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HERBAET 
 
OFTHE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF 
 
JOHANN FRIEDRICH HERBART 
 
PIONEERS IN EDUCATION 
 
 HERBART 
 
 AND EDUCATION BY INSTRUCTION 
 
 BY 
 GABRIEL COMPAYRE 
 
 CORRESPONDENT OF THE INSTITUTE J DIRECTOR OF THE ACADEMY 
 
 OF LYONS; AUTHOR OF "PSYCHOLOGY APPLIED TO 
 EDUCATION," "LECTURES ON PEDAGOGY," 
 
 "A HISTORY OF PEDAGOGY," ETC. 
 
 TRANSLATED BY 
 MARIA E. FINDLAY, B.A. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 
 PUBLISHERS 
 
C 5 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 190T, 
 
 BY THOMAS T. CKOWELL & COMPANY. 
 PUBLISHED, SEPTEMBEB, 1907. 
 
CONTENTS AND SUMMAET 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PREFACE .......... vii 
 
 I. Life of Jean-Frederic Herbart (1776-1841). His early 
 
 places of residence : Oldenburg, Jena, Bremen, Gottin- 
 gen. The successor of Kant at the University of 
 Konigsberg (1809-1833). He returns to Gottingen 
 and ends his life there (1833-1841). Forming of his 
 intellect. His natural gifts and the multiplicity of his 
 aptitudes. His mother's influence. His precocity in 
 philosophy. How he became a teacher. His years 
 as a tutor in Switzerland (1797-1800). Influence 
 of Pestalozzi on his theories. Points of resemblance 
 and of contrast between the two teachers. Practice in 
 teaching joined to the theory of education. The 
 Konigsberg Pedagogical Seminary. Few vicissitudes 
 in Herbart 's quiet life. His marriage (1811). His 
 death (August 11, 1841) 1 
 
 II. Herbart's psychology and its pedagogical consequences,- 
 Pedagogy based on psychology. Exposition of 
 Herbart's psychology. A matter apart from his 
 mathematical speculations. His conception opposed 
 to idealism. Absence of faculties. There are in the 
 mind representations gained from experience. Her- 
 bart 'a spiritualism. The soul a monad lacking con- 
 tents and without original activity. Struggle of ideas 
 for consciousness. Static and dynamic states of mind. 
 Attraction and repulsion of ideas. Fusions and com- 
 plexes. Psychical mechanism. Sentiments and vo- 
 
 iii 
 
 1 65083 
 
iv CONTENTS AND SUMMARY 
 
 PAGE 
 
 litions. Sensation a mode of intelligence. Criticism 
 of Herbart's psychology. Pedagogical intellectualism 
 a result of psychological intellectualism. Power of 
 education. Its limitations. The body the physio- 
 logical obstacle. Criticism of formal culture. 
 "Knowledges" not valuable for themselves. Theory 
 of apperception. Its importance. Home education 
 superior to public education. Disadvantages of public 
 instruction. Reestablishment of the individuality in 
 Herbart's system. Necessity of studying the disposi- 
 tion of each individual. Diversity of temperaments. 
 
 Abnormal children. Pedagogy the goal of all the 
 sciences. Necessity of uniting practice and theory. 
 Science and the art of education 17 
 
 III. Herbart's intellectual pedagogy. Its complexity. 
 Difficulty of a brief exposition. The foundation of edu- 
 cation is instruction. To instruct the mind is to con- 
 struct it. Interest the essential condition of instruc- 
 tion. Two fundamental sources of interest : acquaint- 
 anceship with nature, and dealings with mankind. 
 Various forms of interest. Empirical interest. 
 Speculative interest. ^Esthetic interest. Sympa- 
 thetic interest. Social interest. Religious interest. 
 All the forms of interest should be cultivated. The 
 "many-sided interest." Exclusiveness and narrow- 
 ness of mind. The full life. Can a single individual 
 attain it? New distinction: "direct" and "indirect" 
 interest. Direct interest springs from the things 
 themselves. Relation of direct interest and of involun- 
 tary attention. Criticism of attention called voluntary. 
 
 Primitive attention and apperceptive attention. 
 Important role of apperceptive attention. The point of 
 departure for instruction is experience. Rules to follow 
 to arouse attention. Nothing should be taught which 
 
CONTENTS AND SUMMARY v 
 
 PAGE 
 
 is entirely new. The four "moments" of instruction : 
 clearness, association, systematization, and method. 
 Intuition. It should be completed by description. 
 The three "methods" or "modes" of instruction. 
 Descriptive, analytic, and synthetic methods. Analy- 
 sis arranges and defines the intuitions. It proceeds 
 above all by questions. Synthesis occurs particularly 
 in didactic expositions. Defects and virtues of Her- 
 bart's pedagogical theories. Excessive systematiza- 
 tion and artificial methodizing. Integral education. 
 The perfect man. All matters of instruction in- 
 cluded in his schedule of studies. Preference for the 
 positive sciences. Herbart's opinion of the study of 
 
 ancient languages 44 
 
 IV. Moral culture. Man measured by his desires. 
 Will depends on knowledge. Special rules of moral 
 culture. Its point of departure in experience. Dis- 
 cipline or " control of children." Preparatory period 
 before moral culture should begin. Aim and char- 
 acteristics of discipline. Threats. Watching. 
 Disciplinary punishments. Corporal chastisement. 
 "Pedagogic" punishments. Herbart and Mr. Her- 
 bert Spencer. Authority and affection. The 
 mother's role. Virtue the supreme aim in life. 
 Herbart's moral system. Attraction of goodness 
 substituted for the categorical imperative. Criticism 
 of transcendental freedom. A moral system without 
 free will and without obligation. The five moral 
 ideas. Inner liberty. Perfection. Good-will. 
 Law. Justice. The moral ideas result from the re- 
 lationships of the ideas and the volitions. Morality, 
 like mentality, is the product of experience. The 
 "aesthetic necessity." Conscience and taste. Moral 
 judgments are none other than aesthetic judgments. 
 
vi CONTENTS AND SUMMARY 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Intellectual conditions necessary to the formation 
 of aesthetic judgments. Character. Formation of 
 character. " Obj ective " character. " Subj ective " 
 character. "Memory of the will." Role of action 
 in moral culture. Criticism of Herbart's moral sys- 
 tem. Special processes of moral culture. It is neces- 
 sary to control the child. It is necessary to direct his 
 mode of action. Rules or maxims of conduct. 
 Calmness and serenity of mind. Approval and blame. 
 
 Warning and exhortation. Religious education . 82 
 V. Herbart's influence. A Herbartian library. The 
 
 Herbartian pedagogical school in Germany. Its lead- 
 ing representatives. Ziller (1817-1883). The peda- 
 gogical seminary at Leipzig. Original and bizarre 
 methods. Ziller's concentration plan. Reasons 
 given for the coordination of studies. Stoy (1815- 
 1885). The seminary at Jena. M. Rein, Stoy's suc- 
 cessor at Jena. Otto Frick and the Halle Institute. 
 Slow spread of the ideas of Herbart. Reasons for their 
 success. The United States another centre of the Her- 
 bartian pedagogy. American Herbartians : Mr. de 
 Garmo, Mr. McMurry, Colonel Parker, William James, 
 etc. Causes of Herbart 'a success in America. In- 
 fluence of Herbart in England, in Italy, and in France. 
 
 Conclusion : why the Herbartian movement will last. 
 
 Herbart had faith in education. He had faith in 
 instruction. He had imagined a society based on the 
 progress of individuals 113 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY . 141 
 
PREFACE 
 
 WE desire to call attention to a thinker who is 
 worthy of being placed in the very first rank of 
 educationists, both as theorist and practical teacher. 
 
 Kousseau was a romance writer; Herbert Spencer, 
 a brilliant essayist in the field of education. ^Her- 
 bart was at once a schoolmaster and a profound 
 philosopher; and if it could be said of him that he 
 was "JJie father of modern psychology/' he has no 
 less a claim to be considered the founder of a scien- 
 tific pedagogy, with psychology iLs fas basis. 
 
 Pestalozzi, a man of admirable natural gifts, but 
 gifts which lacked the support of a sound psy- 
 chology, had only dim perceptions and "partial 
 intuitions " ; and, also, his theory concerned almost 
 entirely the education of little children and ele- 
 mentary instruction. 
 
 Herbart had all the resources of a subtle dialecti- 
 cian and of a learned psychologist, and he built up 
 with hands powerful, but somewhat awkward, a 
 whole system; a system wide and full, which em- 
 braces the whole field of education and is applica- 
 
 vii 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 ble to every style, to youth as well as to 
 childhood. His works no longer present to us 
 disconnected opinions, disjecti membra poetae, but 
 a solidly linked and harmonized doctrinal whole. 
 Parts of it are certainly open to criticism, but 
 every one must acknowledge and admire its firm, 
 well-marshalled order. In addition to this, we 
 note that he was not satisfied with theorizing and 
 arguing about the general laws of education; he 
 studied narrowly and with infinite care the small- 
 est details of applied pedagogy; he did not keep 
 the science apart from the art of education; he 
 extended the same watchful care over both 
 together; his science was replete with abstract 
 conceptions and bold generalizations; his art de- 
 scended to the smallest details and abounded in 
 methods and practical devices. 
 
 We shall try to give an idea of this vast system, 
 with the intention of throwing light on a theory 
 of education, which is at times obscure and always 
 complicated ; we shall, so to say, try to make this 
 somewhat muddy stream clearer; and this not 
 without the fear of weakening it by our abridg- 
 ment and of making it shallower by our explana- 
 tions. 
 
 The reasons, in our opinion, why Herbart's 
 system of education is to be recommended is, in 
 
PKEFACE ix 
 
 the first place, because lie claims to haveestab- 
 lished it on experience, on the natural history 
 of the mind. But if Herbart is a realist who 
 breaks with the metaphysical dreams of his age, 
 in his own way he is also an idealist; and educa- 
 tion as he conceives it, education aiming above__all_. 
 at forming the individual, the human creature, is , 
 in no way utilitarian. It is in a high degree moral, 
 proclaiming as the Qhief ends of instruction, morality | 
 and virtue. It is a universal education, offering/ 
 'invitations to all men. Finally, it is a democratic/ 
 education, which counsels children to seek the 
 company of workmen and peasants; like to the 
 education which made Edgar Quinet, our fellow- 
 countryman, a simple, free soul, loved by the people 
 from his earliest years in a rural district of his 
 native land. 
 
 It is a hundred years since Herbart published 
 his treatise on General^ Pedagogy : it dates from 
 1806. And yet, this book, now old, answers per- 
 haps better to the needs and aspirations -of the 
 hour than any other. At this time, in fact, when 
 democratic peoples are seeking more and more to 
 base their morality on science, it is surely worth 
 while to listen to the voice of a philosopher who 
 believed, and tried to demonstrate, that all educa- 
 tion depends alone on instruction, and that ideas 
 
x PREFACE 
 
 and knowledge are the source of good feeling and 
 virtue. When we feel that faith in education is 
 increasing every day, and, too, the hope that as it 
 advances it will guarantee to human societies a 
 better future, might we not think that only yester- 
 day were said these noble words of Herbart : " The 
 interest which we take in education is one of the 
 forms of interest which we take in human beings. 
 Our hopes find refuge in the hearts of the young, 
 in the expectation that men, when they are more 
 carefully educated, will attain to things yet beyond 
 
 our view." 
 
HERBART 
 
 THERE is little to tell about the life of Herbart. 
 It was an unbroken, simple, and peaceful life, 
 comparable to that of Kant; the noble life of a 
 thinker wholly devoted to study, who never let dis- 
 tractions withdraw him from meditation. There 
 are few events to be recorded from the laborious 
 years of a professor who left his study only for his 
 lecture-room, other than changes of residence and 
 the publication of his books. 
 
 Herbart was born at Oldenburg on the 4th of 
 May, 1776; he died at Gottingen, the llth of 
 August, 1841. He differed from Kant in this, that 
 he travelled, either as student or professor, to all 
 quarters of Germany, while Kant never left Konigs- 
 berg, his native town. During the years 1788 to 
 1794, he took his first course of higher studies at the 
 Gymnasium of Oldenburg, where his grandfather 
 had been head-master. Then, from 1794 to 1798, 
 he attended the University of Jena. Jena was at 
 that time one of the most brilliant centres for the 
 
 i 
 
2 HERBART 
 
 study of German philosophy, and Fichte was teach- 
 ing there. After completing his university course, 
 Herbart became a tutor, and from 1797 to 1800 he 
 educated the three sons of the governor of Inter- 
 laken, M. de Steiger. It was while he lived in 
 Switzerland that he had the good fortune to meet 
 Pestalozzi, and to visit his school at Burgdorf in 
 1798. After a short stay at Halle, and a two years' 
 residence at Bremen, where he studied and taught 
 specially mathematics, he settled, from 1802 to 
 1809, at Gottingen. He was admitted to the doc- 
 tor's degree there on theses purely pedagogical, 1 and 
 he began his career as university teacher in the 
 capacity of Privat Docent (private lecturer); after 
 having declined an ordinary professorship which was 
 offered to him at the University of Heidelberg, he 
 became special lecturer at Gottingen. 
 
 To this period belongs the most important of his 
 pedagogical writings, General Pedagogy deduced 
 from the Aim of Education; 2 it was published in 
 
 1 Allgemeine Paedagogik aus dem Zweck der Erziehung abgeleitet, 
 which Herbart dedicated to his friend John Smith, senator of 
 Bremen. 
 
 2 These are the titles of the theses put forth by Herbart for 
 his Doctorship: (1) Ars pedagogica non experientia sola nititur; 
 
 (2) In liberorum educatione matheseos et poeseos maxima vis est; 
 
 (3) Institutio liberorum a Greeds litteris incipienda et quidem ab 
 Homeri Odyssea, nullo omnino prosaico, minime autem chrestomatico, 
 libra proemisso. 
 
HERBART 3 
 
 1806. Already in this he was formulating the fun- 
 damental principles of his system of education, and 
 in his subsequent works he only developed and ex- 
 plained the theories which he had projected before 
 his thirtieth year. These theories were full of new 
 ideas ; this is seen especially in his Outline of Peda- 
 gogical Lectures, 1 which appeared in 1835, and which 
 crowns all the others. 
 
 It was the period when Germany was winning in 
 the world of thought a fine revenge for its defeat on 
 the battle-field. Kant, it is true, had just died in 
 1804, and his successor was Krug, a man of no 
 account. But Schelling was lecturing on philosophy 
 at Wtirzburg, and Hegel at Jena. Celebrated 
 additions were being made to the literature of edu- 
 cation. In 1803 appeared Kant's short essay On 
 Pedagogy. Schwartz was beginning the same year 
 the publication of his treatise on pedagogy, the 
 Theory of Education. In 1807 Jean-Paul Richter 
 published his Levana. Niemeyer was the heir of 
 Francke, and Director of the Educational Institute 
 at Halle; Francke greatly esteemed Herbart's 
 work, quoted him often, and tried to keep him at 
 
 1 Umriss paedagogischer Vorlesungen, 1835; 2d edition, 1841. 
 The list of Herbart's pedagogical publications is long, but the two 
 essential works are the General Pedagogy and the Outlines of 
 Pedagogical Lectures. Let us add the Aphorisms on Pedagogy 
 collected by Hartenstein. 
 
4 HERBART 
 
 
 
 Halle. Niemeyer, in 1806, was issuing the fifth 
 edition of the third volume of his Fundamental 
 Principles of Education and Instruction; Fichte was 
 then delivering at Berlin his famous Discourses 
 to the German Nation. Everywhere an intellectual 
 movement of rare power was stirring and gathering 
 strength. The young professor at Gottingen at- 
 tached himself to this movement with all the ardor 
 of an intellect matured already by patient reflection, 
 and with the boldness of an exceptional originality, 
 he resolved to occupy a position apart, and deliver 
 severe attacks on the dominant philosophy. In the 
 midst of idealists lost in dreams of metaphysical 
 | pantheism, Herbart at once announced himself an 
 individualist and a realist who put faith only in 
 -experience. Already, in 1795, a philosopher only 
 twenty years old, he had dared to measure himself 
 ( with Schelling and to criticise his theories, and to 
 break with Fichte, whose course of lectures he was 
 following. In 1802 he had openly rejected the doc- 
 trine of Kant in his doctor's theses ; he there ar- 
 dently opposed the theory of " transcendental 
 liberty," and that of " forms of a priori intuition." 
 Yet it was this same man who was called seven 
 years later to occupy the chair of Kant at the 
 University of Konigsberg. He accepted it, so it 
 would seem, rather to oppose the work of his prede- 
 
HERBART 5 
 
 cessor than to continue it. Herbart in no way 
 concealed his joy at succeeding the greatest philoso- 
 pher of modern times, dissent from his doctrine in 
 no way diminishing the profound admiration in- 
 spired by his genius. "How great was my happi- 
 ness," he said, "in occupying this most celebrated 
 of all chairs of philosophy, the chair dreamt of in 
 ambitious youth, when I was studying the works 
 of the sage of Konigsberg. . . ." 
 
 For more than twenty years, from 1809 to 1833, 
 Herbart brought honor in his turn, in a new spirit, 
 to the chair held by Kant with so much fame from 
 1770 to 1797. In 1831 another great honor just 
 missed him, that of following Hegel, who had 
 recently died, and occupying after him the Chair 
 of Philosophy in the University of Berlin. But he 
 was suspected of liberalism, and the spirit of reaction 
 was triumphant in Prussia : he was not nominated. 
 So it was to Gottingen that he returned, to take the 
 place of Schulze, who also was an opponent of Kant. 
 
 How was the powerful intellect of Herbart formed ? 
 Certainly by grace of natural gifts. He was~a 
 striking refutation of his own psychological doc- 
 trine, defective in this respect, that it does not \ 
 acknowledge anyjpower whatever as innate in the 
 souE The forclTof his insight into philosophy re- 
 vealed itself early with extraordinary precocity; 
 
6 HERBART 
 
 and circumstances, however favorable they may 
 have been, would not suffice to explain the rapid 
 expansion of his genius. To the college graduate 
 at Oldenburg in 1793 was assigned for the custom- 
 ary leaving oration this weighty subject : " Causes 
 of the growth and decay of morality amongst the 
 common people/ 7 and his speech made a great 
 impression. The Jena student in 1796 wrote an 
 important monograph, On the Duty of the State in 
 Education. 1 
 
 In his youth Herbart was specially remarkable 
 for an extraordinary variety of pursuits : on the one 
 hand for an aptitude for understanding science, phys- 
 ics as well as mathematics, and on the other for an 
 equal delight in literature and the fine arts. "Poe- 
 try and mathematics," he said in one of his theses, 
 "are the two fountains of education." Already in 
 his play as a child he revealed the mental gift of 
 the mathematician, before he applied it boldly to 
 measuring psychological phenomena. Music had 
 attractions for him, and this taste lasted all his life ; 
 he played different instruments, the harp and vio- 
 lin, piano and violincello. He composed a sonata 
 (1808), and he wrote a treatise on harmony. He 
 was an eager student of antiquity, and yet imbued 
 
 1 Herbart returned to this subject in an essay published in 1810, 
 On the Task of Public Authorities in Education. 
 
HERBART 7 
 
 with the modern spirit. In conclusion, it might be 
 said that he found in himself, in the manifold diver- 
 sity of his own aptitudes, the germ that inspired 
 his favorite theory, the theory which perceives in 
 " many-sided interests," in a variety of tastes, the 
 first condition for the successful training of the 
 intellect. 
 
 The work of nature in forming the genius of Her- 
 bart was completed by intense personal effort and 
 persistent application. In the midst of the disturb- 
 ances of those troublous times, and while the wars of 
 Napoleon were thundering their cannon, he buried 
 himself in quiet study and solitary meditation. 
 Finally, the tender solicitude of a devoted mother 
 also helped and sustained him in his life of study. 
 His father, a state councillor in Oldenburg, a cold 
 and severe man, does not appear to have exercised 
 any influence on the formation of his mind. It was 
 otherwise in regard to his mother, a woman of 
 superior mental gifts despite some defects of char- 
 acter. In fact, she was of a capricious and irritable 
 disposition; in 1801 she separated from her husband 
 and went to live in Paris, where two years after- 
 ward she died. She had directed the education of 
 her son during his early years, with pleasure, herself ; 
 not, however, without severity and with some harsh- 
 ness of the Protestant type. On account of his 
 
8 HERBART 
 
 delicate health (when quite a child he burnt him- 
 self in a vessel of boiling water) she delayed send- 
 ing him to the grammar school until he was thirteen. 
 She learnt Greek in order to work with him. Ar- 
 dently longing for the honors which she saw would 
 be his in the future, she would not leave him even 
 during his adolescent years. She followed him to 
 Jena when he entered the university. She helped 
 him to make acquaintance with noted people, for 
 example, with Schiller. Certainly Herbart partly 
 owed to her to the enlightened care with which she 
 surrounded his entrance into life the unfolding of 
 his faculties, or, to use his own expression (since he 
 rejects the notion of faculties), the cultivation of 
 his intellect and the early acquisition of a wealth of 
 ideas. He was not an ungrateful son. He tenderly 
 returned the affection of his mother. During his 
 residence in Switzerland, in 1799, she was seriously 
 ill ; he was wretched at not being able to be with 
 her, and he wrote to his friends: "My excellent 
 mother, and eternal benefactress, how much suffer- 
 ing she has borne for me ! How much I wish I could 
 repay all her trouble ! With what joy I would 
 lighten her pain if that were possible ! . . ." 
 
 It has been said that Herbart was a born school- 
 master, that he bore the sign on his forehead. 
 That is quite true ; but it must be added, and there 
 
HERBART 9 
 
 is no contradiction in this, that he was also born a 
 philosopher. At twenty years of age he had ex- 
 plored all systems, the most ancient as well as the 
 most recent. He was not less familiar with the 
 philosophy of Plato, and even with that of Cicero, 
 than with modern philosophy. Before he turned 
 his attention to new speculations, and attempted 
 to grasp the bold conceptions of his great con- 
 temporaries, he had had as his first master in his 
 own home a disciple of Wolf, who initiated him into 
 classical philosophy. Studied almost from child- 
 hood, during adolescence philosophy grew to be 
 his only passion, and it continued a constant sub- 
 ject of reflection and research, no side of it being 
 neglected. In 1808 he published a book on ethics, 
 General Practical Philosophy; in 1816, his Manual of 
 Psychology; in 1824, Psychology as Science, founded, 
 according to a New Method, on Experience, Metaphys- 
 ics, and Mathematics; in 1828, General Metaphysics. 
 But all these essays at constructing a comprehensive 
 philosophy tended, however, toward one end only, 
 an end that lay nearer to his heart than any other, 
 to establish a science of education, the aim and 
 completion of all other sciences. 
 
