conservative faculty, or memory."-(Hamilton.) When this act is exercised under the direction of the will, it is recollection.

But knowledge that has been acquired, retained and reproduced, may be brought anew before the mental vision for analysis and examination. This art is re-presentation.

"In the fifth place, these four acts of acquisition, conservation, reproduction, and re-presentation, form a class of faculties which we may call subsidiary, as furnishing the materials to a higher faculty, the function of which is to elaborate these materials. * * * * * This faculty is thought proper.”—(Hamilton.)

193. The fact that knowledge, after having been originally acquired, is stored up for future examination and study, implies that, as first received, it is unfit for the purposes of mental growth, and that it needs to be re-presented to the mind. The notion that the elaboration of knowledge must proceed pari passu with its acquisition, is a very crude and

erroneous one.

Memory will hold in store many things that are imperfectly understood:* formulas whose content is but obscurely seen; abstract truths that await explication; definitions that are to be made clear; sentences that do not transmit the thought of the author and are thus waiting to be interpreted; empty words that are to be filled with a content; isolated facts whose relations are to be determined.

The dogma that we should commit to memory only what has been understood is scarcely less absurd than to say that only food which has been digested should be committed to the stomach. As a fact, food is taken into the stomach that it may be digested; and it is equally a fact that the materials of thought must be firmly held within the range of the mind's activities as the essential condition of being elaborated. The only question would seem to be whether this material should be loosely and uncertainly held, or whether it should be fixed in a definite form of expression. Where it is expected that the mind is to gain possession of fruitful truths through the interpretation of language, memorizing in exact form is by all means the best.

18. *A thing is understood when the mind has seen its relations to other things and to the whole of which it is a part; or when it has been brought under some higher generalization.

194. Under the conception that the largest factor in education is observation, and that thinking depends mainly upon a stimulation of the senses, it must necessarily happen that the functions of memory should be degraded; but under the conception that the materials for thought are not sensations, but notions, and that the processes of thinking are often automatic and unconscious,* the functions of this faculty will be exalted.

In the old education, through the influence of religious teaching and the superstitious veneration of books, memorizing became a vice by making the form of more account than the content, or rather by divorcing form from content; by a natural recoil from the old error the new education has fallen into the more serious error of telling instead of instructing.t

195. If it be asked whether a pupil should memorize what he may not at the time understand, the answer must be in the affirmative. And if it be asked whether this memorizing may precede the understanding by an indefinite interval, the reply must still be affirmative, provided the matter be within the probable range of the pupil's power of understanding.

In many cases the understanding of a truth is as the morning light that "shineth more and more unto the perfect day." The growth of conceptions from confused to perfect is elsewhere illustrated. (§ 172.)

196. What is to be memorized is often a matter of deli

:

19. **I question whether the persons who think most-that is, have the most conscious thought pass through their minds-necessarily do more mental work. The tree you are sticking in will be growing when you are sleeping. So with every new idea that is planted in a real thinker's mind: it will be growing when he is least conscious of it. An idea in the brain is not a legend carved in a marble slab it is an impression made on a living tissue, which is the seat of active nutritive processes. Shall the initials I carved in bark increase from year to year with the tree? And shall not my recorded thought develop into new forms and relations with my g owing brain?"-(O. W. Holmes, quoted from Carpenter's Mental Physiology, p. 534. See also Hamilton's Metaphysics, Lecture XVIII.)

20. +Instruction: an in-building. The term implies the organization in the pupil's mind of a body of truth articulate in outline and fit to receive growing accumulations. There are implied a definiteness and a firmness that can come only from some exactness in memorizing.

cate discrimination.

It is sheer waste of time and mental

effort to commit some things to memory. The following categories will include most of the cases where formal memorizing is legitimate.

.* such

1. Certain useful facts, tables, formulas, rules, etc.;* as the succession of Presidents, important dates, certain weights and measures, (a + b)2 a2 + 2 ab + b2, etc., etc.

=

2. Examples of fine diction, where the form is co-ordinate with the thought; such as short poems in which there is great unity of thought; elegant extracts in prose and verse; scriptures, liturgies, etc.

3. Fruitful truths, statements of principles or of doctrines, that will unfold under reflection or experience, or will serve as nuclei to organize growing knowledge.†

4. Definitions and technical terms that guard the entrance to every new domain of knowledge.

In all these cases the pupil may have only the empty forms of knowledge. But if so, the fault is due to some one's stupidity. As a rule, however, it is as safe to trust these forms to find their content, as to trust loose facts to embody themselves in intelligible forms.

