he says, “it is evident that education ought to be one and the same in all, and that this should be a common care, and not of each individual.... It is the duty of the legislator to regulate this interest for all the citizens.” There must, therefore, be the intervention of the State, not from the day of birth, as Plato would have it, for the nursing of infants, but only at the age of seven, for instructing and training them in the habits of virtue.

What, then, should be the training of the child, and upon what subjects would Aristotle direct his studies?

38. The Progressive Development of Human Nature.—An essential and incontrovertible distinction is taken by the Greek philosopher as his starting-point. There are, he says, three moments, three stages, in human development: first, there is the physical life of the body; then, instinct and sensibility, or the irrational part of the soul; and finally, the intelligence, or the reason. From this, Aristotle concludes that the course of discipline and study should be graduated according to these three degrees of life. “The first care should necessarily be given to the body rather than to the mind; and then to that part of the spiritual nature which is the seat of the desires.” But he adds this important observation, which is a refutation of Rousseau in advance: “In the care which we give to the sensibilities, we must not leave out of account the intelligence; and in our care of the body, we must not forget the soul.”

39. Physical Education.—The son of a physician of the Macedonian court, and well versed in the natural sciences, Aristotle is very happy in his treatment of physical education. It begins before the child is born, even before it has been conceived. Consequently he enjoins a legal regulation of marriages, interdicts unions that are too early or too late,[39] indicates the climatic conditions most favorable for marriage, and gives mothers wise counsels on matters of hygiene, recommending them to nurse their own children, and prescribing cold baths. Such, in outline, is a plan which a modern hygienist would not disavow.

40. Intellectual and Moral Education.—It was the opinion of Aristotle that intellectual education should not begin before the age of five. But, in accordance with the principle stated above, this period of waiting should not be the occasion of loss to the intelligence of the child; even his play should be a preparation for the work to which he will apply himself at a later period. On the other hand, Aristotle strongly insists on the necessity of shielding the child from all pernicious influences, such as those which come from association with slaves, or from immoral plays.

In accord with all his contemporaries, Aristotle includes grammar, gymnastics, and music, among the elements of instruction. To these he adds drawing. But he is chiefly preoccupied with music, by reason of the moral influence which he attributes to it. He shared the prepossession which caused the Greeks to say, that to relax or to reform the manners of a people, it suffices to add a string to the lyre or to take one from it.[39]

Aristotle was strongly preoccupied with moral education. Like Plato, he insists on the greatest care in forming the moral habits of early life. In his different writings on ethics he has discussed different human virtues in a spirit at once wise, practical, and liberal. No one has better sung the[40] praises of justice, of which he says, “Neither the evening nor the morning star inspires as much respect as justice.”

It would do Aristotle injustice to seek for a complete expression of his thoughts on education in the incomplete and curtailed statements of theory which are found in his Politics. In connection with these, we should recall the admirable instruction which he himself gave in the Lyceum, and which embraced almost all the sciences in its vast programme. He excluded from it only the sciences and the arts which have a mechanical and utilitarian character. Enslaved on this point to the prejudices of antiquity, he regarded as servile and unworthy of a free man whatever has a direct bearing on the practical and material utilities of life. He recommended to his hearers only studies of the intellectual type, those whose sole purpose is to elevate the mind and to fill it with noble thoughts.[40]

41. Faults in the Pedagogy of Aristotle, and in Greek Pedagogy in General.—It must be said in conclusion, that whatever admiration we may feel for the pedagogy of Aristotle, it was wrong, like that of all the Greek writers, in being but an aristocratic system of education. The education of which Plato and Aristotle dreamed was restricted to a small minority, and was even made possible only because the majority was excluded from it. The slaves, charged with the duty of providing for the sustenance of their superiors, and of creating for them the leisure claimed by Aristotle, had no more participation in education than in liberty or in property. In the century of Pericles,[41] at the most glorious period of the Athenian republic, let us not forget that there were at Athens nearly four hundred thousand slaves to do the bidding of twenty thousand free citizens. To indulge in an easy admiration for Greek pedagogy, we must detach it from its setting, and consider it in itself, apart from the narrow plan on which the Greek states were constructed, and apart from that social régime which assured the education of some, only by perpetuating the oppression of the many.

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43. Two Periods in Roman Education.—In Greece, as we have seen, there were two essentially different systems of education in use: at Sparta, a one-sided education, wholly military, with no regard for intellectual culture; at Athens, a complete education, which brought into happy harmony the training of the body and the development of the mind, and by means of which, as Thucydides observed, “men philosophized without becoming effeminate.”

Rome, in the long course of her history, followed these two systems in succession. Under the Republic, down to the conquest of Greece, preference was given to education after the Spartan type; while under the emperors, Athenian education was dominant, with a very marked tendency to give the first place to an education in literature and oratory.

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44. The Education of the Early Romans.—The first schools were not opened at Rome till towards the end of the third century B.C. Till then, the Romans had no teachers save their parents and nature. Education was almost exclusively physical and moral, or rather, military and religious. On the one hand, there were the gymnastic exercises on the Campus Martius, and on the other, the recitation of the Salian hymns, a sort of catechism containing the names of the gods and goddesses. Besides this, there was the study of the Twelve Tables, that is, of the Roman Law. Men the most robust, the most courageous, the best disciplined, and the most patriotic that ever lived, were the fruit of this natural education. Rome was the great school of the civic and military virtues. The Romans did not imitate the Athenians in a disinterested pursuit of a perfect physical and intellectual development. Rome worked for practical ends; she was guided only by considerations of utility; she had no regard for ideals; her purpose was simply the education of soldiers and citizens who should be obedient and devoted. She did not know man in the abstract; she knew only the Roman citizen.

These high qualities of the early Romans were marred by a sort of brutal insensibility and a contempt for the graces of intellect and heart; and leaving out of account the circumstances of environment and race, their practical virtues may be ascribed to three or four principal causes. First among these was a firm family discipline. The authority of the father was absolute, and answering to this excessive power, there was blind obedience. Another cause was the position of the mother in the family. At Rome, woman was held in higher esteem than at Athens. She became almost the equal of man. She was the guardian of the family circle and the teacher of her children. The very name matron[45] inspires respect. Coriolanus, who took up arms against his country, could not withstand the tears of his mother Veturia. The noble Cornelia was the teacher of her sons, the Gracchi, whom she was accustomed to call “her fairest jewels.” Besides, the influence of religion was made to supplement the active efforts of the family. The Roman lived surrounded by deities. When a child was weaned, tradition would have it that one goddess taught him to eat, and another to drink. Later on, four goddesses guided his first steps and held his two hands. All these superstitions imposed regularity and exactness on the most ordinary acts of daily life. Men breathed, as it were, a divine atmosphere. Finally, the young Roman learned to read in the laws of the Twelve Tables, that is, in the civil code of his country. He was thus accustomed from infancy to consider the law as something natural, inviolable, and sacred.

45. Rome at School in Greece.—The primitive state of manners did not last. Under Greek influence, Roman simplicity suffered a change, and, as Horace says, Greece, in being conquered, conquered in turn her rude victor. The taste for letters and arts was introduced at Rome towards the close of the third century B.C., and transformed the austere and rude education of the primitive era. The Romans, in their turn, acquired a liking for fine phrases and subtile dialectics. Schools were opened, and the rhetoricians and philosophers took up the business of education. Parents no longer charged themselves with the instruction of their children. Following the fashion at Athens, they entrusted them to slaves, without troubling themselves about the faults or even the vices of these common pedagogues.

“For if any of their servants,” says Plutarch, “be better than the rest, they dispose some of them to follow husbandry, some to navigation, some to merchandise, some to be stew[46]ards in their houses, and some, lastly, to put out their money to use for them. But if they find any slave that is a drunkard or a glutton, and unfit for any other business, to him they assign the government of their children; whereas, a good pedagogue ought to be such a one in his disposition as Phœnix, tutor to Achilles, was.”[41]

46. Why Rome had no Great Educators.—In the age of Augustus, when Latin literature was in all its glory, we are astonished not to find, as in the century of Pericles, some great thinker like Plato or Aristotle, who presents general views on education, and makes himself famous by a remarkable work on pedagogy. This is due to the fact that the Romans never formed a taste for disinterested science and speculative inquiry. They reached distinction only in the practical sciences; in the law, for example, in which they excelled. Now pedagogy, while in one sense a practical science, nevertheless reposes upon philosophical principles, upon a knowledge of human nature, and upon a theoretical conception of human destiny,—questions which had no living interest for the Roman mind, and which even Cicero has noticed only in passing, in the course of his translation of Plato, made with his usual magnificence of literary style.

It is to be noted, moreover, that the Romans seem never to have considered education as a national undertaking, as an affair of the State. The Law of the Twelve Tables is silent upon the education of children. Up to the time of Quintilian there were at Rome no public schools, no professional teachers. In the age of Augustus each teacher had his own method. “Our ancestors,” says Cicero, “did not wish that children should be educated by fixed rules, determined by the laws, publicly promulgated and made uniform for all.”[42][47] And he does not seem to disapprove of this neglect, even while noting the fact that Polybius saw in this an important defect in Roman institutions.

47. Cicero.—In all Cicero’s works we find scarcely a line relative to education. And yet the great orator exclaims: “What better, what greater service can we of to-day render the Republic than to instruct and train the young?”[43] But he was content with writing fine discourses on philosophy for his country, abounding more in eloquence than in originality.

48. Varro.—A less celebrated writer, Varro, seems to have had some pedagogic instinct. He wrote real educational works on grammar, rhetoric, history, and geometry. Most of these have been lost; but if we may trust his contemporaries, they were instrumental in the education of several generations.

49. Quintilian (35-95 A.D.).—After the age of Augustus, education became more and more an affair of oratory. The chief effort in the way of education was a preparation for a career in the Forum. But from these vulgar rhetoricians, occupied with the exterior artifices of style, these “traffickers in words,” as Saint Augustine called them, we must distinguish a rhetorician of a higher order, who does not separate rhetoric from a general culture of the intelligence. This is Quintilian, the author of the Institutes of Oratory.

Appointed at the age of twenty-six to a chair of eloquence, the first that was established by the Roman state, and called at a later period by the Emperor Domitian to direct the education of his grand-nephews, Quintilian was practically acquainted with both public and private instruction.

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50. The Institutes of Oratory.—This work, under the form of a treatise on rhetoric, is in parts a real treatise on education. The author, in fact, begins the training of the future orator from the cradle; he gives counsel to its nurse, and “not blushing to descend to petty details,” he follows step by step the education of his pupil. Let us add, that in the noble ideal which he conceives, eloquence never being considered apart from wisdom, Quintilian was led by his very subject to treat of moral education.

51. His General Plan of Education.—The first book entire is devoted to education in general, and its teachings might be applied indifferently to all children, whether destined or not to the practice of oratory.

“Has a son been born to you? From the first conceive the highest hopes of him.” Thus Quintilian begins. He thinks that we cannot have too high an opinion of human nature, nor propose for it too high a purpose. Minds that rebel against all instruction are unnatural. Most often it is the training which is at fault; it is not nature that is to blame.

52. The Early Education of the Child.—The child’s nurses should be virtuous and prudent. Quintilian does not demand that they shall be learned, as the stoic Chrysippus would have them; but he requires that their language shall be irreproachable. The first impressions of the child are very durable: “New vases preserve the taste of the first liquor that is put into them; and wool, once colored, never regains its primitive whiteness.”

By an illusion analogous to that of the literary men of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who would have the little French boy first learn Latin, Quintilian teaches his pupil Greek before making him study his native tongue.

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Studies, moreover, should begin betimes: “Turn to account the child’s first years, especially as the elements of learning demand only memory, and the memory of children is very tenacious.”

We seem to be listening to a modern teacher when Quintilian recommends the avoidance of whatever might ruffle the spirits of the child. “Let study be to him a play; ask him questions; commend him when he does well; and sometimes let him enjoy the consciousness of his little gains in wisdom.”

53. Reading and Writing.—The passage relative to reading deserves to be quoted in full. It is wrong, says Quintilian, to teach children the names of the letters, and their respective places in the alphabet, before they know their shapes. He recommends the use of letters in ivory, which children take pleasure in handling, seeing, and naming.

As to writing, Quintilian recommends, for the purpose of strengthening the child’s hand, and of preventing it from making false movements, that he should practise on wooden tablets on which the letters have been traced by cutting.[44] Later on, the copies shall contain, “not senseless maxims, but moral truths.” The Roman teacher did not counsel haste in any case. “We can scarcely believe,” he says, “how progress in reading is retarded by attempting to go too fast.”

54. Public Education.—Quintilian has made an unsurpassed plea for public education and its advantages, which[50] Rollin has reproduced almost entire.[45] From this we shall quote only the following passage, which proves how far the contemporaries of Quintilian had already departed from the manly habits of the early ages; and the truth which is herein expressed will always be applicable to parents who are inclined to be over-indulgent: “Would that we ourselves did not corrupt the morals of our children! We enervate their very infancy with luxuries. That delicacy of education, which we call fondness, weakens all the powers, both of body and mind.... We form the palate of our children before we form their pronunciation. They grow up in sedan chairs; if they touch the ground, they hang by the hands of attendants supporting them on each side. We are delighted if they utter anything immodest. Expressions which would hot be tolerated even from effeminate youths, we hear from them with a smile and a kiss. Need we be astonished at this behavior? We ourselves have taught them.”[46]

55. Duties of Teachers.—There was at Rome, in the first century of the Christian era, a high conception of the duties of a teacher: “His first care should be to ascertain with all possible thoroughness the mind and the character of the child.” Judicious reflections on the memory, on the faculty of imitation, and on the dangers of precocious mental development, are proofs of the fine psychological discernment of Quintilian. His insight is no less accurate when he sketches the rules for moral discipline. “Fear,” he says, “restrains some and unmans others.... For my part, I prefer a pupil who is sensitive to praise, whom glory animates, and from whom defeat draws tears.”

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Quintilian expresses himself decidedly against the use of the rod, “although custom authorizes it,” he says, “and Chrysippus does not disapprove of it.”

56. Grammar and Rhetoric.—Like his contemporaries, Quintilian distinguishes studies into two grades,—Grammar and Rhetoric. “As soon as the child is able to read and write, he must be placed in the hands of the grammarian.” Grammar was divided into two parts,—the art of speaking correctly and the explication of the poets. Exercises in composition, development lessons called Chriæ, and narratives, accompanied the theoretical study of the rules of grammar.[47] It is to be observed that Quintilian gives a high place to etymological studies, and that he attaches great importance to reading aloud. “That the child may read well, let him have a good understanding of what he reads.... When he reads the poets, let him shun affected modulations. It is with reference to this manner of reading that Cæsar, still a young man, made this excellent observation: ‘If you are singing, you sing poorly; if you are reading, why do you sing?’”

57. The Simultaneous Study of the Sciences.—Quintilian is very far from confining his pupil within the narrow circle of grammatical study. Persuaded that the child is capable of learning several things at the same time, he would have him taught geometry, music, and philosophy simultaneously:—

“Must he learn grammar alone, and then geometry, and in the meanwhile forget what he first learned? As well advise a farmer not to cultivate, at the same time, his fields, his vines, his olive trees, and his orchards, and not to give his[52] thought simultaneously to his meadows, his cattle, his gardens, and his bees.”[48]

Of course Quintilian considers the different studies which he sets before his pupil only as the instruments for an education in oratory. Philosophy, which comprises dialectics or logic, physics or the science of nature, and lastly morals, furnish the orator with ideas, and teach him the art of distributing them into a consecutive line of argument. And so geometry, a near relative of dialectics, disciplines the mind, and teaches it to distinguish the true from the false. Lastly, music is an excellent preparation for eloquence; it cultivates the sense of harmony and a taste for number and measure.

58. The Schools of Philosophy.—By the side of the schools of rhetoric, in which the art of speech was cultivated, imperial Rome saw flourish in great numbers schools of philosophy, whose purpose was the formation of morals. It was through no lack of moral sermonizing that there was a degeneration in the virtues of the Romans. All the schools of Greece, especially the Stoics and the Epicureans, and also the schools of Pythagoras, of Socrates, of Plato, and of Aristotle, had their representatives at Rome; but their obscure names have scarcely survived.

59. Seneca.—Among these philosophers and these moralists of the first century of the Christian era, Seneca has the distinction of standing in the front rank. It is true that he was not the founder of a school, but by his numerous writings he succeeded in maintaining among his contemporaries at least some vestiges of the ancient virtues. His Letters to Lucilius, letters abounding in real intellectual and moral insight, also contain some pedagogical precepts.[53] Seneca attempts to direct school instruction to practical ends, in following out the thought of this famous precept: “We should learn, not for the sake of the school, but for the purposes of life” (Non scholæ, sed vitæ discimus). Moreover, he criticises confused and ill-directed reading that does not enrich the understanding, and concludes by recommending the profound study of a single book (timeo hominem unius libri). In another letter he remarks that the best means for giving clearness to one’s own ideas is to communicate them to others; the best way of being taught is to teach (docendo discimus). Let us quote this other maxim so often repeated: “The end is attained sooner by example than by precept” (longum iter per præcepta, breve per exempla).

60. Plutarch (50-138 A.D.).—In the last period of Roman civilization two names deserve to arrest the attention of the educator,—Plutarch and Marcus Aurelius. Although he was born in Bœotia, and wrote in Greek, Plutarch belongs to the Roman world. He lived at Rome at several different times, and there opened a school in the reign of Domitian, where he lectured on philosophy, literature, and history. Numerous works have transmitted to us the substance of that instruction which had such an extraordinary success.

61. The Lives of Illustrious Men.—Translated in the fifteenth century by Amyot, the Parallel Lives of Plutarch were for our fathers a true code of morals founded on history. How many of our great men, or how many of our men of worth, have drawn from this book, at least in part, the material which has nurtured their virtues! L’Hôpital and d’Aubigné enriched their lives from this source. Henry IV. said of this book: “It has been to me as my conscience, and has whispered in my ear many virtuous suggestions and[54] excellent maxims for my own conduct and for the management of my affairs.”[49]

62. The Essay on the Training of Children.—The celebrated essay entitled Of the Training of Children,[50] is the first treatise, especially devoted to education, that antiquity has bequeathed to us. Its authenticity has been called in question by German critics; but this is of little moment, since these critics are the first to recognize the fact that the author of this essay, whoever he might have been, was intimately acquainted with Plutarch, and has given us a sufficiently exact summary of the ideas which are more fully developed in others of his works.[51]

We shall not give an analysis of this work, which, however, abounds in interesting reflections on the primary period of education. We shall simply note the fundamental thought of the essay, its salient and original characteristic, which is its warm appreciation of the family. In society, as Plutarch conceives it, the State no longer exercises absolute sovereignty. Upon the ruins of the antique commonwealth Plutarch builds the family. It is to the family that he addresses himself in order to assure the education of children.[52] On this point he is not in accord with Quintilian.[55] What he recommends is an education that is domestic and individual. He scarcely admits the need of public schools save for the higher instruction. At a certain age a young man, already trained by the watchful care of a preceptor under the supervision of his parents, shall go abroad to hear the lectures of the moralists and the philosophers, and to read the poets.

63. The Education of Women.—One of the consequences of the exalted function which Plutarch ascribes to the family is that by this single act he raises the material and moral condition of woman. In his essay entitled Conjugal Precepts, which recalls the Economics of Xenophon, he restores to the wife her place in the household. He associates her with the husband in the material support of the family, as well as in the education of the children. The mother is to nurse her offspring. “Providence,” he naively says, “hath also wisely ordered that women should have two breasts, that so, if any of them should happen to bear twins, they might have two several springs of nourishment ready for them.”[53] The mother shall also take part in the instruction of her children, and so she must herself be educated. Plutarch[56] proposes for her the highest studies, such as mathematics and philosophy. But he counts much more upon her natural qualities, than upon the science that she may acquire. “With women,” he says, “tenderness of heart is enhanced by a pleasing countenance, by sweetness of speech, by an affectionate grace, and by a high degree of sensitiveness.”

64. The Function of Poetry in Education.—In the essay entitled How a Young Man Ought to Hear Poems, Plutarch has given his opinion as to the extent to which poetry should be made an element in education. More just than Plato, he does not condemn the reading of the poets. He simply demands that this reading should be done with discretion, by choosing those who, in their compositions, mingle moral inspiration with poetic inspiration. “Lycurgus,” he says, “did not act like a man of sound reason in the course which he took to reform his people that were much inclined to drunkenness, by traveling up and down to destroy all the vines in the country; whereas he should have ordered that every vine should have a well of water near it, that (as Plato saith) the drunken deity might be reduced to temperance by a sober one.”[54]

65. The Teaching of Morals.—Plutarch is above all else a moralist. If he adds nothing in the way of theory to the lofty doctrines of the Greek philosophers from whom he catches his inspiration, at least he enters more profoundly into the study of practical methods which insure the efficacy of fine precepts and exalted doctrines. “That contemplation which is dissociated from practice,” he says, “is of no utility.” He would have young men come from lectures on[57] morals, not only better instructed, but more virtuous. Of what consequence are beautiful maxims unless they are embodied in action? The young man, then, shall early accustom himself to self-government, to reflection upon his own conduct, and to taking counsel of his own reason. Moreover, Plutarch gives him a director of conscience, a philosopher, whom he will go to consult in his doubts, and to whom he will entrust the keeping of his soul. But that which is of most consequence in his eyes is personal effort, reflection always on the alert, and that inward effort which causes our soul to assimilate the moral lessons which we have received, and which causes them to enter into the very structure and fibre of our personality.

“As it would be with a man who, going to his neighbor’s to borrow fire, and finding there a great and bright fire, should sit down to warm himself and forget to go home; so is it with the one who comes to another to learn, if he does not think himself obliged to kindle his own fire within, and influence his own mind, but continues sitting by his master as if he were enchanted, delighted by hearing.”[55]

So are those who are not striving to have a personal morality, but who, incapable of self-direction, are always in need of the tutorship of another.

The great preoccupation of Plutarch—and by this trait he has a legitimate place among the great educators of the world—was to awaken, to excite, the interior forces of the conscience, and to stimulate the intelligence to a high state of activity. When he wrote this famous maxim, “The soul is not a vase to be filled, but is rather a hearth which is to be[58] made to glow,”[56] he was not thinking alone of moral education, but also of a false intellectual education which, instead of training the mind, is content with accumulating in the memory a mass of indigested materials.[57]

66. Marcus Aurelius.—The wisest of the Roman emperors, the author of the book entitled To Myself, better known as Meditations, Marcus Aurelius deserves mention in the history of pedagogy. He is perhaps the most perfect representative of Stoic morality, which is itself the highest expression of ancient morality. He is the most finished type of what can be effected in the way of soul-culture by the influence of home-training and the personal effort of the conscience. His teacher of rhetoric was the celebrated Fronto, of whose character we may judge from this one characteristic: “I toiled hard yesterday,” he wrote to his pupil; “I composed a few figures of speech, with which I am pleased.” On the other hand, Marcus Aurelius found examples for imitation in his own family. “My uncle,” he says reverently, “taught me patience.... From my father I inherited modesty.... To my mother I owe my feelings of piety.” Notwithstanding the modesty that led him to attribute to others the whole of his moral worth, it is especially to himself, to a persistent effort of his own will, and to a ceaseless examination of his own conscience, that he is indebted for becoming the most virtuous of men, and the wisest and purest, next to Socrates, of the moralists of antiquity. His Meditations show us in[59] action that self-education which in our time has suggested such beautiful reflections to Channing.

67. Conclusion.—Finally, it must be admitted that Roman literature is poor in material for educational study. Some passages, scattered here and there in the classical authors, nevertheless prove that they were not absolutely strangers to pedagogical questions.

Thus Horace professed independence of mind; he declares that he is not obliged to swear by the “words of any master.”[58] On the other hand, Juvenal defined the ideal purpose of life and of education when he said that the desirable thing above all others is “a sound mind in a sound body.”[59] Finally, Pliny the Younger, in three words, multum, non multa, “much, not many things,” fixes one essential point in educational method, and recommends the thorough study of one single subject in preference to a superficial study which extends over too many subjects.

While by their taste, their accuracy of thought, and the perfection of their style, the Latin writers are worthy of being placed by the side of the Greeks as proficients in education of the literary type, they at the same time deserve to be regarded as reputable guides in moral education. At Rome, as at Athens, that which formed the basis of instruction was the search after virtue. That which preoccupied Cicero as well as Plato, Seneca as well as Aristotle, was not so much the extension of knowledge and the development of instruction as the progress of manners and the moral perfection of man.

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69. The New Spirit of Christianity.—By its dogmas, by the conception of the equality of all human creatures, by its spirit of charity, Christianity introduced new elements into the conscience, and seemed called to give a powerful impetus to the moral education of men. The doctrine of Christ was at first a reaction of free will and of personal dignity against the despotism of the State. “A full half of man henceforth escaped the action of the State. Christianity taught that man no longer belonged to society except in part; that he was under allegiance to it by his body and his material interests; that being subject to a tyrant, he must submit; that as a citizen of a republic, he ought to give his life for it; but that in respect of his soul, he was free, and owed allegiance only to God.”[60] Henceforth it was not simply a question of training citizens for the service of the State;[62] but the conception of a disinterested development of the human person made its appearance in the world. On the other hand, in proclaiming that all men had the same destiny, and that they were all equal in the sight of God, Christianity raised the poor and the disinherited from their condition of misery, and promised them all the same instruction. To the idea of liberty was added that of equality; and equal justice for all, and participation in the same rights, were contained in germ in the doctrine of Christianity.