 If the philosopher Herbart was primarily a teacher, 
 if he became a teacher in youth to remain a teacher 
 until his last hour, this was in a great degree owing 
 
10 HERBART 
 
 to the practical knowledge which a three years' 
 experience as tutor enabled him to acquire when 
 a youth of twenty years. Circumstances made him, 
 in 1797, the tutor of the three sons of M. de Steiger, 
 the oldest of whom was barely fourteen. This was a 
 most fruitful experience, for he took his duties as 
 /instructor very seriously. He studied the characters 
 / of his pupils closely; he gathered observations, 
 I combined methods, thought out principles. The 
 reports which he sent twice a month to M. de Steiger 
 to keep him informed about the studies, the con- 
 duct, and progress of his children, five of these 
 reports have been preserved and published, 
 bear witness to the delicacy of his observing power, 
 the clearness and fulness of his views, as well as 
 to the nobility of the sentiments which inspired him 
 in accomplishing a task which possessed his whole 
 heart. He left his beloved pupils with regret; he 
 never forgot them ; their old tutor remained their 
 friend ; he corresponded with the eldest, Karl, until 
 1817. There is no doubt that it was this first 
 contact with children, this practical initiation into 
 the duties of a teacher, that decided forever the 
 destiny of Herbart, determining the pedagogical 
 tendency which was henceforth to control all his 
 labors. 
 His residence in Switzerland was also the occa- 
 
HERBART 11 
 
 sion of his contact with Pestalozzi, and the influence 
 exerted by the humble teacher of Burgdorf on the 
 greatest of modern education philosophers is un- 
 deniable. Doubtless there are profound differences 
 between them, all the distance which exists between 
 the floating, vague enthusiasm of a dreamer, about 
 whom it has been said justly that he had more 
 heart than head, and the scholarly reflection, the 
 methodical reasoning, of a profound and subtle 
 psychologist. On the one side excessive and ill- 
 regulated sentiment; nothing beyond "partial 
 intuitions/' flashes of genius, no well-defined sys- 
 tem; on the other, an astonishing gift for abstrac- 
 tion and excessive systematization. In spite of 
 these differences of temperament, the two had 
 much in common. 1 * Both accepted sense-perception 
 as their starting-point. ' ' Sense-perception," said 
 Herbart, "is the great inspiring idea of the noble 
 Pestalozzi ; but he applied it over a narrow sphere, 
 only that of elementary education." Herbart 
 wanted it to illuminate all parts of teaching and 
 education. "The essential element in Pestalozzi's 
 method of instruction," he wrote again, "is that he 
 
 1 The importance that Herbart attached to the work of Pesta- 
 lozzi is shown by the fact that he devoted to him three pamphlets 
 in succession : On the Recent Book of Pestalozzi, How Gertrude, etc., 
 1802; The A B C of Sense-perception, 1802; and finally, A 
 Criterium for judging Pestalozzi's Method of Instruction, 1804. 
 
12 HERBART 
 
 understood that the business of teaching is to con- 
 
 I struct the mind of the child by dint of definite and 
 
 (clear experiences." And that is also the essential 
 
 / element of Herbart's method. VThey ^greejr^gajd - 
 
 ing the necessity of selecting and adapting the 
 
 arious subjects of instruction in logical coordination 
 
 needs of the child as he 
 
 develops^ naturally. The points of contact between 
 them are numerous, the descent is clearly marked. 
 But what in the case of Pestalozzi a man un- 
 skilled, after all, in psychological questions was 
 only an outline, a kind of instinctive divination, 
 this grew through the industrious application of 
 Herbart into a scientific doctrine, a complete pic- 
 ture, all the details of which had been sought out 
 and examined with minute care. 
 
 The pedagogy of Herbart aspires, in short, to 
 become a science. Here, for the first time in the 
 history of education, we see ourselves confronted 
 by a strongly organized body of doctrine. In con- 
 ceiving his system Herbart was guided by abstract 
 ideas; but, be it stated also, he was something 
 more than a pure theorist. During the whole of 
 his career as professor he was not satisfied to ex- 
 pound the result of his reflections ex cathedra; he 
 always endeavored to control and justify his ideas 
 by experience./ His first care on assuming the 
 
HERBART 13 
 
 chair at Konigsberg, was to organize a kind of 
 practical laboratory as companion to his lectures. 1 
 Kant had already thought of this when he said: 
 " We need normal schools and experimental schools." 
 It was this plan which Herbart made an effort to 
 carry out by establishing a pedagogical seminary, 
 where a few university students, eight or ten at 
 most, prepared themselves to teach under his direc- 
 tion ; and also a practice school, where a small num- 
 ber of children (at most fifteen) gave opportunity 
 for experiment and for putting to proof and testing 
 the theories of the master. Such was the origin of 
 those institutions for pedagogical apprenticeship, 
 which have been founded in Germany 2 during the 
 last century at Halle, at Leipzig, and elsewhere; 
 above all, at Jena, where first Stoy, the direct pupil 
 of Herbart and a student in the Konigsberg Semi- 
 nary, and then Rein, one of the most eminent repre- 
 sentatives of the Herbartian tradition, have followed 
 their master. 
 
 His days being divided between occupations 
 which were complements the one of the other, so 
 
 1 See the details furnished by Rein about the pedagogical semi- 
 nary in the Encyklopddisches Handbuch der Padagogik, t. v. p. 208. 
 
 2 See the recent interesting work of M. Chabot, La Pedagogic au 
 Lycee, notes de voyage sur les seminaires de gymnase en Allemagne, 
 Paris, Golin, 1903. See also, La Preparation professionelle a 
 l'enseignement secondaire, Paris, 1902, by Ch. V. Langlois. 
 
14 HERBART 
 
 arranged that he could at the same time both 
 think and act, Herbart led a happy life: that 
 is the usual lot of men who study and act both. 
 Nothing in his life recalls the dramatic and vexed 
 career of a Comenius or a Pestalozzi. Nevertheless, 
 he suffered some reverses. About the year 1800, he 
 passed through a wretched attack of pessimism. He 
 lost his health ; he felt as if each winter as it came 
 would be his last. Also at the beginning of his 
 career he was poor. At Gottingen, he was forced 
 to exert himself to the utmost to make a bare 
 living, wearing himself out by giving private 
 lessons. And when the government demanded 
 five hundred francs as his contribution to the 
 war fund, he had difficulty in making both ends 
 meet. A more lasting trouble was the small 
 measure of success which attended his ideas of 
 reform amongst colleagues indifferent and even 
 hostile. He had to suffer and be vexed by the 
 opposition of elderly professors, who were sunk in 
 routine. He was struggling, he said, "against 
 wind and tide." 1 And again, "My poor pedagogy 
 has not been able to lift up its voice." But calm 
 and patient by nature, Herbart followed his course, 
 without letting himself be disturbed beyond meas- 
 
 1 See the pamphlet published in 1814, On my Struggle against 
 the Prevailing Philosophy. 
 
HERBART 15 
 
 ure by public opinion. ' ' Although he was not averse 
 to winning honor," wrote one of his biographers, 1 
 "he preferred to await it even vainly, rather than 
 gain it by the methods of the charlatan methods 
 which he judged unworthy of philosophy, and which, 
 in the case of some of his contemporaries, he severely 
 castigated." 2 
 
 For the rest, a union which he contracted in 1811 
 at Konigsberg helped to render his life happy and 
 fortunate. He married a young lady gifted with an 
 intelligence which fitted her to be his intellectual 
 companion. It was & marriage of mutual affection. 
 Herbart is represented by his biographer Har- 
 tenstein as an active man, of short stature, large 
 blue glancing eyes, and resolute gait. At a party 
 in Konigsberg, one evening, the company was en- 
 gaged in the innocent amusement of playing cha- 
 rades. The word selected was "Herbart." The 
 first syllable was represented as signifying "a 
 
 1 The chief biographers of Herbart are Hartenstein and Fr. 
 Bartholomai. Bartholomews biography has been republished in 
 the series of Pddagogische Schriften, edited by von Sallwiirk; we 
 quote from this edition at present. 
 
 2 We pass over without comment the regrettable incident which 
 occurred at Gottingen in 1837, consequent on the coup d'etat 
 of the king of Hanover. Herbart separated himself from his 
 colleagues, many of whom resigned their chairs. The position he 
 took up was regarded as a weak acquiescence in the tyranny of 
 the government. To justify himself, he published a memorandum 
 entitled, Recollections of the Catastrophe at Gottingen in 1837. 
 
16 HERBART 
 
 gentleman" (Herr)j the second as "the ornament 
 of the face" (Bart, beard). Miss Drake, a young 
 English lady, educated in Germany, was present, 
 and when she was asked what the whole word 
 represented, she exclaimed in earnest, "The whole, 
 that is the ornament of the University." Herbart 
 smiled. A few days later he asked and obtained 
 the hand of the agreeable lady who had declared her 
 sentiments so prettily. Their union of heart and 
 mind lasted undimmed by any cloud for nearly 
 thirty years. It was severed by the death of 
 Herbart in 1841; a death swift and easy, which 
 overtook him almost in his lecture-room. On the 
 9th of August he delivered a lecture, as usual, 
 before a large audience. On the llth he was 
 attacked by apoplexy. "Blessed apoplexy," a great 
 French surgeon called it. 
 
ii 
 
 IN the system in which Herbart sought to con- 
 struct a new metaphysics, psychology, logic, aesthet- 
 ics, and ethics, everything is interdependent and 
 connected; and his pedagogy is only a fragment of 
 the great whole. It is wrapped in a general con- 
 ception of nature and humanity, which determines 
 and explains it. It is, above all, directly dependent 
 upon and derived from his psychology. If his 
 General Pedagogy, at the time of its appearance in 
 1806, appeared obscure to his readers, that was 
 because Herbart left the principles of his philosophy 
 too much concealed in it : he had not yet explained 
 them separately. 
 
 Although this is not the place either to study in 
 detail or to criticise thoroughly Herbartian philoso- 
 phy, it is yet necessary, if we wish to understand 
 his pedagogy, to make a rapid review of his psy- 
 chology : we shall select from it only what is indis- 
 pensable. 
 
 The psychology of Herbart is usually represented 
 as an attempt more or less useless to apply the cal- 
 
 17 
 
18 HERBART 
 
 culus to the measurement of mental phenomena. 1 
 In fact, Herbart considered the states of conscious- 
 ness as so many forces, isolated and independent of 
 each other, which, since quantity forms one of their 
 elements, may be valued and numbered mathe- 
 matically. But this is, however, merely a peculiar 
 aspect of his theory, and the one most disputed. 
 Herbart 's general psychology is a matter apart from 
 these mathematical speculations ; it is new, profound, 
 and lays claim to originality, although it is allied 
 to the empiricism of Locke, of Hume, and Condillac. 
 To Herbart we owe, at least, the first attempt 
 to frame a scientific psychology a psychology 
 which seeks to establish a definite order and a 
 determined sequence amongst the states of con- 
 sciousness. It is a bold rejoinder to the idealism 
 of Kant and Fichte. To the philosophers who 
 regarded the world, time, and space, as a purely 
 
 1 It was especially in the Letters on the Application of Psy- 
 chology to Pedagogy, addressed to Professor Griepenkel , and written 
 towards 1831, that Herbart indulged in mathematical speculation 
 and in abstract digressions. Although we owe thanks to M. Dereux 
 for having conscientiously analyzed this work in his articles in the 
 Revue Pedagogique in 1890, we must not look to that work to find 
 the essential ideas of Herbart or, at least, the ideas which ought to 
 live. The Letters are an incomplete work, and the author treats in 
 them only the preliminaries of education ; he examines the diverse 
 temperaments which condition the degree of education possible to 
 the child. The projected work was to comprise three parts, of which 
 he composed only the first. 
 
HERBART 19 
 
 subjective creation of the intellect, Herbart opposed 
 a conception which, on the contrary, sees in the 
 mind only a reflection of things outside, a construc- 
 tion from sense experiences. To the metaphysicians 
 who represented everything as issuing from within 
 the soul and the thinking subject, a realist replied, 
 who, by way of extreme reaction, claimed to estab- 
 lish that everything emanates from objects and from 
 the external world, and who was bent on discover- 
 ing in sense-perception all the conditions of the birth 
 and development of mind. 
 
 The point of departure of the psychological 
 conception of Herbart is that there are no faculties 
 in the soul. This must be accepted in its strictest 
 sense. Herbart does not admit in the mind any 
 original force, any native energy. Others had dis- 
 missed to the land of dreams the old machinery of 
 innate ideas: Herbart went farther, he rejected 
 not only ideas but innate faculties. The faculty 
 theory is, in his view, only a mythology. Faculties 
 are idols that must be overthrown. In the soul 
 there are only successive happenings. The mind, 
 in its original state, js^ merely a tabula rasa. It 
 has no content. It is created bit by bit, thanks 
 to representations or ideas (Vorstellungeri) brought 
 to it by sense-perception. According to the popular 
 view (and whatever Herbart thought, this is the cor- 
 
20 HERBART 
 
 rect view), nature has endowed the mind with latent 
 powers, inherited or innate, and these mental predis- 
 positions, developing with the help of the senses, give 
 birth to the inner world of thought. Mind is thus 
 conceived as a primitive force which puts something 
 of its own more or less, according to the system 
 into its successive acquisitions. In Herbart's theory 
 thetfe is nothing of this sort. To Euclid you grant his 
 axioms and postulates, and he produces from these 
 a whole geometry. In the same way you grant to 
 Herbart his sense representations, and by an in- 
 genious manipulation of these representations, from 
 their interplay and reciprocal reactions, he claims to 
 build a mind, sensibility, and will as well as in- 
 tellect. According to him it is not mind which, 
 preexisting at least as power, pursues ideas; it is, 
 on the contrary, representations or ideas which, 
 following each other and uniting together, in a way 
 pursue mind, and which, by forming groups, end 
 by fashioning it. They enter the soul through the 
 avenue of the senses, and they become conscious by 
 accident, as it were; they pass out and return as 
 they please, or rather, as it pleases other ideas, 
 which now summon them, now repulse and replace 
 them, in a perpetual coming and going. 
 
 Let us say at once that it is not easy to under- 
 stand how Herbart, with such a conception of in- 
 
HERBART 21 
 
 tellectual development, could deem himself justified 
 in holding to a belief in the existence of a soul. It 
 is vain to say that the soul is a " monad," simple and 
 homogeneous, superior to the myriads of monads 
 which people the universe; this undefined being, 
 this hypothetical substratum, appears to be a pure 
 negation, for it has no activity of its own, possesses 
 at most a vis inertice, power to enter into relation- 
 ship with the world of sense through the medium 
 of the nervous system. The monad of Leibniz 
 was quite a different thing: isolated and shut in, 
 having no opening to the external world, its prin- 
 ciple of activity was in itself. Herbart's monad, as 
 he himself defined it, "has originally no ideas, desires, 
 or feelings. Itself knows nothing of itself, nothing 
 of the external world. Still more, it has no forms of 
 perception, as Kant thought, no laws of will or action, 
 no sort of predisposition remote even from all that ; 
 its nature is entirely unknown." * One might just 
 as well say that it does not exist; and if Herbart 
 grants to it a power of "conservation," in face of 
 other monads which try to destroy it, one wants to 
 ask him what has it to conserve ? To deny to it all 
 preformation, impoverish and empty it, so to speak, 
 
 1 Text-book of Psychology, Part III, 152, 153. In addition he 
 says: "I would not admit any kind of germs, or any kind of 
 natural predispositions; such predispositions are the death of 
 psychology." 
 
22 HERBART 
 
 to the point of depriving it of all initial force, does 
 not this, in fact, amount to denying its existence? 
 
 Nevertheless, Herbart represents himself as a 
 spiritualist; he calls materialism an " absurdity." 
 The soul which he has reduced to nothing, he de- 
 scribes as mistress of the body which she rules ; and 
 this preeminence he attributes to the place which he 
 assigns to it in a locality of the brain: "a splendid 
 situation where all the nerves meet and end." 
 
 However that may be, such is the way in which 
 Herbart reconstructs the soul and builds a scaffold- 
 ing for his intellectualism on the ruins of the innate, 
 without any primitive foundation, with nothing 
 except the deposit of sensations; for his system 
 might be defined as absolute intellectualism on 
 an empirical basis. I Mind, as we have said, is a 
 vague and empty place, into which are introduced 
 one after another different representations of the 
 external world, " presentations" of the senses. 
 Mind cannot be said to be conscious of these repre- 
 sentations or ideas, since it is itself nothing but the 
 whole group of ideas; but each is conscious of itself, 
 and it remains so until it yields place, as it were, to 
 other ideas. Then it falls back below what Herbart 
 calls the " threshold of consciousness." When they 
 have returned to the region of shadows, all the ideas 
 acquired form in the depths, one might say the crypt, 
 
HERBART 23 
 
 of the soul, as it were, an unconscious or subcon- 
 scious underground region. They are not, indeed, 
 "annihilated, nor have they disappeared forever"; 
 they are merely latent ; they continue in a condition 
 'of tendency, and they aspire to reproduce and re- 
 instate themselves, as soon as a favorable occasion 
 will permit this to occur. Amongst all the represen- 
 tative elements which have gradually enriched the 
 mind, there is in progress a sort of struggle for con- 
 sciousness, analogous to the struggle for life amongst 
 individuals in society. 
 
 I/ But it is not by chance or regardless of law that 
 : the ideas stored up reappear in order to again take 
 possession of the light. There are both static and 
 dynamic states of mind. Static, when ideas have, 
 so to speak, fallen asleep and entered a state of 
 rest or repose; dynamic, when circumstances set 
 them free and recall them to conscious life. Ideas, 
 moreover, find in themselves the power to render 
 mutual assistance, or to struggle with each other. 
 They are mental forces which act on each other by 
 attraction or repulsion, though it is not easy to 
 understand how an idea, which is only a passive 
 representation of an external object, can become 
 active, when there is no feeling and willing subject 
 who communicates activity to it. v But the power 
 which Herbart has withdrawn from the soul and 
 
24 HERBART 
 
 the faculties he must discover somewhere, and he 
 attributes it to ideas. If ideas are more or less 
 alike, they tend to form groups and unite : that is 
 what we call a " fusion." If they are merely dif- 
 ferent, unlike, they get mixed and entangled, form- 
 ing a " complex." If they are contrary, opposed to 
 each other, they cannot coexist, and they drive 
 each other out. 
 
 The soul, then, is like the stage of a theatre, on to 
 which the actors come in their turns to occupy 
 the front place before the footlights. The first 
 person appears, and stays until another, entering 
 in his turn, either expels him by violence and throws 
 him back behind the curtain, or, on the contrary, 
 tells him to stay, and, if they can find a common sub- 
 ject of conversation, makes friends with him. The 
 soul, in other terms, is only a series of states of 
 consciousness, a flow and ebb of ideas, which now 
 emerge like rising stars above the horizon, now 
 vanish into night. Ideas agree with each other or 
 struggle together : the soul, a dumb creature, has no 
 objection to raise. Hence Herbart thought that ideas 
 might be subjected to quantitative determination; 
 that was a chimerical notion which we may wholly 
 reject in spite of the importance which Herbart him- 
 self may^have attached to it ; but when the notion is 
 transferred from the realm of pure ideas to that of 
 
HERBART 25 
 
 sensations and psychological phenomena (so far as 
 they are allied with physiological manifestations) it 
 may lead to solid and certain results ; hence we may 
 say that Herbart, by one of his errors, even opened 
 up the road for the fruitful researches in psycho- 
 physiology of Lotze, Fechner, Helmholtz, and Wundt. 1 
 
 Everything, then, with Herbart is reduced to 
 psychical mechanism; " fusions" and " complexes" 
 of representations explain all phenomena of the in- 
 tellect : abstraction, judgment, comparison, reason, 
 the notion of self, not leaving out memory and im- 
 agination. The other phenomena of the soul, sen- 
 timents, desires, volition, are adequately accounted 
 for by the relation of ideas to each other. Senti- 
 ments are no longer elementary and primitive states, 
 but states transitory and derived : fleeting modifica- 
 tions of ideas. They are the shadows that pass: 
 the foundation of the mind remains, and this founda- 
 tion consists of ideas. Education, therefore, must 
 be constructed on ideas, and not on the shifting 
 sands of sensation. 
 
 Sensation, and this opinion of Herbart has 
 maintained its prestige in the German philosophy of 
 the nineteenth century, sensation is only a mode, 
 
 1 On the relation of the doctrine of Herbart to experimental 
 psychology, see the recent work of Th. Jehen: Das Verhaltniss 
 der Herbartischen Psychologic zur physiologisch experimentellen 
 Psychologic, Berlin, 1900. 
 
26 HERBART 
 
 a function of the intellect. Pain arises from a con- 
 flict, an antagonism of two ideas, and from the result- 
 ing state of tension. Pleasure is the consequence 
 of the union of two ideas which are in accord. 
 Pleasure comes from the forward movement of 
 thought, pain from its arrest. Desire is only a 
 strong, vivid representation, which tends to maintain 
 itself above the " threshold of consciousness"; and, 
 finally, volition, a special form of desire, appears 
 when a representation which tends to reappear is 
 assisted by other representations, and, in addition, 
 belief that it can be realized is present. 
 
 The psychological system of Herbart, as far as 
 one can judge from this short study, is extremely 
 ingenious; but it is difficult to perceive in it any- 
 thing but a work of his imagination. It proceeds, 
 in fact, neither from the old method of introspective 
 observation, the evidence for which may be sought 
 in the testimony given by the consciousness of 
 others (and this may or may not confirm what you 
 believe you have discovered in your own conscious- 
 ness), nor the method of modern psychology, the 
 psychology which seeks the conditions of mental 
 life in the study of the nervous system. 
 
 Physiologists may rightly say to Herbart: You 
 neglect and slight the function of the brain. At 
 least you make very rare allusions to it. You forget 
 
HERBART 27 
 
 that ideas are only conscious manifestations of 
 molecular movements and vibrations of the cerebral 
 masses. On the other hand, an objection may be 
 raised by the spiritualists : You reduce to nothing 
 the activity of the soul ; you leave it only the func- 
 tion of King Log (roi faineant). In ascribing to ideas 
 alone the duty of explaining mental movement, 
 you annihilate the thinking subject. We can see 
 how they come one after the other, brought in by 
 the senses ; but there is no one to receive them. . . . 
 Herbart is wrong on both counts. He eliminates 
 at one stroke the double framework : the brain and 
 the general consciousness, the material substance, 
 and the intellectual principle of psychic phenomena. 
 If " representations" pass back and forth in the mind 
 like marionettes on the stage of a Guignol theatre, 
 or Chinese shadows behind a screen, that is riot, as 
 he thought, because of relationships between them. 
 If they obey a settled order of succession, it is be- 
 cause they are directed by an invisible hand; that 
 is to say, either by the brain or by the soul. Thus, 
 as M. Fouillee has expressed it: "A cloud in the sky 
 does not take the form of a tower because it had 
 previously the form of a mountain, but it took the 
 two forms successively under the action of the wind 
 which drives it." * 
 
 1 M. Fouillee, L'tvolutionnisme des ide es-forces, p. 34. 
 
28 HERBART 
 
 To convince oneself that the hypotheses of Her- 
 bart are false, it suffices to confront them with a few 
 facts from experience. Let us recall, for example, 
 any moment of our lives when we felt a keen sorrow 
 or great joy. Immediately after this emotional dis- 
 turbance, whether painful or pleasant, is it not a 
 fact that some interior force, the emotion still thrill- 
 ing us, summons incessantly to consciousness ideas 
 which correspond to our feeling, ideas connected with 
 sorrow or pleasure? Is it possible that the mere 
 resemblance of these ideas, whether sad or merry, 
 to the idea dominating our mind, explains their 
 union ? No ; what proves that the force of attrac- 
 tion does not lie in the ideas alone, that its source 
 must be sought where it resides, in an inner feeling, 
 is the fact that the busiest occupations and repre- 
 sentations, quite new and unlike, of such a nature 
 as completely to turn aside the current of thoughts, 
 do not hinder the wave of wretchedness or satis- 
 faction from overtaking us again in the middle of 
 cares of quite another kind. We may work, or we 
 may seek distraction in vain, or even succeed for 
 several hours in turning our attention to objects 
 which have no relation to the happy or unhappy 
 event which has disturbed our life, but that does 
 not hinder the sorrowful or joyful ideas from gain- 
 ing the ascendant again, at a moment when we 
 
HERBART 29 
 
 are thinking least about them. What can be said, 
 except that ideas do not control themselves by 
 virtue of their relations ; that above them there is 
 a hidden power which governs them, and which 
 intervenes to disturb the order of their succession. 
 
