ception as a phase of education, but he will be suspicious of the place given it in the Pestalozzian theory.

The question will arise whether a premature and exclusive training of sense-perception will not produce something like what is called “arrested development” of the human mind at an animal plane of intelligence.

For the psychologist soon discovers that the power of thinking (both analytical and synthetical) is not a continued and elevated sort of sense-perception, but rather a reaction against it,.which is negative toward the impressions and images of sense.

The element of thought is generalization, and this deals with definitions rather than with images or pictures of sense. Instead of reproducing the things of experience, the thinking activity has to do with the forces, energies, or causes which produce things and likewise annul and remove things by the.continual process of change.

In other words thought deals with the dynamic element of experiente fatlier than with mere things, which are only static results.

Pursuing this line of inquiry, the reader will everywhere find Pestalozzi's experiments and writings of a stimulating character, suggesting far more than they reveal, and pointing significantly toward the great educational process that is active in our time.

The memory, which was at one time almost the only intellectual activity known to the pedagogue, has now been happily placed in the rank assigned to it by its wellknown limits. The time is coming when the limits of sense-perception will be discovered and seen quite as clearly. Then we shall hear more of the proper develop

ment of the thinking activity. For it is the thinking activity that assimilates the results of observation and brings them to fruitage. It is the same thinking activity that assimilates also the stored-up knowledge of the experience and reflection of the race which the school offers to the pupil. Without his painstaking thought, neither personal observation nor book-learning will avail him much. W. T. HARRIS.

WASHINGTON, D. C., May, 1890.

INTRODUCTION.

"I READ your essay on Pestalozzi," said to me one of the three Commissioners who were some twenty years ago empowered to remodel our endowed schools; "I read your essay on Pestalozzi, whom they are always talking about on the Continent, and I found there was nothing whatever in him." This might have been a very effective sarcasm, but I have reason to think that it was not so intended. It was only an expression of our insular ignorance, and of our inability to measure the effect of ideas. Since then we have seen France prostrate before Germany; and not a few, both of the Germans and the French, have attributed the German triumph to the influence of Pestalozzi. So perhaps

there was something in him after all.

But what was there in these ideas of Pestalozzi which can be supposed to have so profoundly affected the education of the Germans? Let us go back a little pour mieux sauter.

Europe was indebted to the Renascence for the conception of "a learned education." The key to all wisdom seemed to have been found in the classical languages, and the highest display of the human intellect was seen in imitating the ancient writings. So education was for the few; the many might do as best they could without it.

This sixteenth-century devotion to the classical literatures met with many adversaries in the centuries following; but the notion had got so firmly fixed that education consisted in learning, that the only question it seemed possible to raise was, In learning what?

A great advance was made by our philosopher Locke, when he treated of education under the four heads (1) Virtue; (2) Wisdom; (3) Manners; (4) Learning; and declared that learning was least and last.

But according to him, the education of the gentleman was the only thing to be cared for. "If," says he, "those of that rank are by their education once set right, they will quickly bring all the rest into order." (Epistle Ded. to "Thoughts c. Educ.")

Then came Rousseau. From the circumstances of his life he had no class prejudices, and he had a genius for thinking himself free from all conventions. He it was who first severed entirely education and learning, and brought up his ideal Emile without any regard to the requirements of "Society."

Pestalozzi was, like Rousseau, a citizen of the Swiss Republic, and little fettered by class distinctions. He read Rousseau with enthusiasm, and saw what a force education might become. His great object in life was the elevation of the people, and the consequence was, he became "a schoolmaster."

But his notions of the schoolmaster's function were based on conceptions which then for the first time came clearly into consciousness.

First, as to the aim of education, he announces that