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THE CONTEMPORAR Y SCIENCE SERIES. 
 
 Edited by HAVELOCK ELLIS. 
 
 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
Education and 
 Heredity. 
 
 A STUDY IN SOCIOLOGY. 
 
 By J. M. GUYAU. 
 
 TRANSLATED FROM THE SECOND EDITION BY 
 
 W. J. GREENSTREET, M.A., 
 
 ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 
 
 G. F. STOUT, M.A., 
 
 FELLOW OF ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 SCRIBNER & WELFORD, 
 
 743 & 745 BROADWAY, 
 
 NEW YORK. 
 
 1891. 
 

 llx 
 
 EDUCATION IXm\ 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Suggestion and Education as Influences 
 
 modifying the moral instinct . . i-45 
 
 I. Nervous Suggestion and its Effects. 
 II. Psychological Suggestion, Moral and Social. 
 111. Suggestion as a Means of Moral Education, and 
 as an Influence modifying Heredity. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 The Genesis of the Moral Instinct. The 
 
 Role of Heredity, Ideas, and Education 46-110 
 
 I. The Power of Habits, giving rise to a Moment- 
 ary Impulse or to a Permanent Obsession. 
 1 1. The Power of the Consciousness and Idea-Forces, 
 the Moral Agent. 
 
 III. Power begetting Duty. 
 
 IV. Possible Dissolution of Morality. 
 
 V. The Role of Education and Heredity in the 
 Moral Sense. _ ,^ 
 
 f>44nf>8 
 
VI .*. CONTENTS. 
 
 • « 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Physical Education and Heredity. The 
 
 boarding-school. overpressure . . iii-158 
 
 I. The Absolute Necessity of Physical Education 
 
 in the Education of the Race. 
 II. The Boarding- School Question. 
 
 III. The Question of Overpressure. 
 
 IV. Manual Work in Schools. 
 
 <r V. The Physical Progress of the Race, and the 
 Growth of Population. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 The Object and Method of Intellectual 
 
 Education 159-177 
 
 I. The Object and Method of Intellectual Educa- 
 tion. 
 II. Methods of Teaching. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 The School 178-234 
 
 I. The Inadequacy and Dangers of purely Intel- 
 lectual Education. 
 II. Possibility of Teaching Ethics Methodically. 
 
 III. Moral Discipline in the Primary School. 
 
 IV. Necessity for the Teaching of Civic Duties in 
 
 all stages of Instruction. 
 
 V. Instruction in Esthetics. 
 VI. Intellectual Education. 
 
CONTENTS. Vll 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Secondary and Higher Education . . 235-259 
 
 I. Object of a Classical Education. 
 II. History. 
 
 III. Science. 
 
 IV. Technical Instruction. 
 
 V. Competition and Examinations. 
 VI, Higher Education. 
 VII. The Great Schools. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 The Education of Girls and Heredity . 260-275 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 Education and '* Rotation of Crops " in 
 
 Intellectual Culture . . . .276-282 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 The Aim of Evolution and Education. Is 
 it Consciousness, or the Automatism of 
 Heredity? 283-296 
 
 Appendix . . . . . . . . 297 
 
 Index ........ 303 
 
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. 
 
 In this posthumous work I have taken the liberty of 
 inserting many marks of quotation, which no doubt 
 would have been added upon revision if the untimely 
 death of the lamented author had not intervened. I 
 must express my obligations to all who have assisted 
 me while engaged upon this translation. I am glad 
 of this opportunity of expressing my indebtedness 
 to M. Alfred Fouill^e for his extreme courtesy to a 
 complete stranger, and for the trouble he has taken 
 to explain such difficulties as I have from time to 
 time referred to him for solution. In particular, I 
 have to acknowledge the advice and unfailing sym- 
 pathy received from my friend Mr. G. F. Stout, 
 whose ungrudging assistance has been invaluable. 
 
 W. J. G. 
 
 Cardiff, /««^ 1891. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Jean-Marie GUyaU, philosopher and poet, was born 
 on the 28th of October 1854, and died at the age of 
 thirty-three. His early training was mainly due to 
 his mother, who is known in France as the author of 
 various works on education, and to his step- father, 
 M. Fouillee, one of the most remarkable of living 
 French philosophers. At the age of nineteen, M. 
 Guyau wrote a volume on the Utilitarian moralists 
 from Epicurus to Bentham and his school. Portions 
 of this work, which was " crowned " by the Academic 
 des sciences morales et politiqueSy were afterwards 
 expanded into two treatises. The first of these was on 
 the Philosophy of Epicurus ; it received a full and ap- 
 preciative notice in the English Journal of Philology; 
 the second treatise was an exposition and criticism 
 of contemporary English Ethics. At the age of 
 twenty his health broke down, and he was practically 
 compelled to reside for the rest of his life on the 
 shores of the Mediterranean. During the few years 
 that remained to him he showed himself marvellously 
 prolific, producing a series of works on the leading 
 problems of philosophy, marked by striking origin- 
 ality and power. In addition, he also published a 
 volume of poems, entitled Vers d'un philosopher ex- 
 hibiting a unique vein of genius. They represent in 
 the clearest and simplest language the emotional 
 aspect of philosophy ; in the fullest sense they justify 
 
Xli INTRODUCTION. 
 
 their title, they are the verses of a philosopher who 
 was in his inmost nature a genuine poet. From the 
 bibHography appended to this Introduction the reader 
 will see that M. Guyau gave to the world three 
 sociological studies on Art, Relfgion, and Education 
 respectively. The last of these is here presented in 
 an English dress. Perhaps a few preparatory words 
 on its distinctive aim and value may be acceptable 
 to the general reader. 
 
 The main value of M. Guyau's work on Education 
 and Heredity is to be found in the point of view from 
 which it is written. The ultimate good of society is 
 ever present to his mind as the one standard by which 
 to estimate and regulate all educational aims and 
 methods. At the same time he holds that the good 
 of the individual is only to be found in social activity. 
 The development of the life of each of us is 
 measured by the range and intensity of our human 
 interests. Thus, though Guyau is essentially prac- 
 tical, he is not utilitarian in the bad sense of the word. 
 He do^s not set up as the ultimate aim of education 
 the acquirement of useful knowledge, or the training 
 of the intellect, ox the passing of examinations. 
 These ends are to be pursued only in so far as they 
 conduce to the " conservation of social tissue," and 
 to the progress of the race. 
 
 In accordance with his general principle, Guyau 
 gives the first place in order of value, and in order of 
 treatment, to moral education. Like Plato, he draws 
 a distinct line of demarcation between the morality 
 of impulse and the morality of insight. The morality 
 of impulse takes the form of inward imperatives 
 which impose themselves on the mind of the agent 
 without his knowing whence they come, or why they 
 
INTRODUCTION. xiil 
 
 possess authority. These inward imperatives are in 
 part instincts transmitted by heredity. But according 
 to Guyau it is also possible to create them by educa- 
 tion. In order to elucidate this point he lays stress 
 on the analogy between the operation of natural 
 instinct and that of suggestions made to hypnotised 
 subjects, which are afterwards spontaneously carried 
 into action. In such cases the person who performs 
 the suggested action commonly feels himself under 
 a kind of necessity or obligation to act as he does, 
 but he cannot trace back this necessity or obligation 
 to its true source. The artificially created impulse! 
 governs him as if it were an innate instinct. Now, 
 just as hypnotic patients are suggestible because their 
 mental organisation is disordered, so young children 
 are suggestible because their mental organisation is 
 as yet imperfect. What the experimenter is able to 
 do in the one case, the educator ought to be able to 
 do in the other. 
 
 But the morality which is based on a blind sense of 
 obligation is only a preparation for the morality which 
 is based on insight. Guyau's views on the subject 
 of direct moral instruction are coloured by his 
 peculiar ethical theories. He seems to start with 
 the assumption, which is perhaps not altogether justi- 
 fiable, that every healthy child has a natural dis- 
 position to be active for the sake of being active. 
 So soon as he is made aware of his powers and 
 capabilities he will straightway endeavour to realise 
 these powers and capabilities. For the same reason 
 he will prefer the higher modes of self-realisation to 
 the lower, so soon as he becomes alive to the distinc- 
 tion between them. Thus a child in good physical 
 health and with moral instincts need only be shown 
 
xiv INTRODUCTION. 
 
 how he can live the most complete life. When once 
 he feels that he can, he will at the same time feel that 
 he ought. Ideas tend by their very nature to act them- 
 selves out. The more pervasive and persistent the 
 ideas the more potent and enduring is this tendency. 
 
 Now the representation of an ideal self may be 
 made the most pervasive and persistent of ideas, and 
 may thus become the dominant principle of conduct. 
 To effect this is the aim of ethical education. It is of 
 course essential that the child should be brought to 
 see and feel his true relation to the society of which 
 he forms a part. He must be led to understand that 
 his own self-realisation is possible only if and so far 
 as he widens and deepens his social interests and 
 sympathies. 
 
 Physical education is, in Guyau's opinion, second 
 in importance only to moral education. For on it 
 depends the general health and vigour of the race 
 — the general store of energy necessary to moral and 
 intellectual activity. To train the intellect at the 
 expense of bodily health is to kill the goose that lays 
 the golden eggs. This becomes apparent when we 
 consider the question from the point of view of the 
 race. An individual may be supposed to gain an 
 equivalent in the way of worldly success and so 
 forth for the physical exhaustion produced by over- 
 pressure. But the general result to the race can only 
 be decay. 
 
 Guyau's consistently sociological point of view 
 makes his treatment of intellectual education very 
 interesting and suggestive. He is led by it to 
 emphasise the claims of aesthetic and literary culture. 
 For him the word useful means useful to the com- 
 munity and to the race as a whole. Whatever then 
 
INTRODUCTION. XV 
 
 makes men more human by giving them a wider and 
 fuller sympathy with their fellow-men is useful par 
 excellence. Now Guyau holds that it is the function of 
 art and literature to bind society together. They supply 
 common sources of enjoyment disconnected from the 
 private aims and interests of the individual. They give 
 definite form and vivid colouring to ideals in an ob- 
 jective embodiment which is common property, and in 
 this way they tend to excite a common impulse towards 
 the realisation of ideal ends. Lastly, in so far as they 
 reflect human life and emotion, they tend to widen 
 the mental horizon of the individual by giving him 
 enlarged sympathy and insight. With these ideas of 
 the nature and scope of art it is not surprising that 
 Guyau should regard aesthetic education as more 
 important than scientific. Botany and chemistry are 
 good in their way; but poetry is indispensable. 
 
 The reader may perhaps be somewhat perplexed 
 by the title of the book. He may be led to expect a 
 discussion of the relative parts played by " nature and 
 nurture" in forming the character of the individual. 
 Now the only passage in which this subject is directly 
 discussed is contained in the last section of Chapter II. 
 The book as a whole seems to be concerned merely 
 with Education apart from Heredity. Nevertheless, 
 the title, Education and Heredity^ is quite appropriate. 
 It indicates the general standpoint of the author. 
 Guyau never for a moment loses sight of the fact that 
 every child is a possible parent, and that on the edu- 
 cation of the child depends the future of the race. 
 The physical, intellectual, and moral health of each 
 generation must be so cared for as to ensure the 
 physical, intellectual, and moral health of posterity. 
 
 G. F. S. 
 
WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 La Morale d'Epicure et ses rapports avec les doctrines contem- 
 
 poraines. 
 La morale anglaise contemporaine. 
 Les Probl^mes de I'esth^tique contemporaine. 
 Esquisse d'une morale sans obligation ni sanction. 
 L'Irrdligion de I'avenir, etude de sociologie. 
 Vers d'un philosophe. 
 L'Art au point de vue sociologique. 
 La Gen^se de I'idee de temps. 
 Le manuel d'Epict^te, traduction en Frangais. 
 Ciceron : De Finibus, Edition classique. 
 Pascal : Entretien avec M. de Sacy, Edition classique. 
 La Premiere ann^e de lecture courante, livre de morale pour les 
 
 ecoles primaires. 
 L'annee preparatoire. 
 L'ann^e enfantine. 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 It is in paternity alone that man first " sounds the 
 depths of his heart " — in complete, conscious paternity, 
 that is to say, in the education of his child. Ah ! the 
 patter of the little feet ! the light and gentle patter- 
 ing of the feet of the generations, that come as doubt- 
 ful and uncertain as the future. And perhaps that 
 future will be determined by the way in which we 
 bring up the new generations. 
 
 Flaubert says that life ought to be an incessant 
 education, that " from speaking to dying " everything 
 has to be learned. Left to chance, this long education 
 is every moment deviating. Even parents, in most 
 cases, have not the slightest idea of the aim of 
 education, especially when the children are still very 
 young. What is the • moral idea set before most 
 children in a family? Not to be too noisy, not to 
 put the fingers in the nose or mouth, not to use the 
 hands at table, not to step into puddles when it rains, 
 etc.^ A reasonable being ! In the eyes of many 
 parents the reasonable child is a marionette, which 
 is not to stir unless the strings are pulled ; he is 
 supposed to have hands which are meant to touch 
 nothing, eyes which are never to sparkle with desire 
 for what he sees, little feet which must never trot 
 noisily on the floor, and a silent tongue. 
 
 ^ From a higher point of view, is the ideal of most men more 
 elevated of its kind ? 
 
XVlll PREFACE. 
 
 Many parents bring up their children, not for the 
 children's sake, but for their own. I have known 
 parents who did not wish their daughter to marry, 
 because it would involve separation from her ; others 
 who did not want their son to take up this or that 
 profession (that of a veterinary surgeon, for instance), 
 because it was displeasing to them, etc. The same 
 rules dominated their whole course of conduct towards 
 their children. That is egoistic education. There is 
 another kind of education which has as its object, 
 not the pleasure of the parents, but the pleasure of 
 the child as estimated by the parents. Thus a 
 peasant, whose whole life has been spent in the open 
 air, will consider it his duty to spare his son the 
 labour of tilling the soil ; he will bring him up to 
 make him a government clerk, a poor official stifled 
 in his office, who, cooped up in a town, will sooner or 
 later die of consumption. True education is disinter- 
 ested : it brings up the child for its own sake ; it also 
 and especially brings it up for its country and for the 
 human race as a whole. In the various works I have 
 published I have had a single end in view : the linking 
 together of ethics, aesthetics, and religion, with the idea 
 of life — life in its most intensive, extensive, and there- 
 fore most fruitful form ; it is this idea therefore which 
 will supply us in this volume with the object of 
 ^. 4ucatioi% the fundamental formula of pedagogy. 
 Pedagogy' might be defined as the art of adapting 
 I new generations to those conditions of life which are 
 the most intensive and fruitful for the individual and 
 Uhe species. It has been asked if the object of 
 yeducation is individual or social ; it is simultaneously 
 /individual and social : it is, to speak accurately, 
 I the search for means to bring the most intensive 
 
PREFACE. XIX 
 
 individual existence into harmony with the most 
 extensive social life. Besides, in my opinion, there 
 is a profound harmony underlying the antinomies 
 between individual existence and collective existence ; 
 whatever is really conformable to the summum bonum 
 of individual life (moral and physical) is ipso facto 
 useful to the whole race. Education ought, there- 
 fore, to have a triple end in view : — ist. The har- 
 monious development in the human individual of all 
 the capacities proper to the human race and useful 
 to it, according to their relative importance. 2nd. 
 The more particular development in the individual of 
 those capacities which seem peculiar to him, in so far 
 as they cannot disturb the general equilibrium of the 
 organism, 3rd. To arrest and check those tendencies 
 and instincts which may disturb that equilibrium — in 
 other words, to aid heredity in proportion as it tends 
 to create permanent superiority within the race, and 
 to resist its influence when it tends to accumulate 
 causes pernicious to the race itself. Thus education 
 becomes the pursuit of the means of bringing up 
 the largest number of individuals in perfect health, 
 endowed with physical or moral faculties as well 
 developed as possible, and thereby capable of contri- 
 buting to the progress of the human race, 
 r- It follows that the whole system of education 
 /should be orientated with reference to the mainten- 
 lance and progress of the race. In time past the 
 creeds of a race acted by means of education, and 
 preserved either the elect of a people or the nation as 
 a whole. In this direction, therefore, education must 
 act to-day. In my opinion education has been far 
 /too much looked upon as the art of bringing up the 
 ^individual — apart from the family and the race. 
 
XX PREFACE. 
 
 From the individual we try to get the best yield ; but 
 it is as if a farmer were to endeavour for a few years 
 to get the largest possible crops from a field without 
 restoring to the land what he has taken from it : the 
 field would eventually be exhausted. This is the case 
 with exhausted races ; but with this difference, that land 
 lasts for ever, and in the long run regains its original 
 fertility by rest and lying fallow, while the exhausted 
 race may grow weaker and disappear for ever. 
 Recent studies in heredity (Jacoby, De Candolle, 
 Ribot), statistics of the professions, etc., have shown 
 in a very striking manner that certain environments, 
 certain professions or social conditions, are fatal to 
 the race in general. People talk of the " devouring 
 
 [existence" of our great towns, without realising that 
 they are not using a mere figure of speech, but are 
 
 [speaking the sober truth. Towns are the whirlpools 
 of the human race, said Jean Jacques. As much may 
 be said, not only of great towns, but of most places 
 where there is a fashionable world, where there are 
 salons, theatres, and political assemblies ; all excess of 
 nervous excitement in the individual will, by the 
 law of organic equilibrium, introduce into the race 
 either mental weakness or diseases of the nervous 
 system, or some form of physiological derangement 
 which will issue in sterility. According to the 
 statisticians, there are " devouring " provinces and 
 towns, districts peopled only at the expense of the 
 neighbourhood which is thus more or less exhausted ; 
 similarly, there are " devouring " professions ; and 
 they are often the most useful to the progress of the 
 community, and at the same time the most tempting 
 to the individual. In fact, some have gone so far as 
 / to assert that every intellectual superiority in the 
 
'in; 
 
 PREFACE. XXI 
 
 struggle for existence is a sentence of death for the 
 race, that progress is literally made by the sacrifice of 
 the very individuals or races who have worked the 
 hardest in the direction of progress, that the best 
 condition for the permanence of the race is life as 
 little intellectual as possible, and that all education 
 which over-excites a child's faculties, which tries to 
 make the child a rare and exceptional being, is ipso 
 ^acto endeavouring to destroy both the individual and 
 the race.^ 
 
 I think this assertion is partly true for education as 
 at present organised, but I shall show that education, 
 when better understood and more far-sighted in its 
 aims, might remedy this exhaustion of the race, just as 
 in agriculture exhaustion of the soil is remedied by 
 rotation of crops. 
 
 It is only in modern times that science has been 
 formed ; a crowd of subjects of knowledge have 
 sprung up, which are not as yet adapted to the human 
 mind. This adaptation can only be produced by a 
 rational division and classificatiorr of the different 
 subjects of study; and the mind is exposed to suffer- 
 ing and overpressure because this division is not yet 
 effected. It follows that the science of education must 
 
 Ebe harmonised with new conditions. Education must 
 be organised — that is to say, we must establish the 
 subordination of subjects of study and their hierarchy 
 in the social unity.^ As Spencer justly remarks, the 
 more perfect and therefore the more complex an 
 organism is, the more difficulties beset its harmonious 
 development. 
 
 ^ Vide Qi2\ion, Natural Inheritance^ Appendix F, p. 241. (Tr.) 
 
 <^ *^ Vide Dr. J. Ward, " Ec^cational Values, "y<?«r«a/ (t/" -£'^;?^^a/?V7«, 
 November 1890. (Tr.) 
 
XXll PREFACE. 
 
 The education of each new-comer in the case of the 
 lower races of animals is not of long duration ; and 
 whatever is not actually taught it by others will be 
 taught it by life, and that without great danger ; its 
 instincts are simple, therefore but few experiences 
 are necessary for its guidance. But the higher we 
 rise in the scale of beings, the longer is the evolution ; 
 the necessity of a real education then begins to make 
 itself felt ; the adults must help, support, and succour 
 the young for a longer period, as, for instance, in 
 the case of the higher mammiferous animals, the 
 mother must carry the young and suckle it. So 
 even in animals we find the germ of a kind of primi- 
 tive pedagogy : education is a prolongation of this 
 suckling, and its necessity is derived from the laws of 
 evolution. 
 
 Here, however, a serious objection is presented, to 
 which Spencer's own ideas have given rise. Must it 
 fbe maintained, as has been done, that education is 
 / useless, or even powerless, because human evolution is 
 I necessary, and that evolution always depends on 
 (heredity? In the last century the importance ofS 
 education was so far exaggerated that a man like j 
 Helvetius naively asked if all the difference between! 
 men does not spring from nothing but the difference of\ 
 instruction they have received, and from their varied/ 
 environment ; if talent and virtue alike cannot be/ 
 taught. We are now thrown upon distinctly opposite 
 assertions by recent studies in heredity. Many 
 philosophers and men of science now believe that 
 education is radically powerless when it has to modify 
 to any great extent the racial temperament and 
 character of the individual ; according to them a 
 s criminal as well as the poet nascitur nonfit; the child's 
 
PREFACE. XXlil 
 
 whole moral destiny is contained in it while yet 
 unborn, and in later life this destiny develops itself 
 relentlessly. Obviously, then, there is no possible 
 remedy for this common disease called neurasthenia^ 
 to which all criminals, poets, visionaries, the insane, 
 hysterical women — in fact, all whose mental equili- 
 brium is disturbed — are subject ; races simultaneously 
 descend the scale of life and morality, and there is no 
 ascent. The disequilibrated are for ever lost to 
 humanity ; if they do propagate their kind for a 
 longer or shorter period, it is all the worse for them. 
 The Jukes family,^ starting from a drunkard, pro- 
 duced in seventy-five years, 200 thieves and assassins, 
 248 invalids, and 90 prostitutes. By the ancients, 
 whole families were proscribed as impure ; it must be 
 confessed antiquity was right. We are told in the 
 Bible that the sins of the fathers were visited upon the 
 children to the third and fourth generations : modern 
 science pronounces curses of the same kind, and 
 seems to justify the Jews by the remark, that every 
 moral characteristic, good or bad, does in fact tend to 
 persist for about five generations, and then to be 
 effaced altogether if abnormal. Woe, then, to the 
 weak ! they must be eliminated, and we must merci- 
 lessly apply to them the words of Jesus to the 
 Canaanitish woman — Jesus, pitiless and angered — " It 
 is not meet to take the children's bread and to cast it 
 to the dogs. "2 
 
 In fact, between the powers attributed by some 
 thinkers to education, and by others to heredity, is an 
 
 1 The Criminal, Havelock Ellis (Walter Scott), p. 100. (Tr.) 
 
 ^ Vide Fere, Sensation et mouvement ; Dr. Jacoby, La Selection; 
 
 Dr. Dejerine, L ^ HerSdite dans les maladies du systeme nerveux ; and the 
 
 Italian criminalists — Lombroso, Ferri, Garofalo. 
 
xxiv PREFACE. 
 
 antinomy dominating the whole of moral and even 
 political science ; for if the effects of heredity are 
 without a remedy, political science is paralysed. The 
 problem has therefore a twofold aspect, and needs 
 serious examination. I shall endeavour to exhibit 
 the exact role belonging to the two terms before us, 
 namely, hereditary or ancestral habit, and individual 
 habit — the one incarnate in the organism, and the 
 other acquired. We shall examine if the laws of 
 ^r,^^^.-^^ suggestion^ which have been recently ascertained by 
 
 Stnfpsycho-physiologists, and of which the effects are 
 still imperfectly known, do not constitute a new 
 element, and if we cannot by their aid modify the 
 data of the problem. Modern discoveries in sugges- 
 tion seem to me of capital importance in education, 
 because they ^\m^ us the power of ascertaining de 
 facto the possibility of always creating in a mind, 
 at every stage of its evolution, an artificial instinct 
 capable of producing an equilibrium of long or short 
 persistence in pre-existing tendencies. If this intro- 
 duction of new sentiments is possible by entirely 
 physiological means, it should be equally possible by 
 moral and psychological means. Recent studies on 
 the nervous system will be adapted to correct 
 scientific prejudices by means of a more complete 
 
 . science. Suggestion, which creates artificial instincts, 
 capable of keeping in equilibrium the hereditary 
 instincts, or even of stifling them, constitutes a new 
 power, comparable to heredity itself; now, in my 
 
 (opinion, education is nothing but a totality of co-or- 
 ^ |dinated and reasoned-out suggestions; and we may 
 readily foresee the efficiency it may acquire from the 
 psychological and the physiological points of view. 
 
 J. M. G. 
 
61 ,^. 
 
 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 THE r6lE of heredity AND 
 SUGGESTION IN MORAL EDUCATION. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 SUGGESTION AND EDUCATION AS INFLUENCES 
 MODIFYING THE MORAL INSTINCT. 
 
 I. T^e Effects of Nervous Suggestion. — Suggestion {a) of .sensa- 
 tions and sentiments, {b) of ideas, {c) of volitions and actions — The 
 possibility of creating by suggestion new instincts, and even instincts 
 of a moral character — Suggested obligations — Artificial duties — The 
 possibility of ** moralising" and demoralising the subject — Suggestion 
 as a means of moral reformation. 
 
 II. Psychological, Moral, and Social Suggestion. — Suggestion by 
 example, by command, by authority, by assertions, by the use of 
 words, by gestures, etc. — Suggested beliefs — Suggestion is the intro- 
 duction into our being of a practical belief which realises itself 
 spontaneously. 
 
 III. Suggestion as a Means of Moral Education, and as an Influence 
 Modifyi^tg Heredity. — The true moral authority of the educator — 
 Punishments— On inspiring self confidence — Suggestions to be pro- 
 duced, and suggestions to be avoided, 
 
 I 
 
2 :^DWATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 I. Nervous Suggestion and its Effects, 
 
 The well-known results of nervous suggestion affect 
 the sensibility, the intellect, and the will ; sensations, 
 sentiments, ideas, and volitions, may be suggested. 
 " A man," says Shakespeare, 
 
 "... can hold a fire in his hand 
 By thinking on the frosty Caucasus ; 
 Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite 
 By bare imagination of a feast ; 
 Or wallow naked in December snow 
 By thinking on fantastic summer's heat." ^ 
 
 Suggestion realises Shakespeare's words. If a hyp- 
 notised subject is persuaded that he is in danger of 
 perishing in the snow, he shivers with cold ; if he is 
 told that the room is excessively warm, he imme- 
 diately perspires with the heat. 
 
 During the hypnotic sleep, or during catalepsy, M. 
 F^r^ has suggested to patients the idea that on a 
 dark table there was a portrait in profile ; when they 
 awoke they distinctly saw the portrait in the same 
 place ; and when a prism was placed before one eye, 
 they were hugely surprised to see two profiles.^ The 
 -lateral compression of the eyeball of the hypnotised 
 subject is enough to displace the optical axis and 
 produce diplopia. This, as Dr. Hack Tuke points 
 out,^ is due to the possibility of a central sensation, 
 objective in its origin, supplanting a sensation derived 
 from a peripheral impression. The suggested sensa- 
 tion is impressed upon that region of the cerebral 
 cortex which is ordinarily impressed by the real 
 
 ^ Richard II,, Act I., Sc. iii., 294-299. 
 
 2 Moll, Hypnotisjn, pp. 280, 281 (Walter Scott). (Tr.) 
 
 3 The Influence of the Mind upon the Body (1872), p 31. — Binet and 
 Fere, Animal Magnetism (Kegan Paul), pp. 230, 231. (Tr.) 
 
NERVOUS SUGGESTION AND ITS EFFECTS. 3 
 
 sensation — a region which has become the seat of a 
 kind of local hypnotism. An attendant at the Crystal 
 Palace, whose duty it is to manipulate a galvanic 
 battery, has often noticed that ladies who had hold 
 of the handles experienced peculiar sensations, and 
 that they quite believed that they were galvanised 
 before the machine had begun to act^ 
 
 "In 1862," says Mr. Woodhouse Braine, "I was 
 called in to administer chloroform to a young, very 
 nervous, and highly hysterical girl, from whom two 
 tumours had to be removed. I sent out for the 
 chloroform, and in the meantime, to accustom her 
 to the mask, I placed it on the patient's face ; imme- 
 diately she began to breathe irregularly. After half a 
 minute she said : * Oh ! I feel I am going off! ' The 
 chloroform had not yet arrived. A gentle pinch 
 produced no effect ; I pinched her severely, and to 
 my great surprise she felt nothing. This seemed a 
 favourable opportunity, and I asked the surgeon to 
 begin the operation. At its conclusion I asked the 
 patient if she had felt anything. * No 1 ' she said, * I 
 do not know what has happened.* When she left 
 the hospital, she was still a firm believer in the power 
 of the anaesthetic which had been given her." 
 
 It is well known that stigmata are a phenomenon 
 of auto-suggestion. The reader is familiar with the 
 case of Louise Lateau, the Belgian stigmatic. The 
 periodicity of the stigmata is readily explained by 
 the fact that an association was established between 
 certain days of the week and the ideas determining 
 the physical result.^ 
 
 1 Take, o/>, «/., p. 34. (Tr.) 
 
 2 Vtdg Carpenter's Mental Physiology^ p. 689, and Moll's Hypnotism^ 
 p. 117. (Tr.) 
 
4 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 Ideas of action, and volitions, may be suggested as 
 in the case of sensations. Take a hypnotised subject: 
 we can suggest to him this or that idea of action, as, 
 for instance, a visit to some one at a certain day and 
 hour, a mistake in the spelling of his own signature to 
 a letter, the opening of a book and reading the first 
 twenty words on page lOO, repeating a prayer, taking 
 
 \a handkerchief from the pocket of some one in the 
 room and throwing it into the fire, etc. This idea of 
 
 I action, instilled during the hypnotic sleep, haunts the 
 patient's mind when he awakes, becomes a fixed idea, 
 and in most cases pursues him until he has in some 
 way or other worked it out. Moreover, when he is 
 working out this idea, he fancies he is acting quite 
 spontaneously, and obeying a whim of his own; he 
 attributes to himself another's will implanted in him, 
 and he often finds almost plausible reasons to justify 
 the irrational acts he has been made to perform.^ 
 
 In addition to the ideas and beliefs that may be 
 thus suggested, in addition to volitions, sensations, 
 and hallucinations, we may instil sentiments^ — admi- 
 ration or contempt, sympathy or antipathy, — and 
 passions and emotions, such as permanent fear. 
 And all these suggestions, so certain sometimes in 
 their action, may be ^w^n instantaneously ; within 
 fifteen seconds we may by a sudden gesture stop a 
 subject on his way between two doors, throw him 
 into a state of cataleptic immobility, produce som- 
 nambulism, suggest actions to him, and then awaken 
 him.^ The subject will probably be unaware that he 
 has been asleep, he will have only felt a slight and 
 
 ^ Moll, Hypnotism, pp. 154, 155. — Binet and Fere, Animal Mag- 
 netism^ pp. 290, 291. (Tr.) 
 
 2 Moll, Hypnotism^ pp. 259, 260. (Tr.) 
 
NERVOUS SUGGESTION AND ITS EFFECTS. 5 
 
 transient tremor; but a new idea is from that moment 
 implanted in him, an impulse which, if unimpeded, 
 will very soon pass into action : fifteen seconds have 
 sufficed to put the hand on the lever of the human 
 machine. If this be so, can we not go further and 
 create genuine instincts, and those of a moral kind ? 
 While habit or instinct is at first organic, to be 
 afterwards reflected in the form of an idea in the 
 domain of consciousness, suggestion shows us an idea 
 penetrating from without into the brain of an indi- 
 vidual, striking root, so to speak, and eventually trans- 
 forming itself into a habit. The order is inverted, 
 the practical result is the same. I believe I was the 
 first to point out the close analogy between suggestion 
 and instinct, as well as the possible application of 
 normal and natural suggestion to education, and of 
 artificial suggestion to therapeutics, as a corrective 
 of abnormal instincts, or as a stimulant of normal 
 instincts which are too weak. Every suggestion is in 
 fact a nascent instinct^ created by the hypnotiser, just 
 as the modern chemist produces organic substances- 
 by synthesis. And as every instinct is the germ of 
 a sense of necessity, and sometimes even of obligation, 
 it follows that every suggestion is an impulse which 
 is beginning to impose itself on the mind — an element- 
 ary purpose which is in the act of incorporating itself 
 with the personality. This purpose, in most cases, 
 believes itself free and autonomous, and before long 
 would dominate the being with all the characters 
 of the most energetic and conscious volition, if it 
 were not resisted by other pre-established and active 
 tendencies. 
 
 When a permanent artificial instinct is created 
 in this way, it is probable that a mystical and 
 
6 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 quasi-religious sentiment would soon attach itself to 
 that instinct. Suggestion under certain conditions is 
 physical restraint; under more complex conditions we 
 may almost enforce moral obligation. On the whole, 
 every moral or natural instinct, as Cuvier remarks, is 
 derived from a kind of somnambulism, because it 
 gives us a command, the reason of which is unknown 
 to ourselves : we hear the " voice of conscience," and 
 localise this voice within us, although its origin is far 
 more remote, and although it is a distant echo trans- 
 mitted from generation to generation. Our instinctive 
 conscience is a kind of hereditary suggestion. 
 
 M. Delboeuf suggested to his servant M. the idea 
 of embracing a guest, a young man, M. A. She 
 went up to him, hesitated, retreated, blushed vividly, 
 and hid her face in her hands. Next day she confided 
 to Madame Delbceuf that she had felt an extraordinary 
 longing to embrace M. A.; and further, this longing 
 had not yet disappeared ; on the third day it was 
 still felt. Eight days after, M. Delboeuf repeated the 
 order already given, and this time, in the evening, his 
 command is obeyed. M. Delboeuf, who has taught 
 his subjects to remember their acts under the influence 
 of suggestion, asked the girl what she had felt the 
 night before when she went up to embrace M. A. 
 "I was thinking of nothing in particular," she said; 
 *' but when I opened the door, the idea suddenly came 
 into my head to embrace M. A. ; I felt as if / was 
 absolutely obliged to do it, and I embraced him."^ "At 
 5.15 P.M. on the Sth April," proceeds M. Delboeuf, "I 
 suggest to M. that at the stroke of 5.30 she will go up 
 and console a wooden statue of a weeping monk on 
 
 ^ Revue Philosophique, Feb. 1887, p. 123. The italics are M. 
 Delboeufs. 
 
NERVOUS SUGGESTION AND ITS EFFECTS. 7 
 
 the mantelpiece. I awake her. The clock strikes ; 
 M. rises from her seat, and proceeds to comfort the 
 monk with many signs of commiseration, and then 
 sits down again. . . . Recollection of what has 
 happened is perfect. — ' How do you make up your 
 mind to do so unreasonable a thing as that ? ' '/ 
 feel as if I were obliged to do it! " 
 
 The effects of suggestion have been ably analysed 
 by M. Beaunis. There is nothing more curious from 
 the psychological point of view than to follow on the 
 face of the subject the unfolding and development of 
 the idea suggested to him. It may be, for instance, 
 in the middle of a trivial conversation having no rele- 
 vance to the suggestion. Suddenly the hypnotiser, 
 who is on the alert, watching the subject without 
 appearing to do so, observes at a given moment a kind 
 of pause in the flow of ideas, an inward shock which 
 betrays itself by a scarcely perceptible sign, a look, 
 a gesture, or a working of the face ; then the conver- 
 sation is resumed, but the idea returns to the charge 
 — still faint and indefinite ; a touch of astonishment 
 appears in the look, we feel something unexpected is 
 from moment to moment crossing the mind like a ray 
 of light. Soon the idea gradually grows in vigour ; 
 takes more and more complete possession of the 
 intellect ; the struggle has begun ; eyes, gestures — 
 everything bespeaks, everything betrays the internal 
 conflict ; we follow the fluctuations of the thought ; 
 the subject still listens to the conversation, but 
 vaguely and mechanically ; he is elsewhere : " his 
 whole being is a prey to the fixed idea which is 
 becoming more and more deeply rooted in his brain. 
 When the moment has come, all hesitation disap- 
 pears and the face assumes a striking character of 
 
8 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 resolution." This inward struggle, terminated by 
 action, is not without analogy to the other struggles in 
 which the moral instincts engage. And, as we know, 
 the conflict is accompanied by consciousness and 
 reason, for the hypnotised subjects always find some 
 pretext or other for their conduct.^ The mechanism^ 
 as such, is therefore comparable in the two cases, and 
 the subjects of M. Beaunis seem to obey the same 
 natural laws as any hero in Corneille when he sacrifices 
 himself to duty. There is always a great difference 
 in complexity and value between these mechanically 
 analogous phenomena ; in fact, the formula of action 
 we call duty is the moral and self-conscious resultant 
 of very complex co-ordinated forces, the resultant of 
 higher natural tendencies harmonised by that formula ; 
 on the other hand, command, as conveyed by sugges- 
 tion, is the sudden and fugitive effect of a single and 
 disturbing tendency, artificially introduced into the 
 mind. It follows that he who feels the inner pressure 
 of suggestion must necessarily be conscious that he is 
 in an abnormal state, that he is under a disturbing 
 influence, that he is, in fact, dominated by an isolated 
 force, and not borne forward by the totality of the 
 best, most normal, and most deeply rooted tendencies 
 of his nature. 
 
 Nevertheless, it is probable that by treating a 
 
 human being as if he were a plant removed from 
 
 its normal environment, and by systematising sugges- 
 
 ^> tions, we might eventually create — as I have shown 
 
 in my Esquisse (Tune Morale ^ — real artificial duties^ 
 
 ^ Vide Richet, La Mimoire et la Personnalite dans le Somnambulisme, 
 {Revue Philosophique^ March 1882.) — Binet and Fere, Animal Magnet- 
 isnty pp. 290, 291. — Moll, Hypnotism^ p. 152. (Tr.) 
 
 2 Pp. 45, 46. — Vide Binet and Fere, Animal Magnetism^ pp. 1^4- 
 142. (Tr.) 
 
NERVOUS SUGGESTION AND ITS EFFECTS. 9 
 
 each complete in itself. This would be synthesis 
 proving the accuracy of our analysis. We might 
 also, by an inverse experiment, annul more or less 
 provisionally this or that natural instinct. A som- 
 nambulist may be made to lose his memory,^ — for 
 example, his memory for names, — and we may even, 
 according to M. Richet, make him lose his whole 
 memory {Revue Philosophique, 8th October 1880). 
 He adds : — " This experiment ought only to be 
 made with every possible precaution ; I have seen 
 such terror and disorder supervene in the intellect — 
 the disturbance lasting about a quarter of an hour — 
 that I would not voluntarily renew this dangerous 
 experiment." If, as most psychologists do, we iden-^ 
 tify memory with habit and instinct, we must suppose 
 it would also be possible to annihilate provisionally, 
 or at least to weaken, in a somnambulist, any instinct, 
 even though it be among the most fundamental and 
 most binding on the self-conscious being, — for example, [ 
 those of maternity, modesty, etc. If this suppression 
 of the instinct left no traces upon waking, we would 
 then be able to test the resistance of the different 
 instincts, — for example, of the moral instincts, — and to j, 
 ascertain which are the deepest and most tenacious, the 
 altruistic* or egoistic tendencies. We might, in that 
 Hereditary and social memory called morality, distin- 
 guish between the more solid parts, and the weaker 
 that have been more recently superinduced. 
 
 Of course the experimenter, if an honourable man, 
 will never use the power of suggestion for the pur- 
 pose of demoralising ; he will use it for " moralising." 
 On this point, the general hints I had formerly given 
 
 ^ Moll, Hypnotism^ pp. 123-139. — Binet and Fere, pp. 321, 322. 
 (Tr.) 
 
lO EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 have been already successfully followed up by a con- 
 siderable number of experimenters. It has now been 
 shown that we can counteract a mania or depraved 
 habit by an artificial habit, created by means of sug- 
 gestion during the hypnotic sleep. Suggestion will 
 therefore have consequences of which we cannot yet 
 accurately determine the scope from this double 
 point of view of mental therapeutics, and even of 
 education in the case of young neuropaths.^ In 
 the first place, the therapeutic results of suggestion 
 are already numerous. Dr. Voisin asserts that he 
 has cured by suggestion both delirious melancholia 
 and dipsomania. In all cases morphinomania may 
 be cured by this means, and the cure may even be 
 suddenly made, without provoking the attacks of 
 furious madness ordinarily ensuing on the prohibition 
 of morphia. Alcoholism and the craving for tobacco 
 have been cured in the same way by MM. Voisin and 
 Li^geois. 
 
 Suggestion may also in certain cases become a 
 means of correction. After the civil disturbances in 
 Belgium, M. was terribly afraid of going out at night- 
 fall : even a bell at that time would make him 
 tremble. M. Delboeuf hypnotises and reassures him, 
 and orders him to be more courageous in future ; his 
 alarm disappeared as if by magic, and " Ais conduct 
 was modified in consequence."^ It is possible there- 
 fore to influence the conduct. Jeanne Sch — , aged 
 22, a thief and prostitute, lazy and slovenly, has been 
 transformed by M. Voisin of the Salpetri^re — thanks 
 to hypnotic suggestion — into a submissive, obedient, 
 
 ^ Moll, Hypnotism^ pp. 331, 332. — Binet and Fere, Animal Mag 
 netism, pp. 359, 360. (Tr.) 
 
 2 Revue Philosophique^ August 1886. M. Delboeuf. 
 
NERVOUS SUGGESTION AND ITS EFFECTS. II 
 
 honest, clean, and hard-working woman. For many- 
 years she had not voluntarily opened a book ; now, 
 she learns by heart pages of a moral work ; all her 
 affections are awakened, and finally she has been 
 admitted into a charitable institution as a servant, 
 where "her conduct is irreproachable." It is true 
 this is simply the substitution of a pleasant for an 
 unpleasant neurosis. Numerous cases of moral cure 
 of the same kind have been effected at the Salpetriere. 
 Even in his private practice M. Voisin claims to have 
 transformed, by hypnotic suggestion, a woman whose 
 character was unbearable, and to have made her 
 gentle and affectionate to her husband, and hence- 
 forth free from exhibitions of temper. A metamor- 
 phosis indeed ! In the same way, Dr. Li^bault, of 
 Nancy, succeeded, by means of a single suggestion, in 
 making a persistently idle boy diligent for a period 
 
 ""oTsix weeks. This is a beginning. It may, however, 
 be asked whether it is not better to leave a boy in 
 
 idleness than to make him a neuropath. M. Delboeuf 
 has recently proposed the use of suggestion for young 
 criminals in reformatories and houses of correction. 
 Already several doctors have applied for permission 
 to make experiments. While making every allow- 
 ance for professional enthusiasm, the truth remains 
 that suggestion has a considerable influence, and, as 
 we shall see, the psychologist may draw important 
 deductions from this fact 
 
12 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 1 1. Psychological Suggestion, Moral and Social, 
 
 Physiological and neuropathic suggestion is nothing 
 but the exaggeration of facts occurring in the normal 
 state. Experiment on the nervous system is a kind 
 of analysis which isolates the facts, and thus throws 
 them into relief Hence we may and ought to admit 
 a psychological, moral, and social suggestion, which 
 IS produced even in the healthiest subjects, without 
 acquiring that artificial exaggeration to which nervous 
 derangements are due. This normal suggestion, if 
 well organised and regulated, may evidently either 
 favour or repress the effects of heredity. Let us study 
 it in its origin and different forms. 
 
 I have already pointed out that we may now con- 
 sider it as proved, that if mental suggestion exists to 
 an exceptional degree in certain subjects peculiarly 
 qualified for its reception, it ought, in virtue of the 
 analogy of constitution in the human race, to exist 
 also in some degree, however slight, in everybody: 
 - why then is it not more easily detected ? Because : — 
 1st, it is very weak in most people, only producing an 
 effect which is imperceptible at any given moment 
 or in any detached instance, though it may well 
 have a cumulative influence which is very consider- 
 able ; 2nd, in normal subjects mental suggestions 
 must intersect more or less, coming as they do from 
 very different individuals coincidently. In our normal 
 state we are not under the influence of one determinate 
 
 ^ By physiological suggestion is implied mental suggestion effected 
 by physiological means — e.g.^ hypnotism. By i^\xxQ\y psychological sug- 
 gestion is implied mental suggestion by means of a psychological char- 
 acter — e.g., commands, advice, the contagion of example, sympathy, 
 imitation, etc.— M. Fouill^e. 
 
PSYCHOLOGICAL SUGGESTION. 1 3 
 
 magnetiser^ the only person in the world who moulds 
 us to his will. But it does not follow that we are not 
 accessible to an infinite number of small suggestions, 
 sometimes inhibiting each other, sometimes accumu- 
 lating so as to produce a very appreciable resultant 
 effect ; these are suggestions that have come, not 
 from an isolated individual, but from the whole of 
 society, from the whole of our environment : they 
 are, strictly speaking, social suggestions. 
 
 Nothing happens, then, in artificial sleep which 
 cannot be produced in a more or less rudimentary 
 degree in most people in a waking state ; we are all 
 susceptible to suggestions, and even social life is only, 
 so to speak, a balanced interchange of reciprocal sug- 
 gestions. But the possibility of personal resistance 
 to suggestion varies considerably with the individual. 
 There are some who are almost incapable of resist- 
 ance, whose personality in a measure goes for nothing 
 in the totality of motives determining action. They 
 are stricken with a kind of moral paralysis. That 
 remarkable observer, Dostoieffsky, mentions among 
 other characteristics of the criminal class, the impossi- 
 bility of repressing a desire : " reason has no power 
 over these men, except in so far as their volition is in 
 abeyance. When they desire something, obstacles 
 are non-existent to them. . . . They are born with 
 an idea which unconsciously sways them to and fro 
 all their lives ; in this fashion they wander aimlessly 
 till they have met with some object violently arousing 
 desire within them, and then they lose their heads. 
 When Petrof wants something, that something he 
 must have. An individual like Petrof will assassi- 
 nate a man for twenty-five copecks, simply for the 
 price of half a pint ; on another occasion he will 
 
14 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 look With contempt on hundreds of thousands of 
 roubles."^ 
 
 Example ought of itself to exert a force, due to 
 the unity and continuity of the social consciousness. 
 The mere sight of rhythmic motion induces the 
 neuropath to imitate it — a phenomenon of psycho- 
 motor, suggestion of which MM. Richet and F^r6 
 have given instances.^ Hence arise spasmodic 
 epidemics. If we ask the neuropath to look atten- 
 tively at the motion of flexion given to our hand, in 
 a few minutes he declares he has a sensation as if the 
 same movement is taking place in his own hand, 
 although it is perfectly motionless. But this immo- 
 bility does not continue, for his hand very soon 
 begins to carry out irresistibly the rhythmic move- 
 ments of flexion. All perception is more or less 
 
 ^ reducible to an imitation, to the creation within us of 
 a state corresponding to that which we see in others ; 
 all perception is a kind of incipient suggestion, which 
 in certain individuals, not being neutralised by other 
 suggestions, completes itself in action. The sugges- 
 tive element inherent in all perception is, as we have 
 seen, stronger in proportion as the perception is that 
 of an action or of a state bordering on action.^ In 
 fact, all suggestion becomes irresistible when per- 
 ception, instead of being produced in the midst of 
 the complex states of consciousness which limit it, 
 occupies the whole consciousness, and at a given 
 moment constitutes the whole inner being. This 
 
 > state has been called monoi'deism, and is found in 
 
 ^ Quoted by M. Garofalo, Revue Philosophique, March 1887, p. 236. — 
 Vide Ellis, The Criminal {^zMqx Scott), pp. 17, 18, 147, 213. (Tr.) 
 2 Binet and Y6ti, Animal Magnetism , pp. 281 et seq. (Tr.) 
 ^ Here especially is manifested what has been termed the "idea 
 force." 
 
PSYCHOLOGICAL SUGGESTION. IS 
 
 somnambulists, and in all whose mental equilibrium is 
 made more or less unstable by a kind of abstraction 
 which suppresses in the mind one aspect of reality. 
 
 The neuropath who tends to mechanically repro- 
 duce a muscular movement executed in his presence, 
 will equally tend to reproduce a state of sensibility 
 or volition which he sees in another individual, and 
 which has been revealed to him either directly by 
 facial expression, or indirectly by speech and the tone 
 of the voice. 
 
 Thus suggestion is the transformation by which a 
 relatively passive organism tends to bring itself into 
 unison with a relatively active organism ; the latter 
 dominates the former, and eventually controls its 
 external movements, its volitions, and its inward 
 beliefs. Intercourse with respected relatives, a 
 master, or any superior whatever, must produce 
 suggestions which extend through a child's lifetime. 
 Education has the magic and " charms " spoken of by 
 Callicles in the Gorgias,i of which it makes use to 
 tame the young lions when need arises. There are 
 in man "thoughts by imitation," which are trans- 
 mitted from individual to individual, and generation 
 to generation, with the same strength as real instincts. 
 I know a child of thirteen, who had read in Martin 
 PaZy one of Jules Verne's novels, the description of a 
 captivating heroine who had a mincing gait, and from 
 
 ^ The following is Professor Jowett's translation of the passage 
 referred to: — "These are the men who act according to nature; yes, 
 by Heaven, and according to the laws of nature : not perhaps according 
 to that artificial law, which we forge and impose upon our fellows, of 
 whom we take the best and strongest from their youth upwards, and 
 tame them like young lions — charming them with the sound of the 
 voice, and saying to them that with equality they must be content, and 
 that the equal is the honourable and the just." (Tr.) 
 
l6 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 _ that time forward the child endeavoured to take very 
 short steps. This habit is now so inveterate that she 
 will in all probability never be able to rid herself of it. 
 If we take into account the continuous interconnec- 
 tion of every movement of the body, we shall under- 
 stand what an important modification this artistic 
 impression has introduced into this child's mode 
 of existence — little steps, gestures, and voice, and 
 perhaps a childish expression of face. 
 
 We know the rapidity with which crimes are 
 propagated by suggestion in the very form under 
 which the first was accomplished : women cut to 
 pieces, strange suicides, the nail in the sentry-box 
 from which seven soldiers in succession hanged 
 themselves, etc.^ Hence arises the danger of the 
 press. The editor of the Morning Herald has 
 declared that he will never insert in his paper reports 
 of murders, suicides, or forms of madness, because 
 they may become contagious ; and he has kept his 
 word. The authority possessed by certain persons is 
 also explained by the contagion of a state of con- 
 sciousness, and this state is nothing but the state of 
 belief and faith, the intensity of assurance. Obedi- 
 ^ ence is the effect of successful suggestion, and the 
 power of suggestion is reducible to the power of 
 assertion. Accordingly, the temperaments most 
 capable of acquiring authority over men are those 
 which assert most strongly, or which at least appear to 
 assert most strongly, by gesture and tone. Those in 
 whom we believe most, and who are most obeyed, are 
 those who have or seem to have the strongest belief 
 
 The power of affirmation being reducible to an 
 energy of the will, the words that is may be reduced 
 
 ^ Vide Ellis, The Criminal, p. 177.— Tuke, op, cit,, p. 66. (Tr.) 
 
PSYCHOLOGICAL SUGGESTION. 1/ 
 
 to : — / wish this to be so, I act as if this were so, I 
 adapt myself entirely to this supposed phenomenon. 
 Hence the following law : every strong will tends 
 to create a will in the same direction in other 
 individuals ; every adaptation of the consciousness 
 to a supposed phenomenon — for example, a future 
 event or distant ideal — tends to propagate itself 
 in other consciousnesses, and the social conditions 
 favourable to the appearance of the phenomenon 
 tend of themselves to enter into combination, owing 
 solely to the fact that their combination has already 
 been presented to an individual consciousness. 
 
 What I think and see with sufficient energy, I 
 make everybody else think and see ; and if all see it, 
 it exists, at least in so far as consciousness and 
 collective belief may be regarded as equivalent to a 
 realisation. 
 
 The second law is, that the contagious influence of 
 a belief, and consequently of a volition, is in direct 
 ratio to its force of inward tension, and, so to speak, 
 of its first inward realisation. The more we ourselves 
 believe and act, the more do we act on others and 
 ' make them believe. Energetic volition is immedi- 
 ately transformed into a kind of command ; authority 
 is the centre from which action is radiated. Char- 
 latans and orators are generally familiar with the 
 contagious power of affirmation; the voice of assur- 
 ance and accent of faith in which they assert what 
 they wish to convince their audience of must be 
 heard ; tone of voice is their first and sometimes the 
 most solid of their arguments. 
 
 In hypnotisable subjects ^ — we must not forget that 
 they are about 30 per cent, of normal individuals — 
 
 ^ Moll, Hypnotism^ pp. 38-41. (Tr.) 
 