 Let us consider another case, recalling an ex- 
 perience somewhat as follows : during hours of soli- 
 tary meditation, when the senses were mute, even 
 when we were controlling the stream of ideas with a 
 strong hand, the thread of thought to use Herbart's 
 expression was suddenly interrupted and cut short 
 by an idea quite foreign to the matter which occupied 
 us. An unexpected reminiscence, a landscape long 
 ago passed from our vision, the image of some one we 
 have not seen for years, these come and disturb 
 us by their sudden apparition. They come from I 
 do not know where, and they have no relation what- 
 ever to the reflections which were absorbing us. An 
 internal spring was touched, a latent activity of the 
 imagination, or modification of the cellules of the 
 brain, and caused a sleeping image to awaken. In > 
 any case, the logical association of ideas does not 
 hold good here, and the theory of Herbart regard- 
 ing an intrinsic interlacing, a normal union of ideas, 
 falls once more to the ground. 
 
 But, true or false, the psychology of Herbart is 
 the foundation of his pedagogy, and it is possible 
 
30 HERBART 
 
 already to discern, according to what has just been 
 said, what will be the general characteristic features 
 of his system of education. 
 
 In the first place, from a psychological intellec- 
 tualism which explains the soul as consisting only 
 of a series or a network of representations or ideas, 
 arises a pedagogical intellectualism which makes 
 instruction, that is, the acquisition of ideas, the only 
 basis of education. Even the formation of charac- 
 ter will depend on forming the intellect. There 
 will be no manner of separation or scission between 
 intellectual and moral education. The understand- 
 ing will be the principle of the will, and actions will 
 conform to ideas. 
 
 A second consequence of this psychological em- 
 piricism of Herbart is that the influence of education 
 .sets up a claim to be considered omnipotent. Since 
 ^,the souls of men are originally alike, it depends 
 bn education alone to form them. If there are no 
 inborn intellectual tendencies which assist the 
 educator, neither does the soul inherit vicious or 
 adverse inclinations to hinder his efforts. He can 
 write at will on the white pages of the child's 
 understanding ; on this condition, however, that the 
 supposition in the education of the solitary Emile 
 is made actual, viz., that from his infancy only one 
 master controls the pupil. The destiny of each 
 
31 
 
 individual depends on the grouping of ideas which 
 the wisdom of his parents or the ability of his 
 teachers has been able to bring about in his mind 
 when a child. From this the conclusion inevitably 
 follows that education is the mistress ruling the 
 future of mankind; if, by a strange contradiction, 
 Herbart did not restore to the body the innate pre- 
 dispositions of which he was content to rob the soul, 
 and attribute to the organism, the physical tem- 
 perament, those individual characteristics, defects, 
 or virtues, which sometimes favor the action of edu- 
 cation, sometimes oppose it, and thus fix in a meas- 
 ure the character and destiny of individuals in 
 advance, now by over-exciting intellectual activity, 
 now by checking it. "Bodily differences are re- 
 flected in psychical manifestations." The body is 
 the physiological obstacle, the hereditary enemy. 
 It is to the body that individuality belongs. In 
 consequence, Herbart does not indulge that simple 
 illusion that one could produce geniuses or even 
 talented men at will. He admits that the best 
 education sometimes fails, that great men have edu- 
 cated themselves, that men of moderate ability re- 
 main such, in spite of all the efforts of their masters. 
 None the less Herbart is warranted by his system 
 as a whole in ascribing very great influence to edu- 
 cation. In his pedagogy, therefore, he belongs to the 
 
 i 
 
32 HERBART 
 
 believers, the men of faith. "Without the joyful 
 hope inspired by meditating on youth, how could one 
 overcome the benumbing impressions made by the 
 idea that the world might remain always what it is 
 
 now." 
 
 A third point, and one of the most important: 
 there can no longer be any question about the culti- 
 vation of faculties in a system which denies that they 
 exist. Although in current psychology " faculties" 
 are no longer held to be anything beyond conven- 
 tional terms, labels for connecting a series of phe- 
 nomena, methods of education are none the less still 
 in part adjusted to suit the old faculty theory. 
 Hence we still witness examples of mischievous 
 educational procedure. We speak, for example, of 
 developing the memory as such, as if there were a 
 memory independent of the successive ideas that 
 enter consciousness. Regarding judgment and rea- 
 son, the same is true. Who amongst us has not 
 made sacrifice to this ancient prejudice of classic 
 psychology? In that case it would then matter 
 little what knowledges were used to cultivate the 
 so-called faculties, whether or no they were inter- 
 esting. Some science or other, arithmetic, for ex- 
 ample, would be taught, not in order to know it, but 
 to exercise the reasoning faculty. Herbart's posi- 
 tion in this paramount and delicate question is alto- 
 
HERBART 33 
 
 gether different. In his opinion, the knowledges are 
 valuable onfy for themselves by reason of their 
 intrinsic utility, and not for the doubtful profit 
 which formal culture might claim to derive from 
 them. 
 
 It seems an argument on his side, that an aptitude 
 acquired in one branch of knowledge does not appear 
 applicable to studies in general, without losing any 
 of its power and with like results, yet this should be 
 the case if faculties really existed. Certain children 
 have good memories at home and none at school. 
 That would be enough to prove that there is no 
 memory faculty applicable without distinction to 
 all objects; that there are only groups of recollec- 
 tions; hence we may have acquired with ease a 
 knowledge series in a certain sphere, and be quite 
 incapable of acquiring fresh knowledge in another 
 field. A certain study cultivates the mind in a 
 certain direction, not in all directions. 
 
 In the same way we have known children who at 
 twelve years of age gave clear proofs of the strength 
 of their reasoning power in mathematical science; 
 that was because they had just been studying, 
 mathematics. Afterwards they neglected this study. 
 They exercised their reason in other studies, histori- 
 cal or philosophical. At eighteen years of age they 
 found themselves quite unskilled in understanding 
 
 \ 
 
34 HERBART 
 
 mathematics. Herbart, then, has some reason to 
 maintain that the general cultivation of hypotheti- 
 cal faculties is absurd, that the only real education 
 is such as furnishes the intellect with positive knowl- 
 edge. As an English humorist has said, "The 
 prescription for developing digestive power is not to 
 chew elastic rubber, it is to grow strong on good 
 beefsteaks." In the same way intellect is cultivated, 
 not by purely formal and empty exercises, but by 
 solid, substantial, and nourishing instruction. 
 
 Let us note in the fourth place in Herbart's 
 psychology an assumption of very wide bearing in 
 pedagogy: his theory of "apperception," a term 
 that has found favor in modern philosophy. It 
 was not new, for Kant employed it to signify the 
 elemental knowledge of self, anterior to all percep- 
 tion. Herbart, however, gave it a different mean- 
 ing. His apperception must be understood as 
 applying to sense-perception, in so far as it is made 
 clear and complete by representations already ac- 
 quired by the mind. As a matter of fact, the new 
 expression was, perhaps, not quite necessary; the 
 term "conception" would have sufficed, if conception 
 is, as sometimes defined, the apprehension of an 
 object by the intellect. You look at a rose : your 
 senses tell you its form, color, and convey to you 
 its perfume. But with these simple, immediate, per- 
 
HERBART 35 
 
 ceptions others are united that have been formerly 
 acquired, and which are more or less distinct: 
 that this small round thing, red or white, is called 
 a rose, that you have seen others similar in other 
 gardens, etc.; this is, then, an apperception. Mr. 
 Stout, one of the commentators of Herbart who 
 has given an excellent exposition of his psychology, 1 
 has said that apperception is "the act by which a 
 mental system appropriates a new element:" one 
 might define it more clearly yet as the act by which 
 ideas already acquired assimilate and incorporate 
 a new idea. In consequence, they modify and alter 
 the perception : whence it may be inferred that two 
 persons never have an identical apperception of the 
 same object. Above all, ideas facilitate or hinder 
 the acquisition of knowledge : groups of ideas pre- 
 viously acquired do or do not lend themselves to 
 further acquisitions. From this way of conceiving 
 the mind at work acquiring knowledge, Herbart 
 derived the inspiration of some of his methods of 
 teaching which do the most honor to his pedagogical 
 insight, notably as regards the necessity of rendering 
 the mind ready to receive instruction. In order 
 that a new representative may be received into the 
 circle of ideas, that it may find its way with ease 
 and security amidst the network of knowledges, 
 
 1 See Mind, 1888, 1889. 
 
36 HERBART 
 
 the teacher, at the beginning of each lesson, must 
 prepare the ground; he must, so to speak, summon 
 up a mental escort into the presence of the newcomer 
 to welcome and introduce him. In other words, 
 the teacher must put before the child only such 
 notions as can easily combine with those he already 
 has, and thus form groups of ideas associated logi- 
 cally and united strongly ; on this will depend not 
 only wealth of mind but also strength and force of 
 character. The old faculty psychology taught us that 
 when pupils enter the class-room they had at their 
 disposal an intelligence and memory quite ready to 
 learn anything whatever. But this view is false; 
 it is necessary to summon, to awaken and set in 
 order, those ideas to which the topic selected for the 
 day's lesson can be adjusted; we must eliminate and 
 crowd out all preoccupations which might hinder 
 the effect of the teacher's words, his instruction, from 
 penetrating ; we must thus clear the road for distinct 
 and fruitful apperception. 
 
 If it was his own psychology which suggested to 
 Herbart those processes in instruction which he 
 extols, it also led to his definite conclusion regarding 
 the preference to be given to public or to home edu- 
 cation. He rejected the opinions of his master at 
 Jena, the famous Fichte, as much in pedagogy as 
 in philosophy. Fichte, having specially in view 
 
HERBART 37 
 
 national and civic education, sketched his plans for 
 regiments of young men in the gymnasiums ; Herbart, 
 on the contrary, is concerned above all with the 
 individual himself, with the man rather than with 
 the citizen. He makes the reproach against the 
 State as educator that it thinks only of preparing 
 bureaucrats. Home education, if that were always 
 possible, would be superior to all other. "That boy," 
 said he, "is infinitely more accessible to the influ- 
 ences of education who has been a long time educated 
 by one person, especially if he has had the good for- 
 tune to be educated by his mother." He was here 
 recalling a personal experience. When a child passes 
 from hand to hand, it is difficult for the masters 
 who follow each other to establish authority over 
 him. For the rest, Herbart recognized that domestic 
 education is, as a rule, an unrealizable ideal, that 
 the family is too much occupied otherwise to fulfil 
 its duty in this respect, and besides it is often 
 too noisy and gay to fulfil it well. But since 
 parents must send away their children, let them 
 at least be followed in thought, and never lost from 
 view. These are truths worth recalling at a time when 
 families abandon their children to the State more 
 and more, and shift on to it the burden of caring for 
 and educating their children. The great mischief 
 of the public school, according to Herbart, is that it 
 
38 HERBART 
 
 collects together children who are very different, 
 unequal morally and intellectually, for the pur- 
 pose of giving them a uniform education. Even 
 supposing that all had in the beginning the same 
 starting-point, they have already had time when 
 they become scholars to undergo very different im- 
 pressions, whether at home or in society, and these 
 have modified their character and intellect. Hence 
 the inferiority of public-school education, which, 
 bending all heads under the same yoke, cannot 
 mete out and adapt the rules of discipline and 
 methods of instruction to the many and various 
 aptitudes of the scholars as would a teacher in con- 
 versation with a single child. No matter whether 
 they are ailing or strong, it presents to them the same 
 difficulties to conquer ; whether their pace is rapid 
 or slow, it conducts them along the same road and 
 in the same order. The disadvantage of public 
 instruction is still more marked when, following 
 the theory of apperception, we consider that in- 
 struction can bring forth all its fruit only when the 
 teacher knows how to impart it skilfully with all 
 kind of precaution, adjusting it to the complicated 
 network of ideas of which the intellect of each child 
 is composed. 
 
 A philosopher who, like Herbart, denies all innate- 
 ness and mental heredity, would seem condemned, 
 
HERBART 39 
 
 in consequence, to ignore the special and individual 
 elements in human personality. But by reason of 
 the influence ascribed by him to the physical or- 
 ganism, an influence varying from one child to 
 another, Herbart reestablishes the individuality, 
 which his system appeared at first to compromise. 
 To this subject he devotes long chapters. Hence 
 he does not admit that to be an educator it is suffi- 
 cient to have studied abstract psychology and its 
 general principles. Since it is the individual that 
 we have to educate, it is the individual that it is 
 necessary to know. As an English humorist has 
 said, it is not a matter of grinding in a pedagogical 
 mortar the sixty pupils of a class of which John is a 
 member, until they have been reduced, so to speak, 
 to the state of a mass of uniform youth, in order 
 to obtain the average. John is not a quotient; he 
 is an actual individual being, who must be studied 
 in his own character, with the virtues and faults 
 which mark him off from all his comrades. 1 
 
 From the writings of Herbart one could gather 
 precious contributions for the psychology of the 
 adolescent yet to be written, and which, when once 
 in existence, will render not less service to the art and 
 science of education than the psychology of the little 
 
 1 John Adams, The Herbartian Psychology applied to Education, 
 London, 1898. 
 
40 HERBART 
 
 child. I mean a descriptive psychology, in which 
 different temperaments will be distinguished, causes 
 of their diversity analyzed, and then the means 
 pointed out which should be used as remedy for the 
 deficiencies or mental defects of youth according to 
 the particular case. Herbart traced out the charac- 
 teristic differences between children, and also those 
 marking young men, with delicate insight. He 
 deserves to be considered one of the forerunners 
 of the science called "ethnology." He shows us, for 
 example, children of a contradictory humor, " an in- 
 tellect that always replies no," whom nothing suits, 
 who mix with everything, as it were, a drop of bit- 
 terness. With these morose and peevish natures, 
 special precautions must be taken; in order to in- 
 spire them with respect, or even fear, they should be 
 subject to severe discipline. On the other hand, there 
 are children who see everything rose-colored, and 
 Herbart considers this superficial optimism also a 
 kind of disease which needs appropriate attention. 
 Herbart, like a good psychologist, had listened to 
 doctors and health experts, and the question of 
 physical temperament attracted and held his at- 
 tention. He distinguished seven classes of tem- 
 peraments four normal, three abnormal. Here are 
 children muscularly feeble, but with a well-shaped 
 head and active intellect. They prefer intellectual 
 
HERBART 41 
 
 occupations to games and physical exercises. They 
 are, as Plato would have said, " musicians "as opposed 
 to "gymnasts." We must take books away from 
 their hands, force them to play and be active. But 
 the nature of the physical organism is not the only 
 source of diversity of temperament. Circumstances, 
 the conditions of education and life, may modify the 
 primitive disposition. There are, for example, 
 blunted temperaments which Herbart calls " Boeo- 
 tians"; and this intellectual languor, this mental 
 heaviness, is often the effect of the mode of life of 
 the individual and of the habits he has contracted. 
 Thus the peasant whose thoughts are imprisoned in 
 a narrow and predetermined circle, whose imagina- 
 tion passes regularly from seed-time to harvest, and 
 harvest to seed-time, he is condemned by the yoke 
 of his monotonous life, to become in every land a 
 " Boeotian," whatever may have been the original 
 wealth of his temperament. In the same way a 
 child, naturally of very sweet temperament, will 
 become, perhaps, irritable and cross under the in- 
 fliction of repeated annoyances. The most san- 
 guine and ardent man will succumb to melancholy 
 if he is subjected to a kind of life which undermines 
 his natural gayety. 
 
 But it is impossible for us to follow Herbart's 
 footsteps along all the roads whither his observant 
 
42 HERBART 
 
 intelligence led him. Let it suffice to have shown 
 the important place that his psychology holds in 
 his system of education. Since Herbart's time, the 
 assertion that psychology and pedagogy cannot 
 mingle, that they are "like oil and water," is no 
 longer admissible. Herbart employed his life and 
 all his thinking-power to prove the contrary. 
 
 That psychology is enough to prepare and form a 
 teacher, however, cannot be said. The science of 
 education can be the goal only of the whole range 
 of research of the human mind. In order that 
 pedagogy may at last leave behind the " gross 
 empiricism" where it has so long languished, it must 
 have recourse to all forms of knowledge; it will 
 " erect its scaffold on a united group of all sciences." 
 The educator will, then, be a theorist above all else, 
 -a scholar, a philosopher. Nowhere else is the 
 necessity of having wide philosophic views and 
 broad general ideas so imperative as in pedagogy; 
 for the hard daily toil imposed on teachers tends to 
 narrow their horizon. 
 
 Without theory, practice ends in routine ; but on 
 the other hand, without practice, theory may lose 
 itself in the clouds of abstraction. There is at one 
 and the same time a science of education and an art 
 of education. Herbart does not separate them. 
 No one has understood better than he the complex 
 
HERBART 43 
 
 and delicate conditions under which the teacher 
 of infancy and youth is formed, what a heavy price 
 he pays. No one has contributed more than he to 
 discredit and destroy the traditional prejudice that 
 the teacher is born, that a man is a professor by 
 the grace of God. Too often it is imagined that to 
 become a good schoolmaster it is enough to have 
 knowledge and ability. Herbart believed, on the 
 contrary, that skill, pedagogical efficiency, is ac- 
 quired only by prolonged effort, that long practice 
 and exercise are necessary, experience gained 
 through failure as well as success ; at the same time 
 there must be the continuous hard work involved 
 in a philosophic investigation of the laws of edu- 
 cation. 
 
 "It is by meditation," said he, "it is by reflection 
 and research, it is through scientific study, that the 
 educator must prepare his mind and heart to fit 
 himself to conceive, feel, and judge rightly the par- 
 ticular incidents, the special cases, which he must 
 meet in his career as a teacher." 
 
Ill 
 
 THE pedagogy of Herbart is a whole world of 
 thought, and a big volume would be necessary for an 
 analysis and exposition covering the whole ground. 
 There is not a question, whether of pedagogical 
 theory or practice, which he has not attacked and 
 solved. By the side of general notions, conceptions 
 in which he delights to revel with exceptional power, 
 he furnishes abundant special rules. He abounds 
 in methods, processes, devices. He is not satisfied 
 to skim over the surface of his subject; he descends 
 to the details of a matter with minute accuracy. 
 ' Moreover, a brief exposition of the theories of 
 Herbart is rendered difficult by his peculiar mode of 
 thought. Some one has said, " We do not read Her- 
 bart, we must study him." So one might say, 
 "We do not make a synopsis of Herbart, we are 
 forced to examine him thoroughly." His penetra- 
 tive power makes him subtle, and at times his 
 extreme abstraction renders him obscure. He 
 analyzes beyond measure. His writings bristle 
 with endless distinctions, divisions, subdivisions. 
 
 44 
 
HERBART 45 
 
 jv^vr 
 
 His central thought is constantly overlaid with 
 incidental considerations which hamper and con- 
 ceal it. To use his own term, he does not suffi- 
 ciently sharpen ' 'the point " of his ideas. He hardly 
 makes any assertion without immediately gathering 
 round it corrections and reservations. Doubtless, 
 in the delicate matters of which he treats, there are, 
 perhaps, modes of approximation to truth. All the 
 same, one would like greater clearness, clearer-cut 
 conclusions. At the beginning, the reader loses 
 himself amid the twists and turns of his elaborated 
 reflections. The first impression is painful, confus- 
 ing, and even annoying. But provided we return 
 to the study of the pages which at first repelled 
 us, one becomes attracted, fascinated, and we be- 
 gin to think we may become Herbartian. We end 
 by moving at ease through the windings of thoughts 
 which are endlessly complex, and of which we did 
 not at first apprehend the strict logic. Diamonds 
 are not less brilliant because effort must be exerted 
 to separate them from their bed; so Herbart's ideas, 
 some of them at least, do not appear less sound or 
 less admirable, because they must be loosened from 
 a somewhat rough case, and from the scholastic 
 form in which he embodied them. Certainly in the 
 thick growth of his theories there is more than one 
 dead branch ; but these branches may fall and yet 
 
46 HERBART 
 
 the trunk remain healthy and unshaken ; and when 
 one is allowed to neglect those parts of his work 
 which to-day are of interest only from the historic 
 and curious point of view, there yet remain enough 
 living ideas for it to be worth while to gather and 
 bring them to the light. 
 
 The governing idea of Herbart's pedagogy, the 
 \ idea which should guide us if we wish to understand 
 \ it, is that the foundation, the only foundation of 
 ' the whole of education, is instruction. There exist, 
 then, no longer two distinct educations, an intellec- 
 tual and a moral education, as those necessarily 
 were tempted to believe who acknowledged distinct 
 faculties, and who, in consequence, had to provide 
 for the intellect, the senses, the will, and their sep- 
 arate cultivation each by themselves. Above all, 
 there is no education as distinct from instruction. 
 No ; the mental nature is a unity, and consequently 
 there is only one education, education by instruc- 
 tion, or educative instruction. 
 
 We are acquainted with the new force which the 
 word " instruction" gains in Herbart's writings. To 
 i instruct the mind is, he considers, to construct it. 
 It is no longer a question, as under the old hypothe- 
 sis of faculties bestowed by nature, of overlaying 
 a more or less trustworthy memory, of causing 
 literary or scientific knowledge to enter an under- 
 
HERBART 47 
 
 standing more or less open. Knowledge is no longer 
 a mental ornament, it is a mental element. Knowl- 
 edge builds up and produces mind. According to 
 the old theory, since mind existed prior to expe- 
 rience, it conditioned the unity of consciousness. 
 But if it is true that there is no intellect apart 
 from successive ideas, henceforth we must seek the 
 bonds that unite them in the cohesion, the interlac- 
 ing of the ideas themselves. "Whatever is isolated," 
 said Herbart, "is valueless." It is a consequence 
 of this theory that instruction assumes a profound 
 and delicate meaning, and that quite new duties 
 are imposed on teaching; its office is no longer 
 confined to developing the intellect, since it must 
 create it, and since by the association, of memories, 
 by regular " series" of ideas, those mental forces 
 are aroused whence spring not only strength of 
 intellect, but also strength of will. 
 
 The essential condition of fruitful instruction is 
 that it excites " interest" and attracts it. A peda- 
 gogical theorist may be allowed to be dull (and it 
 must be acknowledged that Herbart sometimes per- 
 mits himself this), but the practical teacher, the 
 schoolmaster, commits a fatal sin if he is dull; 
 the first duty of a master is to be interesting. 
 
 Interest is the watchword, the word to conjure 
 with in Herbart's pedagogy. Just as in ethics he re- 
 
48 HERBART 
 
 jects the categorical imperative, and as guide for 
 souls seeking virtue he desires to substitute for the 
 hard law of Kant the pure but arid bond of duty, 
 the pleasant and attractive notion of the ideal, so 
 in pedagogy he excludes constraint, and he tones 
 down effort almost to the degree of suppressing it. 
 " All is lost," said he, "if from the beginning we have 
 been clumsy enough to make study a source of 
 misery and torment." The charm of the true, 
 like the charm of the good and of the beautiful, 
 this is the chief principle of education. 
 
