nusual
proportion of distinguished men: if even they have reached the average.
We are not surprised at this. The success of every appliance depends
mainly upon the intelligence with which it is used. It is a trite
remark that, having the choicest tools, an unskilful artisan will botch
his work; and bad teachers will fail even with the best methods. Indeed,
the goodness of the method becomes in such case a cause of failure; as,
to continue the simile, the perfection of the tool becomes in
undisciplined hands a source of imperfection in results. A simple,
unchanging, almost mechanical routine of tuition, may be carried out by
the commonest intellects, with such small beneficial effect as it is
capable of producing; but a complete system--a system as heterogeneous
in its appliances as the mind in its faculties--a system proposing a
special means for each special end, demands for its right employment
powers such as few teachers possess. The mistress of a dame-school can
hear spelling-lessons; and any hedge-schoolmaster can drill boys in the
multiplication-table. But to teach spelling rightly by using the powers
of the letters instead of their names, or to instruct in numerical
combinations by experimental synthesis, a modicum of understanding is
needful; and to pursue a like rational course throughout the entire
range of studies, asks an amount of judgment, of invention, of
intellectual sympathy, of analytical faculty, which we shall never see
applied to it while the tutorial official is held in such small esteem.
True education is practicable only by a true philosopher. Judge, then,
what prospect a philosophical method now has of being acted out! Knowing
so little as we yet do of psychology, and ignorant as our teachers are
of that little, what chance has a system which requires psychology for
its basis?

Further hindrance and discouragement has arisen from confounding the
Pestalozzian principle with the forms in which it has been embodied.
Because particular plans have not answered expectation, discredit has
been cast upon the doctrine associated with them: no inquiry being made
whether these plans truly conform to the doctrine. Judging as usual by
the concrete rather than the abstract, men have blamed the theory for
the bunglings of the practice. It is as though the first futile attempt
to construct a steam-engine had been held to prove that steam could not
be used as a motive power. Let it be constantly borne in mind th