70. Poverty of the First Christian Centuries in Respect of Education.—Nevertheless, the germs contained in the doctrines of the new religion did not bear fruit at once. It is easy to analyze the causes which led to the poverty of educational thought during the first centuries of the Christian era.

In the first place, the Christian instruction was addressed to barbarous peoples who could not at once rise to a high intellectual and moral culture. According to the celebrated comparison of Jouffroy, the invasion of the barbarians into the midst of ancient society was like an armful of green wood thrown upon a blazing fire; at first there could issue from it only a mass of smoke.

Moreover, we must take into account the fact that the early Christians, in order to establish their faith, had to struggle against difficulties which were ever being renewed. The first centuries were a period of struggle, of conquest, and of organization, which left but little opportunity for the disinterested study of education. In their contests with the ancient world, the early Christians came to include in a common hatred classical literature and pagan religion. Could they receive with sympathy the literary and scientific inheritance of a society whose morals they repudiated, and whose beliefs they were bent on destroying?

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On the other hand, the social condition of the men who first attached themselves to the new religion turned them aside from the studies which are a preparation for real life. Obliged to conceal themselves, to betake themselves to the desert, true Pariahs of the pagan world, they lived a life of contemplation; they were naturally led to conceive an ascetic and monastic existence as the ideal of education.

Moreover, by its mystical tendencies, Christianity at the first could not be a good school for a practical and humane system of education. The Christian was detached from the commonwealth of man, only to enter into the commonwealth of God. He must break with a corrupt and perverse world. By privations, and by the renunciation of every pleasure, he must react against the immorality of Græco-Roman society. Man must aspire to imitate God; and God is absolute holiness, the very negation of all the conditions of earthly life,—supreme perfection. The very disproportion between such an ideal and human weakness as an actual fact must have betrayed the early Christians into leading a mystical life which was but a preparation for death. And the consequence of these doctrines was to make of the Church the exclusive mistress of education and instruction. Individual initiative, if called into play, on the one hand, by the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, was stifled, on the other, under the domination of the Church.

71. The Fathers of the Church.—Of the celebrated doctors who, by their erudition and eloquence, if not by their taste, made illustrious the beginning of Christianity, some were jealous mystics and sectaries, in whose eyes philosophical curiosity was a sin, and the love of letters a heresy; and others were Christians of a conciliatory temperament, who, in a certain measure, allied religious faith and literary culture.

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Tertullian rejected all pagan education. He saw in classical culture only a robbery from God; a road to the false and arrogant wisdom of the ancient philosophers. Even Saint Augustine, who in his youth could not read the fourth book of the Æneid without shedding tears, and who had been devotedly fond of ancient poetry and eloquence, renounced, after his conversion, his literary tastes as well as the mad passions of his early manhood. It was by his influence that the Council of Carthage forbade the bishops to read the pagan authors.

This was not the course of Saint Basil, who demands, on the contrary, that the young Christian shall be conversant with the orators, poets, and historians of antiquity; who thinks that the poems of Homer inspire a love for virtue; and who desires, finally, that full use should be made of the treasures of ancient wisdom in the training of the young.[61] Nor was this the thought of Saint Jerome, who said he would be none the less a Ciceronian in becoming a Christian.

72. Saint Jerome and the Education of Girls.—The letters of Saint Jerome on the education of girls form the most valuable educational document of the first centuries of Christianity.[62] They have excited high admiration. Erasmus knew them by heart, and Saint Theresa read selections from them every day. It is impossible, to-day, while admiring certain parts of them, not to condemn the general spirit which pervades them,—a narrow spirit, distrustful of the world, which pushes the religious sentiment even to mysticism, and disdain for human affairs to asceticism.

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73. Physical Asceticism.—It is no longer the question of giving power to the body, and thus of making of it the robust instrument of a cultured spirit, as the Greeks would have it. The body is an enemy that must be subdued by fasting, by abstinence, and by mortifications of the flesh.

“Do not allow Paula to eat in public, that is, do not let her take part in family entertainments, for fear that she may desire the meats that may be served there. Let her learn not to use wine, for it is the source of all impurity. Let her food be vegetables, and only rarely of fish; and let her eat so as always to be hungry.”

Contempt for the body is carried so far that cleanliness is almost interdicted.

“For myself, I entirely forbid a young girl to bathe.”

It is true that, alarmed at the consequences of such austerity, Saint Jerome, by way of exception, permits children the use of the bath, of wine, and of meat, but only “when necessity requires it, and lest the feet may fail them before having walked.”

74. Intellectual and Moral Asceticism.—For the mind, as well as for the body, we may say of Saint Jerome what Nicole wrote to a nun of his time: “You feed your pupils on bread and water.” The Bible is the only book recommended, and this is little; but it is the Bible entire, which is too much. The Song of Songs, with its sensual imagery, would be strange reading for a young girl. The arts, like letters, find no favor with the mysticism of Saint Jerome.

“Never let Paula listen to musical instruments; let her even be ignorant of the uses served by the flute and the harp.”

As for the flute, which the Greek philosophers also did not like, let it be so; but what shall we say of this condem[66]nation of the harp, the instrument of David and the angels, and of religious music itself! How far we are, in common with Saint Jerome, from that complete life, from that harmonious development of all the faculties, which modern educators, Herbert Spencer, for example, present to us with reason as the ideal of education! Saint Jerome goes so far as to proscribe walking:—

“Do not let Paula be found in the ways of the world (emphatic paraphrase for streets), in the gatherings and in the company of her kindred; let her be found only in retirement.”

The ideal of Saint Jerome is a monastic and cloistered life, even in the world. But that which is graver still, that which is the fatal law of mysticism, is that Saint Jerome, after having proscribed letters, arts, and necessary and legitimate pleasures, even brings his condemnation to bear on the most honorable sentiments of the heart. The heart is human also, and everything human is evil and full of danger:

“Do not allow Paula to feel more affection for one of her companions than for others; do not allow her to speak with such a one in an undertone.” And as he held in suspicion even the affections of the family, the Doctor of the Church concludes thus:—

“Let her be educated in a cloister, where she will not know the world, where she will live as an angel, having a body but not knowing it, and where, in a word, you will be spared the care of watching over her.... If you will send us Paula, I will charge myself with being her master and nurse; I will give her my tenderest care; my old age will not prevent me from untying her tongue, and I shall be more renowned than the philosopher Aristotle, since I shall instruct, not a mortal and perishable king, but an immortal spouse of the Heavenly King.”

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75. Permanent Truths.—The pious exaggerations of Saint Jerome only throw into sharper relief the justice and the excellence of some of his practical suggestions,—upon the teaching of reading, for example, or upon the necessity of emulation:—

“Put into the hands of Paula letters in wood or in ivory, and teach her the names of them. She will thus learn while playing. But it will not suffice to have her merely memorize the names of the letters, and call them in succession as they stand in the alphabet. You should often mix them, putting the last first, and the first in the middle.

“Induce her to construct words by offering her a prize, or by giving her, as a reward, what ordinarily pleases children of her age.... Let her have companions, so that the commendation she may receive may excite in her the feeling of emulation. Do not chide her for the difficulty she may have in learning. On the contrary, encourage her by commendation, and proceed in such a way that she shall be equally sensible to the pleasure of having done well, and to the pain of not having been successful.... Especially take care that she do not conceive a dislike for study that might follow her into a more advanced age.”[63]

76. Intellectual Feebleness of the Middle Age.—If the early doctors of the Church occasionally expressed some sympathy for profane letters, it is because, in their youth, before having received baptism, they had themselves attended the pagan schools. But these schools once closed, Christianity did not open others, and, after the fourth century, a profound night enveloped humanity. The labor of the Greeks and the Romans was as though it never had[68] been. The past no longer existed. Humanity began anew. In the fifth century, Apollinaris Sidonius declares that “the young no longer study, that teachers no longer have pupils, and that learning languishes and dies.” Later, Lupus of Ferrières, the favorite of Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald, writes that the study of letters had almost ceased. In the early part of the eleventh century, the Bishop of Laon, Adalberic, asserts that “there is more than one bishop who cannot count the letters of the alphabet on his fingers.” In 1291, of all the monks in the convent of Saint Gall, there was not one who could read and write. It was so difficult to find notaries public, that acts had to be passed verbally. The barons took pride in their ignorance. Even after the efforts of the twelfth century, instruction remained a luxury for the common people; it was the privilege of the ecclesiastics, and even they did not carry it very far. The Benedictines confess that the mathematics were studied only for the purpose of calculating the date of Easter.

77. Causes of the Ignorance of the Middle Age.—What were the permanent causes of that situation which lasted for ten centuries? The Catholic Church has sometimes been held responsible for this. Doubtless the Christian doctors did not always profess a very warm sympathy for intellectual culture. Saint Augustine had said: “It is the ignorant who gain possession of heaven (indocti cœlum rapiunt).” Saint Gregory the Great, a pope of the sixth century, declared that he would blush to have the holy word conform to the rules of grammar. Too many Christians, in a word, confounded ignorance with holiness. Doubtless, towards the seventh century, the darkness still hung thick over the Christian Church. Barbarians invaded the Episcopate, and carried with them their rude manners. Doubtless,[69] also, during the feudal period the priest often became soldier, and remained ignorant. It would, however, be unjust to bring a constructive charge against the Church of the Middle Age, and to represent it as systematically hostile to instruction. Directly to the contrary, it is the clergy who, in the midst of the general barbarism, preserved some vestiges of the ancient culture. The only schools of that period are the episcopal and claustral schools, the first annexed to the bishops’ palaces, the second to the monasteries. The religious orders voluntarily associated manual labor with mental labor. As far back as 530, Saint Benedict founded the convent of Monte Cassino, and drew up statutes which made reading and intellectual labor a part of the daily life of the monks.

In 1179, the third Lateran Council promulgated the following decree:—

“The Church of God, being obliged like a good and tender mother to provide for the bodily and spiritual wants of the poor, desirous to procure for poor children the opportunity for learning to read, and for making advancement in study, orders that each cathedral shall have a teacher charged with the gratuitous instruction of the clergy of that church, and also of the indigent scholars, and that he be assigned a benefice, which, sufficient for his subsistence, may thus open the door of the school to the studious youth. A tutor[64] shall be installed in the other churches and in the monasteries where formerly there were funds set apart for this purpose.”

It is not, then, to the Church that we must ascribe the[70] general intellectual torpor of the Middle Age. Other causes explain that long slumber of the human mind. The first is the social condition of the people. Security and leisure, the indispensable conditions for study, were completely lacking to people always at war, overwhelmed in succession by the barbarians, the Normans, the English, and by the endless struggles of feudal times. The gentlemen of the time aspired only to ride, to hunt, and to figure in tournaments and feats of arms. Physical education was above all else befitting men whose favorite vocation, both by habit and necessity, was war. On the other hand, the enslaved people did not suspect the utility of instruction. In order to comprehend the need of study, that great liberator, one must already have tasted liberty. In a society where the need of instruction had not yet been felt, who could have taken the initiative in the work of instructing the people?

Let us add that the Middle Age presented still other conditions unfavorable for the propagation of instruction, in particular, the lack of national languages, those necessary vehicles of education. The vernacular languages are the instruments of intellectual emancipation. Among a people where a dead language is supreme, a language of the learned, accessible only to the select few, the lower classes necessarily remain buried in ignorance. Moreover, Latin books themselves were rare. Lupus of Ferrières was obliged to write to Rome, and to address himself to the Pope in person, in order to procure for his use a work of Cicero’s. Without books, without schools, without any of the indispensable implements of intellectual labor, what could be done for the mental life? It took refuge in certain monasteries; erudition flourished only in narrow circles, with a privileged few, and the rest of the nation remained buried in an obscure night.

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78. The Three Renascences.—It has been truly said that there were three Renascences: the first, which owed its beginning to Charlemagne, and whose brilliancy did not last; the second, that of the twelfth century, the issue of which was Scholasticism; and the third, the great Renaissance of the sixteenth century, which still lasts, and which the French Revolution has completed.

79. Charlemagne.—Charlemagne undoubtedly formed the purpose of diffusing instruction about him. He ardently sought it for himself, drilled himself in writing, and learned Latin and Greek, rhetoric and astronomy. He would have communicated to all who were about him the same ardor for study. “Ah! that I had twelve clerics,” he exclaimed, “as perfectly instructed as were Jerome and Augustine!” It was naturally upon the clergy that he counted, to make of them the instruments of his plans; but, as one of his capitularies of 788 shows, there was need that the clergy themselves should be reminded of the need of instruction: “We have thought it useful that, in the bishops’ residences, and in the monasteries, care be taken not only to live according to the rules of our holy religion, but, in addition, to teach the knowledge of letters to those who are capable of learning them by the aid of our Lord. Although it avails more to practise the law than to know it, it must be known before it can be practised. Several monasteries having sent us manuscripts, we have observed that, in the most of them, the sentiments were good, but the language bad. We exhort you, then, not only not to neglect the study of letters, but to devote yourselves to them with all your power.”

On the other hand, the nobles did not make any great effort to justify their social rank by the degree of their knowledge. One day, as Charlemagne entered a school,[72] displeased with the indolence and the ignorance of the young barons who attended it, he addressed them in these severe terms: “Do you count upon your birth, and do you feel a pride in it? Take notice that you shall have neither government nor bishoprics, if you are not better instructed than others.”

80. Alcuin (735-804).—Charlemagne was seconded in his efforts by Alcuin of England, of whom it might be said, that he was the first minister of public instruction in France. It is he who founded the Palatine school, a sort of imperial and itinerant academy which followed the court on its travels. It was a model school, where Alcuin had for his pupils the four sons and two daughters of Charlemagne, and Charlemagne himself, always eager to be instructed.

Alcuin’s method was not without originality, but it is a great mistake to say that it resembles the method of Socrates. Alcuin doubtless proceeds by interrogation; but here it is the pupil who interrogates, and the teacher who responds.

“What is speech? asks Pepin, the eldest son of Charlemagne. It is the interpreter of the soul, replies Alcuin. What is life? It is an enjoyment for some, but for the wretched it is a sorrow, a waiting for death. What is sleep? The image of death. What is writing? It is the guardian of history. What is the body? The tenement of the soul. What is day? A summons to labor.”[65]

All this is either commonplace or artificial. The sententious replies of Alcuin may be fine maxims, fit for embellishing the memory; but in this procedure of the mere scholar, affected by the over-refinements of his time, there is nothing which can call into activity the intelligence of the pupil.

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Nevertheless the name of Alcuin marks an era in the history of education. His was the first attempt to form an alliance between classical literature and Christian inspiration,—to create a “Christian Athens,” according to the emphatic phrase of Alcuin himself.

81. The Successors of Charlemagne.—It had been the ambition of Charlemagne to reign over a civilized society, rather than over a barbarous people. Convinced that the only basis of political unity is a unity of ideas and of morals, he thought to find the basis of that moral unity in religion, and religion itself he purposed to establish upon a more widely diffused system of instruction. But these ideas were too advanced for the time, and their execution too difficult for the circumstances then existing. A new decadence followed the era of Charlemagne. The clergy did not respond to the hopes which the great emperor had placed on them. As far back as 817, the Council of Aix-la-Chapelle decided that henceforth no more day-pupils should be received into the conventual schools, for the reason that too large a number of pupils would make impossible the maintenance of the monastic discipline. No one of Charlemagne’s successors seems to have taken up the thought of the great emperor; no one of them was preoccupied with the problems of education. It is upon despotic authority, and not upon the intellectual progress of their subjects, that those unintelligent rulers wished to found their power. Under Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald there were constructed more castles than schools.

The kings of France were far from imitating the Anglo-Saxon king, Alfred the Great (849-901), to whom tradition ascribes these two sayings: “The English ought always to be free, as free as their own thoughts”; “Free-born sons should know how to read and write.”

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82. Scholasticism.—It was not till the twelfth century that the human mind was awakened. That was the age of Scholasticism, the essential character of which was the study of reasoning, and the practice of dialectics, or syllogistic reasoning. The syllogism, which reaches necessary conclusions from given premises, was the natural instrument of an age of faith, when men wished simply to demonstrate immutable dogmas, without ever making an innovation on established beliefs. It has often been observed that the art of reasoning is the science of a people still in the early stage of its progress; we might almost say of a barbarous people. A subtile dialectic is in perfect keeping with manners still rude, and with a limited state of knowledge. It is only an intellectual machine. It was not then a question of original thinking. All that was necessary was simply to reason upon conceptions already acquired, and the sacred depository of these was kept in charge by Theology. Consequently, there was no independent science. Philosophy, according to the language of the times, was but the humble servant of Theology. The dialectics of the doctors of the Middle Age was but a subtile commentary on the sacred books and on the doctrines of Aristotle.[66] It seems, says Locke, to see the inertness of the Middle Age, that God was pleased to make of man a two-footed animal, while leaving to Aristotle the task of making him a thinking being. From his point of view, an able educator of the seventeenth century, the Abbé Fleury, pronounces this severe judgment on the scholastic method:—

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“This way of philosophizing on words and thoughts, without examining the things themselves, was certainly an easy way of getting along without a knowledge of facts, which can be acquired only by reading” (Fleury should have added and by observation); “and it was an easy way of dazzling the ignorant laics by peculiar terms and vain subtilties.”

But Scholasticism had its hour of glory, its erudite doctors, its eloquent professors, chief among whom was Abelard.

83. Abelard (1079-1142).—A genuine professor of higher instruction, Abelard, by the prestige of his eloquence, gathered around him at Paris thousands of students. Human speech, the living words of the teacher, had then an authority, an importance, which it has lost in part since books, everywhere distributed, have, to a certain extent, superseded oral instruction. At a time when printing did not exist, when manuscript copies were rare, a teacher who combined knowledge with the gift of speech was a phenomenon of incomparable interest, and students flocked from all parts of Europe to take advantage of his lectures. Abelard is the most brilliant representative of the scholastic pedagogy, with an original and personal tendency towards the emancipation of the mind. “It is ridiculous,” he said, “to preach to others what we can neither make them understand, nor understand ourselves.” With more boldness than Saint Anselm, he applied dialectics to theology, and attempted to reason out the grounds of his faith.

84. The Seven Liberal Arts.—The seven liberal arts constituted what may be called the secondary instruction of the Middle Age, such as was given in the claustral or conventual schools, and later, in the universities. The liberal arts were distributed into two courses of study, known as the trivium and the quadrivium. The trivium comprised grammar (Latin grammar, of course), dialectics, or logic, and[76] rhetoric; and the quadrivium, music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. It is important to note the fact that this programme contains only abstract and formal studies,—no real and concrete studies. The sciences which teach us to know man and the world, such as history, ethics, the physical and natural sciences, were omitted and unknown, save perhaps in a few convents of the Benedictines. Nothing which can truly educate man, and develop his faculties as a whole, enlists the attention of the Middle Age. From a course of study thus limited there might come skillful reasoners and men formidable in argument, but never fully developed men.[67]

85. Methods and Discipline.—The methods employed in the ecclesiastical schools of the Middle Age were in accord with the spirit of the times, when men were not concerned about liberty and intellectual freedom; and when they thought more about the teaching of dogmas than about the training of the intelligence. The teachers recited or read their lectures, and the pupils learned by heart. The discipline was harsh. Corrupt human nature was distrusted. In 1363, pupils were forbidden the use of benches and chairs, on the pretext that such high seats were an encouragement to pride. For securing obedience, corporal chastisements were used and abused. The rod is in fashion in the fifteenth as it was in the fourteenth century.

“There is no other difference,” says an historian, “except that the rods in the fifteenth century are twice as long as those in the fourteenth.”[68] Let us note, however, the protest of Saint Anselm, a protest that pointed out the evil rather than cured it. “Day and night,” said an abbot to[77] Saint Anselm, “we do not cease to chastise the children confided to our care, and they grow worse and worse.” Anselm replied, “Indeed! You do not cease to chastise them! And when they are grown up, what will they become? Idiotic and stupid. A fine education that, which makes brutes of men! ... If you were to plant a tree in your garden, and were to enclose it on all sides so that it could not extend its branches, what would you find when, at the end of several years, you set it free from its bands? A tree whose branches would be bent and crooked; and would it not be your fault, in having so unreasonably confined it?”

86. The Universities.—Save claustral and cathedral schools, to which must be added some parish schools, the earliest example of our village schools, the sole educational establishment of the Middle Age was what is called the University. Towards the thirteenth and fourteenth century we see multiplying in the great cities of Europe those centres of study, those collections of students which recall from afar the schools of Plato and Aristotle. Of such establishments were the university which opened at Paris for the teaching of theology and philosophy (1200); the universities of Naples (1224), of Prague (1345), of Vienna (1365), of Heidelberg (1386), etc.[69] Without being completely affranchised from sacerdotal control, these universities were a first expansion of free science. As far back as the ninth century, the Arabs had given an example to the rest of Europe by founding at Salamanca, at Cordova, and in other cities of Spain, schools where all the sciences were cultivated.

87. Gerson (1363-1429).—With the gentle Gerson, the supposed author of the Imitation, it seems that the dreary dialectics[78] disappear to let the heart speak and make way for feeling. The Chancellor of the University of Paris is distinguished from the men of his time by his love for the people. He wrote in the common tongue little elementary treatises for the use and within the comprehension of the plain people. His Latin work, entitled De parvulis ad Christum trahendis (“Little children whom we must lead to Christ”), gives evidence of a large spirit of sweetness and goodness. It abounds in subtile and delicate observations. For example, Gerson demands of teachers patience and tenderness: “Little children,” he says, “are more easily managed by caresses than by fear.” For these frail creatures he dreads the contagion of example. “No living being is more in danger than the child of allowing himself to be corrupted by another child.” In his eyes, the little child is a delicate plant that must be carefully protected against every evil influence, and, in particular, against pernicious literature, such as the Roman de la Rose. Gerson condemns corporal punishment, and requires that teachers shall have for their pupils the affection of a father:—

“Above all else, let the teacher make an effort to be a father to his pupils. Let him never be angry with them. Let him always be simple in his instruction, and relate to his pupils that which is wholesome and agreeable.” Tender-hearted and exalted spirit, Gerson is a precursor of Fenelon.[70]

88. Vittorino da Feltre (1379-1446).—It is a pleasure to place beside Gerson one of his Italian contemporaries, the celebrated Vittorino da Feltre, a professor in the University of Padua. It was as preceptor to the sons of the[79] Prince of Gonzagas, and as founder of an educational establishment at Venice, that Vittorino found occasion to show his aptitude for educational work. With him, education again became what it was in Greece,—the harmonious development of mind and body. Gymnastic exercises, such as swimming, riding, fencing, restored to honor; attention to the exterior qualities of fine bearing; an interesting and agreeable method of instruction; a constant effort to discover the character and aptitudes of children; a conscientious preparation for each lesson; assiduous watchfulness over the work of pupils; such are the principal features of the pedagogy of Vittorino da Feltre, a system of teaching evidently in advance of his time, and one which deserves a longer study.

89. Other Teachers at the Close of the Middle Age.—Were we writing a work of erudition, there would be other thinkers to point out in the last years of the Middle Age, in that uncertain and, so to speak, twilight period which serves as a transition from the night of the Middle Age to the full day of the Renaissance. Among others, let us notice the Chevalier de la Tour-Landry and Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini.

The Chevalier de la Tour-Landry, in the work which he wrote for the education of his daughters (1372), scarcely rises above the spirit of his time. Woman, as he thinks, is made to pray and to go to church. The model which he sets before his daughters is a countess, who “each day wished to hear three masses.” He recommends fasting three times a week in order “the better to subdue the flesh,” and to prevent it “from diverting itself too much.” There is neither responsibility nor proper dignity for the wife, who owes obedience to her husband, her lord, and “should do his will,[80] whether wrong or right; if wrong, she is absolved from blame, as the blame falls on her lord.”

Æneas Sylvius, the future Pope Pius II., in his tract on The Education of Children (1451), is already a man of the Renaissance, since he recommends with enthusiasm the reading and study of most of the classical authors. However, he traces a programme of studies relatively liberal. By the side of the humanities he places the sciences of geometry and arithmetic, “which are necessary,” he says, “for training the mind and assuring rapidity of conceptions”; and also history and geography. He had himself composed historical narratives accompanied by maps. The distrusts of an overstrained devotion were no longer felt by a teacher who wrote, “There is nothing in the world more precious or more beautiful than an enlightened intelligence.”

90. Recapitulation.—It is thus that the Middle Age in drawing to a close came nearer and nearer, in the way of continuous progress, to the decisive emancipation which the Renaissance and the Reformation were soon to perpetuate. But the Middle Age, in itself, whatever effort may be put forth at this day to rehabilitate it, and to discover in it the golden age of modern societies, remains an ill-starred epoch. A few virtues, negative for the most part, virtues of obedience and consecration, cannot atone for the real faults of those rude and barbarous centuries. A higher education reserved to ecclesiastics and men of noble rank; an instruction which consisted in verbal legerdemain, which developed only the mechanism of reasoning, and made of the intelligence a prisoner of the formal syllogism; agreeably to the barbarism of primitive times, a fantastic pedantry which lost itself in superficial discussions and in verbal distinctions; popular education almost null, and restricted to[81] the teaching of the catechism in Latin; finally, a Church, absolute and sovereign, which determined for all, great and small, the limits of thought, of belief, and of action; such was, from our own point of view, the condition of the Middle Age. It was time for the coming of the Renaissance to affranchise the human mind, to excite and to reveal to itself the unconscious need of instruction, and by the fruitful alliance of the Christian spirit and profane letters, to prepare for the coming of modern education.