 Interest (die Interesse) is the liking one may 
 conceive for a thing, and that causes one to take 
 pleasure in it. To interest is to arouse the hunger 
 of the intellect. Let us mark well that its aim is 
 not to amuse or divert, and make teaching into a 
 play. Herbart marked himself off clearly from the 
 educationists of his time, called " Philanthropists," 
 who claimed to make of instruction a recreation. 
 He will not have "soft pedagogy," or let a teacher 
 stoop to construct an infantile world for his pupil. 
 Interest, as he understood it, is at once the charac- 
 teristic of things which captivates the attention, and 
 a feeling of curiosity, of alertness and activity of 
 intellect, manifested in the mind. The term inter- 
 est, then, is two-faced; it belongs at the same time 
 to the object which arouses the taste and the sub- 
 
HERBART 49 
 
 ject in whom the taste is aroused. It is interest 
 which is the spring of mental activity, the principle 
 of intellectual life. It keeps the attention of the 
 class centred on the lips of a skilful master, and like- 
 wise fixes it and holds it to the observation of things 
 that please them, or to carrying out attractive pieces 
 of work to the end. The activity which Herbart 
 denied to the soul itself, he revived under the form 
 of interest ; for interest summons up old ideas, calls 
 for new ones, and, in short, determines the move- 
 ment of the intellect. 
 
 There are, moreover, two fundamental sources of 
 interest: first, the feeling of questioning attention > 
 provoked by experience (Erfahrung), by the study 
 of nature, and by the search for knowledge ; and ,-. 
 also interest springing out of social life, the presence 
 of human beings and communication with them 
 (Umgang). Hence education, or instruction, must 
 have a double aim: to give knowledge of things, 
 and love of humanity. But Herbart divides only in 
 order to subdivide; and the two forms of interest 
 are each presented under three successive aspects. 
 
 The interest belonging to knowledge has three ^ 
 phases: empirical interest, speculative interest, 
 and aesthetic interest. Empirical interest takes its u\ 
 rise in the direct sense-perception of things, from 
 variety amongst the concrete objects which nature 
 
50 HERBART 
 
 or instruction presents to the wondering eyes of 
 childhood. Speculative interest follows empirical: 
 it has its source in prolonged reflection on the objects 
 of experience, the need for an explanation of phe- 
 nomena and inquiry into causes and effects. This 
 type of interest is already manifest in the ever- 
 recurring "why" of the child. It is the pleasure felt 
 by the mind in understanding the reason for things, 
 the laws of nature. To enjoy the sight of the sky 
 studded with stars, that is empirical interest : to re- 
 flect on the origin of the stars, on the causes of their 
 movements, that is speculative interest. Finally, 
 ^ it aesthetic interest is fed by the contemplation of 
 beauty in nature, in works of art, or in moral actions. 
 To this kind of interest Herbart gave a large share 
 of his attention. He claimed that sesthetic taste 
 should be cultivated early, as the source of the purest 
 joys that life reserves for mankind, that it should 
 be cultivated in every child without exception, re- 
 gardless of the social rank to which he belongs; for 
 the day will come and it is our duty to try to 
 hasten that day when the artisan will be in his own 
 fashion an artist, and when beauty will become the 
 charm and enchantment of existence for every one. 
 Turning now to the interest occasioned, not by 
 knowledge, but by human relationships, which the 
 child derives from his environment, his relation to 
 
HERBART 51 
 
 his fellows, in his family, in the school, in church, 
 and in society, this also appears wider under three 
 distinct aspects. In the first place, there is sym- 
 pathetic interest, the interest the chijd feels when it 
 takes part in the joy or grief of the people who 
 surround him: this is developed at home, in the 
 social life of the school. In the second place, there is 
 social interest, an extended form of family sympathy 
 or school comradeship; it springs from reflection 
 on the important facts about social cooperation; 
 it is the root of philanthropy, of all the social virtues, 
 of what to-day we call human solidarity. Finally, 
 religious interest is the crown, the last rung of the 
 ladder which the human mind ascends to reach 
 complete living, and to exercise its activity in the 
 fullest way. Herbart, who would not have religion 
 excluded from education, declared that the order of 
 the world would remain unintelligible, if one did not 
 admit that a divine spirit has presumably willed 
 and conceived its plan, and a divine power realized 
 it. Yet however incomprehensible and undefinable, 
 God appears to Herbart as "the father of man- 
 kind " ; and it is in the feeling of filial respect that 
 the first elements of religious humility, of divine 
 veneration and adoration, germinate in the child's 
 heart. "God is thought of by the child as the 
 father of his father and mother." 
 
52 HERBART 
 
 Not one of the six forms of interest just enumer- 
 ated may be neglected. In schools of the lowest as 
 well as of the highest rank, all these sources of mental 
 activity must be either simultaneously or successively 
 drawn upon ; each must gush forth in a stream of 
 ideas that the soul may be filled. Interest is, in 
 all kinds of study, a necessary condition of mental 
 fruitfulness and value; and manifold interest, "a 
 many-sided interest" (Vielseitigkeit des Interesse), 
 is not less demanded, in order that education may 
 reach its end and correspond with the high calling 
 of man. What Herbart requires, is that minds 
 should be broad and wide, awake to everything, 
 active in every direction, that the intellect should 
 have, so to speak, "many sides/' and should, in con- 
 sequence, escape exclusiveness, the great stumbling- 
 block to a complete plan of education. 
 
 This exclusiveness, in other terms narrow-minded- 
 ness, is the inevitable consequence of education when 
 it develops only one type of interest. It is evident, 
 for example, that a mind will remain imperfect and 
 limited if it is confined to speculative or religious 
 interest without room being made for sympathetic 
 interest. The understanding will then be hard, and 
 the soul without heart. Hence how often must 
 we acknowledge a kind of insensibility regarding 
 affairs of the world in men whose religious devotion 
 
HERBART 53 
 
 leads to asceticism, or in scholars who let themselves 
 be entirely occupied in meditation, and who spare 
 no glances for what is passing around them. On 
 the other hand, the exigencies of practical life too 
 often lead men to shut themselves up in their pro- 
 fession or trade; a grave error; a profession should 
 not isolate a man. However much a man's own 
 occupations may play the tyrant over him, he should 
 not remain unconcerned and a stranger to the oc- 
 cupations of others. His interest should extend to 
 the labors of all his fellows. When an individual 
 wraps himself up in himself, a frost penetrates his 
 egoistic soul; it then warms itself only at one 
 hearth, that of personal well-being. The true destiny 
 of each man is to take interest in everything human, 
 and, so to speak, to bear and to honor all humanity 
 in himself. 
 
 Further, the mischievous effect of exclusiveness 
 does not emanate only from the fact that some of 
 the six forms of interest are sacrificed in order that 
 the man may devote himself entirely to the others. 
 Each of them tends to develop special tastes in its 
 own domain, and these lead to intellectual or moral 
 excesses, against which education cannot strive too 
 strongly. Thus it may happen that empirical, or 
 speculative, or aesthetic interest may be centred on 
 one favorite study, and this causes all others to be 
 
54 HERBART 
 
 neglected; one may wish to be only a botanist or 
 zoologist, or mathematician, or metaphysician, 
 painter, or musician. Sympathetic interest, in the 
 same way, may unite the child only to his parents, 
 or to his school or comrades. In the same way, 
 again, social interest may fall into regrettable ex- 
 clusiveness, when it inspires passionate attachment 
 to any special political party, to which the man is 
 given up to such a degree that he measures every- 
 thing by its value to the party. Finally, even 
 religious interest has a tendency also to mutilate the 
 soul, when it induces a believer in religion to despise, 
 and even perhaps to hate, all those who do not think 
 with him, and who belong to other faiths. 
 
 Many-sided interest, then, is the safeguard of a 
 broad, well-balanced education, the only kind which 
 can guarantee fulness of mind and heart. It is true 
 that if wide interests save and preserve the soul from 
 partiality and narrowness, they expose it to another 
 danger, that of enfeebling it by dispersion. Wealth 
 may result in weakness: the calyx of a flower is 
 broken by trying to enlarge it too much. But 
 Herbart thinks it will be possible to steer clear of 
 this rock, if, through an equal division of the dif- 
 ferent interests, balance is maintained, and if we 
 can unify the subjects by coordinating them and 
 strictly systematizing them. 
 
HERBART 55 
 
 It must be acknowledged that Herbart's goal is 
 very high. What more desirable, if it were possible, 
 than to call upon all men to slake their thirst at 
 every source of interest, that is to say, to profit by 
 all forms of instruction, all the subjects taught? 
 But how could one single man accomplish a task 
 so immense ? Herbart has sketched his fascinating 
 picture not from the individual, but from humanity 
 as a whole, its collective activity exerted in different 
 directions. In practical life time passes too rapidly, 
 school life is too short, professional necessities too 
 urgent, to entirely escape the inevitable specializa- 
 tion and limitation, to indulge the hope in the educa- 
 tion of the individual, of attaining to the universality 
 of interests and tastes which would be perfection, 
 but which remains, unhappily, an inaccessible ideal. 
 
 However that may be, interest, wherever it can 
 serve as agent in exciting mental activity, is subject 
 to certain delicate conditions which it is important 
 for us to analyze. Herbart proposes, first of all, a 
 new distinction, and a very true one. There is a 
 "direct," and an "indirect" interest. Only the 
 first is really fruitful. Indirect interest, which we 
 impose on the child through praise and blame, 
 through exhortation and threats, through hope of 
 reward and fear of punishment, just because it is 
 commanded and imposed, leaves the mind in a 
 
OU H r j r\, H A r\. J. 
 
 relatively passive condition. It necessitates an 
 effort, sometimes a painful effort, and Herbart dis- 
 likes effort. It corresponds to the kind of attention 
 which he improperly calls voluntary (artificial would 
 be a more correct designation), and which, in hi3 
 opinion, is not the best. " In the case of children, 
 the desire to be attentive is uncertain and waver- 
 ing, and in the effort which they make to maintain 
 it, they expend part of their strength, thus injuring 
 the smoothness and clearness of their perceptions." 
 We must not have recourse to indirect interest, 
 except when it is impossible to do otherwise, for 
 example, in oral lessons and in memory exercises, 
 which have no attraction in themselves, but are, 
 nevertheless, indispensable ; for Herbart rightly con- 
 siders that in every study some parts must be 
 learnt by heart. 
 
 Direct interest is the true interest; it springs 
 spontaneously from the things themselves, from the 
 knowledge which the child gathers from his daily 
 experience at home and in school, and from interest 
 which wells up naturally from pleasant sensations 
 and skilled instruction; these captivate the mind 
 and hold it prisoner, while at the same time they 
 arouse, inspire, and quicken it. 
 
 With this direct interest is united voluntary at- 
 tention, which at bottom is nothing but curiosity: 
 
HERBART 57 
 
 the need of understanding, the desire to see and 
 know. Only, in the theory of Herbart, curiosity, 
 which the old psychology considered an instinct of 
 the intellect aspiring spontaneously after knowl- 
 edge, becomes merely the result of interest. We are 
 justified in saying it is provoked, rather than for 
 holding it fully spontaneous. 
 
 Herbart has thrown the most vivid light on the 
 doctrine of attention. On the whole, he is in agree- 
 ment with modern psychologists, who, like Ribot, 
 maintain that the cause of attention is always some 
 emotional condition. Interest, in fact, which keeps 
 the mind alert, must be regarded as an emotional 
 condition, since it provides pleasure and renders 
 study agreeable. 
 
 But this involuntary and natural attention, which 
 Ribot says is "the true and fundamental form of 
 attention," 1 may, according to Herbart, cover two 
 distinct forms: it is either "primitive" or "apper- 
 ceptive." 
 
 Primitive attention depends on the strength of 
 sensations. The mind becomes the immediate prey, 
 as it were, of vivid sense impressions. Hence Her- 
 bart, following Pestalozzi, accords a large place 
 to intuition, that is to say, to the direct perception 
 of sounds, colors, forms. The presentation of the 
 
 1 Ribot, The Psychology of Attention, p. 3. 
 
58 HERBART 
 
 objects themselves is worth more than an image 
 representing them, because it strikes and stirs the 
 mind to a greater degree by conquering the atten- 
 tion ; and the image is worth more, in its turn, than 
 a verbal description. 
 
 But in instruction the principal role is played by 
 involuntary attention of the second degree, by ap- 
 perceptive attention. This theory of apperception 
 is the most interesting innovation in Herbart's psy- 
 chology, and the application he has made of it in 
 education is the luminous point in his pedagogy. 
 Apperceptive attention has its origin not in the 
 excitement caused by sensations emanating from 
 the outside, but from representations previously 
 acquired, these being aroused by the approach of a 
 new representation which has points of contact 
 and attachment with the former. Existing ideas, 
 asleep in the soul, mount guard, as it were, around 
 consciousness, ready on the one hand to repulse 
 ideas which do not meet with approval, or at least 
 to let them pass by with indifference; on the other 
 hand, disposed to welcome those which appear 
 as friends, bearing marks, so to say, which will 
 render intimacy and union easy. Ideas already 
 assimilated by the mind prepare for new assimila- 
 tions. Like so many magnetized points they at- 
 tract those ideas which ask to enter consciousness, 
 
HERBART 59 
 
 making it a condition that these, in their turn, shall 
 be affinity between what is already known and what 
 is going to be learnt. 
 
 This way of viewing mental progress and the 
 increase of knowledge is big with pedagogical con- 
 sequences. Apperceptive attention should be active 
 during the whole period of study. It illuminates 
 every part of instruction. Interest will favor it 
 ~a'hd come to its assistance ; it is from the theory of 
 apperception, combined with that of interest, that 
 Herbart evolves the greater part of his methods of 
 instruction. 
 
 Thus, his first recommendation is that the teacher 
 should not present to the child anything quite new 
 to him. We must not teach ex abrupto. There 
 must always be connective links and relations be- 
 tween what one is now teaching and what has been 
 previously taught. New impressions, suddenly 
 made, create intellectual disturbance, produce violent 
 sensations of shock. The links of consciousness are, 
 in consequence, broken, the movement of mind 
 checked. There is no true instruction except when 
 a new notion is introduced exactly in its right 
 place in the series of notions already fixed, when 
 it forms one of the loops in the tissue, one of 
 the rings in the chain. A mind cannot be dis- 
 cerned at all amid a mere collection of fragmentary 
 
60 HERBART 
 
 pieces of knowledge, a heap of stones placed haphaz- 
 ard one upon another. Mind derives its substance 
 only from the coherence of the ideas it contains ; it is 
 like a mosaic, of which all the little stones are closely 
 adjusted and tightly compacted together to form a 
 complete structure. 
 
 Since old knowledge must blaze the pathways for 
 new knowledge, the point of departure for regular 
 instruction is none other than the personal ex- 
 perience of the child: all that he has learnt by 
 himself, at home or at school, in his walks or play. 
 School lessons only intervene to supply the gaps in 
 this slender and limited experience ; this it is which 
 supplies the true starting-point for the teacher's 
 efforts. Knowledge of nature and of humanity 
 began for the child in his first manifestations of 
 interest, empirical interest and sympathetic interest ; 
 and it is by utilizing the beginnings of spontaneous 
 instruction that the teacher will succeed in inspiring 
 a taste for the sciences, insuring a full instruction, a 
 many-sided and harmonious culture: on the one 
 hand, those natural sciences with which Herbart 
 associated mathematics, and on the other, the sci- 
 ences of humanity, history, languages, and literature. 
 
 When once school studies have begun, many pre- 
 cautions should be taken to facilitate the play of 
 apperceptive attention and to sustain interest. The 
 
HERBART 61 
 
 general rule, which Herbart holds to be the chief 
 rule, is that the teacher, before beginning to instruct, 
 should busy himself with placing the minds of his 
 pupils within the circle of ideas related to the special 
 subject in hand. The pupils come to the class in a 
 mood of indifference or mental distraction. They 
 are no longer thinking of the studies of yesterday; 
 they have forgotten them. At home and in the 
 street they have been thinking of other things, and 
 during their recreation their minds have been 
 wandering. It is, then, necessary to bring them 
 back to the line of thought, to prepare them to 
 profit by the lesson. Their intellect is not like a 
 clean slate upon which chalk will write any ex- 
 pressions whatever without difficulty. In the first 
 place, let all ideas, all preoccupations, be excluded 
 from their minds which might bar the way to the 
 knowledge which we are going to put before them. 
 And next, let us awaken those ideas which, since 
 they are related to the approaching lesson, will 
 render a comprehension of it more sure and easy. 
 Representations which are asleep in the mind are 
 like the force which sleeps in an electric current: 
 turn a button, and light leaps forth. But to cause 
 light to spring forth in the intellect, that is to 
 say, to awaken interest and fix attention, is not so 
 simple an operation. The master will have recourse 
 
62 HERBART 
 
 to various expedients. In the first place, he will 
 take care that the topic which he selects is con- 
 nected with those that he has treated previously. 
 It would be dangerous to jump suddenly from one 
 subject to another. Concepts that have taken pos- 
 session of the soul do not willingly yield their place 
 to intruders. In the next place, in order that the 
 connection which exists amongst the subjects studied 
 may be established also in the mind that studies 
 them, the master will take pains from the very 
 beginning of to-day's lesson to recall the ideas pre- 
 sented in yesterday's lesson. He will announce and 
 recapitulate beforehand what is going to be said, 
 and also what is going to be read. Then, thanks to 
 all these precautions, and above all, if he knows 
 how to express himself simply and vividly, as Her- 
 bart counsels, in popular language, avoiding the use 
 of too many new and technical words, he will succeed 
 in arousing curiosity and a kind of expectation. 
 Thus the intellect of the pupil, inclined in the right 
 direction, will be disposed to listen, and the instruc- 
 tion, thrown on to a well-prepared soil, will bear 
 the fruit which he expected. 
 
 The above are, however, only the preliminary steps 
 in the scientific (too scientific) system of didac- 
 tics expounded by Herbart. On the ' ' moments " and 
 "modes" of instruction, on the order of the studies, 
 
HERBART 63 
 
 he held views that are extremely complicated; 
 nevertheless, of these we must try to give some 
 notion. Seeing that these courses of instruction are 
 now a hundred years old, they consist, no doubt, 
 largely of lifeless abstractions, of empty generaliza- 
 tions, set forth with minute but fruitless attention 
 to order. Yet sometimes, when you have cracked 
 the shell of the almond and taken away its rough 
 envelope, you find solid and palatable fruit, on 
 which you feast with pleasure. 
 
 According to Herbart, there are four moments or 
 steps to pass in instruction. Since he himself felt 
 that the distinction he draws is not very clear, he 
 varies and multiplies expressions to distinguish these 
 stages, without finding possible fitting and exact 
 terminology. Thus, for instance, he says that the 
 four stages of instruction are clearness, association, 
 systematizationj and method. Elsewhere, translating 
 his thoughts into other terms, he proves that teach- 
 ing should successively show, associate, teach, and 
 philosophize. Some of Herbart's disciples, little 
 satisfied with this terminology, in their turn hold 
 that distinction must be made between intuition, 
 comparison, abstraction or generalization, and finally, 
 application. 
 
 From another aspect, to complete the description of 
 Herbart's scheme-table, if there are four moments or 
 
64 HERBART 
 
 periods in instruction, there are three modes, or three 
 methods, to be used, more or less, during each of the 
 four moments of instruction ; viz., descriptive method, 
 analytic method, and finally, synthetic method. 
 
 Let us say it at once : the mistake of Herbart, as 
 of all philosophers who carry abstraction too far, 
 is to desire to subject the differences amongst real 
 things to an arbitrary and fictitious unity, and in 
 consequence to establish amongst studies an in- 
 flexible and unbending order. Is it quite certain, 
 as Herbart believed, that all branches of instruction, 
 instruction consisting of concrete facts, such as 
 natural history and geography, instruction by reason- 
 ing, such as geometry and algebra, lend themselves 
 to a uniform and unvarying treatment? How can 
 the course of instruction be always the same, when 
 the roads to be pursued are so different ? Since, for 
 the construction of the sciences there are profoundly 
 distinct methods, how can there be only one for 
 instruction in them? Herbart, like Pestalozzi, 
 " mechanics" instruction. He plans the order of 
 lesson-giving on an invariable pattern ; and by dint 
 of commands, prescriptions, regulations, he runs the 
 risk of compromising the originality of the teacher 
 and the spontaneity of the scholar, of suppressing, 
 in short, life and liberty in instruction. 
 
 1. On certain points, however, it is impossible not 
 
HERBART 65 
 
 to agree with Herbart; for example, in regard to 
 what concerns the first step in instruction, clear- 
 ness. We must comprehend in that all the light 
 that a direct view, "intuition," in a word, throws 
 on a subject. Intuition is the prelude necessary for 
 every study, and Herbart speaks of it with enthu- 
 siasm. Intuition, he says, opens before the child's 
 eyes large and vast spaces : his gaze, when it has 
 recovered from its first surprise, distinguishes, ana- 
 lyzes, associates, is active in every way ; then it stops, 
 it rests, and then begins again. Touch, and the 
 other senses now act in their turn. Sensations are 
 multiplied, ideas come in a crowd, experiences 
 begin and bring new thoughts: " Everywhere there 
 is life, life full and free, everywhere delight in be- 
 holding the multitude of scenes which are unfolding 
 themselves before the child." 
 
 But to the free intuition of the earliest years 
 should succeed the intuition, so to speak, of the 
 learner, the intuition provoked by the teacher. 
 Thus, in teaching history, we shall make use of every 
 means for representing to the eyes by way of sensa- 
 tion the things belonging to the past : portraits of 
 great men, images, and pictures, walks through 
 museums, visits to monuments, to ruins of ancient 
 castles, not forgetting the reading of works contem- 
 poraneous with the epoch studied, especially poems, 
 
66 HERBART 
 
 for these illuminate the bald narrative of facts. In 
 geography, the district where teacher and scholar 
 reside, and the surrounding neighborhood, will be 
 the point of departure, and from this, little by little, 
 the horizon of the imagination will stretch right 
 across the world. In physics, before any direct 
 teaching, we must cause the children to observe the 
 simplest of the natural phenomena; we shall point 
 out to them mills and the movements of the clock; 
 we shall give them electric toys. In natural science 
 we shall accustom them to make collections of plants 
 and insects; if they cannot see the animals them- 
 selves, we shall put into their hands books with 
 pictures representing the zoological types; before 
 talking of the tiger, we shall make them recall what 
 they know of the cat. There is no science, not even 
 the science of mathematics, in which this intuitive 
 initiation is not both necessary and possible: we 
 shall let the children practise measuring distances, 
 counting objects ; in geometry, we shall develop their 
 imagination by constructive plays. And this prepa- 
 ration through the senses for abstract reasoning in 
 the future will begin very early. Herbart required 
 that even in the child's cradle, different models 
 of triangles l should be put before his eyes, the form 
 
 1 Herbart substituted the triangle for Pestalozzi's square, as 
 elementary geometric form. 
 
HERBART 67 
 
 being made with brightly shining nails, which would 
 attract and fix his gaze. 
 
