whose own qualities must be defined before the former can be shaped into harmonious adaptation to them. The learning to read, to write, and to cipher, with all other branches of school instruction, is in itself but a mode of education; the directing of that mode by a staff of monitors or an individual master, but a question of convenience and efficacy in imparting its self-educating means. The explaining of words and better plans of teaching are but organic improvements in the art of applying these Even the religious and secular question refers but to the administrative department, while its propagation by national enactment or voluntary efforts, is a question of political and social economy.

means.

All these adventitious circumstances, therefore, however individually important, are but of secondary moment to a consideration of the great first principles from which they all emanate, and of which they form but a physical apparatus or frame-work. This apparatus, too, must ever vary by circumstances; and however valuable the discoveries made for the better working of its machinery, it should be borne in mind that the whole is but a conventional arrangement, and much of it liable to be superseded or remodelled according as clearer views are developed regarding the fundamental laws of education itself, which are above all change, and eternal. But certain systems and modes of administering these essential laws have been generally

assumed as first principles, and whatever improvements have been effected from such data have rather tended outwards from the subject than inwards towards it. The improvements introduced under the Bell and Lancasterian systems are of this nature. These were at first merely organic changes in the external management of a school, with perhaps better modes of teaching what was taught before. But that which was taught before constituted only a small part of education, and hence little improvement in it was thus effected. Nor, for the same reason, was the adoption of the explanatory and intellectual mode much of an essential improvement. While monitorism arranged and methodized its previous materials, the intellectual system improved upon the materials themselves. But neither a better arrangement nor improvement of these instruments was much advance towards a knowledge and practice of their application, or the work to be done by them, much less of that greater and more important part of the work not even subject to their influence. And the reason is, that erroneous systems of belief regarding the nature of that work no less generally prevailed than an ignorance of its practice.

This tendency in the universal mind to deposit, as it were, certain systems of belief and practice, which the lapse of time equally consolidates, whether erroneous or otherwise, is not therefore always beneficial to the cause of truth, but more frequently the reverse. How often,

Of

and how long have the correct principles of science been retarded, in having had thus to struggle up from nature through the superincumbent framework of a popular but erroneous system of contrary opinions! The minds of the majority of mankind, trained up beneath such a canopy of ideas, passively receive the stereotyped impression; while it is only the rare occurrence of some less plastic but more original mind refusing to be thus moulded, that imbibes its convictions of truth from more natural sources. this "love of system" as a source of error, specified by Lord Bacon under the allegorical phrase, "The Idol of the Tribe," the Aristotelian philosophy is an instance—though indeed the system of doctrines that became popular under that name was very different from those contained in the genuine writings of the Stagirite. That system was taught in the schools for ages, and a blind submission to its dogmas exacted from pupils. In some universities it was considered scarcely inferior to the Scriptures. It was supported by statutes requiring teachers upon oath to follow no other guide than that of Aristotle, and it was considered a bold innovation when to that philosophy were merely added the writings of Plato, Pythagoras, and the Stoics. Yet the monks and Jesuits, who so loudly denounced that "heresy," as threatening a revolution in the science of mind, might have saved their alarms, had they known that no extension of the same system of reasoning would ever develop sounder views of mental

philosophy.

It was but adding to a building whose foundation was unsound, and which indeed, in another way than they feared, accelerated the ruin of the entire structure. But the temple of truth arose upon a different foundation, laid deep in nature, and was gradually reared to perfection by materials derived from the same source. Rejecting the logomachies and sophistries of the schoolmen, a return was made to the natural workings of the mind itself in its examination of nature, and the principles of a system of inductive reasoning drawn from thence, that have revolutionized or modified all former systems, not only of mental but material philosophy.

In a similar way the theories and fallacious systems of ancient astronomy long retarded an advance of the true principles of that science. Its former data were mostly conjectures, from which facts were attempted to be drawn; and though many facts harmonized with such data, it did not therefore follow that these were correct as general principles of astronomy. It was building downwards from heaven to earth by an artificial prop-work, instead of upwards from earth to heaven upon a natural foundation and scaffolding. Yet the consolidating hand of time gave a consistency to these loose principles, which held sway over the human mind for long ages; and as the glimmering of a taper serves but to render the surrounding darkness of night the more intense, the dawning light of a Copernicus only revealed the universality and

magnitude of the errors that had been perpetuated under the Ptolemaic system. In addition to his own early belief, however, Copernicus was also a close observer of nature; and finding discrepancies between the two, happily yielded to the evidence of sense, and drew his own conclusions from the latter. From the simple phenomenon, that must have been familiar to every one, namely, the optical illusion that takes place to a spectator in a boat moving along the banks of a river, the objects on which seem to move past, he drew the sublime induction, that a similar illusion happens with respect to the heavenly bodies, and thus laid the basis of an entirely different system. But aware of the danger of its coming into competition with the former belief, he neither announced his rejection of the one, nor discovery of the other, till near the close of his life, fifty years afterwards. And another half century elapsed before, by the exertions of Galileo, "it was kindled into so bright a flame as to consume the philosophy of Aristotle, to alarm the hierarchy of Rome, and to threaten the existence of every opinion not founded on experience and observation.' "*

To this "love of system" may also be added the danger that threatened for a time the discovery of the great law of planetary gravitation, inductively though each step of the process was gone through; and had the investigation

* Playfair.