he must be led into the world of religion. Brought up as he has been by the sense-world, the abstract scarcely finds entrance. God withdraws himself from our senses. The word Spirit has meaning only for the philosophers. In his fifteenth year Émile does not know whether he has a soul or not. If I wished to represent stupidity symbolically, I would paint a pedant teaching children out of a catechism. They say a child should be reared in the religion of his father, and prove this is the only true one, the others absurd. But suppose the strength of the argument depends upon the district where they use it, or upon authority, to which Émile pays no attention. How then? In what religion shall we educate him? The answer is plain -in none. We will place him in condition to choose that which the best use of his reason may approve."

The time, the thought, and the style of Rousseau's "Émile" combined to make it the most powerful word yet spoken for the true development of education. "It was a vigorous blow against the science of mere words, against the pitiable omniscience of children, against books as means of instruction. Never before had the natural methods for education been so forcibly thrust into the places of the miserable middle-age apparatus."

We need not delay for any extended criticism of Rousseau's thought. Its radical deficiency has been often stated and acknowledged. We phrased it as the personification of an abstraction. Believing in the total degeneration of humanity, believing that there was nothing natural in the historic development, Rousseau would call men back to Nature. How back to Nature? Where was Nature? Not in society-in Rousseau ? Certainly here, if anywhere, and with this the entire thought fails, so far as respects its efficiency for a scientific principle in education. Emile, separated from his unnatural fellowbeings, must be guarded against the possibility of doing as they did; and yet he must be taught according to Nature. Rousseau was all the nature Émile could have, and he would be educated naturally, therefore, only so far as Rousseau corresponded to Nature.

To break away from artificial restraints and to find Nature has fascinated men from earliest times. One of the most beautiful illustrations of this impossible undertaking is the Arabian romance, “Hai Ebn Yokdahn" ("The Nature-Man "). This was written by Tophail, who died in the year 1190, and is mentioned here merely as a reference for those specially interested in these endeavors.

It is among the Germans that we find a serious attempt to apply the new ideas to the actual work of instruction. The philanthropists attempted to realize the educational ideas of Rousseau. Their leading principles, both negative and positive, are as follows: "The universal condition of the world is infinitely bad. Church and state, school and family, are marked by folly and wickedness. Above all, the school is thoroughly defective in its very foundation. Every

where uncomprehended words are learned verbatim, school-dust lies. hundreds of years thick on the natural method of teaching languages; every one who breathes this dust is sick in the brain. Instruction carries everywhere the marks of the time when the schools were established. Young people are taught a multitude of things of which they make no use in all their life.

"A new foundation must be laid upon which a new species can develop, since a regeneration can not be thought of while the youth are not transplanted to a new ground."

We note a few of the affirmative propositions: "Artists must be trained if art is to prosper. In physical education we must return to the method of the ancients.

"The will must be governed by the reason. During youth religion shall be taught only in its extreme simplicity, without attention to sects or parties. We should not repress the natural tendency to freedom, but guide it. Children are by nature good-compulsion renders them bad.

"The boy who has no sense for anything abstract and incomprehensible, least of all for the ordinary catechism, should, before anything else, be made acquainted with the sense-world. This can be shown to him in Nature and by pictures.

"The youth are troubled with nothing so much as with Latin. More than five years are given simply to the learning of Latin. Yet there is not a fourth of the pupils thus taught who can read Latin books without trouble or without mistakes. When these hindrances are removed, the true aim of education will be reached. This aim is to form Europeans, people having such habits and manners as are common in all Europe, people whose life should be free from harmfulness, as universally useful and contented as they might become through education."

Kant, born April 22, 1724, expressed his opinion very forcibly as to the needs of the schools at this time: "In the civilized lands of Europe educational institutions are not lacking, neither is there lacking, on the part of the teachers, a well-intentioned industry. Still, it has been clearly shown that these institutions are worthless, and that, since everything in them works contrary to Nature, they fall far short of bringing out of men the good for which Nature has given the material. We should see quite different men around us if those educational methods came into force which are really drawn out of Nature, and not those which are but slavish imitations of the ancient customs of rude and inexperienced ages. The solicitude of the common people of all lands should now be directed to the establishment of such a master-school. This institution is no longer a merely beautiful idea, but now shows, by visible proofs, the practicability of what has been so long desired. The public repute, and pre-eminently the united voices of scientific and discerning judges from varied lands, have

marked the Dessau Educational Institute as the one that displays the evidences of excellence."

Kant's commendatory words refer to the School of the Philanthropists, founded December 27, 1774, at Dessau, under the direction of Basedow. This reformer represented Comenius and Rousseau. A few sentences from his writings are significant in this connection : "The great aim of education should be to prepare the youth for a useful, patriotic, and happy life. Instruction should be rendered as agreeable as is consistent with its nature. Practice in the memory of

things is far more important than in the memory of words.

"But this knowledge of things must furnish new representations to the understanding; must not simply fill out the memory with words. Paintings and engravings are of great service in instruction. Experience teaches how everything which resembles a picture pleases children."

