The material world and the moral.

every way develop the child's animal or physical life, retard his intellectual life, and ignore his life as a spiritual and moral being.

§ 28. A variety of influences had combined, as they combine still, to draw attention away from the importance of physical training; and by placing the child's bodily organs and senses as the first things to be thought of in education, Rousseau did much to save us from the bad tradition of the Renascence. But there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in his philosophy, and whatever Rousseau might say, Émile could never be restrained from inquiring after them. Every boy will think; i.e., he will think for himself, however unable he may seem to think in the direction in which his instructors try to urge him. The wise elders who have charge of him must take this into account, and must endeavour to guide him into thinking modestly and thinking right. Then again, as soon as the child can speak, or before, the world of sensation becomes for him a world, not of sensations only, but also of sentiments, of sympathies, of affections, of consciousness of right and wrong, good and evil. All these feelings, it is true, may be affected by traditional prejudices. The air the child breathes may also contain much that is noxious; but we have no more power to exclude the atmosphere of the moral world than of the physical. All we can do is to take thought for fresh air in both cases. As for Rousseau's notion that we can withdraw the child from the moral atmosphere, we see in it nothing but a proof how little he understood the problems he professed to solve.*

* This part of Rousseau's scheme is well discussed by Saint-Marc Girardin (J. J. Rousseau, vol. ij.). The following passage is striking :

Shun over-directing.

§ 29. Although the governor is to devote himself to a single child, Rousseau is careful to protest against overdirection. "You would stupify the child," says he, "if you were constantly directing him, if you were always saying to him, 'Come here! Go there! Stop! Do this! Don't do that!' If your head always directs his arms, his own head becomes useless to him." (Ém. ij., 114). Here we have a warning which should not be neglected by those who maintain the Lycées in France, and the ordinary private boarding-schools in England. In these schools a boy is hardly called upon to exercise his will all day long. He rises in the morning when he must; at meals he eats till he is obliged to stop; he is taken out for exercise like a horse; he has all his indoor work prescribed for him both as to time and quantity. In this kind of life he never has occasion to think or act for himself. He is therefore without self-reliance. So much care is taken to prevent his doing wrong, that he gets to think only of checks from without. He is therefore incapable of self-restraint. In the English public schools boys have much less supervision from their elders, and organise a great portion of their lives for them"How is it that Madame Necker-Saussure understood the child better than Rousseau did? She saw in the child two things, a creation and a ground-plan, something finished and something begun, a perfection which prepares the way for another perfection, a child and a man. God, Who has put together human life in several pieces, has willed, it is true, that all these pieces should be related to each other; but He has also willed that each of them should be complete in itself, so that every stage of life has what it needs as the object of that period, and also what it needs to bring in the period that comes next. Wonderful union of aims and means which shews itself at every step in creation! In everything there is aim and also means, everything exists for itself and also for that which lies beyond it! (Tout est but et tout est moyen; tout est absolu et tout est relatif.)” J. J. R., ij., 151.

Lessons out of school. Questioning. At 12.

selves. This proves a better preparation for life after the school age; and most public schoolmasters would agree with Rousseau that "the lessons the boys get from each other in the playground are a hundred times more useful to them than the lessons given them in school: les leçons que les écoliers prennent entre eux dans la cour du collège leur sont cent fois plus utiles que tout ce qu'on leur dira jamais dans la classe." (Em. ij., 123.)

§ 30. On questions put by children, Rousseau says: "The art of questioning is not so easy as it may be thought; it is rather the art of the master than of the pupil. We must have learnt a good deal of a thing to be able to ask what we do not know. The learned know and inquire, says an Indian proverb, but the ignorant know not what to inquire about." And from this he infers that children learn less from asking than from being asked questions. (N. H., 5th P. 490.)

§ 31. At twelve years old Émile is said to be fit for instruction. "Now is the time for labour, for instruction, for study; and observe that it is not I who arbitrarily make this choice; it is pointed out to us by Nature herself."

§ 32. What novelties await us here? As we have seen Rousseau was determined to recommend nothing that would harmonise with ordinary educational practice; but even a genius, though he may abandon previous practice, cannot keep clear of previous thought, and Rousseau's plan for instruction is obviously connected with the thoughts of Montaigne and of Locke. But while on the same lines with these great writers Rousseau goes beyond them and is both clearer and bolder than they are.

§ 33. Rousseau's proposals for instruction have the fol lowing main features.

No book-learning. Study of Nature.

Ist. Instruction is to be no longer literary or linguistic. The teaching about words is to disappear, and the young are not to learn by books or about books.

2nd. The subjects to be studied are to be mathematics and physical science.

3rd. The method to be adopted is not the didactic but the method of self-teaching.

4th. The hands are to be called into play as a means of learning.

§ 34 1st. Till quite recently the only learning ever given in schools was book-learning, a fact to which the language of the people still bears witness: when a child does not profit by school instruction he is always said to be "no good at his book." Now-a-days the tendency is to change the character of the schools so that they may become less and less mere "Ludi Literarii." In this Rousseau seems to have been a century and more in advance of us; and yet we cannot credit him with any remarkable wisdom or insight about literature. He himself used books as a means of "collecting a store of ideas, true or false, but at any rate clear" (J. Morley's Rousseau, j. chap. 3, p. 85), and he has recorded. for us his opinion that "the sensible and interesting conversations of a young woman of merit are more proper to form a young man than all the pedantical philosophy of books" (Confessions, quoted by Morley j., 87). After this, whatever we may think of the merit of his suggestions we can sit at the Sage's feet no longer.

§ 35. 2nd. Rousseau had himself little knowledge of mathematics and natural science, but he was strongly in favour of the "study of Nature"; and in his last years his devotion to botany became a passion. His curriculum for Émile is in the air, but the chief thing is to get him to

Against didactic teaching.

attend to the phenomena of nature, and "to foster his curiosity by being in no hurry to satisfy it."

$ 36. 3rd. About teaching and learning, there is one point on which we find a consensus of great authorities extending from the least learned of writers who was probably Rousseau to the most learned who was probably Friedrich August Wolf. In one form or other these assert that there is no true teaching but self-teaching.

Past a doubt the besetting weakness of teachers is "telling." They can hardly resist the tendency to be didactic. They have the knowledge which they desire to find in their pupils, and they cannot help expressing it and endeavouring to pass it on to those who need it, "like wealthy men who care not how they give." But true "teaching," as Jacotot and his disciple Joseph Payne were never tired of testifying, is "causing to learn," and it is seldom that "didactic" teaching has this effect. Rousseau saw this clearly, and clearly pointed out the danger of didacticism. As usual he by exaggeration laid himself open to an answer that seems to refute him, but in spite of this we feel that there is valuable truth underlying what he says. "I like not explanations given in long discourses," says he; "young people pay little attention to them and retain little from them. The things themselves! The things themselves! I shall never repeat often enough that we attach too much importance to words: with our chattering education we make nothing but chatterers."* Accordingly Rousseau lays down the rule that Émile is not to learn

"Je n'aime point les explications en discours; les jeunes gens y font peu d'attention et ne les retiennent guère. Les choses! les choses! Je ne répéterai jamais assez que nous donnons trop de pouvoir aux mots : avec notre éducation babillarde nous ne faisons que des babillards." Em. iij., 198.