acticability and
desirableness of casting our studies into the form of courses of
re-discovery is somewhat distantly and delicately approached,
incorporated into speeches by an allusion or in the way of _apercu_, or
thrown out as a suggestion of a partial or auxiliary method with the
younger learners, all which is of a fashion highly patronizing to the
thought, spite of the scruples about confessing who was the suggester of
it. But other questions, which spring up in the train of this, which by
themselves had received attention long since, but had been mainly
dropped and unheard of among us during the past twenty-five years, have
come again into full and unconcealed prominence. Such are the questions
about the natural order of appearance of the faculties in childhood, as
to what are the elementary faculties of the mind, as to the adaptation
of the kinds and order of studies to these, etc. And thus, all at once,
is disclosed that Education itself, which many had thought quite a
'finished' thing, well and happily disposed of, or at least so far
perfected as to leave no work further save upon the veriest outskirts of
details, is in truth a giant superstructure with foundations in sand, or
so almost visibly lacking underneath it, that it threatens to fall. For,
in the name of the simplest of all common sense, how are we to educate
to the best, _not yet knowing_--and that is now acknowledged--_what are
the_ FACULTIES _of the very minds we are dealing with, nor what are the_
PROCESSES _by which those minds begin and keep up their advance in
knowledge?_ So, also, those who in the most charitable mood could see in
education only something too hum-drum and narrow for their better
fancies, find it now rising and expanding into a new and large field for
intellectual effort, full of interesting problems, and fraught with
realizations as yet undreamed of.

It may be said, that the young mind had always learned what it did
learn, by discoveries; we answer, our methods and our books have not in
any sufficient degree recognized the fact, provided for it, nor taken
advantage of it. It may be said, that writers had previously
acknowledged that the mind learns well--some of them even, that it
learns best--when it discovers: we answer, that nevertheless, no one had
recorded it as a well-grounded, universal conclusion and positive law,
that the mind only can learn, in all strictly scientific matters, as it
discovers, and that hence, the can