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92. General Characteristics of the Education of the Sixteenth Century.—Modern education begins with the Renaissance. The educational methods that we then begin to discern will doubtless not be developed and perfected till a later period; the new doctrines will pass into practice only gradually, and with the general progress of the times. But from the sixteenth century education is in possession of its essential principles. The education of the Middle Age, over-rigid and repressive, which condemned the body to a régime too severe, and the mind to a discipline too narrow, is to be succeeded,[84] at least in theory, by an education broader and more liberal; which will give due attention to hygiene and physical exercises; which will enfranchise the intelligence, hitherto the prisoner of the syllogism; which will call into play the moral forces, instead of repressing them; which will substitute real studies for the verbal subtilties of dialectics; which will give the preference to things over words; which, finally, instead of developing but a single faculty, the reason, and instead of reducing man to a sort of dialectic automaton, will seek to develop the whole man, mind and body, taste and knowledge, heart and will.

93. Causes of the Renaissance in Education.—The men of the sixteenth century having renewed with classical antiquity an intercourse that had been too long interrupted, it was natural that they should propose to the young the study of the Greeks and the Romans. What is called secondary instruction really dates from the sixteenth century. The crude works of the Middle Age are succeeded by the elegant compositions of Athens and Rome, henceforth made accessible to all through the art of printing; and, with the reading of the ancient authors, there reappear through the fruitful effect of imitation, their qualities of correctness in thought, of literary taste, and of elegance in form. In France, as in Italy, the national tongues, moulded, and, as it were, consecrated by writers of genius, become the instruments of an intellectual propaganda. Artistic taste, revived by the rich products of a race of incomparable artists, gives an extension to the horizon of life, and creates a new class of emotions. Finally, the Protestant Reform develops individual thought and free inquiry, and at the same time, by its success, it imposes still greater efforts on the Catholic Church.

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This is not saying that everything is faultless in the educational efforts of the sixteenth century. First, as is natural for innovators, the thought of the teachers of this period is marked by enthusiasm rather than by precision. They are more zealous in pointing out the end to be attained, than exact in determining the means to be employed. Besides, some of them are content to emancipate the mind, but forget to give it proper direction. Finally, others make a wrong use of the ancients; they are too much preoccupied with the form and the purity of language; they fall into Ciceromania, and it is not their fault if a new superstition, that of rhetoric, does not succeed the old superstition, that of the syllogism.

94. The Theory and the Practice of Education in the Sixteenth Century.—In the history of education in the sixteenth century, we must, moreover, carefully distinguish the theory from the practice. The theory of education is already boldly put forward, and is in advance of its age; while the practice is still dragging itself painfully along on the beaten road, notwithstanding some successful attempts at improvement.

The theory we must look for in the works of Erasmus, Rabelais, and Montaigne, of whom it may be said, that before pretending to surpass them, even at this day, we should rather attempt to overtake them, and to equal them in the most of their pedagogical precepts.

The practice is, first, the development of the study of the humanities, particularly in the early colleges of the Jesuits, and, before the Jesuits, in certain Protestant colleges, particularly in the college at Strasburg, so brilliantly administered by the celebrated Sturm (1507-1589). Then it is the revival of higher instruction, denoted particularly by the foundation of the College of France (1530), and by the brilliant lec[86]tures of Ramus. Finally, it is the progress, we might almost say the birth, of primary instruction, through the efforts of the Protestant reformers, and especially of Luther.

Nevertheless, the educational thought of the sixteenth century is in advance of educational practice; theories greatly anticipate applications, and constitute almost all that is deserving of special note.

95. Erasmus (1467-1536).—By his numerous writings, translations, grammars, dictionaries, and original works, Erasmus diffused about him his own passionate fondness for classical literature, and communicated this taste to his contemporaries. Without having a direct influence on education, since he scarcely taught himself, he encouraged the study of the ancients by his example, and by his active propagandism. The scholar who said, “When I have money, I will first buy Greek books and then clothes,” deserves to be placed in the first rank among the creators of secondary instruction.

96. The Education of Erasmus: the Jeromites.—Erasmus was educated by the monks, as Voltaire was by the Jesuits, a circumstance that has cost these liberal thinkers none of their independent disposition, and none of their satirical spirit. At the age of twelve, Erasmus entered the college of Deventer, in Holland. This college was conducted by the Jeromites, or Brethren of the Common Life. Founded in 1340 by Gerard Groot, the association of the Jeromites undertook, among other occupations, the instruction of children. Very mystical, and very ascetic at first, the disciples of Gerard Groot restricted themselves to teaching the Bible, to reading, and writing. They proscribed, as useless to piety, letters and the sciences. But in the fifteenth century, under the influence of John of Wessel and[87] Rudolph Agricola, the Jeromites became transformed; they were the precursors of the Renaissance, and the promoters of the alliance between profane letters and Christianity. “We may read Ovid once,” said John of Wessel, “but we ought to read Virgil, Horace, and Terence, with more attention.” Horace and Terence were precisely the favorite authors of Erasmus, who learned them by heart at Deventer. Agricola, of whom Erasmus speaks only with enthusiasm, was also the zealous propagator of the great works of antiquity, and, at the same time, the severe critic of the state of educational practice of the time when the school was too much like a prison.

“If there is anything which has a contradictory name,” he said, “it is the school. The Greeks called it σχολὴ, which means leisure, recreation; and the Latins, ludus, that is, play. But there is nothing farther removed from recreation and play. Aristophanes called it φροντιστήριον, that is, place of care, of torment, and this is surely the designation which best befits it.”

Erasmus then had for his first teachers enlightened men, who, notwithstanding their monastic condition, both knew and loved antiquity. But, as a matter of fact, Erasmus was his own teacher. By personal effort he put himself at the school of the ancients. He was all his life a student. Now he was a foundation scholar at the college of Montaigu, in Paris, and now preceptor to gentlemen of wealth. He was always in pursuit of learning, going over the whole of Europe, that he might find in each cultivated city new opportunities for self-instruction.

97. Pedagogical Works of Erasmus.—Most of the works written by Erasmus relate to instruction. Some of them are fairly to be classed as text-books, elementary treatises on practical education, as, for example, his books[88] On the Manner of writing Letters, Upon Rules of Etiquette for the Young, etc. We may also notice his Adages, a vast repertory of proverbs and maxims borrowed from antiquity; his Colloquies, a collection of dialogues for the use of the young, though the author here treats of many things which a pupil should never hear spoken of. Another category should include works of a more theoretical character, in which Erasmus sets forth his ideas on education. In the essay On the Order of Study (de Ratione Studii), he seeks out the rules for instruction in literature, for the study of grammar, for the cultivation of the memory, and for the explication of the Greek and Latin authors. Another treatise, entitled Of the First Liberal Education of Children (De pueris statim ac liberaliter instituendis), is still more important, and covers the whole field of education. Erasmus here studies the character of the child, the question of knowing whether the first years of child-life can be turned to good account, and the measures that are to be taken with early life. He also recommends methods that are attractive, and heartily condemns the barbarous discipline which reigned in the schools of his time.

98. Juvenile Etiquette.—Erasmus is one of the first educators who comprehended the importance of politeness. In an age still uncouth, where the manners of even the cultivated classes tolerated usages that the most ignorant rustic of to-day would scorn, it was good to call the attention to outward appearances and the duties of politeness. Erasmus knew perfectly well that politeness has a moral side, that it is not a matter of pure convention, but that it proceeds from the inner disposition of a well-ordered soul. So he assigns it an important place in education:

“The duty of instructing the young,” he says, “includes several elements, the first and also the chief of which is,[89] that the tender mind of the child should be instructed in piety; the second, that he love and learn the liberal arts; the third, that he be taught tact in the conduct of social life; and the fourth, that from his earliest age he accustom himself to good behavior, based on moral principles.”

We need not be astonished, however, to find that the civility of Erasmus is still imperfect, now too free, now too exacting, and always ingenuous. “It is a religious duty,” he says, “to salute him who sneezes.” “Morally speaking, it is not a proper thing to throw the head back while drinking, after the manner of storks, in order to drain the last drop from the glass.” “If one let bread fall on the ground, he should kiss it after having picked it up.” On the other hand, Erasmus seems to allow that the nose may be wiped with the fingers, but he forbids the use of the cap or the sleeve for this purpose. He requires that the face shall be bathed with pure water in the morning; “but,” he adds, “to repeat this afterwards is nonsense.”

99. Early Education.—Like Quintilian, by whom he is often inspired, Erasmus does not scorn to enter the primary school, and to shape the first exercises for intellectual culture. Upon many points, the thought of the sixteenth century scholar is but an echo of the Institutes of Oratory, or of the educational essays of Plutarch. Some of his maxims deserve to be reproduced: “We learn with great willingness from those whom we love;” “Parents themselves cannot properly bring up their children if they make themselves only to be feared;” “There are children who would be killed sooner than made better by blows: by mildness and kind admonitions, one may make of them whatever he will;” “Children will learn to speak their native tongue without any weariness, by usage and practice;” “Drill in reading and writing is a little bit tiresome, and the teacher[90] will ingeniously palliate the tedium by the artifice of an attractive method;” “The ancients moulded toothsome dainties into the forms of the letters, and thus, as it were, made children swallow the alphabet;” “In the matter of grammatical rules, instruction should at the first be limited to the most simple;” “As the body in infant years is nourished by little portions distributed at intervals, so should the mind of the child be nurtured by items of knowledge adapted to its weakness, and distributed little by little.”

From out these quotations there appears a method of instruction that is kindly, lovable, and full of tenderness for the young. Erasmus claims for them the nourishing care and caresses of the mother, the familiarity and goodness of the father, cleanliness, and even elegance in the school, and finally, the mildness and indulgence of the teacher.

100. The Instruction of Women.—The scholars of the Renaissance did not exclude women from all participation in the literary treasures that a recovered antiquity had disclosed to themselves. Erasmus admits them to an equal share.

In the Colloquy of the Abbé and the Educated Woman, Magdala claims for herself the right to learn Latin, “so that she may hold converse each day with so many authors who are so eloquent, so instructive, so wise, and such good counsellors.” In the book called Christian Marriage, Erasmus banters young ladies who learn only to make a bow, to hold the hands crossed, to bite their lips when they laugh, to eat and drink as little as possible at table, after having taken ample portions in private. More ambitious for the wife, Erasmus recommends her to pursue the studies which will assist her in educating her own children, and in taking part in the intellectual life of her husband.

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Vives, a contemporary of Erasmus (1492-1540), a Spanish teacher, expressed analogous ideas in his books on the education of women, in which he recommends young women to read Plato and Seneca.

To sum up, the pedagogy of Erasmus is not without value; but with him, education ran the risk of remaining exclusively Greek and Latin. A humanist above everything else, he granted but very small place to the sciences, and to history, which it sufficed to skim over, as he said; and, what reveals his inmost nature, he recommended the study of the physical sciences for this reason in particular, that the writer will find in the knowledge of nature an abundant source of metaphors, images, and comparisons.

101. Rabelais (1483-1553).—Wholly different is the spirit of Rabelais, who, under a fanciful and original form, has sketched a complete system of education. Some pages of marked gravity in the midst of the epic vagabondage of his burlesque work, give him the right to appear in the first rank among those who have reformed the art of training and developing the human soul.[71]

The pedagogy of Rabelais is the first appearance of what may be called realism in instruction, in distinction from the scholastic formalism. The author of Gargantua turns the mind of the young man towards objects truly worthy of occupying his attention. He catches a glimpse of the future reserved to scientific education, and to the study of nature. He invites the mind, not to the labored subtilties and complicated tricks which scholasticism had brought into fashion, but to manly efforts, and to a wide unfolding of human nature.

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102. Criticism of the Old Education: Gargantua and Eudemon.—In the manners of the sixteenth century, the keen satire of Rabelais found many opportunities for disporting itself; and his book may be regarded as a collection of pamphlets. But there is nothing that he has pursued with more sarcasms than the education of his day.

At the outset, Gargantua is educated according to the scholastic methods. He works for twenty years with all his might, and learns so perfectly the books that he studies that he can recite them by heart, backwards and forwards, “and yet his father discovered that all this profited him nothing; and what is worse, that it made him a madcap, a ninny, dreamy, and infatuated.”

To that unintelligent and artificial training which surcharges the memory, which holds the pupil for long years over insipid books, which robs the mind of all independent activity, which dulls rather than sharpens the intelligence,—to all this Rabelais opposes a natural education, which appeals to experience and to facts, which trains the young man, not only for the discussions of the schools, but for real life, and for intercourse with the world, and which, finally, enriches the intelligence and adorns the memory without stifling the native graces and the free activities of the spirit.

Eudemon, who, in Rabelais’ romance, represents the pupil trained by the new methods, knows how to think with accuracy and speak with facility; his bearing is without boldness, but with confidence. When introduced to Gargantua, he turns towards him, “cap in hand, with open countenance, ruddy lips, steady eyes, and with modesty becoming a youth”; he salutes him elegantly and graciously. To all the pleasant things which Eudemon says to him, Gargantua finds nothing to say in reply: “His countenance appeared as though he had taken to crying immoderately; he hid his[93] face in his cap, and not a single word could be drawn from him.”

In these two pupils, so different in manner, Rabelais has personified two contrasted methods of education: that which, by mechanical exercises of memory, enfeebles and dulls the intelligence; and that which, with larger grants of liberty, develops keen intelligences, and frank and open characters.

103. The New Education.—Let us now notice with some detail how Rabelais conceives this new education.[72] After having thrown into sharp relief the faults contracted by Gargantua in the school of his first teachers, he entrusts him to a preceptor, Ponocrates, who is charged with correcting his faults, and with re-moulding him; he is to employ his own principles in the government of his pupil.

Ponocrates proceeds slowly at first; he considers that “nature does not endure sudden changes without great violence.” He studies and observes his pupil; he wishes to judge of his natural disposition. Then he sets himself to work; he undertakes a general recasting of the character and spirit of Gargantua, while directing, at the same time, his physical, intellectual, and moral education.

104. Physical Education.—Hygiene and gymnastics, cleanliness which protects the body, and exercise which strengthens it,—these two essential parts of physical education[94] receive equal attention from Rabelais. Erasmus thought it was nonsense (“ne rime à rien”) to wash more than once a day. Gargantua, on the contrary, after eating, bathes his hands and his eyes in fresh water. Rabelais does not forget that he has been a physician; he omits no detail relative to the care of the body, even the most repugnant. He is far from believing, with the mystics of the Middle Age, that it is permissible to lodge knowledge in a sordid body, and that a foul or neglected exterior is not unbefitting virtuous souls. The first preceptors of Gargantua said that it sufficed to comb one’s hair “with the four fingers and the thumb; and that whoever combed, washed, and cleansed himself otherwise, was losing his time in this world.” With Ponocrates, Gargantua reforms his habits, and tries to resemble Eudemon, “whose hair was so neatly combed, who was so well dressed, of such fine appearance, and was so modest in his bearing, that he much more resembled a little angel than a man.”

Rabelais attaches equal importance to gymnastics, to walking, and to active life in the open air. He does not allow Gargantua to grow pale over his books, and to protract his study into the night. After the morning’s lessons, he takes him out to play. Tennis and ball follow the application to books: “He exercises his body just as vigorously as he had before exercised his mind.” And so, after the study of the afternoon till the supper hour, Gargantua devotes his time to physical exercises. Riding, wrestling, swimming, every species of physical recreation, gymnastics under all its forms,—there is nothing which Gargantua does not do to give agility to his limbs and to strengthen his muscles. Here, as in other places, Rabelais stretches a point, and purposely resorts to exaggeration in order to make his thought better comprehended. It would require days of several times twenty-four[95] hours, in order that a real man could find the time to do all that the author of Gargantua requires of his giant. In contrast with the long asceticism of the Middle Age, he proposes a real revelry of gymnastics for the colossal body of his hero. We will not forget that here, as in all the other parts of Rabelais’ work, fiction is ever mingled with fact. Rabelais wrote for giants, and it is natural that he should demand gigantesque efforts of them. In order to comprehend the exact thought of the author, it is necessary to reduce his fantastic exaggerations to human proportions.

105. Intellectual Education.—For the mind, as for the body, Rabelais requires prodigies of activity. Gargantua rises at four in the morning, and the greater part of the long day is filled with study. For the indolent contemplations of the Middle Age, Rabelais substitutes an incessant effort and an intense activity of the mind. Gargantua first studies the ancient languages, and the first place is given to Greek, which Rabelais rescues from the long discredit into which it had fallen in the Middle Age, as is proved by the vulgar adage, “Græcum est, non legitur.”

“Now, all disciplines are restored, and the languages reinstated,—Greek (without which it is a shame for a person to call himself learned), Hebrew, Chaldean, Latin. There are very elegant and correct editions in use, which have been invented in my age by divine inspiration, as, on the other hand, artillery was invented by diabolic suggestion. The whole world is full of wise men, of learned teachers, and of very large libraries, and it is my opinion that neither in the time of Plato nor in that of Cicero, nor in that of Papinian, were there such opportunities for study as we see to-day.”

Like all his contemporaries, Rabelais is an enthusiast in classical learning; but he is distinguished from them by a[96] very decided taste for the sciences, and in particular for the natural sciences.

106. The Physical and Natural Sciences.—The Middle Age had completely neglected the study of nature. The art of observing was ignored by those subtile dialecticians, who would know nothing of the physical world except through the theories of Aristotle or the dogmas of the sacred books; who attached no value to the study of the material universe, the transient and despised abode of immortal souls; and who, moreover, flattered themselves that they could discover at the end of their syllogisms all that was necessary to know about it. Rabelais is certainly the first, in point of time, of that grand school of educators who place the sciences in the first rank among the studies worthy of human thought.

The scholar of the Middle Age knew nothing of the world. Gargantua requires of his son that he shall know it under all its aspects:

“As to the knowledge of the facts of nature,” he writes to Pantagruel, “I would have you devote yourself to them with great care, so that there shall be neither sea, river, nor fountain, whose fish you do not know. All the birds of the air, all the trees, shrubs, and fruits of the forests, all the grasses of the earth, all the metals concealed in the depths of the abysses, the precious stones of the entire East and South,—none of these should be unknown to you. By frequent dissections, acquire a knowledge of the other world, which is man. In a word, I point out a new world of knowledge.”

Nothing is omitted, it is observed, from what constitutes the science of the universe or the knowledge of man.

It is further to be noticed, that Rabelais wishes his pupil not only to know, but to love and experience nature. He[97] recommends his pupils to go and read the Georgics of Virgil in the midst of meadows and woods. The precursor of Rousseau on this point as upon some others, he thinks there is a gain in spiritual health by refreshing the imagination and giving repose to the spirit, through the contemplation of the beauties of nature.

Ponocrates, in order to afford Gargantua distraction from his extreme attention to study, recommended once each month some very clear and serene day, on which they set out at an early hour from the city, and went to Chantilly, or Boulogne, or Montrouge, or Pont Charenton, or Vannes, or Saint Cloud. And there they passed the whole day in playing, singing, dancing, frolicking in some fine meadow, hunting for sparrows, collecting pebbles, fishing for frogs and crabs.[73]

107. Object Lessons.—In the scheme of studies planned by Rabelais, the mind of the pupil is always on the alert, even at table. There, instruction takes place while talking. The conversation bears upon the food, upon the objects which attract the attention of Gargantua, upon the nature and properties of water, wine, bread, and salt. Every sensible object becomes material for questions and explanations. Gargantua often takes walks across fields, and he studies botany in the open country, “passing through meadows or other grassy places, observing trees and plants, comparing them with ancient books where they are described, ... and taking handfuls of them home.” There are but few didactic lessons; intuitive instruction, given in the presence of the objects themselves, such is the method of Rabelais. It is in the same spirit that he sends his pupil to visit the stores of the silversmiths, the founderies, the alchemists’ laboratories,[98] and shops of all kinds,—real scientific excursions, such as are in vogue to-day. Rabelais would form a complete man, skilled in art and industry, and also capable, like the Émile of Rousseau, of devoting himself to manual labor. When the weather is rainy, and walking impracticable, Gargantua employs his time in splitting and sawing wood, and in threshing grain in the barn.

108. Attractive Methods.—By a reaction against the irksome routine of the Middle Age, Rabelais would have his pupil study while playing, and even learn mathematics “through recreation and amusement.” It is in handling playing-cards that Gargantua is taught thousands of “new inventions which relate to the science of numbers.” The same course is followed in geometry and astronomy. The accomplishments are not neglected, especially fencing. Gargantua is an enormous man, who is to be developed in all directions. The fine arts, music, painting, and sculpture, are not strangers to him. The hero of Rabelais represents, not so much an individual man, as a collective being who personifies the whole of society, with all the variety of its new aspirations, and with all the intensity of its multiplied needs. While the Middle Age, through a narrow spirit, left in inaction certain natural tendencies, Rabelais calls them all into life, without choice, it is true, and without discrimination, with the whole ardor of an emancipated imagination.

109. Religious Education.—In respect of religion as of everything else, Rabelais is the adversary of an education wholly exterior and of pure form. He ridicules his Gargantua, who, before his intellectual conversion, when he was still at the school of “his preceptors, the sophists,” goes to church, after a hearty dinner, to hear twenty-six or thirty masses. What he substitutes for this exterior devotion, for[99] this abuse of superficial practices, is a real feeling of piety, and the direct reading of the sacred texts: “It is while Gargantua was being dressed that there was read to him a page of Divine Scripture.”[74] Still more, it is the intimate and personal adoration “of the great psalmodist of the universe,” excited by the study of the works of God. Gargantua and his master, Ponocrates, have scarcely risen when they observe the state of the heavens, and admire the celestial vault. In the evening they devote themselves to the same contemplation. After his meals, as before going to sleep, Gargantua offers prayers to God, to adore Him, to confirm his faith, to glorify Him for His boundless goodness, to thank Him for all the time past, and to recommend himself to Him for the time to come. The religious feeling of Rabelais proceeds at the same time, both from the sentiment which provoked the Protestant Reformation, of which he came near being an adherent, and from tendencies still more modern,—those, for example, which animate the deistic philosophy of Rousseau.

110. Moral Education.—Those who know Rabelais only by reputation, or through some of his innumerable drolleries, will perhaps be astonished that the jovial author can be counted a teacher of morals. It is impossible, however, to misunderstand the sincere and lofty inspiration of such passages as this:

“Because, according to the wise Solomon, wisdom does not enter into a malevolent soul, and knowledge without conscience is but the ruin of the soul; it becomes you to serve, to love, and to fear God, and to place on Him all your thoughts,[100] all your hopes.... Be suspicious of the errors of the world. Apply not your heart to vanity, for this life is transitory; but the word of God endures forever. Be useful to all your neighbors, and love them as yourself. Revere your teachers, flee the company of men whom you would not resemble; and the grace which God has given you receive not in vain. And when you think you have all the knowledge that can be acquired by this means, return to me, so that I may see you, and give you my benediction before I die.”[75]

111. Montaigne (1533-1592) and Rabelais.—Between Erasmus, the learned humanist, exclusively devoted to belles-lettres, and Rabelais, the bold innovator, who extends as far as possible the limits of the intelligence, and who causes the entire encyclopædia of human knowledge to enter the brain of his pupil at the risk of splitting it open, Montaigne occupies an intermediate place, with his circumspect and conservative tendencies, with his discreet and moderate pedagogy, the enemy of all excesses. It seemed that Rabelais would develop all the faculties equally, and place all studies, letters, and sciences upon the same footing. Montaigne demands a choice. Between the different faculties he attempts particularly to train the judgment; among the different knowledges, he recommends by preference those which form sound and sensible minds. Rabelais overdrives mind and body. He dreams of an extravagant course of instruction where every science shall be studied exhaustively.[76][101] Montaigne simply demands that “one taste the upper crust of the sciences”; that one skim over them without going into them deeply, “in French fashion.” In his view, a well-made head is worth more than a head well filled. It is not so much to accumulate, to amass, knowledge, as to assimilate as much of it as a prudent intelligence can digest without fatigue. In a word, while Rabelais sits down, so to speak, at the banquet of knowledge with an avidity which recalls the gluttony of the Pantagruelian repasts, Montaigne is a delicate connoisseur, who would only satisfy with discretion a regulated appetite.

112. The Personal Education of Montaigne.—One often becomes teacher through recollection of his personal education. This is what happened to Montaigne. His pedagogy is at once an imitation of the methods which a father full of solicitude had himself applied to him, and a protest against the defects and the vices of the college of Guienne, which he entered at the age of six years. The home education of Montaigne affords the interesting spectacle of a child who develops freely. My spirit, he himself says, was trained with all gentleness and freedom, without severity or constraint. His father, skilful in his tender care, had him awakened each morning at the sound of musical instruments, so as to spare him those brusque alarms that are bad preparations for toil. In a word, he applied to him that tempered discipline, at once indulgent and firm, equally removed from complacency and harshness, which Montaigne has christened with the name of severe mildness. Another characteristic of Montaigne’s education is, that he learned Latin as one learns his native tongue. His father had surrounded him with domestics and teachers who conversed with him only in Latin. The result of this was, that at the age of six he was so proficient in the language of Cicero, that the best[102] Latinists of the time feared to address him (craignissent à l’accoster). On the other hand, he knew no more of French than he did of Arabic.[77] It is evident that Montaigne’s father had taken a false route, but at least Montaigne derived a just conception from this experience, namely, that the methods ordinarily pursued in the study of the dead languages are too slow and too mechanical; that an abuse is made of rules, and that sufficient attention is not given to practice: “No doubt but Greek and Latin are very great ornaments, and of very great use, but we buy them too dear.”[78]

At the college of Guienne, where he passed seven years, Montaigne learned to detest corporal chastisements and the hard discipline of the scholars of his day: “ ... Instead of tempting and alluring children to letters by apt and gentle ways, our pedants do in truth present nothing before them but rods and ferules, horror and cruelty. Away with this violence! away with this compulsion! than which, I certainly believe, nothing more dulls and degenerates a well-descended nature.... The strict government of most of our colleges has evermore displeased me.... ’Tis the true house of correction of imprisoned youth.... Do but come in when they are about their lesson, and you shall hear nothing but the outcries of boys under execution, with the thundering noise of their Pedagogues, drunk with fury, to make up the consort. A pretty way this! to tempt these tender and timorous souls to love their book, with a furious countenance, and a rod in hand. A cursed and pernicious way of[103] proceeding.... How much more decent would it be to see their classes strewed with green leaves and fine flowers, than with bloody stumps of birch and willows? Were it left to my ordering, I should paint the school with the pictures of Joy and Gladness, Flora and the Graces ... that where their profit is, they might have their pleasure too.”[79]

113. Importance of a General rather than a Special Education.—If Montaigne, in different chapters of his essays,[80] has given passing attention to pedagogical questions, it is not only through a recollection of his own years of apprenticeship, but also because of his judgment as a philosopher, that “the greatest and most important task of human understanding is in those matters which concern the nurture and instruction of children.”