 2 
 
1§ feDUCATiON AND HEREDttV. 
 
 a simple assertion in the waking state, made authori- 
 tatively by a person in whom they have confidence, 
 is enough to produce illusions or true hallucinations. 
 On the simple assertion of M. Bernheim, one of his 
 subjects, completely awake, gives information to a 
 commissary of police of a scuffle between workmen 
 which he thinks he has seen in a chapel ; moreover, he 
 ? declares himself ready to give sworn evidence before 
 the magistrate. Thus we see how suggested hallu- 
 cinations become the basis of a line of conduct, and 
 may give rise to the most serious social consequences. 
 There is a natural power and authority in the fone 
 of voice, a power which is well exhibited by 
 I observation of hypnotisable subjects, whom children 
 ^^^J! resemble in so many ways. M. Delboeuf, addressing 
 a hypnotisable but unhypnotised subject, can, he 
 tells us, either make her see his beard, which is really 
 white, as if it were black, or assent in part : " Not 
 quite black, sir; there are many white hairs in it," or 
 can persuade her of nothing at all. There is an 
 infinite number of gradations in the tone of the voice ; 
 and hypnotisable subjects, being peculiarly sensitive, 
 interpret them more rapidly than others ; but their 
 actions are only the translation and exaggeration of 
 impressions felt by every one. 
 
 Suggestion by imitation and nervous sympathy 
 increases in power when gesture and even the action 
 itself are added to the tone of voice. MM. Binet and 
 Fere remark that if we say to a subject, " Grip that 
 with all your might," a dynamometric contraction of 
 much less intensity is produced than when we grip 
 the object ourselves, and say, " Do as I do."^ 
 
 The commands of God are real suggestions made 
 
 "'■ Animal Magnetism^ pp. 120-134, 295. (Tr.) 
 
PSYCHOLOGICAL SUGGESTION. I9 
 
 in the ears of a whole race — suggestions the more 
 powerful because they were based on the authority of 
 a superhuman being, and because the sound of the 
 words seemed to be of heavenly origin. Every 
 strong impulse in a conscious being becomes a kind 
 of inward voice saying : " Thou shalt ! thou shalt 
 not ! advance ! retreat ! " It therefore assumes the 
 form of a precise suggestion, which owes its authority 
 to its very precision, and if energetic enough becomes 
 a command : " Thou shalt do this ! thou shalt not do 
 that!" 
 
 Words are, in man, the natural and necessary pro- 
 duct of intellectual evolution, when consciousness is 
 characterised by a certain distinctness ; they are a 
 phase in the development of the idea and the emo- 
 tion, from which they are inseparable. Accordingly 
 every word (especially in the concrete and limited 
 tongues of primitive races) immediately and vigor- 
 ously awakens the idea or the corresponding emotion. 
 On the other hand, since it is a psychological law 
 that every image vividly engrossing the consciousness 
 tends to issue in action, a word is an action in its 
 inception. All the words of a language, especially 
 of a primitive race, are possibilities competing with 
 each other for realisation — suggestions neutralising 
 each other. When a person, armed in our opinion 
 with authority of any kind, utters a word to us, or 
 formulates a precept, he completes and brings into 
 overt action a latent suggestion already a part of our- 
 selves — gives a new force to a pre-existing impulse. 
 The internal impulse of power seeking to manifest 
 itself, and the external impulse of speech, are two forces 
 of the same nature, which can only be conjoined in 
 moral suggestion, or command, whether hypnotic or 
 
20 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 not. Further, a word is effective only inasmuch as it 
 .is the symbol of that act of the will or reaction of the 
 sensibility which it expresses and commands. In 
 itself it is nothing. A hypnotised subject to whom it 
 has been suggested that he should steal a spoon, puts 
 out his hand to a watch he sees on the table ; it was 
 the moral idea of the theft, rather than the object of 
 the theft, that was borne in upon his mind. Another, to 
 whom Dr. Bernheim had suggested that upon waking 
 he would smell eau de cologne very strongly, thought 
 that he smelled a very strong odour, but that it was 
 burnt vinegar. Words mean nothing to the hypnotised 
 subject except as definitions of the moral or sensory 
 character of actions or reactions ; it is this character 
 that is of importance to him, and the external object 
 of these actions or reactions is of but slight import- 
 ance. Belief, as I have said, plays a leading part in all 
 suggestion ; suggestions affecting sensibility, and par- 
 ticularly visual imagery, enable us to measure the force 
 of the belief by the intensity of the image produced. 
 The mere fact that we cannot believe a certain thing 
 makes our representation of it fainter. Doubt rela- 
 tive to a suggested image prevents the production of 
 complete hallucination. M. Binet said one day to a 
 sleeping subject : " Look at that dog sitting on the 
 carpet." The subject immediately saw the dog; only 
 as it seemed to him very strange that the dog should 
 have so suddenly entered the laboratory, the image 
 failed to become objectified. "You want to * halluci- 
 nate ' me." " Don't you see the dog then ? " " Yes, I 
 see it in my imagination, but I know perfectly well it 
 is not on the carpet." Another patient being allowed 
 to discuss a suggestion of Dr. Binet's, the latter im- 
 posed silence on him, and the subject immediately 
 
PSYCHOLOGICAL SUGGESTION. 21 
 
 answered : " I know why you do not wish me to dis- 
 cuss the suggestion, because it would weaken it." A 
 doubtful turn of expression — " If you do such and 
 such a thing" — either produces a very faint sug- 
 gestion or none at all. 
 
 The if is introduced into the mind of the subject, 
 and creates a meeting point of divergent paths, instead 
 of the single direction in which the will was to be im- 
 pelled. The power possessed by the subject of weaken- 
 ing the suggested image by doubt explains why auto- 
 suggestion succeeds when simple suggestion fails. We 
 always believe more strongly what we assert to our- 
 selves than what others assert to us. " If the subject 
 himself," says M. Binet, " by dint of reasoning sug- 
 gests to himself an idea, he will adopt it without 
 resistance, it will be more intense, and therefore more 
 efficacious." Again, let me quote a remarkable experi- 
 ment by M. Binet, We know that in catalepsy an 
 expressive attitude given to the limbs is immediately 
 reflected on the face : this is muscular suggestion. M. 
 Binet asked himself if a moral suggestion given by 
 way of preliminary could not modify and even sus- 
 pend muscular suggestion in catalepsy. G. being 
 in the somnambulist state, he warns her that she is 
 to be thrown into the cataleptic state, and that in this 
 state her face will remain impassive whatever move- 
 ments are communicated to her hands. The patient 
 instead of submitting to the injunction, discusses it, 
 and observes that she cannot obey because she loses 
 consciousness during catalepsy. In spite of these very 
 well reasoned misgivings of the subject, M. Binet pro- 
 ceeds with the experiment, but the muscular sugges- 
 tions are carried out as usual ; the failure is complete. 
 M. Binet then puts her again into the somnambulist 
 
22 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 state, and she spontaneously inquires if the sugges- 
 tion has succeeded. M. Binet answers in a perfectly 
 natural tone that it has been quite successful, and 
 the patient being astonished but convinced, he imme- 
 diately throws her into catalepsy again, and repeats 
 the experiment. This time it is completely successful; 
 the preliminary mental suggestion entirely suspends 
 the muscular suggestions ; when her hands are put to 
 her mouth in the position of sending a kiss, the line of 
 the mouth remains motionless ; on closing the fists 
 before her eyes, no sign of anger appears. In order to 
 gradually awaken muscular suggestion, the hand had 
 to be left for five minutes in the same position (of 
 throwing a kiss) ; at the end of that time, M. Binet 
 succeeded in bringing a smile to the mouth by giving 
 the hand a waving motion.^ 
 
 Just as a positive suggestion — i.e., the idea that one 
 will do or see a thing — is tantamount to a contagious 
 assertion, in the same way a negative suggestion — 
 the idea that we shall not see this or that person 
 present, or that we shall not perform this or that 
 habitual act — reduces to a contagious negation, which 
 is an assertion of another kind. As M. Binet 
 remarks, scepticism is suggested instead of faith. 
 We can thus weaken and even entirely destroy 
 real perceptions.^ When we say to a subject : " You 
 cannot move your arm," we paralyse the motor cur- 
 rent that sets the arm in motion. Hence I think we 
 can establish the following law : — Every manifesta- 
 tion of muscular or sensorial activity does not take 
 effect unless accompanied by a certain belief in one's 
 self, or by the expectation of a determinate result, on 
 the occurrence of certain antecedent conditions. The 
 
 ^ Moll, pp. 171 et seq. ^ Moll, vide Index, "Paralyses." 
 
SUGGESTION A MEANS OF MORAL EDUCATION. 23 
 
 consciousness of action is thus partly reduced to the 
 belief that one is acting, and if this belief is destroyed, 
 the consciousness itself becomes disorganised. All 
 conscious life is based on a certain self-confidence, 
 which may be identified with self-habit ; and this 
 self-habit, this vague belief in the conformity of 
 what one has been, with what one is, and will be, 
 may be very easily disturbed, just as reflex acts 
 may be disturbed by a doubt arising from conscious 
 reflection. 
 
 III. Suggestion as a Means of Moral Education^ and 
 as an Influence modifying Heredity, 
 
 The state of the child at the moment of its entrance 
 into the world is more or less comparable to that of a ^ 
 hypnotised subject. There is the same absence of 
 ideas or "a'fdeism," the same domination of a single 
 idea or passive " monoideism.'* Further, all children 
 are not only hypnotisable, but readily hypnotisable. 
 In fact, they are peculiarly open to suggestion and/ 
 auto-suggestion.^ 
 
 Everything the child perceives will therefore be a 
 
 ■^ M. Motet made an interesting communication to the Academie de 
 Medecine^ 12th April 1887, on the false evidence given by children 
 in courts of law. Drawing attention to the affecting character of 
 the account given by a child of the details of a crime, the author 
 has collected a number of facts which clearly characterise the mental 
 state of a child-plaintiff, and which show the psychic mechanism of 
 their false evidence. In many of these cases the gravest accusations 
 have no other motive than the necessity for explaining some trivial 
 prank. In one case, the child not knowing what answer to make to its 
 mother, the latter, by her questions, suggests the whole story of an 
 indecent assault, which the child retains and repeats before the magis- 
 trate. In another, a child plays truant from school and falls into the 
 water, and under the influence of this moral shock, which awakens in 
 him a series of dreams and phantasms of previous fear, he organises a 
 
24 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 suggestion ; this suggestion will give rise to a habit 
 which may sometimes be prolonged through its life- 
 time, just as impressions of fright instilled in children 
 by nurses are, as we know, perpetuated. Suggestion, 
 as I have said before, is the introduction within us of 
 a practical belief which is spontaneously realised ; the 
 moral art of suggestion may therefore be defined 
 as the art of modifying an individual by persuading 
 him that he is or may be other than he is. This art is 
 one of the most important appliances in education. 
 All education, indeed, should be directed to this end, 
 to convince the child that he is capable of good and 
 incapable of evily in order to render him actually so ; 
 to persuade him that he has a strong will, in order to 
 give him strength of will ; to make him believe he is 
 morally free and master of himself, in order that "the 
 
 menial drama, and accuses an individual of having thrown him into the 
 water. In another case, hypnagogic hallucinations become the basis of 
 an accusation of indecent assault. In fact, leading questions implying 
 guilt, made in an energetic tone of voice, appear enough under other 
 circumstances to determine in the child a process of unconscious assimi- 
 lation, in virtue of which he proceeds to declare himself guilty of a 
 crime he has not committed, or to testify to what he has never seen. In 
 all these cases we recognise the influence of suggestion and auto-sugges- 
 tion, as having an exaggerated effect upon the child's brain, which is 
 still plastic and in process of organisation. Whereas in the adult it is the 
 contradictory details and different versions which prove that there is 
 wilful perjury, so that the magistrates wait in their examination for the 
 moment when the witness will contradict himself, it is otherwise with 
 the child ; the automatic invariability of its deposition ought to be a 
 reason for suspecting its veracity. ** When a medical expert," con- 
 cludes M. Motet, ** after several visits, finds the same words and the 
 same details, when he has only to siart the train of ideas to hear 
 unfolded in unchanging sequence the most important statements, 
 we may be sure the child is not telling the truth, and that it is 
 unconsciously substituting acquired data for the true account of events 
 in which it may have taken part." — Vide also Moll, pp. 345 et seq. 
 (Tr.) 
 
SUGGESTION A MEANS OF MORAL EDUCATION. 2$ 
 
 idea of moral liberty" may tend to progressively 
 realise itself. Moral slavery, " aboulia," as it is called, 
 reduces either to a partial unconsciousness an irreso- 
 lution which makes the agent abandon himself at 
 every turn to opposed impulses without struggle or 
 comparison, or to the belief that he will have no 
 strength to resist, that he is powerless, or, in other 
 words, that his consciousness has no power to act on 
 the ideas and tendencies that cross it. To deny the 
 repressive power of his own consciousness is to 
 abandon himself with a light heart to the haphazard 
 play of impulse. 
 
 Further, the hypnotiser who wishes to produce an 
 act with certainty takes care to suggest, along with 
 the idea of action, the idea that the subject cannot but 
 do as he is told ; he creates simultaneously a tendency 
 to act, and the idea that the tendency is irresistible ; 
 he excites the brain with regard to one point, while 
 he paralyses it with regard to every other ; he isolates 
 an impulse from the total mental system which might 
 otherwise resist it, and makes — so to speak — a 
 void around it. Thus he creates an entirely artificial 
 and morbid state similar to the states of aboulia 
 observed in numerous patients. M. Bernheim, for 
 instance, had suggested to S. the idea of a theft, 
 without the idea that he could not resist the 
 suggestion. On his awaking, S. sees a watch, puts 
 out his hand to it, and then stops short. " No ! " 
 says he, " it would be thieving." Another day Dr. 
 Bernheim sends him to sleep again, and says : " You 
 will put this spoon in your pocket ; you will be 
 unable to do otherwise^ When S. awakes he sees the 
 spoon, still hesitates a moment (the persuasion of 
 powerlessness not being quite strong enough), and 
 
26 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 cries : " Well, so much the worse ! " and puts the spoon 
 in his pocket 
 
 It is often enough to tell children and young people, 
 or otherwise lead them to believe, that we assume 
 this or that good quality in them, to induce them to 
 exert themselves to justify the opinion. To assume 
 in them depraved sentiments, to reproach them 
 undeservedly, to treat them badly, is to produce the 
 contrary result. It has been justly said that the art 
 of managing the young consists before anything else 
 in assuming them to be as good as they wish them- 
 selves to be. If an hypnotic subject is persuaded he 
 is a pig, he straightway wallows and grunts like a pig. 
 The same happens in the case of those who theoreti- 
 cally think themselves of no more worth than a 
 pig ; their practice must necessarily offer points of 
 correspondence with their theory. This is an auto- 
 suggestion. 
 
 The same principles find their application in the 
 art of governing men. Numerous facts from prison- 
 life show that to treat a half-criminal as a great 
 criminal is to urge to crime. To raise a man in the 
 esteem of the public and himself is to raise him in 
 reality. A clasp of the hand offered by an enthusi- 
 astic young lawyer to a thief who had been ten times 
 convicted was enough to produce a moral impression 
 which is lasting to the present moment. A prisoner, 
 seeing one of his comrades rushing forward to strike 
 the governor of the prison, stops him by an almost 
 instinctive movement ; and this action will be enough 
 to save him from himself, to rescue him from his 
 antecedents and moral environment. Henceforth his 
 conduct will be irreproachable.^ 
 
 ^ Ellis, The Criminal^ pp. 232-282. (Tr.) 
 
SUGGESTION A MEANS OF MORAL EDUCATION. 2/ 
 
 Testimony of esteem is one of the most powerful 
 forms of suggestion.^ 
 
 On the other hand, to believe in the wickedness of 
 any one is as a rule to make him more wicked than 
 he is. In education, therefore, we must always obey 
 the rule just laid down : presuppose the existence of 
 goodness and goodwill. Every statement made aloud 
 upon the mental state of a child immediately plays 
 the rdle of a suggestion : " This child is naughty — 
 he is idle — he will not do this or that." How 
 many vices are thus developed, not by hereditary 
 fatality, but by ill-advised education ! ^ For the same 
 reason when a child has misconducted itself, we must 
 not in blaming it interpret the action in its worst 
 sense. The child is in general too unconscious to 
 have had a completely perverse intention ; to ascribe 
 to it deliberation, fixed purpose, and manly resolution 
 
 ^ Are the numerous cases of second offences, ascertained to have 
 taken place after the imprisonment of delinquents, due to the incura- 
 bility of crime, or are they not rather due to the deplorable organisation 
 of our prisons, where everything suggests and teaches crime? The 
 variability of second offences with the country, and with prison organ- 
 isation, would seem to prove the latter case ; they are 70 per cent, in 
 Belgium and 40 per cent, in France. The system of separate cells has 
 brought them down to 10 per cent. ; in fact, at Zwickau, by "the 
 graduation of punishment and its adaptation to the individual," the 
 proportion has been reduced to 2.68 per cent. We must draw the 
 conclusion that, as far as we know at present, it is barely certain that 
 as many as 20 per cent, of our criminals are predestined to crime by 
 other causes than their environment, and the suggestions they receive 
 from it. And if, even in this 20 per cent., we admit the overmastering 
 influence of atavism, we must know how far this action has been 
 unaided in their early years by the suggestions of their first education, 
 which are the most powerful of all. 
 
 ^ Receipt for stopping crying: Pour cold water on the face. "Come, 
 my dear, wash those red eyes of yours ; oh, how much good that does 
 you ! " This is suggestion of a comforting idea, instead of a depressing 
 idea. 
 
28 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 in wrong doing, is to deceive ourselves and develop 
 those habits in it ; to assume the existence of vice is 
 often to produce it. We must therefore say to the 
 child : " You did not really wish to do that ; but see 
 how others would interpret your action if they did not 
 know you." 
 
 When a man, followed by a vaguely threatening 
 crowd, musters up courage to face it, and suddenly 
 cries, " You want to hang me, do you ? " there is every 
 chance that they will immediately apply the formula 
 he has found for them. This is the case with a 
 multitude of more or less bad instincts, which are 
 necessarily awakened in the child's heart at certain 
 moments of its existence ; we must not give the 
 > child the formula of its instincts, or by so doing we 
 strengthen them and urge them to pass into action. 
 Sometimes, indeed, we create them. Hence this one 
 important rule I lay down for educators : It is as use- 
 ful to make good tendencies self-conscious, as it is 
 dangerous to make the bad tendencies self-conscious, 
 when as yet they are not so. 
 
 A sentiment is a very complex thing — so complex 
 that parents must not fancy they can raise it by a 
 reproach. To assert, for instance, that a child is in- 
 different to its parents, is not the way to make it 
 affectionate ; on the contrary, it is much to be feared 
 that assertion of indifference only produces it, or at 
 any rate increases it, by persuading the child of its 
 existence. A sentiment must be imputed in far 
 more delicate terms than an act. We may reproach 
 a child for having done or not done this or that ; 
 but in my opinion it should be a rule in educa- 
 tion to suggest rather than reproach in matters of 
 sentiment. 
 
SUGGESTION A MEANS OF MORAL EDUCATION. 29 
 
 Suggestion may weaken or momentarily increase 
 intelligence ; we may suggest to a person that he is 
 a fool, that he is incapable of understanding this 
 or that, that he will be unable to do that or the other ; 
 thereby we develop a proportionate lack of intelligence 
 and want of power. The educator, on the contrary, 
 should follow this rule : Persuade the child that he 
 will be able to understand dind to do a thing. In Pascal's 
 words : — " Man is so made that by dint of frequent 
 asserting that he is a fool, we make him believe it ; 
 and by dint of telling himself this, he makes himself 
 believe it. For man carries on with himself an 
 inward conversation^ which it is of importance to 
 regulate carefully ; corrumpunt mores bonos colloquia 
 pravar 
 
 We ought to accept what a child says or does out of 
 good-will. His confidence in all those around him , 
 ought to stifle his innate timidity. When we think of 
 the sum total of courage which a child, who feels 
 himself such a mere beginner, and so unskilful in every- 
 thing, must summon up to express himself or take 
 the slightest initiative in the presence of adults, we 
 understand how very important it is not to let timidity 
 get the upper hand, and eventually paralyse him. We 
 must therefore look at the child with an encouraging 
 eye, making him observe, merely in a quiet way, 
 when the opportunity arises, that he would succeed 
 better if he acted in such or such a manner. He must 
 learn everything ; we must show our appreciation of 
 his least effort, while we tell him what effort has yet 
 to be exerted. 
 
 Why is it a good thing to ^w^ tasks to children ? 
 To accustom them, in the first place, to zvill, and 
 in the second place, to succeed — i.e., to feel their 
 
30 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 own power.^ One sentiment, then, that should be 
 
 ^developed in the child, is true self-confidence. We 
 all have pride, but we have not all sufficient confidence 
 in ourselves — or rather in our perseverance in effort. 
 Every one says : " So much I am well able to do ; " but 
 few venture to try, or if they do they quickly give it 
 up, and pride ends in a kind of inward abasement and 
 self-annihilation. " Have faith " is the cry of piety. 
 For morality it is further necessary to have faith in 
 oneself, in one's own power, and that independently 
 of all external aid ; it is a good thing to expect an 
 abundant spring to leap forth from the heart at the 
 first summons, without the employment of the magic 
 wand which Moses used in his day of doubt ; the least 
 doubt may make us dry and sterile, and prevent the 
 welling-up of the living will. We must have con- 
 fidence in the power of our lord and master — our- 
 selves. The dominant idea of religious morality is 
 
 ' the powerlessness of the will without grace, — in 
 other words, the opposition of will and power, the 
 original sin seated in the heart of man. Original 
 
 -, sin is a kind of suggestion instilled in this way 
 from childhood, and producing a real hereditary 
 sin. There is in us, said the Hindoo mystics, a 
 self which is the enemy of self. This internal foe 
 is personified by Christians in Satan, ever present 
 in the best of us. Thus the obsession of sin be- 
 
 ' came a true hallucination, and gave place to a 
 
 1 Only, not to obtain an effect diametrically opposed to what we 
 desire, the task must require a minimum of time, and be far from 
 exceeding the child's powers. The task should only be increased in 
 proportion to the strength of the pupil, and so as to always constitute a 
 gymnastic exercise of the attention and the will, never an exhausting 
 labour. Madame Perier tells us that Pascal's father made a rule never 
 to give his boy a task beyond his powers. 
 
SUGGESTION A MEANS OF MORAL EDUCATION. 3 1 
 
 doubting of the personality such as we see in certain 
 patients. 
 
 Nowadays we no longer do feel, and we no longer 
 ought to feel, the demon within us ; we ought to 
 proclaim that the so-called "possessed " are impotent"^ 
 or sick, and that healthy people are good ; man, when 
 vyt'qs, is the real aytos. In religion and in morality alike, 
 the idea of salvation — ie.y healthgiving — is the essential 
 idea; it is in no way essential to its existence that it 
 should be considered as a simple corollary of the idea 
 of sin. We can conceive of health without sin, nor is 
 there a contradiction in this ; after all it was upon the 
 idea of health that Jesus insisted most, much more 
 than on sin ; indeed, the most imperfect and least 
 human portions of the gospel are those referring to sin. 
 The sentiment of sin, no doubt, includes an element 
 worthy of respect — scrupulousness, the conscience 
 embittered and tormented by the least deviation from 
 its ideal ; but this inward grief must not increase so 
 as to fill the whole of life, and to give birth to what is 
 really moral pessimism. If self-distrust be a good 
 thing, it is also a good thing to believe in one's own 
 powers. A too intense sense of sin may lead to a kind 
 of moral paralysis. We spontaneously link ourselves 
 to the object of our dread ; we are attracted by the fear- 
 ful object upon which we fix our minds ; human nature 
 is itself perverted by asserting its irremediable perver- 
 sion. In this respect the lay morality of Confucius, 
 of which the peculiar characteristic is the repeated 
 assertion of the goodness of human nature in the 
 normal man, is much superior to the religious ethics 
 derived from Christianity or Brahminism. Although 
 the doctrine may be disputed from the physiological ^ 
 point of view, it is useful for educative suggestions. 
 
^2 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 " I say that human nature is good," writes Meng-Tseu ; 
 " . . . there is no man who is not naturally good, just 
 as there is no stream which does not naturally find its 
 own level. . . . The heart is the same in all men. 
 What, then, is the common property of all hearts? 
 What is called natural reason, natural equity. . . . 
 Natural equity pleases the heart, as a tasty morsel 
 pleases the palate. . . . The human race, created by 
 God, has received as its portion a faculty for action and 
 a rule for action." Modern philosophy, while re-estab- 
 lishing the ro/e of heredity, must return in a measure to 
 the ancient wisdom of China, and must free man from 
 deadly sin ; it must show not only that moral obliga- 
 tion presupposes the faculty of action, but that it pro- 
 ceeds from it, that it is the normal exercise of it, that 
 he who does with reflection and reason what he can, 
 also does what he ought. " Have you noticed," 
 says Meng-Tseu, naively enough, " that in years of 
 plenty many good actions are done, and that in poor 
 years many bad actions are done ? " Meng-Tseu is 
 right ; all the causes of discord among mankind are 
 always a more or less complex transubstantiation of a 
 piece of primitive bread ; man's real sin is hunger in 
 all its forms. An organism completely nourished, not 
 only in its framework and muscles, but in the finest 
 ramifications of its nervous system, would be, but for 
 morbid hereditary dispositions, a well-equilibrated 
 organism. Every vice, which reduces to a dis- 
 equilibration, thus reduces scientifically to the more 
 or less incomplete nutrition of some deeply-seated 
 organ. 
 
 Man is not fundamentally bad, for he is a naturally 
 sociable being. Homo homini lupus is true, but even 
 the wolves have some good in them, for they sometimes 
 
SUGGESTION A MEANS OF MORAL EDUCATION. 33 
 
 assemble in bands and organise more or less pro- 
 visional societies. Besides, they have the best of the 
 animals — the dog — for cousin-german. If man has 
 sometimes the instincts of the wolf, he has also those 
 of the dog ; he has also those of the sheep ; and all 
 this makes a mixture which is not exactly ideal 
 virtue or sanctity, but which Chinese wisdom was 
 right not to underrate. Every being who is not 
 monocellular is sure to have something good in him, 
 because he is a society in embryo, and a society does 
 not subsist without a certain equilibrium, a mutual 
 balance of activities. Further, the monocellular being 
 itself would become plural if more completely 
 analysed ; nothing in the universe is simple; now, 
 every one who is complex has always more or less 
 solidarity with other beings. Man, being the most 
 complex being we know of, has also more solidarity 
 with respect to others; moreover, he is the being with 
 most consciousness of that solidarity. Now, he is 
 the bestj who has most consciousness of his solidarity 
 with other beings and the universe. 
 
 The essential purpose of education, as I have 
 pointed out, is to create, by direct suggestion or ' 
 repeated action, a series of habits — />., of permanent 
 reflex impulses, capable of strengthening the other 
 impulses of hereditary origin, or, on the other hand, 
 of substituting themselves for them and arresting 
 them. The most certain remedy for temptation 
 assailing the instincts is, therefore, as all educators 
 are more or less aware, suggestion by precept and 
 example, by idea and action. Children like firmness, 
 even if it affects themselves. An energetic will, 
 employed for what is good and just, imposes itself 
 on them ; just as they admire physical strength, so 
 
 3 
 
34 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 they admire moral strength, which is will: this 
 is an hereditary instinct, and salutary for the race. 
 Now, as a child always models itself on those around 
 it, and imitates especially what in them most strikes 
 it, to have power of will is to make the child have it : 
 to set the example of firmness in what is just and 
 true is to make him in his turn just and true. But 
 the educator must proceed in a manner entirely 
 different from that of the trainer, who tries from the 
 very first to arouse in the animal a tendency to 
 mechanical obedience. The object is not to break 
 the child's will, but to prevent the struggle with the 
 paternal will — i.e,^ to direct and simultaneously 
 strengthen the will. What, then, is true authority, 
 and how should it be exercised ? Authority is 
 composed of three elements — ist, affection and 
 moral respect ; 2nd, the habit of submission — a habit 
 born of practice; 3rd, fear. Each of these three 
 elements enters into the sentiment of authority, but 
 ought to be subordinated to that of affection. Affec- 
 tion renders harsh authority and punishment useless. 
 A loving child obeys lest he should " give his parents 
 pain." The child needing punishment is the child 
 lacking affection ; lavish on it enough love, and blows 
 will be unnecessary, for love begets love — the most 
 powerful weapon in all education. 
 
 Besides, affection should be a reward earned by the 
 child for its conduct. "Be good and you will be 
 loved." And it must attach such a value to the 
 reward that all else is as nothing in comparison. 
 With the advent of reason the child must first reach 
 the point of casting out fear, and then obey; not 
 because it is in the habit of obeying, but because it 
 respects and loves — especially because it loves ; for 
 
SUGGESTION A MEANS OF MORAL EDUCATION. 35 
 
 respect is at bottom nothing but affection. But 
 reason ought only to suppress the two latter elements 
 — fear and the habit of submission — when affection 
 is strong enough to compensate for them. Analysis 
 applied to submission by habit destroys it, by making 
 it a matter for discussion. To the sentiment of fear 
 analysis is still more unfavourable ; fear is only moral 
 when spontaneous, when produced rather by respect 
 than dread. If the child passes from this stage to 
 that of reason, he will put the satisfaction of acting 
 as he likes in one scale, and punishment in the other, 
 and then he will either be a coward and give way, 
 or he will harbour a rebellious spirit. The child is 
 not like the criminal, whom society strikes without ^< 
 troubling itself about the mental impressions punish- 
 ment will produce. It is therefore very important to 
 prevent this spirit of analysis from dissociating in the *^ 
 child at too early a period the elements which con- 
 stitute in his eyes respect for his parents.^ 
 
 Corporal punishment in the very young may enter 
 into the sentiment of moral authority as a constituent 
 element, but this element ought not to have too much 
 prominence, nor should it encroach on the others ; 
 otherwise it alters the sentiment of moral authority 
 and replaces it by cowardly fear or a rebellious spirit. 
 In order to decide when in full knowledge of the 
 circumstances whether the corporal punishment of 
 little children may be useful, we must lay down the 
 general principle that in no case should the parents 
 
 ^ Practical conclusion : a child should never be allowed time for 
 reflection ; he should )deld to a spontaneous movement, should be 
 carried away by repentance for his fault. It is important that he 
 should at once understand that the punishment inflicted on him is just 
 —that he has deserved it ; in a word, he must be morally punished by 
 remorse for the fault committed. 
 
36 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 show brutal anger to the children ; otherwise the 
 latter, following the example set them, will feel 
 themselves in their turn justified in being passionate 
 and brutal. Parents may be indignant with a mis- 
 chievous or unjust act in proportion as the child 
 acted mischievously or unjustly, but they must not 
 show violence. The justification of corporal punish- 
 ment at a tender age is that a child will undergo, 
 later in life, the ruder consequences of his acts ; but 
 as these consequences do not always follow the 
 immediate accomplishment of the action, and as the 
 child is too short-sighted to foresee the future, it 
 follows that he cannot connect effect and cause. 
 Corporal punishment, inflicted after an act which he 
 knows to be a bad act, should appear to him the 
 logical sequel of that act, although it is a sequel 
 conjoined with it merely by the will of his parents. 
 Trivial corrections ought never to be inflicted on 
 children at random ; they constitute their first experi- 
 ence of the social sanction, their first punishment 
 after a verdict. We cannot, from the pedagogic 
 point of view, help approving of that influential 
 elector in mid-France, who, when he had to chastise 
 his children rather severely, requested that the rod 
 should be wielded by the hands of the deputy of 
 the department.^ Unfortunately every elector has 
 not got his representative at his disposal. It is 
 none the less true that the least blow given to a 
 child, under the most trivial circumstances, should 
 
 -have the grave character of justice — never of passion. 
 
 ' The child being pre-eminently a creature of routine, 
 
 it is in itself a grievous matter to him to have 
 
 imposed upon him something abnormal ; and, on 
 
 ^ Authentic. 
 
SUGGESTION A MEANS OF MORAL EDUCATION. 37 
 
 the other hand, to be effectual, every chastisement 
 should be abnormal, exceptional, and reserved for 
 cases of open disobedience. The essentially excep- 
 tional character of punishment makes it formidable, 
 and may make it a powerful means of acting on 
 the child's mind. If scoldings and whippings are 
 of daily occurrence, the child will get as accustomed 
 to them as to sugar-plums, and that at the expense - 
 of his character. 
 
 A moral colour must always be given to punish- 
 ments. By provoking fear, punishment creates 
 hypocrisy ; here then, again, we must not develop 
 fear alone in the child, but moral remorse for having 
 displeased his parents. Punishment should be merely 
 a symbol; moral pain should be first blended with 
 physical pain, and then substituted for it. Still less 
 should two reprimands or punishments follow close 
 on each other, whether for the same or different 
 offences ; by doing this we exhaust the moral effect 
 of the reprimand, and produce in the child the habit 
 of being punished, which would be a deplorable 
 result. When, a few moments after having been 
 punished for a trivial offence, the child begins to 
 " sin " again, it is better to close one's eyes to the new 
 offence, or suddenly change one's tone. Especially 
 when we anticipate a bad intention on the child's 
 part, it is important to distract his attention, and thus 
 nip the misdeed in the bud. We ought, in fact, to 
 husband our reprimands as a soldier husbands his 
 resources in time of war. Reprimand or punishment 
 can never produce their moral effects at the moment 
 of infliction ; they must have time to act before they 
 can take their place among the habitual motives of 
 the child. Punishment does not act by itself^ but only 
 
38 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 when transfigured in recollection. Time is an essential 
 factor in the formation of child-morality, and the 
 educator should not proceed by revolution, but rather, 
 as nature does, by uniform evolution. 
 
 No doubt the object is not to make little reasoners 
 of children, and we have even seen that sometimes 
 reasoning and the spirit of analysis should be dis- 
 trusted ; but we must make children understand that 
 a parent's orders are always reasonable and capable 
 of explanation, even when the explanation is beyond 
 the grasp of the young mind. There ought thus to 
 be associated with the natural affection and respect 
 ot a child for its parents a perpetual vote of con- 
 fidence in them ; they ought to know, once for all, 
 that their parents only wish their good, and good 
 in general. If, then, the art of education in the first 
 place consists in forming good habits, it also consists, 
 in the second place, in strengthening those habits 
 by the consciousness and by the belief that they are 
 rational} 
 
 Every recognised profession, every social status, 
 may be psychologically defined as a totality of constant 
 and co-ordinated suggestions which urge to action 
 
 Further, "of all the errors in education the worst is inconsistency; 
 just as, in a community, crimes multiply when there is no certain 
 administration of justice, so in the family an immense increase of 
 transgressions results from a hesitating application of rules and punish- 
 ments." '* A weak mother," says Spencer, " who perpetually threatens 
 and rarely performs — who makes rules in haste and repents of them at 
 leisure — who treats the same offence, now with severity and now with 
 leniency, as the passing humour dictates, is laying up miseries for 
 herself and her children. She is making herself contemptible in their 
 eyes. • Better even a barbarous form of domestic government carried 
 out consistently, than a humane one inconsistently carried out." ** If," 
 says Jean Paul, "the secret mental fluctuations of a large class of 
 ordinary fathers were brought to the light of day, they would run some- 
 
l^tlGGESTION A MEANS OF MORAL EDUCATION. 39 
 
 conformably to an idea or general type present to the 
 thought. Suggestions springing from a profession 
 may be detected in action in what M. Richet 
 has called "the objectivation of types," by means of 
 induced somnambulism. If a hypnotised subject 
 thinks he has become a general, he will act as a 
 general, assume a tone of authority, and no longer 
 wish to recoil from danger ; he will draw his sword if 
 accused of cowardice ; if transformed into a good 
 citizen, he will act as a citizen, etc. Given any type 
 whatever to be realised, all the secondary features of 
 that type will be faithfully followed out in the repro- 
 duction of it attempted by the subject ; his tone of 
 voice, his gestures, and even his writing will undergo 
 very appreciable modifications. So it is in life : our 
 social status constantly suggests to us, in all circum- 
 stances, and often even in spite of hereditary tenden- 
 cies, the conduct appropriate to that status ; moreover, , 
 that is why a regular profession has always a greater 
 moralising influence, because its suggestions are 
 always accommodated to social life ; the absence of a 
 profession at once deprives the individual of a whole 
 class of social suggestions, and thus leaves him an 
 easier prey to the influence of individual passions or 
 hereditary inclinations. Not only a profession, but 
 
 what after this fashion : In the first hour, * the child should be taught 
 pure morality;' second hour, * the morality of expediency;' third hour, 
 *you do not see that your father does so and so;' fourth hour, *you 
 are little, only grown-up people do that;' . , . seventh hour, * bear 
 with injustice and have patience;* eighth hour, *but defend yourself 
 bravely if any one attack you ; ' ninth hour, * dear child, do not make 
 so much noise ; ' tenth hour, * a little boy ought not to sit still doing 
 nothing.' " And Jean Paul reminds us of the harlequin who appeared 
 on the stage with a bundle of papers under each arm, and who answered 
 when asked what was under his right arm — ** orders," and when asked 
 what was under his left — " counter-orders." 
 
40 EDUCATION ANl) HEREDITY. 
 
 even a uniform has an incomparable suggestive 
 power, and legislators have, not without good reason, 
 always attached much importance to the uniform. 
 It is not mere childishness ; it is, so to speak, the 
 profession itself, made visible to him who exercises it; 
 it is a complete regulating principle of systematic 
 action, made palpable in the cut of a garment. The 
 habit does not make the monk, it is true ; but respect 
 for the habit often counts for much in the conduct of 
 the monk. There is one profession that is universal 
 — the profession of 7nan; one role is common to us all 
 — the role of the social being; the idea of society and 
 sociability must therefore be suggested from child- 
 hood, and made a living idea, so that it may accom- 
 modate to itself the whole being ; the ideal of the 
 existing human race must be raised above hereditary 
 instincts, and gradually modify them in its own 
 direction. Let the child have presented to its mind 
 from the earliest period those words of Benjamin 
 Constant, which sum up all non-egoistic life : " The 
 great thing to be considered is the pain we may cause 
 to others." Some sentiments are social, and others 
 unsocial ; the former must be carefully developed, and 
 the latter must be carefully suppressed. And un- 
 
 ^^ sociability lies in embryo in certain mental states 
 which are apparently of no serious import. For 
 example, very early in life, from eighteen months to 
 
 ^two years old, every tendency to sulkiness in the 
 child should be combated. Sulkiness is, in fact, 
 nothing but a first manifestation of unsociability. 
 The formula of sulkiness is : "A love of displeasing 
 those who displease us." Sometimes with sulkiness 
 is joined a lethargy of the will, w^hich, in the presence 
 of another's will, gives in, for fear of defeat, and 
 
SUGGESTION A MEANS OF MORAL EDUCATION. 4t 
 
 much prefers confessing itself beaten to engaging in 
 conflict. We must also habituate children to speedy 
 reconciliation with the person who has reproved them. 
 A child of three or four years of age, having com- 
 mitted some peccadillo for which he was scolded, 
 several times asked permission to embrace his mother, 
 but the latter obstinately refused ; the child, in conse- 
 quence, conceived such a feeling of rancour, that he 
 acquired the habit of sulking every time he was 
 afterwards scolded. Once more, we can only make a 
 child obey by making him love ; and on the other 
 hand, we can only make him love by making him 
 obey when he is given a rational command. By 
 letting the child get the habit of sulking, he acquires 
 the habit of abiding by the fault he has committed 
 without making any effort of reparation. He ex- 
 periences, it is true, a vague sense of uneasiness, but 
 this, in conjunction with the gratification of self-love, 
 deprives him of all active remorse. On the other 
 hand, if we never let a scolding pass without a rapid 
 reconciliation and final kiss, the child will eventually 
 be unable to bear the idea of being angry with any 
 one ; he will feel he must atone for his offence, obtain 
 pardon, and receive the kiss of reconciliation. Thus 
 the educator himself may lay in the child's mind the 
 foundations of that complex sentiment, active remorse 
 — the need of atonement for a fault, of re-establish- 
 ing the equilibrium of the friendship disturbed and 
 fellowship compromised. 
 
 Bad temper is another unsocial tendency — a 
 tendency, moreover, which is depressing to the 
 individual. Bad temper is a very complex mental 
 state, which it is of great importance to overcome 
 at an early age. It is relatively easy to repress 
 
xr ?y 
 
 42 EDUCATION AND HEREt)ltV. 
 
 this or that movement of anger, jealousy, or im- 
 patience ; but with these may be blended a general 
 sentiment of bad temper, which afterwards will 
 assume countless forms and be betrayed in a hundred 
 ways ; it will form a moral atmosphere surrounding 
 the whole mind from which it will be very difficult to 
 emerge. A child thwarted unwisely and at every 
 turn acquires in some measure a habit of melancholy; 
 he gets a habit of wrapping himself up in himself, his 
 heart big with his little grievances, and of turning 
 them over in his mind ; later, it is to be feared, dis- 
 couragement will have more effect upon him than 
 upon others. Bad temper contains in embryo all the 
 derangements of those who have lost their mental 
 equilibrium — derangements so acutely expressed in 
 all our modern literature. It is a good thing to 
 accustom children to the gaiety and solid good 
 humour of those who have nothing to reproach them- 
 selves or others with, who have, to use the popular 
 phrase, " nothing on their minds." A fund of gaiety 
 which follows him through life, and which he has at 
 his disposal in spite of every trial, is created for the 
 child brought up in this way with indulgence and 
 smiling affection. 
 
 The happy child is more beautiful, more loving and 
 lovable, more spontaneous, open, and sincere. His 
 smile lights up all around him, and gives a deep and 
 tranquil delight like that given by a newly-discovered 
 truth. 
 
 As society is a reciprocal suggestion, the object we 
 should pursue in society is the increase and not the 
 dwarfing of the sentiments. Unfortunately the latter 
 is the result whenever we are in prolonged contact 
 with mediocre men. The society of average men is 
 
SUGGESTION A MEANS OF MORAL EDUCATION. 43 
 
 precious to those whose intellectual and, above all, 
 whose moral level is below the average ; but it is not 
 without its inconveniences to those who are rather ^ 
 above it. Accordingly, the dominating principle of 
 education should be the choice of companions morally < 
 one's superiors. We then develop in the right direc- 
 tion that sentiment of solidarity so necessary to 
 mankind. With a certain moral delicacy we may 
 eventually feel ourselves as even having a part in 
 the merits or demerits of others. " The goodness of 
 others should afford me as much pleasure as my 
 own," as Joubert said. The goodness of others must 
 become our own from the very sense we have of its 
 value. 
 
 The principle of all disequilibration is perhaps moral 
 and social. Most disequilibrated minds are wanting ^ 
 in altruistic sentiments ; by developing in them these 
 sentiments, education and suggestion may be able to 
 re establish the internal equilibrium. One of the 
 characteristic features of the criminal class is the total ^ 
 absence of pity.^ Now we cannot suppose that an 
 appropriate education is unable to develop this senti- 
 ment even in the most poorly endowed being, — in a 
 more or less rudimentary degree perhaps, but enough 
 to modify his conduct. We may even at the bottom 
 of every form of insanity discover a certain want of 
 the social instinct, for a constant symptom in insanity 
 is an exaggerated magnifying of self, an exclusive < 
 self-preoccupation. From extreme vanity to madness ^. 
 is often but a step. Now vanity or pride, the first of 
 the deadly sins, is a form of unsocial egoism : the man 
 whose altruistic sentiments are sufficiently developed 
 appreciates at their true value the merits of others, 
 
 ^ Ellis, TAe Criminal^ chap, iv., sec. i, ** Moral insensibility." (Tr.) 
 
44 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 and thus finds a counterpoise to his sense of personal 
 merit. By moral and social suggestion we may even 
 prevent the formation of the fixed idea in the mono- 
 maniacs of crime and insanity — a fixed idea of which 
 the elements for the most part combine from a very 
 early period. To know how to " moralise " men 
 would be therefore the power of introducing equili- 
 brium not only into their conduct, but also into their 
 intellect, and into the inmost recesses of their being ; 
 and this equilibrium is at the same time harmony 
 with others — sociability. 
 
 To sum up, suggestions, the mechanism of which 
 is now occupying the attention of our physiological 
 psychologists, are only isolated and curious cases of 
 the action of the environment upon the individual, 
 of percepts on the being who perceives them. These 
 suggestions may, as we have seen, disequilibrate the 
 organism, but they may also, though with more 
 difficulty, restore its equilibrium. The influence of 
 the social environment is a power henceforth too 
 manifest for the most exclusive partisans of heredity, 
 of hereditary crime and vice, of the inevitable decay 
 of certain races, not to be compelled to take it into 
 
 ^ account. Hereditary tendencies are nothing but 
 acquired habits — i.e.^ accumulated action ; it is the 
 action of our ancestors which is now prompting us to 
 action, and which in certain cases disturbs our inner 
 equilibrium. The corrective of the action thus 
 capitalised is itself action, but in its living form, such 
 as we see it in the environment that envelops us ; the 
 
 ^ corrective for the harmful consequences of heredity — 
 ix., of the solidarity of the race from which we spring 
 — is our solidarity with the existing human race. 
 The hereditary mechanism and the intellect react 
 
SUGGESTION A MEANS OF MORAL EDUCATION. 45 
 
 incessantly on each other ; they are two forces with 
 which no one ought to be unacquainted : — 
 
 Every individual^ by the series of acts constituting the 
 framework of his life, and ultimately co-ordinating 
 themselves for his descendants in hereditary habits, 
 exerts a ^^ moralising'' or depraving influence over his 
 posterity, just as he has been " moralised'' or depraved 
 by his ancestors. 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE GENESIS OF THE MORAL INSTINCT. THE R&LE 
 OF HEREDITY, IDEAS, AND EDUCATION. 
 
 I . Power of Habits y giving rise to a Momentary Impulse or Perj7ianent 
 Obsession, ^ — Habit and adaptation — Habit and heredity — Habit and the 
 sense of the becoming — How habit may produce an impulse — How it 
 may produce a permanent obsession and inward pressure — Suggestion 
 producing an obsession and a kind of obligation. 
 
 I I. Power of the Consciousness and of Idea- Forces , the Moral Agent, — 
 How the idea-force explains the two terms of the moral problem: 
 volition and the object of the will — The active subject, the moral 
 agent is constituted by a volition capable of acting by an effort to 
 realise an idea. 
 
 III. Power begetting Duty, — i. Existence of a certain duty created 
 by the very power of action. 2. Existence of a certain duty created by 
 the very conception of action — The normal human type. 3. Existence 
 of a certain duty created by the increasing interfusion of sensibilities, 
 and by the more and more social character of higher pleasures. 
 
 IV. The Dissolution of the Moral Instinct. — Different degrees of 
 moral dissolution : — i. Negative morality. 2. Moral ataxia. 3. Moral 
 insanity. 4. Moral idiocy. 5. Moral depravity. 
 
 V. Heredity and Education in the Moral Sense. — Criticism of 
 Spencer, Darwin, Wundt, and Ribot — Moral power of education — Its 
 limits. 
 
 I. The Power of Habits^ giving rise to a Momentary 
 Impulse or to a Permanent Obsession. 
 
 We have seen,-in the preceding chapter, how educa- 
 tion and suggestion may modify the moral instinct 
 which has become hereditary in our race. We now 
 propose to ourselves a more fundamental and more 
 theoretical problem : we ask ourselves if education 
 
 1 Vide p. 57. (Tr.) 
 
THE POWER OF HABITS. 47 
 
 and suggestion, if ideas transformed into sentiments 
 may not, with the aid of heredity, produce the moral 
 sentiment itself. In a word, what is the share of 
 heredity? what is the share of ideas and education in 
 the genesis of morality? There is no study more apt 
 to give us a deep insight into the two essential 
 terms, in their union and in their antagonism, of the 
 question which forms the problem of this work. 
 
 Heredity and education alike create in us powers, 
 which tend to exercise themselves, and are in fact 
 exercised when opportunity occurs. What then 
 must be understood by the word power? It is an 
 inward starting-point of activity in the individual, < 
 which is no longer a pure and simple reaction upon a 
 shock initiated from without. To feel within our- 
 selves the power of action in this or that direction, is 
 to feel ourselves organically pre-adapted to a certain 
 environment, instead of having to adapt ourselves to <^ 
 it by a series of experiments requiring effort. To 
 speak of power, then, is to speak of a pre-established, 
 constitutional adaptation, an aptitude ready to be ' 
 awakened and translated into actions. Now every 
 adaptation reduces to a habit of the individual or 
 race. There is therefore no power coming into play 
 in the individual which may not be explained by the 
 property of habituating itself, possessed by all living - 
 matter and every species, and which is the very 
 foundation of educability. We know that habit, on 
 the other hand, reduces to a series of accumulated 
 actions and re-actions, stored up so to speak, and 
 facilitating in the future every action in the same 
 direction. Power is therefore nothing but a kind of 
 residuum left by past actions and re-actions ; it is "^ 
 action, living and capitalised. For us the possible 
 
4^ EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 V reduces in a great measure to a habit ; it is a deter- 
 mination of the future by a more or less analogous 
 past ; it is an inchoate adaptation. The possible is a 
 suppressed realisation, which under certain conditions 
 will tend to become actualised. 
 
 In its origin, even in the most rudimentary being, 
 every action is induced directly by a stimulus, or 
 external shock. The spring of action is placed out- 
 side the being, just as in those toys of which the arms 
 and legs are only capable of motion on the pulling of 
 a string. But as every .accomplished act has opened 
 a way in the organs for the accomplishment of a 
 similar act, action becomes spontaneously fertile, and 
 tends to reproduce itself: it is a starting-point of 
 fresh activity. This internal starting-point of activity, 
 
 • habit, begets acts which are no longer the simple 
 response to an immediate shock from without. The 
 primitive string pulling the arms of the puppet has 
 become the mechanism of a very complicated piece 
 of clock-work placed within it, and only needing to 
 be wound up ab extra from time to time, owing to the 
 stimulus of periodic necessities. Habit, having become 
 an instinct in the race by heredity, modifies the being 
 
 ^ so as to accommodate it not only to the hrvX^S. present^ 
 but to mere possibilities. This is a kind of uncon- 
 scious prevision based upon an analogy between past 
 and future. Hence proceeds a profound modification 
 in the most rudimentary psychological phenomena, 
 to which we " can trace the beginnings of experi- 
 ence : for the impact of a shock or sensation, are 
 substituted promptings from the very depths of the 
 
 ^ being, urging it to action, without, so to speak, pre- 
 cipitating it into action. The impetus of a sensation 
 is thus prepared for, mitigated, and often avoided by 
 
THE POWER OF HABITS. 49 
 
 the organisation of habits, by the much gentler 
 and much more intelligent inward springs of a less 
 suddenly imperative action. 
 
 Now it is important to distinguish between two 
 kinds of habit or adaptation to the environment : first, 
 the adaptation of a passive being to an environment 
 always the same — for instance, of a rock to the 
 surrounding air, or of a plant to a given climate ; 
 second, the adaptation of an active and moving being 
 to an ever-varying environment — for instance, that of 
 a man to the social environment — which is a real 
 education. The first adaptation is made once for all ; 
 it is passive, and may give rise m the being to new 
 properties^ not to new powers^ or new activities. The 
 second is always unfinished : it comprises a system of 
 reactions which is always incomplete, without, how- 
 ever, being entirely wanting ; it therefore urges to an 
 action which is only automatic in its most general 
 direction, but which, in detail, gives rise to a multitude 
 of spontaneous and even self-conscious acts. Thus 
 every habit of action, every active instinct, tends 
 to awaken the intellect and activity, instead of 
 entirely repressing them by automatism. Natural 
 history might furnish us with an infinite number of 
 examples. 
 
 There exists then, at the outset, a formless and 
 obscure nisus of life, no doubt already endowed with 
 a vague consciousness, and in every case with the 
 faculty of habituating itself, identical with what has 
 been called the organic memory. The first mani- 
 festation of this more or less unconscious memory of 
 the living molecule is reflex action. Reflex action con- 
 stitutes a fixed formula in the fluctuating changes of 
 life, an elementary but definitely-formed track in the 
 
 4 
 
50 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 education of the being, and in its complex adaptation 
 to its environment. 
 
 When the reflex action is impeded or checked, it 
 tends not merely to produce consciousness, but at the 
 same time (and I do not think this simultaneity has 
 received sufficient attention) pain and consciousness. 
 Consciousness, in its origin, could only be due to 
 the vague formulation of pain by a kind of inward 
 cry; it is the solidarity of all the living atoms in 
 presence of some danger, a kind of echo of peril 
 within the being itself Pain sets in motion all the 
 activity at the disposal of the organism to reppl the 
 causes of derangement. So, when the country is in 
 danger, it is clear that all its members will display an 
 activity directed towards a single purpose — an activity 
 much greater than if it were merely a question of a 
 national fete. There is more solidarity of the organ- 
 isation in pain than pleasure. Hence the utility of 
 consciousness for the preservation of the individual, 
 and hence, therefore, its increasing diffusion. The 
 total consciousness no doubt is in its origin only a 
 propagation and multiplication of different cellular 
 consciousnesses in a tremor of alarm: it is not the calm 
 self-inspection that psychologists have a tendency to 
 represent it as being. Little by little, after a series 
 of impeded reflex actions — i.e.^ of interrupted adapt- 
 ations — is formed the power of constantly re-adapting 
 oneself, of incessantly moulding oneself in conformity 
 with one's environment. It is this power of continuous 
 re-adaptation, this habit of constantly re-habituating 
 oneself, which is at once the basis of the intellect and of 
 the volition properly so called, and which consequently 
 is the main-spring of all education. Intellectual or 
 moral activity is, so to speak, a broad and infinitely 
 
THE POWER OF HABITS. 5 1 
 
 flexible adaptation, allowing a large number of re- 
 adaptations in detail, and of corrections of every kind. 
 In other words, intellectual and voluntary power 
 reduces to a habit of acting in a certain general 
 direction, — a habit continually transformed, following 
 the particular transformations of the changing environ- 
 ment in which it is exercised. 
 