197. Mr. Latham‡ distinguishes three varieties, or better, degrees of memory, as follows:

1. "The Portative Memory, which simply conveys matter, and whose only aim, like that of a carrier, is to deliver the parcel as it was received."

21. *"Boys can easily learn to apply rules, before they can easily learn to understand them; and are likely to understand them the better, from being already familiar with the mode in which they are applied. The memory may be brought into extensive action before the understanding can, and may be made to assist powerfully in unfolding the understanding, by supplying it with materials to operate upon. If no boy was allowed to learn anything of which he did not, at the time, understand the reason, no general system of teaching could be applied; the progress of learning must be slow and irregular; and after all, there is no ground to believe that boys so taught would understand their rules better than those who begin by applying them, and end by understanding the reasons of them, for it can admit of no doubt that to understand the rules and their reasons at a subsequent period is a necessary portion of the system of education to which they belong."-(Dr. Whewell on Cambridge Education, p. 103.)

22. We may collect specimens and then hunt up a classification for them; or we may take a ready-made classification and then hunt for specimens to exemplify them. In most cases the latter is the better plan.

On the Action of Examinations, pp. 222-223.

2. "The Analytical Memory, which is exercised when the mind furnishes a view of its own, and thereby holds together a set of impressions selected out of a mass. Thus a barrister strings together the material facts of his case, and a lecturer those of his science, by regarding their bearing on what he wants to establish."

3. "The Assimilative Memory, which absorbs the matter into the system, so that the knowledge assimilated becomes part of the person's own self, like that of his name, or of a familiar language."

4. "The Index Memory, that which does not recollect the matter itself, but only where to find it."

THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF STUDIES.

198. The studies employed for educational purposes have been distinguished as Permanent and Progressive.* "To the former class belong those portions of knowledge which have long taken their permanent shape; ancient languages with their literature, and long-established demonstrated sciences. To the latter class belong the results of the mental activity of our own times; the literature of our own age, and the sciences in which men are making progress from day to day."

The principal Permanent Studies are: Greek and Latin; Arithmetic and Geometry; Mechanics and Hydrostatics; Grammar, Rhetoric and Deductive Logic.

The principal Progressive Studies are: Modern Languages and Literatures; the Sciences of classification; Geology and Chemistry; Linguistics and Ethnography; Philosophy, Inductive Logic and Sociology.

*I borrow this classification from Dr. Whewell, On Cambridge Education, London,

1850.

199. The Permanent Studies connect us with the past, and are the subjects best fitted to cultivate the faculties of Language and Reason. They should form the basis of a liberal education.

"Of the two classes of studies above mentiond, the Permanent and the Progressive Studies, the former are the most essential as parts of education; and must be mastered before the others are entered on, in order to secure such an intellectual culture as we aim at. * * *The Progressive Sciences are to be begun towards the end of a liberal education. On the other hand, the Permanent Studies, Classical Literature and Solid Reasoning, are fundamental parts of a liberal education, and can not be dispensed with. Modern Science and Philosophy ought to be introduced into education so far as to show their nature and principles; but they do not necessarily make any considerable or definite part of it."-(Dr. Whewell.)

200. The Progressive Studies connect us with the present and the future, and fit us to participate in the general forward movement of the times. Such of them as embody large measures of permanent truth and are freest from individual caprice and fancy should form an essential part of a liberal education.

"No one can be considered as furnished with the knowledge, tastes and sympathies which connect the successive generations of liberally educated men, who is not familiar with Homer and the Greek tragedians, as well as with Virgil, Homer, and Ovid. These two great families of writers, the Greek and the Roman classics, form the intellectual ancestors of the cultivated minds of modern times; and we must be well acquainted with their language, their thoughts, their forms of composition, their beauties, in order that we may have our share in that inheritance by which men belong to the intellectual aristocracy of mankind. The study of these title deeds and archives of the culture of our race must be a permanent portion of the best education of men as long as the tradition of such culture is preserved upon the face of the earth.”—(Dr. Whewell.*)

201. There are some studies that end in mere knowing, and there are others that lead to doing. The former may be

*On Cambridge Education, pp. 79-80.