y, and to make us dread
even relaxation, lest it break the precious and fragile chain of
thought. Our growth in knowledge is not after that narrow pattern. We
take food at one time, work at another, and sleep at a third: and so,
the mind too has its variations of employment, and best grows by a like
periodicity in them. This is our point--that it is a peculiarity and law
of mind, growing out of the very nature of mind and of its knowings,
that no truth or knowledge which is in its nature a _consequent_ on some
other truths or knowledge, can by any possibility be in reality attained
by any mind until after that mind has first secured and rightly
appreciated those _antecedent_ truths or knowings. No later or more
complex knowledge is ever comprehensible or acquirable, until after the
elements of knowledge constituting or involved in it have first been
definitely secured. To suppose otherwise, is precisely like supposing a
vigorously nourishing foliage and head of a tree with neither roots nor
stem under it; it is to suppose a majestic river, that had neither
sufficient springs nor tributaries. Now, for the pupil, the text-book
maker, the educator, no truth is more positive or profoundly important
than this. He who fails of it, by just so much as he does so, fails to
educate. Let the pupil, as he must, alternately study and not study--go
even on the same day from one study to a second, though seldom to more
than a third or fourth. By all this he need lose nothing; and he will
tax and rest certain faculties in turn. But then, insist that each
subject shall recur frequently enough to perpetuate a healthy activity
and growth of the faculties it exercises, usually, daily for five days
in a week, or every other day at farthest; that each shall recur at a
stated period, so that a habit of mind running its daily, steady and
productive round with the sun may be formed; and that in and along the
material of every subject pursued, whether it be arithmetic, or grammar,
or chemistry, or an ancient or modern language, the mind shall so be
enabled to advance consecutively, clearly and firmly from step to
step--from observation to law, from law to application, from analysis to
broader generalization, and its application, and so on--that every new
step shall just have been prepared for by the conceptions, the mental
susceptibility and fibre, gotten during the preceding ones, and that
thus, every new step shall be one forward upon new and ye