 These facts being established, what may be deduced 
 concerning the genesis of morality, and what part in 
 it is played by education in all its forms ? Let us 
 first notice that even in the consciousness of the 
 habit; as such, there is already something moral 
 or, at any rate, something aesthetic. In fact, 
 beneath every moral or aesthetic concept is to be 
 found as an essential element, the idea of order, 
 arrangement, and symmetry. The aesthetic pleasure 
 caused in us by order is explained by the pleasure of 
 repetition (the repetition of certain movements of the 
 retina, etc.) ; the repetition of an act, in its turn, is 
 agreeable to us only from- the facility attained — a 
 facility springing from habit. Order, then, reduces 
 subjectively, in a great measure, to habit. Similarly, 
 the most elementary form of moral order is regularity, 
 and in connection with others, reciprocity — i,e,y the 
 repetition of the same acts under the same circum- 
 stances by one or several individuals. To be 
 perfectly accustomed to a thing — that is to say, 
 to perceive it without experiencing any resist- 
 ance in any of our senses, and in any of our 
 intellectual or motor activities — is almost tantamount 
 to feeling it to be beautiful or good. Every habit 
 begets a kind of personal rule : the act accomplished 
 without resistance in the past becomes a type for 
 action in future. Habit, in fact, is a force having a 
 
$2 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 certain pre-determined direction ; it is therefore the 
 centre of a system of actions and sensations, and it 
 is enough for it to acquire self-consciousness to 
 become an active and controUing sentiment ; it is a 
 sentiment-force. The idea-force, to which I will come 
 later, marks a still higher degree of evolution. Habit, 
 in a word, has a canonical and educative virtue ; it 
 is the primitive rule of life. The becoming is in a 
 great measure the habitual. Every habit tends to 
 become a force imposing itself on things and beings, 
 a formula of action and personal education, an 
 immanent law, lex insita. We may even ask if every 
 law, including the laws of nature, does not reduce to 
 a habit. 
 
 Ceremony, which is a higher development of habit, 
 has not merely a religious value ; it has also a moral 
 value. Now, ceremony, as I have said elsewhere, 
 arises from the need of reproducing the same act 
 under the same circumstances — a need which is the 
 basis of habit, and without which life would be im- 
 possible. Further, there is something sacred, to the 
 ' primitive man and the child alike, in every habit, 
 whatever it may be ; on the other hand, every 
 action, v/hatever it may be, tends to become a habit, 
 and hence to assume a venerable character — in a 
 measure to consecrate itself Ceremony, then, from 
 its origin, has to do with the very basis of life. The 
 > craving for ceremony is very early manifested in the 
 child ; not only does it imitate, and imitate itself, 
 repeat, and spontaneously repeat itself, but it exacts 
 scrupulous accuracy in these repetitions. The child 
 is naturally curious, but it does not like to urge 
 curiosity to the point where it might violently contra- 
 dict what it knows already, or thinks it knows. And 
 
THE POWER OF HABITS. S3 
 
 iri a measure it is right ; it only obeys a powerful 
 instinct of intellectual preservation : its intellect is 
 not flexible enough to be perpetually tying or untying 
 the knots or associations it establishes between its 
 ideas. It is therefore by a kind of instinct of intel- 
 lectual protection that primitive races attach so much 
 importance to their customs and ceremonies. In the 
 same way, all the acts of life, both the most insignifi- 
 cant and the most important, are classed in the child's ^^ 
 mind, rigorously defined according to a unique 
 formula, and modelled on the type of the first act 
 of the kind it has seen performed, without its clearly 
 distinguishing between the reason and the form of an - 
 act. This confusion of reason and form exists in a 
 no less striking degree among savages and primitive 
 races ; and it is upon this very confusion that the 
 sacred character of religious ceremonies rests.^ 
 
 Once incarnate in the being, how does this inner 
 law of habit manifest itself? I have shown in my 
 Esquisse d^une Morale that the power of habit may 
 give rise to a momentary impulse or to a permanent 
 obsession. 
 
 The power accumulated by habits, instincts, and 
 mechanical associations, in many cases no sooner 
 appears on the threshold of the consciousness than it 
 is translated into actions. In these cases there is a~ 
 sudden and momentary impulse. The impulse that 
 meets with no obstacle — even that of delay in time — 
 is only a kind of reflex action^ passing like a ray of 
 light across the consciousness to afterwards re-enter 
 the shade. No impulse, which is in this manner 
 isolated by the rapidity of its action, is capable of 
 eliciting the complex phenomena which constitute 
 ^ Vide Irreligion de VAvenir^ p. 92. 
 
54 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 moral life. It is a force which only momentarily 
 gives rise to a conscious idea, and leaves no deep trace 
 
 "on the mind. The moral and social instinct, in its 
 primitive and perfectly elementary form, is an expan- 
 sion which has almost the suddenness of a reflex. It 
 is a spontaneous impulse, a sudden unfolding of the 
 inner life towards another, rather than a self-conscious 
 respect for " the moral law," and a search for " utility " 
 or "pleasure." We must also notice that with the 
 actual development of the human intellect and sen- 
 sitiveness, it is impossible to discover the moral 
 impulse in this state, bordering as it does on reflex 
 
 "action, apart from the intervention of general, racial, 
 and indeed even metaphysical ideas. Hence, it is in 
 the case of animals especially that we must with 
 Darwin search for the moral and social impulse in its 
 naked form. We may recall the instance of the 
 baboon which, seeing a young monkey, six months 
 old, surrounded by dogs and in a desperate situation, 
 descends the mountain, throws itself into the pack in 
 a genuine fit of madness, snatches the young monkey, 
 and succeeds in carrying it off in triumph.^ 
 
 The impulsive force ot social tendencies is powerful 
 enough to precipitate into action those who are habit- 
 ually the most incapable, and whom the conscious 
 sentiment of duty would find irresolute and impotent. 
 M. Ribot quotes the case of a patient suffering from 
 aboulia, who found all his energies restored in trying 
 to save an injured woman. ^ At other times the 
 
 ^ Vide Esqiiisse d'une Morale. 
 
 2 I may add that this patient was finally cured by the excitement of 
 the events of June 1848 — again an emotion of a social or at least ego- 
 altruistic character, which shows the power of the social element in 
 the individual. 
 
THE POWER OF HABITS. 55 
 
 spontaneous sentiment of duty, instead of urging 
 to action, suspends it abruptly ; it may then develop 
 what Messrs. Maudsley and Ribot, with the physiolo- 
 gists, would call a power of arrest or "inhibition," 
 not less abrupt or violent than the power of impulse.^ 
 And instinct shows its power still better by suspend- 
 ing than by provoking action. In the second case 
 there is nothing to overcome but the force of inertia 
 proper to an organism in repose ; in the first case it 
 has to strive against the force accumulated in a certain 
 direction. Experiments on suggestion readily confirm 
 this. It is very difficult in the waking state to per- 
 suade a person that he cannot open his hand ; but if 
 he has been previously asked to hold tightly an object 
 in the closed hand, and if, profiting by this preliminary 
 tension of the muscles, we suggest to him that he will 
 be unable to open his hand, he will often find himself 
 really unable to do so. 
 
 M. Bernheim having met a subject who thought him- 
 self capable of resisting his orders, even in the hypnotic 
 state, told him to whirl his arms round, and asserted 
 that he would be unable to stop ; and in fact he could 
 not stop, and continued the gyratory motion of his 
 arms, like that of the sails of a windmill.^ 
 
 In my Esquisse (Tune Mo7^ale I quoted a case of 
 sudden arrest of action produced by the sentiment of 
 duty, blended with sympathy and gratitude. " A man, 
 with a resolute intention of drowning himself, throws 
 himself into the Seine, near the Pont d'Arcole. A 
 workman leaps into a boat to save him, but being an 
 unskilful oarsman, the boat is dashed against a pier 
 of the bridge, capsizes, and the would-be saviour 
 
 ^ Vide, Esquisse d^une Morale, 
 !* Moll, Hypnotism^ p. 6i. (Tr.) 
 
S6 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 disappears beneath the surface just when the would- 
 be suicide comes to the top again. The latter incon- 
 tinently abandons his intention of suicide, swims to his 
 rescuer, and lands him safe and sound on the bank." 
 A similar occurrence more recently took place between 
 two dogs — a Newfoundland and a mastiff — who fell 
 into the sea in the midst of a furious fight on the jetty 
 at Donaghadee. Immediately the instinct of rescue 
 was awakened in the Newfoundland ; quickly forget- 
 ting his anger, he brought his adversary to the bank. 
 But for this the latter, being a poor swimmer, would 
 have inevitably been drowned. 
 
 We must remember that certain instincts in animals 
 possess the same power of suspending an act begun. 
 The pointer^ for instance, seems, so to speak, nailed to 
 his place, as if by a mysterious command, just when 
 all his other instincts lead him to bound forward. 
 Romanes tells of a dog which had only stolen once in 
 its life : — " One day when very hungry he seized a 
 cutlet and carried it off under the sofa. I saw this, 
 but pretended not to have seen anything, and the 
 culprit remained under the sofa a few minutes, divided 
 between the longing to assuage his hunger and the 
 sentiment of duty ; finally the latter triumphed, and 
 the dog came and laid at my feet the cutlet he had 
 stolen. Having done this he returned to his hiding 
 place, whence no blandishments could induce him to 
 issue. In vain I gently patted his head ; my caresses 
 only made him hang down his head with an irresistibly 
 comic air of contrition. What gives peculiar value to 
 this instance is, that the dog had never been beaten, 
 so that the fear of corporal punishment cannot have 
 made him act in this way. I am therefore compelled 
 to see in these actions instances of a development of 
 
THE POWER OF HABITS. 57 
 
 the consciousness as elevated as the logic of sentiment 
 can give rise to without the logic of signs — i,e., in a 
 degree almost as high as we find in the lower savages, 
 little children, and a large number of idiots, or unedu- 
 cated deaf mutes." ^ 
 
 The social instinct, by the force of natural selection, 
 eventually permeates so thoroughly the whole being in 
 all its parts, that, if we cut an ant in two, the head and 
 upper half of the body, which can still walk, continue 
 to defend the ant-hill, and to carry off the females to a 
 place of safety. This is a degree of spontaneous im- 
 pulse which human morality has not yet reached. 
 For this, every fragment of the social self would have 
 to live and die for others, our life would have to be 
 blended, even in its deepest springs, with the social 
 life in its entirety. 
 
 The impulsive action of an hereditary or acquired 
 habit assumes a more and more remarkable character 
 when it takes the form, no longer of an impulse or 
 sudden restraint, but of an inward prompting or 
 persistent tension. This is obsession. Obsession is 
 the perception of the effort with which an impulse 
 enters into the field of consciousness, maintains itself 
 there by trying to subordinate to itself the other 
 tendencies it encounters in that field, and seeks to 
 prolong itself in action. 
 
 There are two chief starting-points of mental 
 obsession : habit (or instinct, which is an hereditary 
 habit) and suggestion (conscious in voluntary imita- 
 tion and obedience, unconscious in the phenomena of 
 hypnotism). Obsession — i.e.^ an impulse persisting 
 in the midst of internal obstacles — is an important 
 element which will enter at a later stage into the 
 ^ Vide the collection of instances in Animal Intelligence^ c. xvi. (Tr.) 
 
S8 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 very complex phenomena of obligation. The marked 
 distinction between them is due to the fact that 
 obsession may have nothing rational in it, may urge us 
 to acts repugnant at once to all our logic and all our 
 sentiments. Obsession may be perfectly irrational, as 
 in the case of the insane and maniacs. We should 
 notice that wherever it is produced it always endeavours 
 to become rational, to explain itself to itself, to insinu- 
 ate itself surreptitiously into the main current oi ideas 
 which is continually passing through the mind. This 
 is why mad people always have in reserve more or 
 less plausible explanations of their most extraordinary 
 acts, even of their irregular gestures, as in the case of 
 the madman who explained the nervous agitation of 
 his arms by asserting that he was weaving sunbeams 
 to make himself a garment of light. Cases of hypnotic 
 suggestion are pre-eminently able to furnish us with 
 the most striking instances of the fertility of the 
 intellect when an act in which reason has had no play 
 has to be justified on rational grounds.^ We know 
 the case of the somnambulist who had been told 
 during sleep to come to the magnetiser at a certain 
 hour on a certain day. On the appointed day she 
 arrives at his house in the midst of a dreadful thunder- 
 storm, and as she can recall nothing of the imperative 
 order she has unconsciously obeyed, she finds a whole 
 series of plausible reasons to explain her visit. We 
 may say that there is nothing so suggestive to the 
 intellect as an instinct which has not its origin in it 
 Manifesting itself in the form of a fixed idea, before 
 long it constitutes an intellectual centre, around which 
 all the ideas crystallise and group themselves in the 
 most unexpected relations. 
 
 ^ Moll, Hypnotism, p. 152. (Tr.) 
 
THE POWER OF HABITS. 59 
 
 A person she mortally hates is mentioned to Miss 
 X. when in the somnambulist state ; her anger is 
 aroused, and she says she will never forgive her. 
 After a few moments' exposure to magnetic influence, 
 her face expresses compassion ; the action of the 
 magnet, while modifying the functional activities of 
 the nervous system, has modified the course of con- 
 comitant emotions, and the new emotions are straight- 
 way formulated in this moral theory : " Poor wretch," 
 she cries, "she did me a bad turn because he loved 
 me too much. I cannot really hate her."^ 
 
 As Dr. Bernheim points out, susceptibility to sug- <• 
 gestion is nothing but an aptitude for the transfor- 
 mation of idea into action.^ Many experimenters 
 record the state of anguish into which the hypnotised 
 subjects fall when the time for acting out a sug- 
 gestion arrived. This anguish may be explained 
 by two causes. The first is the very search for the 
 object suggested ; they know they have something to 
 do, but what ? An effort has to be made to draw 
 from the depths of the unconscious the formula of 
 obligation they feel within them. The second cause 
 is that, even when the obligation is clearly formulated, 
 they are in the presence of an action not habitual to 
 them, or which is contrary to established ideas, which, ^ 
 in fact, presents something peculiar ; and suggestions 
 always have this character, since by their very oddity 
 the experimenter recognises his power. 
 
 From the preceding we may conclude that every 
 formula of activity which is obsessive in character, and 
 which consequently monopolises the field of con- 
 sciousness, tends to become, in this relation, a formula ^ 
 
 ^ Revue Philosophique, February 1887, Bianchi and Sommer, 
 ' What about suggested hallucinations, etc.? (Tr.) 
 
6o EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 of obligatory action ; all obsession strives to develop 
 into an obligation on its emergence into conscious- 
 ness ; the rude mechanism of the impulses tends to 
 organise itself in a mental and, up to a certain point, 
 a moral order. 
 
 II. The Power of the Cottsdousness and Idea- Forces^ 
 the Moral Agent. 
 
 The force of the idea simultaneously explains the 
 two terms of the moral problem : the volition and the 
 object of the will. The volition is essentially the 
 power of simultaneously representing to oneself, 
 before the action, all the contrary motives to action 
 or inaction, by dieting from this complexity of 
 motives not the state of indecision, but the perfectly 
 self-conscious resolve ; the impulsive force of motives 
 thus appears proportional to their rational character, 
 and thus the volition is the germ of morality 
 itself In the well-organised being is created, to use 
 a happy expression of M. Ribot, a series of corrective 
 states of consciousness, depressive in character, which 
 are indissolubly associated with states of con- 
 sciousness of which the consequences would be 
 harmful ; thus, for instance, the desire to touch, 
 awakened in the child by the brilliancy of the flame, 
 is habitually associated with the fear of being burnt — 
 a depressive state which eventually annihilates the 
 prompting of the desire. 
 
 The Buddhist or Christian monks used to say that 
 if a beautiful body excited in them an unhealthy 
 desire, the thought of that body as the corpse it 
 was soon to be was enough to cure them. This is 
 an example of a depressive state of consciousness 
 
THE POWER OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 6l 
 
 associated with an impulse. A being is capable of 
 education and morality, in proportion as it is capable 
 of volition, in proportion as there are operative within 
 it, in endlessly increasing complexity, those associa- 
 tions which bring into consciousness an almost 
 simultaneous survey of all the possible effects of an 
 act. If, with M. Ribot, volition is defined as the 
 reaction of the whole individual character in a given 
 case, we must conclude that an act is only really 
 voluntary if with the strongest tendency that pro- 
 duced it coexist weaker and duller tendencies which, 
 under other circumstances, might have produced a 
 contrary act. A complete volition — i.e.^ the total 
 evolution of internal energies — presupposes that to the 
 representation of the act itself is presently associated 
 the weakened representation of the contrary act. ^ 
 And then we reach this conclusion : There is no 
 completely voluntary act — or what comes to the 
 same thing, no completely conscious act — which is 
 not accompanied by the sense of victory of certain 
 internal tendencies over others, and, consequently, 
 of a possible struggle betwee^t these tendencies, and 
 therefore of a possible struggle against them. 
 
 Liberty pre-eminently consists in deliberation. 
 Choice is only free if it has been deliberate ; we must 
 look for the real principle of liberty behind the mere 
 act of decision in that period of examination which 
 precedes it, and in which the intellect is brought into 
 full play. Now deliberation, far from being incom- 
 patible with determinism, cannot be understood 
 without it ; for a deliberate action is one for which 
 one can fully account, and is therefore entirely 
 determinate. There is no liberty apart from 
 deliberation ; and, on the other hand, deliberation 
 
62 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 consists simply in the determining influence of the 
 best motive elicited by a rational process. To be free 
 is to have deliberated ; to have deliberated is to have 
 submitted to, to have been determined by, real or 
 apparent motives. It seems, then, that deliberation 
 is the point at which liberty and determinism are 
 fused. Why do we deliberate ? to be free. How do 
 we deliberate? Through a balancing of the motive 
 forces inherent in feelings^ and ideas which operate by 
 a necessary mechanism. But why do we wish to be 
 free ? I answer, because we have learned by experi- 
 ence that liberty is a thing practically advantageous 
 for us as for others. Liberty, like all accumulated 
 power, derives value from its possible consequences. 
 
 We must notice that, under certain conditions, 
 fatality, the grossest form of slavery, cannot fail to 
 assume the appearance of liberty. If a dog were held 
 in the leash by a master who wished to go exactly 
 where the dog wished, and as quickly as it wished, 
 the dog would fancy itself perfectly free. A fish in a 
 globe of water, and perpetually attracted to the centre 
 of the globe by a tit-bit, or for some other reason, 
 would not have the least idea it was confined by the 
 vessel. How, then, should we fail to believe ourselves 
 free, being as we are in a position infinitely superior 
 to that of the dog or fish ? No one, of course, holds 
 us in leash or in prison ; our slavery only consists in 
 doing exactly what seems good to us ; we only obey 
 our preference, — whatever pleases us most. Add to this 
 that no one can ever foresee with absolute certainty 
 
 ^ It seems difficult to find simple words completely expressing mobile 
 or motif. The mobiles are sentiments, passions^ etc., influencing the 
 volition — i.e.t are emotional. The jnotifs are ideas influencing the 
 volition — i.e. J are intellectual. A mobile is initiation of action by 
 feelitig. A motif is initiation of action by ideas or ends in vieiv. (Tr.) 
 
THE POWER OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 63 
 
 what we will prefer to-morrow, which is easily 
 explained by the perpetual variation of our motives. 
 Each of them, being a thought, is really a living 
 being, which is born, grows, and decays within a 
 few moments. All this is enacted within us. Hence 
 we believe our liberty absolute and indeterminate, 
 because of the infinite number of motives which 
 determine us. And we are satisfied within the limits 
 in which we are. When Christopher Columbus 
 landed in America, he thought he had discovered a 
 continent : it was only an island, but the natives had 
 never experienced a desire to explore it completely ; 
 they therefore thought it extended indefinitely. This 
 infinity of motives prevents all fixed equilibrium, 
 and forbids all prevision on the part of the external 
 observer. As far as we are concerned, to end this 
 struggle of motives, all we want is a mere desire ; nay, 
 further, the mere thought of this desire is enough. 
 An action conceived as possible is ipso facto of itself 
 sufficient to give us the power of realising it. We 
 can never, therefore, conceive of an action as impos- 
 sible, for the mere conception of that action makes it 
 possible ; hence we are necessarily free in our own 
 eyes. We may always wish for what appears to us 
 more desirable than anything else, precisely because 
 it appears to us as such ; and we shall therefore 
 never feel our chains. Thus is produced the delusion 
 of free will, — a lower degree of freedom. Certain 
 desires and passions, even when we willingly follow 
 them, show us only too clearly that it would be 
 difficult to act otherwise ; — e.g.^ love and hatred. We 
 abandon ourselves to these passions, and feel they are 
 our masters. Running down a rapid slope, and really 
 wishing to run down, we cannot say we do not wish 
 
64 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 to run down, although we feel ourselves impelled 
 forward and mastered by a stronger force. That is 
 how passion acts. That is why a more complete 
 liberty appears to be deliverance from violent and 
 coarse passions. Liberty of action is above liberty 
 of desire. Reason alone can suspend its own action 
 
 - in time, can alone ignore habit, — the acquired force. 
 That is why reason and liberty are identical. 
 
 If now we notice, with M. Ribot, that the dis- 
 tinctive characteristic of the voluntary act is that it is 
 not the simple transformation of a detached state of 
 consciousness, and that on the contrary it presupposes 
 the participation of the whole group of conscious or 
 sub-conscious states which constitute the individual at 
 a given movement, we shall conclude that the very 
 idea of such an act, of an act in which our whole 
 being participates, is the idea which will beset the 
 consciousness with most force, because it is blended, 
 so to speak, with the whole consciousness. The idea 
 
 > of a voluntary act is therefore by its very definition 
 the idea-force^ which possesses most practical power 
 in our consciousness. 
 
 Every idea being the representation of a possibility 
 of action or sensation (the sensation itself may be 
 resolved into an action), it follows that the group of 
 conscious or sub-conscious states that constitute the 
 ego is nothing but the shifting equilibrium of repre- 
 sentations of action^ to which corresponds an impulsive 
 force, roughly proportional to the force of the repre- 
 sentation itself. Our ego is but an approximation, a 
 kind of permanent suggestion. It does not exist, it 
 is in the process of making, it will never be complete. 
 We shall never succeed in reducing to complete unity, 
 
 ^ For ** Idea- Force," vide Preface. 
 
THE POWER OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 65 
 
 in subordinating to a thought or central volition, all 
 the systems of ideas and tendencies which are strug- 
 gling within us for existence. All life is a deforma- 
 tion, a disequilibration — seeking, it is true, a new 
 shape and new equilibrium. Those patients whose 
 personality is doubled or even trebled^ show us, in 
 an exaggerated form, the phenomenon constantly 
 going on within us — the coexistence of several 
 centres of attraction in our consciousness, of several 
 currents crossing the field of consciousness, each of 
 which currents, if not limited by another, would sub- 
 merge us and carry us away. Our ego is only a line 
 of division between the different currents of thought 
 and action which pass through us. In the depths of 
 each of us there are more selves than one, whose 
 shifting equilibrium constitutes what we imagine is 
 our real self ; which is, in fact, only our past 
 self; the figure traced by the mean resultant of 
 our antecedent actions and thoughts, the shadow we 
 cast behind us as we pass through life. This ego 
 is only ours in so far as our past determines our 
 future ; and there is nothing more variable than this 
 determination of the future of a being by its past. It 
 is true that our body serves us as a centre of reference; 
 it is the basis of our personality. But the body itself 
 is for us only a system of perceptions, and therefore 
 of sensations, which, from a deeper point of view, 
 reduce to a system of favoured or thwarted tendencies. 
 Our body is constituted by a co-ordination, in unstable 
 equilibrium, of every kind of appetite ; it is only the 
 rhythm according to which these appetites are balanced. 
 Without the law of habit and of economy of force, by 
 which a being is always tending to repeat itself, to 
 
 ^ Mercier, Sanity and Insanity (Walter Scott), pp. 367-369. 
 
 5 
 
66 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 project the image of itself into the coming time, to 
 reproduce its past in its future, our ego would be lost 
 in each of our movements — we should be constantly 
 ^ losing ourselves. Our ego is therefore an idea, 
 and an " idea-force '' which maintains our identity — 
 though that identity is incessantly threatening to 
 disappear into peculiar and present phenomena ; it 
 is a regular grouping of conscious or sub-conscious 
 possibilities. What we call a state of repose, is the 
 moment when these possibilities are in equilibrium. 
 Action is a disturbance of that equilibrium, and as 
 every such disturbance requires an effort, the possi- 
 bility which is victorious must first triumph over a 
 certain resistance before the machine is set in motion. 
 We feel this resistance, and that is why the beginning 
 of every voluntary action has something painful in it. 
 At the same time, every voluntary effort, as such, is a 
 germ of moral energy, an education, a beginning of 
 moral character in the subject, abstraction being made 
 from the object to which it is directed. 
 
 To properly realise the most elementary part of 
 moral energy, we must carry ourselves back to primi- 
 tive man, incapable of any voluntary process, of any 
 tension of the will which is not the mechanical ex- 
 pansion produced by a momentary need — incapable, 
 in fact, of any kind of intellectual attention. For 
 such a man the action not immediately demanded by 
 a need, requiring a certain share of reflection, calcula- 
 tion, or consecution of ideas, becomes after a fashion 
 meritorious. Every act which in its initial stage is 
 a thought or sentiment, instead of being a simple 
 answer to a brute sensation, everything which is 
 raised above a simple reflex action, ipso facto assumes 
 a moral character. The Turk, with his oriental 
 
THE POWER OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 67 
 
 inertia, in the eyes of the moralist will have some 
 merit when he repairs a house that is tumbling into 
 ruins, when he fills up the ruts in front of his door, or 
 when he hastens his leisurely gait to help another, — 
 even from some motive of self-interest. A fortiori^ 
 the primitive man will have displayed a rudimentary 
 moral energy in the construction of his first hut, or in 
 fashioning his first tools. When premeditated and 
 organised action begins — action willed in its successive 
 stages — some element of art, morality, and personal 
 education is already shown. This is because, when 
 the will pursues an end, immediately the sense of 
 effort of resistance to overcome arises, and because 
 the first act of morality was effort intentionally sus- 
 tained, — the active and painful realisation of any idea, 
 however naive and elementary it may have been. The 
 function — at once the deepest and simplest — of moral 
 life is to realise in this way an idea or sentiment by a 
 self-conscious effort. 
 
 If every self-conscious action requires a certain 
 effort or a certain tension of the will to disturb 
 internal equilibrium, and if it thereby presents a 
 moral character, it is no longer so when we act in 
 consequence of an immediate need, and still less so 
 when this need is of the most definite, pressing, and 
 present character — as, for instance, hunger and thirst. 
 The inner equilibrium is disturbed, to start with, by 
 suffering, by a discomfort to which action alone serves 
 as a remedy. At this stage, action is no longer the 
 result of an inward and self-conscious tension, but 
 rather the result of a spontaneous expansion ; the 
 action bursts into being of itself, just as we are sub- 
 ject to a burst of laughter or tears. Hence it follows 
 that we act without the sense of effort. On the other 
 
68 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 hand, the sense of the effort necessary to commence 
 an action increases in proportion to the ill-defined 
 and indistinct character of the need requiring the 
 action. This is why, in the early days of weaning, a 
 real effort and a first step in education are required in 
 order that the child may begin to take the nourish- 
 ment offered it. It experiences a need that is very 
 real, which is not yet associated in any definite 
 manner with this or that food, specified by sensations 
 of taste ; the need remains an indeterminate suffering, 
 " and the child is disposed to passively await the cessa- 
 tion of that suffering ; it cries and does not know it is 
 hungry, sometimes even it rebels against the effort of 
 mastication and deglutition. It is only by a series of 
 experiments, adaptations, and associations, by a more 
 
 > or less tardy education, that all physical suffering in 
 the living being, combining at once with the repre- 
 sentation of its remedy, becomes the immediate 
 spring of this or that determined action. All pain, 
 
 > therefore, tends to become only the translation into 
 sensible language of a possibility or necessity of 
 action ; hunger is the possibility and necessity of 
 eating ; thirst, the possibility and necessity of drink- 
 ing ; as soon as the animal has felt the need, it sets 
 to work to find the remedy. The disturbance of 
 equilibrium in the inward energy begins with the 
 sensation itself, and the sense of the need of action 
 suppresses the sense of the effort involved. 
 
 > Accordingly desire must not be confounded with duty. 
 
 > There are two kinds of desires — the desire of enjoy- 
 ment and the desire of action. The first results in the 
 clear representation of an external object, with refer- 
 ence to which the moral agent is in a state of passivity ; 
 the second results in the representation of a state of 
 
THE POWER OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 69 
 
 inward tension, of an action or group of actions 
 depending on the moral subject. Although, at 
 bottom, there is always partial passivity within us, 
 it increases when we are a prey to any desire ; it 
 decreases, on the other hand, when we feel ourselves 
 urged forward by the consciousness of a duty — 
 i.e., by an active idea of a higher order, which opens 
 for itself a way through the environment of internal 
 or external resistances. The very enjoyment of a 
 duty is aesthetically quite different from all other 
 enjoyments ; its serious character is its distinctive 
 mark to the impartial observer, and this character 
 may certainly place it, in the case of many people, 
 outside the reach of everyday life. This or that noble 
 piece of classical music, for example, will exert no 
 attraction on men whose musical taste is little 
 developed. Morality, it might be said, is the serious 
 music of existence ; a certain education is necessary 
 before an exclusive appreciation of its charms can be 
 reached, before the sublime rhythm of the morally 
 beautiful is preferred to the trivial dance airs we hear 
 everywhere around us on our way through life. 
 
 Every time an inward tendency is awakened and 
 revealed to itself by the presence of an external 
 object, it seems to lose in force of internal tension all 
 that it gains in force arising from external representa- 
 tion and solicitation. The moral good itself seems to 
 change its nature when we bring before our minds the 
 luxury of doing good : it then appears that we are 
 rather persuaded than obliged to do good. It is in the 
 effort and slowness with which the inward equilibrium 
 is disturbed that we really obtain consciousness of 
 obligation. 
 
 Between the desire of action and the desire of 
 
70 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 enjoyment is the same difference as between the ten- 
 ' dency urging the true artist to produce a work of his 
 own and the desire an amateur may experience to go 
 and hear the work of another. The desire of action 
 is one of the elements of duty; and, on the other hand, 
 duty generally excludes the desire of enjoyment. It 
 has been said that the moral will is the power of 
 acting along the line of greatest resistance. That is 
 true, provided we add that the power thus revealed is 
 greater than the said resistance.. In other words, the 
 moral subject is constituted by a will capable of 
 acting with effort to realise an ideal. Thus, in the 
 normal state the sense of obligation should be 
 proportional to the capacity a man possesses of 
 making an internal effort, or, in other words, of 
 being led by the force of an idea — for volition is 
 thought with a certain consecution of ideas. The 
 sense of obligation, on the contrary, diminishes in 
 direct ratio with the weakness of the will : feeble 
 characters, incapable of this tension and fatigue that 
 every resistance to the first impulse necessitates, are 
 therefore those who will feel the least remorse, or in 
 whom remorse will be least adapted to produce its 
 corrective and educative effects. To sum up — to feel 
 ourselves under an obligation, we must feel ourselves 
 capable of sustaining an inward struggle : it is the 
 consciousness of a force which is also a thought, 
 the consciousness of a logic working itself out, 
 the consciousness of an internal command. Every 
 idea which reaches the threshold of the conscious- 
 ness only penetrates it and maintains its position 
 by a kind of restraint exercised upon other ideas. 
 Thus consciousness itself is the result of a struggle : 
 as the physiologists have shown, it corresponds 
 
THE POWER OF CONSCIOUSNESS. 7I 
 
 to a movement which maintains and propagates 
 itself in spite of all obstacles. Every conscious- 
 ness IS a spontaneous choice, a natural selection, and 
 that is precisely why it will be the moral idea which 
 will some day suppress all others. From the action 
 which is accumulated by habit, and which becomes 
 reflex, springs fresh power of action ; from this power 
 spring simultaneously consciousness and morality, 
 the thought of power and of duty : every idea enfolds 
 the germ of a duty. Each thinking and willing being 
 has already within him, because he thinks and wills, 
 a primary element of morality which will be fixed and 
 organised by education and evolution : it constitutes 
 a moral subject. 
 
 It follows that the basis of education is to develop ^^c 
 the will, and ipso facto to form a subject capable of 
 morality. We are too much led to judge children's 
 actions objectively, to measure them by our rules, by 
 our precepts, and our own ideals. The child's ideal 
 cannot be and ought not to be so developed; we 
 must therefore pay special attention to the force of . 
 will displayed by the child, to its self-control, to its 
 power of internal resistance. This or that mark of 
 will, which thwarts us, puts us out, or wounds us, may 
 be in reality the mark of internal and subjective 
 progress. Energy must be stored up before it can be 
 discharged in the proper direction. The genesis of^^c 
 morality is pre-eminently the genesis of the will ; its 
 education ought to be the reinforcement of the will ; 
 the will develops its own activity as it apprehends its 
 own powers. 
 
f2 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 III. Power Begetting Duty. 
 
 Let us now proceed from the moral subject to the 
 object. In my opinion, it is the subject itself which 
 after a fashion creates its object for itself, in the sense 
 that the consciousness of a higher power produces of 
 itself the consciousness of a duty. To prove this, let 
 us look at the question, as I have done in my Esquisse 
 (Tune Morahy from the triple point of view of the will, 
 the intellect, and the sensibility. 
 
 1st. Duty is the consciousness of a certain internal 
 power, superior in character to all other powers. To 
 be inwardly aware that one is capable of doing some- 
 thing greater is ipso facto to have the dawning 
 consciousness that it is one's duty to do it Duty, 
 from the point of view of facts and apart from 
 metaphysical notions, is a superabundance of life 
 requiring exercise and development ; it has hitherto 
 been too often interpreted as the sense of a necessity 
 or restraint, I think I have shown in my Esquisse 
 (Tune Morale that it is pre-eminently the sense of a 
 power, " All force which is accumulating creates 
 pressure against the obstacles in its way ; all power, 
 considered by itself, produces a kind of obligation 
 proportional to it: power to act is duty to act. 
 Among inferior beings whose intellectual life is 
 checked and stifled there are few duties ; but it is 
 because there are few powers. Civilised man has 
 innumerable duties, because he has a wealth of 
 activity to expend in countless ways."^ And not 
 merely duty, but even the will is largely reducible to 
 the consciousness of a possible self If will is power, it 
 is because the will is referable to a belief that we have 
 
 ^ Vide Esquisse d^une Morale. 
 
POWER BEGETTING DUTY. 73 
 
 the power, and because belief is a beginning of action. 
 The will itself is thus an action at its initiation. 
 
 From this point of view, which has nothing of the 
 mystical about it, I have reduced moral obligation to 
 that great law of nature : Life can only be maintained 
 by development It has been objected that the fecun- 
 dity of our various internal powers may be as amply 
 satisfied in conflict as in harmony with others, in the 
 suppression as well as in the helping upward of other 
 personalities. But in the first place it is forgotten 
 that the others are not so easily suppressed : the will 
 which seeks to impose itself on others necessarily 
 meets with resistance. Even if it triumphs over that 
 resistance, it cannot do so single-handed ; it must fall 
 back upon the assistance of allies, and thus constitute 
 a social combination, and, in view of this friendly 
 combination, impose upon itself the very slavery 
 from which it wished to free itself with respect to 
 other men, its natural allies. Every struggle, there- 
 fore, always issues in an external limitation, and in 
 the second place in an internal alteration of the will. 
 The violent man stifles all the sympathetic and 
 intellectual side of his being — i.e., all in him that is, 
 from the evolution point of view, most complex and 
 elevated. Brutalising others, he more or less brutalises 
 himself. Violence, which thus seems to be a victorious 
 expansion of the inward power, ends by restricting it ; 
 to set before our will the abasement of others as an 
 end, is to set before it an insufficient aim, and to 
 impoverish our own being. In fact, by a final and 
 deeper disorganisation, the will proceeds to completely 
 and spontaneously disequilibrate itself by the use of 
 violence ; when, as in the case of despots, it is not 
 accustomed to meet with opposition from without. 
 
74 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 every impulse becomes irresistible in it; the most 
 contradictory tendencies then succeed one another; 
 complete ataxia ensues ; the despot becomes a child 
 again, he gives himself up to the most contradictory 
 caprices, and his objective omnipotence eventually 
 brings on what is really subjective impotence. 
 
 If this be so, internal fecundity and fertility ought 
 to be the first aim of moral education, of what the 
 Germans call culture. This is what makes education 
 so superior to instruction. Education creates living 
 forces ; instruction directs them. 
 
 2nd. Just as the power of activity involves a kind 
 of natural obligation or imperative impulse, so the 
 intellect has in itself a motive power. When we rise 
 to a sufficiently high level, we may find ends of action 
 which no longer operate merely as feelings, but which, 
 in themselves and by themselves, without the direct 
 intervention of the sensibility, are motive principles of 
 activity and life. The will as a whole is at bottom 
 nothing but inward power in operation, action in 
 embryo. The wish to do good, if sufficiently conscious 
 of its own force, need not therefore wait for grace from 
 without : it is its own grace ; in the nascent stage it 
 was already efficacious ; nature, by willing, creates. 
 
 Here again the important theory of idea-forces 
 may be applied. Every power felt within us has a 
 point of application ; I can do anything possible^ and 
 among possibilities those which appear to me most 
 rational and desirable are ideals^ idea- forces ;^ our 
 ideal is only the projection, the objectifying of our 
 inner power, the form it assumes for the self-conscious 
 intellect 
 
 ^ Vide A. Fouillee, Critique des Sysihnes de Morale Contemporaine 
 (second edition). 
 
POWER BEGETTING DUTY. 75 
 
 Among the most powerful idea-forces we first find 
 that of the normal human type^ an aesthetic and moral 
 idea, which is no more difficult to acquire than that 
 of the tree or animal for instance, and which, once 
 acquired, tends to actualise itself in us. Further, as 
 we live in a community, we conceive more or less 
 distinctly a normal social type. In fact, from the very 
 function of all society — as of every organism — is dis- 
 engaged the vague idea of what is normal, healthy, 
 and conformable to the general direction of social 
 changes. 
 
 Our temperament, through the countless oscillations 
 of evolution, tends however to always accommodate 
 itself more and more to the environment in which we 
 live, to ideas of sociability and morality. The thief, 
 mentioned by Maudsley, who took such pleasure in 
 stealing, even if he were worth millions, is a kind of 
 social monster, and of this he ought to be vaguely 
 conscious when comparing himself with almost any 
 other man. To be completely happy he would have 
 to meet with a community of monsters like himself, 
 and in their turn presenting to him his own image. 
 Although remorse has an entirely empirical origin, the 
 very nature of the mechanism producing it is rational; 
 it tends to favour normal — Le,^ social and, in a word, 
 moral beings. 
 
 The anti-social being is as much sundered from the 
 type of moral man as the hunchback from the type 
 of physical man ; hence arises the inevitable shame 
 we experience when we feel anything anti-social 
 within us ; hence also our desire to stamp out this 
 monstrosity. We see the importance of the idea of 
 normality in the idea of morality. There is something 
 offensive to thought and sensibility alike in being a 
 
76 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 monstrosity, in not feeling oneself in harmony with 
 all other beings, in not being able to contemplate 
 ourselves in them, or re-discover them in ourselves. 
 The idea of absolute responsibility being no longer 
 tenable in the present state of science, remorse reduces 
 to regret — regret at being inferior to one's own ideal, 
 at being abnormal, and more or less monstrous. 
 We cannot feel some inward imperfection without an 
 accompanying sense of shame — shame independent 
 of the sentiment of liberty, but already the germ of 
 remorse. To my own thought as judge, I answer in 
 a certain measure for all the bad in me, even when 
 I myself did not put it there, because my thought 
 judges me. Besides, monstrosity produces the sense 
 of absolute and definite solitude^ which is most painful 
 to an essentially social being, because solitude is a 
 moral sterility, an incurable impotence. 
 
 In these days remorse may sometimes torment the 
 hearts of men in proportion to their very elevation 
 and the scruples of a higher conscience ; but this is 
 the exception and not the rule. Exceptions are 
 explained by the fact that moral, like all other pro- 
 gress, tends to disturb the equilibrium between the 
 being and its environment ; all premature superiority 
 then becomes a cause of suffering ; but this provisional 
 disturbance of the primitive equilibrium will some day 
 issue in a more perfect equilibrium. The beings whose 
 lot it is to serve as transitions in nature suffer in order 
 that the total sufferings of the race may be diminished 
 — they are the scape-goats of the species. They 
 bring us nearer the still distant time — the ideal 
 limit, impossible of complete attainment — when the 
 sentiments of sociability, having become the very 
 basis of every being, would be powerful enough to 
 
POWER BEGETTING DUTY. 77 
 
 proportion the quality and quantity of its internal 
 pleasures to its morality, which again is identical 
 with its sociability. The individual consciousness 
 would then so exactly reproduce the social conscious- 
 ness that every action capable of deranging the latter 
 would derange the former in the same ratio ; every 
 shadow cast outside of us would be projected on us ; 
 the individual would feel the life of society as a whole 
 in his own heart. In a word, we think of the species^ 
 we think of the conditions under which life is possible 
 to the species^ we conceive the existence of a certain 
 normal type of man adapted to these conditions, we 
 even conceive of the life of the whole species as adapted 
 to the worlds and in fact the conditions under which 
 that adaptation is maintained. On the other hand, 
 our individual intellect being nothing but the human 
 race — and even the world — become conscious in us, it 
 is the race and the world which tend to act by us. In 
 the mirror of thought every beam radiated by things 
 is transformed into a movement. We know the 
 perfection to which the pendulum has been recently 
 brought, so that each of its tiny and almost imper- 
 ceptible oscillations are self-registered ; at each tick 
 a ray of light passes through it ; this ray is trans- 
 formed into a force and presses a spring ; the motion 
 of the pendulum, without losing any force by friction, 
 is then betrayed to the eyes by other movements, is 
 fixed by visible and permanent marks. This is a 
 symbol of what is going on in the living and thinking 
 being, in which the rays sent by the universe of 
 objects pass through the thought to register 
 themselves in acts in which each of the oscilla- 
 tions of individual life leaves behind it a reflex 
 of the universal ; life, tracing out in time and space 
 
78 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 its own internal history, traces out in time and 
 space the history of the world, thereby indirectly 
 visible. 
 
 Once conceived, the type of possible normal man 
 is actualised more or less in us. From the purely 
 mechanical point of view, we have seen that the 
 possible is but an elementary adaptation to an environ- 
 ment which permits us, as the mean resultant of a 
 certain number of modifications, to re-adapt ourselves 
 to other slightly varying environments. From the point 
 of view of the consciousness, the possible is the sense 
 of analogy in circumstances which calls for analogous 
 acts ; thus the intelligent man conceives his possible 
 line of conduct to others ex analogia with his own 
 conduct towards himself; he thinks he can assuage 
 another's hunger in the same way as his own, etc. 
 Altruism, in more than one point, is thus conceived 
 by the means of egoism itself. Every consciousness 
 of an analogy which satisfies the intellect opens a new 
 direction for activity, and activity tends to hasten 
 along the track. There is therefore no need to look 
 for a rule outside human nature conscious of itself 
 and its type. Consciousness and knowledge neces- 
 sarily have a directing and regulating function. To 
 understand is to measure. All that is really con- 
 scious tends to become normal Moral obligation is 
 the force inherent in the idea approaching most closely 
 to the universal, in the idea of the normal to us and to 
 all beings » Since, in fact, the conscious idea derives 
 most of its power from its very generality, the idea-force 
 would be par excellence that of the universal^ if the 
 generality were conceived in a concrete manner as 
 representing a totality of social conditions. This idea 
 we call the good, and in ultimate analysis it is the 
 
POWER BEGETTING DUTY. 79 
 
 highest object of morality. Hence it appears to us 
 obligatory. 
 
 Moral obligation has nothing resembling external 
 restraint, and in fact it is not a discharge of mechanical 
 force, it is not a violent impulse in this or that 
 direction. When I say : — " I am morally com- 
 pelled to this or that act," I mean something quite 
 different from : — " I cannot help doing it." It 
 would seem then that the sentiment of obligation 
 escapes from the domain of mental dynamics ; 
 it is, however, as we have just seen, the mental state 
 into which enter into play manifold springs of every 
 kind, in which the internal dynamics of idea-forces 
 are most intelligent and complex, although to the 
 spectator from without the voluntary act is precisely 
 the most contingent. And thus we come to under- 
 stand this phenomenon, so often a subject of wonder 
 to psychologists, that the ideas which appear to us 
 the most obligatory are precisely those least urgently 
 imposed upon us by the brute force of physical 
 necessities.^ 
 
 It follows from the preceding considerations that 
 education ought to make it its main duty to establish 
 a classification of ideas, a hierarchy giving the 
 first place to the most typical and universal ideas, 
 incessantly placing before the child's eyes as a pattern 
 
 ^ It will be observed that in this theory the intellect and activity no 
 longer appear to be separated by an abyss. In my Esquisse d*une 
 Morale I think I have shown that there is no necessity to invoke the 
 intervention of an extraneous pleasure, no need of a middle term or 
 bridge to pass from one to the other of the two things — thought, 
 action. They are at bottom identical. And what is called moral 
 obligation or constraint is, in the sphere of the intellect, the sense of 
 this radical identity ; obligation is an internal expansion, a need for 
 completing our ideas by making them pass into action. Morality is 
 the unity of the being. 
 
80 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 the ideal of the species and of normal man. We 
 know we must proportion the ideal to the child's age : 
 the individual, alike from the moral and physical 
 point of view, passes anew through the different 
 stages of evolution ; it cannot therefore attain in a 
 moment a degree of ripe civilisation. There is even a 
 danger, as Spencer says, in excess of moral precocity 
 as in excess of intellectual precocity. To demand 
 too much from a child is to expose oneself to the 
 danger of exhausting prematurely will and intellect 
 alike. "You cannot put an old head on young 
 shoulders?" Parents should be the more inclined 
 to indulgence for the faults of their children, since 
 those faults are usually attributable by heredity 
 to the parents themselves, if they are not attributable 
 to their mismanagement as educators. 
 
 3rd. So far we have considered the formation of 
 moral obligation as the result of individual evolution. 
 I think that in the genesis of moral obligation it is 
 best to first consider, as we have done from an 
 abstract point of view, the evolution of the conscious- 
 ness in the individual — i.e.^ in a restricted and more or 
 less complete society, for to repeat what I have said 
 before, in the eyes of modern science the individual 
 himself is a society. We thus avoid the exag- 
 geration into which so many have fallen : the 
 mistake of absorbing the individual consciousness 
 into the social ; of the exclusive reduction of moral 
 tendencies to social ; of believing that the combina- 
 tion of individuals has succeeded in bringing to light 
 ideas and sentiments which did not already exist in 
 embryo in each taken singly. Selection, according to 
 Darwin the dominant law of social combinations, is 
 in fact only the development and triumph of some 
 
POWER BEGETTING DUTY. 8l 
 
 internal capacity generated by individual evolution 
 itself; this capacity is prolonged in the species rather 
 than created by natural or sexual selection. The 
 English are therefore wrong in identifying morality 
 too absolutely with the social instinct ; in actual 
 practice no doubt it becomes fused with it, but 
 reality does not exhaust every possibility. Besides, 
 it is not always the fact that morality consists 
 in the pursuit of a directly social purpose ; progress 
 seems to multiply among us the search for ends 
 which only very indirectly satisfy our emotional 
 instincts ; we devote ourselves to science, or to a 
 hazardous undertaking, or to a work of art, for their 
 own sakes. Wherever there is such a devotion, such 
 an exclusive pursuit of any end, even if illusory, we 
 cannot deny that there is an expression of moral effort, 
 although this effort is exercised independently of the 
 social instincts of the race. Moral fecundity in a 
 measure overlaps human society. In fact, we must 
 not believe that the instinctive and hereditary senti- 
 ment fixed by natural selection creates and explains 
 in every detail the action of the individual. On the 
 contrary, it often happens that accumulated activity 
 has created a corresponding sentiment. The social 
 sentiment springs from the very nature of our organs, 
 which have been fashioned by our antecedent actions ; 
 power has preceded the sense of duty. We have not 
 hands because we are charitable; we are charitable 
 and we hold out our hands to others because we have 
 hands. But if it be true that the individual might 
 have spontaneously formed for himself an embryonic 
 moral obligation, it is equally true that moral obliga- 
 tion assumes an entirely new aspect when we consider 
 it from the social point of view, when we take into 
 
 6 
 
82 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 account the new views of existing physiology 
 on the subject of the constant action and reaction 
 of nervous systems on each other. We then under- 
 stand much better, not only the direction in which 
 the moral sense is urging us now, but also its 
 internal character, the secret of its energy ; finally, 
 and especially, we understand the increasing import- 
 ance it will assume in us as education comes into 
 play. 
 
 From this new point of view, moral obligation 
 appears to be a direct inter-action, conscious or un- 
 conscious, of nervous systems on each other, and 
 in general of life on life ; it is reducible to a 
 deep sense of solidarity. To feel ourselves morally 
 obliged is, in fact, in most cases, to feel ourselves 
 obliged to others, bound to others, having solidarity 
 with others. If with Darwin we exclusively attri- 
 bute the origin of moral obligation to certain deter- 
 minate social tendencies, we may recognise in man, 
 as in every organism, a social bast's^ identical on the 
 whole with the moral basis. In scientific analysis 
 the individual is resolved into more than one — 
 i.e.y into a society; the physiological individual is a 
 society of cellules, the psychological individual is a col- 
 lective consciousness. Moral obligation is therefore 
 resolved into a solidarity — either the intra-organic 
 solidarity of several cellules, or the extra-organic 
 solidarity of social individuals. Morality being 
 a harmony and an internal determinism, is in this 
 sense, within the limits of the individual, a social 
 phenomenon ; for every determination springing from 
 the depths of our being is the result of the reciprocal 
 action of the cellules and elementary consciousnesses 
 which constitute us. These principles granted, we 
 
POWER BEGETTING DUTY. 83 
 
 can understand how a certain duty is created by the 
 increasing fusion of the sensibilities, and by the more 
 and more social character of the higher pleasures 
 which every day take a larger share in human life, — 
 aesthetic pleasures, the pleasures of reasoning, under- 
 standing, learning, seeking, etc. These pleasures 
 make fewer demands on external conditions, and are 
 much more accessible to all than pleasures properly 
 egoistic. They are simultaneously deeper, more 
 intimate, and more inexpensive (without being 
 always completely so). They tend much less to 
 make a line of demarcation between individuals than 
 do inferior pleasures.^ The conscious solidarity of 
 the sensibilities tends therefore to establish a moral 
 solidarity between men. There are in the social 
 being normal sufferings and joys multiplied between 
 individuals by the phenomena of induction. These 
 are, so to speak, symphonic pleasures — choirs chanting 
 within us. 
 
 Whatever development the fusion of sensibilities 
 may thus acquire by sympathy and altruism, we may, 
 it is true, always maintain that there is no real 
 disinterestedness in it, but a transformation of the 
 primitive instinct of life, which is " the bias in one's 
 own favour." And to prove an action is disinterested, 
 it is not enough to show it has no interested motive. 
 Rochefoucauld has, by subtle but necessarily inexact 
 analyses, traced every action to interested motives ; 
 he has tried to explain the most spontaneous acts of 
 sensibility by intellectual calculation. It was a serious 
 mistake — due to the imperfection of physiological and 
 
 ^ This point I have developed in my Moru " Epicure et ses Rapports 
 avec les Doctrines Conte?nporaineSf and latei ..1 my Esquisse d'une 
 Morale, 
 
84 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 natural science in that age. Ideas ^ are not the sole 
 motives in an action ; feelings must be taken into 
 account. Now everything is changed if the new- 
 datum of feeling is introduced among causes pro- 
 ducing acts. The noblest devotion, in which no 
 interested motive can be found, may be referred to 
 the promptings of emotion ; and sympathy is straight- 
 way added to what Pascal calls ^^ pente vers sot" — 
 bias in one's own favour; according to the utili- 
 tarians, altruism completes but does not radically 
 transform egoism. Man is an intelligent and social 
 animal; this is the most accurate definition, into 
 which, say the utilitarians, it is useless to introduce 
 the element of disinterested liberty : nature is enough, 
 the fatality of instinct replaces free impulse. If some- 
 times we think ourselves freely disinterested, it is 
 because we only consider ourselves from an external 
 point of view ; where we no longer see the conscious 
 and refined calculation of Rochefoucauld, we think we 
 have discovered something extraordinary and supra- 
 sensible : liberty and disinterestedness ! But instead of 
 looking for an explanation above the intellect in an 
 incomprehensible free will, look beneath the intellect 
 and you will find it in sentiment. Letting ourselves 
 be carried away by sympathy, we calculate no longer, 
 but it is nature which has calculated for us : nature 
 urges us gently towards others, so gently that we 
 think we are walking alone, like a child who is held 
 by its mother when taking its first steps, and who, not 
 seeing the hand that holds it, but feeling the force 
 supporting it, already imagines that its legs move 
 nimbly of themselves. 
 
