_Essay on Burns_ if it were carefully read in class, and a good sixth
form might learn much from Wordsworth's _Prelude_.

The whole question, however, of such deliberate instruction in the
emotional and intellectual facts of man's nature as may lead men to
conceive of the co-ordination of reason and passion as a moral ideal is
one on which much steady thinking and observation is still required. The
instincts of sex, for instance, are becoming in all civilised countries
more and more the subject of serious thought. Conduct based upon a
calculation of results is in that sphere claiming to an ever increasing
degree control over mere impulse. Yet no one is sure that he has found
the way to teach the barest facts as to sexual instinct either before or
during the period of puberty, without prematurely exciting the instincts
themselves.

Doctors, again, are more and more recognising that nutrition depends not
only upon the chemical composition of food but upon our appetite, and
that we can become aware of our appetite and to some extent control and
direct it by our will. Sir William Macewen said not long ago, 'We cannot
properly digest our food unless we give it a warm welcome from a free
mind with the prospect of enjoyment.'[62] But it would not be easy to
create by teaching that co-ordination of the intellect and impulse at
which Sir William Macewen hints. If you tell a boy that one reason why
food is wholesome is because we like it, and that it is therefore our
duty to like that food which other facts of our nature have made both
wholesome and likeable, you may find yourself stimulating nothing except
his sense of humour.

[62] _British Medical Journal_, Oct. 8, 1904.

So, in the case of the political emotions, it is very easy to say that
the teacher should aim first at making his pupils conscious of the
existence of those emotions, then at increasing their force, and finally
at subordinating them to the control of deliberate reasoning on the
consequences of political action. But it is extraordinarily difficult to
discover how this can be done under the actual conditions of school
teaching. Mr. Acland, when he was Education Minister in 1893, introduced
into the Evening School Code a syllabus of instruction on the Life and
Duties of the Citizen. It consisted of statements of the part played in
social life by the rate-collector, the policeman, and so on,
accompanied by a moral for each section, such as 'serving personal