For him, education is the art of forming men, and not specialists. This he explains in his original manner under the form of an anecdote:

“Going to Orleans one day, I met in that plain this side Clery, two pedants who were going towards Bordeaux, about fifty paces distant from one another. Still further back of them, I saw a troop of horse, and at their head a gentleman who was the late Count de la Rochefoucault. One of my company inquired of the foremost of these dominies, who that gentleman was who was following him. He had not observed the train that was following after, and thought that the question related to his companion; and so he replied pleasantly, ‘He is not a gentleman, but a grammarian, and I am a logician.’ Now, as we are here concerned in the training, not of a grammarian, or of a logician, but of a[104] complete gentleman, we will let those who will abuse their leisure; but we have business of another nature.”[81]

It is true that Montaigne says gentleman, and not simply man; but in reality his thought is the same as that of Rousseau and of all those who require a general education of the human soul.

114. The Purpose of Instruction.—From what has now been said, it is easy to comprehend that, in the opinion of Montaigne, letters and other studies are but the means or instrument, and not the aim and end of instruction. The author of the Essays does not yield to the literary craze, which, in the sixteenth century, took certain scholars captive, and made the ideal of education to consist of a knowledge of the ancient languages. It is of little consequence to him that a pupil has learned to write in Latin; what he does require, is that he become better and more prudent, and have a sounder judgment. “If his soul be not put into better rhythm, if the judgment be not better settled, I would rather have him spend his time at tennis.”[82]

115. Education of the Judgment.—Montaigne has expressed his dominant thought on education in a hundred different ways. He is preoccupied with the training of the judgment, and on this point we might quote whole pages:

“ ... According to the fashion in which we are instructed, it is not singular that neither scholars nor masters become more able, although they become more wise. In fact, our parents devote their care and expense to furnishing our heads with knowledge; but to judgment and virtue no additions are made. Say of a passer-by to people, ‘O what a learned man!’ and of another, ‘O what a good man goes there!’ and they will not fail to turn their eyes and attention towards[105] the former. There should be a third to cry, ‘O the blockheads!’ Men are quick to inquire, ‘Does he know Greek or Latin? Does he write in verse or in prose?’ But whether he has become better or more prudent, which is the principal thing, this receives not the least notice; whereas we ought to inquire who is the better learned, rather than who is the more learned?”

“We labor only at filling the memory, and leave the understanding and the conscience void. Just as birds sometimes go in quest of grain, and bring it in their bills without tasting it themselves, to make of it mouthfuls for their young; so our pedants go rummaging in books for knowledge, only to hold it at their tongues’ end, and then distribute it to their pupils.”[83]

116. Studies Recommended.—The practical and utilitarian mind of Montaigne dictates to him his programme of studies. With him it is not a question of plunging into the depths of the sciences; disinterested studies are not his affair. If Rabelais proposed to develop the speculative faculties, Montaigne, on the contrary, is preoccupied with the practical faculties, and he makes everything subordinate to morals. For example, he would have history learned, not for the sake of knowing the facts, but of appreciating them. It is not so necessary to imprint in the memory of the child “the date of the fall of Carthage as the character of Hannibal and Scipio, nor so much where Marcellus died as why it was unworthy of his duty that he died there.”[84]

And so in philosophy, it is not the general knowledge of man and nature that Montaigne esteems and recommends; but only those parts that have a direct bearing on morals and active life.

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“It is a pity that matters should be at such a pass as they are in our time, that philosophy, even with people of understanding, should be looked upon as a vain and fanciful name, a thing of no use and no value, either for opinion or for action. I think that it is the love of quibbling that has caused things to take this turn.... Philosophy is that which teaches us to live.”[85]

117. Educational Methods.—An education purely bookish is not to Montaigne’s taste. He counts less upon books than upon experience and mingling with men; upon the observation of things, and upon the natural suggestions of the mind:

“For learning to judge well and speak well, whatever presents itself to our eyes serves as a sufficient book. The knavery of a page, the blunder of a servant, a table witticism,—all such things are so many new things to think about. And for this purpose conversation with men is wonderfully helpful, and so is a visit to foreign lands ... to bring back the customs of those nations, and their manners, and to whet and sharpen our wits by rubbing them upon those of others.”

“ ... The lesson will be given, sometimes by conversation, sometimes by book.... Let the child examine every man’s talent, a peasant, a mason, a passer-by. Put into his head an honest curiosity in everything. Let him observe whatever is curious in his surroundings,—a fine house, a delicate fountain, an eminent man, the scene of an ancient battle, the routes of Cæsar, or of Charlemagne....”[85]

Things should precede words. On this point Montaigne anticipates Comenius, Rousseau, and all modern educators.

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“Let our pupil be provided with things; words will follow only too fast.”[86]

“The world is given to babbling; I hardly ever saw a man who did not rather prate too much, than speak too little. Yet the half of our life goes in that way; we are kept four or five years in learning words....”[87]

“This is not saying that it is not a fine and good thing to speak well; but not so good as it is made out to be. I am vexed that our life is so much occupied with all this.”

118. How we should read.—Montaigne has keenly criticised the abuse of books: “I would not have this boy of ours imprisoned, and made a slave to his book.... I would not have his spirit cow’d and subdu’d by applying him to the rack, and tormenting him, as some do, fourteen or fifteen hours a day, and so make a pack-horse of him. Neither should I think it good, when, by a solitary and melancholic complexion, he is discovered to be much addicted to his book, to nourish that humor in him, for that renders them unfit for civil conversation, and diverts them from better employments.”[88]

But while he advises against excess in reading, he has admirably defined the manner in which we ought to read. Above all, he says, let us assimilate and appropriate what we read. Let the work of the reader resemble that of bees, that, on this side and on that, tap the flowers for their sweet[108] juices, and make them into honey, which is no longer thyme nor marjoram. In other terms, we should read with reflection, and with a critical spirit, while mastering the thoughts of the author by our personal judgment, without ever becoming slaves to them.

119. Montaigne’s Errors.—Montaigne’s greatest fault, it must be confessed, is that he is somewhat heartless. Somewhat of an egoist and Epicurean, he celebrates only the easy virtues that are attained “by shady routes through green meadows and fragrant flowers.” Has he himself ever performed painful duties that demand effort? To love children, he waits till they are amiable; while they are small, he disdains them, and keeps them at a distance from him:

“I cannot entertain that passion of dandling and caressing an infant, scarcely born, having as yet neither motion of soul nor shape of body distinguishable, by which they can render themselves amiable; and have not suffered them to be nursed near me....”[89] “Never take, and, still less, never give, to the women of your household the care of the feeding of your children!”

Montaigne joined precept to example. He somewhere says unfeelingly: “My children all died while at nurse.”[90] He goes so far as to say that a man of letters ought to prefer[109] his writings to his children: “The births of our intelligence are the children the most truly our own.”[91]

120. Incompleteness of his Views on the Education of Women.—Another mental defect in Montaigne is, that, by reason of his moderation and conservatism, he remains a little narrow. High conceptions of human destiny are not to be expected of him; his manner of conceiving of it is mean and commonplace. This lack of intellectual breadth is especially manifest in his reflections on the education of women. Montaigne is of that number, who, through false gallantry, would keep woman in a state of ignorance on the pretext that instruction would mar her natural charms. In their case, he would prohibit even the study of rhetoric, because, he says, that would “conceal her charms under borrowed charms.” Women should be content with the advantages which their sex assures to them. With the knowledge which they naturally have, “they command with the switch, and rule both the regents and the schools.” However, he afterwards thinks better of it; but in his concessions there is more of contempt than in his prohibitions: “If, however, it displeases them to make us any concessions whatever, and they are determined, through curiosity, to know something of books, poetry is an amusement befitting their needs; for it is a wanton, crafty art, disguised, all for pleasure, all for show, just as they are.”[92]

The following passage may also be quoted:—

“When I see them tampering with rhetoric, law, logic, and the like, so improper and unnecessary for their business, I begin to suspect that the men who inspire them with such things do it that they may govern them upon that account.”[93]

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It is impossible to express a greater contempt for women. Montaigne goes so far as to deny her positive qualities of heart. He chances to say, with reference to Mlle. de Gournay, his adopted daughter: “The perfection of the most saintly affection has been attained when it does not exhibit the least trace of sex.”

To conclude: notwithstanding some grave defects, the pedagogy of Montaigne is a pedagogy of good sense, and certain parts of it will always deserve to be admired. The Jansenists, and Locke, and Rousseau, in different degrees, draw their inspiration from Montaigne. In his own age, it is true, his ideas were accepted by scarcely any one save his disciple Charron, who, in his book of Wisdom,[94] has done scarcely more than to arrange in order the thoughts that are scattered through the Essays. But if he had no influence upon his own age, Montaigne has at least remained, after three centuries, a sure guide in the matter of intellectual education.

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122. Origin of Primary Instruction.—With La Salle and the foundation of the Institute of the Brethren of the Christian Schools, the historian of education recognizes the Catholic origin of primary instruction; in the decrees and laws of the French Revolution, its lay and philosophical origin; but it is to the Protestant Reformers,—to Luther in the sixteenth century, and to Comenius in the seventeenth—that must be ascribed the honor of having first organized schools for the people. In its origin, the primary school is the child of Protestantism, and its cradle was the Reformation.

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123. Spirit of the Protestant Reform.—The development of primary instruction was the logical consequence of the fundamental principles of the Protestant Reform. As Michel Bréal has said: “In making man responsible for his own faith, and in placing the source of that faith in the Holy Scriptures, the Reform contracted the obligation to put each one in a condition to save himself by the reading and the understanding of the Bible.... The necessity of explaining the Catechism, and making comments on it, was for teachers an obligation to learn how to expound a thought, and to decompose it into its elements. The study of the mother tongue and of singing, was associated with the reading of the Bible (translated into German by Luther) and with religious services.” The Reform, then, contained, in germ, a complete revolution in education; it enlisted the interests of religion in the service of instruction, and associated knowledge with faith. This is the reason that, for three centuries, the Protestant nations have led humanity in the matter of primary instruction.

124. Calvin (1509-1564), Melancthon (1497-1560), Zwingli (1484-1532).—However, all the Protestant Reformers were far from exhibiting the same zeal in behalf of primary instruction. Calvin, absorbed in religious struggles and polemics, was not occupied with the organization of schools till towards the close of his life, and even the college that he founded at Geneva, in 1559, was scarcely more than a school for the study of Latin. Melancthon, who has been called “the preceptor of Germany,” worked more for high schools than for schools for the people. He was above all else a professor of Belles-Lettres; and it was with chagrin that he saw his courses in the University of Wittenberg deserted by students when he lectured on the Olynthiacs of[114] Demosthenes. Before Calvin and Melancthon, the Swiss reformer Zwingli had shown his great interest in primary teaching, in his little book “upon the manner of instructing and bringing up boys in a Christian way” (1524). In this he recommended natural history, arithmetic, and also exercises in fencing, in order to furnish the country with timely defenders.

125. Luther (1483-1546).—The German reformer Luther is, of all his co-religionists, the one who has served the cause of elementary instruction with the most ardor. He not only addressed a pressing appeal to the ruling classes in behalf of founding schools for the people, but, by his influence, methods of instruction were improved, and the educational spirit was renewed in accordance with the principles of Protestantism. “Spontaneity,” it has been said, not without some exaggeration, “free thought, and free inquiry, are the basis of Protestantism; where it has reigned, there have disappeared the method of repeating and of learning by heart without reflection, mechanism, subjection to authority, the paralysis of the intelligence oppressed by dogmatic instruction, and science put in tutelage by the beliefs of the Church.”[95]

126. Appeal addressed to the Magistrates and Legislators of Germany.—In 1524, Luther, in a special document addressed to the public authorities of Germany, forcibly expressed himself against the neglect into which the interests of instruction had fallen. This appeal has this characteristic, that the great reformer, while assuming that the Church is the mother of the school, seems especially to count on the secular arm, upon the power of the people, to serve his purposes[115] in the cause of universal instruction. “Each city,” he said, “is subjected to great expense every year for the construction of roads, for fortifying its ramparts, and for buying arms and equipping soldiers. Why should it not spend an equal sum for the support of one or two school-masters? The prosperity of a city does not depend solely on its natural riches, on the solidity of its walls, on the elegance of its mansions, and on the abundance of arms in its arsenals; but the safety and strength of a city reside above all in a good education, which furnishes it with instructed, reasonable, honorable, and well-trained citizens.”[96]

127. Double Utility of Instruction.—A remarkable fact about Luther is, that as a preacher of instruction, he does not speak merely from the religious point of view. After having recommended schools as institutions auxiliary to the Church, he makes a resolute argument from the human point of view. “Were there neither soul, heaven, nor hell,” he says, “it would still be necessary to have schools for the sake of affairs here below, as the history of the Greeks and the Romans plainly teaches. The world has need of educated men and women, to the end that the men may govern the country properly, and that the women may properly bring up their children, care for their domestics, and direct the affairs of their households.”

128. Necessity of Public Instruction.—The objection will perhaps be made, says Luther, that for the education of[116] children the home is sufficient, and that the school is useless: “To this I reply: We clearly see how the boys and girls are educated who remain at home.” He then shows that they are ignorant and “stupid,” incapable of taking part in conversation, of giving good advice, and without any experience of life; while, if they had been educated in the schools, by teachers who could give instruction in the languages, in the arts, and in history, they might in a little time gather up within themselves, as in a mirror, the experience of whatever has happened since the beginning of the world; and from this experience, he adds, they would derive the wisdom they need for self-direction and for giving wise counsel to others.

129. Criticism of the Schools of the Period.—But since there must be public schools, can we not be content with those which already exist? Luther replies by proving that parents neglect to send their children to them, and by denouncing the uselessness of the results obtained by those who attend them. “We find people,” he says, “who serve God in strange ways. They fast and wear coarse clothing, but they pass blindly by the true divine service of the home,—they do not know how to bring up their children.... Believe me, it is much more necessary to give attention to your children and to provide for their education than to purchase indulgencies, to visit foreign churches, or to make solemn vows.... All people, especially the Jews, oblige their children to go to school more than Christians do. This is why the state of Christianity is so low, for all its force and power are in the rising generation; and if these are neglected, there will be Christian churches like a garden that has been neglected in the spring-time.... Every day children are born and are growing up, and, unfortunately, no one cares for the poor young people, no one thinks to train them;[117] they are allowed to go as they will. Was it not lamentable to see a lad study in twenty years and more only just enough bad Latin to enable him to become a priest, and to go to mass? And he who attained to this was counted a very happy being! Right happy the mother who bore such a child! And he has remained all his life a poor unlettered man. Everywhere we have seen such teachers and masters, who knew nothing themselves and could teach nothing that was good and useful; they did not even know how to learn and to teach. Has anything else been learned up to this time in the high schools and in the convents except to become asses and blockheads? ...”

130. Organization of the New Schools.—So Luther resolves on the organization of new schools. The cost of their maintenance he makes a charge on the public treasury; he demonstrates to parents the moral obligation to have their children instructed in them; to the duty of conscience he adds civil obligation; and, finally, he gives his thought to the means of recruiting the teaching service. “Since the greatest evil in every place is the lack of teachers, we must not wait till they come forward of themselves; we must take the trouble to educate them and prepare them.” To this end Luther keeps the best of the pupils, boys and girls, for a longer time in school; gives them special instructors, and opens libraries for their use. In his thought he never distinguishes women teachers from men teachers; he wants schools for girls as well as for boys. Only, not to burden parents and divert children from their daily labor, he requires but little time for school duties. “You ask: Is it possible to get along without our children, and bring them up like gentlemen? Is it not necessary that they work at home? I reply: I by no means approve of those schools where a child was accustomed to pass twenty or thirty years[118] in studying Donatus or Alexander[97] without learning anything. Another world has dawned, in which things go differently. My opinion is that we must send the boys to school one or two hours a day, and have them learn a trade at home for the rest of the time. It is desirable that these two occupations march side by side. As it now is, children certainly spend twice as much time in playing ball, running the streets, and playing truant. And so the girls can equally well devote nearly the same time to school, without neglecting their home duties; they lose more time than this in over-sleeping and in dancing more than is meet.”

131. Programme of Studies.—Luther gives the first place to the teaching of religion: “Is it not reasonable that every Christian should know the Gospel at the age of nine or ten?”

Then come the languages, not, as might be hoped, the mother tongue, but the learned languages, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Luther had not yet been sufficiently rid of the old spirit to comprehend that the language of the people ought to be the basis of universal instruction. He left to Comenius the glory of making the final separation of the primary school from the Latin school. But yet, Luther gave excellent advice for the study of languages, which must be learned, he said, less in the abstract rules of grammar than in their concrete reality.

Luther recommends the mathematics, and also the study of nature; but he has a partiality for history and historians,[119] who are, he says, “the best people and the best teachers,” on the condition that they do not tamper with the truth, and that “they do not make obscure the work of God.”

Of the liberal arts of the Middle Age, Luther does not make much account. He rightly says of dialectics, that it is no equivalent for real knowledge, and that it is simply “an instrument by which we render to ourselves an account of what we know.”

Physical exercises are not forgotten in Luther’s pedagogical regulations. But he attaches an especial importance to singing. “Unless a schoolmaster know how to sing, I think him of no account.” “Music,” he says again, “is a half discipline which makes men more indulgent and more mild.”

132. Progress in Methods.—At the same time that he extends the programme of studies, Luther introduces a new spirit into methods. He wishes more liberty and more joy in the school.

“Solomon,” he says, “is a truly royal schoolmaster. He does not, like the monks, forbid the young to go into the world and be happy. Even as Anselm said: ‘A young man turned aside from the world is like a young tree made to grow in a vase.’ The monks have imprisoned young men like birds in their cage. It is dangerous to isolate the young. It is necessary, on the contrary, to allow young people to hear, see, and learn all sorts of things, while all the time observing the restraints and the rules of honor. Enjoyment and recreation are as necessary for children as food and drink. The schools till now were veritable prisons and hells, and the schoolmaster a tyrant.... A child intimidated by bad treatment is irresolute in all he does. He who has trembled before his parents will tremble all his life at the sound of a leaf which rustles in the wind.”

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These quotations will suffice to make appreciated the large and liberal spirit of Luther, and the range of his thought as an educator. No one has more extolled the office of the teacher, of which he said, when comparing it to preaching, it is the work of all others the noblest, the most useful, and the best; “and yet,” he added, “I do not know which of these two professions is the better.”

Do not let ourselves imagine, however, that Luther at once exercised a decisive influence on the current education of his day. A few schools were founded, called writing schools; but the Thirty Years’ War, and other events, interrupted the movement of which Luther has the honor of having been the originator.

133. The States General of Orleans (1560).—While in Germany, under the impulse of Luther, primary schools began to be established, France remained in the background. Let us note, however, the desires expressed by the States General of Orleans, in 1560:—

“May it please the king,” it was said in the memorial of the nobility, “to levy a contribution upon the church revenues for the reasonable support of teachers and men of learning in every city and village, for the instruction of the needy youth of the country; and let all parents be required, under penalty of a fine, to send their children to school, and let them be constrained to observe this law by the lords and the ordinary magistrates.”

It was demanded, in addition, that public lectures be given on the Sacred Scriptures in intelligible language, that is, in the mother tongue. But these demands, so earnest and democratic, of the Protestant nobility of sixteenth century France, were not regarded. With the fall of Protestantism, the cause of primary instruction in France was doomed to a long eclipse. The nobles of the seventeenth and eighteenth[121] centuries did not think of petitioning again for the education of the people, and Diderot could truthfully say of them: “The nobility complain of the farm laborers who know how to read. Perhaps the chief grievance of the nobility reduces itself to this: that a peasant who knows how to read is more difficult to oppress than another.”

134. Ratich (1571-1635).—In the first half of the seventeenth century, Ratich, a German, and Comenius, a Slave, were, with very different degrees of merit, the heirs of the educational thought of Luther.

With something of the charlatan and the demagogue, Ratich devoted his life to propagating a novel art of teaching, which he called didactics, and to which he attributed marvels. He pretended, by his method of languages, to teach Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, in six months. But nevertheless, out of many strange performances and lofty promises, there issue some thoughts of practical value. The first merit of Ratich was to give the mother tongue, the German language, the precedence over the ancient languages. An English educational writer, Mr. R. H. Quick, in his Essays on Educational Reformers (1874), has thus summed up the essential principles of the pedagogy of Ratich: 1. Everything should be taught in its own time and order, and according to the natural method, in passing from the more easy to the more difficult. 2. Only one thing should be learned at a time. “We do not cook at the same time in one pot, soup, meat, fish, milk, and vegetables.” 3. The same thing should be repeated several times. 4. By means of these frequent repetitions, the pupil will have nothing to learn by heart. 5. All school-books should be written on the same plan. 6. The thing as a whole should be made known before the thing in its details, and the sequence should be from the general to the special. 7. In every case we should proceed by induction and experi[122]ment. Ratich especially means by this that we must make an end of mere authority, and of the testimony of the ancients, and must appeal to individual reason. 8. Finally, everything should be learned without coercion. Coercion and the rod are contrary to nature, and disgust the young with study. The human understanding learns with pleasure all that it ought to retain. It does not seem that Ratich knew how to draw from these principles, which, by the way, are not true save under certain corrections, all the happy results that are contained in them. He left to Comenius the glory of applying the new spirit to actual practice.

135. Comenius (1592-1671).—For a long time unknown and unappreciated, Comenius has finally received from our contemporaries the admiration that is due him. Michelet speaks of him with enthusiasm as “that rare genius, that gentle, fertile, universal scholar”;[98] and he calls him the first evangelist of modern pedagogy, Pestalozzi being the second. It is easy to justify this appreciation. The character of Comenius equals his intelligence. Through a thousand obstacles he devoted his long life to the work of popular instruction. With a generous ardor he consecrated himself to infancy. He wrote twenty works and taught in twenty cities. Moreover, he was the first to form a definite conception of what the elementary studies should be. He determined, nearly three hundred years ago, with an exactness that leaves nothing to be desired, the division of the different grades of instruction. He exactly defined some of the essential laws of the art of teaching. He applied to pedagogy, with remarkable insight, the principles of modern logic. Finally, as Michelet has said, he was the Galileo, we would rather say, the Bacon, of modern education.

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136. Baconian Inspiration.—The special aims of pedagogy are essentially related to the general aims of science. All progress in science has its corresponding effects on education. When an innovator has modified the laws for the discovery of truth, other innovators appear, who modify, in their turn, the rules for instruction. To a new logic almost necessarily corresponds a new pedagogy.

Now Bacon, at the opening of the seventeenth century, had opened unknown routes to scientific investigation. For the abstract processes of thought, for the barren comparison of propositions and words, in which the whole art of the syllogism consisted, the author of the Novum Organum had substituted the concrete study of reality, the living and fruitful observation of nature. The mechanism of deductive reasoning was replaced by the slow and patient interpretation of facts. It no longer answered to analyze with docile spirit principles that were assumed, right or wrong, as absolute truths; nor to become expert in handling the syllogism, which, like a mill running dry, often produced but little flour. It was now necessary to open the eyes to the contemplation of the universe, and by sense intuition, by observation, by experiment, and by induction, to penetrate its secrets, and determine its laws. It was necessary to ascend, step by step, from the knowledge of the simplest things to the discovery of the most general laws; and, finally, to demand of nature herself to reveal all that the human intelligence, in its solitary meditations, is powerless to discover.

Looking at this subject more closely, this revolution in science, so important from the point of view of speculative inquiry, and destined to change the aspect of the sciences, also contained in itself a revolution in education. For this purpose, all that was needed was to apply to the develop[124]ment of the intelligence and to the communication of knowledge the rules proposed by Bacon for the investigation of truth. The laws of scientific induction might become the laws for the education of the soul. No more setting out with abstract principles, imposed by authority; but facts intuitively apprehended, gathered by observation and verified by experiment; the order of nature faithfully followed; a cautious progression from the simplest and most elementary ideas to the most difficult and most complex truths; the knowledge of things instead of an analysis of words,—such was to be the character of the new system of instruction. In other terms, it was possible to make the child follow, in order to lead him to know and to comprehend the capitalized truths that constitute the basis of elementary instruction, the same method that Bacon recommended to scholars for the discovery of unknown truths.[99]

It is this conversion, or, as we might say, this translation, of the maxims of the Baconian logic into pedagogical rules, that Comenius attempted, and this is why he has been called “the father of the intuitive method.” He was nourished, intellectually, by the reading of Bacon, whom he resembles, not only in his ideas, but also in his figurative and often allegorical language. Even the title of one of his books, Didactica Magna, recalls the title of Bacon’s Instauratio Magna.

