on of the infant's mind that instinctive principle or power of
faith, which alone makes the father's and mother's love efficacious
towards its intellectual growth and development. Of what use were
parents or teachers, in instructing a child which required proof for
every statement that father, mother, or teacher gives? How cruel to
force the confiding young heart into premature scepticism, by compelling
him to hunt up reasons for everything, when he has reasons, to him
all-sufficient, in the fact that father, mother, or teacher told him so?

It may seem trifling to dwell so long upon these elementary points. Yet
there are wide-spread plans of education which violate every principle
here laid down. Educators and systems of education, enjoying the highest
popularity, seem to have adopted the theory, at least they tacitly act
upon the theory, that the first faculty of the mind to be developed is
the Reasoning power. Indeed, they are not far from asserting that the
whole business of education consists in the cultivation of this power,
and they bend accordingly their main energies upon training young
children to go through certain processes of reasoning, so called. They
require a child to prove everything before receiving it as true; to
reason out a rule for himself for every process in arithmetic or
grammar; to demonstrate the multiplication-table before daring to use
it, or to commit it to memory, if indeed they do not forbid entirely its
being committed to memory as too parrot-like and mechanical. To commit
blindly to memory precious forms of truth, which the wise and good have
hived for the use of the race, is poohed at as old-fogyish. To receive
as true anything which the child cannot fathom, and which he has not
discovered or demonstrated for himself, is denounced as slavish. All
authority in teaching, growing out of the age and the reputed wisdom of
the teacher, all faith and reverence in the learner, growing out of a
sense of his ignorance and dependence, are discarded, and the frightened
stripling is continually rapped on the knuckles, if he does not at every
step show the truth of his allegations by what is called a course of
reasoning. Children reason, of course. They should be encouraged and
taught to reason. No teacher, who is wise, will neglect this part of a
child's intellectual powers. But he will not consider this the season
for its main, normal development. He will hold this subject for the
present subordina