 This is how the partisans of fundamental egoism 
 
 ^ Vide note, p. 62. 
 
POWER BEGETTING DUTY. 8$ 
 
 reason. Into the discussion of this problem the 
 author of Systhnes de Morale Conternporaine has 
 introduced a new element of supreme importance — 
 the influence of the idea. Even though our nature 
 ignored true and free affection, should we ignore what 
 might be called the appearance of affection ? By no 
 means. Then again let us assume for the sake of 
 argument the hypothesis of radical egoism. There 
 exists in all beings a certain number of tendencies 
 which are neither more nor less inevitable than others, 
 but which have reference to other persons, and are 
 called altruistic. These tendencies will naturally exist 
 in each of us, and will tend to bring us closer together. 
 We shall then try to outrun them, urged from within 
 by an emotional prompting, but from without having 
 the appearance of being moved by a moral idea. Well, 
 is not that a great deal ? If I see one of my com- 
 panions stretch out his hand, and, to use Kant's 
 expression, make as if he loved me, I shall clearly 
 become the sport of an inevitable and beneficent 
 illusion ; I shall see him without any apparent 
 motive of interest drawn towards me by all the 
 outward signs of affection : I shall then conceive 
 his acts as free from every egoistic object, and 
 at the same time as having myself for their end : 
 this is the idea of love. I shall believe I am loved, 
 and even though the being who appears to love 
 me should act at bottom from inevitable instinct, 
 I shall imagine his action is free. How could it be 
 otherwise ? I do not, by hypothesis, know enough 
 physiology to distinguish in what seems to be the 
 entirely spontaneous and entirely pure affection 
 another being appears to have for me, what part is 
 played by the egoistic instincts inherent in his 
 
S6 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 organisation. When I cannot attribute to one of my 
 companions any interested motives, it will not occur 
 to me to seek in his organisation the hidden cause of 
 his action. Whether then I am deceived, or whether, 
 on the other hand, I see further than men of science 
 themselves, I shall believe I feel a heart and a volition 
 where there may only be wheels and a machine ; I 
 shall acquire the pure idea of love. Now, once 
 acquired, what will this idea not produce ? When I 
 see a fellow-man making friendly advances to me, 
 I revolt at the thought of remaining cold and in- 
 sensible to that affection, of remaining amiable 
 externally alone, amiable in what is not me, by 
 a kind of deceit. I wish to be worthy of being 
 loved ; I wish to deserve the affection shown me ; I 
 wish the appearance of some one loving me to become 
 a reality, and, as Socrates said, I wish to be what I 
 seem. But how can I become amiable if not by 
 loving? How can I respond to affection if not by 
 affection ? My personality therefore unfolds itself, 
 and tends to complete itself in a love more and more 
 approaching real love. 
 
 Thus the only two faculties philosophers have left 
 us — the intellect and sensibility — quite naturally give 
 rise to the idea of will guided by love. We have 
 reached this idea by what may seem a circuitous 
 route, but it is none the less natural for that ; for, in 
 a word, how does the child learn to love ? Is it not 
 because it sees it is loved ? Can we say that in the 
 child love is natural and innate, and not a work of 
 education ? The first movements of the child express 
 nothing but the e£-o, its sensations and passions, 
 cries of joy or pain ; and later, with the sentiment 
 of personality, cries of anger. But seeing around it 
 
POWER BEGETTING DUTY. 8/ 
 
 the tenderest love manifested by the most palpable 
 signs, feeling or believing itself to be loved, the child 
 at length wishes in some measure to deserve this 
 love, therefore it attempts to stammer a response to 
 so many reiterated appeals. Through seeing others 
 smile, the child smiles. How long it took to produce 
 this first manifestation of love ! We think it natural, 
 spontaneous ; who knows all the accumulated efforts, 
 the perseverance, the will, that the child had to exert 
 to bring into the light of day that wonderful smile, 
 already the faint sketch of disinterestedness ? Follow 
 with the eye the moral life of the child reflected 
 on its face : you will see the preliminary sketch 
 filled in with countless shades and colours ; but 
 how slowly! No painting of Raphael ever cost so 
 much effort. The child is naturally egoistic ; all for 
 it, as little as possible for others. Only by receiving 
 first does it end in giving; love, which seems its 
 nature, is on the contrary an impulse above its 
 nature, an enlargement of its personality. In this 
 sense we may say with the greatest truth, it seems 
 to me, that love is in the first place gratitude ; it is 
 the sentiment of response to benefits received, and 
 as it were an effort to deserve the boon conferred. 
 It seems as if the first act of gratitude were an act 
 of faith : I believe in the benefit ; I believe in the 
 good intention of the benefactor. From signs of 
 love in its parents the child infers the reality 
 of their love for it ; man, in the presence of his 
 fellows, draws the same deduction. Just as the idea 
 of liberty determines us to act as if we were free, 
 the idea of love invites us to act as if others loved 
 us, and as if we really loved them. This idea, by 
 which egoism is transformed into altruism, is like 
 
88 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 the force which, in a locomotive, reverses the steam 
 and makes the engine run in an opposite direction. 
 
 Education consists in favouring this expansion 
 towards others, instead of favouring forces of attrac- 
 tion to oneself It teaches how to find pleasure in 
 the pleasure of others, and so how to make a choice 
 among pleasures; to prefer the highest and most 
 impersonal enjoyments, and ipso facto those which 
 involve the longest duration, and are, as it were, 
 unending. 
 
 The preceding analyses issue in the conclusion 
 that to be moral is, in the first place, to feel the 
 force of our will, and the multiplicity of the powers 
 inherent in our being ; in the second place, to realise 
 the superiority of those possibilities having for their 
 object what is universal over those with merely 
 private objects. The revelation of duty is at the 
 same time the revelation of a power which is inherent 
 in us, and of a possibility extending to the largest 
 group of beings who come within the sphere of our 
 activity. Something infinite may be seen in and 
 through the limits imposed upon us by individual 
 obligation ; and this infinity has nothing mystical about 
 it In duty we feel and experience, as Spinoza says, that 
 our personality is always capable of further develop- 
 ment, that we are infinite to ourselves, that our surest 
 object of activity is what is universal. The sense of 
 obligation is not attached to an isolated tendency 
 in proportion to its intensity alone, but in proportion 
 to its "generality, to its expansive force and associa- 
 tive power. That is why the obligatory character of 
 the tendencies essential to human nature increase in 
 proportion as they are separated from the simple 
 necessity inherent in the coarser functions of the body. 
 
POWER BEGETTING DUTY. 89 
 
 To sum up, we have marked out the three following 
 stages in the development of the moral instinct : — 
 
 1. Mechanical impulsion, only momentarily appear- 
 ing in the consciousness to be there translated into 
 blind propensities and unreasoned sentiments. 
 
 2. An impulse, checked but not destroyed, tending 
 ipso facto to invade the consciousness, and to be there 
 incessantly translated into a sentiment, and to produce 
 a permanent obsession. 
 
 3. An idea-force. The moral sense grouping around 
 it an increasing number of sentiments and ideas, 
 becomes not only a centre of emotion, but an object 
 of self-conscious reflection. Then obligation springs 
 into being ; it is a kind of reasoned obsession — an 
 obsession strengthened and not dissolved by reflec- 
 tion. To gain consciousness of moral duties is to 
 gain consciousness of inner and higher powers which 
 are developing in us and urging us to action ; of ideas 
 tending by their own force to realise themselves; of 
 sentiments which, by their very evolution, tend to 
 socialise themselves, to impregnate themselves with 
 all the sensibility present in humanity and in the 
 universe. 
 
 In a word, moral obligation is twofold conscious- 
 ness: 1st, of the power and of the fecundity of higher 
 idea-forces, unified by their common object — the 
 universal ; 2nd, of the resistance of contrary 
 and egoistic propensities. The tendency of life to 
 the maximum of intensity and expansion is the 
 elementary volition ; the phenomena of irresistible 
 impulse, of simple and permanent obsession, and, 
 finally, of moral obligation, are the result of the 
 conflicts or the harmony of that elementary volition 
 with all the other propensities of the human mind. 
 
go EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 The reconciliation of these conflicts is nothing but 
 the search for and recognition of the normal pro- 
 pensity which includes in us most auxiliary propen- 
 sities, which has been associated with the greatest 
 number of our other permanent tendencies. In other 
 words, it is the search for that propensity which is 
 at once the most complex and the most persistent 
 Now these are the characteristics of the tendency to 
 the universal. Moral action is therefore like the sound 
 awakening in us most harmonics, vibrations at once 
 the richest and the most permanent. 
 
 The consciousness of the impulsive force which 
 belongs to the higher motives only reaches its full 
 strength, we must clearly understand, when once it 
 has been disobeyed. The moral instincts, in fact, 
 reappear after the action all the stronger for the very 
 resistance they have momentarily experienced. Thus 
 is produced the sentiment of remorse. This senti- 
 ment does not imply the notion of absolute liberty ; 
 it presupposes the consciousness of the determinism 
 which links our present to our past. If we had a 
 keen enough sense of absolute liberty, if we thought 
 we could completely renew ourselves by a single 
 act of will, if we had not a vague fear that, in our 
 being, each of our resolutions is implicit in the rest, 
 and that the one issues from the other, the word 
 "peccavi" would not have so profoundly sorrowful 
 a character, for it would rather imply a past 
 imperfection, but it would not imply an actual 
 or future imperfection. Responsibility is not merely 
 causality, but also solidarity ; I must feel myself 
 linked with something bad or repugnant, as if a 
 blamable act were a part of me, before I experience 
 that regret and shame which are the beginning of 
 
POWER BEGETTING DUTY. 9I 
 
 remorse. An act accomplished by me with the best 
 intentions in the world, but of which the issue has 
 been unfortunate in spite of every possible prevision, 
 will still leave me a prey to a kind of internal torture, 
 a regret for intellectual imperfection, not without 
 analogy to regret for moral imperfection. A father 
 is as pleased at his son^s good action as if he had 
 done it himself, even when he has had nothing to 
 do with the boy's education ; if, on the other hand, 
 the lad behaves badly, the father will suffer and 
 experience a remorse often keener than that of the 
 culprit himself. Further, an act committed by a 
 stranger, which we have witnessed without being 
 able to prevent it, produces in us, if we have a well- 
 developed and very delicate morality, an internal 
 laceration, a sorrow analogous to remorse, and we 
 feel as if the consequences of the act must partly 
 fall upon ourselves. After all, there is some part of 
 us in other men, and it is not without good reason 
 that we feel ourselves degraded in our own eyes by 
 whatever degrades humanity. In a word, responsi- 
 bility seems far from being, as Kant thought, outside 
 time and space, in the sphere of pure liberty and 
 the pure noumenon ; on the contrary, it seems to be 
 in both time and space, linked with the thousand 
 associations of ideas which constitute the phenomenal 
 ego. It is for the rriost part explained by the 
 solidarity, the contiguity and continuity of beings. 
 Accordingly, responsibility may pass from one being 
 to another. We may have, so to speak, remorse 
 for others; we may also rejoice in others ; it is a kind 
 of sympathy or antipathy sometimes exercised by 
 ourselves to ourselves, sometimes by ourselves to 
 others. If the sense of responsibility extends 
 
92 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 especially from the past of the individual to his 
 present and future, it is perhaps because we all 
 feel, sometimes without being able to account 
 for it to ourselves, the deep determinism which 
 connects every moment of our individual life; we 
 feel that all within us is linked together : the past 
 is, as it were, chained to us. Moral wounds, there- 
 fore, like certain cicatrices, are ever painful, because 
 we are always changing, without, however, being 
 able to renew or forget ourselves, and because an 
 ever-increasing contrast is drawn between what we 
 are and what we conceive ourselves to be. 
 
 IV. Possible Dissolution of Morality, 
 
 After the genesis of morality, it is appropriate to 
 say a few words on its possible dissolution in the 
 individual and in society, and also on its more or 
 less diseased stages and arrested development. It is 
 important to the educator to be able to recognise 
 them, and to know how to determine the share taken 
 here again by heredity, and the influence of the 
 internal or external environment respectively. As 
 in the case of physical life, moral life is susceptible of 
 disease or dissolution, and in this dissolution or 
 arrested development of morality there are different 
 degrees. 
 
 1st. Morality purely negative^ produced by the 
 mutual nullification of tendencies, altruistic or 
 egoistic, aesthetic or brutal, etc. This neutral moral- 
 ity is not due to a really solid organisation of the 
 moral instincts formulated into a rational system of 
 idea-forces, and further, it is necessarily unstable ; it is 
 
POSSIBLE DISSOLUTION OF MORALITY. 93 
 
 the transitory equilibrium of opposing tendencies, the 
 morality of many people, whose impulses are not 
 sufficiently strong in one direction or the other to be 
 able to carry them very far from the normal line. 
 
 2nd. Moral arovta, or the reign of caprices. This is 
 an exaggeration of the former state, with the difference 
 that the oscillations towards what is bad, or some- 
 times towards what is good, have more amplitude, 
 because the propensities are stronger. This state is 
 peculiar to the impulsive temperament when its 
 orientation is not referred to a centre of idea-forces 
 of adequate attractive power. The impulsive tempera- 
 ment produces a large number of criminals, who are 
 not, however, necessarily the most dangerous ; it has 
 even, under some circumstances, produced heroes. 
 Among certain individuals moral tendencies exist, 
 but they are not always sufficiently present, and may 
 at any moment give place to opposite tendencies. 
 In these individuals the consciousness is unilateral, 
 powerless to present to itself two opposite directions 
 of action, powerless to excite in itself those antagon- 
 istic states whose presence is a characteristic of the 
 more highly developed consciousness. In this case 
 the lively sense of obligation disappears at the 
 moment of the act, but is not long before it re- 
 appears when once the act is accomplished, and the 
 tendency abolished which produced the act. Thus in 
 the same individual we may see states of absolute 
 immorality succeed each other, to be followed a few 
 hours later by very keen, very genuine, but always 
 fruitless remorse. This is because such an individual, 
 gifted with an impulsive temperament, is, at the 
 moment of the evil impulse, quite incapable of elicit- 
 ing the contrary impulse with sufficient strength to 
 
94 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 partially paralyse the anterior impulse. The anta- 
 gonistic states of consciousness are realised in him 
 successively, instead of simultaneously; he is not a 
 monster, but a man impotent from the moral point of 
 view ; his will has undergone an alteration analogous 
 to that produced in patients afflicted with " aboulia." 
 The latter are powerless to pass from the conception 
 of an act to its consummation ; they wish to go out 
 for a walk, but they are unable to do so ; desire has 
 not in them the determining force necessary to action. 
 In individuals afflicted in some degree with moral 
 aboulia, it is not the power of performing the act that 
 is wanting, but the power of representing to them- 
 selves simultaneously and completely the ends or the 
 feelings which determine action. In the internal 
 balance a certain number of weights are always for- 
 gotten, and they do not reappear until the scale is 
 already turned. 
 
 3rd. Moral madness — i,e.^ the intervention of 
 abnormal impulses (as, for example, those impelling 
 children to destroy for the sake of destroying, to 
 behave badly for the sake of doing so, to immodest 
 acts, to eat their own excrement, etc.). These more 
 or less irresistible abnormal impulses may coexist 
 with the normal impulses, and with remorse for the 
 act committed. A dipsomaniac is not a drunkard, 
 nor is a kleptomaniac a thief ; a pyromaniac is not an 
 incendiary, nor is a man with homicidal mania a 
 genuine assassin ; the former protest all the time 
 against the actions, and sometimes feel horror at 
 them ; their moral sense is not altered, it is merely 
 practically impotent. 
 
 4th. Moral idiocy — that is to say, the total or partial 
 absence of impulses, altruistic, intellectual, aesthetic, 
 
POSSIBLE DISSOLUTION OF MORALITY. pS 
 
 etc. Moral idiocy is never met with in the complete 
 state; we constantly find it, however, in the partial 
 state : how many children and men, on certain 
 points of conduct, remain invincibly dull ! In others, 
 altruism is entirely wanting, and that at the outset, 
 without their having to undergo a preliminary train- 
 ing, as in the case of professional criminals. Moral 
 tendencies may be almost completely wanting in an 
 individual ; for instance, Maudsley mentions a case of 
 a minister poisoning his wife with the utmost non- 
 chalance, and without experiencing the least inward 
 repugnance to the act. In these extreme cases both 
 the actual sentiment of obligation during the act and 
 moral remorse after it are wanting. 
 
 5th. Moral depravity, produced by normal impulses 
 of abnormal intensity (anger, vengeance, etc.), which 
 become grouped, co-ordinated, and reasoned, and 
 which counterbalance — and sometimes substitute 
 themselves for — the moral sense. Then is produced 
 not a primary but a secondary moral idiocy; it marks 
 the last stage of the moral dissolution, because it 
 corresponds to an evolution of sentiment-forces and 
 idea-forces in a direction contrary to the normal ; it is 
 really an organisation of immorality. Dostoieffsky 
 says, speaking of criminals he observed in Siberia : — 
 " Not the least sign of shame or repentance. . . . For 
 several years I never noticed the least sign of repent- 
 ance, nor the least uneasiness for a crime com- 
 mitted. . . . Certainly vanity, bad example, boasting, 
 and false shame were there in plenty. ... It seems to 
 me that in so many years I ought to have been able 
 to seize some indication, however fugitive, of remorse 
 or moral suffering. I noticed positively nothing of 
 the kind." M. Garofalo adds : — ** Their moral 
 
g6 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 insensibility is such, that at the assizes assassins 
 who have confessed do not recoil before the most 
 harrowing descriptions of their crimes ; they exhibit 
 a complete indifference to the shame with which their 
 families are overwhelmed, and to the grief of their 
 parents."^ 
 
 Thus the moral instinct, instead of being a funda- 
 mentally immutable faculty as represented to us by 
 certain schools, is a complex product of evolution, 
 ipso facto subject to dissolution, to decadence, and to 
 perfectibility alike. The educator should have before 
 his mind this character of the moral sense, at once so 
 elevated and up to a certain point so unstable. Not 
 only individuals, but whole races are moralised or 
 demoralised. And as morality is a condition of their 
 progress — nay, of existence — they rise or fall in life, 
 they are victorious or vanquished in the struggle 
 for existence, according as they have enriched or 
 impoverished their treasure of hereditary morality. 
 
 Hence the morality of the race, together with its 
 health and vigour, must be the principal object of 
 education. All else is only secondary. Intellectual 
 qualities, for example, and especially knowledge, 
 learning, and information, are much less important 
 to a race than its moral and physical vigour. Thus 
 the educator never ought to invert the hierarchy of 
 qualities necessary to the race ; he must never forget 
 that the strength and vitality of creeds is due to their 
 moral effect upon nations ; and that the more their 
 influence declines, the more necessary it becomes to 
 replace it by all moral influences. 
 
 ^ Revue Philosophique., March 1887, p. 243. — On pp. 126-132 of 
 Maudsley's Mind and Body will be found much interesting matter on 
 this point. — Also see Ellis, The Criminal^ pp. 124-133. (Tr.) 
 
THE ROLE OF EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 97 
 
 V. The Role of Education and Heredity in the 
 Moral Sense, 
 
 The moral sense is, as I have pointed out, a higher 
 product of education, in the widest significance of 
 this word, which embraces the whole action of the 
 physical and social environment. I do not wish to 
 imply that morality is artificial ; but merely that it is 
 a second nature added to a primitively animal nature 
 by the action and reaction of our faculties and 
 environment. Man, as we have seen, has made his 
 own moral law by the higher powers he has little 
 by little acquired in the process of evolution, by 
 an education partly spontaneous, partly enforced, 
 sometimes individual, sometimes collective. It is 
 obvious that heredity also has its rdle in the genesis 
 of the moral instinct. Let us then proceed to 
 determine the respective spheres of these two 
 influences. 
 
 According to Wundt, it is by no means certain that 
 even the intuition of space is innate ; in all cases 
 the simple perceptions of the senses are not so, in 
 spite of their constant repetition in past ages. A 
 man born blind has not a connate perception of light, 
 nor has a man born deaf a connate perception of 
 sound ; we cannot therefore speak of " innate moral < 
 intuitions," which would presuppose a multitude of 
 very complex representations, relative to the agent 
 himself and his fellows, and referring to his relation 
 with the external world.^ Doubtless ; but we do not 
 maintain or admit the existence of perfectly preformed 
 moral intuitions, and Spencer has certainly gone too. 
 
 1 Vide Wundt's Ethik, p. 345. 
 
98 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 , far in that direction. A tendency is not an intuition, 
 and it is certain that there are hereditary tendencies, 
 some moral and others immoral. We all know this, 
 and Darwin has shown that among certain wild animals 
 fear has become hereditary. For instance, when the 
 Falkland Islands were first visited by man, the large 
 dog-wolf (cams antarcticus) came up fearlessly to 
 Byron's sailors. Even more recently, a man with 
 a piece of meat in one hand and a knife in the other 
 could easily cut the throats of these creatures in the 
 night. In an island on the Sea of Aral, the antelopes, 
 generally so vigilant and timid, instead of taking to 
 flight, looked at man as a kind of curiosity. Originally, 
 on the coasts of the island of Maurice the sea-cow had no 
 fear of man ;^ and the same was the case with the phoca 
 and walrus in several parts of the globe. The birds of 
 certain islands have acquired but slowly (and heredi- 
 tarily) a salutary terror at the sight of man. In the 
 Galapagos Archipelago, Darwin tells us he could push 
 a hawk off a branch with the barrel of his gun, and he 
 saw birds settle on a pitcher of water which he held 
 out for them to drink from. There is in this, if not 
 an intuition, at least the association of reflex move- 
 ments, and almost of reflex sentiments with a repre- 
 sentation — that of man. Why then should not the 
 representation of man, by hereditary tendency, excite 
 in man himself a peculiar pleasure, and an inclination 
 no longer of flight, but to approach, speak, be helped, 
 to put others in his place ? When a child falls under 
 the wheels of a carriage, we precipitate ourselves to 
 
 ^ The Lamantin, or sea-cow {Rhytina Stelleri). Vide Weismann's 
 Essays on Heredity, edited by E. B. Poulton, M. A. (Clarendon Press, 
 18S9), note on p. 92, where serious doubts are cast upon the accuracy 
 of these statements. (Tr.) 
 
THE RO'LE OF EDUCATION AND riEkli:DlTY. ' '99 
 
 its rescue by an almost instinctive movement, just 
 as we should start aside from a precipice. The 
 image of others is thus substituted for the image of 
 ourselves. In the scales of the inner balance, /, thou^ 
 are constantly interchanged. This delicate mechan- 
 ism is partly produced by heredity. Man is thus 
 domesticated, made gentler, and more civilised ; now 
 he is partially savage, partially civilised or civilisable. 
 The result of education through the ages is thus fixed 
 in heredity itself, and this is one of the proofs of the 
 power possessed by education, if not always for the 
 present, at least for the future. 
 
 We are also familiar with cases of reversion 
 and atavism. The warlike and nomadic instincts 
 characterising savage life persist in certain civilised 
 men ; it is difficult for certain natures to adapt them- 
 selves to the complex environment resulting from the 
 host of opinions and habits we call civilisation. We 
 may see from this, says M. Ribot, that one funda- 
 mental element in primitive savage life is preserved 
 and reproduced by heredity. Thus the taste for war 
 is one of the most generally prevalent sentiments 
 among savages ; with them, to live is to fight. " This 
 instinct, common to all primitive races, has not been 
 without its use in the progress of humanity, if, as 
 we may believe, it has assured the triumph of the 
 stronger and more intellectual races over those less 
 generously endowed. But these warlike instincts, 
 preserved and accumulated by heredity, have become 
 the cause of destruction, carnage, and ruin. After 
 having served to create social life, they are no longer 
 of any use but to destroy it ; after having made 
 certain the triumph of civilisation, they then only 
 work for its destruction. Even when these instincts 
 
100' EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 are not bringing two nations to blows, they are 
 manifested in ordinary life, in certain individuals, by 
 a quarrelsome and combative humour, which often 
 leads to vengeance, the duel, and murder."^ The 
 same is the case with the spirit of adventure : savage 
 races possess it in so marked a degree that they 
 plunge into the unknown with the carelessness of 
 children. This spirit of enterprise, and want of fore- 
 sight, although at first useful enough in opening up 
 new worlds to commerce, travels, science, and art, has 
 become in certain individuals a source of futile or 
 ruinous excitement, the only excitement permitted 
 by their environment, "such as the passion for play, 
 stock-jobbing, and intrigue, or the egoistic and turbu- 
 lent ambition of conquerors, sacrificing whole nations 
 to their caprices." ^ We sometimes see reappear in 
 remote descendants the old instincts of the race, 
 lulled or latent for a great many generations, and 
 manifested as an inexplicable reversion to the 
 ancestral moral type. The higher classes of society, 
 who are more in evidence, offer us striking examples ; 
 as if the leisure and independence secured to them by 
 wealth, depriving them of the influence of the local 
 environment, and of the present conditions of life of 
 their race, set at liberty "psychic forces" restrained 
 in their contemporaries. "Thus," says Madame 
 Royer, " we sometimes see the instinct of theft not 
 only in the children of our cultured races, where 
 education as a rule corrects it at an early period, but 
 we sometimes see it persist in adults, and by its 
 irresistible power draw into crimes, barely excusable 
 from their obviously inevitable character, the women 
 of our old and noble houses, who are thus the 
 
 1 Ribot, LHirMitl 2 /^^-^ 
 
THE ROLE OF EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. lOI 
 
 melancholy heiresses of the old instincts of our 
 barbarian conquerors."^ 
 
 We know how air, climate, the configuration of 
 the soil, mode of life, the nature of food and drink, 
 fashion the human organism by their incessant 
 action; how these latent and dull sensations which 
 do not reach so far as the consciousness, but 
 which penetrate incessantly into our being, form 
 
 ^ What has always distinguished the savages of the Philippines from 
 the other Polynesian races is their indomitable passion for liberty. In 
 a massacre on the island of Luzon, made by native soldiers under the 
 order of a Spanish officer, a little black, of about three years old, was 
 seized by the troops and brought to Manilla. An American obtained 
 permission from the government to adopt him, and he was baptised 
 under the name of Pedrito. As soon as he was old enough, efforts 
 were made to give him all the instruction that could be obtained in 
 that remote land. The old residents on the island, knowing the 
 character of the Negritos, laughed in their sleeves at the attempts made 
 to civilise the lad, and predicted that sooner or later the youth would 
 return to his native mountains. Thereupon his adopted father 
 announced that he would take Pedrito to Europe. He took him to 
 Paris and London, and only returned after two years of travel. On 
 his return, Pedrito spoke Spanish, French, and English, with all the 
 facility with which the black races are gifted; he wore thin patent 
 leather boots, and "everybody in Manilla still remembers the grave 
 manner, worthy of any gentleman, with which he received the first 
 advances of those who had not been introduced to him." Two years 
 had scarcely elapsed after his return from Europe, when he disappeared 
 from the house of his patron. Those who had laughed now had their 
 hour of triumph. It would probably have never been known what had 
 become of the adopted child of the philanthropic Yankee, if a European 
 had not come across him in a remarkable way. A Prussian naturalist, 
 a relative of the celebrated Humboldt, resolved to make the ascent of 
 Mount Mariveles, a mountain not far from Manilla. He had almost 
 reached the summit of the peak when he suddenly saw before him 
 a swarm of little blacks. The Prussian prepared to sketch a few faces, 
 when one of the savages came forward and smiled, and asked him in 
 English if he knew an American in Manilla of the name of Graham. 
 It was our Pedrito. He told his whole story, and when he had ended, 
 the naturalist in vain endeavoured to persuade him to return with him 
 to Manilla. — ^Vide Revue des Detix-MondeSy June isth, 1869. 
 
102 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 in the long run "that habitual mode of the con- 
 stitution we call the temperament." The influence 
 of education is, according to M. Ribot, analogous to 
 this ; it consists in a moral environment, and it issues 
 in the creation of a habit M. Ribot remarks that even 
 this moral environment is as complex, heterogeneous, 
 and variable as any physical environment. " For 
 education," he says, " in its accurate and complete 
 sense, does not merely consist in the lessons of our 
 parents and masters ; manners, religious beliefs, 
 letters, conversations heard or overheard, are so many 
 mute influences acting on the mind just as latent per- 
 ceptions act on the body, and contributing to our edu- 
 cation — i.e., contributing to make us contract habits." 
 In spite of this, M. Ribot tries to restrict the influence 
 of education, and to vindicate anew against it the 
 claims of innate tendencies : — " For," says he, " the 
 cause of the innate tendency is in ourselves." He 
 adds : " Whether certain psychic qualities spring from 
 spontaneous variation or from hereditary transmis- 
 sion, is a matter for our present purpose of small 
 importance ; what we must be shown is, that they 
 ^are pre-existent to education, which sometimes trans- 
 forms but never creates them." ' 
 Why, we may ask M. Ribot, might not education 
 create certain psychic qualities ? The words to create 
 can no more be taken absolutely in heredity than in 
 education. Heredity does not, properly speaking, 
 create : it fixes and accumulates certain qualities, 
 which often have themselves been acquired by that 
 education, in the broad sense of the word, which M. 
 Ribot has just before so well defined. If we are to 
 believe M. Ribot, the opponents of heredity have 
 made a great mistake in explaining by an external 
 
THE ROLE OF EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. I03 
 
 cause, by education, what is due to an internal cause, 
 the character : " their polemic has often in fact con- 
 sisted in laying down this, in their opinion, decisive 
 dilemma : either children ought not to resemble their 
 parents, and then where is the law of heredity ? or 
 children resemble their parents morally, and then why 
 seek any other cause but education ? Is it not quite 
 natural that a painter or a musician should teach his 
 art to his son ? that a thief should train his child to 
 theft ? that a child born in the midst of debauchery 
 should be tainted by its environment?" 
 
 In my opinion, if the dilemma of which M. Ribot 
 speaks does not show the influence of education, 
 it shows at least that the influence of heredity, 
 in countless cases, is not itself demonstrable, and 
 that in the majority of cases it is not possible to 
 draw the line of demarcation between the two 
 influences. 
 
 Gall has clearly shown that those faculties existing 
 in all individuals of the same race, exist in different 
 individuals in very different degrees, and that this 
 variety of tendencies, aptitudes, and characters, is a 
 fact common to all classes of beings, independent of 
 education ; but, in my opinion, the existence of natural 
 varieties by no means precludes that of acquired 
 varieties. Among domestic animals, spaniels or 
 hounds are far from all displaying the same delicacy 
 of scent, the same cunning in the chase, the same 
 certainty in pointing the game ; shepherds' dogs are 
 far from all being endowed with the same instinct. 
 Race-horses of the same breed differ in speed ; 
 draught-horses of the same strain differ in strength. 
 So with wild animals. Singing birds have natur- 
 ally the song of their species ; but the skill, timbre, 
 
104 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY, 
 
 compass, and charm of voice, vary from one bird 
 to another. Certainly ; but it has also been shown 
 that singing-birds may learn to sing better, just as 
 race-horses may be trained to run faster. 
 
 In man, M. Ribot thinks that a few well-chosen 
 examples are enough to show the rdle played by 
 innate tendencies (often nothing but heredity), and 
 to cut short all incomplete explanations drawn from 
 the influence of education. We remember how 
 D'Alembert, a foundling brought up by the widow 
 of a poor glazier, penniless, without advice, pursued 
 by the mockery of his adopted mother, his comrades, 
 and the master who did not understand him, none 
 the less went on his way hopefully, and became, at 
 the age of twenty-four, a member of the Academic des 
 Sciences, which was only the beginning of his glory. 
 "Imagine him brought up by his mother. Mademoiselle 
 de Tencin, and at an early age admitted to the salon 
 where met together so many men of parts ; imagine 
 him initiated by them into scientific and philosophical 
 problems, and refined by their conversation ; and the 
 opponents of heredity would infallibly see in his 
 genius the result of his education." That genius, we 
 answer, cannot be the product of education ; but 
 education does not profess to give genius ; it develops 
 it, gives it free play, and may produce talent. If we 
 are to believe M. Ribot, the biography of most 
 celebrated men shows that the influence of education 
 has been sometimes nil^ sometimes harmful, and in 
 most cases weak. If we take, he says, great generals 
 — i.e.y those generals whose debuts are the easier 
 verified because of their striking characters — we find 
 Alexander commenced his victorious career at 20; 
 Scipio Africanus (the first) at 24; Charlemagne at 
 
THE ROLE OF EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 105 
 
 30; Charles XII. at 18; Prince Eugene commanded 
 the Austrian Army at 25 ; Buonaparte the Army of 
 Italy at 26 ; etc. In the case of many thinkers, 
 artists, inventors, men of science, the same precocity 
 shows that education is of small moment compared 
 with the innate tendencies. M. Ribot always speaks 
 of men of genius. Even with men of genius, with 
 Alexander, Charles XII., and Buonaparte — the 
 accounts of the glorious deeds of others have almost 
 invariably been the cause of the manifestation of 
 genius. In conclusion, M. Ribot thinks he is reducing 
 the influence of education to its just limits by saying — 
 " // is never absolute^ and is efficacious only in average 
 natures^ Assume that the different degrees of the 
 human intellect are drawn up so as to form a linear 
 series from idiocy at one end to genius at the other. 
 According to M. Ribot, the influence of education is a 
 minimum at each end of the series. It has almost no 
 influence at all on the idiot ; unheard-of efforts, 
 prodigies of patience and skill, only issue in insignifi- 
 cant and ephemeral results. But as we ascend towards 
 the middle of the series, this influence increases, and 
 attains its maximum in those average natures, which 
 being neither good nor bad, are pretty well what 
 chance makes them. Then if we glance at the higher 
 forms of the intellect, we see the influence of educa- 
 tion again decreasing, and " tending to its minimum " 
 as it approaches the loftiest genius. We willingly 
 admit this ingenious law of the variations of influence 
 in the two first applications, without feeling bound to 
 conclude that education " is efficacious only in average 
 natures." In fact we readily see why an idiot is but 
 little educable, but we do not see why the great 
 natural qualities of genius should make it inaccessible 
 
I06 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 to education. The more naturally intelligent one is, 
 > the more one is capable of learning, and of having 
 one's intelligence developed by education. The more 
 naturally generous one is, the more one is capable of 
 becoming heroic by education, etc. I think, therefore, 
 that genius simultaneously realises the maximum of 
 abundantly fruitful heredity and educability. 
 
 It has been often noticed that it is not rare to find 
 sceptical children in pious families, or pious children 
 in sceptical families, children led astray in the midst 
 of good example, or ambitious, though born in a 
 peaceful and modest family. But because parents are 
 pious, it by no means follows that they are good 
 educators in religion ; a sceptic may produce belief 
 by reaction in his children, and vice versA, We can 
 scarcely understand an hereditary scepticism, nor 
 even an hereditary piety. 
 
 Finally, concludes M. Ribot, to rule over average 
 natures is still an important function ; for, " if the 
 higher natures act^ the average natures re-act ; '' and 
 history tells us that " the progress of humanity is as 
 much the result of the re-actions which check as of 
 the actions which precipitate its motion." We may 
 accept this conclusion, with, however, the addition 
 that education may and ought to reign over higher 
 as well as average natures. Speed already acquired 
 is only one condition more for the acquisition of still 
 greater speed. 
 
 It is especially in the moral order (on which M. 
 Ribot barely touches) that education reigns supreme. 
 It is difficult to pretend that we are born virtuous by 
 the law of heredity. We certainly may have a natural 
 goodness, gentleness, and generosity, but that is not 
 yet morality properly so called. Morality is really 
 
THE ROLE OF EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. I07 
 
 the daughter of the intellect, for the intellect frames 
 an idea of the highest good, sets before itself an ideal ^ 
 end, and, having the consciousness of an initial power 
 of realisation arising out of the very existence of the 
 idea, erects into a law and duty the complete realisa- 
 tion of the ideal. In the development of this ascending 
 tendency, this perpetual sursum, education has enor- 
 mous power; in my opinion it is, according to 
 circumstances, the great moralising or demoralising 
 influence. 
 
 The tendency of life towards the maximum of 
 inward intensity and of outward expansion, is for us 
 inherent in life itself It is its initial spring. This 
 tendency first becomes moral when the striving after 
 the greatest inward intensity takes place in the direc- 
 tion of the highest psychic activities ; right direction is 
 the essential point Now it is obvious that this right 
 direction may be produced by education, just as it 
 may also be naturally facilitated or partly predeter- 
 mined by heredity, which makes certain tendencies 
 and sentiments dominate others. The moral hierarchy 
 of the sentiments is then easier to establish. In 
 the second place, the tendency towards the maxi- 
 mum vitality becomes moral when the tendency to 
 outward expansion is manifested by concord with 
 others, by sympathy and affection, instead of being 
 manifested by brutality and violence. Here again 
 education and heredity play an important part. 
 Education ends by putting others on the same 
 footing as ourselves in our thoughts, in our senti- 
 ments, and ipso facto in our wills. Heredity, on the ^ 
 other hand, transmits the tendencies to gentleness and 
 kindness, as it may also transmit tendencies to violence 
 and brutality. 
 
I08 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 The element of obligation and duty remains — the 
 form attached by us to the idea of the most intensive 
 and expansive life. I have shown that obligation is a 
 power which, conscious of its superiority, is opposed 
 to what is inferior or incompatible, and is thus of 
 itself tran:>lated into duty ; I can do more and better 
 than I do, therefore I ought. Here is a contrast, a 
 sense of internal division, making us lay down in our 
 thoughts a higher law than we realise, or see realised. 
 This tendency to development of the maxi7num power 
 is accumulated in two ways — by education and by 
 heredity. The more we do, the more we want to do ; 
 the better we do, the better we wish to do ; there is 
 an accelerated speed, an incessant craving to excel 
 one's self; as in the artist who is always wishing to 
 produce a masterpiece better than all his preceding 
 work. As for the form of the law, — imperative, or 
 inward command, which is really a kind of internal con- 
 straint, — it has the characteristics of an instinct which 
 belong to everything that is hereditarily transmissible. 
 We are born more and more controlled by this 
 internal law ; the civilised child, instead of being like 
 the savage, lawless and unrestrained, is quite ready to 
 bend to the yoke of this inward law. Education finds 
 in it a kind of pre-established respect for law, of 
 natural loyalty, but it strengthens the inner law by the 
 enormous force of acquired habits. Modern educa- 
 ^ tion should, above all, preserve and develop its own 
 higher product — morality. In the case of children 
 ? we must store up moral power by good habits. Duty 
 being but the consciousness of higher power, we 
 must before anything else give that power, or at 
 least the belief in it, which tends spontaneously to 
 produce it. 
 
THE ROLE OF EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. IO9 
 
 Herbart very clearly saw the tendency of the 
 human mind to ^^ maximation" which is, according 
 to Kant, the most general characteristic of " practical 
 reason." He understood the use to be made of 
 it, and the role it should play in education. In the 
 course of life each individual is led to formulate 
 for himself rules of conduct, varying with the kind 
 of life he leads, his tastes, preferences, habits, and 
 needs. The rake and the hard-working man, the 
 criminal and philanthropist, alike obey certain con- 
 stant rules which at bottom are only the theoretical 
 formula of their practice. This apparently singular 
 fact is due, according to Herbart, to the necessary 
 priority of action to the analysis or criticism of 
 action. Moral consciousness itself does not exist 
 in every detail in the child's mind ; but it is de- < 
 veloped in proportion as the child is called upon to 
 act. If, then, we wish to exercise a moral influence 
 on children, we must direct their actions before teach- < 
 ing them axioms ; we must, as Herbart says, let them 
 formulate for themselves rules of conduct conform- 
 able to the virtuous habits inculcated in early life. 
 " Men, if they are not fond of carrying their maxims 
 into practice, never forget to turn their practice into 
 maxims. Now this offers no inconvenience when 
 the practices are good practices." The idea is true, 
 but is exaggerated by Herbart when he thinks it< 
 useless to give maxims to children. It is good to 
 accustom the child to make for itself a law^ a duty^ 
 an obligation^ but as we cannot count on the absolute 
 spontaneity of the child, we must first impose on it . 
 a law which it recognises as just and rational. The 
 law will then be accepted, and autonomy will subsist 
 until it becomes obedience. Only, for this to be so. 
 
no EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 we must wish and act as a real lawgiver should — 
 i.e,^ with perfect uniformity and perpetual constancy. 
 Thus the influence of education will be added to 
 that of heredity. The latter may be enough to pro- 
 duce genius, but it will never be enough to produce 
 true morality. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 PHYSICAL EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. THE 
 BOARDING-SCHOOL. OVERPRESSURE. 
 
 I. The Absolute Necessity of Physical Education in the Education of 
 the Race. — Reasons for its neglect at the present day — Sedentary habits 
 and their dangers — Precocity. 
 
 II. The Boarding- School Question. — English public schools — The 
 tutorial system — Germany — The United States. 
 
 III. The Question of Overpressure. — Necessity for recreation and 
 games — Gymnastics, its advantages and shortcomings. 
 
 IV. Manual Work in Schools. 
 
 V. The Physical Progress of the Race, and the Growth of Population, 
 
 I. The Absolute Necessity of Physical Education in the 
 Education of the Race. 
 
 It IS said that the first pen ever used for writing 
 was a cornstalk. With the stem of the corn that 
 nourishes the body the first intellectual food is 
 prepared. 
 
 Whatever the sex of a child, its bodily powers may 
 always be developed without any inconvenience, for 
 physical health under all circumstances is a desirable 
 possession. On the other hand, intellectual over- 
 pressure, by fatiguing the body, may disturb the 
 equilibrium of the mind. "To brace the mind, we 
 must strengthen the muscles," said Montaigne. And 
 
/ 
 
 112 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 Rousseau observed that "the weaker a body is, the 
 more it commands ; the stronger it is, the more it 
 obeys." 
 
 "The rationale of our high-pressure education is 
 that it results from our passing phase of civilisation." 
 " In primitive times," says Spencer, " when aggression 
 and defence were the leading social activities, bodily 
 vigour, with its accompanying courage, were the 
 desiderata; and then education was almost wholly 
 physical ; mental culture was little cared for, and 
 indeed, as in feudal ages, was often treated with 
 contempt. But now that our state is relatively 
 peaceful, — now that muscular power is of use for 
 little else than manual labour, while social success 
 of nearly every kind depends very much on mental 
 power, — our education has become almost exclusively 
 mental. Instead of respecting the body and ignoring 
 the mind, we now respect the mind and ignore the 
 body. . . . Few seem conscious that there is such a 
 thing as physical morality. Men's habitual words 
 and acts imply the idea that they are at liberty to 
 treat their bodies as they please."^ 
 
 "Though the evil consequences inflicted on their 
 dependents, and on future generations, are often as 
 great as those caused by crime, yet they do not 
 think themselves in any degree criminal. It is true 
 that in the case of drunkenness the viciousness of a 
 bodily transgression is recognised; but none appear 
 to infer that if this bodily transgression is vicious, 
 so too is every bodily transgression. The fact is 
 that all breaches of the laws of health are physical 
 sinsy^ 
 
 The object of education is to develop all the powers 
 
 * Spencer, Education, p. 189 (stereotyped edition). ^ Ibid., p. 190. 
 
THE BOARDING-SCHOOL QUESTION. II 3 
 
 of a being, to cause it to act in all directions, to make 
 it expend as much as possible, and therefore not to 
 draw upon it except for expenditure easily made 
 good, — expenditure setting up the process of recu- 
 peration, and in some measure itself recuperative. 
 
 Exercise in the open air is a type of expenditure of 
 this kind. The exact opposite of this is a prolonged 
 stay in an unhealthy environment — e.g., certain fac- 
 tories, a badly-ventilated clerks' office, the drawing- 
 rooms where the middle classes spend a large part of 
 their useless existence, or, finally, the French schools 
 and colleges where sedentary habits are carried to 
 excess. Sedentary habits are the greatest enemy of 
 the body ; the greatest enemy of the mind is inatten- 
 tion. The ideal of the educator is therefore to obtain 
 from the child for a short period its whole attention, 
 then to let it unbend and repair its expenditure. 
 
 II. The Boarding' School Question. 
 
 Hygienic mistakes in schools are very numer- 
 ous ; the time for meals is too short ; the pupils 
 eat too quickly and in silence, — this impedes their 
 digestion. The bad air of the class-rooms gets 
 worse and worse as the lesson is prolonged. We 
 feel revulsion at the idea of all eating out of the 
 same dish ; but in reality in our school-rooms 
 we breathe in this way, or rather we do worse still, 
 and breathe an atmosphere already expired several 
 times. 
 
 In addition to good food and good air, one essential 
 point is a sufficient amount of well distributed sleep. 
 Nourishment alone is not enough to repair the 
 expenditure of the nervous system, and one of the 
 
 8 
 
114 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 greatest inconveniences of modern education is the 
 cutting short or the unwise distribution of the hours 
 of sleep. Every one has recognised the dangers the 
 boarding-school may present with reference to 
 hygiene — overcrowding and confinement, unhealthy 
 for mind and body alike ; a rigid syllabus, narrowly 
 conceived rules, breaking too often in the child that 
 spring of the will, the strengthening of which educa- 
 tion properly understood ought to have as its object ; 
 the difficulty of getting house-masters ; separation 
 from the family which ceases to care, while the child 
 himself loses his home affections. In the time of 
 Napoleon I. the most violent efforts were necessary 
 to fill the boarding lyceums ; the foundation of 6400 
 scholarships does not seem to have been enough for 
 the purpose. Over and above this, the edict of 
 January i8th, and the decree of November 15th, 181 1, 
 abruptly closed all the small boarding-houses estab- 
 lished either by the University professors or by 
 others. The boarding-house is therefore an institu- 
 ■ tion artificially implanted in France by the all- 
 powerful hand of the State. Napoleon wanted the 
 student at a lyceum to be already a soldier and an 
 official. Twenty years before, M. Sainte- Claire 
 Deville called the attention of the Academic des 
 Sciences Morales et Politiques to the question of 
 morality in boarding-schools : — " Experimental mor- 
 ality, if I may use the expression, can no more 
 be practised on man than physiology; but by 
 operating on animals, and at the same time 
 taking into sufficient account the human intellect, 
 we may try to discover the physical causes of 
 the faults and vices of children, who at certain 
 periods of their development are so near the brute 
 
THE BOARDING-SCHOOL QUESTION. IIS 
 
 creation, and I am sure we may eventually arrive 
 at practical results of great interest. ... In general, 
 whenever we group together and bring into domestic 
 restraint animals of the same — and especially of 
 the male — sex, we notice at first a great excite- 
 ment, and afterwards a formidable perversion of the 
 reproductive instincts. On the other hand, when 
 animals destined to live in community are kept in 
 flocks, or are at complete liberty, we see the normal 
 characteristics of the animal dominate. . . . What 
 happens in a flock happens also in a collection of 
 male children, of whatever kind it may be, though 
 restrained by the strictest surveillance both day 
 and night. The gravest inconvenience to society of 
 these vices is the exaggerated development, between 
 twenty or thirty years of age, of the generative 
 faculties, from which spring debauchery and impurity 
 of every kind." The consequences to heredity and 
 the race are obvious. 
 
 Although the State has done much for instruction, 
 it has done but little for education. If education is 
 left in the hands of the State, the result will be large 
 boarding-schools — the legacy of the sixteenth or 
 seventeenth century Jesuits — where the child, parted 
 from its family, acquires neither distinction of manner 
 nor refinement. Education, says M. Renan, is 
 respect for what is really good, noble, and beautiful ; 
 it is politeness, "that delightful virtue which atones 
 for the lack of so many others ; " it is tact, which is 
 almost a virtue. "The professor cannot teach that 
 purity and refinement of conscience, which is the basis 
 of all solid morality, that bloom of sentiment which 
 some day will be the great charm of the man, that 
 mental subtlety with its almost imperceptible shades, 
 
Il6 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 — where then can the child and young man learn all 
 these? In books, in lessons, if due attention be paid 
 to them ? in texts learned by heart ? Not at all ; 
 these things are learned in the atmosphere in which 
 we live, from our social environment ; they are 
 learned in domestic life and nowhere else." Instruc- 
 tion is given in the class, the lyceum, and the school ; 
 education takes place in the father's house ; the 
 masters are the mothers and sisters. . . . "Woman, 
 deeply thoughtful and moral, alone can heal the sores 
 of the present times ; alone can take up anew the 
 education of man, and bring back the taste for the 
 beautiful and the good." We must therefore take 
 back the child, we must not entrust it to mercenary 
 hands, we must never be separated from it except 
 during the hours devoted to class-teaching. 
 
 The defenders of the boarding system speak of 
 mutual formation of character. That is to say, that 
 at school we quickly learn from the wholesome dread 
 of solid fists to restrain within ourselves certain 
 asperities of character ; but to think that those 
 asperities have in consequence disappeared, is to 
 forget that the hostile environment immediately 
 formed by children in relation to those who are dis- 
 tasteful to them is also apt to develop unsociability. 
 
 But if the boarding system is an evil, it is none the 
 less a necessary evil, and those who wish the State to 
 suppress it in the lyceums do not realise what its aboli- 
 tion would bring about. There are only about a 
 hundred lyceums, and as many more colleges and 
 private schools, where secondary education can be 
 effectually given. Now there are thirty-six thousand 
 communes, and in each of these communes there are 
 many children who must receive secondary education. 
 
THE BOARDING-SCHOOL QUESTION. II7 
 
 Hence, for the provincial lower middle class, the 
 boarding-school is the only, or at any rate the 
 simplest, means of obtaining instruction for their 
 children without too heavy a sacrifice. If the State 
 suppressed these schools to-day, it would in the first 
 place have to fear the competition of the clerical 
 boarding-schools, and then schools of the same kind 
 would be in a short time established by private indi- 
 viduals. Public instruction, instead of being a State 
 department, would become a private speculation — the 
 worst of all industries. These little private boarding- 
 schools have all the inconveniences of the lyceums, 
 without having either their scholastic advantages or 
 their discipline. The master is more than anything 
 else afraid of losing a pupil, so he must shut his eyes 
 to all that goes on. His assistant masters are on 
 contract (/.^., the lowest tender accepted) ; so we may 
 imagine what they are like. The food is just what we 
 might expect from the minimum fees paid by the 
 parents. 
 
 Lastly, there is far greater danger of immorality, 
 for there is neither proper surveillance, nor is the 
 head master responsible to the university authorities. 
 Laissez faire^ let things go, and hush up every scandal. 
 
 Though the boarding-school cannot be entirely 
 suppressed, at least it may be improved. To under- 
 stand in what direction it may be reformed, and even 
 partially replaced, let us see what is done in foreign 
 countries. 
 
 In England, a school of secondary instruction — 
 Harrow, for instance — is quite a hamlet. Different 
 houses, tenanted by the teachers and their pupils, are 
 grouped around the main building containing the 
 class-rooms. All around are wide stretches of ground 
 
Il8 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 for tennis, football, and cricket. The boys, only 
 massed together in school hours, leave school directly 
 the lessons are over, and return to the house in which 
 they live. 
 
 In fact, the boys sent by their parents to a public 
 school as boarders are handed over to one of the 
 masters, whose house becomes theirs. There they 
 remain — and this is the important point — during the 
 whole time of their stay at school. There they find, up 
 to a certain point, family life ; they have their meals 
 with the master, his wife, his mother, and his sisters. 
 A boy may have ten masters, but he has always the 
 same tutor. Thus the tutors are able to carry out 
 the regulations laid down by the statutes, and are to 
 the boys in loco parentis. 
 
 The great schools are divided into two classes, 
 according to the system pursued with respect to 
 sleeping arrangements. At Eton, for instance, each 
 boy has his own little room. In others, as at Rugby, 
 the boys are distributed, at night only of course, in 
 dormitories of from two to sixteen beds. But on one 
 point they all agree — viz., the perfect freedom of the 
 boys out of school hours. Once the lesson is over, 
 the boy comes back, goes out, works, or plays, just as 
 he likes and when he likes. The only rule that 
 obtains is absolute ; it refers to the hours of lessons, 
 meals, and " lock-up," the latter being at nine in 
 summer, and in winter at dusk. The only obligation 
 is to have finished the work set by a stated time. 
 " Severe penalties are inflicted for all forgetful n ess, 
 and for all neglected work." Under such conditions 
 as these, surveillance as understood in France is 
 literally impossible : out of school the boys watch and 
 govern themselves. 
 