 It was perhaps superfluous after Pestalozzi, it 
 certainly is so after Herbart, to recommend intuition 
 and object-lessons. But Herbart has this special 
 merit, that he sets forth clearly in detail every ques- 
 tion which he examines; he specifies everything 
 with remarkable exactitude. At this point, for in- 
 stance, he takes pains to observe that on the one 
 hand, immediate intuition is always cut short in 
 some direction or other, since it is closed in by the 
 limits of time and space; it must, therefore, be 
 completed by description; and, on the other hand, 
 intuition is always complex, the object being com- 
 posed of different elements ; it must, then, be rendered 
 clear and simple by analysis. 
 
 Herbart attaches great significance to the method 
 of description. When the child has seen all that he 
 can see, it is necessary for the teacher to enlarge the 
 circle of his ideas by relating to him historical events, 
 by talking to him of regions which he cannot ex- 
 plore; he must extend the child's experience in 
 space by descriptions, in time by narrations. 
 Herbart far prefers oral exposition to the narrations 
 and written descriptions that abound in books, 
 provided that the teacher can manifest some skill 
 in speech. In order that the description of a coun- 
 
68 HERBART 
 
 try, the recital of an event, should interest and lay 
 hold of the mind, the teacher must know how to 
 put color and life into it ; to do this he must borrow 
 analogies and comparisons from objects known and 
 already familiar to the child. Intuitive elements 
 should mingle, as far as it is possible, continually in 
 instruction. We should be careful to arrange for an 
 agreement and easy union between what is recounted 
 or described and the facts of experience. For ex- 
 ample, in history lessons, we should not carry the 
 imagination back to a far-distant past all in a trice ; 
 we should cause it to ascend gradually to events 
 that happened not very long ago, by following the 
 life-thread of aged people who surround the child. 
 A well-given historical description should cause, in a 
 way, an illusion of present time ; and we must bring 
 about this result, that the pupil imagines that he 
 really sees, that he has before his eyes, the people 
 and the events about which we are talking to him. 
 I Analysis, like description, is a mode of teaching, 
 and one cannot do without it even during the first 
 period of instruction. It is necessary for the purpose 
 of disentangling the confused mass or, so to speak, 
 the chaos of intuitions which the child has accumu- 
 lated. However clear and captivating these intui- 
 tions as a matter of fact may be, they are never 
 absolutely simple; complex and entangled, they 
 
HERBART 69 
 
 have invaded in confusion the mind of the child, who 
 sees and looks, but does not know how to observe. 
 If impressions arising from the free experience of 
 the child have the advantage of being personal and 
 vivid, they have the defect of following one another 
 without order, of being mixed up, confused one 
 with another; they float in the mind at haphazard, 
 without logical connection. It is the province of 
 analytic instruction to remedy this twofold mischief. 
 In the first place, it is analysis which will distinguish ^ 
 and arrange diverse intuitions by singling out the 
 objects from which they have been derived; which 
 will help the child to make, so to speak, an inventory 
 of his intuitive knowledge of the wealth which he 
 has thus far appropriated. In the second place, 
 analysis will decompose each intuition ; it will make 
 out a list of its elements, and will enumerate the 
 qualities even of these elements, such as number 
 and form. Analytic instruction is then, as it were, ~~*f*< 
 the first step of instruction; it should introduce" 
 every exposition of a didactic nature. The teacher 
 intervenes then only with a view to leading his 
 pupil to see himself in his own experiences; the 
 inverse of what takes place in synthetic instruction, 
 when the teacher transmits knowledge which tran- 
 scends the scholar's own experience, either in the 
 world of nature or in the life of mankind. Let us 
 
70 HERBART 
 
 add that analysis has to play more than one role 
 in order to unravel the bundle of primary intuitions ; 
 it will be found useful and necessary during all the 
 steps of instruction. However different it is from 
 synthesis, neither mode of instruction should ex- 
 clude the other ; the two should always be associated. 
 2. The second "moment " of instruction is that of 
 association, work in comparing which leads the stu- 
 dent to apprehend the relations between intuitions. 
 From this time, the extension given to experience by 
 descriptions, thanks to experience, are broad and 
 numerous; thanks to analysis, they are clearly 
 defined. The ground is thus well prepared for the 
 ascent to general ideas; these become detached as 
 isolated notions approach each other. Pestalozzi 
 was little but a "man of intuitions/' incapable of 
 generalizing with exactitude. Herbart, on the 
 contrary, said of himself that he was "a man of 
 concepts"; that is to say, of general notions. And 
 all instruction worthy of the name presupposes this 
 ascent of the intellect from the particular to the 
 general, from intuition to concept. Thought, in- 
 deed, has no real existence, so long as it is limited 
 to gathering particular notions; it must lead to 
 the conception of rules, laws, principles. Kant 
 had already said, "Concepts without percepts are 
 empty, but percepts without concepts are blind." 
 
HERBART 71 
 
 In every concrete reality there is embodied an 
 abstract notion which must be disengaged, the 
 universal and essential must be extracted from 
 the unity of individual things. The second effort of 
 instruction must aim at forming such concepts, and 
 here again it will not be a question of formal instruc- 
 tion. The best method is that of conversation and 
 interrogation. The child will be practised in finding 
 similarities and relations, amongst the notions which 
 he possesses, for himself. If he makes a mistake, 
 and if he lets himself be deceived by relations more 
 apparent than real, he must be set right. It is in 
 the act of guiding him that we shall lead him gradu- 
 ally to conceive for himself abstract and general 
 ideas. 
 
 3. It is more troublesome to render an account 
 of the third step in instruction, the step described 
 as systematization. It would seem, however, that 
 Herbart means by that a systematic exposition given 
 by the teacher. Here the synthetic method at last 
 appears. Until now the master has kept the pupil 
 contributing, and has confined himself to guiding 
 him in his business of analysis and generalization, 
 while teaching him how to develop and define what 
 was already in his mind. Now he expounds at 
 greater length ; he teaches what the pupil could not 
 discover for himself. And how much wise, practical 
 
72 HERBART 
 
 advice might we gather from the works of Herbart 
 on this part of instruction, if space permitted ! For 
 example, he puts the teacher of history on his guard 
 against an error common amongst beginners, of being 
 "diffuse," of losing himself amongst details. In 
 geography he requires an exposition of facts after 
 the manner of travellers, that is to say, in exact 
 and vivid language. From all teachers, in short, he 
 asks vivid and attractive instruction. Whatever 
 may be his confidence, a confidence somewhat 
 bigoted in the mechanical efficiency, so to speak, 
 of the methods he suggests, he upholds the personal 
 qualities of the teacher ; he requires of him talent, 
 that he be a good speaker. He knows how deadly 
 is the abuse of a dogmatic instruction which fetters 
 the activity and initiative of the child. Such instruc- 
 tion he compares most ingeniously to a long, fine, 
 and flexible thread, which is broken by the striking of 
 the clock at school, and knotted together again when 
 the clock strikes afresh; which, unwinding slowly 
 year by year, fastens and binds the child, without 
 leaving him either freedom of movement or repose 
 of mind. Moreover, synthetic instruction must be 
 employed with discretion, and it must be made 
 living and fruitful by constant return to perception, 
 to experience. "To desire to shut out experience 
 and social life, in order to confine the child in a class- 
 
HERBART 73 
 
 room, condemning it to find instruction from books 
 alone, or from the dull lessons of a master, this," 
 said Herbart forcibly, "is to affirm that one can 
 do without the bright light of the day and be 
 satisfied with the feeble glimmer of a candle." 
 
 4. The four moments of instruction overlap and 
 complete each other. The last is the inverse of the 
 first three, which had the common feature of pre- 
 paring for and developing theoretic instruction; it 
 brings us back to practice. For the rest, one cannot 
 see why, in the strange terminology of Herbart, 
 the word "method," or the term "to philosophize," 
 is introduced into the business at all. 1 The last 
 stage is, in fact, only an affair of application or 
 of practical exercises. The teacher has finished his 
 lesson, he is silent. It now behooves the pupil to 
 again do something, to show by his personal work 
 that he has profited by the instruction which he has 
 received, that he can move at ease amongst the 
 notions now acquired, that he can handle them 
 successfully, that he is ready to use them profitably. 
 He will show this in reviewing them, in original com- 
 positions, in the solution of problems, or in various 
 
 1 It is true that Herbartians sometimes interpret this fourth 
 operation in a sense which may justify the expression " to philoso- 
 phize" ; it then consists in uniting the particular subject of the les- 
 son to the general system, and to the whole circle of knowledge 
 of the same kind. 
 
74 HERB ART 
 
 kinds of written exercise. Here, as always, uniting 
 his theory with advice regarding technical details, 
 Herbart tells us that written exercises should not be 
 too long, too easy, or too difficult; that we must not 
 impose on our pupils too heavy tasks to be done at 
 home; that compositions will be of service only if 
 they are based "on a rich store of exact ideas," 
 which have already been placed at the pupil's 
 disposal. 
 
 But let us stop before we exhaust the subject. 
 We have said enough to make both the virtues and 
 defects of the pedagogy of Herbart plain before all 
 eyes. We cannot deny to him the merit of having 
 constructed a complete system, with relationships 
 well planned, full of symmetry, all the parts holding 
 together, leaving no gaps. We certainly do not 
 do justice to this vast conceptual whole when we 
 limit ourselves to presenting in a short and dry 
 review only the skeleton of a mighty and very Active 
 organism. To appreciate Herbart's pedagogy ac- 
 cording to its merits, it is necessary to turn to the 
 original sources. But we must yet recognize that 
 Herbart, in his laborious effort, has sometimes 
 taken great pains to say over again in systematic 
 form truths known to all the world. It will be 
 readily granted that in his pedagogy there are su- 
 perfluous arguments and a measure of artificiality. 
 
HERBART 75 
 
 How can we resign ourselves to thinking that such 
 a complicated method, such rigorous regulations, are 
 the last word in the art of educating human beings, 
 that the mind must be enmeshed by the inflexible 
 threadwork of the manifold operations of the four 
 "moments" of instruction, and that, in a word, edu- 
 cation must cost all this ? Is it not possible that 
 Herbart has confused the course of instruction with 
 the evolution of science ? Science, indeed, takai its 
 rise in experience, advances next to general laws, 
 and finally coordinates its generalizations in a 
 system embracing all science. But to form and 
 instruct a mind, is that necessary which builds 
 science ? Notice besides that according to Herbart 
 the four periods of instruction ought to reappear 
 invariably in every study. What ! even in reading 
 and writing ? In each of his lessons, and within the 
 time-limit of class instruction, the teacher must 
 pass always through four successive series of exer- 
 cises. 1 That is absolutely impossible. 
 
 1 In one of the very interesting discussions conducted by Pro- 
 fessor Chabot with the pupils of the normal schools of Lyons, we 
 made notes of a lesson-plan prepared according to Herbartian 
 method: Subject of the lesson, "Courage" : (1) First stage of in- 
 struction, clear ideas or perceptions : an act of courage by a pupil 
 of the school or an inhabitant of the town, who, for example, has 
 thrown himself into the water to effect a rescue, who has stopped a 
 horse, etc. (2) Second " moment," comparison : other courageous 
 acts will be put side by side before the mental vision of the pupils 
 
76 HERBART 
 
 We have not said all, far from it, nor have we 
 pointed out all the refinements in the pedagogical 
 instruments of Herbart. We have not spoken of 
 "reflection" nor of "concentration," two opera- 
 tions of the mind which he expressly distinguishes : 
 concentration (Verliefung), of which the disciples 
 of Herbart make great use, consists in uniting all 
 subordinate ideas to one chief idea; for instance, 
 grouping all the events of an epoch around one great 
 historical name ; reflection (Besinnung), calling forth 
 again ideas already imprisoned in consciousness; 
 nor of ideas "called forth" or "spontaneous" ideas, 
 the former demanding an effort, and appearing 
 chiefly during lessons, the latter being freely self- 
 aroused in consciousness; nor yet of syntheses 
 that unite, and syntheses that construct. . . . 
 We should never end. Herbart is the father of that 
 heavy and pedantic methodizing which has caused 
 
 with this particular act, acts of which they have heard reports, 
 those of soldiers on the battle-field, firemen at a fire, doctors in an 
 epidemic, etc. (3) Third "moment," system: courage in gen- 
 eral is defined. (4) Fourth "moment," method or "philosophiz- 
 ing" : courage, the particular virtue, is united with the whole group 
 of virtues; or, if the other interpretation of the fourth stage of 
 instruction, as marked by Herbart, is adopted, the pupil will 
 be asked how, in such or such a given circumstance, he himself 
 would show his courage. See, also, in the Revue pedagogique of 
 June 15, 1903, an article in which M. Chabot explains the manner 
 in which M. de Sallwiirk applies Herbart' s method in a liberal 
 spirit. 
 
HERBART 77 
 
 the production of so many big, useless, and fruitless 
 volumes. 
 
 But, to compensate, how many useful researches 
 has he not inspired? He has forced a legion of 
 disciples to reflect; some are fervent and docile, 
 others are independent, and in their turn innovators. 
 If he has not succeeded in establishing a definite 
 system of instruction, he has at least proved the need 
 of one. If he has applied and misapplied the ideas 
 of connectedness and unity, that was not in order 
 to establish mechanical teaching ; it was, on the con- 
 trary, to penetrate to that well of life, interest, in- 
 terest which can be maintained only by connected- 
 ness of ideas. Advance in instruction, indeed, is 
 measured by this : that new ideas penetrate deeply 
 into the mass of already existing ideas. Thus, 
 although girt about, as it were, with a formid- 
 able armor of logic, the theory of Herbart is sim- 
 ple, wise, and well-balanced. He is, more than all 
 else, a man of a free spirit, who, within the rigid 
 lines of his method, desires to introduce life and 
 movement. Was it not he who said that a man could 
 work serviceably in the education of others only 
 on condition of working at the same time at his own 
 education ? He desires young and enthusiastic edu- 
 cators. Away with melancholy and morose disposi- 
 tions. Education is not the business of such men. 
 
78 HERBART 
 
 Herbart would have been unfaithful to his prin- 
 ciples, and to the idea of " manifold interests/ 7 if 
 he had narrowed the field of studies open to the 
 child. He did not discuss, like Herbert Spencer, J 
 the question of finding out " which kind of knowledge [ 
 is the most worth." He did not ask it, because he 
 admits that all are necessary to form a complete 
 man. He is already on the side of the theory of 
 an all-round education. And as well as seeing in 
 this universality of studies the condition of mental 
 equilibrium, he has yet another" reason for recom- 
 mending it, one of the gravest reasons: education 
 has no right to hinder or limit in advance a man's 
 future activity, and in consequence to narrow the 
 attention of a child by keeping it on special studies. 
 
 Shall we object that the intelligence of all pupils 
 does not lend itself equally well to all kinds of instruc- 
 tion? No; for Herbart considers that no study is 
 above the reach of children, if one knows how to 
 choose the opportune moment for beginning it, if 
 one takes care to begin early,"to present it skilfully, 
 according to the law of evolution natural to the 
 mind. It is an illusion to believe, for instance, that 
 mathematical aptitude is naturally more rare than 
 any\pther. It is so, in fact, because preparatory 
 elementary work has been too much delayed and 
 neglected. 
 
HERBART 79 
 
 Every subject, then, should be taught, as 
 Comenius already desired, and all subjects to all 
 children in all schools. The same subjects for in- 
 struction will appear on the programme except 
 Latin and Greek in primary schools as in the 
 schools for secondary instruction. There should be 
 no difference in the nature of the studies from one 
 grade to another of education; that should occur 
 only in their proportion. The same things should be 
 taught everywhere, but in the school only the surface 
 be skimmed; in the gymasium (grammar or high 
 school) the depths should be sounded. 
 
 The concrete, positive sciences, realien, the 
 Germans call them, the humanities, equally with 
 the natural sciences, are the basis of instruction. 
 The study of ancient languages is not an essential 
 element. Herbart certainly was a lover of Greek; it 
 is known that he put the Odyssey into the hands of 
 children at ten years of age, that he used it as a 
 first reading book, and that he did not believe that 
 there was a better means of forming the mind than 
 to continue this study for ten months or more. 1 
 He liked Latin less, the writers of Rome not being 
 suitable, in his opinion, to initiate the child into the 
 classic ages. This initiation into classic ages weighed 
 
 1 " It took us a year and a half to read the Odyssey." See 
 the reports to M. de Steiger, 1797-1798. 
 
80 HERBART 
 
 with him far more than a philological study of dead 
 languages: " Latin and Greek/' he said, "a source 
 of torment for pupils, a necessary evil in secondary 
 schools now, ought to disappear entirely from the 
 curriculum of the schools, if we could acquire with- 
 out knowing these languages an exact view, a living 
 representation, of antiquity." Without doubt, the 
 classic writings are the immortal models of beauty, 
 purity, and style, and the progress or decadence of 
 modern languages is linked with the maintenance 
 or suppression of the study of ancient languages. 
 But Herbart at the same time called attention to 
 the fact that this is not the business of the school, 
 that it does not fall to most men to look after the 
 fate of their language, and that the aim of school 
 studies is only to attend to the function of literature. 
 Greco-Latin studies will be, then, in the future, 
 only the favorite task of a few privileged educators. 
 "Let us put aside the superstitious belief that to be 
 really cultivated a modern man must be able to 
 decipher Greek and Latin texts." The labor 
 required by a study is rewarded for its pains only 
 in the case of those who display a marked apti- 
 tude and a firm intention of reaching a high degree 
 of culture. "Also, it is necessary to begin this 
 labor early, at seven or eight years of age, before 
 the circle of ideas closes." Languages, ancient or 
 
H K/ryriA H- L 81 
 
 modern, all systems of symbols, are a burden in 
 teaching; we should endeavor to lighten it by 
 interest in the things which the signs represent. 
 Greek should be studied before Latin, a con- 
 sequence of the principle that pedagogical evolution 
 should correspond to the historical. For the same 
 reason, modern languages will not be learnt before 
 ancient: "this would be to put the cart before the 
 horse." The study of texts should be connected 
 with the study of ancient history; this is the only 
 possible basis for a really pedagogical study of 
 Latin and Greek, a consequence of the principle 
 of connectedness amongst ideas. And thus the old 
 humanities, subjects which are not necessary to 
 every one, but which will remain the ideal of a few, 
 should be given their right place. No one has 
 felt more fully the value of classic culture than he 
 who, with deep insight, said : "Who, then, has really 
 received classic culture? Only those who praise it. 
 . . . For it could not be granted that those who 
 malign classic culture can claim to have received it." 
 
IV 
 
 "THE worth of a man," said Herbart, "is measured 
 not by what he knows, but what he desires to do." 
 That is the same as saying that moral culture, cul- 
 ture that forms the will, is still more important than 
 intellectual culture, the source of knowledge. In- 
 struction is of value only when it tends to moral 
 ends. The moral idea ought to dominate all in- 
 struction. Virf.np in flp aiipremfl end of education. 
 
 Now, in the system of Herbart, instruction and 
 education are found commingled, united in one. 
 Will depends on knowledge. If each act of the will 
 is only an idea in action, an idea energized (idee- 
 force) according to the expression dear to M. Fouill6e, 
 moral character itself is only a collection, a group- 
 ing, of ideas that tend to become active. Whoever 
 forms enlightened men, forms at the same time 
 moral and virtuous men. Thinking rightly is the 
 source of willing and acting rightly. 
 
 Moral culture does not the less lay claim to 
 special attention, and Herbart has considered it 
 apart in a series of chapters in which he scatters 
 
 82 
 
HERBART 83 
 
 delicate observations and judicious counsel from 
 full hands. Herbart, who had a blind faith in his 
 theories and systematic notions, is most valued by 
 us for detail in special subjects and wealth of prac- 
 tical observations. ^Tn trying to summarize his 
 views, we are liable to distort them. We ought to be 
 able to cite these pages, so profoundly thought out 
 in their entirety; for in them the question of moral 
 education is discussed in all its heights and depths ; 
 and the goodness of heart of a talented thinker is 
 revealed with a sweet seriousness. 
 
 Moral as well as intellectual culture has its point 
 of departure in the experience of the child. Her- 
 bart, without doubt, has no wish for the " natural 
 man " of Rousseau's type. He makes the just obser- 
 vation that the word " nature" is vague and equivo- 
 cal, since both stoics and epicureans could appeal to 
 it in theories of morals quite opposed to each other. 
 But he still less desires a " school man," one who 
 has had no contact with moral realities, who has not 
 steeped his soul in the relations of social life. " The 
 world and nature do much more for the pupil than 
 education, properly so called." The moral experi- 
 ences of the child, like his intellectual experience, 
 is narrow and limited. The relations that he can 
 establish within the circle of this family or the school 
 are necessarily inadequate; they dispose him to 
 
84 HERBART 
 
 develop only one sentiment, to the exclusion of all 
 others, love of family at the expense of love of 
 country, or the latter at the expense of love of 
 humanity. It is indispensable, then, that instruction 
 should widen the field of experience, and that a 
 " many-sided interest" should help to enlarge the 
 heart, fight the tendency toward social exclusiveness, 
 and form a full and complete soul. And again, 
 this is also necessary to correct the bad effects of 
 experience, to provide a remedy for the egoistic 
 feelings, antipathies, aversions, which may be 
 bred by the chances of life in school and family, 
 for the scars and bruises, caused not seldom by the 
 earliest relations of the child with its parents or 
 tyrannical masters, and which hinder the upspring- 
 ing of sympathetic interest. 
 
 But before moral culture can begin with advan- 
 tage, there is a preparatory and provisional period, 
 that of the " control of children" (Reg wrung der 
 Kinder), of what is called by us discipline. 1 For- 
 merly, discipline might have been considered as the 
 whole law of education, in days when teachers 
 believed they had only to oppress and constrain 
 dispositions rebellious and wholly bad. Herbart, 
 who considers that wickedness in children proceeds 
 
 1 Let us note that Herbart reserves the word " discipline " (Zucht) 
 to designate " moral culture." 
 
HERBART 85 
 
 for the most part from defects in parents, and who 
 aspires to form an inner man capable of self-govern- 
 ment, permits discipline and coercive measures only 
 during early years. It should last only for a season, 
 and should give place as soon as possible to real 
 education, for which it should, moreover, prepare. 
 Its end is to maintain provisional order. It pre- 
 vents the child from injuring itself, and from being 
 unbearable to others. It imposes passive sub- 
 mission while awaiting the birth of the will. It is 
 necessary because of the petulance and lack of re- 
 flection of young children. It renders the first 
 instruction possible; for one cannot instruct in- 
 subordinate and undisciplined children. It works 
 for the present ; education works for the future^ 
 
 The discipline recommended by Herbart is in no 
 way severe or oppressive. It should be already 
 steeped in the liberal spirit that will animate educa- 
 tion. Herbart, we may be certain, was a kind, 
 sweet-tempered, and patient genius. If he consents 
 to authorize threats, watching, punishment, he 
 introduces into the application of these disciplinary 
 agencies all kinds of restrictions, which soften their 
 severity and guard the spontaneity of the child. 
 Upon occasion, however, he can advise vigorous 
 though not angry repression, when, for instance, it is 
 a question of falsehood, of which he had a horror. 
 
86 HERBART 
 
 Threats, he recognized that they are often 
 ineffective, even when they are regularly followed 
 by deeds, and parents or masters do not, before the 
 tears or entreaties of the child, weakly retract them. 
 And above all, he desires that refusals and pro- 
 hibitions be reduced to a strict minimum. They 
 should leave a free field for the need of activity in 
 the child, on every occasion when no danger is in- 
 curred by giving him a loose rein. 
 
