d, we are told with endless
repetition, ought always to be led to suppose that it is following its
own judgment or impulses, and has only them and their consequences to
consider. But Rousseau could not help seeing, as he meditated on the
actual development of his Emilius, that to leave him thus to the
training of accident would necessarily end in many fatal gaps and
chasms. Yet the hand and will of the parent or the master could not be
allowed to appear. The only alternative, therefore, was the secret
preparation of artificial sets of circumstances, alike in work and in
amusement. Jean Paul was wiser than Jean Jacques. "Let not the teacher
after the work also order and regulate the games. It is decidedly
better not to recognise or make any order in games, than to keep it up
with difficulty and send the zephyrets of pleasure through artistic
bellows and air-pumps to the little flowers."[287]

The spontaneousness which we ought to seek, does not consist in
promptly willing this or that, independently of an authority imposed
from without, but in a self-acting desire to do what is right under
all its various conditions, including what the child finds pleasant to
itself on the one hand, and what it has good reason to suppose will be
pleasant to its parents on the other. "You must never," Rousseau
gravely warns us, "inflict punishment upon children as punishment; it
should always fall upon them as a natural consequence of their
ill-behaviour."[288] But why should one of the most closely following
of all these consequences be dissembled or carefully hidden from
sight, namely, the effect of ill-behaviour upon the contentment of the
child's nearest friend? Why are the effects of conduct upon the
actor's own physical well-being to be the only effects honoured with
the title of being natural? Surely, while we leave to the young the
widest freedom of choice, and even habitually invite them to decide
for themselves between two lines of conduct, we are bound afterwards
to state our approval or disapproval of their decision, so that on the
next occasion they may take this anger or pleasure in others into
proper account in their rough and hasty forecast, often less hasty
than it seems, of the consequences of what they are about to do. One
of the most important of educating influences is lost, if the young
are not taught to place the feelings of others in a front place, when
they think in their own simple way of what will happen to them