THE BOARDING-SCHOOL QUESTION. II9 
 
 The big boys, or rather the boys in the highest 
 class, called monitors ^ prcepostors^ or prefects ^ are 
 legally invested with power, and maintain their rights 
 with all possible energy. This does away with the 
 maitre d'^tudes"^ at once. I should add, that if this 
 system became prevalent in France, it would be 
 necessary to modify some of the English customs. 
 Fagging, for example, would have no chance of being 
 established here. The main objection is that English 
 secondary education is of a very aristocratic character. 
 The fees at Harrow or Eton are from ;^320 to £\Zo 
 per annum. At this price they may have comfort. 
 It has yet to be ascertained if it is easy for the child 
 of a tradesman or peasant to pursue his classical 
 studies. It is true there are many less expensive 
 schools, and that there are a great many scholarships. 
 Unfortunately the English themselves assure us that 
 the " scholars " are looked down upon with the utmost 
 contempt by their aristocratic school-fellows. 
 
 Harrow, Eton, and Rugby are the principal seats of 
 secondary instruction, and nearly correspond to our 
 great lyceums ; there are about 800 boys at Eton, and 
 500 each at Harrow and Rugby, in age averaging 
 from 13 to 18. Eight hours' work per day is the 
 maximum ; in most cases it is only six or seven ; 
 athletics — tennis, football, running, boating, and 
 especially cricket — occupy a part of every day ; 
 in addition, two or three times a week there is 
 no afternoon school, and games reign supreme. 
 
 I have shown from the French point of view the 
 advantages of the English system; let us ask the 
 
 1 The duties of the mattre d^ etudes are to look after the boys when 
 not in school — i.e.^ when preparing lessons, sleeping, walking, playing, 
 eating, etc. (Tr.) 
 
I20 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 English themselves what are its drawbacks. The 
 first is physical overpressure^ which stands out in 
 strange contrast to our intellectual overpressure. 
 This physical overpressure has affected all classes of 
 the community, even those who, from their position, 
 would seem most likely to escape it — viz., the aris- 
 tocracy. And, in curious contrast to what obtains in 
 France, if the English doctors raise the question of 
 overpressure, it is physical overpressure, and they 
 lead the crusade against the abuse of rough games. 
 The most pronounced opponent of games of strength 
 in England is a contemporary novelist, Wilkie Collins, 
 who, in his Man and Wife, discusses amongst other 
 questions the present rage for muscular exercise, 
 and its influence on the health and morality of the 
 rising generation in England. In the preface of 
 this book, written in 1871, he expresses himself as 
 follows : — 
 
 " As to the physical results of the mania for muscular cultiva- 
 tion which has seized on us of late years, it is a fact that the 
 opinions expressed in this book are the opinions of the medical 
 profession in general — with the high authority of Mr. Skey at 
 their head. And (if the medical evidence is to be disputed as 
 evidence based on theory only) it is also a fact that the view 
 taken by the doctors is a view which the experience of fathers 
 in all parts of England can practically confirm by reference to 
 the cases of their sons. This last new form of our * national 
 eccentricity' has its victims to answer for — victims who are 
 broken for life. 
 
 " As to the moral results, I may be right or I may be wrong, 
 in seeing as I do a connection between the recent unbridled 
 development of physical cultivation in England, and the recent 
 spread of grossness and brutality among certain classes of the 
 English population. But, is it to be denied that the grossness 
 and the brutality exist? and, more, that they have assumed 
 formidable proportions among us of late years? We have 
 
THE BOARDING-SCHOOL QUESTION. 121 
 
 become so shamelessly familiar with violence and outrage, that 
 we recognise them as a necessary ingredient in our social 
 system, and class our savages as a representative part of our 
 population, under the newly invented name of * Roughs.' 
 Public attention has been directed by hundreds of other writers 
 to the dirty Rough in fustian. If the present writer had confined 
 himself within those limits, he would have carried all his readers 
 with him. But he is bold enough to direct attention to the 
 washed Rough in broadcloth — and he must stand on his defence 
 with readers who have not noticed this variety, or who, having 
 noticed, prefer to ignore it.'* 
 
 Mr. Matthew Arnold, in his turn, does not hesitate 
 to declare that the great mass of his fellow-countrymen 
 are either Barbarians, recruited especially from the 
 aristocracy; Philistines, forming the bulk of the middle 
 classes; or the squalid masses, which he calls the 
 Populace.^ He is of opinion that the character of this 
 or that class of society depends especially upon its 
 conception of happiness ; now the Barbarians, as he 
 tells us, delight in honours, consideration, bodily exer- 
 cises, field sports, and noisy pleasures. The Philistines 
 care for nothing but fanaticism, the fever of business, 
 money-making, comfort, and tea-meetings. As for the 
 masses, their only happiness is in brawling, hustling, 
 smashing — and cheap beer. Mr. Matthew Arnold 
 asserts that in England public education is deficient, 
 that it tends to increase the number of Philistines and 
 Barbarians, and does but little to mitigate the brutality 
 of the masses ; that it would be a good thing for the 
 government to take it in hand ; that it is for the State 
 alone to instruct and elevate the people; and that 
 this system works well in France. 
 
 On the other hand, a great authority at the Universi- 
 ties, Edward Lyttleton,has pointed out in the iVi^W/^^;///^ 
 
 ^ Culture and Anarchy y chap. iii. (Tr.) 
 
122 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 Century the abuse of athletics in schools. The spec- 
 tators are so numerous, and to such an extent have 
 the parents and the public encouraged these games, 
 that they have become the dominant and almost 
 exclusive interest of a large number of pupils. If a 
 boy is robust and skilful, even if at the bottom of a 
 class of dunces, the hope of approaching triumph is 
 placed before him ; he becomes the master, and the 
 absolute master. Teachers and heads of schools are 
 obliged to subordinate themselves to the necessities 
 of the games. Intellectual culture takes rank after 
 athletics. As for morality, Mr. Lyttleton asserts that 
 even if games are of use in restraining certain dis- 
 orderly habits, they have nothing in themselves of a 
 moralising tendency. " Mere students are as a body 
 more virtuous than the mere athletes." According 
 to Mr. Lyttleton, the cause of this excess is the 
 infatuation of the public and its enormous interest in 
 games.^ 
 
 In spite of all these drawbacks, it must be agreed 
 that this athletic education, confined within proper 
 limits, is a condition of the regeneration and heredi- 
 tary strength of the race. If an idle fellow in England 
 becomes a Hercules, it is a compensation and consola- 
 tion to the race. But our idle boys are " little and 
 overworked," only adapted to cause our race to dis- 
 appear. 
 
 Let us now see how things are managed in 
 Germany. M. Michal Br^al, who is singularly com- 
 petent to speak on this question, will give us the infor- 
 mation we require. In Germany the parents look 
 out for some family of good repute, able and willing 
 to give the child board and lodging. He is received 
 
 ^ Nineteenth Centwy^ January 1880. 
 
THE BOARDING-SCHOOL QUESTION. 1 23 
 
 as a playfellow of the children of the house, and has 
 his place at the domestic hearth. All this is done for 
 a sometimes astonishingly small remuneration ; the 
 little guest disturbs no arrangements, an unoccupied 
 room is all he wants, and one mouth more at table 
 increases inappreciably the household expenses. For 
 two hundred years this custom has obtained in Ger- 
 many, and there is no likelihood of its being aban- 
 doned. " At the present moment, out of one thousand 
 pupils at the gymnasiums, less than a hundred are 
 without the advantages of family life." ^ The board- 
 ing-school does, however, exist in Germany, but is the 
 exception to the rule. 
 
 In the matter of school organisation, the United 
 States are inspired both by Germany and England ; 
 there we find schools like Harrow, for instance, for 
 the children of the wealthy classes. 
 
 How far are these different systems applicable in 
 France with our present customs? With reference 
 to the adoption of the English tutorial system, it may 
 be objected that if the teacher fulfils at the same time 
 
 ^ This system also obtained in France in bygone days. * ' I was 
 born," says M. Renan, "in a small town in Lower Brittany, where was 
 a school kept by a few respected ecclesiastics who taught Latin very 
 well. The perfume of antiquity exhaled by that house enchants me now 
 when I think of it ; one might imagine one's self transported to the days 
 of Rollin or of the recluses of Port Royal. This school was attended 
 by the youth of the town and of the country round within a radius of 
 from six to eight leagues. There were very few boarders. When the 
 young folk had no relations in the town, they lived with the towns- 
 people, many of whom made some little profit in the exercise of this 
 hospitality ; the relations coming in to market on Wednesday brought 
 the children their provisions for the week ; and the latter messed in 
 common with much cordiality, gaiety, and economy. This was the 
 system pursued in the Middle Ages. It is also the custom in England 
 and Germany, — countries so advanced in all matters connected with 
 education." 
 
124 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 the duties of tutor, his office must sustain some detri- 
 ment. We cannot without danger combine the work 
 of preparing a class with the absorbing care of private 
 teaching. " The university," says Bersot, " has a staff 
 of professors, men much respected and of great dis- 
 tinction, with modest means, but independent of the 
 families whose children they educate, entirely devoted 
 to the work of their classes, or perhaps adding to it 
 other labours, ranking among the most important 
 works of our time; we do not want them to be 
 other than they are, or to cease to do what they do 
 so well." When he represents our professors as 
 entirely devoted to the work of their classes^ Bersot 
 forgets that nine-tenths of them spend their days 
 in giving private lessons, etc., no less absorbing 
 and stupefying than tutorial work. It is obvious 
 that only such professors as these would take 
 boarders. 
 
 The model Alsatian school, into which have been 
 introduced most of the reforms lauded by modern 
 pedagogues, has succeeded in replacing the boarding- 
 school by the tutorial regime. The Direct eur of the 
 school recently congratulated himself, and with good 
 reason ; he contrasted the life of a boarder in one of 
 the best lyceums with the child's life in one of the 
 teacher's houses. The child sleeps in his own room ; 
 his private life is watched as it would be by his father 
 or mother, but it is respected. He gets up early in 
 the morning, not at the sound of bell or drum, but 
 because the whole household is getting up, and 
 because there is a tradition that morning work is the 
 healthiest and most fruitful. He does his exercises, 
 or he learns his lessons, either alone in his own room, 
 if he is a big boy, or in the common room with other 
 
THE BOARDING-SCHOOL QUESTION. 1 25 
 
 little friends of his own age, under the paternal care 
 of the head of the family, or sometimes under a young 
 master — a teacher in the school — who is like an elder 
 brother of the pupils. The holidays, Thursday and 
 Sunday, are always devoted to long walks ; the 
 country is visited in order that the boys may have 
 the opportunity of giving themselves up to those 
 amusements which form the best part of the existence 
 of the English youth — walking, rough games, cycling, 
 skating, swimming ; there the boarders frequently 
 meet their school-fellows ; in fact, life in the open-air, 
 long walks, and bodily exercise are the traditions not 
 merely of the school but of most of the families from 
 which the pupils are drawn. 
 
 We may also mention the Ecole Monge as a model 
 of an improved boarding-school, where the children 
 talk during meals ; where — and I draw particular 
 attention to this point — they sleep in a well-ventilated 
 room, the younger children for 10 hours, the elder 
 children for 9 hours ; whereas at a lyceum the children 
 above 13 years of age get no more than 8 hours' sleep 
 in summer. 
 
 The only drawback is the question of money. Even 
 in the Alsatian school, where the tutorial regime 
 appears to have been established in a peculiarly 
 economical fashion, the average fees are as high as 
 ;^ioo per annum for the younger children, and ;^I20 
 for the rest. 
 
 Our higher primary instruction is at present pro- 
 vided with boarding-scholarships, which are a very 
 happy adaptation of the German plan. The holders 
 of these scholarships are placed in families within 
 easy distance of the schools, and the State pays ;^20 
 a year for their board. If we remember that these 
 
126 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 scholars are on the avprage between 12 and 16, we 
 may hope that an average of £28 per annum would 
 be enough for the board of pupils receiving secondary 
 instruction. Add to this the school fees — about ;^I2 
 per annum — and the total expense is not greater than 
 that of the ordinary boarding-school. Hence the 
 boarding-out system, from the pecuniary point of view, 
 does not raise the same objections as the tutorial 
 system. The difficulty would be to find the families 
 (with the necessary guarantees) to whom the children 
 might be entrusted. MM. Breal and Raunid think 
 they would certainly be forthcoming. The parents of 
 day-boys would often offer to receive some of their 
 boys' school-fellows. In this way would be formed 
 little groups of scholars, over whom the adopted 
 family would exercise the necessary care and super- 
 vision. 
 
 The day-school system leaves to the family its share 
 of legitimate and necessary action. In Paris and our 
 great towns it is the day-school to the development of 
 which our main attention must be drawn. 
 
 In France we have pushed uniformity to the verge 
 of eccentricity. Why should all our lyceums and 
 schools be organised on the same type ? Why should 
 we not try the partial introduction into France of 
 the public school, the tutorial, and the boarding-out 
 systems ? But, at the same time, the boarding-school 
 must be reformed. Discipline must be relaxed ; 
 children must be allowed to talk whenever they may 
 talk without inconvenience ; supervision must be 
 improved by investing those to whom it is entrusted 
 with more authority ; mutual discipline must be 
 organised by monitors and pupils of high standing. 
 
 As authority based on capacity is the only authority 
 
THE BOARDING-SCHOOL QUESTION. 1 27 
 
 that is not factitious, mattres d'etudes can only be 
 retained on condition that they are really repetition- 
 masters — i.e., that they have to correct exercises and 
 hear lessons. But how can that be properly done in 
 a class of from 25 to 30 boys? M. Jules Simon 
 proposes to re-establish in France the long-abandoned 
 system of entrusting parts of the supervision to the 
 boys. This proposal arouses the cry of, " Oh, that is 
 espionage ! " " Not at all," replies M. Simon ; " there 
 is no such thing as open espionage." Give the boys 
 the sergeant-major's stripes, and extend into school 
 hours the authority entrusted to them at other times. 
 There is no espionage in that, nor is good-fellowship 
 affected. As soon as ever such a small degree of super- 
 vision is entrusted to the head boys, the duties of 
 supervision will be changed in the eyes of the whole 
 school, and the repetition-masters will be able to take 
 their share without loss of dignity. " I have seen this 
 plan in working order on a very large scale," adds M. 
 Simon. " We had only one preparation-master for 60 
 or more boys ; but in each form a boy was entrusted 
 with the maintenance of discipline, and he acquitted 
 himself of his duties admirably, without losing caste 
 or being the worse thought of for it. No difficulty 
 occurred if the master went out ; silence prevailed as 
 if he were in the room. It is all a question of habit. 
 Military rank is a very good instrument for the attain- 
 ment of this end." It is important that we should 
 realise that we are almost the only European nation 
 who do not utilise the elder boys in the maintenance 
 of discipline among their younger school-fellows. It 
 is of Course true that the Frenchman is so undiscip- 
 lined by nature ! 
 
 Again, we must reform in the matter of walking. 
 
128 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 In the days of the Jesuits, and in most of the Catholic 
 schools, long walks were rather frequently taken. A 
 rendezvous was appointed — an old castle, a remark- 
 able site, the sea coast, etc. Generally a lunch was 
 served on the grass, or even supper if weather per- 
 mitted. A long walk was always necessary before 
 the goal was reached, but it was done merrily, and 
 the very fatigue became a pleasure. " I thought of 
 introducing this plan into our schools," says M. Simon ; 
 " I thought of giving our walks an instructive object."^ 
 
 ^ M. Simon thinks that if the weather is uncertain, and the country 
 impossible, the boys should go to the museum at the Louvre, some- 
 times with a drawing-master, but in most cases with the master who 
 teaches history or literature. " Another day we might have visited 
 Cluny, La Monnaie, the Fine Art Schools. The history-master might 
 have taken us to the National Library to admire the books, manuscripts, 
 medals, stamps, and the palace itself, so full of memories of Mazarin. 
 There is always something to teach, even if we do nothing but walk 
 about the streets of a town so often the scene of the most important 
 events in French history. Notre Dame, in the heart of Paris, teems 
 with lessons. This building alone teaches us half the history of 
 France. There Henry IV. went to hear the Te Deum immediately 
 after his return to Paris ; there, too, after the abjuration of Gobel, was 
 inaugurated the worship of the goddess Reason. In the square of the 
 Hotel de Ville, or rather in one of its corners, for our fathers liked to 
 crowd together, they used to hang, draw and quarter, break on the 
 wheel, torture, and burn. There many a bonfire has blazed. There 
 have been heard cries of ' Vive le Roi ! ' to all the kings of France ; 
 there, too, cries of *Vive la Ripublique V to every provisional 
 government ; until at length, on a day of eternal shame, the Palace of 
 the Ville de Paris was converted into a sinister ruin. Going up the 
 Rue St. Antoine we find no traces of either the Hotel St. Paul nor of 
 the Bastille. Etiam peritre ruinae» We should have summoned 
 around the H6tel Rambouillet the shades of the great Corneille, 
 Chapelain, and Voiture. We should have visited the room in which 
 Voltaire died, the street in which Jean Jacques Rousseau lived, the 
 street where Moliere was born, the spot whither his body was carried, 
 in doubt if a corner could be obtained as a resting-place for his 
 remains. Paris, a town of eternal agitation, allows all its relics to be 
 destroyed, either by the weather or by rioters, nay, sometimes at the 
 
THE BOARDING-SCHOOL QUESTION. J 29 
 
 The country ought to be an especial attraction to 
 children ; in it they should lay up a store of good 
 spirits and health. 
 
 In geological walks, the master before starting 
 gathers the boys together, and in twenty minutes 
 gives them a few general notions on the district they 
 are going to study ; then each takes his hammer and 
 his bag, and they rush off to get in the open air a 
 lesson, the recollection of which will never be effaced. 
 The sciences of facts — history, natural history, and 
 geography — are learned by the eye. Montaigne was 
 not content with walks for his pupils : like Locke, he 
 wanted real travels.^ Nothing could be easier and 
 less expensive, as Bouillier has shown, than the 
 journey from one lyceum to another, to the sea or 
 mountains, to a town full of interest, from Paris to 
 the provinces, or from the provinces to Paris, putting 
 up all along the road at the schools and lyceums, 
 which would be like so many free inns; the school- 
 boy's uniform — as in the army — ensuring reduced 
 railway fares. Mutual hospitality between the schools 
 
 expense of its magistrates. It scatters broadcast neither statues nor 
 inscriptions ; and all this makes one more reason for piously following 
 up the traces of history — campos ubi Troja. Even to understand the 
 history of the Revolution we have to take into account the subsequent 
 changes in Paris. If we are unaware that between the Louvre and the 
 Tuileries lay a whole quarter, theatres, palaces, a market, a hostelry 
 for pages, and two barracks, how can the events of the loth of August 
 be explained ? How many Parisians know where the Convention sat ? 
 or where the Salle de Feuillants or the Salle de Jacobins were situated? 
 Medical students who visit the Dupuytren Museum do not know it 
 was once the Club of the Cordeliers. Does the obelisk between the 
 Champs-Elysees and the Tuileries hide or mark the site of the revolu- 
 tionary scaffold ? " 
 
 ^ ** le vouldrois qu'on commen9east a promener I'enfant dez sa tendre 
 enfance par les nations voysines ou le langage est plus esloingue du 
 nostre. . . ."—Montaigne, Essais, bk. i., chap. xxv. (Tr.) 
 
130 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 on these travels would take the place of payment. 
 The boarding-schools should be established outside 
 the towns, and — if practicable — on the hills : if we 
 had, as they have in England and Germany, great 
 schools far in the country, near forests, or better still 
 on the heights of the Dauphin^ or on the Pyrenees, 
 fashion would eventually make them the homes of 
 education for the wealthy classes. In this way we 
 could combat the degeneration of the middle classes, 
 which is much more rapid in France than elsewhere, 
 because the custom of restricting the number of 
 children of itself is sufficient to check natural selec- 
 tion of the higher qualities. 
 
 Others might be established near the large towns, 
 but always in the country, and within easy reach 
 by rail or tram. The companies would give to 
 pupils and masters, on the presentation of satisfactory 
 certificates, school season-tickets at extremely reduced 
 rates, as is already done in a few places in France and 
 everywhere in Belgium and Germany. Daily special 
 trains, like the children's Sunday trains from Paris to 
 Vanves, Fontenay, etc., might be organised to take 
 children to a place in the morning and bring them 
 back in the evening. In this way the difficulties 
 arising from both children and masters living at a 
 distance from the school would be removed. 
 
 III. The Question of Overpressure, 
 
 The question of overpressure has long divided and 
 passionately excited men of intellect. 
 
 Spencer justly remarks that " in all businesses and 
 professions, intense competition taxes the energies 
 
THE QUESTION OF OVERPRESSURE. I31 
 
 and abilities of every adult. . . . The damage is thus 
 doubled. Fathers, who find themselves run hard by 
 their multiplying competitors, and, while labouring 
 under this disadvantage, have to maintain a more 
 expensive style of living, are all the year round 
 obliged to work early and late, taking little exercise 
 and getting but short holidays. The constitutions 
 shaken by this continual over -application they 
 bequeath to their children. And then these com- 
 paratively feeble children, predisposed to break down, 
 even under ordinary strains on their energies, are 
 required to go through a curriculum much more 
 extended than that prescribed for the unenfeebled 
 children of past generations. The disastrous con- 
 sequences which might be anticipated are everywhere 
 visible," especially in the case of girls, and they are 
 accumulated by heredity. " In a child or youth the 
 demands upon this vital energy are various and 
 urgent; . . the waste consequent on the day's 
 bodily exercise has to be met; the wear of brain 
 entailed by the day's study has to be made good; 
 a certain additional growth of body has to be pro- 
 vided for; and also a certain additional growth of 
 brain ; to which must be added the amount of energy 
 absorbed in digesting the large quantity of food 
 required for meeting these many demands. Now, 
 that to divert an excess of energy into any one of 
 these channels is to abstract it from the others is 
 both manifest ^ priori^ and proved i posteriori by 
 the experience of every one. . , . Every one knows 
 that excess of bodily exercise diminishes the power 
 of thought — that the temporary prostration following 
 any sudden exertion, or the fatigue produced by a 
 thirty miles' walk, is accompanied by a disinclination 
 
132 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 to mental effort ; that, after a month's pedestrian 
 tour, the mental inertia is such that some days are 
 required to overcome it ; and that in peasants who 
 spend their lives in muscular labour the activity of 
 mind is very small. . . . During those fits of rapid 
 growth which sometimes occur in childhood, the great 
 abstraction of energy is shown in an attendant pros- 
 tration, bodily and mental. . . . Violent muscular 
 exertion after eating will stop digestion ; children 
 who are early put to hard labour become stunted;" 
 these facts "similarly imply that excess of activity 
 in one direction involves deficiency of it in other 
 directions. Now, the law which is thus manifest in 
 extreme cases, holds in all cases. These injurious 
 abstractions of energy as certainly take place 
 when the undue demands are slight and constant, 
 as when they are great and sudden. Hence, if 
 during youth the expenditure in mental labour 
 exceeds that which nature has provided for, the 
 expenditure for other purposes falls below what it 
 should have been ; and evils of one kind or other 
 are inevitably entailed. . . . The brain, which during 
 early years is relatively large in mass but imperfect 
 in structure, will, if required to perform its functions 
 with undue activity, undergo a structural advance 
 greater than is appropriate to its age ; but the 
 ultimate effect will be a falling short of the size 
 and power that would else have been attained. And 
 this is a part cause — probably the chief cause — why 
 precocious children, and youths who up to a certain 
 time were carrying all before them, so often stop 
 short and disappoint the hopes of their parents. . . . 
 Various degrees and forms of bodily derangement, 
 often taking years of enforced idleness to set partially 
 
THE QUESTION OF OVERPRESSURE. 1 33 
 
 right, result from this prolonged over-exertion of 
 mind. Sometimes the heart is chiefly affected ; 
 habitual palpitations ; a pulse much enfeebled ; and 
 very generally a diminution in the number of beats 
 from seventy-two to sixty, or even fewer. Some- 
 times the conspicuous disorder is of the stomach ; 
 a dyspepsia which makes life a burden, and is amen- 
 able to no remedy but time. In many cases both 
 heart and stomach are implicated, mostly the sleep 
 is short and broken. And very generally there is 
 more or less mental depression. Excessive study 
 is a terrible mistake, from whatever point of view 
 regarded. It is a mistake in so far as the mere 
 acquirement of knowledge is concerned. For the 
 mind, like the body, cannot assimilate beyond a 
 certain rate ; and if you ply it with facts faster than 
 it can assimilate them, they are soon rejected again: 
 instead of being built into the intellectual fabric they 
 fall out of recollection. ... It is a mistake too, 
 because it tends to make study distasteful; ... it 
 is a mistake also, inasmuch as it assumes that the 
 acquisition of knowledge is everything ; and forgets 
 that a much more important thing is the organisa- 
 tion of knowledge, for which time and spontaneous 
 thinking are requisite. ... It is not the knowledge 
 stored up as intellectual fat which is of value ; but 
 that which is turned into intellectual muscle. ... A 
 comparatively small and ill-made engine, worked at 
 high pressure, will do more than a large and well- 
 finished one working at low pressure. What folly 
 it is, then, while finishing the engine, so to damage 
 the boiler that it will not generate steam ! " ^ 
 
 The overpressure of which Spencer complains is 
 
 * Spencer, Education y chap, iv., pp. 174-186, /^zw////. (Tr.) 
 
134 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 much more exceptional in England than in France, 
 where it may be said to be the rule. The pupils of the 
 lyceums in Paris have four hours daily in class, and 
 seven hours of preparation : eleven hours altogether ; 
 and those who take up rhetoric and philosophy are 
 allowed an additional half-hour. Eleven and a half 
 hours' work per day ! During the scanty time allowed 
 for recreation, they stop in a corner of the playground 
 and talk together, or walk about like " grave citizens." 
 Of games of ball or tennis the boys in our lyceums 
 know nothing. "Are there many grown-up men 
 among us who work eleven hours a day ? " asks M. 
 Simon. Quality of work is far better than quantity. 
 This has been shown experimentally in the London 
 schools. Chad wick, inspector of either schools or work- 
 shops in England, was one of the founders of " half- 
 time" schools. His experiment in London was as 
 follows : — He divided the boys of a school into two 
 series of almost equal strength — the ist, 3rd, Sth, 7th, 
 and 2nd, 4th, 6th, Sth, etc. One of the series worked 
 all day, the other worked half the day ; after a time 
 they were set to work together. The half-time school 
 often beat the full-time school ; and " if it beat it at 
 school- work, it d fortiori beat it in games." It was 
 shown that two hours* good work was of more value 
 than four hours' indifferent work.^ 
 
 How many masters have the boys who are taught 
 rhetoric in the lyceums of Paris ? M. Jules Simon, 
 formerly Minister of Public Instruction, is in a better 
 
 ^ In 1832 Chadwick was a Chief Commissioner on the Poor Law 
 Commission, and in 1833 he was a member of the Central Board of 
 the Factory Commission. For account of Sir Edwin Chadwick's efforts, 
 vide Dr. B. W. Richardson's Health of Nations, vol. i. See also 
 Matthew Arnold, Reports on Elementary Schools (1889), pp. 58, 242. 
 (Tr.) 
 
THE QUESTION OF OVERPRESSURE. 1 35 
 
 situation to tell us than most men. First of all there 
 is a teacher of French rhetoric, and then a teacher 
 of Latin rhetoric. The former teaches five, and the 
 latter six hours a week. Then the mathematical 
 master has two hours, chemistry is contented with one 
 hour, German or English (at choice) one hour also ; 
 the history master takes three hours. Each of the six 
 masters has a very full syllabus. " For example, the 
 master of French rhetoric does not merely teach 
 rhetoric; he also gives a course in the history of 
 French literature. Naturally the master of Latin 
 rhetoric does the same with Latin literature. Then 
 come the German and English masters, who teach the 
 history of their respective literatures; indeed, this is 
 the best part of their work. It is agreed that if a boy 
 wants to know English or German, he must learn it 
 after having finished his other work. The history 
 master teaches history and geography, but with such 
 a wealth of detail and such marvellous erudition, that 
 his teaching cannot possibly give any idea of, say, 
 the ensemble of a country, nor of the sequence of 
 events." What can the boys do in the presence of 
 these six masters, who bring them a number of " theses 
 on French authors, Latin authors, Greek authors, 
 German authors;" interminable demonstrations in 
 geometry and arithmetic ; the endless nomenclature 
 of natural history, historical facts enough to make a 
 Benedictine shudder.^ What better can be done for 
 this boy with so many masters than to store up in his 
 head with all rapidity these fine things ? If he takes 
 the trouble to ask his master a question on some point 
 
 ^ An allusion to the pedantry of the school-men. Vide Compayre, 
 Histoire Critique des Doctrines de V Education en France (1885), p. 70. 
 (Tr.) 
 
136 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 as it occurs, the answer is — " Detail ! what more do 
 you want? There is no time. There is no time." If 
 the lad should ask his master to stop a moment and 
 explain something to him, the master is already- 
 several ideas ahead — he would never catch up again ; 
 his neighbour and competitor would have stored up a 
 dozen ideas while he, poor fellow, was stopping at the 
 first : he would be bottom of the class ! " When he is 
 stuffed and crammed in this way, when he has piled 
 up and pressed down all his mental stock, the moment 
 comes when he has to admit — * there is no more 
 room ! ' but the master is behind him and cries — * A 
 little courage ! only about fifty more facts and a 
 mere dozen or so of proofs.* The net result is that 
 our boys at the lyceums are crammed with ideas they 
 do not understand, and with facts over which they 
 have no control. Are the facts true ? are the ideas 
 false ? That is not their business. They have to 
 keep them in their heads, not to criticise them. A jury 
 of masters is impanelled, gorgeous in rose or yellow 
 silk hoods ; they summon the delinquents, and make 
 them draw numbers by lot. * Gentlemen, each num- 
 ber has fifty facts to repeat' If a candidate answers, 
 * I know sixty ' — which is very rare — he is hailed the 
 first." And afterwards? — this bachelor, licentiate, or 
 doctor, what is he ? A store-house, with its boxes 
 and shelves crammed with all sorts of ideas of which 
 he does not know the value, and facts of which he 
 does not know the authenticity ; his memory is so 
 overloaded that when he tries to live, dragging this 
 load behind him, he spills the contents on his way 
 through life. His memory becomes a blank ; but as 
 it was cultivated at the expense of all else, and as it 
 is clear the rest never existed, once his store is lost. 
 
THE QUESTION OF OVERPRESSURE. 1 37 
 
 he has no means of renewing it ; he has neither 
 energy nor method to study alone, nor judgment to 
 see for himself and appreciate, nor will to form a 
 resolution. He is a baccalaureus, not a man ; for what 
 is man, if he be not judgment and will ? And, adds 
 Jules Simon, the master is himself the first victim of 
 this mandarin system. They begin by imposing on 
 him the programmes of work he imposes on the 
 children ; and before robbing the latter of their 
 liberty, they take very good care to deprive the 
 former of it. The greatest crime a master can com- 
 mit in class is to be himself ; if he is so unfortunate 
 as not to follow the syllabus exactly, and not to con- 
 form blindly to official instructions and circulars, he 
 is lost. He is conceited, and will never get on, and is 
 lucky if he does not lose his employment. " I do not 
 attack him," adds M. Simon ; *' on the contrary, I am 
 sorry for him, for in reality he is not in the class-room, 
 where he is nailed for four hours a day. The greatest 
 reproach I can utter against this overpressure is 
 that by oppressing the masters it suppresses them. 
 I cannot help feeling that these boys who go from 
 French Rhetoric to Latin Rhetoric, from German to 
 History, from Chemistry to Mathematics, are left to 
 themselves. They are not helped at all, because they 
 are helped by too many people. There are professors, 
 but no teachers ; there are students and an audience, 
 but no scholars ; there is instruction, but no education. 
 They make bachelors, licentiates, and doctors, but 
 making a man is out of the question ; on the con- 
 trary, they spend fifteen years in destroying his man- 
 hood. What do they turn out for the community ? 
 A ridiculous little mandarin, who has no muscles ; who 
 cannot leap a gate ; who cannot give his elbows play, 
 
138 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 or fire a gun, or ride ; who is afraid of everything. But, 
 on the other hand, he is crammed with every kind of 
 useless knowledge ; he does not know the most neces- 
 sary things ; he can neither give advice to anybody 
 else nor to himself; he needs guidance in everything ; 
 and feeling his weakness, and having lost his leading- 
 strings, he, as a last resource, throws himself into 
 State socialism. The State must take me by the 
 hand as the University has done up to now. It has 
 taught me nothing but passive obedience. A citizen, 
 did you say ? I should perhaps be a citizen if I were 
 a man." 
 
 We know that when the Academic de M^decine 
 took up this question, M. Peter spoke very strongly 
 on overpressure. The University course is not made 
 for what may be termed the average intellectual 
 capacity ; they rise above this average, and daily, 
 under the pretext of completing the programmes, 
 make them still more impossible. When a muscle is 
 fatigued by excess, it becomes curved, owing to the 
 accumulation of the products of disintegration ; simi- 
 larly the brain, when fatigued beyond measure, is 
 exposed to the obstruction caused by the waste of 
 life, to a real curvature. The first symptom of 
 this state is violent headache. If this preliminary 
 warning receives no attention, if the work goes 
 on as before, if the curvature increases, the head- 
 ache becomes periodic, more and more frequent, 
 and becomes maddening from the continued intellec- 
 tual strain. A kind of veil is drawn over the intellect, 
 and the ideas get entangled. M. Peter sees an 
 analogy between this and writer's cramp in the 
 muscle, a functional spasm affecting the brain. But 
 this is only the beginning of pathological phenomena. 
 
THE QUESTION OF OVERPRESSURE. 1 39 
 
 Cerebral and intellectual overwork is almost non- 
 existent in the primary schools.^ In secondary 
 
 ^ Overwork may exist in towns, but not in rural schools. In the 
 latter the children do too little home-work, and are too often absent 
 to feel brain fatigue. The dangers really existing in the village school 
 do not arise from overpressure, but from staying in a necessarily 
 vitiated atmosphere. That is the danger, and this is the remedy. Com- 
 pel every backward and refractory commune to provide proper school 
 buildings, large enough for the demand, and provided with good 
 apparatus. On the other hand, I may append a few rules that, if 
 followed, would prevent fatigue in the children in primary schools : — 
 ** Rules formulated by the Society d'Hygiene de Geneve {Revue Peda- 
 gogique, March 15th). The first hours in morning school should be 
 devoted to those subjects demanding most intellectual effort. Lessons 
 should be broken off every hour for recreation, allowing each pupil 
 opportunity for bodily exercise. " The regulations in France do not allow 
 of recreation every hour ; but motions with the arms might be gone 
 through, the children standing in their places. ** In general, the 
 master should stop teaching as soon as he sees signs of fatigue or 
 excitement in the children, and should let them rest a few moments. 
 All lessons should be arranged so as to be alternately active or passive 
 — /.^., the children should be called upon to speak, listen, and apply 
 the teaching given. Long written exercises should be avoided. Child- 
 ren should only be required to learn what they thoroughly understand. 
 The home-lessons should be as limited as possible. They should be in 
 proportion to the child's age, they should be such as can be done with 
 delight and pleasure, and should satisfy the demands of quality rather 
 than of quantity. Impositions should as a rule be prohibited, and in 
 any case should appeal to the intellect of the child." 
 
 The Academic de Medecine appointed a Commission to find a remedy 
 for intellectual overpressure. This Commission drew up a report ; the 
 principal items affecting primary education were as follows : — From 
 three to eight hours per day, according to the child's age, should be the 
 limit of intellectual work. Twenty to thirty minutes should be the 
 outside length of each lesson for children ; the syllabus should be 
 reduced in proportion to the length of the lessons and time of prepara- 
 tion ; at present the examinations cover far too wide a ground, are too 
 encyclopsedic; partial and frequent examinations should be substituted 
 for them, limiting the intellectual strain, and allowing the intellect time 
 to assimilate the knowledge acquired. It is necessary to devote, 
 according to age, from six to ten hours a day to physical exercise 
 (games, walks, drill, etc.). 
 
140 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 schools it affects about one-third of the pupils, those 
 who wish to reach the top of the class, who are pre- 
 paring for an examination, or for entrance to a State 
 school.^ But in spite of this a certain amount of 
 overpressure obtains, even among the masters, and 
 this is due to the length of the lessons, and to the 
 sitting for too long a period in a close atmosphere. 
 Even if they do nothing, it makes no difference ; the 
 mere effort of sitting still fatigues and exhausts. 
 Finally, it is very fortunate that there are idle people ; 
 they save the race from too rapid degeneration. 
 
 In England the number of hours of brain-work is 
 about half as much as in France. The most hard- 
 working schools require no more than seven or eight 
 hours per day ; others are content with six. 
 
 ^ Although at the Central School of Arts and Manufactures the pupils 
 work only seven hours at school, they have to work four or five hours, 
 or even more, at home. In the Ecole Polytechnique, lessons and pre- 
 paration last eleven hours and a half, and during the time allowed for 
 recreation the hard-working pupils go to the library. In the lyceums 
 for young girls, and in the classes for teachers, the work is equally 
 excessive. 
 
 When we see from 25,000 to 30,000 young men and women, with no 
 means and unable to get work in spite of having had technical instruc- 
 tion, we regret that with this instruction they were not taught a trade 
 or handicraft, which, while preventing overpressure and a sedentary 
 life during school-days, might have eventually placed them, if occasion 
 arose, out of danger of want. '* As instruction in the army and the 
 schools is compulsory," says M. Lagneau, " the Minister of War and 
 the Minister of Education should arrange that gymnastics, fencing, 
 swimming, riding, walking, the handling of arms, military manoeuvres, 
 coming between the intellectual work of class and preparation, and 
 preventing overwork and sedentary habits, should count with science 
 and letters in the winning of diplomas and certificates, and should 
 decrease the period of compulsory military service. But a law analo- 
 gous to that of May 19th, 1874, is necessary, restraining excessive 
 manual labour of children in factories, and equally restraining excessive 
 intellectual labour of children and young people in all educational 
 establishments." 
 
THE QUESTION OF OVERPRESSURE. 141 
 
 Germany also may be taken as a model, but not so 
 much for reduction as for division of work. This 
 accounts for Bersot's saying : " When I saw the 
 German lessons interrupted every hour or every three- 
 quarters of an hour by recreation, I was ashamed of 
 our barbarity in shutting up children in a class-room 
 for three hours on end — three hours in the morning, 
 and three in the afternoon — at an age which is intoxi- 
 cated with life; and I cannot understand how it came 
 about that French children — the most restless in the 
 world — were ever subjected to this r^gimer Two 
 private institutions, the Ecole Monge and the Ecole 
 Alsacienne, have set the example. At the fecole 
 Monge, for instance, the eleven and a half — nay, even 
 twelve — hours per day of the boy at the lyceum are 
 reduced to nine ; the younger boys only work seven 
 hours and a half The longest spell of work without 
 a break is two hours and a half Every boy at the 
 Ecole Monge gives half-an-hour per day to gym- 
 nastics ; this is three times more than is allowed in 
 our lyceums.^ 
 
 The advantage, in the competition of races and 
 individuals alike, is not only, nor perhaps even 
 mainly, on the side of superiority of knowledge ; it 
 especially depends on the ample provision, natural or 
 acquired, of physical energy and intellectual good 
 sense, which alone can give knowledge its full 
 value. Hence the Commission d'Hygiene, inspired 
 by the example of the United States, is right in 
 bearing in mind the American rule of the three 
 eights — 8 hours sleep -|- 8 hours work -\- 8 hours 
 freedom = 24 hours. " We think," reported the Com- 
 
 ^ Vide M. Burdeau, V Ecole Monge, 
 
142 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 mission, " that this is an excellent rule, and that eight 
 hours' work should be considered a maximum which 
 the children of primary schools should never reach, 
 and which the children of other schools should never 
 exceed. The length of a lesson should be reduced to 
 an hour and a half."^ 
 
 Games must be multiplied, and carried on with 
 more life.^ 
 
 Finally, it is all-important to encourage bodily 
 exercise, so necessary for individual and race alike. 
 In his Emilef Jean-Jacques Rousseau gave an 
 impulse in favour of these exercises to a movement 
 which was propagated especially in Germany, where, 
 developed by national and warlike aspirations during 
 the War of Independence, the present system of 
 German gymnastics came into existence. To the 
 
 ^ Out of each lesson two hours long, at least from thirty-five to forty 
 minutes are wasted. Further, the child of eleven and the youth of 
 eighteen are subjected to the same rigime. Tasks and home-work in 
 the lower classes are by an abuse made to fill up the whole of the 
 child's day. Evening work begins about five and ends at half-past 
 seven or a quarter to eight. Two whole hours and a half are given up 
 to an exercise, translation, or problem in mathematics. 
 
 ^ They never play, at least in forms above the third ; they 
 walk round a dismal courtyard, generally treeless, from right to left — 
 not from left to right — in certain lyceums, where gyratory motion 
 sinistrorsum is considered as antagonistic to discipline. This is Dr. 
 Gauthier's statement. They never sing; shouting is a breach of 
 discipline, or barely tolerated; it fatigues the ears of the master, or 
 whoever does the supervision. Games of ball, bowls, skipping, leap- 
 frog, quoits, etc., etc., are quite unknown. The boys walk round and 
 round the narrow cages known as the playground; "they crouch in 
 the corners if it is cold or wet. Justly do the managers of sectarian 
 schools prefer violent games in which the staff take part, to the 
 malicious and suspicious gossip that goes on in other schools." 
 Further, this recreation time is only two and a half hours for the little 
 fellows, and only an hour and a half for the bigger boys. 
 
 '^ Book ii.,/^wm. (Tr.) 
 
THE QUESTION OF OVERPRESSURE. I43 
 
 latter system is now opposed a theoretical form of 
 bodily exercise, — Swedish gymnastics, — of which the 
 fundamental idea is the necessity of "confining 
 exercise to movements, really very varied, but as 
 simple as possible." These movements, exercised 
 against determinate resistances, ought "to methodically 
 strengthen each individual muscle, and to enable the 
 subject to attain the ideal of muscular development." 
 German gymnastics have been attacked from the 
 point of view of the English and their sports. Until 
 quite recently the English have had nothing analo- 
 gous to German gymnastics. Separated more than 
 ever from the Continent during the French revolution 
 and the Empire, they have been almost unaware of 
 the movement initiated by Rousseau. The aspirations 
 of Jahn, which bore more or less the stamp of German 
 . chauvinism, could find no entrance into England. 
 But the English, as Dubois-Reymond points out, felt 
 the need of gymnastics far less than continental 
 nations. Thanks to the country life of the wealthy 
 classes, and the common life of young people educated 
 in the great public schools, the numerous contests and 
 national games referred to above have been intro- 
 duced, which, by the variety of the movements 
 required, are an admirable exercise for the body : 
 the English mountain-climbers who have ascended 
 Chimborazo are an excellent instance in point. 
 The impassioned interest exhibited throughout Great 
 Britain in the annual boat-race between Oxford and 
 Cambridge — the " dark-blues " and " light-blues " — 
 can only be compared to the enthusiasm aroused in 
 the Greeks by their national games ; it excites youth 
 to greater efforts. 
 
 If, with the knowledge we now have of the different 
 
144 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 kinds of bodily exercise, we proceed to form an 
 opinion upon the relative value of the three forms — 
 German gymnastics, Swedish gymnastics, and English 
 sports, we may first of all remark that the second of 
 the three is of little use in the bodily development 
 of healthy youth. ^ Bodily exercise, says Dubois- 
 Reymond, is not merely muscular exercise, as super- 
 ficial observers wrongly suppose ; but it is what is of 
 far greater importance — an exercise of the grey matter 
 of the central nervous system. This alone condemns 
 the Swedish system from the physiological point of 
 view. The system may strengthen the muscles, but it 
 does not give facility in complex movements. " We 
 may even suppose the case of a physical training 
 which would give to the muscles of a Caspar Hauser 
 gigantic strength, while at the same time the victim 
 of the experiment would be unable even to walk. 
 Swedish gymnastics are only valuable from the 
 therapeutic point of view, to preserve or re-establish 
 the activity of certain groups of muscles (for very few 
 muscles can be contracted singly by mere will)." ^ 
 
 As for the relative value of German gymnastics and 
 English games, the latter correspond in a certain 
 measure to the requirements deduced from physio- 
 logical analysis. They make men skilful in running, 
 leaping, dancing, wrestling, riding, swimming, rowing, 
 and skating. But, according to Dubois-Reymond, 
 German gymnastics afford the possibility of giving 
 to an unlimited number of pupils, of every age and 
 condition, the opportunity of exercise with almost a 
 
 ^ Vide Article on "Gymnastics," Journal of Education, March 
 1891. (Tr.) 
 
 2 Dubois-Reymond, VExercice. — Vide Lagrange, L Hygiene de 
 VExercice, 1890, part v., chap, i., pp. 273-286. (Tr.) 
 
THE QUESTION OF OVERPRESSURE. T45 
 
 minimum of apparatus, and independent of condi- 
 tions which are often impossible to obtain ; and 
 further, it has the moral advantage of an effort which 
 has as its object " self-perfection as an ideal end, with- 
 out any immediate utility, — clearly resembling in this 
 the intellectual education which obtains in the German 
 gymnasiums;" in fact, the intelligent choice of German 
 exercises, confirmed and corrected by experience, 
 leads to a much greater uniformity in the develop- 
 ment of the body than could be attained if the 
 individual, as in England, obeying his inclinations, and 
 determined by any circumstance whatever, devoted 
 himself, according to his caprice and with the eager- 
 ness given by ambition, to rowing, or riding, or tennis, 
 or climbing mountains. A youth trained by the 
 German method possesses the great advantage of 
 being master of forms of movement adapted to each 
 position of the body, just as the thoroughly-grounded 
 mathematician is provided with methods for the 
 solution of every problem. Besides, nothing prevents 
 the German gymnast from passing from his theoreti- 
 cal exercises to any practical exercise of immediate 
 utility. " As he has learned how to learn, he will 
 rapidly acquire the utmost skill attainable from his 
 natural disposition, just as we are told the student 
 from the gymnasium very soon catches up to the 
 technical student in the laboratory." 
 
 Moreover, all bodily exercises are in favour among 
 the Germans ; riding, cycling, boating, and fencing 
 are much more popular than in France ; the State 
 compels two hours a day to be given up in all schools 
 to physical exercise under the direction of a special 
 teacher. At Berlin, gymnastics are under the care of 
 a Superintendent, just as we have a Head of the 
 
 10 
 
146 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 University in Paris. In Germany they feel that a 
 race without muscles, with nothing but nerves, a race 
 in which cerebral activity is dominant, is but ill 
 equipped in the struggle for existence.^ 
 
 English games do not deserve the strictures passed 
 upon them by Dubois-Reymond as compared with 
 the more scientific system of the Germans ; the latter 
 is far too much like a lesson. " In this, as in other 
 cases, to remedy the evils of one artificiality, another 
 artificiality has been introduced. Natural spontaneous 
 exercise having been forbidden, and the bad conse- 
 quences of no exercise having become conspicuous, 
 a system of what Spencer calls * factitious exercise ' 
 has been adopted. That this is better than nothing 
 we admit; 2 but that it is an adequate substitute for 
 games we deny." The defects of gymnastic exercises 
 "are both positive and negative. In the first place, 
 these formal muscular motions, necessarily less varied 
 than those accompanying juvenile sports, do not 
 secure so equable a distribution of action to all parts 
 of the body; whence it follows that the exertion 
 falling on special parts produces fatigue sooner than 
 it would else have done; to which, in passing, let 
 us add, that if constantly repeated, this exertion of 
 special parts leads to a disproportionate development.^ 
 The quantity of exercise thus taken will be deficient, 
 and that not merely in consequence of uneven dis- 
 tribution ; for there will be a further deficiency in 
 consequence of lack of interest. Even when not 
 made repulsive, as they sometimes are, by being 
 to all intents and purposes lessons, these monotonous 
 
 * Vide Cambon, De France en Allemagne. 
 2 Vide Dubois-Reymond. 
 
 * Vide Lagrange, IJ Hygiene et f Exercice, part v., chap. ii. (Tr.) 
 
THE QUESTION OF OVERPRESSURE. I47 
 
 movements are sure to become wearisome from the 
 absence of amusement. Competition, it is true, serves 
 as a stimulus ; but it is not a lasting stimulus, like 
 the enjoyment accompanying varied play. . . . Besides 
 being inferior in respect of the quantity of muscular 
 exertion which they secure, gymnastics are still more in- 
 ferior in respect of the quality. This comparative want 
 of enjoyment which we have named as a cause of early 
 desistance from artificial exercises, is also a cause of 
 inferiority in the effects they produce on the system. 
 The common assumption, that so long as the amount 
 of bodily action is the same, it matters not whether it 
 be pleasurable or otherwise, is a grave mistake. An 
 agreeable mental excitement must have a highly 
 invigorating influence. See the effect produced on 
 an invalid by good news, or by the visit of an old 
 friend. Mark how careful medical men are to recom- 
 mend lively society to debilitated patients. Remem- 
 ber how beneficial to health is the gratification 
 produced by change of scene. The truth is that 
 happiness is the most powerful of tonics. By accel- 
 erating the circulation of the blood, it facilitates the 
 performance of every function, and so tends alike to 
 increase health when it exists and to restore it when 
 it has been lost. Hence the intrinsic superiority of 
 play to gymnastics. The extreme interest felt by 
 children in their games, and the riotous glee with 
 which they carry on their rougher frolics, are of as 
 much importance as the accompanying exertion. And, 
 as not supplying these mental stimuli, gymnastics 
 must be radically defective. Granting then, as we do, 
 that formal exercises of the limbs are better than 
 nothing — granting, further, that they may be used 
 with advantage as supplementary aids ; we yet 
 
148 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 contend that they can never serve in place of exercises 
 prompted by Nature. For girls, as well as boys, 
 the sportive activities to which the instincts impel arc 
 essential to bodily welfare."^ 
 
 In France we have gone too far in making 
 gymnastics military. Under the influence of a 
 certainly noble, but too technical idea, there is an 
 increasing tendency to militarise education. What 
 we may call military sport as opposed to games, says 
 M. de Coubertin, will never make good citizens. The 
 numerous sporting and gymnastic societies founded 
 since the war form, we cannot deny, a valuable 
 training-school in patriotism and discipline ; but, on 
 the other hand, the military apparatus with which 
 they are surrounded is likely to give rise to narrow 
 views, and to stamp out that individual initiative, the 
 development of which should have been their main 
 object. The two or three aquatic societies at Paris 
 are far more useful in this respect than the thirty- 
 three gymnastic societies with their 3041 members in 
 the twenty arrondissements of our metropolis.^ 
 
 M. de Laprade asked with justifiable amazement 
 how it is that as the Greeks are deemed worthy of 
 imitation in their poetry, sculpture, philosophy, and 
 politics, we have run counter to their system on the 
 very point in which it was best — the physical educa- 
 tion of the young. If we reduce the hours of work 
 to eight, and allow an hour and a half for meals, 
 there are still three hours and a half for recreation and 
 two for gymnastics. Games must be once more placed 
 in an impregnable and honourable position. After 
 borrowing the boarding-school from the Jesuits, we 
 
 ^ Spencer, Education^ pp. 171, 172. (Tr.) 
 ^ V Education en Angle terre. 
 
THE QUESTION OF OVERPRESSURE. I49 
 
 should be wrong not to borrow also its corrective, 
 which they have had the wisdom to keep. In former 
 days games and bodily exercise had, in fact, an 
 important place in their colleges. The Jesuit schools 
 are almost the only schools in which the children 
 play and run as of old. " That is the education I 
 want to borrow from the reverend fathers," says M. 
 Legouve, " the education of the legs." 
 
 Unfortunately it is useless to tell children to play ; 
 what indeed can they play at in playgrounds too 
 small for one-sixth of their number? M. Dupanloup 
 tells us that a boy said to him one day : " If only 
 you knew, sir, how it bores us to amuse ourselves that 
 way!" However, things are so; and now they even 
 set a game (just like a lesson), and give tasks and 
 punishments to children who do not take part in 
 them, or who do not enter into them with sufficient 
 zest. Which is certainly delightfully ingenuous. 
 Hence, to avoid undeserved punishment, the children 
 learn hypocrisy, and pretend to play till the super- 
 vision master has turned his back and they can renew 
 the interrupted conversation. 
 
 At the lyceum, gymnastics take place during re- 
 creation hours, and as to each trapeze there are many 
 boys, each pupil scarcely has a chance of turning 
 more than one somersault per day, and of course 
 none on Thursday and Sunday. " Why then," asks 
 M. Coubertin, "is not the gymnasium always open, 
 giving every boy an opportunity of exercising his 
 biceps when he takes it into his head ?" 
 
 In summer there are cold baths — lasting for two 
 months; the rest of the year there are no baths. 
 One college has a swimming bath — the lyceum 
 at Vanves, a school remarkably well organised. 
 
