to Pestalozzi, of being exercised almost from the commencement of consciousness. Indeed, it has been objected against Pestalozzi's system that he cultivated the mere intellectual powers at the expense of the poetical and imaginative. All knowledge, he taught, is acquired by sensation and observation : sometimes it has been thought that he traces everything originally to the senses; but he seems to extend the word Anschauung to every experience of which the mind becomes conscious.* The child, then, must be made to observe accurately, and to reflect on its observations. The best subject-matter for the lessons will be the most ordinary things that can be found. Not only is there not one of the little incidents in the life of a child, in his amusements and recreations, in his relation to his parents, and friends, and playfellows; but there is actually not anything within the reach of a child's attention, whether it belong to nature or to the employments and arts of life, that may not be made the object of a lesson by which some useful knowledge may be imparted, and, what is still more important, by which the child may not be familiarised with the habit of thinking on what he sees, and speaking after he has thought. The mode of doing this is not * I dare say I am not the only English reader of German books who has been perplexed by the words Anschauung and anschaulich. Schelling's definition is as follows: Anschauung ist jene Handlung des Geistes in welcher er aus Thätigkeit und Leiden, aus unbeschränkter und beschränkter Thätigkeit, in sich selbst ein gemeinschaftliches Produkt schafft.' The word seems used, in fact, for the mind's becoming conscious of any fact immediately by experience, in contradistinction to inferences from symbols. To make instruction anschaulich, therefore, is to make the learner acquir· knowledge by his direct experiences. MODE OF TEACHING. 191 by any means to talk much to a child, but to enter into conversation with a child; not to address to him many words, however familiar and well chosen, but to bring him to express himself on the subject; not to exhaust the subject, but to question the child about it, and to let him find out and correct the answers It would be ridiculous to expect that the volatile spirits of a child could be brought to follow any lengthy explanations. The attention is deadened by long expositions, but roused by animated questions. Let these questions be short, clear, and intelligible. Let them not merely lead the child to repeat in the same, or in varied terms, what he has heard just before. Let them excite him to observe what is before him, to recollect what he has learned, and to muster his little stock of knowledge for materials for an answer. Show him a certain quality in one thing, and let him find out the same in others. Tell him that the shape of a ball is called round, and if, accordingly, you bring him to point out other objects to which the same property belongs, you have employed him more usefully than by the most perfect discourse on rotundity. In the one instance he would have had to listen and to recollect, in the other he has to observe and to think.'* 'From observation and memory there is only one step to reflection. Though imperfect, this operation is often found among the early exercises of the infant mind. The powerful stimulus of inquisitiveness prompts to exertions which, if successful or encouraged by others, will lead to a habit of thought.' † * Letters on Early Education, xxxix. p. 147. † Ibid. xx. p. 92. Words, which are the signs of things, must never be taught the child till he has grasped the idea of the thing signified. When an object has been submitted to his senses, he must be led to the consciousness of the impressions produced, and then must be taught the name of the object and of the qualities producing those impressions. Last of all, he must ascend to the definition of the object. The object-lessons Pestalozzi divided into three great classes, under the heads of-(1) Form; (2) Number; (3) Speech. It was his constant endeavour to make his pupils distinguish between essentials and accidentals, and with his habit of constant analysis, which seems pushed to an extreme that to children would be repulsive, he sought to reduce Form, Number, and Speech to their elements. In his alphabet of Form everything was represented as having the square as its base. In Number all operations were traced back to 1+1. In Speech the children, in their very cradles, were to be taught the elements of sound, as ba, ba, ba, da, da, da, ma, ma, ma, &c. This elementary teaching Pestalozzi considered of the greatest importance, and when he himself instructed he went over the ground very slowly. Buss tell us that when he first joined Pestalozzi the delay over the prime elements seemed to him a waste of time, but that afterwards he was convinced of its being the right plan, and felt that the failure of his own education was due to its incoherent and desultory character. 'Not only,' says Pestalozzi, 'have the first elements of knowledge in every subject the most important MODE OF TEACHING. 193 bearing on its complete outline, but the child's confidence and interest are gained by perfect attainment even in the lowest stage of instruction.' By his object-lessons Pestalozzi aimed at-1, enlarging gradually the sphere of a child's intuition, i.e. increasing the number of objects falling under his immediate perception; 2, impressing upon him those perceptions of which he had become conscious, with certainty, clearness, and precision; 3, imparting to him a comprehensive knowledge of language for the expression of whatever had become or was becoming an object of his consciousness, in consequence either of the spontaneous impulse of his own nature, or of the assistance of tuition. Of all the instruction given at Yverdun, the most successful, in the opinion of those who visited the school, was the instruction in arithmetic. The children are described as performing with great rapidity very difficult tasks in head-calculation. Pestalozzi based his method here, as in other subjects, on the principle that the individual should be brought to knowledge by a road similar to that which the whole race had used in founding the science. Actual counting of things preceded the first Cocker, as actual measuring of land preceded the original Euclid. The child then must be taught to count things, and to find out the various processes experimentally in the concrete before he is given any abstract rule, or is put to any abstract exercises. This plan is now commonly adopted in German schools, and many ingenious contrivances have been introduced by which the combinations of things can be presented to the children's sight. Next to the education of the affections and the intellect come those exercises in which the body is more prominent. I do not know that there was anything distinctive in Pestalozzi's views and practices in physical education, although he attached the due importance to it which had previously been perceived only by Locke and Rousseau, and in Germany by Basedow and his colleagues of the Philanthropin. Great pains should be taken with the cultivation of the senses, and finally the artistic faculty (Kunstkraft) should be developed, in which the power of the mind and that of the senses are united. Music and drawing played a leading part in Pestalozzi's schools. They were taught to all the children, even the youngest, and were not limited to the conventional two hours a week. It is natural to children to imitate; thus they acquire language, and thus, with proper direction and encouragement, they will find pleasure in attempting to sing the melodies they hear, and to draw the simple objects around them. By drawing, the eye is trained as well as the hand. 'A person who is in the habit of drawing, especially from nature, will easily perceive many circumstances which are commonly overlooked, and will form a much more correct impression, even of such objects as he does not stop to examine minutely, than one who has never been taught to look upon what he sees with an intention of reproducing a likeness of it. The attention to the exact shape of the whole, and the proportion of the parts, which is requisite for |