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137. The Life of Comenius.—To know Comenius and the part he played in the seventeenth century, to appreciate this grand educational character, it would be necessary to begin by relating his life; his misfortunes; his journeys to England, where Parliament invoked his aid; to Sweden, where the Chancellor Oxenstiern employed him to write manuals of instruction; especially his relentless industry, his courage through exile, and the long persecutions he suffered as a member of the sect of dissenters, the Moravian Brethren; and the schools he founded at Fulneck, in Bohemia, at Lissa and at Patak, in Poland. But it would require too much of our space to follow in its incidents and catastrophes that troubled life, which, in its sudden trials, as in the firmness that supported them, recalls the life of Pestalozzi.[100]

138. His Principal Works.—Comenius wrote a large number of books in Latin, in German, and in Czech; but of these only a few are worthy to engage the attention of the educator. In his other works he allows himself to go off on philosophic excursions, and to indulge in mystic reveries, led by his ardor to find what he called pansophia, wisdom or universal knowledge. In this wilderness of publications destined to oblivion, we shall notice only three works, which[126] contain the general principles of the pedagogy of Comenius, and the applications which he has made of his method:—

1. The Didactica Magna, the Great Didactics (written in Czech at about 1630, and rewritten in Latin at about 1640). In this work Comenius sets forth his principles, his general theories on education, and also his peculiar views on the practical organization of schools. It is to be regretted that a French translation has not yet popularized this important book, that would be worthy a place beside the Thoughts of Locke and the Émile of Rousseau.[101]

2. The Janua linguarum reserata, the Gate of Tongues Unlocked (1631). In the thought of the author, this was a new method of learning the languages. Comenius, led astray on this point by his religious prejudices, wished to banish the Latin authors from the schools, “for the purpose,” he said, “of reforming studies in the true spirit of Christianity.” Consequently, in order to replace the classical authors, which he repudiated for this further reason, that the reading of them is too difficult, and to make a child study them “is to wish to push out into the vast ocean a tiny bark that should be allowed only to sport on a little lake,” he had formed the idea of composing a collection of phrases distributed into a hundred chapters. These phrases, to the number of a thousand, at first very simple, and of a single member, then longer and more complicated, were formed of two thousand words, chosen from among the most common and the most useful. Moreover, the hundred chapters of the Janua taught the child, in succession and in a methodical order, all the things in the universe,—the elements, the metals, the stars, the animals, the organs of the body, the arts[127] and trades, etc., etc. In other terms, the Janua linguarum is a nomenclature of ideas and words designed to fix the attention of the child upon everything he ought to know of the world. Divested of the Latin text that accompanies it, the Janua is a first reading-book, very defective doubtless, but it gives proof of a determined effort to adapt to the intelligence of the child the knowledge that he ought to acquire.

3. The Orbis sensualium pictus, the Illustrated World of Sensible Objects, the most popular of the author’s works (1658). It is the Janua linguarum accompanied with pictures, in lieu of real objects, representing to the child the things that he hears spoken of, as fast as he learns their names. The Orbis pictus, the first practical application of the intuitive method, had an extraordinary success, and has served as a model for the innumerable illustrated books which for three centuries have invaded the schools.

139. The Four Grades of Instruction.—We must not require a man of the seventeenth century to abjure Latin studies. Comenius prizes them highly; but at least he is wise enough to put them in their place, and does not confound them, as Luther did, with elementary studies.

Nothing could be more exact, more clearly cut, than the scholastic organization proposed by Comenius. We shall find in it what the experience of three centuries has finally sanctioned and established, the distribution of schools into these grades,—infant schools, primary schools, secondary schools, and higher schools.

The first grade of instruction is the maternal school, the school by the mother’s knee, materni gremii, as Comenius calls it. The mother is the first teacher. Up to the age of six the child is taught by her; he is initiated by her into those branches of knowledge that he will pursue in the primary school.

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The second grade is the elementary public school. All the children, girls and boys, enter here at six, and leave at twelve. The characteristic of this school is that the instruction there given is in the mother tongue, and this is why Comenius calls it the “common” school, vernacula, a term given by the Romans to the language of the people.

The third grade is represented by the Latin school or gymnasium. Thither are sent the children from twelve to eighteen years of age for whom has been reserved a more complete instruction, such as we would now call secondary instruction.

Finally, to the fourth grade correspond the academies, that is, institutions of higher instruction, opened to young men from eighteen to twenty-four years of age.

The child, if he is able, will traverse these four grades in succession; but, in the thought of Comenius, the studies should be so arranged in the elementary schools, that in leaving them, the pupil shall have a general education which makes it unnecessary for him to go farther, if his condition in life does not destine him to pursue the courses of the Latin School.

“We pursue,” says Comenius, “a general education, the teaching to all men of all the subjects of human concern.... The purpose of the people’s school shall be that all children of both sexes, from the tenth to the twelfth or the thirteenth year, may be instructed in that knowledge which is useful during the whole of life.”

This was an admirable definition of the purpose of the primary school. A thing not less remarkable is that Comenius establishes an elementary school in each village:—

“There should be a maternal school in each family; an elementary school in each district; a gymnasium in each city; an academy in each kingdom, or even in each considerable province.”

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140. Elementary Initiation into All the Studies.—One of the most novel and most original ideas of the great Slavic educator is the wish that, from the earliest years of his life, the child may acquire some elementary notions of all the sciences that he is to study at a later period. From the cradle, the gaze of the infant, guided by the mother, should be directed to all the objects that surround him, so that his growing powers of reflection will be brought into play in working on these sense intuitions. “Thus, from the moment he begins to speak, the child comes to know himself, and, by his daily experience, certain general and abstract expressions; he comes to comprehend the meaning of the words something, nothing, thus, otherwise, where, similar, different; and what are generalizations and the categories expressed by these words but the rudiments of metaphysics? In the domain of physics, the infant can learn to know water, earth, air, fire, rain, snow, etc., as well as the names and uses of the parts of his body, or at least of the external members and organs. He will take his first lesson in optics in learning to distinguish light, darkness, and the different colors; and in astronomy, in noticing the sun, the moon, and the stars, and in observing that these heavenly bodies rise and set every day. In geography, according to the place where he lives, he will be shown a mountain, a valley, a plain, a river, a village, a hamlet, a city, etc. In chronology, he will be taught what an hour is, a day, a week, a year, summer, winter, yesterday, the day before yesterday, to-morrow, the day after to-morrow, etc. History, such as his age will allow him to conceive, will consist in recalling what has recently passed, in taking account of it, and in noting the part that this one or that has taken in such or such an affair. Arithmetic, geometry, statistics, mechanics, will not remain strangers to him. He will acquire the elements of these sciences in distinguishing[130] the difference between little and much, in learning to count up to ten, in observing that three is more than two; that one added to three makes four; in learning the sense of the words great and small, long and short, wide and narrow, heavy and light; in drawing lines, curves, circles, etc.; in seeing goods measured with a yard-stick; in weighing an object in a balance; in trying to make something or to take it to pieces, as all children love to do.

“In this impulse to construct and destroy, there is but the effort of the little intelligence to succeed in making or building something for himself; so that, instead of opposing the child in this, he should be encouraged and guided.”

“The grammar of the first period will consist in learning to pronounce the mother tongue correctly. The child may receive elementary notions even of politics, in observing that certain persons assemble at the city hall, and that they are called councillors; and that among these persons there is one called mayor, etc.”[102]

141. The People’s School.—Divided into six classes, the people’s school should prepare the child either for active life or for the higher courses. Comenius sends here not only the sons of peasants and workmen, but the sons of the middle class or of the nobility, who will afterwards enter the Latin school. In other terms, the study of Latin is postponed till the age of twelve; and up to that period all children must receive a thorough primary education, which will comprise, with the mother tongue, arithmetic, geometry, singing, the salient facts of history, the elements of the natural sciences, and religion. The latest reforms in secondary instruction, which, only within a very late period, have postponed[131] the study of Latin till the sixth year,[103] and which till then keep the pupil upon the subjects of primary instruction,—what are they but the distant echo of the thought of Comenius? Let it be noted, too, that the plan of Comenius gave to its primary school a complete encyclopædic course of instruction, which was sufficient for its own ends, but which, while remaining elementary, was a whole, and not a beginning.[104]

Surely, the programme of studies devised by Comenius did not fail in point of insufficiency; we may be allowed, on the contrary, to pronounce it too extended, too crowded, conformed rather to the generous dreams of an innovator than to a prudent appreciation of what is practically possible; and we need not be astonished that, to lighten in part the heavy burden that is imposed on the teacher, Comenius had the notion of dividing the school into sections which assistants, chosen from among the best pupils, should instruct under the supervision of the master.

142. Site of the School.—One is not a complete educator save on the condition of providing for the exterior and material organization of the school, as well as for its moral administration. In this respect, Comenius is still deserving of our encomiums. He requires a yard for recreation,[132] and demands that the school-house have a gay and cheerful aspect. The question had been discussed before him by Vives (1492-1540).

“There should be chosen,” says the Spanish educator, “a healthful situation, so that the pupils may not one day have to take their flight, dispersed by the fear of an epidemic. Firm health is necessary to those who would heartily and profitably apply themselves to the study of the sciences. And the place selected should be isolated from the crowd, and especially at a distance from occupations that are noisy, such as those of smiths, stone-masons, machinists, wheelwrights, and weavers. However, I would not have the situation too cheerful and attractive, lest it might suggest to the scholars the taking of too frequent walks.”

But these considerations that do honor to Vives and to Comenius, were scarcely in harmony with the resources then at the disposal of the friends of instruction. There was scarcely occasion seriously to consider how school-houses should be constructed and situated, at a period when the most often there were no school-houses existing. “In winter,” says Platter, “we slept in the school-room, and in summer in the open air.”[105]

143. Sense Intuitions.—If Comenius has traced with a master hand the general organization of the primary school, he has no less merit in the matter of methods.

When they recommend the observation of sensible things as the first intellectual exercise, modern educators do but repeat what Comenius said three centuries ago.

“In the place of dead books, why should we not open the living book of nature? ... To instruct the young is not to beat into them by repetition a mass of words, phrases, sentences,[133] and opinions gathered out of authors; but it is to open their understanding through things....

“The foundation of all knowledge consists in correctly representing sensible objects to our senses, so that they can be comprehended with facility. I hold that this is the basis of all our other activities, since we could neither act nor speak wisely unless we adequately comprehended what we were to do and say. Now it is certain that there is nothing in the understanding that was not first in the senses, and, consequently, it is to lay the foundation of all wisdom, of all eloquence, and of all good and prudent conduct, carefully to train the senses to note with accuracy the differences between natural objects; and as this point, important as it is, is ordinarily neglected in the schools of to-day, and as objects are proposed to scholars that they do not understand because they have not been properly represented to their senses or to their imagination, it is for this reason, on the one hand, that the toil of teaching, and on the other, that the pain of learning, have become so burdensome and so unfruitful....

“We must offer to the young, not the shadows of things, but the things themselves, which impress the senses and the imagination. Instruction should commence with a real observation of things, and not with a verbal description of them.”

We see that Comenius accepts the doctrine of Bacon, even to his absolute sensationalism. In his pre-occupation with the importance of instruction through the senses, he goes so far as to ignore that other source of knowledge and intuitions, the inner consciousness.

144. Simplification of Grammatical Study.—The first result of the experimental method applied to instruction, is to simplify grammar and to relieve it from the abuse of ab[134]stract rules. “Children,” says Comenius, “need examples and things which they can see, and not abstract rules.”

And in the Preface of the Janua linguarum, he dwells upon the faults of the old method employed for the study of languages.

“It is a thing self-evident, that the true and proper way of teaching languages has not been recognized in the schools up to the present time. The most of those who devoted themselves to the study of letters grew old in the study of words, and upwards of ten years was spent in the study of Latin alone; indeed, they even spent their whole life in the study, with a very slow and very trifling profit, which did not pay for the trouble devoted to it.”[106] It is by use and by reading that Comenius would abolish the abuse of rules. Rules ought to intervene only to aid use and give it surety. The pupil will thus learn language, either in speaking, or in reading a book like the Orbis Pictus, in which he will find at the same time all the words of which the language itself is composed, and examples of all the constructions of its syntax.

145. Necessity of Drill and Practice.—Another essential point in the new method, is the importance attributed by Comenius to practical exercises: “Artisans,” he said, “understand this matter perfectly well. Not one of them will give an apprentice a theoretical course on his trade. He is allowed to notice what is done by his master, and then the tool is put in his hands: it is in smiting that one becomes a smith.”[107]

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It is no longer the thing to repeat mechanically a lesson learned by heart. There must be a gradual habituation to action, to productive work, to personal effort.

146. General Bearing of the Work of Comenius.—How many other new and judicious ideas we shall have to gather from Comenius! The methods which we would be tempted to consider as wholly recent, his imagination had already suggested to him. For example, preceding the Orbis Pictus, we find an alphabet, where to each letter corresponds the cry of an animal, or else a sound familiar to the child. Is not this already the very essence of the phononimic processes[108] brought into fashion in these last years? But what is of more consequence with Comenius than a few happy discoveries in practical pedagogy, is the general inspiration of his work. He gives to education a psychological basis in demanding that the faculties shall be developed in their natural order: first, the senses, the memory, the imagination, and lastly the judgment and the reason. He is mindful of physical exercises, of technical and practical instruction, without forgetting that in the primary schools, which he calls the “studios of humanity,” there must be trained, not only strong and skilful artisans, but virtuous and religious men, imbued with the principles of order and justice. If he has stepped from theology to pedagogy, and if he permits himself sometimes to be borne along by his artless bursts of mysticism, at least he does not forget the necessities of the real condition,[136] and of the present life of men. “The child,” he says, “shall learn only what is to be useful to him in this life or in the other.” Finally, he does not allow himself to be absorbed in the minute details of school management. He has higher views,—he is working for the regeneration of humanity. Like Leibnitz, he would freely say: “Give me for a few years the direction of education, and I agree to transform the world!”

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148. The Teaching Congregations.[109]—Up to the French Revolution, up to the day when the conception of a public and national education was embodied in the legislative acts[139] of our assembled rulers, education remained almost exclusively an affair of the Church. The universities themselves were dependent in part on religious authority. But especially the great congregations assumed a monopoly of the work of teaching, the direction and control of which the State had not yet claimed for her right.

Primary instruction, it is true, scarcely entered at first into the settled plans of the religious orders. The only exception to this statement that can properly be made, is the congregation of the Christian Doctrine, which a humble priest, Cæsar de Bus, founded at Avignon in 1592, the avowed purpose of which was the religious education of the children of the company.[110] But, on the other hand, secondary instruction provoked the greatest educational event of the sixteenth century, the founding of the company of Jesus, and this movement was continued and extended in the seventeenth century, either in the colleges of the Jesuits, ever growing in number, or in other rival congregations.

149. Jesuits and Jansenists.—Among the religious orders that have consecrated their efforts to the work of teaching, the first place must be assigned to the Jesuits and the Jansenists. Different in their statutes, their organization, and their destinies, these two congregations are still more different in their spirit. They represent, in fact, two opposite, and, as it were, contrary phases of human nature and of the Christian spirit. For the Jesuits, education is reduced to a superficial culture of the brilliant faculties of the intelligence; while the Jansenists, on the contrary, aspire to develop the solid faculties, the judgment, and the reason.[140] In the colleges of the Jesuits, rhetoric is held in honor; while in the Little Schools of Port Royal, it is rather logic and the exercise of thought. The shrewd disciples of Loyola adapt themselves to the times, and are full of compassion for human weakness; the solitaries of Port Royal are exacting of others and of themselves. In their suppleness and cheerful optimism, the Jesuits are almost the Epicureans of Christianity; with their austere and somewhat sombre doctrine, the Jansenists would rather be the Stoics. The Jesuits and the Jansenists, those great rivals of the seventeenth century, are still face to face as enemies at the present moment. While the inspiration of the Jesuits tries to maintain the old worn-out exercises, like Latin verse, and the abuse of the memory, the spirit of the Jansenists animates and inspires the reformers, who, in the teaching of the classics, break with tradition and routine, to substitute for exercises aimed at elegance, and for a superficial instruction, studies of a greater solidity and an education that is more complete.

The merit of institutions ought not always to be measured by their apparent success. The colleges of the Jesuits, during three centuries, have had a countless number of pupils; the Little Schools of Port Royal did not live twenty years, and during their short existence they enrolled at most only some hundreds of pupils. And yet the methods of the Jansenists have survived the ruin of their colleges and the dispersion of the teachers who had applied them. Although the Jesuits have not ceased to rule in appearance, it is the Jansenists who triumph in reality, and who to-day control the secondary instruction of France.

150. Foundation of the Society of Jesus.—In organizing the Society of Jesus, Ignatius Loyola, that compound of the mystic and the man of the world, purposed to establish,[141] not an order devoted to monastic contemplation, but a real fighting corps, a Catholic army, whose double purpose was to conquer new provinces to the faith through missions, and to preserve the old through the control of education. Solemnly consecrated by the Pope Paul III., in 1540, the congregation had a rapid growth. As early as the middle of the sixteenth century, it had several colleges in France, particularly those of Billom, Mauriac, Rodez, Tournon, and Pamiers. In 1561 it secured a footing in Paris, notwithstanding the resistance of the Parliament, of the university, and of the bishops themselves. A hundred years later it counted nearly fourteen thousand pupils in the province of Paris alone. The college of Clermont, in 1651, enrolled more than two thousand young men. The middle and higher classes assured to the colleges of the society an ever-increasing membership. At the end of the seventeenth century, the Jesuits could inscribe on the roll of honor of their classes a hundred illustrious names, among others, those of Condé and Luxembourg, Fléchier and Bossuet, Lamoignon and Séguier, Descartes, Corneille, and Molière. In 1710 they controlled six hundred and twelve colleges and a large number of universities. They were the real masters of education, and they maintained this educational supremacy till the end of the eighteenth century.

151. Different Judgments on the Educational Merits of the Jesuits.—Voltaire said of these teachers: “The Fathers taught me nothing but Latin and nonsense.” But from the seventeenth century, opinions are divided, and the encomiums of Bacon and Descartes must be offset by the severe judgment of Leibnitz. “In the matter of education,” says this great philosopher, “the Jesuits have remained below mediocrity.”[111] Directly to the contrary, Bacon had[142] written: “As to whatever relates to the instruction of the young, we must consult the schools of the Jesuits, for there can be nothing that is better done.”[112]

152. Authorities to Consult.—The Jesuits have never written anything on the principles and objects of education. We must not demand of them an exposition of general views, or a confession of their educational faith. But to make amends, they have drawn up with precision, with almost infinite attention to details, the rules and regulations of their course of study. Already, in 1559, the Constitutions, probably written by Loyola himself, devoted a whole book to the organization of the colleges of the society.[113] But in particular, the Ratio Studiorum, published in 1599, contains a complete scholastic programme, which has remained for three centuries the invariable educational code of the congregation. Without doubt, the Jesuits, always ready to make apparent concessions to the spirit of the times, without sacrificing anything of their own spirit, and without renouncing their inflexible purpose, have introduced modifications into their original rules; but the spirit of their educational practice has remained the same, and, in 1854, Beckx, the actual general of the order, could still declare that the Ratio is the immutable rule of Jesuit education.

153. Primary Instruction Neglected.—A permanent and characteristic feature of the educational policy of the Jesuits is, that, during the whole course of their history, they have deliberately neglected and disdained primary instruction. The earth is covered with their Latin colleges; and wherever they have been able, they have put their hands[143] on the institutions for university education; but in no instance have they founded a primary school. Even in their establishments for secondary instruction, they entrust the lower classes to teachers who do not belong to their order, and reserve to themselves the direction of the higher classes. Must we believe, as they have declared in order to explain this negligence, that the only reason for their reserve and their indifference is to be sought for in the insufficiency of their teaching force? No; the truth is that the Jesuits neither desire nor love the instruction of the people. To desire and to love this, there must be faith in conscience and reason; there must be a belief in human equality. Now the Jesuits distrust the human intelligence, and administer only the aristocratic education of the ruling classes, whom they hope to retain under their own control. They wish to train amiable gentlemen, accomplished men of the world; they have no conception of training men. Intellectual culture, in their view, is but a convenience, imposed on certain classes of the nation by their rank. It is not a good in itself; it may even become an evil. In certain hands it is a dangerous weapon. The ignorance of a people is the best safeguard of its faith, and faith is the supreme end. So we shall not be astonished to read this in the Constitutions:—

“None of those who are employed in domestic service on account of the society, ought to learn to read and write, or, if they already know these arts, to learn more of them. They shall not be instructed without the consent of the General, for it suffices for them to serve with all simplicity and humility our Master, Jesus Christ.”

154. Classical Studies: Latin and the Humanities.—It is only in secondary instruction that the Jesuits have taken position with marked success. The basis of their teaching is the study of Latin and Greek. Their purpose is[144] to monopolize classical studies in order to make them serve for the propagation of the Catholic faith. To write in Latin is the ideal which they propose to their pupils. The first consequence of this is the proscription of the mother tongue. The Ratio forbids the use of French even in conversation; it permits it only on holidays. Hence, also, the importance accorded to Latin and Greek composition, to the explication of authors, and to the study of grammar, rhetoric, and poetry. It is to be noted, besides, that the Jesuits put scarcely more into the hands of their pupils than select extracts, expurgated editions. They wish, in some sort, to efface from the ancient books whatever marks the epoch and characterizes the time. They detach fine passages of eloquence and beautiful extracts of poetry; but they are afraid, it seems, of the authors themselves; they fear lest the pupil find in them the old human spirit,—the spirit of nature. Moreover, in the explication of authors, they pay more attention to words than to things. They direct the pupil’s attention, not to the thoughts, but to the elegancies of language, to the elocutionary effect; in a word, to the form, which, at least, has no religious character, and can in nowise give umbrage to Catholic orthodoxy. They fear to awaken reflection and individual judgment. As Macaulay has said, they seem to have found the point up to which intellectual culture can be pushed without reaching intellectual emancipation.

155. Disdain of History, of Philosophy, and of the Sciences in General.—Preoccupied before all else with purely formal studies, and exclusively devoted to the exercises which give a training in the use of elegant language, the Jesuits leave real and concrete studies in entire neglect. History is almost wholly banished from their programme. It is only with reference to the Greek and Latin texts that[145] the teacher should make allusion to the matters of history which are necessary for the understanding of the passage under examination. No account is made of modern history, nor of the history of France. “History,” says a Jesuit Father, “is the destruction of him who studies it.” This systematic omission of historical studies suffices to put in its true light the artificial and superficial pedagogy of the Jesuits, admirably defined by Beckx, who expresses himself thus:—

“The gymnasia will remain what they are by nature, a gymnastic for the intellect, which consists far less in the assimilation of real matter, in the acquisition of different knowledges, than in a culture of pure form.”

The sciences and philosophy are involved in the same disdain as history. Scientific studies are entirely proscribed in the lower classes, and the student enters his year in philosophy,[114] having studied only the ancient languages. Philosophy itself is reduced to a barren study of words, to subtile discussions, and to commentaries on Aristotle. Memory and syllogistic reasoning are the only faculties called into play; no facts, no real inductions, no care for the observation of nature. In all things the Jesuits are the enemies of progress. Intolerant of everything new, they would arrest the progress of the human mind and make it immovable.

156. Discipline.—Extravagant statements have been made relative to the reforms in discipline introduced by the Jesuits into their educational establishments. The fact is, that they have caused to prevail in their colleges more of order and of system than there was in the establishments of the University. On the other hand, they have attempted to please their pupils, to gild for them, so to speak, the bars of[146] the prison which confined them. Theatrical representations, excursions on holidays, practice in swimming, riding, and fencing,—nothing was neglected that could render their residence at school endurable.

But, on the other hand, the Jesuits have incurred the grave fault of detaching the child from the family. They wish to have absolute control of him. The ideal of the perfect scholar is to forget his parents. Here is what was said by a pupil of the Jesuits, who afterwards became a member of the Order, J. B. de Schultaus:—

“His mother paid him a visit at the College of Trent. He refused to take her hand, and would not even raise his eyes to hers. The mother, astonished and grieved, asked her son the cause of such a cold greeting. ‘I refuse to notice you,’ said the pupil, ‘not because you are my mother, but because you are a woman.’ And the biographer adds: ‘This was not excessive precaution; woman preserves to-day the faults she had at the time of our first father; it is always she who drives man from Paradise.’ When the mother of Schultaus died, he did not show the least emotion, having long ago adopted the Holy Virgin for his true mother.”

157. Emulation Encouraged.—The Jesuits have always considered emulation as one of the essential elements of discipline. “It is necessary,” says the Ratio, “to encourage an honorable emulation; it is a great stimulus to study.” Superior on this point, perhaps on this alone, to the Jansenists, who through mistrust of human nature feared to excite pride by encouraging emulation, the Jesuits have always counted upon the self-love of the pupil. The Ratio multiplies rewards,—solemn distributions of prizes, crosses, ribbons, decorations, titles borrowed from the Roman Republic, such as decurions and prætors; all means, even[147] the most puerile, were invented to nourish in pupils an ardor for work, and to incite them to surpass one another. Let us add that the pupil was rewarded, not only for his own good conduct, but for the bad conduct of his comrades if he informed against them. The decurion or the prætor was charged with the police care of the class, and, in the absence of the official disciplinarian, he himself chastised his comrades; in the hands of his teacher, he became a spy and an informer. Thus a pupil, liable to punishment for having spoken French contrary to orders, will be relieved from his punishment if he can prove by witnesses that one of his comrades has committed the same fault on the same day.