ISO EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 Unfortunately this bath, not being covered, is unused 
 in winter. Take a corresponding instance in England. 
 "At Harrow," says M. Coubertin, "each of the five 
 hundred boys pays about twelve francs a year towards 
 the bath : this is not dear.*' To return to games — 
 the exercise par excellence — on the rare occasions on 
 which French schoolboys have been left undisturbed 
 to join in any game whatever, the zest with which 
 they engaged in their amusement has been very 
 noticeable. 
 
 What our schoolboys lack is not ardour for games, 
 but sufficient space for their gambols. That is the 
 real difficulty. Land is always dear in the towns ; but, 
 as has been remarked, nothing prevents provincial 
 schools from taking the country itself as their play- 
 ground. As for Paris, the State might well allot the 
 necessary space on public ground, and the railway 
 companies would issue tickets to squads from the 
 lyceums at reduced fares.^ 
 
 IV. Manual Work in Schools. 
 
 As in the case of games, manual labour has its 
 hygienic effect, and serves the race in the individual. 
 In England there are workshops everywhere, in which 
 boys engage in different kinds of manual labour, 
 carpentry and metallurgy, under the direction of a 
 
 ^ Since this book was written, M. Philippe Daryl has written an excel- 
 lent book on games and the Renaissance Physique^ and a society has 
 been formed for the physical education of the young. The Minister 
 has appointed a Commission to investigate the subject. A summary of 
 the report of the Commission will be found in the Journal of Educa- 
 tion for March 1891. (Tr.) 
 
MANUAL WORK IN SCHOOLS. 151 
 
 skilled workman.^ This is the realisation of the wish 
 of Jean-Jacques Rousseau f but the latter was guided 
 in its expression by a sentiment of poetry and 
 equality, whereas the English had merely "the practical 
 side of the question in view — viz., the advantage of 
 manual training in fashioning wood and iron." The 
 young Americans who, in the University of Ithaca, 
 read high mathematics, philosophy, or history, feel 
 no shame at spending several hours of every day 
 in honourably earning the necessary funds for the 
 acquisition of that knowledge which may in the 
 future lead them to the highest posts in the State. 
 In 1870 about fifty of the students took advantage 
 of the opportunity afforded them. The University 
 paid ;^6oo for the results of their work, and the 
 professors noticed that those who devoted themselves 
 to physical labour had profited by the lectures equally 
 with the rest of their fellow-students. Three hours of 
 manual labour were by no means adverse to mental 
 work. In French primary schools manual training 
 has been introduced, and the official instructions have 
 advised the teachers that this new subject, clearly 
 conceived apart from all professional prospects, ought 
 pre-eminently to have as its object the giving to the 
 child manual dexterity in the elementary use of 
 tools, refinement of taste, and a knowledge of the 
 material world around it.^ " Manual labour," said 
 Emerson, "is the study of the external world." By 
 manual labour in the schools we usually understand 
 the use of the principal tools in the working of iron 
 
 ' This statement, it is to be hoped, will be literally true— after 
 England has her Intermediate Act. (Tr.) 
 ^ Emite, bk. iii. (Tr.) 
 ^ Vuie Com)^2iyYij Organisation PeJagogiqus{i2>()i),^^ 41, 178. (Tr.) 
 
152 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 and wood. The real object of this work, as introduced 
 in general education, is not to teach the child a 
 given profession, but simply to develop his intellectual, 
 aesthetic, and physical faculties, his knowledge of real 
 things, and his skill. The carpenter's shop and the 
 blacksmith's forge may be employed in their educa- 
 tion without our wishing to turn out a carpenter 
 or a blacksmith. Its result ought especially to be 
 to familiarise the pupil with the properties of wood 
 and iron, to accustom his eye and hand to work 
 together, to accustom him to accurate measurements, 
 in fact, to teach him to fashion an object by the aid 
 of his tools and with delicate taste, with no help 
 but a given design. The discipline of the workshop 
 ought to be considered as complementary to that 
 of the drawing-class; they are inseparable; one gives 
 the knowledge oi form^ the other familiarises with 
 matter. To suppose that the best teaching is what we 
 get from books is what Spencer calls a " prejudice of 
 the Middle Ages.' 
 
 As a matter of fact, all games become work when 
 children wish to succeed in them. The first work 
 that little children do is play. Play gives us an 
 opportunity of judging their character and of 
 developing it in the direction of perseverance and 
 active energy. The ideal is the most frequent 
 possible blending of work and play, of recreation 
 and instruction. 
 
 The holidays ought to afford the opportunity for 
 bodily exercise and for walking, especially in the 
 mountains, where the air is pure. " Among them," 
 says Tyndall, " I annually renew my lease of Hfe, 
 and restore the balance between mind and body 
 which the purely intellectual discipline of London 
 
MANUAL WORK IN SCHOOLS. 1 53 
 
 IS calculated to destroy."^ With the object of 
 amusing and occupying young people in a reason- 
 able manner during two months' holiday, the French 
 Alpine Club has organised caravanes scolaires with 
 the following object : — " To bring together young 
 people of the same age, to carry them up into the 
 mountains face to face with the noblest sights of 
 nature; by walks together, knapsack on back and 
 iron-shod stick in hand, to prepare them for the trials 
 of the year's voluntary military service, and even for 
 the fatigues of war ; to guarantee to them during the 
 expedition the careful superintendence of an expe- 
 rienced master, and lessons in physics, geology, and 
 botany, given in the open air and under the blue 
 sky, during the halts ; to amuse the mind without 
 ceasing to instruct it ; to elevate the mind and at 
 the same time strengthen the body." Many large 
 schools have already adopted this course, and have 
 instituted travels during the long and short vacations. 
 Beside being an admirable application of hygienic 
 principles, there is underlying all this a moral and 
 patriotic idea. Unfortunately these expeditions, 
 being rather costly, are not within the reach of 
 every purse.^ 
 
 M. Cottinet conceived the idea of taking the 
 children for a month into the country or to the 
 seaside, without its costing their parents anything, 
 thanks to voluntary subscriptions. He tells us that 
 experience showed that this mere month in the 
 
 ^ Vide Preface to Mountaineering, (Tr. ) 
 
 2 The pupils at the Ecole Normale Superieure are encouraged to spend 
 their vacations at various laboratories on the French coast — Roscoff, 
 Banyuls, Concarneau, Wimereux, Saint-Waast, etc. Vide an interest- 
 ing account from the pen of Dr. Houssay, Revue Internationale de 
 VEnseig7teinent, April 1891. (Tr.") 
 
154 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 country effected an heroic cure. " Two things have 
 been ascertained with equal certainty : before the 
 departure for the country the weight and chest 
 measurement of these children was lamentably below 
 the average for their age ; on their return the pro- 
 portion was reversed ; they had gained five, ten, and 
 even twenty times the normal increase during that 
 period ! " 
 
 The teacher in charge of the boys' colony at 
 Bussang has introduced an improvement into the 
 hygienic register of results obtained. This is an 
 individual statement on the physical condition of 
 each child. This statement is based upon the 
 declarations of the parents and of the head-master 
 of the child's school, and upon a thorough medical 
 examination before leaving home. It is completed 
 upon their return by a comparison of the results 
 obtained. If the doctors attached to our primary 
 schools would adopt and generalise this method, if 
 they would introduce for each child a health sheets 
 to be revised monthly or quarterly, great progress 
 would be made. We could keep an account of 
 what the children gain in health and strength — the 
 two elements of wealth to the individual and the 
 race. 
 
 The reorganisation of physical education in France 
 is all the more important because of the physical 
 degeneration of the race. Heredity will, if we do 
 not take care, eventually bring on progressive de- 
 generation, and our intellect, far from gaining, will 
 lose by it. Being an intellectual people, we have 
 a superstitious belief in intellectual instruction. We 
 must be cured of it and be convinced that a robust 
 and productive man is much more important to the 
 
PHYSICAL PROGRESS OF THE RACE. 155 
 
 race than a man who has furnished his memory with 
 a mass of mostly useless knowledge. 
 
 V. The Physical Progress of the Race, and the Growth 
 of Population. 
 
 With the question of heredity and education are 
 closely connected the questions of physical fertility 
 and population, in so far as they are subject to the 
 will of man, his beliefs, ideas, and his real or apparent 
 interests. This question is of capital importance to 
 the French nation. I have already treated it fully 
 elsewhere, but I must here again lay emphasis upon 
 the momentous character of the danger which 
 threatens us. 
 
 At the last census taken in Germany, December 
 1885, the population of the new Empire reached the 
 total of 46,855,704. In 1870 the number on the same 
 territory was only 40,816,249. If we take into account 
 the number of emigrants and the birth-rate, the 
 effective increase reaches the total of 535,444. So 
 that in one year the population of the German 
 Empire increases by more than half a million. Let 
 us suppose this movement to continue with the pro- 
 portional increase of the decennial period 1871 to 
 1880, and in barely sixty years the present population 
 would be doubled. After the wars of the first Empire, 
 in 1 8 16, the countries of the Germanic Confederation, 
 which now form part of United Germany, had a com- 
 bined population of twenty-four millions. They will 
 have a hundred and seventy millions at the end of the 
 next century, with a density of 525 per square mile, 
 as against 130 in 1880, without territorial increase. 
 
156 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 Compared with the progress of the German Empire, 
 the population of France is almost stationary, barely 
 reaching the total of 37,321,186 from the census of 
 1 88 1, as against 32,569,223 in 1831. There is only 
 an annual increase of 0.2 per cent, in the interval of 
 the two last quinquennial returns — that is to say, six 
 or seven times less than the numerical increase of the 
 Germans. This is a momentous fact, and well worthy 
 of the attention not only of statisticians, but especially 
 of statesmen anxious concerning the future ; for when 
 a nation ceases to advance, it lags behind, and allows 
 political preponderance to pass into the hands of 
 more vigorous races. 
 
 Mr. Myers, criticising the chapters relating to popu- 
 lation in my Irrdigion de VAvenir^ attributes to 
 " modern French pessimism " a depressing influence 
 upon the growth of population in France. I do not 
 quite understand the sterilising influence thus attri- 
 buted to pessimism. We may ask ourselves if 
 pessimism, once become general in a nation, can of 
 itself be the cause of infecundity. The Chinese and 
 Japanese have been cradled from their infancy in the 
 idea that all existence is nothing ; moreover, they 
 have no doctrine based upon immortality; Buddhism 
 is on this point more negative than positive, but they 
 breed none the less. This is because they have a 
 family cult, like the ancient Jews, who also had no 
 distinct belief in immortality.^ In this problem what 
 
 ^ Is there even such a thing as "modern French pessimism"? I do not 
 know whether it would not have been better to have said modern pessi- 
 mism in France. No doubt pessimism did exist at a certain period, and 
 still exists in a fashion in Parisian salons, where a number of used-up 
 and dissipated rakes eagerly assume this serious name. But not a single 
 philosopher, from Taine, Renouvier, Ravaisson, to Fouillee and Ribot, 
 has defended pessimism. M. Zola, a novelist, a powerful genius, but 
 
PHYSICAL PROGRESS OF THE RACE. 157 
 
 ought to particularly engage our interest is the mental 
 attitude of the masses, especially of the peasants, who 
 alone populate or depopulate a country. 
 
 Now the French peasant is anything but a pessi- 
 mist. He, as it has been said, is remarkable for 
 taking life on the best side. Moreover, the majority 
 of the French nation have kept a basis of spiritualism, 
 and if the peasant has often rejected religious 
 dogmas, he regards with none the less awe the great 
 problem of death ; the most sceptical will tell you in 
 his own simple language that burying a dog is not 
 the same thing as burying a man ; death in his 
 opinion should be accompanied by words of hope, 
 and therein he thinks lies the utility of the priest. 
 And this state of things is a growth of the present 
 day. But it is quite true to say that these principles 
 — respect for death and wavering belief in immortality 
 
 with tendencies sombre and often obscene, has made it his business 
 to summon up in his works more or less horrible images, but that is an 
 individual case, and a matter of artistic rather than philosophic doctrine. 
 No doubt M. Renan will be quoted to me, but that admirable writer, if 
 he had his pessimistic days, appears now to be converted to optimism. 
 Perhaps in his more confidential moods he will tell us that the 
 truth lies between the two, and that we might well sustain the 
 two theses successively. In poetry our greatest name, Victor Hugo, 
 is anything but that of a pessimist, or even of a sceptic. He has 
 always struggled with might and main against sceptical ideas. This 
 is perhaps not the case with the great English poets, Byron and 
 Shelley, with Heine in Germany, and Leopardi in Italy. The poetae 
 minores may be quoted to me — Madame Ackermann, Baudelaire, and 
 Richepin. But Madame Ackermann, who has written verses, pessi- 
 mistic, well thought out but a trifle declamatory, and Baudelaire — 
 who seems to have really had a craze — are only read by a limited circle. 
 As for M. Richepin, how can we take that skilful verse-maker and 
 rhetorician seriously? We read him in the same frame of mind as that 
 in which we watch a very clever juggler. His pessimism is nothing but 
 ** matter" for French verses, as if it were the subject for Latin verses 
 at the lyceum and Ecole normale. 
 
158 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 — taken in connection with the real failing of the 
 French peasant (who is a very dcHberate cal- 
 culator, and growing more and more deliberate), 
 are not enough to carry him forward to that 
 practical and perhaps rather unexpected conclusion — 
 not easily referable to its premises — "increase and 
 multiply." From the moment that economical and 
 social motives are placed in the first line, the question 
 of fecundity becomes pre-eminently an object of 
 economic and social reform, a matter of both moral 
 and public education. 
 
 It is necessary in public education not to openly 
 discuss the question of wilful infecundity, but to show 
 the advantage to the race, the country, and the family 
 of a large population. The numbers I have just 
 given of the population of Germany are in themselves 
 eloquent enough. Economic, moral, and social pre- 
 judices have yet to be dissipated in France — and the 
 economists have had no small share in the dissemina- 
 tion of those prejudices. It is not difficult in the 
 primary schools and lyceums, in the teaching of 
 geography and political economy, to lay great weight 
 on the element of power, intellectual wealth, and 
 social selection, that is brought to a State by a large 
 population. By holding meetings of soldiers, or 
 workmen, or peasants, we have the opportunity of 
 pointing out these advantages ; there is no need 
 whatever to enter into details that may outrage 
 modest ears. All we have to do is to accustom 
 every mind to think upon the future of the nation 
 and of the race. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE OBJECT AND METHOD OF INTELLECTUAL 
 EDUCATION. 
 
 I. The object and method of intellectual education. 
 
 II. Methods of teaching — Cultivation of attention — Intuition and 
 action — Memory — Prejudices with respect to cultivation of the memory. 
 
 III. Choice of subjects— Distinction between really useful knowledge 
 and mere accomplishments. 
 
 I. The Object and Method of Intellectual Education, 
 
 The education of childhood and early youth is not 
 and ought not to be pursued except for its own sake. 
 If we start from the principle that every human 
 faculty exists in the brain of a child, the object of 
 education will be to favour the normal, complete, and 
 harmonious development of each and all of those 
 faculties, which, as some one has said, will soon 
 enough have their equilibrium disturbed by life 
 itself. 
 
 It is of the utmost importance that at the moment 
 of taking a decisive step in life a young man should 
 be well aware of what he is and all that he is, in order 
 that he may not follow one path more than another, 
 or abandon himself to the dominant faculty, if he has 
 one, without, so to speak, full knowledge of the reason 
 why. Besides, from the point of view of that very 
 faculty, the most favourable condition for its 
 dominance is that it should feel itself sustained. 
 
l60 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 or as it were furthered, by every other faculty. In a 
 word, education prepares the soil ; the seed will be 
 sown at a later period when the time arrives for 
 professional education ; but for the seed to rise, the 
 ground as a whole must be prepared, for who can tell 
 the exact spot where it will germinate ? 
 
 In education the first place must be awarded to the 
 common interests of the individual and the species, 
 to what can develop simultaneously the intensity and 
 expansion of life. We must not consider the indi- 
 vidual solely in himself, as a point in space, in abstrac- 
 tion from the moral and intellectual atmosphere in 
 which he is completely immersed, and which is per- 
 haps, equally with the terrestrial atmosphere, the very 
 condition of his being. If the first necessity is to live, 
 surely the second is to obtain the means of so doing 
 — ue., of adapting himself to his environment. Now, 
 man being made to live among men, we cannot go too 
 far in the process of moulding the child for social life, 
 in counteracting his egoistic instincts, when they first 
 unfold, by the development of altruistic and social 
 instincts, which ought to play some day so important 
 a part in his individual life. Now, if pre-eminent 
 importance is attached to the interests common to the 
 individual and the species, what are those interests ? 
 The preservation of the individual is certainly indis- 
 pensable to the species, and education ought to tend 
 to ensure the maintenance, the development, and 
 energy of physical life, because upon it depends the 
 hereditary vigour of the race. It is therefore, one may 
 say, the primary necessity, the basis of all others ; 
 hence the importance of gymnastics and hygiene so 
 fully appreciated by the Greeks, and so neglected by 
 us. But here a possible antinomy may be pointed 
 
OBJECT OF INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION. l6l 
 
 out between interests of the body and those of intel- 
 lectual work in a certain select class. The theory of 
 evolution itself admits that the progress of the species 
 is accomplished at the expense of a certain number of 
 individuals. To produce a Pascal or a Newton we 
 must make up our minds to a certain bodily wear and 
 tear resulting from study. But that is, on the whole, 
 the exception, and the good health of the race, its 
 vigour and physical energy, are a preliminary condi- 
 tion for the production of exceptional genius. 
 
 After physical development, or even before if 
 required, we should place moral development, which is 
 the supreme end of the individual, and the essential 
 condition of social existence. We must fully recognise 
 that in our system of education we take as little care of 
 moral as of physical development ; our pupils become 
 moral or immoral, if left to themselves, just as they 
 are left to themselves to become healthy or unhealthy. 
 No use is made of systematic means, no method is 
 employed from the early years of the child in moralisa- 
 tion ; we give instruction and trust to the moral 
 virtue of instruction. Now this virtue is not always 
 as great as we imagine, at least in the case of the 
 object of knowledge properly so called. Arithmetic, 
 physics, and chemistry have no power to " form the 
 heart." 
 
 Further, we ought to place aesthetic before 
 intellectual and scientific instruction, because the 
 beautiful lies nearest to the good, and because 
 aesthetics, art, literature, and what have been so well 
 called the humanities, are the least indirect influences 
 making for morality. Intellectual and scientific 
 instruction properly so called must therefore take up 
 an inferior position to the others. 
 
 II 
 
l62 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 In intellectual instruction we may have three ends in 
 view : either to elevate the mind and to make it look 
 at everything from a higher standpoint, or to apply 
 it to some practical end, such as a trade, bread- 
 winning, etc. ; or simply to furnish it, like a draw- 
 ing-room, with splendid hangings, Chinese pottery, 
 and Japanese lacquer-work. The latter end is most 
 often aimed at nowadays ; instruction is becoming a 
 matter of dress — coquetry in the young girl and vanity 
 in the young man. This is a grievous deviation 
 from the right path. The true object of intellectual 
 education is to instil, with the least possible expendi- 
 ture of energy, the greatest number of generous and 
 fruitful ideas. Once the brain of each individual has 
 been moulded for good, heredity will fix a greater 
 cerebral capacity in the race. Education and heredity, 
 here as elsewhere, will be complementary. 
 
 1 1. Methods of Teaching, 
 
 Psychologists have shown that the physical 
 expression of the sentiments, imitated by reflection, 
 engenders the sentiments themselves, and we 
 have seen that these sentiments are propagated 
 by suggestion. Thus it is easy for a master who 
 takes pleasure in the company of his pupils to 
 communicate his pleasure to them. The interest 
 that he manifests in what he says or does, or in the 
 work that he makes them do, is communicated to all 
 by sympathy. Silence leads by suggestion to silence. 
 The example of order forms habits of order. We 
 cannot help working when every one is working around 
 
METHODS OF TEACHING. 1 63 
 
 US. The nerves are excited by the attitude of those 
 at work. Eventually they reach that point at which 
 inaction becomes suffering. As Herbart says, " there 
 is no well-behaved child who will refuse to work when 
 all around him are full of emulation and eagerness in 
 their work." 
 
 It is therefore less difficult than is generally 
 believed to produce in the young child a love of 
 work. Besides, the slight distaste that he sometimes 
 shows for it at first is rather due to a want of habit 
 and method than to idleness properly so called. We 
 should, to begin with, develop the faculty of obser- 
 vation by object lessons: concrete facts should be 
 presented before abstract truths ; we should try to 
 make the acquirement of knowledge pleasurable. 
 The common characteristic of modern methods lies 
 in the endeavour to conform education to the natural 
 progress of evolution in the child ; which, however, 
 does not at all imply a system of complete laissez- 
 faire^ the child wanting the intellectual nourishment 
 prepared for it and presented to it in a certain order. 
 The general principles of education which, according 
 to Spencer, may be regarded as established, are the 
 following: — 1st. The mind proceeds from the simple 
 to the complex. 2nd. The mind advances from 
 the indefinite to the definite. 3rd. The individual 
 development of the child reproduces the phases of 
 the historic development of mankind. 4th. The 
 process of self-development should be encouraged to 
 the uttermost. Sth. Intellectual activity is in itself 
 pleasurable, and well-directed study ought to be 
 productive of interest and not distaste. In a word, 
 the acquisition of knowledge ought to be the result of 
 the spontaneous activity of the child ; the normal 
 
164 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 exercise of the faculties being in itself pleasurable, 
 study, if well directed, should be interesting. 
 
 However, here again we must avoid excess. To 
 change work into a mere game, to instruct in play, is 
 a bad preparation for life. Is life a game? Kant 
 was right when he said — " It is a fatal thing to 
 accustom the child to look at everything as a game. 
 ... It is of the utmost importance to teach children 
 to work; for man is the only animal compelled to 
 work." Spencer himself takes as his higher criterion 
 of the good method, pleasurable excitement in the 
 child ; — interest and admiration certainly, but plea- 
 sure, amusement? . . . Far from subordinating 
 work to pleasure, the child must find its pleasure in 
 work itself, in the exercise of its faculties and in the 
 sense of duty accomplished. Life is nothing but 
 work, submission to rules ; do not represent it to 
 children as a game of bowls or ninepins : this would 
 have a demoralising effect, and instead of making 
 men, would send out into society mere overgrown 
 children. The man who can do nothing but play, 
 and judges everything by the pleasure it gives him, is 
 an egoist and an idle fellow. 
 
 Again, play itself demands a certain amount of 
 work. For we must not forget that the pleasure of 
 play rapidly becomes interest in difficulties to be 
 overcome, as we may see from the fact that immedi- 
 ately a game has ceased to be difficult it has very 
 often ceased to amuse. We have therefore simply to 
 bring the child to apply to a serious task the whole 
 attention, perseverance, and continuity in the thread 
 of his ideas, which he has naturally and gradually 
 brought to bear upon his games. Finally, to teach 
 him to interest himself in everything, is to teach him 
 
METHODS OF TEACHING. l6S 
 
 to persevere — i.e.y to be familiar with exertion, and to 
 exercise will : it is to moralise him as much as to 
 instruct him. 
 
 The cultivation of the attention is the secret of all 
 intellectual training. Attention produces the more 
 or less systematic grouping of representations and 
 ideas, so that not one remains isolated within us, but 
 each rather attracts and awakens similar and logically 
 or aesthetically analogous images and ideas. Inat- 
 tention, on the other hand, consists in the abortive 
 birth of each representation which passes through us 
 and dies away without having given rise to a per- 
 manent grouping. Attention, therefore, is as much a 
 question of method as of natural intellectual power. 
 To have the habit of attention is simply to have the 
 habit of not permitting an important state of con- 
 sciousness to miscarry without having linked itself to 
 others, without having created a kind of psychic 
 system.^ 
 
 Attention is order and earnestness of thought. The 
 woof of our ideas must not be broken ; we must be like 
 the weaver who works in the broken thread. There 
 are minds, it is true, in which the thread is constantly 
 being broken, but in almost every case the threads 
 may be joined with a little effort. It is a question of 
 will, and attention thus appears to be elementary 
 morality; in fact it is the morality of the intellect, 
 the art of conduct in the inward sphere of action. 
 Attention is only perseverance applied to something. 
 Accordingly, before the intellectual faculties are de- 
 veloped in the child, it is of importance to encourage 
 the habit of perseverance, which in the sequel will be 
 
 ^ Vide Paulhan, Revue Scientifique^ 28th May 1887. 
 
l66 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 manifested in the sphere of ideas. The child must 
 have already acquired a certain sequence in its actions 
 and in its duties before it acquires that sequence later 
 on in its thoughts. " He was only unhappy when he 
 was thinking," says Voltaire of Candide; and he adds, 
 " it is so with most men." Would it, then, be supreme 
 happiness not to think? No! Supreme happiness 
 consists in being master of one's thoughts, and in 
 knowing how to direct them, which is the most 
 difficult thing in the world. We get the habit of 
 being superficial as we get any other habit ; it is 
 merely a lack of attention and courage; a fault as 
 much moral as intellectual ; a fault which may be 
 corrected by the power of the will. 
 
 Attention directed towards an end produces method. 
 It is a law that any work whatever tends to be 
 regular and methodic in proportion as it exacts a 
 larger expenditure of energy — a greater tension ; now 
 intellectual work exacts from the organism an expendi- 
 ture not only the most costly, but the slowest to be 
 repaired : it is therefore the work that should be per- 
 formed in the most regular and methodic fashion. 
 As of all our activities it is the least mechanical, and 
 the furthest removed from reflex actions, it should, 
 by way of compensation, be accomplished in more 
 regular hours; it should have the characteristics of a 
 normal exercise of the activity, which daily finds in 
 the internal budget the income corresponding to the 
 required outlay. All derangement in intellectual 
 work kills the individual, and has a still more fatal 
 effect upon his descendants. Hence the dangers of the 
 artist's life, which is so often a Bohemian existence. 
 The most productive intellects in science,- and even in 
 art, have often been those whose work was as regular 
 
kETHODS OF TEACHING. 167 
 
 as that of a machine, with the necessary intervals for 
 sufficient rest. 
 
 As it is necessary to develop the attention, espe- 
 cially by requiring continuity of thought, so it is of 
 equal importance not to overwork it. The best type 
 of the way in which the very young child ought to 
 learn many things without fatigue, is the way in 
 which it learns its mother-tongue, only listening to 
 the continuous sound of the words uttered around it 
 when it is so disposed; letting the words enter its 
 head rather than placing them there; letting them be 
 driven into its brain like nails by repeated impact. 
 The attention is not developed if we fatigue it, for in 
 that case there is injury to the general state of health. 
 A child passes a more or less lengthy period in 
 learning a lesson ; we think it is attentive, and it 
 fancies itself that it is ; but in reality it is learning it 
 by the help of only a few moments of real attention : 
 the rest is lost time. The ideal of good education is 
 to increase the intensity of attention, and to diminish 
 the time that is given neither to attention nor to 
 complete and thoroughly healthy repose ; it is inten- 
 sive cultivation, the ground not being allowed to lie 
 fallow. When we demand too long an effort of 
 attention from the child, we exhaust it unprofitably. 
 But by keeping it in the society of intellectual people 
 whose thoughts are connected, we may accustom 
 the child not to range from one subject to another, 
 and we may keep its mind within a circle of given 
 ideas, without allowing it to fly off suddenly at a 
 tangent. To dig the earth at any fixed point it is 
 unnecessary to give fifty blows per minute with the 
 pick ; we may take our time over it ; the essential 
 thing is that each blow shall be directed to the right 
 
i68 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 spot. The deviation of attention being always more 
 or less proportional to the curiosity aroused, we 
 can increase very largely the duration of atten- 
 tion by widening the sphere of curiosity. Just 
 as we make the attention more permanent, and 
 thus ensure its exercise, we strengthen immensely 
 by that exercise the faculty of attention itself. 
 The duration of attention is, in fact, the measure 
 of its power, and is one of the means of its 
 production. 
 
 The method of teaching by object lessons has been 
 adopted in our schools ; but to make the children see 
 things is not all ; we must make them understand, 
 reason, and act ; the eyes ought not to be a con- 
 venient substitute for the intellect, but a factor in its 
 development. There is a better method than teaching 
 by sight, and that is teaching by action : to make the 
 children do for themselves what we are at present con- 
 tented with showing them. This method appears 
 much preferable; action is a concrete reasoning, which 
 simultaneously engraves the ideas in the mind and in 
 the fingers. In America, instead of making the child 
 understand on paper the working of a steam engine, 
 he is given a miniature model ; he has to take it to 
 pieces, put it together again, and thus make the 
 machine himself Tyndall, the eminent English 
 physicist, has written a delightful volume on elec- 
 tricity, to show how a child of ordinary intelligence 
 may construct for itself, at the cost of a few shillings, 
 most of the ordinary apparatus employed in electrical 
 experiments. The initiative of the child must be 
 cultivated by every possible means. It must be done 
 even in class by oral and written exercises, by sum- 
 maries, written or viva voce^ etc. The maieutic is the 
 
Methods of teaching. 169 
 
 best method of education whenever it is possible.^ 
 What is essential, is to provoke the desire for action 
 and activity itself. Everywhere and always we see 
 among us the triumph of mnemotechnical methods — 
 the false knowledge so neatly termed psittacism by 
 Leibnitz. What is the end of man ? To be a man, in 
 its true and full sense; to bring into play all that is in 
 human nature. What ways and means have we for 
 this purpose ? Action. Thus wrote Voltaire in 1727, 
 renewing the philosophy of energy and action, the 
 fundamental doctrine of antiquity, the tradition of 
 Greece. The same idea, pointed out by Locke, is to 
 be found throughout that eminently English book, 
 Robinson Crusoe. It is reproduced in the Emile. 
 Michelet is also an enthusiast for action. We must 
 even reconstruct man, and no longer mutilate him by 
 exaggerating this or that part, by giving undue pro- 
 minence to this or that faculty, and suppressing others ; 
 we must not destroy his active faculties, we must 
 bring back life and movement to the class-room. 
 The passivity, inertia, and silence to which children 
 
 ^ ** My father gently and patiently accustomed me to see and think 
 for myself, instead of thrusting upon me his own ideas, which my docile 
 and submissive temperament would have blindly accepted. Never 
 have I seen a more modest and less dogmatic teacher. He asserted, 
 so to speak, nothing ; and was content to draw my attention to things, 
 without telling me what he knew about them. When we went into a 
 wood, for instance, he was giving me a lesson at every step, and yet I 
 never felt I was at school. Thus I insensibly acquired the habit of 
 studying strata wherever an outcrop had exposed them. I knew the 
 names of animals and plants, classed them in a somewhat tentative 
 way, and he let me alone, checking me only by a word or a smile when 
 I went astray. He had the gift of looking at everything from the 
 practical point of view ; he carefully distinguished the useful from the 
 harmful animals, and I early learned to respect the mole, the toad, 
 the bat, the snake, the insectivorous birds, and all my misunderstood 
 friends." — Edmond About, Le Roman (Tun brave homme. 
 
i;^0 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 are nowadays condemned, are the tortures of the 
 school-room. " To be continually receiving and never 
 to give! Life is just the opposite of this. Life 
 eagerly receives, but is none the less happy to expand 
 and give, and there is no middle course." Make the 
 children more active in school, make them as far as 
 possible their own instructors. 
 
 It is often asked if in education we should proceed 
 from the concrete to the abstract, from the particular 
 to the general, from the empiric to the rational. Yes ! 
 in the case of young children. But this method must 
 not be exaggerated or extended beyond due limits, 
 under the pretext that it represents — ist, the natural 
 evolution of the mind ; 2nd, the historical evolution 
 of the sciences themselves. In the first place, children 
 generalise very early, and from the first are given to 
 abstract deduction. They are simplifiers, and some- 
 times thoroughgoing reasoners. The child has an 
 essentially logical mind ; for instance, when it has 
 done a thing once, it wants to begin again, and under 
 precisely the same conditions. Naturally capricious, 
 it refuses to sanction caprice in others. This is 
 because it has had no experience of varying con- 
 ditions and results. And adults are like children ; 
 they are reasoners with a bias to simplicity, often 
 incapable of seeing three or four data simultaneously 
 in a political or moral problem. 
 
 Accordingly, I think that not merely a place, but 
 the first place, must be awarded to a rational and 
 synthetic method, when it seems peculiarly adapted 
 to the work in hand ; for instance, in grammar or 
 logic. But in most cases it is possible to combine both 
 methods ; and whenever we are teaching the sciences 
 of observation, it is important to make the children 
 
METHODS OF TEACHING. 17I 
 
 observe for themselves, and to employ the teaching of 
 action. 
 
 Once the mind is capable of receiving and acquiring, 
 we have to determine the best form of intellectual 
 food, and the quality and quantity of knowledge to 
 be acquired. There is a vast difference between the 
 ingestion and digestion of food, between " cramming 
 the memory " and assimilation. The choice of intel- 
 lectual food must be regulated by the nature of the 
 brain. We have to introduce the maximum of pre- 
 cious elements into intellectual circulation with the 
 minimum of waste. 
 
 Some of the prejudices of the older school of 
 psychology are still to be found in education ; the 
 memory is far too often represented as a simple, 
 unique, and detached faculty. The phrases, to exercise^ 
 to develop the memory^ are of common occurrence ; 
 but, as a matter of fact, we can only exercise and 
 develop particular forms of memory — memory for 
 words, figures, etc. Memory is a habit, and memory 
 in general is no more developed by cramming the 
 child's brain with masses of words and figures, than 
 habit in general is developed by contracting the habit 
 of leaping with the feet together, or of playing cup 
 and ball. When we force a child to remember trivial 
 details, we do not strengthen, we really weaken its 
 memory, because these useless details take the place 
 in his brain of more important ideas. We know that 
 the amount of knowledge which can find room in a 
 human brain of average capacity is after all limited, 
 that one group of subjects may expel another ; for 
 instance, the pursuit of words is incompatible with 
 the pursuit of ideas — frivolities are incompatible with 
 graver matters. Not only is it harmful to store the 
 
17^ EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 brain with rubbish, which, so to speak, empties it and 
 does not fill it, but we ipso facto create a facility of 
 adaptation with respect to those matters, and make 
 mind and memory alike unfitted for the reception of 
 really useful and serious ideas. The memory being 
 nothing but a faculty of adaptation, it is deformed 
 instead of being exercised, if we adapt it to knowledge 
 of inferior rank. Besides, facility in the memory is 
 one thing, tenacity another. The abuse of competi- 
 tions, examinations, curricula fixing a total of know- 
 ledge to be acquired by a certain date, far from tending 
 to develop, tends rather to destroy the tenacity of 
 the memory. We all know the feeling of intellectual 
 relief after an examination, when we feel the brain 
 freed from all that was so hastily thrown into it, when 
 we feel it regain its equilibrium, and forget. An 
 examination, for most pupils, is nothing but permis- 
 sion to forget. A diploma is often only permission 
 to become ignorant again ; and this healthy ignorance, 
 which returns by degrees after the day of trial, is often 
 the deeper in proportion as the boy has undergone 
 more mental strain in mustering all his knowledge by a 
 fixed date, because of the nervous exhaustion neces- 
 sarily consequent upon it. 
 
 The main duty of instruction is to give to the mind 
 a framework whereon to group the facts and ideas 
 given us in the sequel by reading and experience. 
 Facts and ideas have a real and useful influence over 
 the mind only when the mind systematises and co- 
 ordinates them with other facts and ideas as they are 
 produced ; if the mind does not do this, they will 
 remain inert, and will be as if they did not exist. 
 One of the principles of education is the doctrine of 
 the powerlessness of the educator to give more than 
 
METHODS OF TEACHING. 1 73 
 
 a general direction to thought and conduct. The 
 most complete system of instruction only furnishes 
 knowledge necessarily insufficient, which must be in 
 a measure swallowed up in the multitude of experi- 
 ences which compose a life. We must therefore 
 distinguish between the merely ornamental and the 
 necessary form of knowledge. A serious mistake is 
 always made in the classification of these subjects. 
 History, for instance, is in great part ornamental ; 
 hygiene is absolutely necessary. All children of 
 intellectual endowments below the average must be 
 kept from the study of merely ornamental subjects. 
 The higher part of education is already overburdened. 
 Preliminary examinations ought to lop off the 
 branches which seem fated to bear no fruit ; this 
 would be an economy of human sap. 
 
 Among the ornamental subjects I by no means 
 include the lofty truths and speculative principles of 
 science, the beauties of literature, and the arts ; this 
 so-called luxury is in my opinion necessary, because 
 it forms the only means of elevating the mind, 
 and of exerting a moral influence over it by the 
 disinterested love of the good and beautiful. It is 
 the falsely called useful and necessary subjects — 
 the application of science, and the dry details of 
 history, for instance — that are superfluous. We must 
 therefore distinguish between knowledge reputed use- 
 less and knowledge of which no use can be made. The 
 distinction is of moment, because instruction ought 
 certainly to be raised far above the merely utilitarian 
 and humdrum ; and, on the other hand, it ought to 
 avoid with equal care cramming the mind with know- 
 ledge out of proportion to the faculty possessed of 
 bringing it into play. 
 
174 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 The educator should, in the first place, lay down 
 this general rule — that all knowledge would be good 
 for a mind with unlimited power of assimilation ; in 
 the second place, that all knowledge, every time it is 
 not assimilated, is an added burden to the mind, and 
 represents useless expenditure of energy; and thirdly, 
 that to determine the number of subjects we wish to 
 pour into a mind, we must consider not merely their 
 nature, but the relation existing between them, and 
 the capacity of the mind into which we wish to 
 introduce them. 
 
 The practical conclusion to be drawn from these 
 general theses is, that if every man ought to be pro- 
 vided with a certain average measure of knowledge 
 on arriving at ripened years, this total of knowledge 
 ought to be, not utilitarian in the lower sense of the 
 word, but available for the mind — i.e.^ capable of being 
 assimilated ; that we must not wish to widen beyond 
 due bounds the source of the knowledge given to all, 
 because the fruitless mental work done in this way 
 would be so much pure loss to the bodily powers ; 
 and that the best general education is that which 
 leaves to the individual the widest latitude to complete 
 what he has learned, according as he is capable of 
 turning it to good purpose. 
 
 One essential thing we must teach the child is to 
 read methodically, and to assimilate what it reads. 
 We must therefore distinguish — ist, the passages 
 essential from the moral and aesthetic point of view; 
 2nd, the facts or ideas essential from the scientific 
 point of view. Intellectual education, faintly sketched 
 in during early years, is mainly continued by reading 
 — sometimes by the mere reading of the newspapers 
 and of novels. Moreover, a mass of useful knowledge 
 
METHODS OF TEACHING. 175 
 
 might be drawn from even the papers, with a little 
 discrimination. 
 
 Perhaps the most imperative duty is to inculcate 
 what is less a fact or idea than a sentiment — viz., the 
 love of learning ; and to this sentiment should be 
 added the love of deep study, of probing a thing to 
 its depths — in order that the mind may not skim the 
 surface of things, and grasp nothing. This desire 
 for thorough work is one and the same thing with 
 perfect sincerity, the desire of finding the truth, for a 
 little experience forces us to recognise that the truth 
 is never near the surface, and that we must always 
 dig and labour before reaching it. 
 
 It should be noticed that the subjects most difficult 
 for the child to acquire are most often those between 
 which it is impossible to establish a logical connec- 
 tion, and which have nothing to do with the reason- 
 ing powers — unimportant dates, geographical names 
 of no use even if known, and trivial historical facts. 
 Such knowledge fatigues the brain when it is acquired, 
 and instead of forming it by the introduction of 
 habits of reasoning, tends rather to deform it; it 
 is intellectual energy uselessly dissipated, merely 
 futile work. Erudition is therefore one of the 
 enemies of real knowledge. And by erudition I 
 mean, not the knowledge of Greek or Sanscrit, but 
 of an ever-accumulating host of details in which 
 the mind is exhausted and lost. To know in their 
 chronological order the names of the Merovingians, 
 with the dates of their births and deaths, is erudi- 
 tion ; to remember in their order the great streams 
 under the name of La Roya which, according to 
 our text-books, separate France from Italy (an in- 
 accurate statement), is erudition. 
 
176 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 The best education is that which is not merely- 
 instructive but suggestive, and consequently directive; 
 which introduces into the brain not only knowledge 
 susceptible of "double use," as Socrates says, but 
 habits of acting linked with habits of high thinking. 
 In other words, we must not only give a diffuse 
 instruction creating opposed tendencies which divide 
 the mind, but a co-ordinated instruction, concentrated 
 about a point of reference, and issuing in practical 
 suggestions. 
 
 Descartes laid down the following rules for his own 
 guidance, and asserted that he always followed them 
 in his studies: — 
 
 1st. Never to allot more than a few hours per day 
 to thought which occupies the imagination (concrete 
 sciences and arts); 2nd, to give only a few hours per 
 year to work requiring the understanding alone 
 (mathematics and physics); 3rd, to give all the rest . 
 of his time to relaxation for the senses, rest for the 
 mind, and exercise for the body. 
 
 Descartes includes all " serious conversation " 
 among exercises of the imagination, and also every- 
 thing absorbing the attention; this accounts for his 
 withdrawing to the country. Leibnitz, reproducing the 
 rules of Descartes, said: "So far from our mental 
 powers being sharpened by excess of study, on the 
 contrary, they are blunted." 
 
 Will a few hours devoted to study every day be 
 enough for what we ought to know ? They will, 
 answers a contemporary philosopher,^ if, on the one 
 hand, the well-controlled mind has reserved all its 
 resources for the time devoted to study, and if, on 
 the other hand, we limit instruction to subjects it is 
 ^ M. Ravaisson, 
 
METHODS OF TEACHING. 177 
 
 really important we should know. "The great truths 
 in science, the great models in Hterature and arts, may 
 be reduced, for the purposes of education, to a few 
 which will be all the more striking in their effect." 
 
 12 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE SCHOOL. 
 
 I. The Inadequacy and Dangers of purely Intellectual Education. — 
 Results of statistics — Necessity of moral instruction. 
 
 n. Possibility of Teaching Ethics Methodically. — The teaching of 
 ethics in connection with creeds and ** natural religion " — The necessity 
 of referring to the State the control of civic and moral instruction. 
 
 ni. Moral Discipline in the Primary School. — In Tolstoi's anarchic 
 schools — Spencer's method of natural reactions — Its inadequacy. 
 
 IV. Necessity for the Teaching of Civic Dtities in all stages of 
 Instruction. 
 
 V. Instruction in ALsthetics. 
 
 VI. Intellectual Education. 
 
 I. The Inadequacy and Dangers of purely Intellectual 
 Education, 
 
 Primary instruction is intended for the masses 
 constituting the very foundation of the nation (its 
 hereditary foundation), with its good and bad quali- 
 ties. This instruction has therefore to act favourably 
 upon the deeply-lying strata of the nation. Now, as 
 Montesquieu says, it is here especially that we want 
 heads " well formed," not " well filled " ; we must also 
 have, and this is of grave importance, hearts in the 
 right place. 
 
 It was ascertained from judicial statistics at the 
 beginning of the century that out of a hundred 
 prisoners only thirty-nine per cent, had ever received 
 any instruction. In the face of such a proportion of 
 illiterates, it was supposed that ignorance was the 
 
INADEQUACY OF INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION. 1 79 
 
 main cause of crime, and an effort was made to 
 extend primary instruction. At the present moment 
 instruction is obligatory, and the result is simply 
 reversed ; out of a hundred prisoners thirty per cent, 
 are illiterate. We have therefore been compelled to 
 recognise that the greater or less proportion of 
 ignorant people among criminals is due to the 
 greater or less ignorance of the masses, and not to 
 the demoralising effect of ignorance alone. Some 
 authors, M. Tarde among the number, think that higher 
 instruction alone is powerful enough to raise the mind 
 to that point at which the idea of crime can no longer 
 be produced. It has been retorted that if, in the 
 records of crime, we find very few really well-educated 
 people, it is because in these days to obtain real instruc- 
 tion we must already have some resources of our own ; 
 now, with easy circumstances, many temptations dis- 
 appear ; further, higher instruction constitutes in itself 
 resources — a livelihood. If the same scientific instruc- 
 tion were given to all, statistics would probably show 
 a large number of clever, well-educated, and therefore 
 more dangerous criminals. We may also add that 
 fifty years ago only two per cent, of criminals had 
 received higher instruction ; the proportion has now 
 risen to four per cent, and no doubt will increase. 
 As Socrates pointed out, the way to prevent instruc- 
 tion from becoming a weapon in the hands of crime, 
 would be to allot a far larger share in education to 
 moral and aesthetic than to intellectual and scientific 
 instruction ; not to conceive the latter without the 
 former, not to think that the knowledge of facts and 
 truths of a positive order can supply the place of 
 sentiment in a good education.^ 
 
 ^ Ellis, The Crifninaly pp. 299, 300. (Tr.) 
 
l8o EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 The abuse of too purely intellectual an instruction 
 is that, far from always exercising a moralising 
 influence, it often only results in the increase of the 
 unclassed. If the child, when he reaches manhood, 
 has not attained the object of his ambition, he shifts 
 the blame on to society, and accuses its bad organisa- 
 tion. From that time forward he will look at 
 everything from the worst point of view, and will 
 hate every one. If he is feeble and exhausted, he will 
 enter what has been called " The regiment of the 
 resigned " ; ^ of those who, too weak to take an 
 initiative in revolt, have bowed the head, but 
 who always are ready to help those who have 
 revolted, when the latter have begun to rebel. 
 If the latter do evil, the former certainly will 
 not prevent them ; both have an interest in 
 revolutions, and those who do not dare to bell the 
 cat, will certainly not be the men to untie the bell.^ 
 At the beginning of his short reign, the Emperor 
 Frederick III. wrote to Prince Bismarck — "I con- 
 sider that the question of the attention to be given 
 to the young is intimately connected with all social 
 
 1 Vide M. de Coubertin. 
 
 2 A plan for the transformation of the real schools has been laid 
 before the Council of the Russian Empire. These schools were based 
 upon those of Germany for modern instruction. They are still found 
 to have either too much or too little of the classical element in them; 
 they are condemned for forming half-trained men, whose training has 
 been both too literary and too unpractical to enable them to face 
 industrial or commercial life with much chance of success. Hence it 
 is felt that these schools should be turned into purely technical schools. 
 The training will be such as to turn out good foremen and heads of 
 workshops, who will have received such a general culture and technical 
 instruction as to enable them to at once obtain a situation in a manu- 
 facturing or commercial business, and who will not run the risk of 
 being driven into the ranks of the unclassed— the open sore of modern 
 communities, 
 
TEACHING ETHICS METHODICALLY. l8l 
 
 questions. A higher education ought to be made 
 accessible to more and more extended strata ; but 
 half-instruction will have to be avoided, lest it create 
 grave dangers, and give rise to claims on life which 
 the economic forces of the nation will be unable to 
 satisfy. We must equally avoid trying to merely and 
 exclusively increase the amount of instruction, lest 
 we thereby neglect our educative mission." And in 
 fact, moral and civic training, having the most educa- 
 tive influence, must be awarded the first rank. 
 
 II. Possibility of Teaching Ethics Methodically, 
 
 If instruction ought to be pre-eminently moral, is it 
 possible to teach ethics methodically ? Ethics, in my 
 opinion, is partly positive and partly conjectural. 
 There is on its positive side a fundamental theorem 
 which ought, I think, to be also the foundation of 
 moral instruction. This theorem, of which I have else- 
 where shown the importance, is that of the correlation 
 between the intensity of life and its expansion towards 
 others. It is what I have called moral fecundity. In 
 virtue of its very intensity, we have seen that life 
 tends to overflow, expand, and expend itself, and by 
 its expenditure to increase. For, once again, it is a 
 law of life, only to maintain itself by self-sacrifice, 
 only to be enriched by lavishing its wealth. This 
 law is true even in the case of physical life, which is 
 the most egoistic, the most limited, and apparently 
 the most self-centred. All the physical functions 
 must end in this common term — expenditure, move- 
 ment outwards, expansion. The nourishment we 
 have accumulated tends to awaken the need of 
 
1 82 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 propagating our being in another being ; respiration 
 and circulation require movement and exercise — that 
 is to say, external expenditure ; all robust and 
 intense life needs action. When we come to psy- 
 chical life, the need of expansion is still more keenly 
 felt, and in this domain true expansion is that which 
 takes place tozvards others, or, still better, /^r others. 
 The harmony of forces is, in fact, the only or the best 
 means of preserving their intensity. Every conflict 
 is an annihilation of forces ; to exercise one's activity 
 against others is eventually to exhaust it, and to 
 impoverish one's own being ; it is robbing one's 
 happiness to squander it on ambition. The highest 
 activity is that which is exercised not only in agree- 
 ment with others, but also out of regard for others. 
 From all theories on the principles of ethics, which 
 alone are really open to serious controversy, we can 
 even now extract a certain basis of common ideas, and 
 make of that basis a subject of teaching or popular 
 instruction. All moral theories, even those most 
 sceptical or egoistic in their origin, have eventually 
 issued in ascertaining this fact, that the individual 
 cannot live only of himself and for himself, that 
 egoism is a contraction of the sphere of our activity, 
 and that it eventually impoverishes and injures that 
 activity. The sentiment which is at the bottom 
 of all human morality is always that of generosity. 
 Men who are generous and philanthropic make 
 incarnate in themselves the systems of Epicurus 
 and of Bentham.^ This I have shown elsewhere. It 
 is this spirit of generosity inherent in all morality 
 that a moralist always can and ought to try to set 
 free and compel to penetrate the mind of his audience. 
 
 1 Vide my Morale (V Epicure and my Morale Anglaise Contemporaine, 
 
TEACHING ETHICS METHODICALLY. 1 83 
 
 It is objected that if the propagation and teaching 
 of moral ideas become independent of creeds they 
 will lack a final element of sovereign power over all 
 pious minds, namely, the idea of punishment after 
 death, or at any rate the certainty of that punishment. 
 My answer is that precisely what is purest in the moral 
 sentiment is doing good for its own sake. And if the 
 reply is made that it is a chimerical ideal, being so 
 elevated, I retort that the power of the ideal to realise 
 itself will become greater in proportion as the ideal 
 is placed higher in the society of the future.^ It is 
 supposed that the most elevated ideas are the least 
 easy to propagate among the masses : this is an error 
 to which the future will more and more unmistak- 
 ably give the lie.^ The Chinese, who are very acute 
 observers, have the following proverb : — " He who 
 finds pleasure in vice and pain in virtue, is still a 
 novice in both." The object of moral education is to 
 make children find their pleasure in virtue and their 
 pain in vice. We must not always be teaching the 
 utility of the good, and forget its beauty^ which causes 
 what is good to spontaneously afford immediate enjoy- 
 ment. The utilitarian school, wishing to base moral 
 education on the imitation of examples, on the con- 
 sideration of expediency, on the benefits of altruism, 
 decreases the really moral spirit in children by 
 robbing them of the power of doing good for its 
 own sake, independently of what others have done, 
 do, or will do. Kant seemed to foresee the applica- 
 tion of English psychology to English pedagogy: 
 trying to discover why ethical treatises, even those 
 showing by most examples the happy effects of 
 
 ^ Vide V Esquisse cCune Morale , pp. 236, 237. 
 2 Vide my V Irriligion de VAvenir, p. 352. 
 
184 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 good, have nevertheless so little influence; he asked 
 if this inefficiency is not due to the admixture of 
 the ideal of the good with foreign elements. " The 
 moralists," he says, "have never undertaken to reduce 
 their concepts to the simplest expression; searching 
 on every side, with the best intentions in the world, 
 for emotional motives to moral good, they, by so 
 doing, spoil the remedy they wish to be efficacious. 
 In fact, the commonest observation shows that if 
 we have presented to us an act of probity, free from 
 all interested views in this world or another — an act 
 even involving struggle against the hardships of 
 poverty or the seductions of wealth ; and if, on the 
 other hand, we are shown a precisely similar act, 
 in which foreign motives, however slightly, have 
 concurred, the former leaves the latter very far 
 behind it, and throws it into the shade ; it elevates 
 the mind, and inspires in it the desire to go 
 and do likewise. Children experience this senti- 
 ment as soon as they can reason, and duty should 
 never be inculcated in any other way. The power 
 of morality over the human heart is in proportion to 
 the purity of outline with which it is presented." 
 But is not this a matter of mere logic? A happy 
 issue to a series of events implies the possibility of 
 the contrary, which, moreover, is much more prob- 
 able ; the mere good sense of the child will teach 
 him this. The attempted proof that the best way of 
 reaching utilitarian happiness is to abandon oneself to 
 altruistic sentiments is not only always subject to 
 dispute, but it is an appeal to the egoistic sentiments 
 themselves to form a judgment on a cause not within 
 their scope, disinterestedness, to wit ; it is to forget 
 that the sentiments can only be judged by their peers. 
 
Teaching ethics methodically. 185 
 
 Stimulate generosity alone, when you want a burst 
 of generosity, and you will be understood ; the 
 most elevated sentiments, at least those momentarily 
 the strongest, will stifle all others, and the eager 
 trembling of sublime emotion will be produced. 
 
