s, but our chief attention is
employed in making the muscles themselves go through the evolutions,
till, by frequent repetition and correction, they acquire the requisite
quickness and precision of action. So, when we wish to teach music, we
do not merely address the understanding and explain the qualities of
sounds. We train the ear to an attentive discrimination of these sounds,
and the hand or the vocal organs, as the case may be, to the
reproduction of the motions which call them into existence. We follow
this plan, because the laws of organization require the direct practice
of the organs concerned, and we feel instinctively that we can succeed
only by obeying these laws. The purely mental faculties are connected
during life with material organs, and are hence subjected to precisely
the same laws. If, therefore, we wish to improve these faculties--the
reasoning powers, for example--we must exercise them regularly in
tracing the cause and relations of things. In like manner, if our aim is
the development of the sentiments of attachment, benevolence, justice,
or respect, we must exercise each of them directly and for its own sake,
otherwise neither it nor its organ will ever acquire promptitude or
strength.

It is the brain, or organ of the mind, more than the abstract immaterial
principle itself, that requires cultivation, or can, indeed, receive it
in this life. Education hence operates invariably in subjection to the
laws of organization. In improving the _external_ senses, we admit this
principle readily enough; but when we come to the _internal_ faculties
of thought and feeling, it is either denied or neglected. That the
superior quickness of touch, sight, and hearing, consequent upon
judicious exercise, is referable to increased facility of action in
their appropriate organs, is readily admitted. But when we explain, on
the same principle, the superior development of the reasoning powers, or
the greater warmth of feeling produced by similar exercise in these and
other internal faculties, few are inclined to listen to our proposition,
or allow to it half the weight or attention its importance demands,
although every fact in philosophy and experience concurs in supporting
it. We see the mental powers of feeling and of thought unfolding
themselves in infancy and youth in exact accordance with the progress of
the organization. We see them perverted or suspended by the sudden
inroad of disease. We sometimes observe