earliest of all. Such a course is to begin at the end, and to turn the
finished work into an instrument. "In speaking to children in these
early years a language which they do not comprehend, we accustom them
to cheat themselves with words, to criticise what is said to them, to
think themselves as wise as their masters, to become disputatious and
mutinous." If you forget that nature meant children to be children
before growing into men, you only force a fruit that has neither
ripeness nor savour, and must soon go bad; you will have youthful
doctors and old infants.

To all this, however, there is certainly another side which Rousseau
was too impetuous to see. Perfected reason is truly the tardiest of
human endowments, but it can never be perfected at all unless the
process be begun, and, within limits, the sooner the beginning is
made, the earlier will be the ripening. To know the grounds of right
conduct is, we admit, a different thing from feeling a disposition to
practise it. But nobody will deny the expediency of an intelligent
acquaintance with the reasons why one sort of conduct is bad, and its
opposite good, even if such an acquaintance can never become a
substitute for the spontaneous action of thoroughly formed habit. For
one thing, cases are constantly arising in a man's life that demand
the exercise of reason, to settle the special application of
principles which may have been acquired without knowledge of their
rational foundation. In such cases, which are the critical and testing
points of character, all depends upon the possession of a more or less
justly trained intelligence, and the habit of using it. Now, as we
have said, it is one of the great merits of the Emilius that it calls
such attention to the early age at which mental influences begin to
operate. Why should the gradual formation of the master habit of using
the mind be any exception?

Belief in the efficacy of preaching is the bane of educational
systems. Verbal lessons seem as if they ought to be so deeply
effective, if only the will and the throng of various motives which
guide it, instantly followed impression of a truth upon the
intelligence. And they are, moreover, so easily communicated, saving
the parent a lifetime of anxious painstaking in shaping his own
character, after such a pattern as shall silently draw all within its
influence to pursuit of good and honourable things. The most valuable
of Rousseau's notions about education, tho