 I have elsewhere attempted to show that different 
 forms of religion are not eternal, that they have a 
 mythical, dogmatic, ceremonial side, which is des- 
 tined to disappear. In the ideal state of religious 
 anomia towards which we seem to be moving, all 
 tendencies of temperament or of race will still find 
 satisfaction, and in this religion of the future the 
 " worship of the ideal " must find its place. On our 
 part, we by no means wish to destroy ; we even 
 believe that, absolutely speaking, destruction cannot 
 ensue. In human thought and in nature alike, all 
 destruction is but transformation. The ideal irre- 
 ligion, though to us it is a negation of the dogmas and 
 superstitions of the day, is in no way exclusive of 
 renewed religious sentiment, — identical with that 
 sentiment which always corresponds in us to all 
 free speculation on the universe, identical with the 
 philosophical sentiment itself Dogma, free-thought, 
 religion, irreligion, — these terms are only approxima- 
 tions, and there are in things none of those breaches 
 of continuity, hiatus, and artificial antitheses, which 
 we introduce into words. I think therefore that 
 religions of the day are destined to disappear by a 
 dissolution very slow, but none the less sure ; but 
 I also think that man, whatever be his race or class, 
 will always philosophise on the world and on the great 
 cosmical society. He will philosophise, sometimes 
 naively, sometimes deeply, as his education increases 
 and according to the individual tendencies of his 
 
1 86 £DUCATiON AND HEREDITY. 
 
 mind, tendencies which will go on freeing themselves 
 and ever be made stronger by the very progress of 
 education. 
 
 If this be so, we cannot admit that war should 
 be proclaimed against sectarian instruction, for it 
 has its moral utility in the present state of the 
 human mind. It constitutes one of the elements 
 which prevent the disaggregation of the moral edifice, 
 and anything of the nature of a unifying force must 
 not be contemned, when we take into account the 
 individualistic and even anarchic tendencies of our 
 democrats. 
 
 The public schools in France cannot be sectarian, 
 but a philosophic doctrine like the broad theism 
 taught in our schools is not a confession of faith, 
 nor a dogma ; it is an exposition of philosophical 
 opinions conformable to the traditions of the majority. 
 On the other hand, atheism is not a dogma or con- 
 fession, which may have the right to exclude all 
 contrary opinions as an insult to, or infringement 
 of, liberty of conscience. Hence no confession of 
 faith is assailed by any lay, moral, or philosophical 
 teaching if appropriate to the mental state of the 
 children. Besides, anti-religious fanaticism offers 
 grave dangers, just as religious fanaticism does; there- 
 fore the State, to preserve unharmed the children of 
 both, ought to keep to the high road of primary instruc- 
 tion. The State cannot be, and ought not to be, 
 uninterested in these questions. As Michelet truly 
 said, the first duty of politics is education ; the second, 
 education ; the third, education. State intervention 
 alone can prevent the youth of the country from being 
 brought up in a strict "individualism"; it alone can 
 maintain the best national traditions, and oppose 
 
TEACHING ETHICS METHODICALLY. 1 87 
 
 every manifestly patriotic or immoral education. In a 
 word, the duty of the State is to transmit to each new 
 generation the heritage handed on by the past, the 
 literary, scientific, and artistic treasures amassed by 
 our ancestors at the cost of so much effort. " Con- 
 tinuity of national tradition is the true condition of 
 progress, the inexhaustible fount of an enlightened 
 and fertile patriotism. Now it is to be feared that if 
 national education be left to private initiative, pre- 
 judices of a low utilitarianism, the want of an horizon 
 sufficiently wide, with many other causes, will help to 
 break the bond between us and the glorious past. 
 The only way to avoid the gropings, faults, and 
 blunders of our predecessors is to study them. No 
 progress can be made if the lessons of the past are 
 neglected."^ The State ought, moreover, to keep the 
 general level of education up to a certain standard, 
 to watch over the maintenance of good and strong 
 national traditions, and to take the necessary steps to 
 ensure that whatever there is good and beautiful in 
 our modern civilisation may be transmitted to future 
 generations. 
 
 There is a tendency in the present day to substitute 
 the commune for the State, and to award to the 
 former at its own discretion the power of entire 
 direction of all schools within its jurisdiction. But to 
 this the answer has been justly made, that most of 
 the French communes, even if thoroughly reformed, 
 would be incapable of supplying the basis of genuine 
 instruction. In most cases they would hand over 
 the education of youth, either to intelligent but in- 
 experienced innovators, or to charlatans ; in some 
 cases to religious bodies, in others to anti-religious 
 
 ^ V Education selon Herbart (Roerich). 
 
1 88 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 sects, according to the fashion of the day or the 
 impulse of the moment. Those communes which 
 would confine themselves simply to school routine 
 would be least exposed to delusions. The youth of 
 a country is its pride and its wealth : we cannot hand 
 it over to those who wish to take it as an experiment 
 in anhna vili, or as a political weapon. The State 
 cannot tolerate the future of a whole generation being 
 a subject for debate to any political party whatever ; 
 its duty is to maintain the lofty impartiality and 
 disinterestedness of education.^ 
 
 III. Moral Discipline in the Primary School 
 
 The moral discipline of schools is an important 
 question. Rousseau thought it was best to let 
 children incur the natural consequences of their 
 actions. Spencer has reproduced the same theory 
 under the name of natural reactions^ and Tolstoi has 
 carried out the experiment in his anarchic school at 
 Yasnaia. Spencer's principle has been often criticised, 
 and not unjustly. A thoughtless boy teases his 
 neighbour and disturbs the whole class; natural re- 
 action in this environment will be an argument ad 
 hominein. A row will inevitably follow, and order 
 will be compromised for the rest of the lesson. If 
 the master intervenes to bring the culprit to reason, 
 authority is brought into play and the system of 
 natural reactions proves a failure. Suppose a boy is 
 simply inattentive during the lesson. The master 
 cannot reprove him without infringing the doctrine of 
 natural reactions. But if a boy is inattentive one 
 
 ^ V Education selon Herbart (Roerich). 
 
MORAL DISCIPLINE IN SCHOOL. 1 89 
 
 day, and is made to suffer no inconvenience, he 
 will be inattentive the next and the following days. 
 A bad habit is quickly contracted, and the natural 
 reaction is only produced when the evil is irrepar- 
 able. Inattention and habitual carelessness in a boy 
 are naturally followed by ignorance, intellectual in- 
 feriority to his hard-working schoolfellows, and finally 
 by the difficulties of life resulting from that in- 
 feriority. The injury is only felt a long time after 
 the faults of school-life, but then it is irreparable.^ 
 Nature especially excites children to spontaneous 
 physical development. Hence the craving for inces- 
 sant motion, the aversion to everything that keeps 
 them still. Almost all the faults of children are due 
 to their turbulence — i,e.^ to exaggeration in the satis- 
 fying of a want. Fatigue is only the reaction from 
 overstrained activity. The child who neglects his 
 work and plays till he is tired will not feel the punish- 
 ment of his moral fault by physical fatigue. Rest will 
 restore his readiness for movement, and his longing to 
 recommence the exercise that fatigued him ; but he 
 will never be led by any purely physical impulse to 
 the work he has neglected. A child's mind can 
 establish no relation between the work he has for- 
 gotten and the fatigue resulting from too prolonged 
 or too violent exercise in the time he ought to 
 have devoted to that work. Here natural reaction 
 misses its aim ; it neither diverts from play, nor does 
 it induce the child to work.^ The necessity of a rule 
 is clear even in the most instinctive acts of the child. 
 Repletion inspires in him a repugnance to food — a 
 repugnance which may issue in disgust. This is a 
 
 ^ Vide M. Chaumeil, Pidagogie Psychologique. 
 
 2 Vid^ M. Roerich, Les Principes de Herbart sur V Education, 
 
I90 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 natural reaction. But a keener sensation, a pleasing 
 flavour, may produce a reaction which may lead to 
 eating more than he wants. Cold water is agreeable 
 when one is bathed in perspiration ; the natural 
 reaction is inflammation of the lungs. Are we to wait 
 till it comes ? In a word, a man left to the mercy of 
 natural reactions would descend in the animal scale ; 
 he would not even live. 
 
 Tolstoi', in his school at Yasnaia Poliana,i takes as 
 his starting-point the principle that all rules in schools 
 are illegitimate, that the child's liberty is inviolable, 
 and even that children should suggest to the master 
 the subjects they wish to be taught, and the methods 
 to be adopted. Tolstoi* thinks that true liberty pre- 
 cedes culture, that Providence is enough to turn men 
 left to themselves to the true and the good. Hence 
 the beautiful disorder in his school, described by him 
 in such a charming way. The master enters the 
 class-room. On the floor lie the squalling children, 
 rolling in a heap and shouting : " You're choking me, 
 boys ! " " Stop ! stop pulling my hair ! " " Pi6tr 
 Mikhailovitch ! " shrieks a voice from the bottom of 
 the heap to the master, " make them let me alone ! " 
 "Good-day! Piotr Mikhailovitch!" shout the rest, 
 abating none of their noise. The master proceeds 
 to take the books and distribute them to those 
 who have followed him up to the desk. Then 
 the boys on the top of the heap ask for books. 
 Little by little the heap diminishes. When the 
 majority have their books the rest rush to the 
 desk shouting : " One for me ! " '* Where is mine ? " 
 " Give me the book I had yesterday ! " "I want the 
 
 ^ The account of the anarchic schools will be found in The Long 
 iS";*:?/*? (Walter Scott). (Tr.) 
 
MORAL DISCIPLINE IN SCHOOL. I9I 
 
 Koltsof."^ Perhaps two are left, who in the heat 
 of the struggle remain wrestling on the floor. Then 
 the others, seated on the form, book in hand, cry : 
 "What are you dawdling for? We can't hear any- 
 thing. Stop ! '' The combatants submit ; all out of 
 breath they take their books and sit down on the 
 bench, and for the first moment or so the movement 
 of their legs betrays the excitement that has not yet 
 calmed down. The ardour for the fray has vanished, 
 and now an ardour for work reigns throughout the 
 class. With the same zest with which he was a few 
 minutes ago pulling Mitka's hair, the boy now reads 
 his Koltsof ; his mouth is slightly open, his little eyes 
 sparkle, and he sees nothing of what is going on 
 around him — nothing but his book. " The same effort 
 would now be necessary to tear him from his book as 
 would have been required just before to drag him out 
 of the fight." The boys sit just where they fancy : 
 forms, tables, window-ledges, are all the same to 
 them; but the arm-chair is the object of universal envy. 
 When one takes it into his head to instal himself 
 therein, another guesses his intention, from nothing 
 but the expression of his face ; both rush for it, and 
 whoever gets it, keeps it. The smarter of the two 
 stretches himself out in it, his head deep down in the 
 back of the chair, but he is carried away by work, and 
 reads as earnestly as the others. " During class I 
 have never seen them chatter, or pinch one another, or 
 indulge in smothered laughter, or uncouth sounds, or 
 tell tales of one another to the master." When a boy, 
 educated by a ponojnar'^ or at the district school, 
 
 ^ Aleksei Vasilyevitch Koltsof (1809- 1842), a distinguished Russian 
 poet. (Tr. ) 
 
 2 Fonomar ox paramonar is a church ofticial, a doorkeeper, (Tr.) 
 
192 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 comes up to make a complaint, the only comfort he 
 gets is : " Well, are you sure you did not pinch your- 
 self?" 
 
 In Tolstoi's opinion, constraint by any physical 
 means is impossible. The more the master storms, 
 the more noisy the boys are ; his voice only excites 
 them. If he succeeds in stopping them, and in turn- 
 ing their attention in another direction, this little sea 
 becomes less and less agitated until it finally calms 
 down. But in most cases it is best for him to say 
 nothing. Yet it seems as if disorder is growing and 
 increasing every moment, as if nothing can check it 
 but constraint. " Then all we have to do is to wait 
 until this disorder (or fire) has ended, and the order of 
 the class will then be of a better and more stable 
 character than any we could substitute for it." 
 
 In the evening the boys do not care for mathe- 
 matics and analysis ; they have a peculiar taste for 
 singing and reading, and especially for stories. " What 
 is the good of so much mathematics?" they say; " it is 
 far better to tell stories." All the evening lessons stand 
 out in sharp contrast to those of the morning, having 
 a special characteristic — peace and poetry. " Come 
 into the school at dusk ; there is no light in the windows, 
 all is quiet. The snow on the steps of the stairs, a 
 dull, low murmur, a movement behind the door, a 
 young rascal, holding on to the balustrades, tearing 
 up two steps at a time, are the only signs that the 
 boys are within. Go into the school, it is almost too 
 dark to see, but look at that little fellow's face : he is 
 sitting down, gazing intently at the master; his brows 
 are knit, and for the tenth time he pushes off his 
 shoulder the arm of a schoolfellow who is leaning on 
 him. Tickle his neck, he does not" even smile, he 
 
MORAL DISCIPLINE IN SCHOOL. I93 
 
 merely shakes his head as though to dislodge a fly; he 
 is absolutely absorbed by the mysterious and poetic 
 story, how the great veil of the temple was rent in 
 twain, and how darkness brooded over the land : the 
 story is at once entrancing and painful. . . . But now 
 the master has finished. All rise from their seats, and 
 crowd around him, each repeating all that he remem- 
 bers of the story, and trying to out-shout his neigh- 
 bour. Those who are told they need not repeat it 
 because they know it perfectly are none the quieter 
 for that, but rush up to another master, or if there is 
 no other master, to a schoolfellow, a stranger, or even 
 the stove- lighter ; they run from one corner to 
 another, in groups of twos and threes, each begging 
 the other to hear him. It is rare for a single boy to 
 tell the tale. They divide into groups, each seeking 
 his equal in intelligence, and away they go, encourag- 
 ing and correcting one another. * Come now, let us 
 say it together ! ' says one boy to another. But the 
 latter, thinking he is not a fair match, sends him to a 
 third. At last, when they have finished the story, 
 they calm down. Candles are brought, and their 
 attention is diverted to something else. About eight 
 o'clock their eyes grow heavy ; yawns are frequent ; 
 the candles burn more dimly, and are not snuffed so 
 often. The elders are still wide awake, but younger 
 and inferior lads begin to doze, with their elbows on 
 the table, to the drowsy hum of the master's voice." 
 
 When the children are tired of their work, or just 
 before a holiday, all at once, without saying a word, 
 during the second or third lesson after dinner, two or 
 three boys dart into the hall and quickly seize their 
 hats. " Where are you off to ? " *' Home ! " " But 
 how about your singing ? " " The boys said it 
 
 13 
 
194 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 was time to go home/' answers the youth, slipping 
 towards the door with his hat. " But who gave them 
 leave ? " " The boys are gone," is the response. 
 " Well, then," says the master angrily, for he is all 
 ready for his lesson, "just stop a moment!" But 
 another youth runs into the class-room, his face all 
 aglow, but with a certain air of embarrassment. 
 ''What are you stopping for?" he says in a surly 
 tone to the lad who has been kept back, and who in 
 his hesitation is picking the wool from his sheep-skin 
 cap with his fingers. " Look where the other boys 
 are already ! At the blacksmith's, perhaps, by this 
 time." And both rush off shouting to the master 
 from the door, " Good-bye, Ivdn Petrovitch ! " And 
 the little feet clatter on the stairs, and the boys, 
 tumbling, jumping like cats, falling down in the snow, 
 chasing each other, rush home, rending the air with 
 their shouts. 
 
 These scenes, says Tolstoi', are reproduced once or 
 twice a week. It is humiliating and painful to the 
 master, but he puts up with them because they give 
 all the greater meaning to the five or six lessons 
 which are freely and voluntarily attended by the boys 
 every day. If the alternative were proposed in the 
 words : Would you rather never have a scene like 
 this the whole year through, or would you have them 
 recur every other lesson? Tolstolf would choose the 
 latter. The school is freely developed, says he, simply 
 by the principles laid down by the masters and the 
 boys. In spite of the master's authority, the boy 
 was always at liberty to absent himself from school, 
 or even not to listen to him when he did come. On 
 the other hand, the master had the right, if he wished, 
 to neglect the boy when at school, and the power to 
 
MORAL DISCIPLINE IN SCHOOL. 195 
 
 act with all the influence he could bring to bear upon 
 most of the boys — upon them as children at school, 
 and thus upon society at large, of which they were a 
 part. According to Tolstoi*, this disorder, or " free 
 order," only appears frightful to us because we are 
 accustomed to the entirely different system in which we 
 were brought up. In this connection, as in others, the 
 use of violence is only based upon a theory formed, not 
 merely without reflection upon human nature, but with- 
 out even taking it into account at all. Schoolboys are 
 men, subject, small as they are, to the same necessities 
 as ourselves; they are, like us, thinking beings. They 
 all want to learn, and that is why they go to school, 
 that is why they need no effort to arrive at the conclu- 
 sion that to learn anything they must be subjected to 
 certain conditions. Not only are they men, but they 
 form a society of beings united by thoughts in common. 
 " Where two or three are gathered together in My 
 name, there am I in the midst of them." They 
 neither rebel nor murmur when they submit to the 
 only natural laws — the laws derived from nature ; 
 submitting to your unseasonable authority, they 
 nevertheless do not admit that your bells, your time- 
 tables, and your rules are legitimate. 
 
 At the school of Yasna'i'a Poliana, when the spring 
 was over, there were only " two cases of visible con- 
 tusion ; " one boy was pushed down the steps and 
 hurt his leg (the wound healed in a fortnight) ; another 
 had his cheek burned with blazing pitch, and he had 
 a scar for a couple of weeks. Tolstoi" concludes that 
 the school must not interfere in discipline, which con- 
 cerns the parents alone ; that the school ought not 
 to, and has no right to, punish or reward ; that the 
 best discipline is to give the boys absolute freedom 
 
196 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 to learn and to settle their own affairs entirely by 
 themselves. 
 
 TolstoY and Spencer may both be reasonably blamed 
 for calling the system of discipline by natural conse- 
 quences moral education. These reactions only teach 
 the children the relations of natural causality (and 
 that, too, not always with sufficient emphasis), but 
 they are not of a moral character. Spencer, however, 
 thinks that natural reactions are apt to instil in the 
 child the sentiment of responsibility. Yes, but of 
 purely utilitarian responsibility. The object of true 
 pedagogic sanctions is to form the moral judgment, 
 to give birth to, to sustain, and to develop in the 
 child internal sanctions, pleasure and displeasure of 
 the conscience, self-satisfaction and self-dissatisfac- 
 tion. That is how they are distinguished from purely 
 disciplinary measures. They consist essentially in 
 approbation and blame. They may not always be 
 identical with these, but they should always be 
 referred to them as the sign to the thing signified. 
 " The moral consciousness of the pupil is developed, 
 in a measure, by contact with that of the master, 
 manifested by approbation and blame." ^ 
 
 We may ask Tolsto'f why the school should be 
 limited to instruction alone, leaving education to the 
 family, who often acquit themselves but ill of their 
 task? The anarchic system of TolstoY may be 
 applicable when a Tolstoi* conducts the school ; if it 
 became general it would be intolerable. We are by no 
 means persuaded that wherever two or three children 
 are gathered together the spirit of Christ is in the 
 midst of them ; it is more often the spirit of the devil 
 — that is to say, of primitive and ancestral barbarism. 
 
 1 M. Pillon. 
 
TEACHING OF CIVIC DUTIES. 1 97 
 
 Besides, school ought to be a preparation for social, 
 life. The school of Tolstoi may certainly prepare the 
 child for a society such as the great writer dreams of 
 — without judges, prisons, or army ; but anarchy in 
 school life is a detestable preparation for the organised 
 and legal life of society as it is at present. The child 
 must not be persuaded that its only law after leaving 
 school is its own sweet will, checked by that of others ; 
 that life is made for amusement ; that we study and 
 work when we take it into our heads ; that people do 
 nothing unless the whim seizes them. It is not by 
 a system of education like this that citizens, to say 
 nothing of soldiers, will be made. 
 
 What deduction, then, can be drawn from Tolstoi's 
 experiments? That, if discipline is necessary in schools, 
 it should not be carried into rigid formalism; when- 
 ever the moral influence of the master is enough, let 
 us be content with it ; but also, every time the child 
 abuses his liberty or his strength, he must be clearly 
 taught, by some sanction carrying with it its own 
 motive and reason, that every human community is 
 subject to laws, and not left to the anarchy of which 
 the Slavs dream. 
 
 IV. Necessity for the Teaching of Civic Duties in all 
 stages of Instruction. 
 
 Civil and moral instruction should be conjoined. 
 Stuart Mill said that the voter ought at least to be 
 capable of copying out several lines of English, and 
 doing a rule-of-three sum,^ before placing his vote in 
 
 ^ *' I regard it as wholly inadmissible that any person should 
 participate in the suffrage without being able to read, write, and, I will 
 add, perform the common operations of arithmetic." — ^J. S. Mill on 
 Representative Government^ p. 68. (Tr.) 
 
198 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 .the ballot-box. Spencer says, with more justice, that 
 the multiplication table will not help you to see 
 through the fallacies of socialistic theories. What 
 does it matter whether the working man can read or 
 not, if he only reads what will confirm his delusions ? 
 A drowning man clutches at a straw ; a man over- 
 whelmed with care clutches at any social theory that 
 promises him happiness. What is necessary is better 
 civic instruction. Among working men of every kind, 
 who are the best instructed ? The artisans ; and it is 
 precisely from the artisans, with their false ideas, that 
 the greatest peril threatens us. " The ignorant peas- 
 ant," it has been well said, '^ is less irrational than the 
 enlightened artisan. A little instruction sometimes 
 leaves the recipient a long way off good sense ; but 
 much instruction must bring him nearer to it. 
 If we cannot bring primary instruction to perfection, 
 a wide diffusion of that instruction will bring all 
 working men, peasants included, to the level of the 
 artisan, and will give them more power to carry out 
 an unfortunate policy or bad social economy." ^ 
 
 Spencer and Bluntschli agree in the assertion that 
 in our democracies there is no possible liberty, no 
 possible vote, no possible security for property, with- 
 out a "good political education." The school, and 
 especially the school of the people, can only be a 
 distant preparation for this education. "The child 
 grasps with difficulty the notion of the State. We 
 can only give him very vague ideas on the political 
 and social constitution, and they afford but little 
 interest to the youthful intellect. We have especially 
 to inspire the child with public morality, civic virtue, 
 patriotism, and that too by example rather than by 
 ^ A. Fouillee, La Propriiti sociale et la dimocratie^ p. 202. 
 
TEACHING OF CIVIC DUTIES. I99 
 
 precept" But there is always a great gap to be filled 
 up, namely, the time elapsing between leaving school 
 — about fourteen — and the age of political majority. 
 In this interval it is certain that the youth is left to 
 himself; that he is exposed to the danger of forgetting 
 a large part of what has been taught him; that civic 
 instruction, in particular, is forgotten just when it is 
 most necessary. If it is legitimate to require three to 
 five years for military training, would it not be legiti- 
 mate to require a few hours a week to give our young 
 men positive ideas in political science and consti- 
 tutional law? Defence against "the attack of bar- 
 barians from within" is as essentialin our democracies 
 as defence against the foe from without. I am one of 
 those who believe that it would be desirable, during 
 the whole of a young man's military service, that 
 he should be taught not merely his military " theory," 
 but also what has been called civic theory — the 
 principles of our constitution, the organisation of the 
 State, and the duties and rights of the citizen. This 
 might be done by text-books outside all party lines, 
 without either political or religious bias.^ 
 
 In Belgium, examinations for the franchise have 
 been instituted : this would be a good example to 
 follow.^ 
 
 ^ Raleigh's Elementary Politics (is., Clarendon Press) will probably 
 occur to the reader as an instance of what has been done in England in 
 this way. (Tr. ) 
 
 2 The new Belgian law takes as the basis of the franchise not 
 the census, but intellectual and moral capacity. Candidates are sub- 
 mitted before a jury to an electoral examination, comprising very 
 simple questions on morality, Belgian history, constitutional institutions, 
 reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography. 
 
 Before adopting this conclusion, experiments were made on the 
 results already obtained by primary instruction; the militia who had 
 been at school from four to six years were subjected to an extremely 
 
200 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 V. Instruction in Esthetics. 
 
 At present but little effort has been made to give a 
 really cesthetic education. Historical education has 
 received attention, but aesthetic education has not 
 received its share. When literature is taught, it is 
 from the point of view of names and dates, while in 
 aesthetics dates are of but secondary importance. We 
 must give the first place in the different degrees of 
 instruction to the beautiful, and not merely to literary, 
 but also to artistic beauty. In the depths of every 
 man is a fund of enthusiasm which only asks room 
 for expansion ; unfortunately it too often expands on 
 things not worth the trouble. I knew an honest man 
 who left his province, his home, and his everyday 
 
 simple examination. They were asked, for instance: "What are the 
 four great towns of Belgium, and upon what rivers are they situated ? " 
 Thirty-five per cent, could not answer at all ; 44 per cent, were only 
 partly right. To the question, "By whom are the laws made ? " 50 per 
 cent, were unable to answer at all ; 35 per cent, said they were made 
 by the king, or by the king and queen, or by the ministers, or by the 
 government, or by the senate ; 15 per cent, gave an accurate answer. 
 Asked to name an illustrious Belgian, d"] per cent, named all kinds of 
 foreign dignitaries in various countries ; 20 per cent, could only name 
 Leopold I. or Leopold II. Such were the unsatisfactory results of the 
 Belgian law of 1842 on primary instruction. 
 
 Bluntschli, entering into no details, proposes to the State as a 
 model "the profound subtlety of the Church," which is able to fill 
 young minds with its teaching, and to consecrate, in a measure, the 
 entry of the Christian into life by what is called "confirmation." 
 Bluntschli would like a kind of "civic confirmation and consecration." 
 " Before being allowed to exercise his privileges as a citizen, every 
 man should have undergone a course of civic education, or some corre- 
 sponding examination. If necessary, an annual State festival would 
 commemorate this civic consecration. A sense of what the State really 
 is would thus grow in men's minds, and the intellectual and moral 
 capacity of the elector would be better secured." 
 
INSTRUCTION IN ESTHETICS. 20I 
 
 life, to make a journey to the Pyrenees, for the sole 
 purpose of eating trout caught in Lake Gaube. That 
 was gormandising carried to the verge of enthusiasm. 
 The object of education is not to suppress enthusiasm, 
 but to direct it towards objects worthy of it — towards 
 the good and the beautifuL 
 
 There are two kinds of imagination : one consists 
 pre-eminently in approaching things from the point 
 of view of resemblance. Metaphor arises from — first 
 the involuntary, and then the voluntary blending of 
 images. The imagination of children and young 
 people is essentially metaphorical ; their language 
 even is composed of figures of every kind. The 
 analytic spirit, on the other hand, consists in the 
 apprehension of the differences rather than the 
 resemblances of things, in defining the outlines of 
 perceptions. The mind, possessing the highest form 
 of imagination, is able to represent to itself points 
 both of resemblance and difference, and to distinguish 
 all its percepts and concepts, and at the same 
 time to grasp the point at which they touch, and 
 the features they have in common. The creative 
 imagination is constituted by this double faculty of 
 perceiving resemblance and difference. The percep- 
 tion of differences is the more voluntary part of the 
 imagination : it is the part of genius involving work 
 and even effort. Creation by an artist or thinker 
 presupposes two things — first, spontaneous and con- 
 fused synthesis ; then order and analysis introduced 
 into that synthesis. To create is, in a certain sense, 
 to unify (all is one in the universe) ; but it is also to 
 see variety in the indistinct unity of things. The 
 work of art and even of science is always more or less 
 a metaphor, but a metaphor conscious of itself, of its 
 
202 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 different terms, and of the determinate relation which 
 connects them. The child must be accustomed to 
 keep its imagination under control, to guide it, and 
 ipso facto to make it analytic, — to change the play of 
 imagination into methodic work, into an art. The 
 excess of a child's imagination, like that of primitive 
 races, is largely due to the greater indistinctness of 
 the perceptions, which are more easily transformed 
 into one another at will. They see what they wish 
 to see in the confusion of things, just as we see shapes 
 in clouds. As yet the name is for the child insepar- 
 able from the object ; language is not for him the 
 algebra it becomes for us : if we speak to him 
 of anything, he sees it, and when he does not see 
 it, he cannot understand what we are talking about. 
 He distinguishes clearly neither time, place, nor 
 persons. The imagination of children has therefore 
 for its starting-point the confusion of images produced 
 by their reciprocal attraction ; they blend the past 
 with the present or the future ; they do not live as 
 we do, in the real^ in the determinate ; they assign no 
 definite limits to a sensation or an image ; in other 
 words, being unable to distinguish or perceive any- 
 thing very clearly, they dream apropos of everything. 
 The child not having yet developed the art of recol- 
 lection, everything is in the present to him. A con- 
 fusion between the present and the past is often 
 visible in the child. A boy of two and a half years 
 old dropped his ball the other day from the top of a 
 balcony. The ball was restored, and since then 
 he has played with it a hundred times ; in spite of 
 that, he brings me suddenly to the balcony, and 
 then, in a pathetic tone of voice, but with genuine 
 grief, tells me he has dropped it over. The child 
 
iNStRUCtlON IN ESTHETICS. 203 
 
 retains and reproduces images much more than he 
 invents them or thinks them ; and that is precisely 
 why he has no clear idea of time : the reproductive 
 imagination, being isolated, is not distinguished from, 
 nor is it opposed to, the constructive imagination, 
 for the latter is only the higher development of the 
 former. The child or the animal have really no past — 
 that is to say, no totality of recollections systematised 
 and in antithesis to the present or to the future, 
 which they imagine and construct in their own 
 fashion. The faculty of generalisation, so great and 
 so often noticed in children, arises from their much 
 clearer perception of resemblances than differences. 
 In the case of my boy, two and a half years old, 
 every fruit is an apple, every colour attracting his 
 eyes is red, because that is the essentially salient 
 colour. When lying in his cradle he shows me the 
 bottom and then the side of the bed — " this is the road, 
 and that is the ditch ; " he imagines these things of 
 himself without ever having been taught to play such 
 a game. This is because he is led by superficial 
 analogies so powerfully that in a short time he is not 
 conscious of differences ; I am quite sure that when 
 he goes to sleep he really thinks he is right in the 
 middle of a white road, with ditches on the right and 
 left. Children also constantly deceive themselves 
 about persons. If something has been broken, and I 
 ask my little boy, "Who has broken that?" he 
 almost always answers, " Baby." This is because it is 
 generally Baby that has done any mischief. Besides, 
 in his own eyes, he is the centre of the world, and he 
 therefore considers himself not only as the object, but 
 also as the cause of everything that is done. 
 
 Imagination, as I have already said, begins with 
 
204 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 an involuntary confusion of images, which, at first 
 unconscious, becomes conscious in the course of 
 correction, causes a certain pleasure, and then is 
 voluntarily repeated for the sake of that pleasure. 
 The play of the imagination was at first an error. I 
 can compare it to nothing better than to a gentle fall, 
 causing no pain, which amuses, and though on the 
 first occasion an accident, becomes a game at which 
 the child plays. How fond children are, for instance, 
 of rolling on the grass ! 
 
 Fiction is natural to children. It is a mistake to 
 say that, as a rule, they lie artificially to escape, for 
 example, a punishment. The lie is in most cases the 
 first exercise of the imagination, the first invention, 
 the germ of art The child of two and a half alluded 
 to above frequently lies to himself, telling stories 
 out loud in which he inverts the actual occurrences, 
 corrects them, and generally gives them a better turn 
 than they really have. For instance, he says to 
 himself — " Papa does not speak properly : he says 
 ^sevette'; baby does speak properly: he says ^ serviette'^' 
 Naturally, what did happen was just the opposite, 
 and the child had been corrected. All day long the 
 boy goes on in this way, transposing events that 
 really occurred, and changing the part he himself 
 plays in them. The lie is the first romance of child- 
 hood, and often is concocted to embellish what has 
 really happened ; the romance of the philosopher — a 
 metaphysical hypothesis, and ordinarily told for the 
 same purpose — is sometimes the highest class of 
 fiction. Sincerity is a very complex result of social 
 life ; it springs from human respect, a sense of per- 
 sonal dignity, interest properly understood, etc. The 
 child himself is only sincere from the spontaneity. 
 
INSTRUCTION IN .ESTHETICS. 20S 
 
 transparence, and natural purity of his soul ; 
 but unless the words leave his lips under the im- 
 mediate pressure of some emotion, he henceforth is 
 merely translating the play of incoherent images 
 haunting his brain. He plays with words as with 
 everything else ; he tests them, puts them in all pos- 
 sible positions, combines the same ideas in the most 
 unexpected way, and makes phrases just as he makes 
 " houses," " gardens," and " pies " out of sand, without 
 troubling himself about reality. And when he has 
 taken a false direction, his persistence is due to his 
 efforts to mark his personality. In a word, he is 
 perpetually confusing what he really has done with 
 what he would have liked to do, what he has seen 
 done, what he has said he has done, and what he has 
 been told he did. The past is to him the dominant 
 image in the confusion of interwoven images. 
 
 In proportion as the child has a natural turn for 
 invention, and is careless of the reality of his stories, 
 he is the less a hypocrite and a dissembler. The real 
 lie, the moral lie, is dissimulation, which only arises 
 from fear ; it is in direct ratio to the ill-judged 
 severity of parents, and to unscientific education. 
 Far from being naturally inclined to hide an act of 
 disobedience, the child is rather led to tell it, and to 
 place it in bold relief, because in his eyes it is a mark 
 of personal independence. My little lad always 
 comes and tells me the little follies he has committed 
 in the course of the day, sometimes in a boasting 
 view, sometimes duly penitent ; I have made it a rule 
 never to punish him for anything he thus tells me of 
 his own accord, but only when I catch him in the act; 
 my only object is to substitute repentance for satis- 
 faction in these acts of folly, and I am gradually 
 
206 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 succeeding in this by gentle and always very short 
 reprimands. 
 
 To reproduce a fact or a story with changes is a 
 fertile source of amusement for children, but they 
 have difficulty in doing it. It is really hard work to 
 them, as we may see when we watch them in the act. 
 A little four-year-old friend of mine said to me : 
 " Listen, I am going to tell you a story ; but it is not 
 the story of little Poucet.^ Once upon a time there 
 lived in a forest a very little boy, the son of a wood- 
 cutter ; but it was not little Poucet," etc. And so the 
 story went on, always accompanied by the parenthesis, 
 " This is like the story of little Poucet, but it is not 
 really the same story." ^ 
 
 The true culture of the imagination is Art in its 
 various phases : the child must be made an artist — i.e.^ 
 we must introduce into the spontaneous play of his 
 imagination the laws of the true and the beautiful, 
 which constitute, so to speak, the very morality of the 
 imagination. Education, therefore, ought to be pro- 
 foundly cesthetic. The essential part of instruction is 
 to teach the child to admire what is good, to become 
 
 ^ This is our old friend " Hop-o'-my-thumb." (Tr.) 
 ^ A little girl is often much more devoted to an old, spoiled, and 
 disfigured doll than to a new doll, although possessing a face of a 
 much more human character, because her imagination has more power 
 over the former than the latter, and she transfigures it by her recollec- 
 tions or the fictions of the moment. " One day," said a lady, telling 
 me her recollections, ** I wanted to play more seriously at being 
 * mother.' I was then a biggish girl. I left all my dolls, and making 
 a bundle of my table napkin, I spent half the night cradling this 
 improvised baby in my arms." 
 
 It is said that what little girls really are attached to in their dolls is 
 the representation of the children they may have in after years, that 
 they are simply playing at being ''mother." This is not quite true. 
 "When I was a little girl, I had a big ball of various colours that I 
 was really passionately fond of; I never let it out of my sight; I used 
 
INSTRUCTION IN ESTHETICS. 207 
 
 himself capable of imagining things pretty, beautiful, 
 and graceful. Knowledge properly so called, I again 
 repeat, only comes afterwards, and its moralising 
 influence only begins, as it has been pointed out, at 
 the moment it ceases to be merely a tool and becomes 
 an artistic object. 
 
 An image is the best instrument for clearing up the 
 ideas of a child — perhaps of all of us. The poet is 
 pre-eminently he who best perceives the relation of 
 form to emotion and thought ; he elicits by an image 
 what is latent and ignored within us. That is why 
 the ancients saw in the poet an almost divine being — 
 at any rate a being divinely inspired ; that is why 
 they picture Orpheus as the educator even of Nature 
 herself, and that is why they made of their poets the 
 first and the only educators, so to speak, of their 
 youth. The moral, thinking, and feeling being has 
 yet to be created in the child ; and just as we do not 
 profess to leave the child to discover the fundamental 
 laws of science (assuming him capable of such dis- 
 covery), so we ought not to expect him unaided to 
 attain to all the most elevated sentiments ; he must 
 be brought to such a level little by little ; he must be 
 taught not only the discoveries and acquisitions, but 
 also the ideal aspirations of the human mind, from 
 
 to clasp it to my heart as if it were a living being very dear to me, and 
 I always used the utmost precaution when I played with it for fear of 
 breaking it or hurting it. I used to feel a kind of regret that a ball 
 had to bounce up and down in all directions; in reality I only loved it 
 because it was a companion, a real friend. The doll's eyes have no 
 expression but what the child gives it, and the expression is only given 
 in the process of time. To love a being you must live with it, and 
 this is still more true of dolls than men." 
 
 '*The less individuality the doll has, the more it is appreciated by 
 the child, who can the better utilise it as a lay figure in many different 
 characters." — Galton, Enquiries into Human Faculty^ p. io8. (Tr.) 
 
208 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 which, in fact, all science springs. In young people 
 especially an appeal must be made to the heart, the 
 imagination, and the senses, before addressing the 
 intellect; before the imagination can see, every object 
 must have form and colour. Even the heart needs 
 the illumination of the eyes. Thus the young child, 
 when incapable of noticing the care lavished upon it, 
 is nevertheless conscious of the mother's love by the 
 sudden gentleness of her glance, by her caressing 
 gestures, by the accent of her voice as she seems to 
 linger over the lullaby. That is the tenderness of the 
 mother made visible to the eyes and to the heart; 
 and therefore it is the poetry of maternal love. The 
 distinctive characteristic of poetry is that it surges up 
 into the heart and overflows just as love itself; it out- 
 strips the visible form in which it is manifested, and 
 beyond this it presents something of the infinite. 
 The sculptor is as the poet. When the chisel hews 
 the marble, it is not to " embody " in it the idea, but 
 rather to give birth to the idea, and to make it issue 
 from inert matter ; as the statue " leaps " from the 
 block, as the outlines become definite and the features 
 appear, the expression — which gives life and reality 
 to the whole — at the same time seems to emerge; 
 like an impalpable and luminous ray of light, it runs 
 over and plays on this inert matter from which it 
 springs, on the visible shape above which it hovers, 
 and thus it is projected into our eyes, our hearts, and 
 the very depths of our being. Poetry is still more 
 expressive. By its aid the sense for words becomes 
 wider, images reach the point of symbolism. As 
 poetry leaves us to guess more than it tells us, it is 
 within the scope of alike the youngest and the ripest 
 minds, each understanding it according to its powers. 
 
INSTRUCTION IN ESTHETICS. 209 
 
 In its deepest sense it appears to us as the mirror in 
 which are reflected and blended into a single image 
 what our eyes perceive in the outer world, and what 
 our thought anticipates or divines in the apparently 
 impenetrable inner world. Let us then teach our 
 children to know, and especially to understand, the 
 poetry to which at all periods of life we return so 
 many times, sometimes for help to hope, sometimes 
 for help to forget. 
 
 The aesthetic qualities are the most likely to be trans- 
 mitted by heredity; it is therefore of importance that 
 they should be maintained in their purity, and unceas- 
 ingly developed. The Greek was born with natural 
 taste, with an eye and an ear for the beautiful. So it 
 is with the Frenchman. Sense and sentiment play 
 a leading role in aesthetics. Now perfection and 
 delicacy of sense and sentiment are transmitted by 
 heredity. They may also be lost ; we must be care- 
 ful not to allow such a precious heritage to pass away 
 from us through our neglect of aesthetic education. 
 
 " Are the fine arts necessary to the people ? " 
 Pedagogues, says Tolstoi*, as a rule hesitate and are 
 perplexed in dealing with this question. Plato alone 
 boldly answered it in the negative.^ Some say, 
 " Yes, but with certain restrictions ; it would be detri- 
 mental to social order if every one had the oppor- 
 tunity of being an artist." Others say, " Certain arts 
 can only exist in a certain degree in a certain class 
 of society." Again, "the arts require exclusive and 
 single-hearted service." And finally, "great talent 
 should be afforded the opportunity of entire devotion 
 
 ^ Plato, Republic, bk. iii., sec. 401. — Vide Nettleship's Essay on 
 "The Theory of Education in Plato's Republic," in Abbott's Hellenica 
 (Rivington), pp. 113-130. (Tr.) 
 
 14 
 
2IO EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 to art.'' Tolstoi's conclusion is that all this is unfair. 
 He believes that the want of artistic enjoyment and 
 culture exists in all human beings, whatever their race 
 or environment ; that this is a legitimate craving, and 
 should be satisfied. Elevating this maxim to the 
 dignity of an axiom, he adds that if the pleasures and 
 the universal culture of art are fraught with incon- 
 venience and discord, this is due to the character and 
 tendencies of our art ; " we should give to the young 
 generation the opportunity of creating art that will be 
 new alike in matter and fundamental construction." 
 " Every child of the masses has the same — nay, 
 greater rights to the pleasures of art than we, the 
 children of the privileged classes, whom the impera- 
 tive necessity of protracted toil does not constrain, 
 whom all the luxuries of life surround." And again, 
 ** One of these two must hold : either the arts in 
 general are harmful and useless, which is not so 
 strange a theory as it seems at the first glance ; or, 
 every individual, whatever his rank or occupation, has 
 a right to art. To ask if the masses have a right to 
 art is tantamount to asking if they have a right to 
 food, if they have a right to satisfy the necessities of 
 their human nature." No! The question is not a 
 question of right ; what is of importance is to know if 
 the food we offer or refuse to the masses is good. So, 
 by placing within the reach of the masses, as far as 
 is in our power, certain branches of knowledge, and 
 by ascertaining the amount of harm done by those 
 branches, I conclude, not that the masses are vicious 
 because they do not accept that knowledge, not that 
 they are as yet too undeveloped to accept and utilise 
 it, but that the knowledge itself is abnormal and 
 vicious, and that with the aid of the masses 
 
INSTRUCTION IN ESTHETICS. 211 
 
 themselves we must devise fresh branches which will be 
 suitable to all — to the fashionable world and the toil- 
 ing myriads alike. Such arts, such branches of know- 
 ledge as survive among us and do not seem harmful, 
 but cannot survive among the masses, and do seem 
 harmful, — such arts, etc., are not those that are 
 generally necessary ; and we live in this environ- 
 ment only because we are depraved, like those who 
 sit with impunity for five or six hours at a time in the 
 fetid atmosphere of a workshop or a public-house, and 
 who are but little inconvenienced by breathing an air 
 which would prove fatal to others not inured to it. It 
 may be asked : " Who says the knowledge and the 
 arts of the intellectual classes are false ? Why do you 
 conclude they are false because the masses do not 
 accept them ? " All questions of this kind may be 
 very simply answered: "Because we are thousands, and 
 they are millions. As for the trite and trivial paradox 
 that preparation is needed for the appreciation of the 
 beautiful, what kind of man states it, why is it stated, 
 what is there to prove it ? It is only a subterfuge for 
 escape from the cul de sac into which we have been 
 driven by the untenable character of our standpoint, 
 viz., the making of art an exclusive privilege of a 
 class. Why are the beauty of the sun, of the human 
 countenance, of a ballad, of love and sacrifice, acces- 
 sible to each of us, and yet we do not need special 
 preparation for our appreciation of them ? " 
 
 " Because we are thousands, and they are millions," 
 says Tolstoi. If this is not the right of the strongest, 
 at any rate it is the right of the greatest number. To 
 consider false what the majority of men fail to see 
 and believe, is to be rather like the contemporaries of 
 Christopher Columbus, who denied the existence of 
 
212 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 America. Should we disbelieve in the existence of 
 stars merely because they are beyond our view ? 
 Tolstoi' is certainly right when he tells us modern art 
 has unhealthy tendencies which we accept because we 
 are accustomed to them — so accustomed to them, in 
 fact, that we make a kind of abstraction of them ; we 
 instinctively evade the convention of a new style, 
 which has replaced what may be called the " cere- 
 mony " of classical works ; we only see, and we only 
 want to see, the beautiful side of a work — in fact, just 
 that part of it which makes it a work of art. We 
 may safely assert that if a work of art enjoys per- 
 manent success, that success is due in some measure 
 to whatever it possesses of the beautiful and the true. 
 Tolstoif dreams of a great and popular art, quite close 
 to nature, simple and elevated, pure as the air and the 
 light, without the affectation, the hyper-refinement, 
 and morbid character of our arts. The dream is a 
 beautiful dream, and it is good to have such visions. 
 Extreme of refinement is not depth, and art can only 
 gain by being — at any rate partly — accessible to all, 
 and thus tending to the universal. But to go so far 
 as to condemn in art whatever is not as patent as the 
 light of day is really to restrict it. Nothing will ever 
 make the simplest among us seize at the outset what 
 self-conscious thought has been gradually led to 
 understand and express. We must ourselves pursue 
 anew the road traced out by others if we wish to 
 follow them. The artistic education of the eye begins 
 in little children with the mere distinctions of colours ; 
 and its beginning so early in life is a further reason 
 for continuing later. To maintain his position, Tolstoi' 
 unjustifiably connects artistic beauty with moral 
 beauty. If it is true that every one can understand 
 
INSTRUCTION IN ESTHETICS. 21 3 
 
 the beauty of love and sacrifice ; it is because moral 
 beauty springs from the very heart of man, and is 
 radiated without; while the beauty of things, to be 
 thoroughly understood, should re-enter the heart, 
 being brought back thither by emotion ; the one is 
 ours already, the other should become ours. We all 
 can see the sun, but we do not all admire it in the 
 same degree. It is a paradox to pretend that no 
 initiation is necessary even for the comprehension of 
 simple and natural art; unfortunately, that is just 
 what we understand last of all. To believe that 
 children and the populace (that mass of poor grown- 
 up children) will not find more pleasure in flaring 
 daubs than in fine engravings, in the swing and 
 rhythm of dance music than in a sublime and simple 
 song, is a pathetic instance of love for the masses 
 carried to the verge of blindness. Who will give us 
 an art at once noble and popular, an art that is really 
 classical and in every detail educative ? Meanwhile, 
 let us select from our works of art those that are the 
 healthiest, simplest, and most elevated, and let us 
 place them within the reach of all. Perhaps, after all 
 the arts of this period of decadence have passed 
 away, we shall see a new art revive and flourish, young 
 and full of life, destined to become one of the forms 
 of the religion of the world. 
 
 "If it is true," says M. Ravaisson, " that the 
 imagination of children, and especially the children 
 of the masses, is always more developed than their 
 reasoning powers, does it not follow, not merely that 
 a place that it does not at present possess should be 
 awarded to the cultivation of the imagination, but 
 that such a culture should take the most prominent 
 position in primary instruction?" It is, in fact, of 
 
214 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 the greatest moment to direct every nascent faculty, 
 especially when that faculty is connected with what 
 has been called our native fancy. In these days art 
 in the most general sense plays a certain part in the 
 education of the higher classes ; but in the education 
 of the lower classes there is nothing of the kind ; now 
 children and young people of all ranks in life should 
 be brought up in hymnis et canticis : " this is how the 
 ancients nurtured their youth in a poetry at once 
 religious and patriotic, and in an art derived from the 
 same sources ; thus they were nurtured in the culture 
 of the highest beauty. Instead of letting itself be 
 almost entirely overrun by a pseudo-utilitarianism 
 which leaves without culture those faculties from 
 which others ought to receive an impulse, why should 
 not modern education be inspired by the traditions of 
 old ? And I may add, that by that inspiration the 
 great problem would be solved, to which modern 
 systems of pedagogy, from Rousseau to Pestalozzi 
 downwards, have given an inadequate solution — 
 i.e.^ the problem how to interest children in their 
 studies, especially the children of the primary schools." 
 M. Ravaisson remarks that " beauty is the watchword 
 of the universe ; " he adds, with somewhat more truth, 
 that ** beauty is the watchword of education.''^ 
 
 Without being as anxious as M. Ravaisson with 
 regard to the results that purely manual work may 
 have in our schools, I think that that kind of work 
 which, as I have said before, is exercised upon matter, 
 must be completed by both a feeling for and a study of 
 form — by aesthetics. Every trade, every occurrence of 
 daily life, requires what Leonardo da Vinci called " a 
 good eye.*' " It is the eye, in fact," said this great 
 
 ^ Ravaisson, Dictionnaire de Pedagogic ^ article " Dessin." 
 
INSTRUCTION IN ESTHETICS. 21 5 
 
 master, " which has discovered all the arts, from 
 astronomy to navigation, from painting to the craft of 
 the locksmith and carpenter, from architecture and 
 hydraulics to agriculture." 
 
 Drawing and singing are the popular arts par 
 excellence^ and those therefore which may be the 
 least removed from nature. It will be said : If draw- 
 ing is really required in the popular schools, it can 
 only be technical drawing, applied to the purposes of 
 life — the drawing of a plough, a machine, a vessel, 
 etc., in fact, drawing considered as auxiliary to linear 
 drawing. "But," retorts Tolstoi with considerable 
 truth, " experience has shown the inanity and injustice 
 of the technical programme. Most children, after four 
 months at drawing restricted to technical applications, 
 with no reproductions of faces, animals, or landscapes, 
 were eventually almost disgusted at the eternal copy- 
 ing of technical objects ; and their feeling their craving 
 for artistic drawing was so strong, that they made for 
 themselves copy-books in which they drew on the 
 sly, men, horses with four legs starting from the same 
 point, and so on." Every child is conscious of an 
 instinct of independence which it would be dangerous 
 to stifle by any teaching whatever, and which, in this 
 case, is manifested by irritation against the copying of 
 models for imitation. If the pupil does not learn at 
 school how to create, he will only imitate all his life, 
 because, when they have learned how to copy, very 
 few are capable of making a personal application of 
 their knowledge. " By always keeping to natural 
 forms in drawing, by giving them in turn objects of 
 the most diverse character to draw — i.e,^ leaves of 
 characteristic appearance, flowers, ships, articles in 
 ordinary use, tools — I tried to avoid routine and 
 
2l6 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 affectation. Thanks to this method, more than thirty 
 pupils were sufficiently acquainted with the funda- 
 mentals of the art to seize the relations of the lines in 
 faces, and in every kind of object, and to reproduce 
 those objects by clear and accurate lines. The per- 
 fectly mechanical art of linear drawing is gradually 
 and as it were spontaneously developed." Leonardo 
 da Vinci firmly believed in commencing drawing by 
 the study of those forms -offering the most character 
 and beauty. Now these forms are organic and not 
 merely geometrical. 
 
 Music should become the popular art par excellence^ 
 the relaxation it affords, abstracting us from our 
 absorbing material cares, develops sympathy and 
 sociability. To listen to music with others is to 
 make all hearts beat as one with the instruments and 
 voices. A concert is an ideal society into which we 
 are transported, in which harmony and good under- 
 standing are realised, in which life becomes a divine 
 sympathy. The French are beginning to appreciate 
 this view, but their appreciation has not as yet been 
 carried to such an extent as to inquire how far the 
 development of musical taste — so natural to all — is 
 desirable, how far it is important to gradually inspire 
 the nation with a love for great and beautiful music — 
 the music which has a moralising influence because its 
 character is elevated. Military bands and bands under 
 the control of central authorities have an educative 
 mission, which ought to be neither forgotten nor 
 neglected. In addition, music is one of the few 
 pleasures that all classes of society can appreciate 
 together ; it thus becomes a bond of universal 
 sympathy, and of such ties there are far too 
 few. 
 
INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION. 21/ 
 
 No doubt the plastic arts are not so accessible to 
 our youth as poetry and music. There is, however, 
 no sufficient reason for neglecting the artistic educa- 
 tion of children, even in the matter of architecture. 
 Where ruins are not at hand, the plaster casts to be 
 found in museums, the prints and photographs of 
 which so many and so various specimens are now 
 available, appeal to the eyes; indeed, with a little 
 preparation it is not difficult for the master to offer 
 fitting comments on them, to reason out both the 
 detail and the combined effect. After a few lessons 
 of this kind, the child may have a sufficient grasp of 
 this character of sculpture to appreciate Mercier's 
 " Quand Meme," or Barrias' " La Defense de Paris." 
 
 VI. Intellectual Education. p* ^/7 — Z3 "^ 
 
 After moral, civic, and aesthetic teaching, let us 
 examine the intellectual instruction given m our 
 schools. The syllabus of primary instruction now 
 comprises reading, writing, the French language, the 
 elements of French literature, geography (particu- 
 larly France), history (particularly that of France 
 to our own days), a few general ideas on law and 
 political economy, the elements of natural science, 
 physics, and mathematics ; their application to agri- 
 culture, hygiene, and the industrial arts; manual 
 training and the use of the tools used in the principal 
 trades ; the elements of drawing, modelling, and 
 music ; gymnastics and military exercises. Children 
 can only learn and understand in the course of a few 
 years so many things at once by a premature strain- 
 ing of the delicate springs of young minds, and we 
 
21 8 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 run the risk of weakening at one stroke both moral 
 and intellectual energy. 
 