 Superintendence, he permits that, too, but with 
 all sorts of restrictions. At the bottom he dislikes 
 it. "I dare hardly say what I think about it." 
 He will have no companion, no severe tutor who 
 follows the child step by step, who holds him like 
 a slave by a chain, who robs the child of all liberty 
 by sacrificing to him his own. Excess of superin- 
 tendence has, besides, this drawback, that it 
 stimulates the child to employ trickery and subter- 
 fuge. He recalled that during the years of his own 
 tutorship he had been merely the guide and benevo- 
 lent friend to his pupils, that he had placed confi- 
 dence in them, and never hesitated to leave them to 
 themselves, to their games and sports. " Children/ 7 
 he said, "must be exposed to danger, if one wants 
 them to become men." Those who growup under the 
 tyranny of a superintendence that is strict, constant, 
 and indiscreet, will possess neither courage nor self- 
 
HERBART 87 
 
 reliance. They will lack spirit and initiative. 
 The strong, firm character which we should develop, 
 and the formation of which is the essential end of 
 moral culture, is prepared only by action, by ex- 
 ercise of the will. Discipline, then, must not make 
 an improper use of police-like superintendence ; it 
 must be prudent, do nothing which will hinder the 
 earliest manifestations of the will, and finally, while 
 governing the child, it must prepare him to govern 
 himself. 
 
 Punishments, Herbart thinks them necessary. 
 But he distinguishes between several kinds : those 
 which are the instruments of government, others 
 which are of use still after a liberal education has 
 begun. There are, in the first place, disciplinary 
 punishments, those which insure order, which oblige 
 children to remain quiet: all sorts of privations, 
 privations of food, liberty, and even corporal chas- 
 tisement. The Germans have never had much 
 delicacy about this matter, and Herbart does not 
 absolutely reject the old customs. The rod and 
 hands tied behind the back do not shock him. 
 "It is not bad for a child to recall that he was 
 whipped when little." But to purely disciplinary 
 corrections should follow those which have educative 
 virtue, and which will render the child prudent by 
 habituating him to calculate the consequences of his 
 
88 HERBART 
 
 acts. These are the punishments which Herbart 
 calls "pedagogic"; and it is worth noting that the 
 famous theory of Herbert Spencer on natural 
 punishment, the consequences and reactions of our 
 acts, exists already in germ in the writings of Her- 
 bart. 1 The gormand who has eaten too many 
 dainties should take a bitter medicine to cure his 
 indigestion. The neglectful child who has soiled his 
 Sunday garments should be obliged to do without 
 them. . . . There is, finally, a third and higher 
 kind of punishment, in which a moral idea appears : 
 punishment which the culprit accepts, when he is re- 
 pentant, as a deserved expiation of the sin committed. 
 Herbart, to tell the truth, considers discipline 
 only as a necessary evil ; the proof of this is that, if it 
 were possible, he would remove the burden of it from 
 the educator. It is an inferior duty, not suitable to 
 the high calling of men who take charge of the instruc- 
 tion of the child. The educator is, in his way, an 
 artist ; and if a painter, a sculptor, can only rise to 
 
 1 This is fresh evidence of the regrettable condition that in the 
 science of education there is no understanding, no continuity of 
 effort amongst the workers of different nationality, the conse- 
 quence being that one of them believes he has discovered a theory 
 that is more than half a century old. Mr. Herbert Spencer, in 
 writing to me, has stated that before composing his remarkable 
 essay, he had read neither the Entile of Rousseau, nor any work on 
 education except a bad commentary by the Englishman, " Biber, " 
 on Pestalozzi. 
 
HERBART 89 
 
 perfection by means of a concentrated force of genius, 
 entirely absorbed in its art, freed from all the ac- 
 cessory and inferior work of his trade; so it is 
 desirable that a teacher whose mission it is to educate 
 the inner being of the child, should not have to dis- 
 sipate a part of his mental power and energy on the 
 cares and anxieties of discipline. 
 
 The government of children approaches to moral 
 education when it is based upon and supported by 
 "authority" and "affection": two auxiliaries the 
 action of which is so much the more important, 
 since by permeating discipline they tend to render it 
 useless. That is, again, another reason for preferring 
 domestic to public education. 
 
 What teacher could rival parents, who would lay 
 claim to excel or even equal them in matters of 
 authority and affection? If authority is naturally 
 vested in the father, does not the mother claim first 
 place in affection, "the mother who, at the price of 
 endless sacrifices, succeeds in discovering the needs 
 of her child better than any one else could do, who 
 communicates with him in his first speech, of which 
 she alone has the secret, who, favored by the re- 
 finement of her feminine nature, knows how to find 
 the familiar accent which harmonizes with the tender 
 feelings of the child, and whose gentle control, if it 
 is not clumsily exerted, never fails of its end" ? 
 
90 HERBART 
 
 From a stranger, from any educator whatever, 
 it is evidently not possible to ask the same love, the 
 same penetrating force of affection. How could the 
 passing teacher exert the same ascendency over his 
 pupils as the abiding family, which from birth has 
 wrapped the child in tenderness, in a sustained 
 bond of feeling and habit ? Authority and love are 
 not the less at school than at home precious co- 
 workers with discipline, so far as the school can 
 make use of them, and they will endure, forming a 
 solid base for true education and moral culture. 
 
 The period arrives, in fact, and we hasten 
 toward it, when government should disappear; 
 or at least should relax its imperious authority, in 
 order to give place to an education which will pre- 
 pare the child to direct himself. It is here that Her- 
 bart reaches the culminating point of his pedagogical 
 doctrine, the part that is most essential and impor- 
 tant in his system. The child should be freed as 
 soon as possible from the swaddling-clothes which 
 outside influences have woven, in order that he may 
 become an autonomous being, a moral person, who 
 draws from internal forces his rules of conduct and 
 moral laws, without having, henceforth, need to ask 
 them from external guardians. " Education would 
 be a tyranny if it did not lead toward freedom." 
 
 But just as it was impossible to understand Her- 
 
HERBART 91 
 
 hart's theory of instruction without a preparatory 
 review of his psychology, so a glance at the principles 
 of his ethics is indispensable for finding the key to 
 his pedagogy of morality. 1 
 
 Herbart moralizes outside the beaten paths. 
 His moral theories are exceedingly personal, closely 
 associated, in fact, with his system as a whole. He 
 aspired, he says, to continue and complete the prac- 
 tical philosophy of Kant, and while doing so to cor- 
 rect it ; in reality he demolishes it, leaving nothing 
 standing. His ethics, in fact, is a morality with- 
 out free will, a morality without obligation. He 
 admits neither transcendental liberty, nor the cate- 
 gorical imperative, the very foundations of morality 
 such as was conceived by the author of The Criticism 
 of the Practical Reason. Transcendental liberty, 
 considered from the pedagogical point of view alone, 
 and understood not purely as a dream, renders all 
 education useless and impossible, just as much 
 as an absolute fatalism would do. It may be 
 taken for granted that the fatalism of Spinoza, since 
 it views all things as ruled a priori by the decrees of 
 an inexorable destiny, condemns to failure all educa- 
 tional effort. But it is interesting in other respects 
 
 1 See the remarkable articles of M. Dereux : " On the foundations 
 of morality according to Herbart," in the Critique philosophique, 
 for December, 1888, and January, March, and May, 1889. 
 
92 HERBART 
 
 to prove that Kant, too, with his strange conception 
 of a super-sense freedom, independent of experience, 
 active before time began and beyond time, sterilizes 
 and paralyzes the power of education. How affect 
 a being whose destiny has been fixed beforehand by a 
 mysterious will, by a miraculous coup d'etat, causing 
 in advance a break in empirical determinism, in 
 the chain of human actions? When a man 
 enters into this world he has already voted for 
 good or evil in his future actions. Nothing will be 
 able to influence him. The man who thinks he can 
 be made better is only dreaming. One man can 
 no longer affect another; instruction, warning, pun- 
 ishments, these accomplish nothing. If, then, 
 transcendental liberty has the power to modify a 
 man's acts, independently of all reason and well- 
 reflected motives, it is clear that the characteristic 
 feature of the ethics of Kant is nothing but em- 
 pirical determinism, hanging, one knows not how, 
 fronTa first postulate of metaphysical freedom ; and 
 consequently it destroys all attempts at reform and 
 moral progress ; it denies the possibility of education. 
 Herbart, a realist in philosophy, could not admit 
 in any way such an arbitrary and unreal hypothesis 
 as that of transcendental liberty. Neither is one 
 surprised that he refuses to bow down before the 
 categorical imperative of Kant, and, in general, 
 
HERBART 93 
 
 before any idea of moral obligation. To believe 
 in obligation, that is to say, in a command addressed 
 by reason to the will, we must begin by believing in 
 reason itself ; for the same argument there must also 
 be a will. Now, we know that the psychology of 
 Herbart does not admit any primitive faculty; 
 reason and a moral conscience he excludes as much 
 as intellect and sensibility; there is nothing but a 
 confused mass of representations, and, as it were, 
 a dust-cloud of ideas, the confusion of which allows 
 'the construction of mental unity, a form of activity 
 not granted by nature. The child, then, is bor 
 without moral ideas, as without will. Practical / / 
 reason, as well as theoretical reason, arises gradually / 
 from objects represented in consciousness, and from 
 the relation of these objects. It is in no way a first 
 principle, a fundamental law. It is deduced and 
 derived. In consequence, duty (of this Herbart 
 does not even pronounce the name) is no longer the 
 sovereign rule of our actions, established on an idea 
 of the good. Good in itself does not exist. Moral- 
 ity, like understanding as a whole, is only the re- ' 
 sultant from a series of operations, the product of 
 experience. 
 
 It would seem, however, at the first glance, that 
 Herbart admits a different conception. He speaks 
 of a moral ideal, and he distinguishes five ideas as 
 
94 HERBART 
 
 being the elements of it. But these ideas, as we 
 shall see, are neither anterior nor superior to ex- 
 perience; they spring from it. They are the effect 
 rather than the cause of morality. It is not they 
 which determine us to be virtuous ; but it is because 
 we are virtuous that they take shape in the mind. 
 That is to say, that a good man forms a conception 
 of them as the ideal standard for his actions, by a 
 sort of abstraction from his virtues; but it is not 
 they which form the good man. 
 
 Let us enumerate and define these five moral 
 ideas, which Herbart separates absolutely from one 
 another, and which he considers irreducible. They 
 are, indeed, not simple notions. In Herbart's phi- 
 losophy there is nothing simple except the soul, 
 which is unknowable and inert. Everywhere there 
 is connection, relation, function. Thus the first 
 moral idea, inner liberty, is only a relation between 
 the judgment and will when they agree. A desire 
 is conceived; the judgment approves of it; con- 
 sciousness of this harmony is liberty, as Herbart un- 
 derstood it : not an independent power which weighs 
 different motives and selects, but simply the pressure 
 exerted by one idea over another to bring about an 
 action. The mind is then at peace with itself. The 
 man who acts deliberately in conformity with his 
 thoughts, is free inwardly and subjectively. 
 
HERBART 95 
 
 The notion of perfection takes the second place, and 
 is again only a relation between two ideas, two acts 
 of the will, of which one surpasses the other in no- 
 bility because it is the better of the two ; in intensity, 
 if it is the stronger; in extension, if it comprehends 
 a greater number of objects; finally, in concentra- 
 tion, if it firmly coordinates this diversity of objects. 
 A mathematical bent of mind always directed 
 the speculations of Herbart, and moral perfection, 
 one can see, is for him only a question of quantity, 
 we were going to say of dimensions, in the amount 
 and force of will power. 
 
 However that may be, the first two moral notions 
 concern only the relation between acts of "will in one 
 and the same person ; they belong to what is known 
 as individual morality; they concern personal 
 progress, of which the maxim is, "Make yourself 
 perfect." The three other ideas good-will, law, and 
 justice regard, on the contrary, social morality; 
 they presuppose will relationships between two or 
 more different persons. Let us place ourselves in the 
 presence of our kind; if our own will conforms 
 to the will of others, if we desire that this external 
 will finds satisfaction and reaches its end, we have 
 then a kind or benevolent notion. If of two wills 
 desiring the same object neither will yield, there is 
 a conflict; this conflict is disagreeable, contrary to 
 
96 HERBART 
 
 order ; it must be avoided, the struggle ended ; that 
 is the notion of law (droit). Finally, if the strife has 
 not been adjusted, if one person has transgressed his 
 rights, the order that has been disturbed and injured 
 must be restored, and agreement between the wills 
 be reestablished, thanks to the sanctions and com- 
 pensations which render to each what belongs to 
 him : that is the notion of justice. 
 . We need not delay to criticise this particular 
 classification of moral concepts: what is alone of 
 importance to us, is to prove that they claim in no 
 way to be the first principles of moral conduct. 
 They do not derive their force from a direct and 
 original revelation to consciousness. If one might 
 compare them with the " Ideas" of Plato, for they 
 also are models or examples of moral beauty, they 
 are not reminiscences, reflections of a world of super- 
 sensible realities. They are purely mental construc- 
 tions, and follow upon action more than they deter- 
 mine it. Just as representations, when associated, 
 form the intellect, so acts of will, when repeated, 
 construct the moral ideal. There is perfect par- 
 allelism between the development of theoretic reason 
 and of practical reason. We begin by action ; then 
 we reflect, and from reflection come the great ideas 
 which henceforth give direction to human conduct. 
 Once conceived, in fact, they contribute to en- 
 
97 
 
 lighten our judgment, and in a certain measure they 
 become the agents of moral culture. They are 
 lighthouses which illuminate the pathway of life as 
 long as a man acts ; they do not shine when he starts, 
 but their light accompanies humanity on its march. 
 Since it is not in moral ideas, as Herbart under- 
 stands them, that we must seek the principle of 
 virtue, where shall we, then, find it? He replies 
 without hesitation, in an aesthetic necessity. In his 
 view, the good and the beautiful are not sep- 
 arable. A moral judgment is an aesthetic judg- 
 ment. That is a singular conception, which was 
 suggested to Herbart, so it would seem, by the 
 theory of music. He was a good musician, as we 
 have already said, and it was the study of sound- 
 relationships which in part suggested to him his 
 theory of the relationship of acts of will. According 
 to him, aesthetic judgments are absolute. They 
 do not require demonstration. They assert them- 
 selves with complete authority. "If we ask a pro- 
 fessor of counterpoint for a demonstration of the 
 beauty of a sound, he could only laugh, or perhaps 
 pity the stupid ears which have not already ap- 
 preciated it." Moral judgments, since they are 
 aesthetic, have the same character. They need only 
 show themselves to secure our approval, to exercise 
 over our resolutions a gentle constraint. They per- 
 
98 HERBART 
 
 suade at once. "As soon as an aesthetic judgment 
 springs up in the soul, it is felt as a force. This is 
 the gentle pressure that mankind calls conscience." 
 
 We are explaining Herbart's theory, not criticising 
 it. To how many objections is he not exposing him- 
 self in attributing to taste, to aesthetic judgment, 
 the authority which his system did not permit him 
 to require from moral law, from a command of the 
 reason, resting'upon a notion of the good, or of duty ? 
 It will suffice to put forward only one such objection : 
 that this authority appears very precarious, very 
 fragile, and without any assured efficacy. How 
 could a judgment pronounced by taste become 
 a principle of obligation? How could an appre- 
 ciation of beauty suffice to determine action? 
 
 Still, accepting Herbart's theory as it stands, more 
 ingenious than solid, let us try to understand how 
 this theory of a morality interchangeable with 
 aesthetics, can be reconciled with the great principle 
 of educative instruction. Moral education, let us 
 not forget, is in direct and strict correlation with 
 intellectual education. In order, then, that moral 
 education, thus accepted, be possible, aesthetic 
 judgment must itself be formed by instruction. At 
 first approach, it appears as if there were here two 
 distinct theories, and that to reconcile them would 
 be a matter of some difficulty. This is the fashion, 
 
HERBART 99 
 
 however, in which Herbart explains the possibility 
 of such a union, of the required articulation. To 
 form the aesthetic judgment, certain mental states 
 must be brought about. Objects must be clearly 
 represented and sharply defined; also calmness, 
 order, and stability must reign amongst representa- 
 tions as they succeed each other. In a word, char- 
 acter has to be formed. Now, character is a system 
 of regular representations, desires, and acts of will, 
 all firmly united, the result of instruction that is 
 solid and full. 
 
 Character consists of a man's desires, and he 
 desires what he persistently thinks about. ^Jn^. 
 struction, then, is the principle of the formation 
 of character. _It is true that other elements con- 
 tribute to the good functioning of voluntary activity. 
 Herbart admits that assurance and courage are, in 
 part, the effect of our physical constitution, of good 
 health. " Feeble and sickly natures feel themselves 
 dependent; robust natures alone dare to exercise 
 their will. " It is for this reason, also, that he 
 deems he may say: "A man usually has more char- 
 acter than a woman, just because he is superior to 
 her in physical strength." 1 It is not, therefore, 
 
 1 To appease the self-respect of women, let us quote another 
 passage: "Man is often inferior to woman; as regards wisdom, 
 she can promptly distinguish and note in social relationships things 
 that are barely perceptible and escape the observation of men." 
 
100 HERBART 
 
 less true that the education of character depends 
 especially on the education of ideas, and that teach- 
 ing plays much the heavier role in moral culture. 
 
 That is why the child, in his first years, and while 
 still ignorant, has no character, or at least possesses 
 only that inferior form of character called by Her-s 
 bart (who is always drawing distinctions) objective. 
 Objective character consists of the whole of the 
 desires, fancies, caprices, and passions to which the 
 organism gives birth before the thinking will has 
 made its appearance. In this fluid state of child 
 nature, at a time when representations, as ill ordered 
 as the waves of the sea, rush after one another, 
 covering each other in confusion, the real character, 
 what in the terminology of Herbart is called sub- 
 jective character, cannot yet grow firm. That will 
 reveal itself only when reflection and reasoning 
 power control and rule the capricious and incon- 
 sistent desires of the child, by uniting his ideas in 
 permanent groups. 
 
 It is fixity of ideas, rigorous association, that 
 insures force of character. To designate this per- 
 sistence of the same representations, Herbart in- 
 vented the expression " memory of the will." The 
 term is neat and expressive, but possibly only the 
 term is new. The memory of the will, that is to say, 
 a will always in harmony with itself, as opposed to 
 
HERBART 101 
 
 wills wavering and failing, or, again, a disposition 
 to desire always the same things upon the same 
 occasions, is not this what the old psychology called 
 custom? There is no character so long as there is 
 no persistency and constancy of ideas. Herbart 
 mistrusts dispositions that are unsteady, and there- 
 fore light. He speaks in a joking way of those young 
 men who to-day take six courses of study, to-morrow 
 will work alone, and the next day set out on a 
 journey. What he approves in the child as a con- 
 dition favorable to successful education, is a dis- 
 position to will strongly, even when this is accom- 
 panied by a measure of obstinacy. 
 
 If calm, reflective minds make strong characters, 
 something else is, however, yet wanting to complete 
 a moral education: there must be action. And 
 here Herbart seems to hesitate between his funda- 
 mental principle, instruction, and a quite different 
 conception, the importance of exercise, of the part 
 played by action. If the child is developed merely 
 passively, under a system of constraint, he will 
 reach manhood without possessing character. In 
 consequence, it is right to give free course to the 
 energy and initiative of the child. To help him to 
 morality, we ought not to depend on precepts 
 confided to the memory. A maxim is efficacious 
 only when it has been, so to speak, lived, when per- 
 
102 HERBART 
 
 sonal action has given it life, and it has become, 
 in a manner, a fragment of our autobiography. 
 The child who, from his earliest years, has been ac- 
 customed to give water to the thirsty, or food to the 
 hungry, is prepared to formulate this general rule 
 of morality: " Render aid to your neighbor when- 
 ever he has need of it." And, in an inverse sense, 
 a defect of character proceeds only by a fault re- 
 peated several times. 
 
 Herbart, in his pedagogy of morality, does not for- 
 get his pedagogy of the intellect. Thus a many- 
 sided mterestTappears to him to be one of the es- 
 sential conditions of morality. A mind unfurnished 
 with a rich store of ideas is exposed to egoism : its 
 limited knowledge leaves the field open to base 
 desires. We are certainly not going to contest that 
 morality may expect to advance with instruction 
 and with the widening of the circle of ideas; but 
 we ask, nevertheless, whether Herbart does not 
 propose for moral culture an unattainable ideal, in 
 making variety, extent, and multiplicity of knowl- 
 edge a condition of virtue. Does not that exclude 
 from the moral life all whose condition condemns 
 them to remain more or less ignorant or men of 
 partial culture? An aesthetic morality having as 
 foundation universality of knowledge, is that a 
 morality suited to all the world ? One may doubt it. 
 
HERBART 103 
 
 Just as the ancient Greek philosophers moralized 
 only for the privileged classes and forgot the slaves, 
 so Herbart, in his conceptions of morality, appears to 
 have in view only a society of scholars: a morality 
 that will serve only the select few. 
 
 An esthetic intellectualism, that might be a 
 definition of morality, according to Herbart. We 
 cannot speak to him of sentiments as sources of 
 virtue, for sentiments have their origin in ideas. 
 It is no longer true to say with the ancient moralists 
 that " great ideas spring from the heart." It is 
 the contrary that is true : it is the heart that grows 
 warm and animated under the influence of ideas. 
 
 But, whatever may be the confidence professed 
 by Herbart in the moralizing value of an instruction 
 which conforms to the rules traced out in his " di- 
 dactics," he does not the less distinguish special 
 methods of moral culture. There are, in fact, 
 precautions to be taken to insure the regular devel- 
 opment of ideas, and possibly, at times, his reflections 
 will appear to us to contradict the fundamental 
 principle of his system, and lead him to search else- 
 where than in instruction for the conditions of 
 moral education. 
 
 To follow the same order and plan adopted by 
 Herbart, we shall distinguish with him six things to 
 be done hi moral culture. This is the list of them : 
 
104 HERBART 
 
 (1) support the child; (2) incline him to act ; (3) es- 
 tablish rules ; (4) maintain in his soul calmness and 
 serenity; (5) stimulate his intellect with approval 
 and censure ; (6) warn and correct him. 
 
 To tell the truth, that is an arbitrary enumera- 
 tion rather than an exact and rigorous classification. 
 They are like six somewhat frail points of attach- 
 ment, on to which Herbart hangs all the prescrip- 
 tions suggested by his great anxiety for the training 
 of character. They are not all new, far from it; 
 and Herbart is the first to acknowledge that often 
 he is only deriving inspiration from old traditional 
 experience, experience that centuries of reflection 
 have established and rendered trustworthy. 1 
 
 The first rule of this scheme of moral culture seems 
 like a prolongation into education of the need of 
 discipline. We must, in fact, continue to "control" 
 (tenir) the child ; that is to say, to keep order, lest 
 disobedience and disorderliness interrupt and ob- 
 struct the course of personal education, and the 
 child, in using his liberty, oversteps the prescribed 
 limits. Above all else, dissipation and indolence 
 are to be combated. In consequence, one must take 
 care that the child is always occupied, and the best 
 
 1 Herbart had none of the empty vanity 1 of an inventor : 
 "Humanity," he wrote, /'has already gathered along the road 
 a great number of truths; it is our part to profit by them." 
 
