ugh he by no means
consistently adhered to them, was his urgent contempt for this
fatuous substitution of spoken injunctions and prohibitions, for the
deeper language of example, and the more living instruction of visible
circumstance. The vast improvements that have since taken place in the
theory and the art of education all over Europe, and of which he has
the honour of being the first and most widely influential promoter,
may all be traced to the spread of this wise principle, and its
adoption in various forms. The change in the up-bringing of the young
exactly corresponds to the change in the treatment of the insane. We
may look back to the old system of endless catechisms, apophthegms,
moral fables, and the rest of the paraphernalia of moral didactics,
with the same horror with which we regard the gags, strait-waistcoats,
chains, and dark cells, of poor mad people before the intervention of
Pinel.

It is clear now to everybody who has any opinion on this most
important of all subjects, that spontaneousness is the first quality
in connection with right doing, which you can develop in the young,
and this spontaneousness of habit is best secured by associating it
with the approval of those to whom the child looks. Sympathy, in a
word, is the true foundation from which to build up the structure of
good habit. The young should be led to practise the elementary parts
of right conduct from the desire to please, because that is a securer
basis than the conclusions of an embryo reason, applied to the most
complex conditions of action, while the grounds on which action is
justified or condemned may be made plain in the fulness of time, when
the understanding is better able to deal with the ideas and terms
essential to the matter. You have two aims to secure, each without
sacrifice of the other. These are, first, that the child shall grow up
with firm and promptly acting habit; second, that it shall retain
respect for reason and an open mind. The latter may be acquired in the
less immature years, but if the former be not acquired in the earlier
times, a man grows up with a drifting unsettledness of will, that
makes his life either vicious by quibbling sophistries, or helpless
for want of ready conclusions.

The first idea which is to be given to a child, little as we might
expect such a doctrine from the author of the Second Discourse, is
declared to be that of property. And he can only acquire this idea by
having somethi