A public examination of Basedow's work was held in May, 1776. The reformer's invitation contained the following passage: "This affair is not Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed, but Christian. We are philanthropists, cosmopolitans. Russia's or Denmark's sovereignty is not, in our teachings, placed after Switzerland's freedom. Our textbooks are free from theological bias for the Christian as against Jews, Mohammedans, deists, or the dissenters, called, in some places, heretics. Very little memorizing is done by us. The students are not forced to be industrious. Still, we promise by the excellence of our method of instruction, and by its agreement with all philanthropic education, twofold as much progress as can be secured by the best schools or gymnasia." The public examination was favorable, and many influential men approved the undertaking in highest terms. There were bitter enemies, however. Most of the directors of the gymnasia opposed Basedow to the utmost, and Herder expressed a feeling more or less prevalent when he wrote: "The whole thing appears to me horrible. They tell of a new method for raising oakforests in ten years. I wouldn't give Basedow calves to raise, much less men!"

We have considered a slow and complex movement, yet one steadily tending to definite result. The movement has been away from classical training as a necessary part of education. Montaigne, Bacon, Ratich, Comenius, the pietists, the philanthropists, have led education into new courses. The tendency was clearly revealed in the Dessau Institute. Education has been emancipated from scholasticism, and this with such force as to threaten the future supremacy of Greece and Rome.

As matter of fact, we have now before us, in the historical development of our subject, two sharply contrasted ideas. Whether these ideas are necessarily antagonistic is not the present question. We are concerned with the forces actually at work, and with the manner of

their unfolding. Those who favor and those who oppose classical study as a necessary part of education can justify their position by an appeal to one or the other of the ideas about to be stated. All ques. tions as to disciplinary benefit, as to method of instruction, as to amount of net result, are wholly out of date. The changes could be rung forever on these matters, with no gain and much loss of temper. Most of the claims put forth by those who advocate the superiority of classical studies are either nonsense or beside the mark. Classical studies have advantages-that is to say, excellences-peculiar to themselves. So have the sciences. These different advantages will appeal to different minds, and no power can prevent the appeal. Let each party so teach as to bring out the advantages best, in fullest manner. If the history of education shows anything, it shows that the place for all efficient reform in education is in the manner of teaching rather than the matter. Devising something new to be learned will never save the soul; devising, or rather finding, the right way to impart knowledge will save, and this with a growing salvation.

If the professors of Latin and Greek recognize that they are not solely or chiefly professors of philology—but rather that they are appointed to acquaint the scholar with literatures transcendent in their beauty of form, their wealth of imagery, and their depth of thought -if the professors of Latin and Greek recognize the true method of doing this great work, classical study will never be neglected. All this is equally true of the instructors in physical science. The distinction between a fact seen in the dry light of its naked isolation and the same fact as part of an organic and amazing whole is the distinction between life and death in the teaching of science.

To employ a certain kind of teaching (which is in no sense teaching), and to expect educational reform by confining a boy to physical science or to classics, is a colossal mistake. To pay the lowest wages in the primary grades of our schools, where the best teaching is imperatively needed, is an equally impressive blunder. To engage a professor for what he knows, for the number of books he has written, for the amount of original work he has done, is-to do a grand thing for the professor, but by no means necessarily a grand thing for the pupil. Most of the young men and women in American colleges need to be taught. Is this to decry research or the establishment of all means for discovery? Rather is it to discriminate between the work of teaching and the work of investigation. Is a man called to teach, is he employed to teach, is he paid to teach-let him, then, teach, i. e., let him spend himself in the work of education. Were every Were every teacher, nay, were the majority of teachers, to see in the pupil the pupil, there would be a reforming of education such as has not yet been experienced.

We close this paper by such a brief statement of the opposing ideas previously mentioned as may best serve to show their reality.

Fortunately, our purpose has been already served by a few contrasting paragraphs admirably conceived and expressed :

I. "From the standpoint of humanism education has its own purpose in itself, viz., universal culture of man. According to philanthropism, education has not its purpose in itself, but only a relative purpose, viz., the training of man for a future avocation.

II. "From the point of view of humanism it is not, in education, so much matter of chief importance to collect knowledge as to discipline the spirit by it. From the point of view of philanthropism, the aim is to fill the mind with the largest possible amount of useful information.

III. "Humanism exercises the mind of the student not so much to make him apt for some appointed business-culture of the spirit is here an end in itself. With philanthropism culture is something aimless in so far as the spirit is not made more apt by it for some special business.

IV. "As respects the objects of education, humanism does not require many objects by which the youth is distracted and prevented from thorough acquisition. The pupil should be advanced by a few objects to the highest degree of knowledge.

"Philanthropism, on the other hand, in view of the daily increasing territory of what may be known, does not dare confine itself to holding the youth throughout his entire period of education to a few objects-much rather attention should be paid to rendering easy the circle of objects, that the child may be offered the greatest possible amount of knowledge.

V. "Humanism brings before the youth single departments of knowledge in the entire manifoldness of their separate objects, then teaches to arrange these objects with exact system, thereby to accustom the student to logical thinking, so that, when later he ventures upon outlying territories of knowledge, he will not fall into error. Philanthropism would broaden instruction, to cover as far as possible the entire field of knowledge, because he who has not a view of the whole must possess only half-way and distorted impressions concerning the separate departments of knowledge and their particular objects.

VI. "According to humanism, not things but ideas are best adapted to the exercise of the spirit, that the youth may not, during his future, active life lose himself in the region of bread-and-butter knowledge. Philanthropism demands for this very mental exercise not ideas (which strictly considered are only words), but things, and this in order that the mind, perpetually occupied with letters and words empty of content, may not lose itself in the region of mere word-knowledge, and become good for nothing in practical life."

These ideas of man and of his place in the world are fundamentally distinct. They can never be done away or disregarded, for they root themselves in the twofold nature of man. It is possible to be a hu