pens that after one of these reactions the next advance is
achieved by co-ordinating the antagonist errors, and perceiving that
they are opposite sides of one truth; so, we are now coming to the
conviction that body and mind must both be cared for, and the whole
thing being unfolded. The forcing-system has been, by many, given up;
and precocity is discouraged. People are beginning to see that the first
requisite to success in life, is to be a good animal. The best brain is
found of little service, if there be not enough vital energy to work it;
and hence to obtain the one by sacrificing the source of the other, is
now considered a folly--a folly which the eventual failure of juvenile
prodigies constantly illustrates. Thus we are discovering the wisdom of
the saying, that one secret in education is "to know how wisely to lose
time."

The once universal practice of learning by rote, is daily falling more
into discredit. All modern authorities condemn the old mechanical way of
teaching the alphabet. The multiplication table is now frequently taught
experimentally. In the acquirement of languages, the grammar-school plan
is being superseded by plans based on the spontaneous process followed
by the child in gaining its mother tongue. Describing the methods there
used, the "Reports on the Training School at Battersea" say:--"The
instruction in the whole preparatory course is chiefly oral, and is
illustrated as much as possible by appeals to nature." And so
throughout. The rote-system, like ether systems of its age, made more of
the forms and symbols than of the things symbolised. To repeat the words
correctly was everything; to understand their meaning nothing; and thus
the spirit was sacrificed to the letter. It is at length perceived that,
in this case as in others, such a result is not accidental but
necessary--that in proportion as there is attention to the signs, there
must be inattention to the things signified; or that, as Montaigne long
ago said--_Scavoir par coeur n'est pas scavoir_.

Along with rote-teaching, is declining also the nearly-allied teaching
by rules. The particulars first, and then the generalisation, is the new
method--a method, as the Battersea School Reports remarks, which, though
"the reverse of the method usually followed, which consists in giving
the pupil the rule first," is yet proved by experience to be the right
one. Rule-teaching is now condemned as imparting a merely empirical
knowledge--as