158. Official Disciplinarian.—The rod is an element, so to speak, of the ancient pedagogical régime. It holds a privileged place both in the colleges and in private education. Louis XIV. officially transmits to the Duke of Montausier the right to correct his son. Henry IV. wrote to the governor of Louis XIII.: “I complain because you did not inform me that you had whipped my son; for I desire and order you to whip him every time that he shall be guilty of obstinacy or of anything else that is bad; for I well know that there is nothing in the world that can do him more good than that. This I know from the lessons of experience, for when I was of his age, I was soundly flogged.”[115]

The Jesuits, notwithstanding their disposition to make discipline milder, were careful not to renounce a punishment that was in use even at court. Only, while the Brethren of the Christian Schools, according to the regulations of La Salle, chastised the guilty pupil themselves, the Jesuits did not think it becoming the dignity of the master to apply the correction himself. They reserved to a laic the duty of[148] handling the rods. An official disciplinarian, a domestic, a porter, was charged in all the colleges with the functions of chief executioner. And while the Ratio Studiorum recommends moderation, certain witnesses prove that the special disciplinarian did not always carry a discreet hand. Here, for example, is an account given by Saint Simon:—

“The eldest son of the Marquis of Boufflers was fourteen years old. He was handsome, well formed, was wonderfully successful, and full of promise. He was a resident pupil of the Jesuits with the two sons of d’Argenson. I do not know what indiscretion he and they were guilty of. The Fathers wished to show that they neither feared nor stood in awe of any one, and they flogged the boy, because, in fact, they had nothing to fear of the Marquis of Boufflers; but they were careful not to treat the two others in this way, though equally culpable, because every day they had to count with d’Argenson, who was lieutenant of police. The boy Boufflers was thrown into such mental agony that he fell sick on the same day, and within four days was dead.... There was a universal and furious outcry against the Jesuits, but nothing ever came of it.”[116]

159. General Spirit of the Pedagogy of the Jesuits.—The general principles of the doctrine of the Jesuits are completely opposed to our modern ideas. Blind obedience, the suppression of all liberty and of all spontaneity, such is the basis of their moral education.

“To renounce one’s own wishes is more meritorious than to raise the dead;” “We must be so attached to the Roman Church as to hold for black an object which she tells us is black, even when it is really white;” “Our confidence in God should be strong enough to force us, in the lack of a[149] boat, to cross the ocean on a single plank;” “If God should appoint for our master an animal deprived of reason, you should not hesitate to render it obedience, as to a master and a guide, for this sole reason, that God has ordered it thus;” “One must allow himself to be governed by divine Providence acting through the agency of the superiors of the Order, just as if he were a dead body that could be put into any position whatever, and treated according to one’s good pleasure; or as if one were a bâton in the hands of an old man who uses it as he pleases.”

As to intellectual education, as they understand it, it is wholly artificial and superficial. To find for the mind occupations that absorb it, that soothe it like a dream, without wholly awakening it; to call attention to words, and to niceties of expression, so as to reduce by so much the opportunity for thinking; to provoke a certain degree of intellectual activity, prudently arrested at the place where the reflective reason succeeds an embellished memory; in a word, to excite the spirit just enough to arouse it from its inertia and its ignorance, but not enough to endow it with a real self-activity by a manly display of all its faculties,—such is the method of the Jesuits. “As to instruction,” says Bersot, “this is what we find with them: history reduced to facts and tables, without the lesson derived from them bearing on the knowledge of the world; even the facts suppressed or altered when they say too much; philosophy reduced to what is called empirical doctrine, and what de Maistre called the philosophy of the nothing, without danger of one’s acquiring a liking for it; physical science reduced to recreations, without the spirit of research and liberty; literature reduced to the complaisant explication of the ancient authors, and ending in innocent witticisms.... With respect to letters, there are two loves which have noth[150]ing in common save their name; one of them makes men, the other, great boys. It is the last that we find with the Jesuits; they amuse the soul.”

160. The Oratorians.—Between the Jesuits, their adversaries, and the Jansenists, their friends, the Oratorians occupy an intermediate place. They break already with the over-mechanical education, and with the wholly superficial instruction which Ignatius Loyola had inaugurated. Through some happy innovations they approach the more elevated and more profound education of Port Royal. Founded in 1614, by Bérulle, the Order of the Oratory soon counted quite a large number of colleges of secondary instruction, and, in particular, in 1638, the famous college of Juilly. While with the Jesuits it is rare to meet the names of celebrated professors, several renowned teachers have made illustrious the Oratory of the seventeenth century. We note the Père Lamy, author of Entretiens sur les Sciences (1683); the Père Thomassin, whom the Oratorians call the “incomparable theologian,” and who published, from 1681 to 1690, a series of Methods for studying the languages, philosophy, and letters; Mascaron and Massillon, who taught rhetoric at the Oratory; the Père Lecointe and the Père Lelong, who taught history there. All these men unite, in general, some love of liberty to ardor of religious sentiment; they wish to introduce more air and more light into the cloister and the school; they have a taste for the facts of history and the truths of science; finally, they attempt to found an education at once liberal and Christian, religious without abuse of devotion, elegant without refinement, solid without excess of erudition, worthy, finally, to be counted as one of the first practical tentatives of modern pedagogy.

The limits of this study forbid our entering into details. Let us merely note a few essential points. That which dis[151]tinguishes the Oratorians, is, first, a sincere and disinterested love of truth.

“We love the truth,” says the Père Lamy; “the days do not suffice to consult her as long as we would wish; or, rather, we never grow weary of the pleasure we find in studying her. There has always been that love for letters in this House: those who have governed it have tried to nourish it. When there is found among us some penetrating and liberally endowed spirit who has a rare genius for the sciences, he is discharged from all other duties.”[117]

Nowhere have ancient letters been more loved than at the Oratory.

“In his leisure hours the Père Thomassin read only the authors of the humanities;” and yet French was not there sacrificed to Latin. The use of the Latin language was not obligatory till after the fourth year, and even then not for the lessons in history, which, till the end of the courses, had to be given in French. History, so long neglected even in the colleges of the University, particularly the history of France, was taught to the pupils of the Oratory. Geography was not separated from it; and the class-rooms were furnished with large mural maps. On the other hand, the sciences had a place in the course of study. A Jesuit father would not have expressed himself as the Père Lamy has done:—

“It is a pleasure to enter the laboratory of a chemist. In the places where I have happened to be, I did not miss an opportunity to attend the anatomical lectures that were given, and to witness the dissection of the principal parts of the human body.... I know of nothing of greater use than algebra and arithmetic.”

Finally, philosophy itself,—the Cartesian philosophy, so mercilessly decried by the Jesuits,—was in vogue at the Oratory.[152] “If Cartesianism is a pest,” wrote the regents of the College of Angers, “there are more than two hundred of us who are infected with it.” ... “They have forbidden the Fathers of the Oratory to teach the philosophy of Descartes, and, consequently, the blood to circulate,” wrote Madame de Sévigné, in 1673.

Let us also furnish proof of the progress and amelioration of the discipline at the Oratory:—

“There are many other ways besides the rod,” says the Père Lamy; “and, to lead pupils back to their duty, a caress, a threat, the hope of a reward, or the fear of a humiliation, has greater efficiency than whips.”

The ferule, it is true, and whips also, were not forbidden, but made part of the legitima pœnarum genera. But it does not appear that use was often made of them; either through a spirit of mildness, or through prudence, and through the fear of exasperating the child.

“There is needed,” says the Père Lamy again, “a sort of politics to govern this little community,—to lead them through their inclinations; to foresee the effect of rewards and punishments, and to employ them according to their proper use. There are times of stubbornness when a child would sooner be killed than yield.”

What made it easier at the Oratory to maintain the authority of the master without resorting to violent punishments, is that the same professor accompanied the pupils through the whole series of their classes. The Père Thomassin, for example, was, in turn, professor of grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, mathematics, history, Italian, and Spanish,—a touching example, it must be allowed, of an absolute devotion to scholastic labor. But this universality, somewhat superficial, served neither the real interests of the masters nor those of their pupils. The great pedagogical law is the division of labor.

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161. Foundation of the Little Schools.—From the very organization of their society, the Jansenists gave evidences of an ardent solicitude for the education of youth. Their founder, Saint Cyran, said: “Education is, in a sense, the one thing necessary.... I wish you might read in my heart the affection I feel for children.... You could not deserve more of God than in working for the proper bringing up of children.” It was in this disinterested feeling of charity for the good of the young, in this display of sincere tenderness for children, that the Jansenists, in 1643, founded the Little Schools at Port Royal in the Fields, in the vicinity, and then in Paris.[118] They received into those schools only a small number of pupils, preoccupied as they were, not with dominating the world and extending their influence, but with doing modestly and obscurely the good they could. Persecution did not long grant them the leisure to continue the work they had undertaken. By 1660 the enemies of Port Royal had triumphed; the Jesuits obtained an order from the king closing the schools and dispersing the teachers. Pursued, imprisoned, expatriated, the solitaries of Port Royal had but the opportunity to gather up in memorable documents the results of their educational experience all too short.[119]

162. The Teachers and the Books of Port Royal.—Singular destiny,—that of those teachers whom a relentless[154] fate permitted to exercise their functions for only five years, yet who, through their works, have remained perhaps the best authorized exponents of French education! The first of these is Nicole, the moralist and logician, one of the authors of the Port Royal Logic, who taught philosophy and the humanities in the Little Schools, and who published in 1670, under the title, The Education of a Prince, a series of reflections on education, applicable, as he himself says, to children of all classes. Another is Lancelot, the grammarian, the author of the Methods for learning the Latin, Greek, Italian, and Spanish languages. Then there is Arnauld, the great Arnauld, the ardent theologian, who worked on the Logic, and the General Grammar, and who finally composed the Regulation of Studies in the Humanities. In connection with these celebrated names, we must mention other Jansenists not so well known, such as De Sacy and Guyot, both of whom were the authors of a large number of translations; Coustel, who published the Rules for the Education of Children (1687); Varet, the author of Christian Education (1668). Let us add to this list, still incomplete, the Regimen for Children, by Jacqueline Pascal (1657), and we shall have some idea of the educational activity of Port Royal.

163. The Study of the French Language.—As a general rule, we may have a good opinion of the teachers who recommend the study of the mother tongue. In this respect, the solitaries of Port Royal are in advance of their time. “We first teach to read in Latin,” said the Abbé Fleury, “because, compared with French, we pronounce it more as it is written.”[120] A curious reason, which did not satisfy Fleury himself; for he acknowledged the propriety of putting, as soon as possible, into the hands of children, the French[155] books that they can understand. This was what was done at Port Royal. With their love of exactness and clearness, with their disposition, wholly Cartesian, to make children study only the things they can comprehend, the Jansenists saw at once the great absurdity of choosing Latin works as the first reading-books. “To learn Latin before learning the mother tongue,” said Comenius, wittily, “is like wishing to mount a horse before knowing how to walk.” And again, as Sainte-Beuve says, “It is to compel unfortunate children to deal with the unintelligible in order to proceed towards the unknown.” For these unintelligible texts, the Jansenists substituted, not, it is true, original French works, but at least good translations of Latin authors. For the first time in France, the French language was made the subject of serious study. Before being made to write in Latin, pupils were drilled in writing in French. They were set to compose little narratives, little letters, the subjects of which were borrowed from their recollections, by being asked to relate on the spot what they had retained of what they had read.

164. New System of Spelling.—In their constant preoccupation to make study easier, the Jansenists reformed the current method of learning to read. “What makes reading more difficult,” says Arnauld in Chapter VI. of the General Grammar, “is that while each letter has its own proper name, it is given a different name when it is found associated with other letters. For example, if the pupil is made to read the syllable fry, he is made to say ef, ar, y, which invariably confuses him. It is best, therefore, to teach children to know the letters only by the names of their real pronunciation, to name them only by their natural sounds.” Port Royal proposes, then, “to have children pronounce only the vowels and the diphthongs, and not the consonants, which they need not[156] pronounce, except in the different combinations which they form with the same vowels or diphthongs, in syllables and words.”

This method has become celebrated under the name of the Port Royal Method; and it appears, from a letter of Jacqueline Pascal, that the original notion was due to Pascal himself.[121]

165. Discipline in Personal Reflection.—That which profoundly distinguishes the method of the Jansenists from the method of the Jesuits, is that at Port Royal the purpose is less to make good Latinists than to train sound intelligences. The effort is to call into activity the judgment and personal reflection. As soon as the child is capable of it, he is made to think and comprehend. In the lessons of the class-room, not a word is allowed to pass till the child has understood its meaning. Only those tasks are proposed to the child which are adapted to his childish intelligence. His attention is occupied only with the things that are within the compass of his powers.

The grammars of Port Royal are written in French, “because it is ridiculous,” says Nicole, “to teach the principles of a language in the very language that is to be learned, and that for the present is unknown.” Lancelot, in his Methods, abbreviates and simplifies grammatical studies:—

“I have found out, at last, how useful this maxim of Ramus is,—Few precepts and much practice: and, also, that as soon as children begin to know these rules somewhat, it is well to make them observe them in practice.”

It is by the reading of authors that the grammar of Port Royal completes the theoretical study of the rules that are rigidly reduced to their minimum. The professor, with reference[157] to such or such a passage of an author, will make appropriate oral remarks. In this way the example, not the dry and uninteresting one of the grammar, but the living example, expressive, and, drawn from a writer that is being read with interest, will precede or accompany the rule, and the particular case will explain the general law. This is an excellent method, because it accords with the real movement of the mind, and adapts the sequence of studies to the progress of the intelligence, and also because, according to the advice of Descartes, the child in this way proceeds from the known to the unknown, from the simple to the complex.

166. General Spirit of the Intellectual Education at Port Royal.—Without doubt, we need not expect to find among the solitaries of Port Royal a disinterested devotion to science. In their view, instruction is but a means of forming the judgment. “The sciences should be employed,” says Nicole, “only as an instrument for perfecting the reason.” Historical, literary, and scientific knowledge has no intrinsic value. The thing required is simply to employ those subjects for educating just, equitable, and judicious men. Nicole declares that it would be better absolutely to ignore the sciences than to become absorbed in the useless portions of them. Speaking of astronomical researches, and of the works of those mathematicians who believe that “it is the finest thing in the world to know whether there is a bridge and an arch suspended around the planet Saturn,” he concludes that it is preferable to be ignorant of those things than to be ignorant that they are vain.

But, on the other hand, the Jansenists have struck from their programme of studies everything that is merely sterile verbiage, exercises of memory or of artificial imagination. Little attention is given to Latin verse at Port Royal. Ver[158]sion takes precedence of the theme,[122] and the oral theme often replaces the written. The pupil is to be taught, “not to be blinded by a vain flash of words void of sense, not to rest satisfied with mere words or obscure principles, and never to be satisfied till he has gained a clear insight into things.”

167. Pedagogical Principles of Nicole.—In his treatise on the Education of a Prince, Nicole has summarized, under the form of aphorisms, some of the essential principles of his system of education.

Let us first notice this maxim, a true pedagogical axiom: “The purpose of instruction is to carry forward intelligences to the farthest point they are capable of attaining.” This is saying that every child, whether of the nobility or of the people, has the right to be instructed according to his aptitude and ability.

Another axiom: We must proportion difficulties to the growing development of the child’s intelligence. “The greatest minds have but a limited range of intelligence. In all of them there are regions of twilight and shadow; but the intelligence of the child is almost wholly pervaded by shadows; he catches glimpses of but few rays of light. So everything depends on managing these rays, on increasing them, and on exposing to them whatever we wish to have the child comprehend.”

A corollary to the preceding axiom is, that the first appeal must be made to the senses. “The intelligence of children always being very dependent on the senses, we must, as far as possible, address our instruction to the senses, and cause it to reach the mind, not only through[159] hearing, but also through seeing.” Consequently, geography is a study well adapted to early years, provided we employ books in which the largest cities are pictured. If children study the history of a country, we must not neglect to show them the situation of places on the map. Nicole also recommends that they be shown pictures that represent the machines, the arms, and the dress of the ancients, and also the portraits of kings and illustrious men.

168. Moral Pessimism.—Man is wicked, human nature is corrupt: such is the cry of despair that comes to our ears from all the writings of the Jansenists.

“The devil,” says Saint Cyran, “already possesses the soul of even the unborn child.” ...

And again: “We must always pray for souls, and always be on the watch, standing guard as in a city menaced by an enemy. On the outside the devil makes his rounds.” ...

“As soon as children begin to have reason,” says another Jansenist, “we observe in them only blindness and weakness. Their minds are closed to spiritual things, and they cannot comprehend them. But, on the contrary, their eyes are open to evil; their senses are susceptible to all sorts of corruption, and they have a natural inertia that inclines them to it.”

“You ought,” writes Varet, “to consider your children as wholly inclined to evil, and carried forward towards it. All their inclinations are corrupt, and, not being governed by reason, they will permit them to find pleasure and diversion only in the things that carry them towards vice.”

169. Effects on Discipline.—The doctrine of the original perversity of man may produce contrary results, and direct the practical conduct of those who accept it in two opposite directions. They are either inspired with severity[160] toward beings deeply tainted and vicious, or they are excited to pity and to tenderness for those fallen creatures who suffer from an incurable evil. The solitaries of Port Royal obeyed the second tendency. They were as affectionate and good to the children confided to their care as, in theory, they were harsh and rigorous towards human nature. In the presence of their pupils they felt touched with an infinite tenderness for those poor sick souls, whom they would willingly cure of their ills, and raise from their fall, at the cost of any and every sacrifice.

The conception of the native wickedness of man had still another result at Port Royal. It increased the zeal of the teachers. It prompted them to multiply their assiduity and vigilance in order to keep guard over young souls, and there destroy, whenever possible, the seeds of evil that sin had sown in them. When one is charged with the difficult mission of moral education, it is, perhaps, dangerous to have too much confidence in human nature, and to form too favorable an opinion of its qualities and dispositions; for then one is tempted to accord to the child too large a liberty, and to practise the maxim, “Let it take its own course, let it pass” (Laissez faire, laissez passer). It is better to err on the other side, in excess of mistrust; for, in this case, knowing the dangers that menace the child, we watch over him with more attention, abandon him less to the inspiration of his caprices, and expect more of education; we demand of effort and labor what we judge nature incapable of producing by herself.

Vigilance, patience, mildness,—these are the instruments of discipline in the schools of Port Royal. There were scarcely any punishments in the Little Schools. “To speak little, to tolerate much, to pray still more,”—these are the three things that Saint Cyran recommended. The threat to[161] send children home to their parents sufficed to maintain order in a flock somewhat small. In fact, all whose example would have proved bad were sent away; an excellent system of elimination when it is practicable. The pious solitaries endured without complaint, faults in which they saw the necessary consequences of the original fall. Penetrated, however, as they were, with the value of human souls, their tenderness for children was mingled with a certain respect; for they saw in them the creatures of God, beings called from eternity to a sublime destiny or to a terrible punishment.

170. Faults in the Discipline of Port Royal.—The Jansenists did not shun the logical though dangerous consequences that were involved, in germ, in their pessimistic theories of human nature. They fell into an excess of prudence or of rigidity. They pushed gravity and dignity to a formalism that was somewhat repulsive. At Port Royal pupils were forbidden to thee and thou one another. The solitaries did not like familiarities, faithful in this respect to the Imitation of Jesus Christ, in which it is somewhere said that it does not become a Christian to be on familiar terms with any one whatever. The young were thus brought up in habits of mutual respect, which may have had their good side, but which had the grave fault of being a little ridiculous in children, since they forced them to live among themselves as little gentlemen, while at the same time they oppose the development of those intimate friendships, of those lasting attachments of which all those who have lived at college know the sweetness and the charm.

The spirit of asceticism is the general character of all the Jansenists. Varet declares that balls are places of infamy. Pascal denies himself every agreeable thought, and what he called an agreeable thought was to reflect on geometry.[162] Lancelot refuses to take to the theatre the princes of Conti, of whom he was the preceptor.

But perhaps a graver fault at Port Royal was, that through fear of awakening self-love, the spirit of emulation was purposely suppressed. It is God alone, it was said, who is to be praised for the qualities and talents manifested by men. “If God has placed something of good in the soul of a child, we must praise Him for it and keep silent.” By this deliberate silence men put themselves on guard against pride; but if pride is to be feared, is indolence the less so? And when we purposely avoid stimulating self-love through the hope of reward, or through a word of praise given in due season, we run a great risk of not overcoming the indolence that is natural to the child, and of not obtaining from him any serious effort. Pascal, the greatest of the friends of Port Royal, said: “The children of Port Royal, who do not feel that stimulus of envy and glory, fall into a state of indifference.”

171. General Judgment on Port Royal.—After all has been said, we must admire the teachers of Port Royal, who were doubtless deceived on some points, but who were animated by a powerful feeling of their duty to educate, and by a perfect charity. Ardor and sincerity of religious faith; a great respect for the human person; the practice of piety held in honor, but kept subordinate to the reality of the inner feeling; devotion advised, but not imposed; a marked mistrust of nature, corrected by displays of tenderness and tempered by affection; above all, the profound, unwearied devotion of Christian souls who give themselves wholly and without reserve to other souls to raise them up and save them,—this is what was done by the discipline of Port Royal. But it is rather in the methods of teaching, and in the administration of classical studies, that we must look for[163] the incontestable superiority of the Jansenists. The teachers of the Little Schools were admirable humanists, not of form, as the Jesuits were, but of judgment. They represent, it seems to us, in all its beauty and in all its force, that intellectual education, already divined by Montaigne, which prepares for life men of sound judgment and of upright conscience. They founded the teaching of the humanities. “Port Royal,” says an historian of pedagogy, Burnier, “simplifies study without, however, relieving it of its wholesome difficulties; it strives to make it interesting, while it does not convert it into child’s play; it purposes to confide to the memory only what has first been apprehended by the intelligence.... It has given to the world ideas that it has not again let go, and fruitful principles from which we have but to draw their logical consequences.”

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173. Education in the Seventeenth Century.—Outside of the teaching congregations, the seventeenth century counts a certain number of independent educators, isolated thinkers, who have transmitted to us in durable records the results of their reflection or of their experience. The most of these belong to the clergy,—they are royal preceptors. In a monarchical government there is no grander affair than the education of princes. Some others are philosophers, whom the general study of human nature has led to reflect on the principles of education. Without pretending to include everything within the narrow compass of this elementary history, we would make known either the fundamental doctrines or the essential methods which have been concerned in the education of the seventeenth century, and[165] which, at the same time, have made a preparation for the educational reforms of the succeeding centuries.

174. Fénelon (1651-1715).—Fénelon holds an important place in French literature; but it seems that of all the varied aspects of his genius, the part he played as an educator is the most important and the most considerable. Fénelon wrote the first classical work of French pedagogy, and it may be said, considering the great number of authors who have been inspired by his thoughts, that he is the head of a school of educators.

175. How Fénelon became a Teacher.—It is well known that the valuable treatise, On the Education of Girls, was written in 1680, at the request of the Duke and the Duchess of Beauvilliers. These noble friends of Fénelon, besides several boys, had eight girls to educate. It was to assist, by his advice, in the education of this little family school, that Fénelon wrote his book which was not designed at first for the public, and which did not appear till 1687. The young Abbé who, in 1680, was but thirty years old, had already had experience in educational matters in the management of the Convent of the New Catholics (1678). This was an institution whose purpose was to retain young Protestant converts in the Catholic faith, or even to call them there by mild force. It would have been better, we confess, for the glory of Fénelon, if he had gained his experience elsewhere than in that mission of fanaticism, where he was the auxiliary of the secular arm, the accomplice of dragoons, and where was prepared the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. We would have preferred that the Education of Girls had not been planned in a house where were violently confined girls torn from their mothers, and wives stolen from their husbands. But if the first source of Fénelon’s educa[166]tional inspiration was not as pure as one could wish, at least in the book there is nothing that betrays the spirit of intolerance and violence with which the author was associated. On the contrary, The Education of Girls is a work of gentleness and goodness, of a complaisant and amiable grace, which is pervaded by a spirit of progress.

Fénelon soon had occasion to apply the principles that he had set forth in his treatise. August 16, 1689, he was chosen preceptor of the Duke of Bourgogne,[123] with the Duke of Beauvilliers for governor, and the Abbé Fleury for sub-preceptor. From 1689 to 1695, he directed with marvellous success the education of a prince, “a born terror,” as Saint Simon expressed it, but who, under the penetrating influence of his master, became an accomplished man, almost a saint. It was for his royal pupil that he composed, one after another, a large number of educational works, such as the Collection of Fables, the Dialogues of the Dead, the treatise on The Existence of God, and especially the Telemachus, one of the most popular works in French literature.

In furnishing occasion for the exercise of his educational activity, events served Fénelon according to his wish. We may say that his nature predestinated him to the work of education. With his tender soul, preserving its paternal instincts even in his celibate condition, with his admirable grace of spirit, with his various erudition and profound knowledge of antiquity, with his competence in the studies of grammar and history, attested by different passages in his Letter to the Academy; finally, with his temperate disposition and his inclinations towards liberalism in a century of absolute monarchy, he was made to become one of the guides, one of the masters, of French education.