HERBART 105 
 
 occupations are those which he chooses for himself, 
 in accordance with his tastes : serious occupations, 
 other than play; for games quickly weary him. 
 One must take pains to profit by good tendencies in 
 the natural character of the child, in order to 
 strengthen these, the first germs of morality. We 
 shall rarely command him, and only in cases of ab- 
 solute necessity. By uniformity in the manner of 
 life which we prescribe, we shall endeavor to pro- 
 mote the development of the memory of the will. 
 A teacher equable in temper, always calm, and in full 
 control of himself, who does not pass from excessive 
 indulgence to excessive severity, will contribute to 
 inspire analogous qualities: tranquil and patient 
 moderation in the child. Finally, authority and 
 affection will continue to play an important r&le 
 both at home and at school; the child must have 
 a lively sentiment that the approval of parents and 
 masters is a possession which he can either keep by 
 deserving it, or risk to lose. 
 
 In the second place, moral culture exercises the 
 child in doing. It teaches him what he must bear 
 and suffer, in order to possess what he desires or 
 do what he likes. It teaches him, at the cost of his 
 own experience, "that the flame burns, the needle 
 pricks, that falling is dangerous." In a word, it 
 habituates him to control himself, by furnishing 
 
106 HERBART 
 
 him with opportunities of choosing between differ- 
 ent motives for action. But here one is tempted 
 to stop Herbart, and to ask him whether his psychi- 
 cal mechanism, seeing that it covers voluntary acts 
 as well as manifestations of thought, permits him 
 to speak of choice or of option. In very fact, there 
 is no place in his moral mechanism for free self- 
 determination. It is no longer a question of liberty 
 to compare different grounds of action, and after 
 reflection, decide for one or the other. There are 
 present only different groups of ideas and a struggle 
 or conflict between them. It is the strongest element, 
 the dominant group of ideas, which comes off victor 
 and leads to a decision. To this Herbart will reply 
 that it is precisely the business of instruction to 
 cause certain ideas to prevail, and, in consequence, 
 it forms in us the only real liberty, which is none 
 other than harmony between what we think and 
 what we wish. 
 
 The third point in moral culture consists of es- 
 tablishing " rules" and maxims of conduct. Here 
 is the place for dogmatic instruction in morality. 
 The five moral ideas may now begin to exert their 
 sway over conduct. Just as it is imprudent to 
 reason with children at an age when they themselves 
 cannot share in an argument, so now it becomes 
 necessary to discuss with them and to show them the 
 
HERBART 107 
 
 consequences of their actions ; to make them, indeed, 
 understand what is the advantage to them of obe- 
 dience to the general rules by which they ought to 
 feel bound. 
 
 Moral culture should be inspired by the notion 
 that peace of mind, if it is the end of virtue, is also 
 one of its conditions; and hence arises the neces- 
 sity of maintaining "calmness and serenity." This 
 end will be attained by encouraging the natural 
 gayety of the child, by seeking every means of keep- 
 ing it good-humored, by letting it live its child life, 
 by excluding the wearisome and fruitless studies 
 which hamper the free movement of his mind. 
 Above all, we shall be careful that his desires do not 
 degenerate into passions through excessive stimu- 
 lation, and for this reason we shall permit to them 
 only a moderate measure of satisfaction. At need, 
 we shall remove the desired object. We shall direct 
 the activity of the child toward the study of the 
 arts, music, and painting ; and if he lacks talent, we 
 shall fall back on other occupations, collecting 
 plants, insects, or shells, gardening, or cardboard 
 modelling, or even carpentry. Herbart favors man- 
 ual work. Emile as carpenter is not a displeas- 
 ing sight to him. "All men," he says, "should 
 learn to make use of their hands, for the hands take 
 honorable rank by the side of speech in elevating 
 
108 HERBART 
 
 men above the animals." In such ways we shall 
 find means of diverting the child from disturbing 
 passions, passions which darken the mind at the 
 period when a calm and quiet spirit, ready always 
 to conceive clearly, is alone in a fit condition to form 
 aesthetic judgments. 
 
 When Herbart recommends recourse to approval 
 and blame, his fifth rule, it appears to us that 
 he is departing from his system and destroying its 
 framework. In fact, he calls to his aid a foreign 
 agency : the judgment of others. Is it really true 
 that the child is unable to attain to virtue spontane- 
 ously, by himself alone, by the energy of his char- 
 acter, influenced solely by instruction? We must 
 support him on the right path ; by censure and by 
 the punishment which follows thereon, we must recall 
 him to it ; above all, he needs for Herbart desired 
 that all men should grow up " without one word of 
 deserved blame falling on their ears" that ap- 
 proval and its consequent rewards should have influ- 
 ence on his resolutions and conduct. Let us not 
 reproach Herbart with a happy contradiction, which 
 makes him admit that one can, and one should mor- 
 alize the child by praise and by reprimand ; measures 
 which will succeed only when the master has known 
 how to win the esteem and affection of his pupils. 
 
 The sixth and last mode of moral culture is hardly 
 
HERBART 109 
 
 distinguishable from the previous one : " Warning and 
 exhortation" ^'approach very closely to reprimand, 
 and also to correction. Herbart considers, however, 
 that one can give advice without adding reproach, 
 and that correction is profitable only when gentle. 
 The child must be handled humanely ; we must feel 
 all the noble and good that there is in him, and avoid 
 all harshness, not only in acts but also in speech. 
 Moral culture, as defined, is "a continuous treat- 
 ment" : the personal work of a master who employs, 
 above all else, benevolent methods, who knows how 
 to make himself agreeable to a child, and to please 
 him by the interest that he manifests in him ; who does 
 not forget that it is a matter not so much of bend- 
 ing the will but of forming it, having regard to the 
 reasonable being who one day will develop from 
 a creature yet feeble in regard to ideas, weak and 
 unstable in its will; who, in short, knows how to 
 adapt himself in his role as teacher to that fine 
 epigram: "We love the child; but in the child we 
 love the coming man." 
 
 Herbart had a multiple mind, called by English 
 people many-sided, by Germans veilfdltig. He saw 
 things on all sides. He turned a question round 
 and round, on all its faces. We are not surprised 
 then, when, in the laborious and troublesome re- 
 construction of a moral education of which he had 
 
110 HERBART 
 
 destroyed the classic foundations, after having had 
 recourse to all sources of instruction, even to all 
 the sciences, and above all else, to aesthetics, Her- 
 bart turns to religion, to what he calls " religious 
 interest." He by no means founds morality on 
 religion, but religion appears to him as a friend and 
 protectress of morality. He does not say whether 
 we could do without religion ; but if the case stands 
 so that we think we ought to have recourse to its 
 support, then it is useful and effective; there is, 
 however, one condition : it must be accepted in its 
 noblest sense. Herbart knew the perils and the 
 excesses of religious faith, and he denounces them. 
 He commends a religion of the inner man, stripped 
 of vain practices. He ridicules children who kneel 
 after the fashion of little girls, holding a prayer- 
 book in their hands with the air of young saints. He 
 scourges the religiou4iypjaerites who think to cover 
 and excuse bad deeds by acts of devotion. In his 
 opinion, religious instruction is a general instruction 
 which underlies and permeates all particular faiths ; 
 which is essentially Christian, and yet preaches 
 love for those even of a different faith. Religion, 
 as conceived by Herbart, is indeed wide and tol- 
 erant; for he requires that it should be strength- 
 ened in instruction in the classics by reading the 
 Dialogues of Plato; and also that religious instruc- 
 
HERBART 111 
 
 tion should be united with instruction in natural 
 science. 
 
 What Herbart expects from religious instruction 
 is that it should assist the teacher to fight against 
 egoism; that it should develop the feeling of hu- 
 mility in the child, the feeling of the dependence 
 of individuals in their relationship to nature and to 
 a Supreme Being. As to the time when it is right 
 to begin religious education, about this he hesitates 
 and remains vague; we must, he says, if we wish 
 to make deep impressions, neither hasten it nor 
 delay it too late. He is very emphatic, and in 
 advance of modern ideas, when he relieves teachers 
 of the care of the religious instruction, which then 
 becomes the duty of the family and of theologians, 
 that is to say, of the ministers of the various sects. 
 "The church," he says, "may maintain relations with 
 the school, but it must not dominate it." That 
 is not yet to separate them ; but it is already a first 
 step on the road to enfranchising the laity. A sepa- 
 ration which he proclaims necessary, from the present 
 in any case, is that of religion and science. It is 
 doubtless necessary for the soul to have the right 
 to rest in peace and unity in its religious belief; 
 but it is also necessary that scientific speculation 
 should follow its course on its own account with 
 freedom, without uneasiness, and without hin- 
 
112 HERBART 
 
 drance. Philosophy is neither orthodox nor 
 heterodox; it has its own field; it works outside 
 dogmas; and religion cannot claim either to hinder 
 the activity of the reason or to bind the forces 
 of nature. 
 
IF the worth of a thinker may be measured by the 
 number of works suggested by him to disciples and 
 critics, I can well believe that Herbart has no rival. 
 There is a Herbartian library, the wealth and extent 
 of which is not equalled even by the Pestalozzian 
 library. Around the work of a single man a whole 
 literature has grown up. In his Encyklopddische 
 Handbuch der Pddagogik, M. Rein, the noted pro- 
 fessor at Jena, devotes nearly 200 pages to the bibli- 
 ography of the subject, and he reckons that no less 
 than 2234 books or pamphlets have been published 
 on Herbart in Germany and Switzerland alone. 
 According to Mr. Felkin, the English translator of 
 Herbart, there are actually about ten periodicals 
 devoted to spreading the master 's doctrine. A 
 whole legion of commentators, moralists, psycholo- 
 gists, philosophers, and teachers have risen up to 
 interpret the ideas of Herbart, to popularize them, 
 to carry them farther and put them into practice; 
 sometimes to correct and oppose them. 
 
 113 
 
114 HERBART 
 
 But if the ideas of Herbart have made a remarkable 
 stir in general philosophy, it is in the field of educa- 
 tion that the impulse given by him has been specially 
 powerful and promises to endure. This writer, al- 
 most unknown amongst us, has become amongst 
 his countrymen the hero and ruling spirit of modern 
 education. He has formed a school. His disciples 
 have multiplied, and for fifty years now they have 
 succeeded each other from generation to generation, 
 unceasingly, in the chain's of pedagogy, at the Ger- 
 man universities, in gymnasiums (grammar or high 
 schools), as well as in normal schools and primary 
 schools. We have read again recently in a Swiss 
 journal, VEducateur, this significant passage, "If in 
 Germany Pestalozzi was the founder, his successor, 
 the philosopher Herbart, has been the logician and 
 organizer of modern pedagogy ; and his methodical 
 work, having rendered service to first one and then 
 another distinguished man, still maintains its place 
 intact and full of energy, sanctioned by a hundred 
 years of experience and success." 1 
 
 It would, however, not be exact to say that the 
 followers of Herbart have maintained the system of 
 
 1 UEducateur, the organ of the pedagogical society of Latin 
 Switzerland, February 28, 1903. The chief editor of this journal, 
 M. F. Guex, director of the normal schools of Lausanne, is himself 
 a convinced and practical Herbartian, who applies in his schools 
 some of the methods recommended by Herbart. 
 
HERBART 115 
 
 the master in its integrity. They have rejected cer- 
 tain parts of their heritage which are obviously out 
 of date ; they have modified others, either develop- 
 ing or amending them. They have in their mitigated 
 or improved Herbartianism remained faithful only 
 to the dominant ideas of the head of the school. 
 These have been applied and explained, and to tell 
 the truth, we know and understand Herbart better 
 when we have read his successors, be it only through 
 the exaggerations into which, at times, they have 
 let themselves be drawn, where the errors of his 
 doctrine appear writ large and in full relief. 
 
 For example, two of the most brilliant representa- 
 tives of the Herbartian school, Ziller (1817-1883) and ) 
 Stoy (1815-1885), obeyed a common inspiration, for / 
 the rest, with differences and many personal opinions, / 
 they were original and inventive, and thus have 
 contributed the most to popularize the methods of 
 Herbart. In spite of their disagreements and the 
 differences which separated them, we find them 
 in 1868 collaborating at the foundation of a great 
 pedagogic association, Verein filr wissenschaftliche 
 Pddagogik, the title of which indicates its aim, 
 an aim dear to Herbart, to establish a scientific 
 pedagogy. Also they were not content, either of 
 them, to write books, give lecture courses, and 
 revivify the ideas of Herbart: copying what he 
 
116 HERBART 
 
 attempted at Konigsberg, they have exerted them- 
 selves to organize and direct institutes of education, 
 pedagogical seminaries. 
 
 Herbartianism in Germany is a religion, with its 
 orthodox and heterodox members. Ziller, in fact, 
 was neither the one nor the other : he was simply 
 an independent Herbartian, who added to the com- 
 mon stock a certain number of new things. Stoy, 
 and after him his successor at Jena, Dr. Rein, are to 
 be considered rather orthodox Herbartians, faith- 
 ful preservers, fervent guardians of the doctrine. 
 
 It was in 1862 that Ziller established at Leipzig 
 a pedagogical seminary, which continues still, and 
 / to which is attached a practice school. The titles 
 of his books indicate the Herbartian tradition and 
 recall its terminology : Introduction to General Peda- 
 gogy (1856), The Government of Children (1857), Prin- 
 ciples of the Doctrine of Educative Instruction (1865). 
 Ziller, like Herbart, believes that in municipal schools 
 instruction may and should be essentially an instru- 
 ment for eiliisaJin^ni^^ It is to jus- 
 tify this claim that he discusses one by one the selection 
 of the subjects of instruction, their rank and coordi- 
 nation, "in order to arrive at the most perfect grasp 
 of science, the highest moral ideal." Ziller certainly 
 makes great mistakes, and it is not quite without 
 reason that he has been severely criticised and almost 
 
HERBART 117 
 
 mishandled; and Stoy as well, in the articles by 
 M. Buisson in the Dictionnaire de pdagogie. Even 
 in Germany the critics have not spared him. Stoy, 
 although he was a Herbartian too, treated him 
 as a " Visionary." "All that is good in Ziller," said 
 Stoy, "is not new, and what is new is not good." 
 Emancipated disciples generally dispute thus with 
 each other within the lines of the doctrines of a great 
 master. ... It is easy to gibe at the concentration 
 plan invented by Ziller, which consists in making 
 literature, or perhaps sacred or national history, 
 the centre of instruction. He connects all the other 
 studies of each school year with a study in literature 
 or history : the first year, with twelve fables or stories 
 from Grimm; the second year, with Robinson 
 Crusoe; the third year, with the story of the Pa- 
 triarchs, and so on. That these methods are old, 
 I grant you; but the end sought by Ziller 
 though he may not have discovered the true means 
 of reaching it is not, therefore, the less worthy 
 of attention and praise. Who can fail to approve 
 of the effort he made to systematize instruction, to 
 articulate firmly one with another its different parts 
 in a unified plan and in harmonious relationship. 
 Too often teachers and especially is this the case 
 in the curricula of our French schools pile to- 
 gether pell-mell all the subjects of instruction with- 
 
118 HERBART 
 
 out troubling themselves about establishing con- 
 nections, or making them converge to a single goal. 
 There is succession and juxtaposition of studies, 
 but there is no coordination. Each professor follows 
 his own path, teaches his own science, without 
 troubling himself about what his neighbors are 
 doing. Each pupil passes without transition from 
 one study to another, from the flowery paths of 
 literature to the rough ascents of science. We must 
 honor Ziller that, in dismay at such scattered studies, 
 he tried to apply a remedy by unifying and fusing 
 together the two groups which Herbart had already 
 marked out : the sciences of humanity and of nature. 
 Ziller, moreover, gave several reasons for this co- 
 ordination being necessary : two of them are psy- 
 chological and one is moral. The self is a being that 
 constantly grows larger; its individuality is estab- 
 lished and its personality developed] thanks alone 
 to unity amongst the experiences and to the in- 
 struction which it receives. There can be no cohe- 
 sion in mental life if there is no cohesion amongst 
 the studies. In the second place, the condition 
 necessary for progress in instruction and education 
 is that interest should be aroused; and since it is 
 certain that there is hardly a child who has not a 
 natural taste for at least one subject or another, 
 one must connect all the other studies to this fa- 
 

 HERBART 119 
 
 vorite, in order that interest may radiate from the 
 first to the second, and thus onwards. But above 
 all, there is a moral reason to be added on the side 
 of concentration and unity in teaching. Instruction 
 being the true principle of moral culture, it is only 
 when the knowledges have been unified and incor- 
 porated one with another, that we can hope to pro- 
 duce that unity of will and action which constitutes 
 solidity of character. In consequence, we must 
 avoid that overburdening, that incoherence and 
 breaking up of curricula, the result of which is to 
 scatter efforts, to disperse the attention of pupils, 
 and to make out of them amateurs who apply 
 themselves to everything in a superficial way and 
 penetrate deeply into nothing. 
 
 What Ziller had done at Leipzig, Stoy repeated at 
 Jena; he also established a pedagogical seminary, 
 das pddagogische Universitdts-seminar } whichuudeTthQ 
 direction of Dr. Rein is still prospering, and bringing 
 together a large number of pupils. Stoy was a pupil 
 of Herbart at Gottingen, and he gathered from the 
 lips of the master himself the principles of education 
 which he developed in his classes and in his works, 
 the Philosophic Propedentics and Encyclopedia of 
 Pedagogy (1861), a second edition in 1878. Like 
 Herbart, he excludes abstract rules and technical 
 terms from the beginning of the studies ; he requires 
 
120 HERBART 
 
 that the child make at first an abundant provision 
 of sense-perceptions. To aim at forming the mind 
 without previously assembling a great many notions, 
 that, said he, would be "like wishing to play on a 
 harp without strings." And it goes] without saying 
 that these notions would be closely linked and associ- 
 ated according to the Herbartian method. But Stoy, 
 nevertheless, did not adopt a concentration plan of 
 studies, such as Ziller formed, on which all the sub- 
 jects of study had to be grouped around the Holy 
 Scriptures or secular history. Let us add that Stoy 
 recalls his master, Herbart, even in his manner of 
 writing ; that the reader is lost in the mazy windings 
 of his expositions and subtle distinctions; that he 
 reaches the point, as some one has said, "of confusing 
 the most simple things"; and in brief, after reading 
 him, one may ask how the head of an institution, a 
 professor, could descend from these clouds of abstrac- 
 tion to set foot amid the realities of practical teaching. 
 M. Rein succeeded Stoy in 1885, and he has con- 
 tinued the Herbartian propaganda. In the kind 
 of pedagogical laboratory directed by him at Jena, it 
 is chiefly to primary l teaching, to the schools of the 
 people, that he applies his methods. M. Chabot, 
 who recently visited the seminary at Jena, found 
 
 1 The school annexed to the seminary at Jena is an elementary 
 school, comprising three classes, of ten pupils each. 
 
HERBART 121 
 
 M. Rein, with his collaborators, occupied in giving a 
 lesson on the prophets of Israel, and trying to render 
 this history interesting, intuitive, and intelligible 
 to children of seven to eight years of age. 1 Dr. 
 Rein appears to us a wise teacher, very sensible and 
 practical, and also very energetic. He has put to- 
 gether eight volumes, corresponding to the eight 
 years of the elementary school, in which all the 
 material of teaching is expounded. He has ac- 
 cepted with conviction, and applies successfully, 
 the greater part of the methods and processes for 
 exciting attention thought out by Herbart. Every 
 well-conducted lesson must begin with a prepara- 
 tion, just as every play begins with an explanation. 
 The teacher first refreshes the memory of the pupil, 
 recalling ideas familiar to him, so that they may 
 meet the new ideas, and that something from within 
 may come, as it were, to greet and welcome what is 
 approaching from the outside. 
 
 Herbart lives again in his disciples, not only 
 because they receive from him the general inspira- 
 tion for their pedagogy, but also seeing that they 
 imitate him in a taste for formulae and systematic 
 distinctions. Is it necessary, for example, to invent, 
 as Dr. Rein has done, the term method wholej to 
 explain to us that there are in every study distinct 
 
 1 M. Chabot, op. cit. t p. 61. 
 
122 HERBART 
 
 divisions which can be approached only in sequence ? 
 Is it necessary that he should give us as many as 
 four reasons to prove the necessity of indicating at 
 the beginning of each lesson the subject about to 
 be treated ? . . . But Herbart would not have dis- 
 allowed these slow, heavy modes of thought, he who 
 complained of the lightness of the French intellect, 
 about which he said that "it does not permit labor- 
 ing over and exhausting a question." 
 
 It is possible to be Herbartian in education with- 
 out adhering to the errors in Herbart's psychology. 
 Such a disciple, for example, was Otto Frick (1832- 
 1892), who undertook to introduce the ideas of Her- 
 bart into secondary teaching, but who absolutely 
 repudiates his empiricism. Frick directed at Halle 
 the celebrated school founded by Francke in the eight- 
 eenth century, which, originally intended to receive 
 poor orphans, has now become an enormous insti- 
 tution ; it comprises all grades of teaching, and has 
 gathered together as many as four thousand children 
 or young people. It was for the higher classes, 
 especially, that Frick elaborated curricula courses 
 and model lessons, all permeated with the spirit of 
 Herbart. But he does not admit that the mind is an 
 empty re'ceptacle, in which experience stores ideas. 
 Frick, on the contrary, attributes to the soul a very 
 rich, innate content. 
 
HERBART 123 
 
 We can give only a glance to the history of Her- 
 bartianism in Germany. Without speaking of the 
 pure psychologists directly inspired by Herbart, Dro- 
 bisch, Nahlowsky, Lazarus, Steinthal, and others, 1 
 how many other noted Herbartians should we not 
 have to mention amongst German philosophers who 
 have engaged in educational matters ? The philoso- 
 pher, Karl Lange, the apperception theorist and 
 Director of the School at Plauen, is he not Her- 
 bartian? He, too, has insisted on the strict de- 
 pendence of education considered as end, on 
 psychology as means. Lindner, whose Empirical 
 Psychology (1858) translated into English has 
 contributed to extend in the United States of 
 America the ideas of the teacher of Konigsberg, 
 is also Herbartian. There is Beneke, too (1798- 
 1854), he who has opposed the tyranny of Kant's 
 imperative, adopting the theory of Herbart 
 concerning the derived character of pain and 
 pleasure, and the intellectualism of emotional 
 states. 2 
 
 1 See the Contemporary German Psychology of M. Ribot. 
 
 2 One ought also to mention Waitz (1821-1864) and his Gen- 
 eral Pedagogy (1852). Amongst living men we should not omit 
 M. de Sallwiirk, director of the seminary at Karlsruhe, who has 
 published a fine edition of the pedagogical works of Herbart. 
 He criticises Herbart willingly, but is, nevertheless, penetrated by 
 him. See, for example, his last work : Home, World, and School, 
 Wiesbaden, 1902. 
 
