be applied to all intuitions, and are not essential to many, e.g., shades of sharpness and flatness in singing, etc. (no names), water (no shape), sweetness (no number). Yet Pestalozzi asserts "that all our knowledge arises out of number, form and words". Again, he says that" number, form and name are found universally in all objects". This is seriously wrong, for number and name are, so to say, attached to objects by ourselves, not found in them; whilst form only belongs to certain physical objects.

He is self-contradictory in some of his own statements on the matter. Though he rightly says that language "is the reflex of all the impressions which nature's entire domain has made on the human race"; he, nevertheless, goes on to claim for it that it is also the origin and source of knowledge: "I make use of it, and endeavour, by the guidance of its uttered sounds, to reproduce in the child the self-same impressions which, in the human race, have occasioned and formed these sounds. Great is the gift of language. It gives to the child in one moment what nature required thousands of years to give to man."

A sound cannot possibly do this. It can only recall those impressions which objects and experiences have made, and which have been voluntary (and arbitrarily) associated with certain sounds which we call names. We might have called a horse a pimko; and whatever sound we use as its name is only useful to recall the impressions which the animal (or its picture, etc.) has made upon us. A simple illustration of this will show what the facts are: suppose a child to read a list of the names of things in a miscellaneous collection in a museum, what impressions would be reproduced in him

by the names which he does not already know. In other words, the sound apart from its association does nothing; it is the habitual association of sound with percepts and concepts which is the active influence. All this is very clearly set out in what Pestalozzi says of definitions: "Whenever he [man] is left without the greatest clearness of observation of a natural object which has been defined to him, he only learns to play with words like so many counters, deceives himself, and places a blind belief in sounds which will convey to him no idea, nor give rise to any other thought, except just this, that he has uttered certain sounds". In other words, the only impressions reproduced by sounds, as such, are impressions already made by sounds, as such.

Yet, after all, Pestalozzi did a great service to education by insisting upon the importance and value of these points of view in the development of clear ideas and distinct notions; he was only wrong in the reasons he gave for his views. His own statement of the practical purpose of his use of these three points is significant. He says that he bases instruction upon them "in order to enable children: (1) to view every object which falls under their perception as a unit; that is to say, as distinct from all other objects with which it seems connected. (2) To make themselves acquainted with its form or outline, with its measure and its proportions. (3) To designate, as early as possible, by descriptive words and names, all the objects which have thus come to their knowledge.

This requires that the means by which those faculties [number, form and language] are developed and cultivated, should be brought to the utmost simplicity, and to perfect consistency and harmony with each other."

All this is admirable so far as it goes, and in cases in which it can be applied; though it does not justify the claims which Pestalozzi made for it. But, as he himself says: "my whole manner of life has given me no power, or inclination, quickly to work out bright and clear ideas on a subject, until, supported by facts it has a background in me that gives rise to some self-confidence. Therefore, to my grave I shall remain in a kind of fog about most of my views. . . . While I have done very little during my life to reach ideas that can be defined with philosophical certainty; nevertheless, I have, in my own way, found a few means to my end, which I should not have found by philosophical inquiries such as I was capable of making-after clear ideas on my subject."

"Discover everything." Ramsauer, speaking of Pestalozzi's relations with his staff, says: "Even in our pedagogics, he would not permit us to make use of the results of the experience of other times or other countries: we were to read nothing, but discover everything for ourselves. Hence the whole strength of the institute was always devoted to experiments."

Truttman observed the same attitude of mind in Pestalozzi, in connection with the work at Stanz. Describing what he considered the faults of organisation and method, he says: "I begged him even to go to Zurich, to study in detail the organisation of the poorschool in that town, with a view to imitating it, as far as possible in Stanz. He accordingly went, but I do not expect any satisfactory outcome from his visit, because his idea is to do everything for himself, without any plan, and without any assistance other than that given by the children themselves."

Now whilst for the student-beginner the discovery method of training is of the highest possible value, and an indispensable training; its chief value later on is that it enables the learner to take real advantage of other men's work and to enter into their labours, without going through all the work they had to perform. But for men who were engaged in so difficult and delicate a task as that of educating the young, and who were themselves largely untrained and undisciplined, intellectually, to refuse to make use of existing means-if they could approve them-was, to say the least of it, unwise.

Not that there was much of which Pestalozzi could approve; but the attitude of mind was, in itself, wrong; and was likely to cause much waste of time and, perhaps, undue self-satisfaction. It will be remembered that Pestalozzi-so far did he carry this idea-several times boasts that he has not read a book for nearly thirty years. One instance will suffice to show the mistake of all this: Basedow had endeavoured to carry out, at his Philanthropinum school at Dessau, the principles of Rousseau's Emile; and amidst much that was superficial and merely sensational, was doing some good work. A study of his work and writings would have taught something, of both positive and negative value, . to the Pestalozzians.

Criticising this attitude, Raumer writes: "Hence it came, as I have already said, that he committed so many mistakes usual with self-taught men. He wants the historical basis; things which others had discovered long before appear to him to be quite new when thought of by himself or any one of his teachers. He also torments himself to invent things which had been invented and brought to perfection long before, and might have

been used by him, if he had only known of them. For example, how useful an acquaintance with the excellent Werner's treatment of the mineralogical characters of rocks would have been to him, especially in the definition of the ideas, observation, naming, description, etc.

"As a self-taught man, he every day collected heaps of stones in his walks. If he had been under the discipline of the Fribourg School, the observation of a single stone would have profited him more than large heaps of stones, laboriously brought together, could do, in the absence of such discipline.

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Self-taught men, I say, want the discipline of the school. It is not simply that, in the province of the intellectual, they often find only after long wanderings what they might easily have attained by a direct and beaten path: they want also the ethical discipline, which restrains us from running according to caprice after intellectual enjoyments, and wholesomely compels us to deny ourselves and follow the path indicated to us by the teacher.

"Many, it is true, fear that the oracular instinct of the self-taught might suffer from the school. But, if the school is of the right sort, this instinct, if genuine, will be strengthened by it; deep felt, dreamy and passive presentiments are transformed into sound, waking and active observation."

Anybody can teach. Pestalozzi's views on this point raises some very serious and important issues. Is all our modern zeal for technical education and training a mistake is the man in the street, if he be told how, as capable as the well-trained expert who knows both the why and the how in a scientific and practical way: is the school as the teacher's book, or as the teacher: is