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176. Analysis of the Treatise on the Education of Girls.—This charming masterpiece of Fénelon’s should be read entire. A rapid analysis would not suffice, as it is difficult to reduce to a few essential points the flowing thought of our author. With a facility in expression inclining to laxness, and with a copiousness of thought somewhat lacking in exactness, Fénelon easily repeats himself; he returns to thoughts which have already been elaborated, and does not restrict his easy flowing thought to a rigorous and methodical plan. We may, however, distinguish three principal parts in the thirteen chapters composing the work. Chapters I. and II. are critical, and in these the ordinary faults in the education of women are brought into sharp outline; then in chapters III. to VIII. we have general observations, and the statement of the principles and methods that should be followed and applied in the education of boys as in the education of girls; and finally, from chapter IX. to the end of the book, are all the special reflections which relate exclusively to the merits and demerits, the duties and the studies, of women.

177. Criticism on Monastic Education.—In the opening of the treatise, as in another little essay[124] that is usually included in this volume, Fénelon expresses a preference for a liberal and humane education, where the light of the world penetrates, and which is not confined to the shadow of a monastery:—

“I conclude that it is better for your daughter to be with you than in the best convent that you could select.... If a convent is not well governed, she will see vanity honored, which is the most subtile of all the poisons that can affect a[168] young girl. She will there hear the world spoken of as a sort of enchanted place, and nothing makes a more pernicious impression than that deceptive picture of the world, which is seen at a distance with admiration, and which exaggerates all its pleasures without showing its disappointments and its sorrows.... So I would fear a worldly convent even more than the world itself. If, on the contrary, a convent conforms to the fervor and regularity of its constitution, a girl of rank will grow up there in a profound ignorance of the world.... She leaves the convent like one who had been confined in the shadows of a deep cavern, and who suddenly returns to the full light of day. Nothing is more dazzling than this sudden transition, than this glare to which one has never been accustomed.”

178. Refutation of the Prejudices relative to the Education of Women.—It is, then, for mothers that Fénelon writes his book, still more than for the convents that he does not love. Woman is destined to play a grand part in domestic life. “Can men hope for any sweetness in life, if their most select companionship, which is that of marriage, is turned into bitterness?” Then let us cease to neglect the education of women, and renounce the prejudices by which we pretend to justify this neglect. A learned woman, it is said, is vain and affected! But it is not proposed that women shall engage in useless studies which would make ridiculous pedants of them; it is simply a question of teaching them what befits their position in the household. Woman, it is said again, ordinarily has a weaker intellect than man! But this is the best of reasons why it is necessary to strengthen her intelligence. Finally, woman should be brought up in ignorance of the world! But, replies Fénelon, the world is not a phantom; “it is the aggregate of all the[169] families”; and women have duties to fulfill in it which are scarcely less important than those of men. “Virtue is not less for women than for men.”

179. Good Opinion of Human Nature.—There are two categories of Christians: the first dwell particularly on the original fall; and the others attach themselves by preference to the doctrine of redemption. For the first, the child is deeply tainted with sin; his only inclinations are those towards evil; he is a child of wrath, who must be severely punished. For the others, the child, redeemed by grace, “has not yet a fixed tendency towards any object”; his instincts have no need of being thwarted; all they need is direction. Fénelon follows this last mode of thinking, which is the correct one. He does not fear self-love, and does not interdict deserved praise. He counts upon the spontaneity of nature. He regrets the education of the ancients, who left more liberty to children. Finally, in his judgments on human nature, he is influenced by a cheerful and amiable optimism, and sometimes by an excess of complacency and approbation.

180. Feebleness of the Child.—But if Fénelon believes in the innocence of the child, he is not the less convinced of its feebleness. Hence the measures he recommends to those who have in charge the bringing up of children: “The most important thing in the first years of infancy is the management of the child’s health. Through the selection of food and the régime of a simple life, the body should be supplied with pure blood.... Another thing of great importance is to allow the organs to strengthen by holding instruction in abeyance....” The intellectual weakness of the child comes for the most part from his inability to fix his attention. “The mind of the child is like a lighted taper in[170] a place exposed to the wind, whose flame is ever unsteady.” Hence the urgent necessity of not pressing children beyond measure, of training them little by little as occasion permits, “of serving and assisting Nature, without urging her.”

181. Instructive Curiosity; Object Lessons.—If the inattention of the child is a great obstacle to his progress, his natural curiosity, by way of compensation, is a potent auxiliary. Fénelon knows the aid that can be derived from this source, and we shall quote entire the remarkable passage in which he indicates the means of calling it into exercise through familiar lessons which are already real lessons on objects:—

“Curiosity in children is a natural tendency which comes as the precursor of instruction. Do not fail to take advantage of it. For example, in the country they see a mill, and they wish to know what it is. They should be shown the manner of preparing the food that is needed for human use. They notice harvesters, and what they are doing should be explained to them; also, how the wheat is sown, and how it multiplies in the earth. In the city, they see shops where different arts are practised, and where different wares are sold. You should never be annoyed by their questions; these are so many opportunities offered you by nature for facilitating the work of instruction. Show that you take pleasure in replying to such questions, and by this means you will insensibly teach them how all the things are made that serve human needs, and that give rise to commercial pursuits.”

182. Indirect Instruction.—Even when the child has grown up, and is more capable of receiving direct instruction, Fénelon does not depart from his system of mild management and precaution. There are to be no didactic lessons,[171] but as far as possible the instruction shall be indirect. This is the great educational method of Fénelon, and we shall soon see how he applied it to the education of the Duke of Bourgogne. “The less formal our lessons are, the better.” However, there is need of discretion and prudence in the choice of the first ideas, and the first pictures that are to be impressed on the child’s mind.

“Into a reservoir so little and so precious only exquisite things should be poured.” The absence of pedantry is one of the characteristics of Fénelon. “In rhetoric,” he says, “I will give no rules at all; it is sufficient to give good models.” As to grammar, “I will give it no attention, or, at least, but very little.” Instruction must be insinuated, not imposed. We must resort to unexpected lessons,—to such as do not appear to be lessons. Fénelon here anticipates Rousseau, and suggests the system of pre-arranged scenes and instructive artifices, similar to those invented for Émile.[125]

183. All Activity must be Pleasurable.—One of the best qualities of Fénelon as a teacher is that of wishing that study should be agreeable; but this quality becomes a fault with him, because he makes an abuse of attractive instruction. We can but applaud him when he criticises the harsh and crabbed pedagogy of the Middle Age, and depicts to us those tiresome and gloomy class-rooms, where teachers are ever talking to children of words and things of which they understand nothing. “No liberty,” he says, “no enjoyment, but always lessons, silence, uncomfortable postures, correction, and threats.” And so there is nothing more just than this thought: “In the current education, all the pleasure[172] is put on one side, and all that is disagreeable on the other; the disagreeable is all put into study, and all the pleasure is found in the diversions.” Fénelon would change all this. For study, as for moral discipline, “pleasure must do all.”

First, as to study, seek the means of making agreeable to children whatever you require of them. “We must always place before them a definite and agreeable aim to sustain them in their work.” “Conceal their studies under the appearance of liberty and pleasure.” “Let their range of vision extend itself a little, and their intelligence acquire more breadth.” “Mingle instruction with play.” “I have seen,” he says again, “certain children who have learned to read while playing.”

For giving direction to the will, as for giving activity to the intelligence, never subject children to cold and absolute authority. Do not weary them by an indiscreet exactness. Let wisdom appear to them only at intervals, and then with a laughing face. Lead them by reason whenever it is possible for you to do it. Never assume, save in case of extreme necessity, an austere, imperious air that makes them tremble.

“You would close their heart and destroy their confidence, without which there is no profit to hope for from education. Make yourself loved by them. Let them feel at ease in your presence, so that they do not fear to have you see their faults.”

Such, intellectually and morally, is the amiable discipline dreamed of by Fénelon. It is evident that the imagination of our author conducts him a little too far and leads him astray. Fénelon sees everything on the bright side. In education, such as this too complacent teacher dreams of it, there is no difficulty, nothing laborious, no thorns. “All[173] metals there are gold; all flowers there are roses.” The child is almost exempted from making effort: he shall not be made to repeat the lesson he has heard, “for fear of annoying him.” It is necessary that he learn everything while playing. If he has faults, he must not be told of them, save with precaution, “for fear of hurting his feelings.” Fénelon is decidedly too good-natured, too much given to cajolery. In his effort to shun whatever is repulsive, he comes to exclude whatever is laborious. He falls into an artless pleasantry when he demands that the books of his pupil shall be “beautifully bound, with gilt edges, and fine pictures.”

184. Fables and History.—Fénelon’s very decided taste for agreeable studies, determines him to place in the foremost rank of the child’s intellectual occupations, fables and history, because narratives please the infant imagination above everything else. It is with sacred history especially that he would have the attention occupied, always selecting from it “that which presents the most pleasing and the most magnificent pictures.” He properly demands, moreover, that the teacher “animate his narrative with lively and familiar tones, and so make all his characters speak.” By this means we shall hold the attention of children without forcing it; “for, once more,” he says, “we must be very careful not to impose on them a law to hear and to remember these narratives.”

185. Moral and Religious Education.—Contrary to Rousseau’s notions, Fénelon requires that children should early have their attention turned to moral and religious truths. He would have this instruction given in the concrete, by means of examples drawn from experience. We need not fear to speak to them of God as a venerable old man, with white beard, etc. Whatever of the superstitious[174] there may be in these conceptions adapted to the infant imagination will be corrected afterwards by the reason. It is to be noted, moreover, that a religion of extremes is not what Fénelon desires. He fears all exaggerations, even that of piety. What he demands is a tempered devotion, a reasonable Christianity. He is suspicious of false miracles. “Accustom girls,” he says, “not to accept thoughtlessly certain unauthorized narrations, and not to practise certain forms of devotion introduced by an indiscreet zeal.” But possibly, without intending it, Fénelon himself is preparing the way for the superstition he combats, when, for the purpose of indoctrinating the child with the first principles of religion, he presents to him the notion of God under sensible forms, and speaks to him of a paradise where all is of gold and precious stones.

186. Studies Proper for Women.—So far, we have noted in Fénelon’s work only general precepts applicable to boys and girls alike. But in the last part of his work, Fénelon treats especially of women’s own work, of the qualities peculiarly their own, of their duties, and of the kind of instruction they need in order to fulfill them.

No one knew better than Fénelon the faults that come to woman through ignorance,—unrest, unemployed time, inability to apply herself to solid and serious duties, frivolity, indolence, lawless imagination, indiscreet curiosity concerning trifles, levity, and talkativeness, sentimentalism, and, what is remarkable with a friend of Madame Guyon, a mania for theology: “Women are too much inclined to speak decisively on religious questions.”

What does Fénelon propose as a corrective of these mischievous tendencies? It must be confessed that the plan of instruction which he proposes is still insufficient, and that it scarcely accords with the ideal as we conceive it to-day.

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“Keep young girls,” he says, “within the common bounds, and teach them that there should be for their sex a modesty with respect to knowledge almost as delicate as that inspired by the horror of vice.”

Is not this the same as declaring that knowledge is not intended for women, and that it is repugnant to their delicate nature?

When Fénelon tells us that a young girl ought to learn to read and write correctly (and observe that account is taken only of the daughters of the nobility and of the wealthy middle classes); when he adds, let her also learn grammar, we can infer from these puerile prescriptions, that Fénelon does not exact any great things from women in the way of knowledge. And yet, such as it is, this programme surpassed, in the time of Fénelon, the received custom, and constituted a substantial progress. It was to state an excellent principle, whose consequences should have been more fully analyzed, to demand that women should learn all that is necessary for them to know, in order to bring up their children. Fénelon should also be commended for having recommended to young women the reading of profane authors. He who had been nourished on such literature, who was, so to speak, but a Greek turned Christian, who knew Homer so perfectly as to write the Telemachus, could not, without belying himself, advise against the studies from which he had derived so much pleasure and profit. He also recognized the utility of history, ancient and modern. He grants a place to poetry and eloquence, provided an elimination be made of whatever would be dangerous to purity of morals. What we comprehend less easily is that he condemns, as severely as he does, music, which, he says, “furnishes diversions that are poisonous.”

But these faults, this mistrust of too high an intellectual[176] culture, ought not to prevent us from admiring the Education of Girls. Let us be grateful to Fénelon for having resisted, in part, the prejudices of a period when young women were condemned by their sex to an almost absolute ignorance; for having declared that he would follow a course contrary “to that of alarm and of a superficial culture of the intelligence”; and finally, for having written a book, all the generous inspirations of which Madame de Maintenon herself has not caught; and of which we may say, finally, that almost everything that it contains is excellent, and that it is defective only in what it does not contain.

187. Madame de Lambert (1647-1733).—Fénelon, as an educator of women, was the founder of a school. From Rollin to Madame de Genlis, how many teachers have been inspired by him! But in the front rank of his pupils we must place Madame de Lambert. In her Counsels to her Son (1701), and especially in her Counsels to her Daughter (1728), she has taken up the tradition of Fénelon with greater breadth and freedom of spirit. “As discreet as he with respect to works of the imagination, of which she fears that the reading may inflame the mind;” more severe, even, than he towards Racine, whose name she seems to hesitate to pronounce; disposed to exclude her daughter from “plays, representations that move the passions, music, poetry,—all belonging to the retinue of pleasure,—in other respects, Madame de Lambert takes precedence and surpasses her master” (Gréard). She reproaches Molière for having abandoned women to idleness, pastime, and pleasure. She loves history, especially the history of France, “which no one is permitted not to know.” Finally, without entering into the details of her protests, she makes a powerful plea for the cause of woman’s education; she already belongs to the eighteenth century.

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188. Education of the Duke of Bourgogne.—Singularly enough, Fénelon did not make an application of his ideas on education till after he had set them forth in a theoretical treatise. The education of the Duke of Bourgogne permitted him to make a practical test of the rules established in the Education of Girls. Nothing is of more interest to the historian of pedagogy than the study of that princely education into which Fénelon put all his mind and heart, and which, by its results, at once brilliant and insufficient, exhibits the merits and the faults of his plan of education.

189. Happy Results.—The Duke of Bourgogne with his active intelligence, and also with his impetuous, indocile character, and his fits of passion, was just the pupil for the teacher who relied on indirect instruction. It would have been unwise to indoctrinate with heavy didactic lessons a spirit so impetuous. Through tact and industry, Fénelon succeeded in captivating the attention of the prince, and in skillfully insinuating into his mind knowledges that he would probably have rejected, had they been presented to it in a scientific and pedantic form. “I have never seen a child,” says Fénelon, “who so readily understood the finest things of poetry and eloquence.” Doubtless the happy nature of the prince contributed a large part towards these results; but the art of Fénelon had also its share in the final account.

190. Moral Lessons; The Fables.—How shall morals be taught to a violent and passionate child? Fénelon did not think of preaching fine sermons to him; but presented to him, under the form of Fables, the moral precepts that he wished to inculcate. The Fables of Fénelon certainly have not, as a whole, a large literary value; but, to form a just appreciation of them, we must recollect that their merit is[178] especially to be seen in the circumstances attending their composition. Composed from day to day, they were adapted to the circumstances of the life of the young prince; they were filled with allusions to his faults and his virtues, and they conveyed to him, at the favorable moment, under the veil of a pleasing fiction, the commendation or the censure that he deserved. “One might,” says the Cardinal de Bausset, “follow the chronological order in which these pieces were composed, by comparing them with the progress which age and instruction must have made in the education of the prince.” The apologues, even with their very general morals, will always have their value and place in the education of children. What shall be said of the fables in which the moral, wholly individual, was addressed exclusively to the pupil for whom they were written, either on account of some perversity that he let come to the surface, or of a rising virtue that had been manifested in his conduct? It is thus that the fable called The Capricious presented to the young duke the picture of his fits of passion, and taught him to correct himself; that of the Bee and the Fly reminded him that the most brilliant qualities serve no good purpose without moderation. One day, in a fit of anger, the prince so far forgot himself as to say to Fénelon, who was reproving him: “No, no, Sir! I know who I am, and who you are!” The next day, doubtless in response to this explosion of princely self-conceit, Fénelon had him read the fable entitled Bacchus and the Faun: “As Bacchus could not abide a malicious jeerer always ready to make sport of his expressions that were not correct and elegant, he said to him in a fiery and important tone: ‘How dare you jeer the son of Jupiter?’ The Faun replied without emotion: ‘Alas! how does the son of Jupiter dare to commit any fault?’”

Certain fables, of a more elevated tone than the others,[179] are not designed simply to correct the faults of children; they prepare the prince for the exercise of government. Thus, the fable of the Bees disclosed to him the beauties of an industrious State, and one where order reigns; the Nile and the Ganges taught him love for the people, “compassion for humanity, harassed and suffering.” Finally, from each of these fables there issued a serious lesson under the pleasing exterior of a witticism; and more than once, in reading them, the prince doubtless felt an emotion of pleasure or of shame, as he recognized himself in a commendation or in a reproof addressed to the imaginary personages of the Fables.

191. Historical Lessons; The Dialogues of the Dead.—It is not alone in moral education, but in intellectual education as well, that Fénelon resorts to artifice. The ingenious preceptor has employed fiction in all its forms the better to compass and dominate the spirit of his pupil. There are the fables for moral instruction, the dialogues for the study of history, and finally, the epopée in the Telemachus, for the political education of the heir to the throne of France.

The Dialogues of the Dead put on the stage men of all countries and conditions, Charles the Fifth and a monk of Saint-Just, Aristotle and Descartes, Leonardo da Vinci and Poussin, Cæsar and Alexander. History proper, literature, philosophy, the arts, were the subjects of conversations composed, as in the Fables, at different intervals, according to the progress and the needs of the Duke of Bourgogne. These were attractive pictures that came from time to time to be introduced into the scheme for the didactic study of universal history. They should be taken only for what they were intended to be,—the pleasing complement to a regular and consecutive course of instruction. Fénelon knew better than any one else that history is interesting in itself, and[180] that to make the study of it interesting, it is sufficient to present it to the childish imagination with clearness, with vivacity, and with feeling.

192. Variety of Disciplinary Agents.—The education of the Duke of Bourgogne is the practical application of Fénelon’s principles as to the necessity of employing an insinuating gentleness rather than an authority which dryly commands. There are to be no sermons, no lectures, but indirect means of moral instruction. The Duke of Bourgogne was irascible. Instead of reading to him Seneca’s treatise On Anger, this is Fénelon’s device: One morning he has a cabinet-maker come to his apartments, whom he has instructed for the purpose. The prince enters, stops, and looks at the tools. “Go about your business, Sir,” cries the workman, who assumes a most threatening air, “for I am not responsible for what I may do; when I am in a passion, I break the arms and legs of those whom I meet.” We guess the conclusion of the story, and how, by this experimental method, Fénelon contrives to teach the prince to guard against anger and its effects.

When indirect means did not answer, Fénelon employed others. It is thus that he made frequent appeals to the self-love of his pupil; he reminded him of what he owed to his name and to the hopes of France. He had him record his word of honor that he would behave well: “I promise the Abbé Fénelon, on the word of a prince, that I will obey him, and that, in case I break my word, I will submit to any kind of punishment and dishonor. Given at Versailles, this 29th day of November, 1689. Signed: Louis.” At other times Fénelon appealed to his feelings, and conquered him by his tenderness and goodness. It is in such moments of tender confidence that the prince said to him, “I leave the[181] Duke of Bourgogne outside the door, and with you I am but the little Louis.” Finally, at other times, Fénelon resorted to the harshest punishments; he sequestered him, took away his books, and interdicted all conversation.

193. Diversified Instruction.—By turns serious and tender, mild and severe, in his moral discipline, Fénelon was not less versatile in his methods of instruction. His dominant preoccupation was to diversify studies—the term is his own. If a given subject of study was distasteful to his pupil, Fénelon passed to another. Although the success of his tutorship seems to be a justification of his course, there is ground for thinking that, as a general rule, Fénelon’s precept is debatable, and that his example should not be followed by making an over-use of amusement and agreeable variety. Fénelon has too often made studies puerile through his attempts to make them agreeable.

194. Results of the Education of the Duke of Bourgogne.—It seems like a paradox to say that Fénelon was too successful in his educational apostleship; and yet this is the truth. Under his hand—“the ablest hand that ever was,” says Saint Simon—the prince became in all respects the image of his master. He was a bigot to the extent of being unwilling to attend a royal ball because that worldly entertainment coincided with the religious celebration of the Epiphany; he was rather a monk than a king; he was destitute of all spirit of initiative and liberty, irresolute, absorbed in his pious erudition and mystic prayers; finally, he was another Telemachus, who could not do without his Mentor. Fénelon had monopolized and absorbed the will of his pupil. He had forgotten that the purpose of education is to form, not a pale copy, an image of the master, but a man independent and free, capable of sufficing for himself.

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195. The Telemachus.—The Telemachus, composed from 1694 to 1698, was designed for the Duke of Bourgogne; but he was not to read it, and did not read it, in fact, till after his marriage. Through this epopée in prose, this romance borrowed from Homer, Fénelon purposed to continue the moral education of his pupil. But the book abounds in sermons. “I could have wished,” said Boileau, “that the Abbé had made his Mentor a little less a preacher, and that the moral of the book could have been distributed a little more imperceptibly, and with more art.” At least, they are beautiful and excellent sermons, aimed against luxury, the spirit of conquest, the consequences of absolute power, and against ambition and war. Louis XIV. had probably read the Telemachus, and had comprehended the allusions concealed in the description of the Republic of Salentum, when he said of Fénelon that he was “the most chimerical spirit in his kingdom.” Besides the moral lesson intended for princes, the Telemachus also contains bold reflections on political questions. For example, note the conception of a system of public instruction, very new for the time: “Children belong less to their parents than to the Republic, and ought to be educated by the State. There should be established public schools in which are taught the fear of God, love of country, and respect for the laws.”

196. Bossuet and Fénelon.—Bossuet, as preceptor of the Dauphin,[126] was far from having the same success as Fénelon. Nothing was overlooked, however, in the education of the son of Louis XIV.; and the Letter to Pope Innocent XI. (1679), in which Bossuet presents his scheme of study, gives proof of high fitness for educational work.[183] He recommends assiduous labor, no leaves of absence, and play mingled with study. “A child must play and enjoy himself,” he says. Emulation excited by the presence of other children, who came to compete with the prince; a thorough reading of the Latin authors, explained, not in fragments, as with the Jesuits, but in complete texts; a certain breadth of spirit, since the study of the comic poets—of Terence in particular—was expressly recommended; a familiarity with the Greeks and the Romans, “especially with the divine Homer”; the grammar learned in French; history, “the mistress of human life,” studied with ardor, and presented, first, in its particular facts, in the lessons which the Dauphin drew up, and then in its general laws, the spirit of which has been transmitted to us in the Discourse on Universal History; geography learned “while playing and making imaginary journeys”; philosophy; and finally the sciences, brilliantly presented,—with such a programme, and under such a master, it seems that the Dauphin ought to have been a student of the highest rank; but he remained a mediocre pupil, “absorbed,” to use Saint Simon’s expression, “in his own fat and gloom.”

It must certainly be acknowledged that, notwithstanding his excellent intentions, Bossuet was in part responsible for the fact that these results were insufficient, or, rather, nil. He did not know how “to condescend,” as Montaigne says, “to the boyish ways of his pupil.” In dealing with him he proceeded on too high a plane. “The austere genius of Bossuet,” says Henry Martin, “did not know how to become small with the small.” Bossuet lacked in flexibility and tact, precisely the qualities that characterized Fénelon. Bossuet, in education, as in everything else, is grandeur, noble and sublime bearing; Fénelon, as preceptor, is address, insinuating grace. That which dominates in the one[184] is authority, a majesty almost icy; that which constitutes the charm of the other is versatility, a persuasive gentleness, a penetrating tenderness.

To be just, however, it must be added that the faults were not all on Bossuet’s side. In that education, stamped with failure, the pupil was the great culprit, with his ungrateful and rebellious nature. “My lord has much spirit,” said a courtier, “but he has it concealed.” For one not a courtier, does it not amount to the same thing to have one’s spirit concealed and to have none at all?

197. Sphere and Limits of Education.—It seems that, on one page of the Education of Girls, Fénelon has traced in advance, and by a sort of divination, the parallels of the two educations of the Dauphin and of the Duke of Bourgogne respectively. How can we fail to recognize the anticipated portrait of Fénelon’s future pupil in this passage, written in 1680?

“It must be acknowledged, that of all the difficulties in education, none is comparable to that of bringing up children who are lacking in sensibility. The naturally quick and sensitive are capable of terrible mistakes,—passion and presumption do so betray them! But they have also great resources, and when far gone often come to themselves. Instruction is a germ concealed within them, which starts, and sometimes bears fruit, when experience comes to the aid of knowledge, and the passions lose their power. At least, we know how to make them attentive, and to awaken their curiosity. We have the means of interesting them, and of stimulating them through their sense of honor; but, on the other hand, we can gain no hold on indolent natures.”

