Why C.'s schoolbooks failed.

poraries; witness the pictures in the Schaffhausen Janua (Editio secunda, Schaffhus I, 1658), in Daniel's edition of the Janua, 1562, and the very small but beautiful illustrations in the Vestibulum of "Jacob Redinger and J. S." (Amsterdam, 1673). However, the Orbis Pictus gives such a quaint delineation of life 200 years ago that copies with the original engravings keep rising in value, and an American publisher (Bardeen of Syracuse, New York), has lately reproduced the old book with the help of photography.

§ 62. And yet as instruments of teaching, these books, i.e. the Vestibulum and the Janua and even the Orbis Pictus which in a great measure superseded both, proved a failure. How shall we account for this?

Comenius immensely over-estimated the importance of knowledge and the power of the human mind to acquire knowledge. He took it for the heavenly idea that man should know all things. This notion started him on the wrong road for forming a scheme of instruction, and it needed many years and much experience to show him his error. When he wrote the Orbis Fictus he said of it: "It is a little book, as you see, of no great bulk, yet a brief of the whole world and a whole language:" (Hoole's trans. Preface); and he afterwards speaks of "this our little encyclopadia of things subject to the senses." But in his old age he saw that his text-books were too condensed and attempted too much (Laurie, p. 59); and he admitted that after all Seneca was right: "Melius est scire pauca et iis recté uti quam scire multa, quorum ignores usum. It is better to know a few things and have the right use of them than to know many things which you cannot use at all.”

§ 63. The attempt to give "information" has been the ruin of a vast number of professing educators since Comenius.

:

Compendia Dispendia.

Masters "of the old school" whom some of us can still remember made boys learn Latin and Greek Grammar and nothing else. Their successors seem to think that boys should not learn Latin and Greek Grammar but everything else and the last error I take to be much worse than the first. As Ruskin has neatly said, education is not teaching people to know what they do not know, but to behave as they do not behave. It is to be judged not by the knowledge acquired, but the habits, powers, interests: knowledge must be thought of "last and least."

§ 64. So the attempt to teach about everything was unwise. The means adopted were unwise also. It is a great mistake to suppose that a "general view" should come first; this is not the right way to give knowledge in any subject. "A child begins by seeing bits of everything-here a little and there a little; it makes up its wholes out of its own littles, and is long in reaching the fulness of a whole; and in this we are children all our lives in much." (Dr. John Brown in Hora Subsecivæ, p. 5.) So nothing could have been much more unfortunate than an attempt to give the young "a brief of the whole world." Compendia, dispendia.

§ 65. Corresponding to "a brief of the whole world," Comenius offers "a brief of a whole language." The two mistakes were well matched. In "the whole world" there are a vast number of things of which we must, and a good number of which we very advantageously may be ignorant. In a language there are many words which we cannot know and many more which we do not want to know. The language lives for us in a small vocabulary of essential words, and our hold upon the language depends upon the power we have in receiving and expressing thought by means of those words. But the Jesuit Bath, and after him Comenius,

Comenius and Science of Education.

made the tremendous mistake of treating all Latin words as of equal value, and took credit for using each word once and once only! Moreover, Comenius wrote not simply to teach the Latin language, but also to stretch the Latin language till it covered the whole area of modern life. He aimed at two things and missed them both.

§ 66. We see then that Comenius was not what Hallam calls him, "a man who invented a new way of learning Latin." He did not do this, but he did much more than this. He saw that every human creature should be trained up to become a reasonable being, and that the training should be such as to draw out God-given faculties. Thus he struck the key-note of the science of education.

The quantity and the diffuseness of the writings of Comenius are truly bewildering. In these days eminent men, Carlyle, e.g., sometimes find it difficult to get into print; but printing-presses all over Europe seemed to be at the service of Comenius. An account of the various editions of the Janua would be an interesting piece of bibliography, but the task of making it would not be a light one. The earliest copy of which I can find a trace is entered in the catalogue of the Bodleian: "Comenius J. A. Janua Linguarum, 8vo, Lips (Leipzig) 1632." I also find there another copy entered "per Anchoranum, cum clave per W. Saltonstall, London, 1633."

The fame of Comenius is increasing and many interesting works have now been written about him. I have already mentioned the English books of Benham and Laurie. In German I have the following books, but not the time to read them all :

Daniel, H. A. Zerstreute Blätter.

Halle, 1866.

Free, H. Pädagogik d. Comenius. Bernburg, 1884.

Hiller, R. Latein Methode d. J. A. Comenius.

(v. g. and terse; only 46 pp.)

Zschopau, 1883.

Müller, Walter. Comenius ein Systematiker in d. Päd. Dresden,

1887.

Pappenheim, E. Amos Comenius. Berlin, 1871.

Books on Comenius.

Seyffarth, L. W. J. A. Comenius. Leipzig, 2nd edition, 1871. (A careful and, as far as I can judge in haste, an excellent piece of work.) Zoubek, Fr. J. J. A. Comenius. Eine quellenmässige Lebensskizze, {Prefixed to trans. of Didac. M. in Richter's Päd. Bibliothek.)

For a Port-Royalist's criticism of the Janua, see infra. (p. 185 note.)

XI.

THE GENTLEMEN OF PORT-ROYAL.*

§ 1. IN the sixteen-hundreds by far the most successful schoolmasters were the Jesuits. In spite of their exclusion from the University, they had in the Province of Paris some 14,000 pupils, and in Paris itself at the Collège de Clermont, 1,800. Might they not have neglected "the Little Schools," which were organized by the friends and disciples of the Abbé de Saint-Cyran, schools in which the numbers were always small, about twenty or twenty-five, and only once increasing to fifty? And yet the Jesuits left no stone unturned, no weapon unemployed, in their attack on "the Little Schools." The conflict seems to us like an engagement between a man-of-war and a fishing-boat. Thit the poor fishing-boat would soon be beneath the waves, was clear enough from the beginning, and she did indeed speedily disappear; but the victors have never recovered from their victory and never will. Whenever we think of Jesuitism we are not more forcibly reminded of Loyola than of Pascal. All educated Frenchmen, most educated people everywhere, get their best remembered impressions of the Society of Loyola from the Provincial Letters.†

*For full titles of the books referred to see p. 195.

The solitaries of Port-Royal used to vary their mental toil with manual. A Jesuit having maliciously asked whether it was true tha