acticable task. But he has
set it an inadequate and an impracticable task. For behind all the
faculties that he enumerates dwells the living reality which he
cannot bring himself to believe in,--the soul. And because he cannot
bring himself to believe in the soul, he deprives the faculties
which he proposes to cultivate of the very qualities which make
them most worthy of cultivation,--of their interrelation, their
interdependence, their organic unity. In other words he devitalises
each of them by cutting it off from the life which is common to all
of them, and so paralyses its capacity for growing in the very act
of taking thought for its growth. He forgets that every faculty which
is worth cultivating both draws life from, and contributes life to,
the general life of the growing child. He forgets that the child
himself--"the living soul"--is growing in and through the growth of
each of his opening faculties; and that unless, when a faculty seems
to be growing, the life of the child is at once expressing itself in
and renewing itself through the process of its growth, its semblance
of growth is a pure illusion, the results that are produced being in
reality as fraudulent as artificial flowers on a living rose-bush.

But the whole question may be looked at from another point of view.
Let us assume, for argument's sake, that the function of education
is to train, or foster the growth of, certain faculties, which are
mainly though not exclusively mental, and that when those faculties
have been duly trained the teacher has done his work. What, then,
are the faculties which education is supposed to train? In my attempt
to answer this question I will confine myself to the elementary
school,--the only school which I can pretend to know well. A glance
at the time-table of an ordinary elementary school might suggest to
us that there were two chief groups of faculties to be trained--those
which perceive and those which express, those which take in and those
which give out. When such subjects as History, Geography, or Science
are being taught, the child's perceptive faculties are being trained.
When such subjects as Composition, Drawing or Singing are being
taught, the child's expressive faculties are being trained. So at
least one might be disposed to assume.

In what relation do the perceptive faculties stand to the expressive?
Is it possible to cultivate either group without regard to the other?
It must be admitted that the