On the other hand, all that follows applies perfectly to the Dauphin, the indocile pupil of Bossuet:—

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“ ... All the thoughts of these are distractions; they are never where they ought to be; they cannot be touched to the quick even by corrections; they hear everything and feel nothing. This indolence makes the pupil negligent, and disgusts him with whatever he does. Under these conditions, the best planned education runs the risk of failure.... Many people, who think superficially, conclude from this poor success that nature does all for the production of men of merit, and that education has no part in the result; but the only conclusion to be drawn from the case is, that there are natures like ungrateful soils, upon which culture has but little effect.”[127]

Nothing better can be said, and Fénelon has admirably summed up the lesson that should be drawn from these two princely illustrations of the seventeenth century. If the sorry results of Bossuet’s efforts should inspire the educator with some modesty, and prove to him that the best grain does not grow in an ingrate soil, is not the brilliant education of the Duke of Bourgogne, which developed almost all the virtues in a soul where nature seemed to have planted the seeds of all the vices, of a nature to increase the confidence of teachers, and show them what can be done by the art of a shrewd and able teacher?

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199. Descartes, Malebranche, and Locke.—Descartes, a spiritualist; Malebranche, an idealist; Locke, a sensationalist,—such are the philosophers of the seventeenth century who are related to the history of pedagogy. And yet the first two have only a remote connection with it, through their exposition of some of its general principles. Locke is the only one who has resolutely approached educational questions in a special treatise that has become a classic in English pedagogy.

200. Descartes (1596-1650).—Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, does not generally figure in the lists drawn up by the historians of education; and yet, in our[188] opinion, there is no thinker who has exercised a more decisive influence on the destinies of education. The author of the Discourse of Method has, properly speaking, no system of pedagogy, having never directly treated of educational affairs; but through his philosophical principles he has changed the direction of human thought, and has introduced into the study of known truths, as well as into the search for new truths, a method and a taste for clearness and precision, which have profited instruction in all of its departments.

“We now find,” says Rollin, “in the discourses from the pulpit and the bar, and in the dissertations on science, an order, an exactness, a propriety, and a solidity, which were formerly not so common. Many believe, and not without reason, that we owe this manner of thinking and writing to the extraordinary progress which has been made within a a century in the study of philosophy.”[128]

201. The Discourse of Method (1637).—Every system of philosophy contains in germ a special system of education. From the mere fact that philosophers define, each in his own way, the nature and the destiny of man, they come to different conclusions as to the aims and methods of education. Only a few of them have taken pains to deduce from their principles the consequences that are involved in them; but all of them, whether they will or no, are educators.

Such is the case of Descartes. In writing, in the first part of his Discourse of Method, his Considerations Touching the Sciences, Descartes has written a chapter on practical pedagogy, and through the general rules of his logic, he has, in effect, founded a new theory of education.

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202. Criticism of the Current Education.—Descartes has given a long account of the education which he had received among the Jesuits, at the college of La Flèche, and this account furnished him occasion, either to criticize the methods in use, or to indicate his personal views and his educational preferences.

“From my infancy letters have been my intellectual nourishment.... But as soon as I had completed the course of study required for the doctor’s degree, I found myself embarrassed with so many doubts and errors that it seemed to me that I had received no other profit from my efforts at learning than the discovery of my growing ignorance.”

In other terms, Descartes ascertained that his studies, though pursued with ardor for eight years in one of the most celebrated schools of Europe, had not permitted him to acquire “a clear and sure knowledge of all that is useful for living.” This was to condemn the barren teaching and the formal instruction of the Jesuits. Passing in review the different parts of the instruction, Descartes first remarks that it was wrong to make an abuse of the reading of ancient books; for, to hold converse with the men of other centuries “is about the same as travelling; and when we spend too much time in travelling, we become strangers in our own country.” Then he complains that he was not made to know “the true use of mathematics,” since he had been shown their application only to the mechanic arts. He nearly condemns rhetoric and poetics, since eloquence and poetry are “intellectual gifts rather than the fruits of study.” The ancient languages—and in this he gravely deceives himself—seem to him useful only for the understanding of authors. He does not admit that the study of Latin or Greek can contribute to intellectual development.

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From these reflections there seems to issue the notion of an instruction more solid, more positive, more directly useful for the purposes of life, than that which had been brought into fashion by the Jesuits. However, Descartes does not eliminate the ordinary studies, as eloquence, “which has incomparable power and beauty”; poetry, “which has an enchanting tenderness and melody”; the reading of the classics, which is “a studied conversation with the most estimable men of past centuries”; history, “which forms the judgment”; fables, whose “charm arouses the spirit.” But he would give to all these exercises a more practical turn, a more utilitarian character, a more positive application.

203. Great Principles of Modern Pedagogy.—Without intending it, without any other thought than that of modifying the false direction of the mind in the search for scientific truth, Descartes has stated some of the great principles of modern pedagogy.

The first is the equal aptitude of minds to know and comprehend. “Good sense,” says Descartes, “is the thing of all else in this world that is most equally distributed.[129] ... The latent ability to judge well, to distinguish the true from the false, is naturally equal among all men.” What is this but saying that all men are entitled to instruction? In a certain sense, what are the innumerable primary schools scattered over the surface of the civilized globe, but the application and the living commentary of Descartes’ ideas on the equal distribution of good sense and reason among men?

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But, adds Descartes, “it is not enough to have a sound mind; the principal thing is to make a good use of it.” In other words, nature is not sufficient in herself; she needs to be guided and directed. Method is the essential thing; it has a sovereign importance. Success will depend less on natural qualities, such as imagination, memory, quickness of thought, than upon the rules of intellectual direction imposed on the mind. Education has a far greater part than nature in the formation and development of accurate and upright intelligences.

Another Cartesian principle is the substitution of free inquiry and reflective conviction for blind beliefs founded upon authority. Descartes promulgated this famous rule of his method: “The first precept is, never to receive anything for true that I do not know, upon evidence, to be such; ... and to comprise no more within my judgments than what is presented so clearly and distinctly to my mind that I have no occasion to call it in question.” In this declaration he has not only reformed science and revolutionized philosophy, but has banished from the school the old routine, the mechanical processes and exercises of pure memory, and has made a demand for rational methods that excite the intelligence, awaken clear and distinct ideas, and provoke judgment and reflection. Of course, it is not proposed to make a little Descartes out of every child, despoiling him of received beliefs in order to construct personal opinions de novo; but the rule of evidence, applied with moderation and discretion, is none the less an excellent pedagogical precept, which will never be disallowed by those who wish to make of the child something more than a mere machine.

204. Objective and Subjective Pedagogy.—We have now reached a place where we may call into notice two different tendencies, equally legitimate, which we shall find,[192] with exaggerations that compromise their utility, in the practice of modern teachers. There are those who wish above all to develop the intelligence; and there are others who are preoccupied with furnishing the mind with a stock of positive knowledge. The first conceive instruction as taking place, as it were, through what is within, through the development of the internal qualities of precision and measure; the others are preoccupied only with the instruction that takes place through what is without, through an extended erudition, through an accumulation of knowledges. In a word, if I may be allowed the expression, some affect a subjective pedagogy, and others an objective pedagogy. Bacon is of the latter number. That which preoccupies the great English logician above everything else is the extension of observations and experiments. “To reason without knowing anything of that which we reason upon,” he says, “is as if we were to weigh or measure the wind.” Descartes, however, who has never neglected the study of facts, esteems them less as material to be accumulated in the mind, than as instruments for training the mind itself. He would have repudiated those teachers of our day who seem to think the whole thing is done when there has been made to pass before the mental vision of the child an interminable series of object-lessons, without the thought of developing that intelligence itself.

205. Malebranche (1638-1715).—We must not expect great pedagogical wisdom from a mystical dreamer and resolute idealist, who has imagined the vision of all things in God. Besides, Malebranche has given only a passing attention to things relating to education. The member of a teaching congregation, the Oratory, he has not taught; and the whole effort of his mind was spent in the search for metaphysical truth. Nevertheless, it is interesting to stop[193] for a moment this visionary who traverses the earth with eyes fixed on the heavens, and inquire of him what he thinks of the very practical question, education.

206. Sense Instruction condemned.—Malebranche will reply to us, with the prejudices of a metaphysician of the idealist type, that the first thing to do is to nourish the child on abstract truths. In his view, souls have no age, so to speak, and the infant is already capable of ideal contemplation. Then let sense instruction be abandoned, “for this is the reason why children leave metaphysical thoughts, to apply themselves to sensations.” Is it objected that the child does not seem very well adapted to meditation on abstract truths? It is not so much the fault of nature, Malebranche will reply, as of the bad habits he has contracted. There is a means of remedying this ordinary incapacity of the child.

“If we kept children from fear, from desires, and from hope, if we did not make them suffer pain, if we removed them as far as possible from their little pleasures, then we might teach them, from the moment they knew how to speak, the most difficult and the most abstract things, or at least the concrete mathematics, mechanics.”

Does Malebranche hope, then, to suppress, in the life of the child, pleasure and pain, and triumph over the tendencies which ordinary education has developed?

“As an ambitious man who had just lost his fortune and his credit would not be in a condition to resolve questions in metaphysics or equations in algebra, so children, on whose brains apples and sugar-plums make as profound impressions as are made on those of men of forty years by offices and titles, are not in a condition to hear the abstract truths that are taught them.”

Consequently, we must declare war against the senses, and[194] exclude, for example, all sorts of sensible rewards. Only, by a singular contradiction, Malebranche upholds material punishments in the education of children. The only thing of sense he retains is the rod.[130]

207. Influence of Material Environment.—Another contradiction more worthy of note is, that, notwithstanding his idealism, Malebranche believes in the influence of physical conditions on the development of the soul. He does not go so far as to say with the materialists of our time, that “man is what he eats”; but he accords a certain amount of influence to nourishment. He speaks cheerfully of wine and of “those wild spirits who do not willingly submit to the orders of the will.” He never applied himself to work without having partaken of coffee. The soul, in his view, is not a force absolutely independent and isolated, which develops through an internal activity: “we are bound,” he says, “to everything, and stand in relations to all that surrounds us.”

208. Locke (1632-1704).—Locke is above all else a psychologist, an accomplished master in the art of analyzing the origin of ideas and the elements of the mental life. He is the head of that school of empirical psychology that rallies around its standard, Condillac in France, Herbart in Germany, and in Great Britain Hume and other Scotchmen, and[195] the most of modern philosophers. But from psychology to pedagogy the transition is easy, and Locke had to make no great effort to become an authority in education after having been an accomplished philosopher.

209. Some Thoughts on Education (1693).—The book which he published towards the close of his life, under the modest title Some Thoughts concerning Education, was the summing up of a long experience. A studious pupil at Westminster, he conceived from his early years, as Descartes did at La Flèche, a keen sense of repugnance for a purely formal classical instruction, and for language studies in general, in which, nevertheless, he attained distinction. A model student at the University of Oxford, he there became an accomplished humanist, notwithstanding the practical and positive tendency of his mind that was already drawn towards the natural sciences and researches in physics and in medicine. Made Bachelor of Arts in 1656, and Master of Arts in 1658, he passed directly from the student’s bench to the professor’s chair. He was successively lecturer and tutor in Greek, but this did not prevent him later from eliminating Hellenism almost completely from his scheme of liberal education. Then he became lecturer on rhetoric, and finally on moral philosophy. When, in 1666, he discontinued his scholastic life to mingle in political and diplomatic affairs, he at least carried from his studious residence at Oxford, the germs of the most of his ideas on education. He sought occasion to make an application of them in the education of private individuals, of whom he was the inspirer and counsellor, if not the official director. In the families of friends and hosts that he frequented, for example, in that of Lord Shaftesbury, he made a close study of children; and it is in studying them, and in following with a sagacious eye the successive steps of their improvement in disposition and mind, that he succeeded in[196] acquiring that educational experience which has left a trace on each page of the Thoughts concerning Education. This book, in fact, is the issue of one of Locke’s experiences as an assistant in the education of the children of his friends. Towards the year 1684-5, he addressed to his friend Clarke a series of letters which, retouched and slightly modified, have become a classical work, simple and familiar in style, a little disconnected, perhaps, and abounding in repetitions, but the substance of which is excellent, and the ideas as remarkable, in general, for their originality as for their justness. Translated into French in 1695 by P. Coste, and reprinted several times in the lifetime of their author, the Thoughts concerning Education have had a universal success. They have exercised an undoubted influence on the educational writings of Rousseau and Helvetius. They have received the enthusiastic praise of Leibnitz, who placed this work above that on the Human Understanding. “I am persuaded,” said H. Marion recently, in his interesting study on Locke, “that if an edition of the Thoughts were to be published to-day in a separate volume, it would have a marked success.”[131]

210. Analysis of the Thoughts concerning Education.—Without pretending to give in this place a detailed analysis of Locke’s book, which deserves to be read entire, and which discusses exhaustively or calls to notice, one after another, almost all important educational questions, we shall attempt to make known the essential principles which are to be drawn from it. These are: 1. in physical education, the hardening process; 2. in intellectual education, practical utility; 3. in moral education, the principle of honor, set up as a rule for the free self-government of man.

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211. Physical Education; The Hardening Process.—The ideal of education, according to Locke, is “a sound mind in a sound body.” A physician like Rabelais, the author of the Thoughts concerning Education had special competence in questions of physical education. But a love for the paradoxical, and an excessive tendency towards the hardening of the body, have marred, on this point, the reflections of the English philosopher. He has summed up his precepts on this subject in the following lines:—

“The whole is reduced,” he says, “to a small number of rules, easy to observe; much air, exercise, and sleep; a simple diet, no wine or strong liquors; little or no medicine at all; garments that are neither too tight nor too warm; finally, and above all, the habit of keeping the head and feet cold, of often bathing the feet in cold water and exposing them to dampness.”[132] But it is necessary to enter somewhat into details, and to examine closely some of these ideas.

Locke is the first educator to write a consecutive and methodical dissertation on the food, clothing, and sleep of children. It is he who has stated this principle, afterwards taken up by Rousseau: “Leave to nature the care of forming the body as she thinks it ought to be done.” Hence, no close-fitting garments, life in the open air and in the sun; children brought up like peasants, inured to heat and cold, playing with head and feet bare. In the matter of food, Locke forbids sugar, wine, spices, and flesh, up to the age of three or four. As to fruits, which children often crave with an inordinate appetite, a fact that is not surprising, he pleasantly remarks, “since it was for an apple that our first parents lost paradise,” he makes a singular choice. He[198] authorizes strawberries, gooseberries, apples, and pears; but he interdicts peaches, plums, and grapes. To excuse Locke’s prejudice against the grapes, it must be recollected that he lived in England, a country in which the vine grows with difficulty, and of which an Italian said, “The only ripe fruit I have seen in England is a baked apple.” As to meals, Locke does not think it important to fix them at stated hours. Fénelon, on the contrary, more judiciously requires that the hour for repasts be absolutely determined. But this is not the only instance in which Locke’s wisdom is at fault. What shall be said of that hygienic fancy which consists in allowing the child “to have his shoes so thin, that they might leak and let in water, whenever he comes near it”?

It is certain that Locke treats children with an unheard-of severity, all the more surprising in the case of one who had an infirm and delicate constitution that could be kept in repair only through precaution and management. I do not know whether the consequences of the treatment which he proposes, applied to the letter, might not be disastrous. Madame de Sévigné was more nearly right when she wrote: “If your son is very robust, a rude education is good; but if he is delicate, I think that in your attempts to make him robust, you would kill him.” The body, says Locke, may be accustomed to everything. We may reply to this by quoting an anecdote of Peter the Great, who one day took it into his head, it is said, that it would be best for all the sailors to form the habit of drinking salt water. Immediately he promulgated an edict which ordered that all naval cadets should henceforth drink only sea-water. The boys all died, and there the experiment stopped.

Still, without subscribing to Locke’s paradoxes, which have found no one to approve of them except Rousseau, we should recollect that in his precepts on physical education as[199] a whole, the author of the Thoughts deserves our commendation for having recommended a manly course of discipline, and a frugal diet, for having discarded fashionable conventionalities and drawn near to nature, and for having condemned the refinements of an indolent mode of life, and for being inspired by the simple and manly customs of England.

212. Moral Education.—In the thought of Locke, moral education takes precedence of instruction properly so called:

“That which a gentleman ought to desire for his son, besides the fortune he leaves him is, 1. virtue; 2. prudence; 3. good manners; 4. instruction.”

Virtue and prudence—that is, moral qualities and practical qualities—are of first consideration. “Instruction,” says Locke again, “is but the least part of education.” In the book of Thoughts, where repetitions abound, there is nothing more frequently repeated than the praise of virtue.

Doubtless it may be thought that Locke, like Herbert Spencer in our own day, cherishes prejudices with respect to instruction, and that he does not take sufficient account of the moralizing influence exercised over the heart and will by intellectual enlightenment; but, even with this admission, we must thank Locke for having protested against the teachers who think they have done all when they have embellished the memory and developed the intelligence.

The grand thing in education is certainly to establish good moral habits, to cultivate noble sentiments, and, finally, to form virtuous characters.

213. Honor, the Principle of Moral Discipline.—But after having placed moral education in its proper rank, which is the first, it remains to inquire what shall be the principles and the methods of this education. Shall it be the maxim of utility, as Rousseau requires? Must the child,[200] before acting, inquire what is the good of this? Cui bono? No; utilitarian in instruction and in intellectual education, as we have just seen, Locke is not so in moral education. Shall it be fear, shall it be the authority of the teacher or of parents, founded on punishments, upon the slavish feeling of terror? Still less. Locke reproves repressive discipline, and is not inclined to chastisements. Shall it be affection, the love of parents, the aggregate of tender sentiments? Locke scarcely speaks of them. Of too little sensibility himself, he does not seem to think of all that can be done through the sensibility of the child.

Locke, who perhaps is wrong in treating the child too early, as though he were a man, who does not take sufficient account of all the feebleness that is in infant nature, appeals from the first to the sentiment of honor, and to the fear of shame, that is, to emotions which, I fear, by their very nobleness, are above the powers of the child. Honor, which is, in fact, but another name for duty, and the ordinary synonym of virtue,—honor may assuredly be the guide of an adult and already trained conscience; but is it not chimerical to hope that the child, from his earliest years, will be sensible to the esteem or the contempt of those who surround him? If it were possible to inspire a child with a regard for his reputation, I grant with Locke that we might henceforth “make of him whatever we will, and teach him to love all the forms of virtue”; but the question is to know whether we can succeed in this, and I doubt it, notwithstanding the assurances of Locke.

Kant has very justly said:—

“It is labor lost to speak of duty to children. They comprehend it only as a thing whose transgression is followed by the ferule.... So one ought not to try to call into play with children the feeling of shame, but to wait for this till the[201] period of youth comes. In fact, it cannot be developed in them till the idea of honor has already taken root there.”

Locke is the dupe of the same illusion, both when he expects of the child enough moral power so that the sense of honor suffices to govern him, and when he counts enough on his intellectual forces to desire to reason with him from the moment he knows how to speak. For forming good habits in the child, and preparing him for a life of virtue, there is full need of all the resources that nature and art put at the disposal of the educator,—sensibility under all its forms, the calculations of self-interest, the lights of the intelligence. It is only little by little, and with the progress of age, that an exalted principle, like the sentiment of honor or the sentiment of duty, will be able to emerge from out the mobile humors of the child, and dominate his actions like a sovereign law. The moral pedagogy of Locke is certainly faulty in that it is not sufficiently addressed to the heart, and to the potency of loving, which is already so great in the child. I add, that in his haste to emancipate the child, to treat him as a reasonable creature, and to develop in him the principles of self-government, Locke was wrong in proscribing almost absolutely the fear of punishment. It is good to respect the liberty and the dignity of the man that is in the child, but it is not necessary that this respect degenerate into superstition; and it is not sure that to train firm and robust wills, it is necessary to have them early affranchised from all fear and all constraint.

214. Condemnation of Corporal Punishment.—It is undeniable that Locke has not sufficiently enlarged the bases of his theory of moral discipline; but if he has rested incomplete in the positive part of his task, if he has not advised all that should be done, he has been more successful in the[202] negative part, that which consists in eliminating all that ought not to be done. The chapters devoted to punishments in general, and in particular to corporal punishments, count among the best in the Thoughts. Rollin and Rousseau have often copied from them. It is true that Locke himself has borrowed the suggestion of them from Montaigne. The “severe mildness” which is the pedagogical rule of the author of the Essays, is also the rule of Locke. It is in accordance with this that Locke has brought to bear on the rod the final judgment of good sense: “The rod is a slavish discipline, which makes a slavish temper.” He has yielded to the ideas of his time on only one point, when he admits one exception to the absolute interdiction of the rod, and tolerates its use in extreme cases to overcome the obstinate and rebellious resistance of the child. This is going too far without any doubt; but to do justice to the boldness of Locke’s views, we must consider how powerful the custom then was, and still is, in England, in a country where the heads of institutions think themselves obliged to notify the public, in the advertisements published in the journals, that the interdiction of corporal punishment counts among the advantages of their schools. “It is difficult to conceive the perseverance with which English teachers cling to the old and degrading customs of corrections by the rod.... A more astonishing thing is that the scholars seem to hold to it as much as the teachers.” “In 1818,” relates one of the former pupils of Charterhouse, “our head master, Doctor Russell, who had ideas of his own, resolved to abolish corporal punishment and substitute for it a fine. Everybody resisted the innovation. The rod seemed to us perfectly consistent with the dignity of a gentleman; but a fine, for shame! The school rose to the cry: ‘Down with the fine! Long live the rod!’ The revolt triumphed, and the rod was[203] solemnly restored. Then we were glad-hearted over the affair. On the next day after the fine was abolished, we found, on entering the class-room, a superb forest of birches, and the two hours of the session were conscientiously employed in making use of them.”[133][134]

215. Intellectual Education.—In what concerns intellectual education, Locke manifestly belongs to the school, small in his time, but more and more numerous to-day, of utilitarian teachers. He would train, not men of letters, or of science, but practical men, armed for the battle of life, provided with all the knowledge they will need in order to keep their accounts, administer their fortune, satisfy the requirements of their profession, and, finally, to fulfill their duties as men and citizens. In a word, he wrote for a nation of tradesmen and citizens.

216. Utilitarian Studies.—An undeniable merit of Locke is that of having reacted against a purely formal instruction, which substitutes for the acquisition of positive and real knowledge a superfluous culture, so to speak, a training in a superficial rhetoric and an elegant verbiage. Locke disdains and condemns studies that do not contribute directly to a preparation for life. Doubtless he goes a little[204] too far in his reaction against the current formalism and in his predilection for realism. He is too forgetful of the fact that the old classical studies, if not useful in the positive sense of the term, and not satisfying the ordinary needs of existence, have yet a higher utility, in the sense that they may become, in skillful and discreet hands, an excellent instrument for intellectual discipline and the education of the judgment. But Locke spoke to fanatics and pedants, for whom Latin and Greek were the whole of instruction, and who, turning letters from their true purpose, wrongly made a knowledge of the dead languages the sole end, and not, as should be the case, one of the means of instruction. Locke is by no means a blind utilitarian, a coarse positivist, who dreams of absolutely abolishing disinterested studies. He wishes merely to put them in their place, and to guard against investing them with a sort of exclusive privilege, and against sacrificing to them other branches of instruction that are more essential and more immediately useful.

217. Programme of Studies.—As soon as the child knows how to read and write, he should be taught to draw. Very disdainful of painting and of the fine arts in general, whose benign and profound influence on the souls of children his colder nature has not sufficiently recognized, Locke, by way of compensation, recommends drawing, because drawing may be practically useful, and he puts it on almost the same footing as reading and writing.

These elements once acquired, the child should be drilled in the mother tongue, first in reading, and afterwards in exercises in composition, in brief narratives, in familiar letters, etc. The study of a living language (Locke recommends French to his countrymen) should immediately follow; and it is only after this has been acquired that the child shall be put to the study of Latin. Save the omission of the[205] sciences, Locke’s plan is singularly like that which for ten years has been in use in the French lycées.

As to Latin, which follows the living language, Locke requires that it shall be learned above all through use, through conversation if a master can be found who speaks it fluently, but if not, through the reading of authors. As little of grammar as possible, no memoriter exercises, no Latin composition, either in prose or verse, but, as soon as possible, the reading of easy Latin texts,—these are the recommendations of Locke that have been too little heeded. The purpose is no longer to learn Latin for the sake of writing it elegantly; the only purpose truly desirable is to comprehend the authors who have written in that language. The obstinate partisans of Latin verse and conversation will not read without chagrin these earnest protests of Locke against exercises that have been too much abused, and that impose on the learner the torment of writing in a language which he handles with difficulty, upon subjects which he but imperfectly understands. As to Greek, Locke proscribes it absolutely. He does not disparage the beauty of a language whose masterpieces, he says, are the original source of our literature and science; but he reserves the knowledge of it to the learned, to the lettered, to professional scholars, and he excludes it from secondary instruction, which ought to be but the school which trains for active life. Thus relieved, classical instruction will more easily welcome the studies that are of real use and of practical application,—geography, which Locke places in the first rank, because it is “an exercise of the eyes and memory”; arithmetic, which “is of so general use in all parts of life and business, that scarce anything can be done without it”; then what he somewhat ambitiously calls astronomy, and which is in reality an elementary cosmography; the parts of geometry which are necessary for[206] “a man of business”; chronology and history, “the most agreeable and the most instructive of studies”; ethics and common law, which do not yet have a place in French programmes; finally, natural philosophy, that is, the physical sciences; and, to crown all, a manual trade and bookkeeping.

218. Attractive Studies.—Another characteristic of Locke’s intellectual discipline is, that, utilitarian in its purpose, the instruction which he organizes shall be attractive in its methods. After hatred for the pedantry which uselessly spends the powers of the learner in barren studies, the next strongest antipathy of Locke is that which is inspired by the rigor of a too didactic system of instruction, where the methods are repulsive, the processes painful, and where the teacher appears to his pupils only as a bugbear and a marplot.