124 HERBART 
 
 For the rest, it must be said that the ideas of 
 Herbart have spread slowly, even in Germany. It 
 was not until thirty years after his death, three- 
 quarters of a century after the publication of his 
 General Pedagogy, that public favor turned to him. 
 It took time for him to be understood and appre- 
 ciated. He was not one of those who, like Rousseau 
 or Herbert Spencer, attract immediately the atten- 
 tion of people by passionate eloquence or incom- 
 parably clear, lucid exposition. A system so compli- 
 cated, so wrapped in mystery and shadow as that 
 of Herbart, could reach success only slowly. 
 But once set on foot, the movement - made rapid 
 and brilliant progress. To-day the Swiss and 
 German schools in which humble teachers bend 
 their talents to study and apply the pedagogical 
 precepts of Herbart may be reckoned in thou- 
 sands. In 1881, at a German congress on ele- 
 mentary teaching, a director of a normal school 
 was charged with a report on the following 
 question: "Should pedagogy in normal schools be 
 based on the system of Herbart?" The reply 
 was emphatically in the affirmative. It was 
 the same at a congress of directors of gymnasiums 
 in 1883. On the agenda for the day had been 
 put the following subject: "How far can the 
 pedagogy of Herbart be applied in secondary 
 
HERBART 125 
 
 teaching?" The conclusions were here also most 
 favorable. 1 
 
 People have sought to find the causes of this ex- 
 traordinary success. It has been said that even 
 the errors of Herbart have contributed to it, and 
 that they were of a nature to win for him the favor 
 of his countrymen, who enjoy abstruse and abstract 
 conceptions. But it is not only in Germany that 
 Herbart has met with admirers: in America, 
 amongst a people whose intellectual character is, 
 however, very different, he has found disciples as 
 enthusiastic. There is little relationship, it would 
 seem, between the laborious genius of Herbart and 
 the intellect, clear, but at times rather superficial, 
 of the Americans. Yet the fact is certain that, in 
 the United States, Herbart is the fashionable peda- 
 gogical authority. Dr. W. T. Harris went so far, ten 
 years ago, as to say, " There are more adherents of 
 Herbartian pedagogy to-day in America than in 
 Germany itself." 2 This success, which spreads over 
 two worlds, this growing popularity, cannot other- 
 wise be explained except by real merit in the thinker 
 
 1 There were, however, some discordant voices in this concert 
 of approval, notably that of Dittes, who, in 1881, in his Pcedagogium, 
 attacked Herbart, amongst other things, for the insufficiency of 
 his statements regarding the relation of instruction to moral 
 education. 
 
 2 Report of the Commissioner of Education, 1894-1895, p. 322. 
 
126 HERBART 
 
 who has won it. If Herbart has gained a hear- 
 ing, it is by the incontestable might of his concep- 
 tions. It is also because he has a system, a system 
 rich in formulae : one knows the authority, the fasci- 
 nation, exerted over men's minds by the despotism 
 of a systematic doctrine. Human indolence gladly 
 reposes on the soft bed of a ready-made doctrine, 
 in which everything, even to the smallest details, 
 has been foreseen. 
 
 It is now fifteen years since the popularity of 
 Herbart took birth in the United States, and his 
 doctrines were acclimatized there, so that the Ger- 
 man teacher became almost an idol for a certain 
 number of his brethren in America. In the first 
 rank we note M. de Garmo, director of a college in 
 Pennsylvania, 1 who has translated several books on 
 r Tlerbartian pedagogy: the Introduction of the Peda- 
 gogy of Herbart, by Chr. Ufer, and Lindner's Em- 
 pirical Psychology, and who has himself devoted 
 to Herbart, in his list of Great Educators, a work 
 full of research. 2 It is from Germany that M. de 
 Garmo derived the spirit of Herbartianism with 
 
 1 M. de Garmo is now Professor of Education in Cornell Univer- 
 sity, Ithaca, N.Y. TRANS. 
 
 2 Herbart and the Herbartians, 1895. M. de Garmo is the inde- 
 fatigable popularizer of the theories of Herbart. He has pub- 
 lished in the pedagogical reviews of the United States a large 
 number of articles on the subject. 
 
HERBART 127 
 
 which he had thoroughly steeped himself, when he 
 was following the lectures of Stoy at Jena, or when 
 he was the colleague of Frick at Halle, where he 
 taught for two years. But before de Garmo, others 
 had broken a pathway. 
 
 In 1889, Miss M. K. Smith translated the Psychol- 
 ogy of Herbart. In 1892, the same year when 
 there was founded at the end of the annual Educa- 
 tional Congress held at Saratoga by the National 
 Educational Association, the Herbartian Club, with 
 one hundred members, Dr. C. A. McMurry, Pro- 
 fessor of Pedagogy in the University of Illinois, 
 published the Elements of General Method, in 
 which he set forth in a sympathetic way the 
 views of Herbart, as interpreted by Ziller, Stoy, and 
 Rein. No book could explain better than this of 
 Dr. McMurry what has attracted Americans to the 
 pedagogy of Herbart. What they desire, above all/ 
 to derive from him, is the tendency to widen the field 
 of studies, to form minds rich, well-furnished with 
 substantial knowledge, rather than penetrating and 
 refined minds; it is a well-considered intention to 
 break with the old routine, with the formal culture 
 which we used to require from a small number of 
 studies, chiefly languages or mathematics; the cur- 
 rent now sets toward studies which offer the most 
 content, history and the natural sciences. Dr. 
 
128 HERBART 
 
 McMurry opposes energetically what he calls the 
 superstition, the fetichism, of "studies of pure form. 7 ' 
 What has further won over the young and modern 
 American spirit is the fact that Herbart was the 
 philosopher of interest, of attractiveness, and that 
 he opposed asceticism in education. It is not at 
 New York or at Chicago that people resign them- 
 selves easily to believe that the earth is only ai 
 "valley of tears," and that instruction is so 
 much the more profitable as it is disagreeable and 
 painful. 
 
 We could multiply examples. Is not Colonel 
 Parker, the Director of the Normal School of Cook 
 County, a man very noted in America, also in- 
 spired by Herbart, notably, in his plan of "con- 
 centration" of studies? 1 The term is the same, and 
 the method analogous. And can we not also con- 
 sider as enrolled under the Herbartian flag, W. James, 
 the most celebrated of the psychologists of the 
 United States? In his recent book, Talks on Psy- 
 
 1 Colonel Parker died in 1902. He was then Director of the 
 School of Education in Chicago University. It seems only fair 
 to his memory to state that he expressly repudiated the idea that 
 he was a follower of Herbart; in general educational theory he 
 was nearer to Froebel. His plan of concentration differed widely 
 from that of Ziller and Rein, there being no single centre of studies, 
 the centre he adopted with insistence and persistence being the 
 child. See Pedagogies, by Francis Parker, in the International 
 Education Series. TRANS. 
 
HERBART 129 
 
 chology, 1 we find the name of Herbart often cited, 
 and some of his favorite theories reproduced: that 
 there is no general training of a hypothetical faculty 
 ofmemory, thatthere can be only special cultiva- 
 tion of particulargroups of associated meqiorigs^that 
 th^value oHnat.riip.tion lies in correlation, in a con- 
 of views to old knowledp;e T and 
 
 lastly, that interest in the law of instruction^under 
 this condition, however, that a seeking after"attrac- 
 tiveness does not render education too pleasant and 
 too^_soft 1 and that, without suppressing effort, it 
 aims only at rendering it possible ancfeasy. 
 
 Germany and the Urnted~~States~ are the twa 
 centres from which Herbartian influence radiates. 
 But little by little it is penetrating into all the coun- 
 tries of the world as far as Japan. In England the 
 translations of Mr. and Mrs. Felkin have won many 
 disciples; this is proved by different publications: 
 the humorous volume of Professor John Adams, 
 The Psychology of Herbart applied to Education; 2 
 the recent little book of Professor Darroch, Herbart 
 and his theory of Education? despite its critical tone ; 
 
 1 Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on some of 
 Life's Ideals, by William James, New York, 1899. 
 
 2 The Herbartian Psychology applied to Education, by John 
 Adams, London, and Boston, U.S.A., 1898. 
 
 3 Herbart and the Herbartian Theory of Education, by Alexander 
 Darroch, London, 1903. 
 
130 HERBART 
 
 and as is shown by such testimony as that of Mr. 
 Oscar Browning, "Herbart is a psychologist of first 
 rank, one might say the founder of modern psy- 
 chology." l The translations of Mr. Felkin have 
 largely contributed to this diffusion of Herbartian 
 doctrine in the Anglo-Saxon world, everywhere where x 
 the English tongue is spread ; thus it happens th#t 
 in Australia, the Calendar, the Annual of the "Uni- 
 versity of Adelaide, for 1903, announces a special 
 study in the pedagogy of Herbart among the courses 
 of mental science, and that "the students will read 
 the Science of Education in the volume by Felkin." 
 
 In Italy as well, the works of Herbart have not 
 failed to attract attention. From 1886 Professor 
 Fornelli, of the University of Bologna, was publish- 
 ing La Pedagogia secondo Herbart e la sua scuola; and 
 in 1900 appeared La Pedagogia di G. F. Herbart, in 
 which Mr. Luigi Credaro, Professor at the University 
 of Pavia, comments sympathetically on the theories 
 of the Universal Pedagogy. 
 
 We must admit, then, that in France the great 
 German educator has been too long neglected. Very 
 few French philosophers are acquainted with him, 
 although it might be possible to prove that some- 
 thing from his doctrine has crept into the writings 
 of M. Fouille*e or of M. Paulhan, and those who 
 
 1 Preface to the translation by Mr. Felkin, p. 11. 
 
 
HERBART 131 
 
 know him have not always given him fair play; for 
 proof of this, the too severe conclusion to the articles 
 by M. Dereux already mentioned, or M. Auerbach in 
 the Dictionary of Pedagogy, edited by M. Buisson. 
 Herbart has found a better welcome from M. Pin- 
 loche, to whom we owe a translation, unhappily 
 fragmentary and incomplete, of the General Peda- 
 gogy, and of the Sketch; and above all, from M. 
 Mauxion, who, after having studied the metaphysics 
 of our author in his doctor 's thesis, 1 published in 
 1901 under the title, Education by Instruction and the 
 Pedagogical Theories of Herbart, a substantial and 
 solid work, to which more than once, in the course 
 of our own studies, we have had recourse for light 
 and information. 2 
 
 What will become of this almost universal move- 
 ment, which has carried Herbart's name to all 
 quarters of the globe? We are convinced it will 
 last and proceed still farther, that a day will arrive 
 when there will be found in other lands besides 
 
 1 The Metaphysics of Herbart, and the Critique of Kant, Paris, 
 1894. 
 
 2 To complete the list, let us mention also the volume entitled, 
 Theory of Education according to the Principles of Herbart, Paris, 
 Delagrave, 1884. The author, M. E. Roerich, has at least the 
 merit of having been the first in France to call attention to the 
 pedagogical writings of Herbart. A very kind welcome and sum- 
 mary was accorded this little work in the Critique Philosophique, 
 1886, t. I, p. 304. 
 
132 HERBART 
 
 Switzerland and Germany, even in the village 
 schools, hard-working teachers who have recourse to 
 Herbart for safe guidance, or at least for sugges- 
 tive inspiration, fitted to sustain them in practical 
 teaching. 
 
 People will then certainly not concern themselves 
 with his mathematical dreams. They will no longer 
 talk about the strange comparisons which the author 
 of Letters to Professor Griepenkel was enjoying, when 
 he said, "The essential element in childish curiosity 
 consists in forming the 'vault/ or the 'point' of his 
 ideas;" or again, "In order to succeed, instruction 
 should arouse in the mind of the pupil ideas which, 
 one by one, round themselves out to a 'vault/ or 
 sharpen themselves into a 'point/" He indulged 
 himself with the greatest delight in these geometrical 
 analogies ; evidently they have no value, but to him 
 they appeared "like a treasure, inexhaustible in 
 their results." They are mere empty redundancies, 
 happily not an integral part of the body of the sys- 
 tem, dross which can be easily separated from the 
 fundamental conceptions of Herbart, which are thus 
 rendered more clear and luminous. 
 
 Also, and the best of his disciples have set us 
 the example, we shall gladly cast aside his chief 
 
 ;5rror concerning the nature of the soul, which de- 
 Drives it of all self-activity, of all innate or inherited 
 
HERBART 133 
 
 power. It is not necessary to have recourse to pro- 
 fessed philosophers to refute a theory universally 
 condemned, which common sense rejects as con- 
 trary to evidence. It seems as if it was to Herbart 
 that Proudhon was replying when he wrote in his 
 too much neglected book, Justice in the Revolution 
 and in the Church: " Just as an external communica- 
 tion could not by itself create intelligence and cause 
 winged ideas to dart forth in myriads without the 
 intellectual preformation which makes concepts pos- 
 sible, so also the events of social life would have 
 vainly sought to unfold themselves ; without a cer- 
 tain preformation of the heart, that secret command 
 laid by man on himself, which is the origin of justice, 
 could not have come to pass." 
 
 How many other criticisms would one not be 
 obliged to make regarding even the pedagogy of 
 Herbart in his endeavors after system ? He would 
 establish unity of mental life on the unity of science, 
 the former being, according to him, only a reflection 
 of the order and interrelationship of the knowledges. 
 It is relatively easy to establish this interrelation- 
 ship within the framework of a simple science, and 
 we must honor Herbart for having insistently de- 
 manded this. But how can we follow him to the 
 end, when he nourishes the beautiful illusion of 
 making one system of all the sciences, the sciences of 
 
134 HERBART 
 
 man and of nature ? How coordinate, for example, 
 the study of historic facts with that of mathematical 
 reasoning, or again, the teaching of grammar with 
 that of geography ? A vain dream of unity, an illu- 
 sory hope of concentration and uniformity, led both 
 Herbart and his followers astray. When it was 
 evident that each science has its methods and its 
 own laws, and that, in consequence, those who teach 
 it ought to take into account its special character, 
 they believed it possible by spurious connections and 
 superficial welding together to mix and melt to- 
 gether all the subjects taught, and throw into the 
 same mould all methods of instruction. Unity, 
 desirable in so far as it is possible, is a dream when 
 made absolute. The Herbartians have taken the 
 paradox of Jacotot, "All is within all," too seri- 
 ously. And supposing that it can be realized, there 
 is yet to prove that the cohesion, when it has been 
 established amongst the mass of knowledges, can in 
 some way be transmitted from the object to the sub- 
 ject, and there bring about mental unity, without 
 the help of general consciousness and native reason- 
 ing power. 
 
 But these criticisms, and others besides, it would 
 be easy to lengthen the list, cannot cause us to 
 forget the many other grounds on which Herbart 
 deserves to occupy a place in the first rank of educa- 
 
HERBART 135 
 
 tors. His work stands, in our opinion, as one of the 
 most powerful efforts ever put forth to make "all j 
 beings with a human face " men worthy of the name, \ 
 and to introduce into the art of education the spirit / 
 of philosophy and of science. 
 
 ^He had faith in education, and this well-con- 
 sidered and philosophic faith was an active faith, 
 which he testified and proclaimed by fifty years of 
 reflection. No, not in vain did he devote a long life 
 to the study of pedagogical problems, bringing to it 
 not only the resources of a free and profound in- 
 tellect, but all the warmth also of his heart. He 
 was before all else skilled in reasoning, but the 
 abstractions with which his volumes are replete are 
 based on observation and experience. Reflective 
 and scrupulous to excess, in both his writings and 
 his actions, he took up his pen only when he 
 believed he had reached the truth. And just as 
 under the stiff formulae in which he enclosed his 
 thoughts there moves a spirit that is very supple 
 and resourceful, so under an appearance of cold- 
 ness there is hidden a generous soul, which at times 
 reveals itself./ He has his moments of sentimentality. 
 Might we not think we are listening to one of the 
 reveries of Rousseau on Emile and Sophie in such a 
 passage as this? "The greatest of all festivals for 
 the educator is the marriage of his pupil ; the mar- 
 
136 HERBART 
 
 riage-bed is the end and the glory of every educa- 
 tor. . . ." lEducation, in the opinion of Herbart, is 
 not a trade like other trades; it is a sacred mission./ 
 All who engage in the education of their kind, if ever 
 so little fitted for their task, believe themselves below 
 its claims ; and when they think of the difficulties of 
 the work which they undertake, of the responsibili- 
 ties which they incur, they experience, as it were, a 
 shudder of emotion. Herbart had known this shud- 
 der. He placed all his hopes of a better humanity in 
 education; and that is why he expressed the wish 
 that in each society, in the most secluded village, 
 just as there is a doctor for the health of the body, 
 there should be also an accredited teacher for the 
 health of the soul. He should pay visits to the 
 families and give them advice, and act as consulting 
 educator, watching over the intellectual and moral 
 progress of the young generation^ 
 
 Herbart had faith in instruction, and on this point 
 also he was before his time. Certainly it may be 
 objected that education by instruction is but a 
 dream, so long as instruction cannot be pushed far 
 enough and produce all the fruit expected from it 
 for the common people ; and it is for this reason that 
 he himself used to say, "The destiny of the world 
 depends on a small number of people." But why 
 not count on a better future, when, in a school of 
 
HERBART 137 
 
 universal science, virtuous characters will be formed 
 in all men ? Herbart was right, as compared with 
 Locke, who declared that, " Instruction is but the 
 least part of education" ; this, doubtless, was because 
 he did not comprehend instruction in the large 
 meaning of Herbart. He is right when compared 
 with Herbert Spencer, who, indeed, also made the 
 great mistake of denying the educative power of in- 
 struction. He will be proved more and more right 
 in the future, because progress henceforth is bound 
 up with an increasing spread of instruction, and with 
 the development of science. 
 
 Herbart had, before all else, a mind clear and free. 
 He considered that "the clear comprehension of 
 things" is the principle of all education. If he 
 rejects the "categorical imperative" of Kant, it is 
 because he sees in it a survival of the old dogmas 
 which claimed to intimate commandments to men 
 without giving reasons. Morality, in his opinion, 
 should no longer be a "barricade " : it is a reasonable 
 call to complete living, to an expansion, full, free, and 
 unrestrained, of human nature, under the guidance 
 of interest and charm. We must not believe that 
 Herbart, in favor of this guidance, suppresses effort 
 in life. If he asks less of the child and pupil, he 
 imposes more on parents and masters. Let us con- 
 fess that, if until now current pedagogy has demanded 
 
138 HERBART 
 
 a great concentration of effort on the part of those 
 who study, that might well be partly to decrease to 
 the same degree the burden and ease the pains of 
 those who teach. What is in any case certain is 
 this, that the scrupulous application of the methods 
 of Herbart, with the obligation of carefully prepar- 
 ing each lesson, of adapting the instruction to the 
 actual state of the mind of the person who receives 
 it, of seeking and maintaining interest everywhere, 
 this demands on the part of the teachers at the 
 same time more talent, more knowledge, and more 
 work. 
 
 Herbart's own psychology forbade him to be an 
 adherent of the doctrine of evolution, since, accord- 
 ing to him, the soul enters into the world naked. 
 His theories, then, seem little favorable to the 
 notion of a progress natural and, so to say, pre- 
 destined, produced in the race by the accumulation 
 in each generation of successive acquisitions, and 
 transmitted in a natural way from one generation 
 to another. But, in return, and just because they 
 eliminate from humanity thp notion nf hereditary 
 development, the philosophical conceptions of Her- 
 bart favor and render necessary tfre personal prog 5 - 
 ress ol tne individual. Man is horn without in- 
 tellectual patrimony, without moral capital. His 
 business is not to cultivate quietly the garden of his 
 
HERBART 139 
 
 father; he has everything to acquire. He will be 
 whatever the continuous toil of his life makes of 
 him. And is it not thus that the modern spirit tends 
 to represent the ascending course of progress ? no 
 free grace from above, not even help from nature, 
 although on this point Herbart was too exclusive, 
 in a great measure, if not entirely, it is the individual 
 building himself, by his own efforts, with the help of 
 science. 
 
 In working for individuals, Herbart worked for 
 humanity. "Germans," he said, "have no father- 
 land;" things have changed since then, and Germans 
 have regained their prestige. He considered him- 
 self not a man of one nation or one race only. He 
 constructed philosophic theories for all men, for men 
 of the future, for citizens of a society to appear which 
 would unite all human beings in peace and love. 
 The five moral ideas which he defined, rules of in- 
 dividual conduct, would, in his opinion, give birth 
 by deduction to the same number of social ideas, 
 which would rule over nations and over the world. 
 Thus he foreshadowed how, by the end of a gradually 
 expanding flood of instruction, a golden age would 
 be established and spread its power step by step ; an 
 age in which conflicts should diminish, benevolence 
 govern men's actions, right and justice be uni- 
 versally respected, man attain to perfection; thus, 
 
140 HERBART 
 
 finally, the mass of mankind should share in the 
 same ideas and the same sentiments, and the whole 
 of humanity form but one society, a society which, 
 to use his noble expression, "should have one soul." 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 THE pedagogical works of Herbart have often been pub- 
 lished in Germany, either complete or in part. We cite only 
 the most important editions : 
 
 Schriften zur Pcedagogik, Vols. X and XI of the uniform 
 edition of Hartenstein, which comprises 13 vols., Leipzig, 
 1850-1852 ; the 13 volumes appeared in Hamburg in 1883. 
 
 Pcedagogische Schriften, with a biography of Herbart by 
 F. BARTHOLOMAI, 2 vols., 1877. 
 
 Still another edition was published at Leipzig, in 1878, by 
 Karl Richter. 
 
 STOY, Encyclopaedic der Pcedagogik, 2d edition, Leipzig, 1878. 
 
 ZILLER, Einleitung in die allgemeine Pcedagogik, Leipzig, 1856. 
 Grundlegung zur Lehre vom erziehenden Unterricht, 1865. 
 
 REIN, Pcedagogischen Studien, 2 vols., Vienne. 
 
 STRUMPELL, Das System der Pcedagogik Herbarts, Leipzig, 
 1894. 
 
 English and French Works : 
 
 DE GARMO, Herbart and the Herbartians, London, Heinemann, 
 and New York, Scribner, 1895. 
 
 McMuRRY, The Elements of General Method based on the 
 Principles of Herbart, Bloomington, 1892. 
 
 LANG, Outlines of Herbart's Pedagogy, Kellogg, New York, 
 1894. 
 
 VAN LIEW, Life of Herbart and Development of his Pedagogical 
 Doctrines, London, 1893. 
 
 JOHN ADAMS, The Herbartian Psychology applied to Educa- 
 tion, 1 vol., London, 1898. 
 
 141 
 
142 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 HENRY and EMMIE FELKIN, The Science of Education, its 
 General Principles deduced from its aim and the (Esthetic revelation 
 of the world, London, 2d edition, 1897. Letters and Lectures on 
 Education, London, 1901. 
 
 A. DARROCH, Herbart and the Herbartian Theory of Education: 
 a Criticism, London, 1903. 
 
 French Works : 
 
 EDOUARD ROSHRICH, Theorie de Veducation d'apres les prin- 
 cipes de Herbart, 1 vol., Paris, Delagrave, 1884. 
 
 A. PINLOCHE, Traduction des principals ceuvres pedagogiques 
 de Herbart, 1 vol., Lille, 1894. 
 
 M. MAUXION, L'fiducation par ^instruction et les theories 
 pedagogiques de Herbart, 1 vol., Paris, Alcan, 1901. 
 
 DEREUX, Articles de la Critique philosophique, sur le principe 
 de la morale d'apres Herbart, 1888 et 1889 ; articles de la Revue 
 pedagogique, 1890-1891. 
 
 Swiss works : 
 
 F. GUEX, Le P. Girard eleve de Herbart, a booklet, Lausanne. 
 1892. Herbart et son ecole t by same author, in Vfiducateur, 
 Lausanne, 1903. 
 
 Italian Works : 
 
 FORNELLI, La Pedagogia secondo Herbart e la sua scuola, a 
 booklet, Rome, 1886. By same author, II Fondamento morale 
 de la pedagogia, secondo Herbart e la sua scuola, Rome, 1887. 
 
 LUIGI CREDARO, La Pedagogia di G. F. Herbart, Rome, 1900. 
 
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