 The literary, grammatical, and historical part of this 
 syllabus exposes us to the danger of what the English 
 call cramming. Has much been done when we have 
 succeeded in filling their heads with facts, dates, 
 words, and formulas ? Children do not feel the want 
 of words ; it is ideas that are required ; and it is ideas 
 we must give them. Unfortunately erudition invades 
 everything — even grammar — in the schools. Let us 
 keep for secondary education — or, still better, for 
 higher instruction — historical commentaries, compara- 
 tive grammar, lexicology, and phonetics. Do not 
 worry children and masters with lofty speculations 
 with which they have no concern. Let us fear lest, 
 by carrying our imitation of the Germans too far, we 
 substitute dull and dry for frivolous pedantry. 
 
 At school and college alike scientific instruction 
 becomes a storing up of facts in the memory, when 
 its essential object should be the development of the 
 observing and reasoning powers, and its secondary 
 object the furnishing of the student with useful and 
 practical ideas, in quantity no more than can be after- 
 wards remembered. As the number of objects of 
 instruction goes on increasing, we must have recourse 
 to different methods than those that obtain at present; 
 we must blend lessons and recreation as often as 
 possible; that is how to instruct without fatiguing. 
 Hence the utility of school walks. Botany is best of 
 all, because the work entailed is in the open air. If 
 St. Louis administered justice under an oak, surely 
 the master may teach under an oak not only natural 
 history, but the history of France — not forgetting the 
 Druids. In order to vary the subjects, there is nothing 
 
INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION. 219 
 
 to prevent an occasional journey to a mine, a factory, 
 an historic building, or in fact to anything of interest 
 in the neighbourhood. 
 
 The account given by Tolstoi of his attempts at 
 teaching history is full of humour. He began, as 
 usual, with ancient history. But the children were 
 not interested in Sesostris, the Pyramids, or the 
 Egyptians. In fact, where they did remember and 
 appreciate some incident, such as the story of 
 Semiramis, it was accidentally, not because they 
 learned anything from it, but because it was cleverly 
 told. As these episodes were not of frequent occur- 
 rence, Tolstoi tried Russian history, and began " that 
 melancholy, inartistic, and useless History of Russia 
 which from Tchimov to Vodozov has undergone so 
 many transformations." They soon got confused 
 with the Mstislavs, the Vriatschislavs, and the Bole- 
 slax. The effort of remembering these " amazing " 
 names brought into play all the intellectual power of 
 the children ; what these individuals had done was 
 but a secondary matter. — " Here he is — what's his 
 name? — Barikav, or what is it?" began one of the 
 children, — " marched against — what's his name ? " 
 — " Mouslav, L^on Nikolaievitch ? " murmurs a 
 little girl. — "Mstislav," I answer. — "And cut the 
 enemy in pieces," boldly resumes the boy. — ** Stop, 
 now ! There was a river. And the son who massed 
 his men and cut the foe in pieces? what was 
 his name?" — "What queer history!" says Semka. 
 "Mstislav, Tchislav? — Oh, what is the good of all 
 this ? " — Those who had a good memory tried to 
 remember, and, to tell the truth, made very shrewd 
 remarks, for fear of getting their ears boxed. But all 
 this sort of thing was really monstrous, and it was 
 
220 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 pitiful to see the poor children. They were like 
 "chickens to whom sand and grain are alternately- 
 thrown, and who get wild, and cluck, and struggle, 
 and are ready to pluck the feathers out of each 
 other." Read Clotaire, Lothaire, Chilperic, for 
 Tchislav and Mstislav, and you have a similar scene 
 in a French school. 
 
 The taste for history in most children, says Tolstoi, 
 succeeds the taste for art. He made several further 
 attempts at teaching history, beginning with our own 
 times, and found the results very satisfactory. He 
 took the Crimean War, the reign of the Emperor 
 Nicholas, and the story of 1812. The Napoleonic 
 war was, as might have been expected, the greatest 
 success. " The recollection of that class is one of the 
 most memorable in my life." As soon as TolstoT 
 began to tell the children how the theatre of the war 
 was transferred into Russia, from every side arose 
 exclamations and cries of the keenest interest. — 
 " What, is he going to conquer us too ? " — " Don't be 
 frightened; Alexander was quite his match," said a 
 lad who knew the story of Alexander. Tolsto'f had 
 to dash their hopes to the ground ; " the time of 
 triumph had not yet come." Their indignation was 
 aroused when they heard of the plan to marry 
 Napoleon to the Czar's sister, and of how the Czar 
 met Napoleon on the bridge as his equal. — "Listen 
 to that ! " said Petka, with a threatening gesture. 
 — " Go on ! go on with the story ! " — When 
 Alexander refused to submit, that is to say, to 
 declare war, general approbation was expressed. 
 When Napoleon with twelve nations marched on 
 Russia, arousing Germany and Poland against us, the 
 children were overwhelmed with grief 
 
INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION. 221 
 
 I had a German friend in the room. " Ah ! you 
 were against us too ? " cries Petka (our best story- 
 teller). " Go on ! shut up ! " cried the rest. The 
 retreat of the troops was a cruel blow to the listeners, 
 and from all sides arose how? and why? They 
 abused Kutiisof and Barklay. " What a coward 
 Kutiisof was ! " " You wait ! " said another. " But 
 why did he retreat?" asked a third. When they 
 came to the battle of Borodino, and Tolstoi was 
 obliged to tell them that after all the Russians did 
 not conquer, he could not help pitying them ; " it was 
 obvious that I had given them a terrible shock." 
 " Well, if we did not beat them, neither did they 
 beat us." When Napoleon reached Moscow and 
 demanded the keys and homage, they raised a loud 
 cry of disgust. Of course the burning of Moscow 
 caused great satisfaction. 
 
 Finally, there came the triumph, — then the 
 retreat. — " As soon as Napoleon left Moscow, 
 Kutiisof began to follow him and attack him," said 
 Tolstoif. " He let him see what for," said Petka, who, 
 all of a glow, was sitting by the Count, and in his 
 excitement was twisting his dirty little fingers. At 
 Petka's words the whole class was seized with a 
 paroxysm of proud enthusiasm. One little fellow 
 was nearly crushed, and they never noticed it. — 
 " That's right ! — That's how he got the keys ! " — 
 Tolstoi* went on to tell how the Russians chased the 
 French ; the boys were greatly distressed to hear of 
 the delay on the Beresina, the laggard was treated 
 with contempt, and Petka shouted : " I would have 
 shot him dead for being late!" — "Then came pity. 
 for the frozen Frenchmen. Soon the border was 
 crossed, and the Germans, who had been fighting 
 
222 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 against us so far, now threw themselves at our 
 feet." 
 
 Again the children remember the German present 
 in the room. "That's how you behaved, was it? 
 First you were against us, and then when you found 
 us the stronger, you turned round ! " And suddenly 
 all got up and began to shout "ouf!" so that they 
 could have been heard down the street. 
 
 When they had calmed down, Tolstoi' went on, and 
 told them how the Russians escorted Napoleon to 
 Paris, how they set the rightful king on the throne, 
 how they enjoyed their triumphs and feasted. But 
 the memory of the Crimean War spoiled their 
 pleasure. "'Just wait till Fm grown up; I'll pay 
 them back!' cried Petka. If the allied armies had at 
 that moment stormed the Shevardinsky redoubt or 
 the Malakof Tower, we should have driven them 
 back." It was already late when Tolstoi finished. 
 As a general rule, children are in bed asleep by this 
 time. But no one was sleepy. As Tolstoi rose, to 
 the general amazement, out crept Taraska from 
 under the arm-chair, and looked at him with eager, 
 but at the same time serious face. " How did you 
 get under there ? " " He has been there from the 
 first ! " said some one. There was no need to ask 
 him if he understood ; it was evident from his face. 
 " What can you tell us about it ? " " I ? I can tell it 
 all. I am going to tell about it when I get home." 
 " And I." " And I too." " Won't it be too long ? " 
 " No, indeed 1 " And off they rushed downstairs, one 
 vowing to pay the French out, another abusing the 
 German, another repeating how Kutiisof had taken 
 his revenge. 
 
 " * You told the story solely from the Russian point 
 
INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION. 223 
 
 of View/ said my German friend, whom the boys had 
 hooted that evening. ' You should hear that story 
 told among us Germans. You told them nothing 
 about the battles for German liberty.' I agreed that 
 my narrative was not a history, but a tale adapted for 
 the purpose of kindling national sentiment." 
 
 Tolstoi* eventually was convinced that, as far as 
 history is concerned, persons and events interest the 
 scholars in proportion to their dramatic character, and 
 not in proportion to their historic significance — that is 
 to say, in proportion to the artistic nature of the 
 historian's work, or more often because of their con- 
 nection with popular tradition. Romulus and Remus 
 interested them, not because the two brothers founded 
 the most powerful empire in the world, but because 
 the story was pretty, mysterious, and attractive — the 
 wolf that suckled them ! etc. The story of Gracchus 
 is interesting because it is as dramatic as the story of 
 Pope Gregory VII. and the humiliated Emperor. " In 
 fact, in the child, or in any one whose experience is 
 incomplete, there is no taste for history in itself ; it is 
 only a taste for something artistic." 
 
 According to Tolstoi*, the old superstition has passed 
 away, that there is nothing more terrible than for 
 young people to grow up without learning who were 
 Jaroslav and Otho, or that there is such a province as 
 Estremadura. To inspire the young with a desire to 
 know how the human race lives, has lived, has been 
 transformed and developed in different parts of the 
 earth, to know the eternal laws of evolution, to 
 understand natural phenomena, to know how the 
 human race is distributed over the surface of the 
 earth, — that is quite another thing. " Perhaps," says 
 Tolstof, " it is useful to inspire such desires, but I do 
 
224 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 not think Thiers, or Segur, or Obodovski, will help 
 us much. For this purpose two elements are neces- 
 sary — sentiments at once patriotic and artistic." 
 
 Patriotism, in fact, should be the soul of history ; 
 history must be used as a basis for moral instruction ; 
 but when we have to deal with morality, respect for 
 truth is one of the first conditions. Is there really any 
 need, as Tolstoi imagines, to alter history to make it 
 interesting ? If children like stories, it is equally true 
 that they prefer true stories. To turn history into 
 a series of dramas is to entirely misconceive the 
 grandeur and unity of its character, to misplace its 
 interest, to parcel it out, if I may say so, in order 
 to divide it among a few heroes, who, in fact, to 
 deserve this interest will have to satisfy all the rules 
 of dramatic art. 
 
 No! what we call history is not the history of a 
 few men, but of a whole race, of whole races ; and 
 when the race is the hero, the hero is always in 
 evidence, and the interest ought not to fail on each 
 page with the fall of this or that given personage. 
 Once more, the interest of history is entirely in the 
 ideas, sentiments, and efforts of mankind, not of a few 
 men ; the poetry of history is the poetry of life in 
 general, not of a few lives. Even if children are sad- 
 dened by hearing of defeats where they hoped for 
 victories, ought we therefore to regret that life, which it 
 is not in our power to change for them, should appear 
 to them in its reality ? The sole object of considera- 
 tion should be the age of the children. 
 
 As long as children are very young, it is clear that 
 they can only dip into the subject, and cannot read it 
 in the proper sense of the word ; history to them will 
 be a simple succession of images to which will be 
 
INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION. 22$ 
 
 attached whatever events are within their mental 
 grasp. But in the study of history, however old the 
 child may be, there can be no question of the utter 
 inutility of fastidious nomenclature, of trivial facts — 
 arbitrary in their causes, and not followed out in their 
 consequences. As M. Lavisse puts it, " What trace is 
 left after a few years have elapsed ? " Vague recollec- 
 tions are vaguer still ; the few well-known features of 
 historic figures are effaced ; the divisions of the chrono- 
 logical framework are confused ; " Clovis, Charlemagne, 
 St. Louis, Henry IV., fall from their places, as if they 
 were portraits suspended from a loosened nail on a 
 plaster wall." We must therefore choose our facts 
 more wisely ; we must drop everything that is useless 
 and trivial ; we must throw all the light on those of 
 importance ; we must envolve the series so that the 
 pupil may know how France has lived. The history 
 of manners and institutions cannot be taught to the 
 young by abstract terms, phrases, and theories ; but, 
 using the elementary ideas every child possesses, 
 and words with which they are familiar, it is 
 possible to describe, in simple terms, the con- 
 dition of individuals and races.^ " Who is there in 
 
 ^ M. Lavisse was in a primary school in Paris when a young master was 
 beginning a lesson on the feudal system. The young fellow did not under- 
 stand his work, for he talked about hereditary offices and benefices, and 
 the eight-year-old children he was addressing were naturally absolutely 
 indifferent. The head of the school enters, interrupts the master, and 
 addresses the whole class. ** Has any one ever seen a feudal castle ? " 
 No answer. Then the master asks a child who comes from the faubourg 
 St. Antoine, " Have you never been to Vincennes?" ** Yes, sir." ** Well, 
 then, you have seen a feudal castle." Here is a point of departure 
 found in the present. ** What is this castle like? " Several answer at 
 once. The master takes one of them to the blackboard ; the child 
 draws a rude sketch, which the master corrects. He also sketches in 
 the battlements. " What are those ? " No one knew. He explains, 
 
 IS 
 
226 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 France to teach us what constitutes France?" asks 
 M. Lavisse. It is not the family, for in the family is 
 neither authority, discipline, nor moral teaching ; nor 
 is it society, for in society the mention of civic duties 
 
 ** Now what use were they ? " He makes them guess that they were 
 for defence. " What used they to fight with ? — with guns?" Most of 
 the children answer, " No, sir ! " ** Well, what did they fight with? " 
 A budding savant at the end of the class answers, " With bows." 
 "What is a bow?" Ten answer at once, " A cross-bow." The 
 master smiles, and explains the difference. Then he explains the 
 difficulty of taking a castle, whose walls were broad and high, by 
 the bows, and even by the machines of those days, and pro- 
 ceeds : — "When you are workmen, if you are good workmen, 
 you will come across the ruins of castles when you travel about for 
 your pleasure or for work." He names Montlebery and other ruins 
 near Paris. ** In each castle there lived a lord. Now what did all 
 those lords do? " "They fought." Then the master depicts the feudal 
 wars, the knights on horseback and clad in their armour, and not a 
 child loses a single word of what he is saying. " But they could not 
 take a castle with lances and cuirasses. So the war was never over. 
 Who suffered most of all during these wars ? Those who had no castles 
 — the peasants who in those days worked for the lord. A cottage 
 belonging to the peasants of a lord is burned by his neighbour. 'Ah ! you 
 burn my cottages; I will burn yours,' says the lord who is thus attacked. 
 He did burn them, and not only the cottages but the crops. And what 
 happens when they burn the crops? " " There is a famine." " And 
 can they live without food? " The whole class : " No, sir ! " " Then 
 a remedy had to be found, and the remedy was called 'The Truce of 
 God.'" Then he comments on it: — "A curious law it was. Just 
 think ! They said to the brigands, * From Saturday evening to 
 Wednesday morning you must be quiet, but the rest of the time don't 
 trouble yourselves— fight, burn, pillage, and slay, as much as ever you 
 like ! ' Were they mad in those days?" A voice : "Yes, indeed." 
 " No, they were not mad. Now listen attentively. There are idle boys 
 here. I do all I can to make them work the whole week, but I would 
 be fairly content if I saw them working up to Wednesday. The Church 
 would have been pleased if they had not fought at all, but as she could 
 not prevail on the lords to give fighting up altogether, she tried to keep 
 the great lords at peace for half the week. That was always something 
 gained. But the Church did not succeed. It was a case of force against 
 force, and the king had to bring these people to reason." Then the 
 master explained how the lords were not all of equal rank, that the lord 
 
INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION. 227 
 
 calls forth a jest. The school must tell the French 
 what France is. The final object of instruction in 
 history will be to instil into the hearts of every child in 
 every school a stronger sentiment than " the frivolous 
 
 of the castle had a still higher and more powerful lord above him, living 
 in another castle. He proceeds to give a pretty accurate idea of the 
 feudal scale, and at the head of all he places the king. " When people 
 fight together, who stops them ? " Answer : " The police." ** Well, 
 the king was a policeman. What is done with a man who fights and 
 kills some one?" "He is tried before a judge." "Well, the king 
 was a judge. Can the prisoner escape the police and the judge ? " ** No, 
 sir." ** Well, the kings of old were as useful to France as the police 
 and the judges are now. Afterwards the kings behaved badly, but at 
 first they did good. Did I say as useful as the judges nowadays? 
 Much more useful, for there were more brigands then than now. 
 Those lords were fierce fellows, were they not? " The class : " Yes, 
 sir." ** And the people, were they any better? " Answer, unanimous, 
 with a tone of conviction : '* Yes, sir." ** Ah, boys ! they were not. 
 When they were aroused, they were terrible fellows. They, as well as 
 the lords, pillaged, burned, and killed ; they killed women and children. 
 But remember they didn't know the difference between good and bad. 
 They had never been taught how to read." 
 
 " With these words, which are only half true, ended," says M. Lavisse, 
 **a lesson lasting barely half-an-hour. Let us train masters such as 
 this. Put into their hands books in which may be found, laid down in 
 simple terms, the main facts of the history of civilisation. Will they 
 not become capable of teaching children the history of France? " 
 
 ** It is often said, neglect the earlier pages of history. Of what im- 
 portance are the Merovingians, the Carlovingians, or even the Capets ? 
 Our history is barely a century old. Begin with our own times." '* A 
 pretty way of forming settled and solid minds," remarks M. Lavisse, 
 ** to imprison them in an age of burning struggles, when needs had to 
 be satisfied and hatred glutted without delay ! Truly, a prudent 
 method to start with the French Revolution instead of ending with it, 
 of making children sympathise with that unique, even though legitimate, 
 spectacle of rebellion, of making them believe that every good French- 
 man ought to take the Tuileries at least once in his life, twice if possible, 
 and that if the Tuileries are destroyed he may long some day to take by 
 assault the Palais- Bourbon or the i^lysee, so as to deserve the name of 
 patriot ! Not teach the past ! The poetry of the past is a necessity of 
 our present existence." And I may add that the lessons of the past are 
 of equal value with its poetry. Without the past, the present is inex- 
 
228 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 and fragile vanity " which is unbearable in prosperity, 
 and which, in the face of national disaster, collapses 
 and gives place to despair, to self-disparagement, to 
 admiration of the foreigner, and to self-contempt. 
 
 VII. 
 
 The part played by the schoolmaster and by 
 geography in the victories of the Germans in Austria 
 and in France has been much overrated. Though 
 the discipline of the German troops was exemplary, 
 considerable reduction must be made in the estimate 
 generally held as to the education of the soldiers. 
 Besides, reading, writing, and map-lore are not 
 enough of themselves to win battles. M. Hoenig, 
 the author of a book entitled, TraM sur la discipline 
 au point de vue de Varmee^ de VEtat^ et du peuple^ tells 
 us that the recruits enrolled during the campaign had 
 forgotten most of what they had learned at school. 
 For some years the knowledge of these recruits was 
 tested by examination. Now, the simplest facts of 
 their own country were often unknown to these 
 young men when they joined the regiment. "We 
 collected a number of questions on the country of 
 their birth. The answers were incredible. After 
 the war of 1870-71, many did not even know the 
 name of the Emperor of Germany." This does not 
 prevent us from believing that the simple German 
 
 plicable, nor can it take its true place in the chain of events ; we ought 
 to know that the causes which will make the future already exist, not 
 merely in the present, but also in the past, where we can — to a certain 
 extent — ^judge of them in action. If there is any way of avoiding the 
 mistakes of the past, surely it is familiarity with what happened in the 
 past. 
 
INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION. 229 
 
 soldiers knew enough geography to find their way 
 about the roads of the invaded territory. Geography 
 in these days is no longer geography ; it is, as 
 has been remarked, encyclopaedic — the universal 
 science: astronomy and geology; mineralogy, botany, 
 zoology, physics, history, and political economy ; 
 anthropology, mythology, sociology ; it is linguistics 
 and phonetics ; the history of races and creeds, of 
 agriculture, of industry, etc., etc. Estimated in 
 this way, geography must be the most useful of 
 subjects. 
 
 Tolstoi* gives us an account of his perplexities on 
 the subject of geography. After having explained 
 cold and warmth, he came to grief when he tried to 
 explain winter and summer. He repeated his ex- 
 planation, and with the aid of a candle and a ball he 
 made himself, "as far as he could judge," perfectly 
 intelligible. They listened with much attention and 
 interest ; what took their fancy most was that they 
 could learn what their parents refused to believe, 
 and would be able to brag of their wisdom. After 
 Tolstoi had finished, the sceptical Semka, the most 
 intelligent of the boys, asked : " But if the earth 
 moves as you say, how is our isba always in the 
 same spot ? It ought to change its position ! " Tolstoi 
 thought to himself: "If my explanation is a 
 thousand yards beyond the grasp of the most 
 intelligent of the boys, what can the slower children 
 understand of it?" He began again, explained, drew 
 illustrations, quoted all the proofs of the roundness of 
 the earth — the circumnavigation of the globe, the 
 mast of a vessel appearing before the hull ; and other 
 proofs ; then fondly nursing the idea that they under- 
 stood at last, he made them write it all out They 
 
230 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 all wrote : — " The earth is like a ball ; " then the first, 
 and then the second proof. "The third proof they 
 had forgotten, and they came and asked me what it 
 was. It was evident that their main effort was to 
 remember the proofs. Not once only, but ten, a 
 hundred times, I renew my explanations, but always 
 without success. In an examination all the children 
 would answer, and will now answer, satisfactorily 
 enough, but I do not think they really understand ; 
 and when I remember that I was thirty before I 
 understood it myself, I readily make allowance for 
 them. Just as in my own case, they believe on the 
 word of another that the earth is round, etc., but they 
 do not understand it. Once I understood less than 
 they did, for in my childhood my nurse informed me 
 that at the end of the world the earth and sky met, 
 and that there the babas wash their clothes and hang 
 them out on the sky to dry. Our pupils are now 
 grown up, but even at the present moment ideas, 
 absolutely opposite to those I tried to inculcate, still 
 persist in their minds. It will take a long time yet 
 to efface these explanations and the image they form 
 of the universe, before they can understand." To 
 this the answer is, that we must not flatter ourselves 
 that we are ever perfectly understood by the young 
 when we are treating of matters which, after all, are 
 really beyond their grasp. The faculty of understand- 
 ing, with all other faculties, takes time to develop; 
 the essential step is therefore the first, the only step 
 which costs any effort, and it is always good to 
 have that step over. To postpone till later what 
 cannot be entirely understood to-day is a bad plan ; 
 later there will be so much to learn, and above all it 
 must be prepared for. We must take the mind va 
 
INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION. 23 1 
 
 hand at an early period if we wish to bend it to a 
 kind of gymnastics. 
 
 Just as in history the idea is to begin at the end, 
 so in geography the idea has gradually taken root 
 and grown that we must begin with the school and 
 the village. The experiment has been made in 
 Germany. Tolstoif, discouraged by his attempts to 
 teach ordinary geography, began with the class-room, 
 the house, the village. " As in the case of drawing 
 plans, these exercises are not useless ; but to know 
 what comes after our village scarcely interests them at 
 all, because they all know it is Tdiatinkis, and they 
 are not at all interested in what comes after T^liatinkis, 
 because no doubt it is a village just like T^liatinkis, 
 and Teliatinkis with its fields does not interest 
 them in the least. I tried giving them centres of 
 reference, such as Moscow and Kief; but they got so 
 muddled that it came to simply learning by heart. 
 I tried map-drawing, which amused them and helped 
 the memory. Then the question again occurred — 
 why should we help the memory ? I tried once more 
 stories of life in the polar and equatorial regions; they 
 listened with pleasure, and were able to repeat them 
 all afterwards, except the geographical part. In fact, 
 drawing a plan of the village was drawing plans, not 
 geography ; map-drawing was drawing maps, not 
 geography ; stories of animals, forests, towns, ice, etc., 
 were stories, and not geography. Geography was 
 only what they learned by heart." The children, 
 Tolsto'f adds, remember the story, but rarely retain the 
 name and position on the map of the district in which 
 the story is laid ; events are all that are generally 
 remembered. " When Mitrofanouchka studies geo- 
 graphy, his mother says to him : * What is the use of 
 
232 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 learning all those countries? The coachman will 
 take you wherever you want to go.' " Tolsto'f thinks 
 that nothing more damning has ever been alleged 
 against geography, and that all the scientists in the 
 world cannot answer this invincible argument. " I 
 speak very seriously. What is the good of knowing 
 the precise position of Barcelona, when I have reached 
 the age of thirty-three, and have never felt the want 
 of that information ? A description of Barcelona, 
 it seems to me, could not develop any intellectual 
 faculties, be it ever so picturesque. What is the use 
 of Semka or Fedka learning the Marline canal and its 
 source, if, as far as they can judge, they will never be 
 anywhere near it ? And even if Semka should have 
 to go there, it does not matter a straw whether he has 
 or has not learned about it before ; he will learn its 
 navigation by practice, and will learn it well." 
 
 It may be asked how far it is wise to lay stress 
 throughout many lessons on the school and the village. 
 It is never a good thing to make men or the world 
 any smaller, even in the child mind. The moment 
 the school, the village, and the children themselves 
 become the centre of interest, the children will con- 
 sider it perfectly useless to trouble their heads about 
 other lands which do not affect them directly. It 
 may be answered that these preliminary and exclusive 
 lessons are only a starting-point ; that may be so for 
 you ; but children, whose minds are as small as their 
 legs, become prone, if we do not take care, to limit 
 the world to their immediate horizon, and to make a 
 universe of the little world within their sight It 
 would be far safer to make use of the love for the 
 marvellous by which children are possessed, to interest 
 them in distant countries. Since they so^ readily 
 
INTELLECTUAL EDUCATION. 233 
 
 remember stories of animals, forests, etc., it is not 
 impossible, by frequent repetition, to connect the 
 events with geographical names. A child's memory 
 is a good servant, always ready for work, provided 
 the effort be not of long duration. I have known 
 a little boy of three and a half to be keenly interested 
 in America, and to remember the name perfectly, 
 because he had been told that the sun shone there in 
 our night, so that the children in that extraordinary 
 country were getting ready for play when he was 
 thinking of going to sleep. 
 
 I may add that it is not a matter of such indifference 
 as Tolstoi' supposes to absolutely ignore countries the 
 children are never likely to see. It is a well-known fact 
 that as we travel our minds expand, therefore we ought, 
 at least, to get the children to lend a ready ear to all 
 sorts of stories about different countries and their 
 inhabitants. Besides, Tolstoi later on is forced to 
 confess that reading travels must necessarily be use- 
 ful. Finally — perhaps especially — it is wise to intro- 
 duce method into education, so that we may control 
 and direct the child's powers, and prevent them 
 wandering by the way. Sequence in idea and effort 
 by no means implies prosiness. Only do not forget 
 that by discussing the interest of a thing we ipso 
 facto almost refuse to acknowledge that it has 
 interest ; and that, on the other hand, a kind of official 
 interest is attached to all work done without an 
 arriere-pensee, — an interest that the children will have 
 for good or evil at their service, if they are not left sole 
 judges of what is or is not useful, if they are not left 
 of their own will to abandon or pursue the work they 
 have undertaken to do. 
 
 We certainly cannot take Tolstoi as our guide, for 
 
234 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 he is a poet in the pursuit of an Utopian method of 
 education — a method without rules or discipline. But 
 there is a measure of truth in his psychological obser- 
 vations on geography. Geography is a pretext for 
 learning a multitude of subjects ; it is in itself an 
 unpleasing subject, and ought to be reduced to what 
 is absolutely necessary. To adopt Tolstoi's plan, with 
 less dilettante pupils, we would start from the geo- 
 graphy of the district, and proceed to the description 
 of more and more remote countries, telling how they 
 were discovered, the manners and customs of their 
 inhabitants, and the productions of the soil. In a 
 word, what must be taught by the aid of geography 
 is human, national, and international life. 
 
 In conclusion, whatever form of science has to be 
 taught in school, teaching must never be a matter of 
 memory, erudition, or pure knowledge, but rather of 
 intellectual, moral, and civic training. To maintain 
 the balance between the various branches of instruc- 
 tion, to take the essential part of each, and to reject 
 without hesitation every intrusive detail, — that is the 
 task of education. Its object, and its only object, is 
 mental development, not in a single direction, but in 
 all directions ; to lead the mind, in the most general 
 possible way, to the crest of contemporary science, 
 and finally to "launch it upon the waves." In the 
 sequel, from whatever quarter the* wind may blow, 
 any direction will be favourable to the mind thus 
 prepared. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 SECONDARY AND HIGHER EDUCATION. 
 
 I. Object of a Classical Education, — Ancient and modern languages 
 as means of education — Method in the study of literature — Necessity 
 for giving the study of literature a more philosophic character. 
 
 II. History, 
 
 III. ^V^V;/^^.— Its advantages and drawbacks— Methods of scientific 
 instruction. 
 
 IV. Technical Instruction, 
 
 V. Competition and Examinations, 
 
 VI. Higher Education, 
 
 VII. The Great Schools,— The Ecole Polytechnique. 
 
 I. Object of a Classical Education, 
 
 A secondary classical education should develop the 
 faculties of young people harmoniously and for their 
 own sake. It employs for this purpose the great 
 truths, the beauties of poetry and eloquence — in fact, 
 that part of morality and goodness which is inherent 
 in the works of the best moralists, philosophers, poets, 
 and men of letters. Two conditions are necessary — 
 models and practice. The models should be really 
 classical — i,e,^ displaying literary beauties in all their 
 purity and perfect harmony. It is not a question of 
 ascertaining where the most genius lies, but where we 
 shall find most of those qualities that we can imitate, 
 and the fewest of those faults we can avoid. We do 
 not hope to implant genius in children; give them 
 
236 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 taste, a love for the beautiful, a critical sense, and at 
 the same time a certain ability to think, and a talent 
 for composition and style. Now, the models in 
 question are all given. In regard to them there is 
 no dispute: if we can teach enough Greek and Latin 
 to make children study the masterpieces of antiquity, 
 no one will deny that they will have the best literary 
 education, just as a study of Greek sculpture or 
 Italian painting is the best education for the plastic 
 arts. 
 
 Greco-Latin antiquity has one quality of supreme 
 importance from the pedagogic point of view : it is 
 not romantic. There is therefore no risk of develop- 
 ing in the young a wandering imagination, sometimes 
 straying in pursuit of chimeras, sometimes lost in idle 
 reveries ; there is no longer a risk of developing a more 
 or less factitious sentimentality. Transporting the 
 young into an environment distant and different from 
 our own, it prevents them from becoming prematurely 
 familiar with that side of modern literature which is 
 too impassioned and too exciting. At this distance 
 of time that unrest is gone, all is reduced to a beauty 
 more intellectual than emotional. Besides, reason is 
 the leading characteristic of ancient, and especially 
 Roman, literature, and children want reason, good 
 sense, and good taste more than anything else. 
 
 Objection has been taken to the difficulty of the 
 classics and the length of time devoted to them, and 
 it has been proposed to substitute modern languages 
 in their place. The answer is — that in practice the 
 teaching of modern languages would inevitably tend 
 towards practical expediency ; its main object would 
 eventually be to learn to speak foreign languages, for 
 they irresistibly present an aspect of immediate and 
 
OBJECT OF A CLASSICAL EDUCATION. 237 
 
 obvious Utility. Besides, the great English and German 
 classics do not possess the classical qualities in a suffi- 
 cient degree. Modern literatures are sometimes rather 
 barbarous, sometimes too refined and unbalanced, 
 almost always too passionate, too much invaded by 
 what Pascal called the amorous passions. Woman is 
 the inspiring muse of modern literature, and there is 
 a danger of getting the minds of children possessed 
 with the "eternal womanly." The loves of Greeks 
 and Romans are so far off and so vague that, as a 
 rule, they do not have the same disturbing influence. 
 And at any rate we can rapidly pass over that sort 
 of thing, and choose passages relating to love of 
 fatherland, or to domestic life. In fact, we are 
 hereditarily and historically connected with Greek 
 and Latin antiquity: there is nothing more natural 
 than that this connection should be maintained, for 
 after all the Greeks and Latins remain the incompar- 
 able masters of literature. As far as we know, they 
 have not deserved to be hunted away by either 
 Teutons or Saxons. What would be gained by it? 
 After the seven or eight years at college always 
 necessary to a complete education, the same ignor- 
 ance of Latin and Greek of which we complain at 
 the present moment would be found to exist with 
 respect to German and English. It is not linguistic 
 acquirements we have to consider, but the acquired 
 development of mind and taste. From this point of 
 view let the old classics — the masters of the French 
 classics — remain a part of the curriculum. 
 
 Free oral translations have been adopted in the 
 French colleges instead of long written exercises; 
 semi-passive exercises instead of active exercises, 
 themes, verses, speeches. In my opinion this is a 
 
238 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 false step. It used to be thought that the important 
 thing was to know from end to end as many classical 
 works as possible ; but it is not a matter of quantity. 
 Besides, the ancients — not only Homer, but almost 
 all the rest — nod a good deal. A classical fragment 
 thoroughly studied is worth a whole book read in 
 haste. To be attached to an author, to penetrate his 
 thought in every phrase, to follow it by comparing 
 one phrase with another — that is what gives strength 
 and logic to the intellect. Besides, there is involved 
 in this method a careful study of form ; the author 
 should be faithfully interpreted, nothing must be 
 added to or taken from his meaning ; the sense, 
 movement, colour, and harmony must all be faith- 
 fully exhibited : this kind of work makes a language 
 plastic. The writing of a speech, given nothing but 
 the subject and correlative historical facts, teaches 
 how to find the ideas and sentiments in keeping with 
 the particular circumstances or character, and forms 
 an exercise in psychology. The professor, be it 
 understood, ought to inspire his pupils with a love of 
 truth, and with a wholesome contempt for declama- 
 tion, and ought to bring to their notice as frequently 
 as possible the real speeches given in history.^ For 
 French composition he must seek out subjects familiar 
 to the student, into the treatment of which they will 
 introduce their observations, sentiments, and impres- 
 sions — in fact, themselves. Bersot objects to Latin 
 speeches, that in order to succeed in them the pupil 
 has first to think with great effort in French, and 
 afterwards translate his thoughts with great effort 
 into Latin ; in this extreme labour of thought and 
 writing the pupiFs thought and its expression are 
 
 ^ Vide Bersot, Questions cV Enseignement. 
 
OBJECT OF A CLASSICAL EDUCATION. 239 
 
 both wide of the mark. The answer is — that every 
 work of art and style demands effort and repeated 
 trial ; that is what makes it useful. The Latin of the 
 pupils, says another critic, is a collection of expres- 
 sions and turns which besiege their memory and beat 
 at the doors of the mind to gain admittance ; these 
 expressions and turns are from all authors and from 
 all periods promiscuously; the pupils mark as prefer- 
 able what has struck them as being most remote from 
 usage, so that the uniform flow of the language 
 escapes them. What does it matter? We do not 
 learn Latin to talk Latin, nor to write the pure Latin 
 of a single epoch : that is mere gymnastics. We 
 must not dwell so much upon the result as upon the 
 effort of arrangement, composition, and expression. 
 Latin verses are better still ; they are an introduction 
 — imperfect, no doubt, but nevertheless very useful — 
 to the language of poetry, its association of images, 
 its harmony, and its rhythm. Written translations 
 are a capital exercise in logic and style. Narratives 
 are excellent, provided, as has been said, " that the 
 narratives of history are historical, and that in other 
 subjects the student is not expected to write upon a 
 topic of which he is ignorant." Scientific, philo- 
 sophical, moral, and literary dissertations accustom 
 the pupil to reason and to form a judgment ; literary 
 analysis accustom him to seize the essential charac- 
 teristics of a work. These exercises, different in kind 
 and wisely alternated, strengthen the mind and make 
 it flexible. But above all, verses — Latin verses — are 
 pre-eminently the literary exercise ; a student who 
 has never written a Latin verse is not really a man 
 of letters. Latin verse develops the poetic instinct, 
 without persuading the student that he is a budding 
 
240 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 poet, without intoxicating him beforehand with the 
 triumph of the salon. 
 
 No exercise can therefore replace either verses, 
 speeches, narratives, or dissertations in literary educa- 
 tion. Their invention is sometimes ascribed to the 
 Jesuits as a crime, sometimes as an honour. But, in 
 fact, poetry and eloquence have always been the basis- 
 of literary teaching. It was so in India, Egypt, 
 Greece, and Rome ; we followed the same course our- 
 selves until recent days. M. Maneuvrier says, with 
 considerable justice, that there is essentially an orator 
 and poet within each of us ; this poet or this orator 
 emerges at a given moment to express our emotions, 
 passions, or ambitions. Literary culture addresses itself 
 to these intimate forms of our being, to these essential 
 elements of our humanity; and that is why it is called 
 the supreme interest of education. Now, how can we 
 best introduce the young to poetry and eloquence? 
 Will it be enough to narrate history to them ? Will 
 it be enough to make them read ? Is a sculptor 
 formed by " listening to tales of Michael Angelo, or a 
 painter by being shown *Moses and the Holy Family'?" 
 No! Composition, construction of verses — even of 
 bad verses, — of speeches — even of bad speeches, — of 
 narratives, and of descriptions, are all necessary. By 
 learning to set our ideas in order we acquire new 
 ideas, the result of association and suggestion. 
 
 No. doubt we must not fall into the exclusive 
 worship of form ; but there is a sure way of preventing 
 that: introduce early into our classes moral, civic, 
 aesthetic — in a word, philosophical — studies. If we 
 add scientific instruction of an equally philosophical 
 and even aesthetic character, which will display the 
 noble and beautiful side of truth, we shall accustom 
 
HISTORY. 241 
 
 the pupils to think and feel, and not to speak unless 
 they have something to say. To unite, co-ordinate, 
 and at the same time to simplify literary and 
 scientific studies, a middle term is needed, viz., the 
 study of moral and social science, of the philosophy 
 of history, the philosophy of art, and the philosophy 
 of science. Not only to the higher order of minds, 
 but also to minds less cultured and incapable of 
 initiative, is philosophy useful. This is not because 
 an average mind cannot retain a certain number of 
 precise details, — quite the contrary; but it is the 
 main lines of connection between facts that escape 
 them. Even a thorough scientific training in one 
 fixed subject will not bring these main lines to view; 
 just as little can literary training do this ; philo- 
 sophical training alone, by widening the mind, will 
 bring them home to the student 
 
 II. History, 
 
 History has been rightly called "a great cemetery." 
 The most learned historian is he who best knows the 
 names of the dead, who has deciphered most epitaphs 
 on human tombs. For the mind which makes of 
 history its exclusive study, it may remain as barren 
 as death itself. History derives its special value from 
 its social and philosophical side. 
 
 There is a continual tendency to give more pro- 
 minence to history, as well as to the sciences, in the 
 study of the classics. This is a mistake, and opposed 
 to the opinion even of our best historians. When M. 
 Fustel de Coulanges, in an inaugural lecture at the 
 Sorbonne, took as his subject the origin and growth 
 
 16 
 
242 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 of Roman institutions, he devoted part of it to 
 demolishing commonplaces which vaunt the great 
 utility of history. " We shall study history," he said, 
 "purely for its own sake, and for the interest of 
 which the knowledge of its development admits." M. 
 Fustel de Coulanges made light of the alleged fruits 
 of experience which this subject is supposed to supply 
 to statesmen and political leaders. "A statesman 
 who is thoroughly familiar with the needs, ideas, and 
 interests of his own times, will have no reason to 
 covet any historical erudition whatever, though it be 
 more complete and more profound than his own. His 
 familiarity with the needs of his day will be of far 
 more value to him than the much belauded lessons 
 of history." History, he continues, may even lead us 
 astray, if we do not sufficiently realise the difference 
 between the present and the past. " I by no means 
 wish the world to be governed by historians," says M. 
 Lavisse. " Between politics and history are essential 
 differences, especially in this country, where there 
 exists no historic force bequeathed by the past and 
 having an influence which must be studied in order 
 to control it. The politician need not be a learned 
 historian : it is enough if he knows the ideas, passions, 
 and interests which underlie the opinions and acts of 
 contemporary France. It seems to me that a really 
 good historian would be a poor statesman, because 
 his veneration for the ruins of antiquity would prevent 
 him from resigning himself to necessary sacrifices." 
 In fact, it would not do to entrust sanitary reforms in 
 Paris to the Societe de Thistoire de Paris et de I'lle 
 de France ; archaeologists are capable of feeling 
 respect for a fever — if it lives in an old palace. How- 
 ever, if history gives no precise notions which can be 
 
HISTORY. 243 
 
 employed in this or that part of the art of govern- 
 ment, does it not explain the qualities and defects of 
 the French temperament, which on pain of death it is 
 necessary to control? Does it not warn different 
 forms of government of the dangers peculiar to them? 
 Does it not teach patience, moderation, and trust in 
 the work of time? And lastly, does it not teach us 
 our relations with foreign countries ? 
 
 The teaching of history and geography is carried 
 on too much by passive methods ; it is a monologue 
 from the master, an academical lecture followed by 
 questions summing up the previous lesson ; the pupils 
 take shorthand notes, and afterwards transcribe and 
 learn part of them by heart. It would be a good 
 thing to teach pupils about documents and ancient 
 remains ; and how varying evidence is checked, 
 criticised, and verified.^ They ought to be conducted 
 
 ^ It is extremely difficult to imagine how hard it is to get at historic 
 truth, even in the case of recent events of which there have been 
 numerous witnesses. M. d'Harcourt gives a curious instance of this 
 difficulty — or rather quasi-impossibility — of recognising events as 
 they really took place. He takes the report of Marshal MacMahon 
 on the battle of Solferino. 
 
 ** It was on the day after the battle," says M. d'Harcourt, "and we 
 were still on the summit of the ridge where the battle came to an end. 
 Lying or sitting in a very narrow space, we could none of us do 
 anything without the knowledge of the rest. The Marshal asked the 
 general at the head of his staff to prepare the outlines of a report. The 
 latter ordered two of his officers to draw up this document, and they 
 immediately set to work. It seemed easy enough. The whole field of 
 battle was in sight. All the staff-officers who had carried orders were 
 there within a few yards. The very source of the most trustworthy 
 and complete information was at hand. The officers therefore drew up 
 their report with a full knowledge of their work ; but when it was 
 handed to the head of the staff, he objected, and asserted that the affair 
 had taken place quite differently, — the enemy was at that moment 
 in front and not on the left, — the enemy had been hurled back by 
 this corps and not by that, — a movement only mentioned cursorily 
 
244 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 on historical excursions, like those made by geologists 
 and botanists : sites of battles, old streets, pictures 
 and statues, cathedrals and town halls, manuscripts 
 and old books in libraries — all these should be visited. 
 The different pupils should each have a personal task 
 
 had decided the day, etc. In short, the whole report had to be 
 remodelled under the direction of the general. When the corrections 
 were made, the report was handed to the Marshal ; but scarcely had 
 he perused it than he declared it incorrect from beginning to end. — 
 * You are utterly wrong,' he cried ; * the flanking movement took place 
 much later ; I remember perfectly the orders I gave and why I gave 
 them.' * But,' expostulated the oflicer he was addressing, 'you gave 
 the orders to me, and I also think I remember them.' In short, the 
 report already once corrected, was corrected again, until nothing was 
 left of the original." Now, to make a general report on a battle, all the 
 reports bearing on different details have to be cut down in one place, 
 supplemented in another, and finally combined into one. Thus, 
 continues the narrator of this episode, documents relative to an event 
 only lasting a few hours, and taking place in the broad daylight, 
 although apparently most authentic and written without any bias by 
 men who had the best opportunity of knowing the facts — these 
 documents can only inspire us, as far as details are concerned, with 
 very moderate confidence. What then will be the case when the 
 question is of political events, when intrigue will play its part, and the 
 actors will be led by party passion to represent history in different 
 aspects? From this difficulty of obtaining an exact knowledge of 
 facts, M. d'Harcourt is led to the conclusion that no very solid basis 
 is given to social science by history. In his opinion, individual 
 experience— r.^., the knowledge of a very large number of facts, such 
 as occur in the natural course of events, the knowledge acquired not by 
 accounts or various readings, but by personal observation, first hand, 
 after a ripe age and experience in public affairs — constitutes the safest 
 means of investigation in every study of human society, and in most 
 historical studies. ** No book can replace experience. Experience is 
 best calculated to throw light upon the affairs of men ; it enables us to 
 penetrate their motives much more surely than history alone, which is 
 always uncertain in itself, always obscure to the man who has had no 
 practice in public affairs'' We cannot fail to recognise that there is 
 much truth in these words. — For some extremely valuable and sug- 
 gestive remarks on this point see John Morley's Miscellanies^ vol. iii., 
 pp. 15-25. (Tr.) 
 
SCIENCE. 245 
 
 allotted to him ; they should be taught to form their 
 own opinions, not to be credulous, and not to make 
 up their minds too rapidly. 
 
 III. Science. 
 
 Outside the sum total of the narrow and positive 
 science indispensable in practical life all restricted 
 scientific instruction is sterile. It may be vague, but 
 at least let it be broad, for general views, and the 
 perspective in which science displays objects, are 
 worth far more than the actual knowledge of the 
 things themselves ; the facts acquired are of far less 
 value than the inductions drawn. In a word, even 
 the science of nature, if I may say so, is especially 
 valuable from the humanities contained in it. 
 
 Scientific instruction develops the reasoning power 
 less than one might think, for it provides the mind 
 with facts and prepared formulas ; it does not exer- 
 cise the power of thinking for one's self It does not 
 communicate that initiative which is the basis of all 
 personal thought. In addition, it scarcely affords 
 any culture of the imagination which is especially 
 exercised by aesthetic education. Philosophical 
 training and a good literary training on proper lines 
 alone develop the reasoning power. Mathematics, 
 with their severity and their apparent precision, may 
 teach the student to hide the weakness of reason 
 under the force of ratiocination ; they give simple 
 formulas which are incapable of grasping reality, and 
 destroy "that spirit oi finesse^' which is the common- 
 sense of life. Mathematicians fancy that their 
 formulas are infallible because they are drawn from 
 
246 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 mathematics, and they have a formula for every- 
 thing ; everything is classed, ticketed, and in such 
 a way as to preclude discussion : how can one 
 dispute with a formula? Even in physical science 
 the teaching excludes every possibility of doubting 
 the facts recognised and registered by science. It is 
 true that in certain cases the master, if he has the 
 necessary apparatus, can give, before the eyes of his 
 pupils, a practical demonstration of the truths he 
 teaches. But this demonstration is a mere " illustra- 
 tion " which can in no way develop the mechanism 
 of inductive reasoning. Herbart was right when 
 he said that science teaching in the colleges will 
 always eminently favour the deductive faculty : for 
 the contrary to take place the pupil ought to be able, 
 as in grammatical and literary exercises, to incessantly 
 verify and check any law that is not self-evident, or 
 is not imposed upon the mind with irresistible force. 
 We are allowed to question the correctness of an 
 application of grammatical rules or of an expression ; 
 the pupil may without any drawback criticise it, take 
 it as doubtful, or hesitate before applying the rule ; but 
 we cannot imagine ourselves "questioning the accuracy 
 of a table of logarithms, or of the laws of gravity." 
 
 In scientific teaching the essential point is the 
 method ; in these days it is passive, and very often ends 
 in merely mechanical work, in editing — the work of the 
 drudge and the copyist : active methods must be sub- 
 stituted for passive. Teach a little science, but teach 
 it scientifically — that is to say, by reconstructing the 
 science and making the student reconstruct it. The 
 students ought, each in his turn, to handle the appar- 
 atus and make experiments ; the pupils ought to care- 
 fully keep the apparatus, and make collections of plants 
 
TECHNICAL INSTRUCTION. 247 
 
 and minerals — to go botanising.^ We do not present 
 with sufficient force the connection between theory 
 and practice ; we do not give the pupils habits of 
 accuracy and observation. We ought to commence 
 with the study of physical and natural science, with- 
 out forgetting that knowledge which is of daily use 
 through life, such as hygiene, with the notions of 
 physiology upon which it is based. " There is scarcely 
 anybody," says Spencer, " to whom you put the ques- 
 tion, who has not in the course of his life brought 
 upon himself illnesses which a little information would 
 have saved him from. Here is a case of heart dis- 
 ease consequent on a rheumatic fever that followed 
 reckless exposure. . . . Yesterday it was one whose 
 long-enduring lameness was brought on by continu- 
 ing, spite of the pain, to use a knee after it had been 
 slightly injured. And to-day we are told of another 
 who has had to lie by for years, because he did not 
 know that the palpitation he suffered under resulted 
 from overtaxed brain. Now we hear of an irremedi- 
 able injury which followed some silly feat of strength; 
 and again, of a constitution that has never recovered 
 from the effects of excessive work needlessly under- 
 taken. ... Is it not clear that the physical sins — 
 partly our forefathers' and partly our own — which 
 produce this ill-health . . . make life a failure and a 
 burden instead of a benefaction and a pleasure ? " ^ 
 
 IV. Technical Instruction, 
 
 The new technical instruction undertaken by the 
 lyceum, wrote Bersot, is so far mischievous that the 
 
 ^ Vide M. Maneuvrier and M. Blanchard on this subject. 
 2 Spencer, Education^ p. 15, 
 
248 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 other pupils despise it, and " mark their contempt by 
 the name they give it . . . they are so convinced of 
 their own superiority that they convince even those 
 upon whom they heap their contempt. . . . The pre- 
 judice is so strong that students do not enter for these 
 professional courses, but fall into them." In my opinion 
 there is a very just feeling in this contempt — the 
 sense of the danger which is now becoming more and 
 more menacing to classical education. M. Frary 
 himself recognises that the " experiment has failed." 
 If we persist in this course we shall eventually dis- 
 organise classical education by trying to organise the 
 other. Then we shall see unfolded the whole logic of 
 consequences. We shall no longer consider in instruc- 
 tion anything except what will or will not be useful to 
 the future profession. Then Latin and Greek will be 
 useless. Most parents will say, What is the use of them ? 
 And this will suit the idleness of the children very well. 
 Presently the whole of France will be full of short- 
 sighted utilitarians, and classics will have had their 
 day. The dite^ whom they profess to form by means 
 of a classical training, losing the instruction common 
 to pupils receiving technical training, will hardly exist 
 at all, or will be reduced to the infinitely small. 
 
 Besides, all precocious specialisation is dangerous. 
 A given individual is never one, but several individuals; 
 some children first resemble their father, then their 
 mother, and thus successively represent a series of 
 types distinct both morally and physically. We 
 cannot therefore flatter ourselves that we can lay 
 hold of the man in his final aspect either in the child 
 or even in the youth ; we can therefore never fore- 
 see all the possibilities in a character, all the apti- 
 tudes which it will develop. Hence the danger of 
 
COMPETITION AND EXAMINATIONS. 249 
 
 all education which prejudges too hastily the 
 tendencies of the child. The only object of tech- 
 nical instruction, for instance, should be to awaken 
 aptitudes, and never to respond to aptitudes supposed 
 to exist. Without this it is a mutilation from which 
 a whole life may suffer. Once again, it is not a fixed 
 and crystallised individual that the educator has to 
 deal with; it is the shifting series of individuals, a 
 family in the moral sense of the word as well as in 
 the sense in which it is taken in natural history. A 
 specialist is very often Utopian ; his sight is distorted 
 by the narrowness of his horizon. All precocious 
 specialisation is a disequilibration. To make a soldier, 
 an engineer, or a musician, is not necessarily to turn 
 out a man in the full possession of all his faculties. 
 Moreover, we must take into account the failures, the 
 rejection of candidates at entrance examinations, etc. 
 Out of the thousands of candidates for the Ecole 
 Polytechnique, for instance, only 300 are admitted ; 
 now if a good polytechnician is not necessarily an 
 accomplished man, what will a polytechnician who 
 has failed be ? 
 
 V. Competition and Examinations, 
 
 We are familiar with the drawbacks of competition, 
 and especially of those examinations with long pro- 
 grammes, causes of expenditure which can be with 
 difficulty recuperated, and further, which can only set 
 in active motion one special organ of the brain, the 
 memory ; examinations do not even strengthen that 
 organ, they exhaust it. The only good thing in com- 
 petition is the emulation it develops; but this emulation 
 
250 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 only acquires its tension or becomes discharged with 
 a view to a frequently fictitious result — superiority 
 for a single day on one particular point. Very 
 often emulation stops there, and thinks the rank it 
 has gained fixed and final. Competition gives a 
 verdict which checks the winners by giving them an 
 exaggerated consciousness of their value, the losers 
 by discouraging them. It is emulation discontinuous 
 and disorganised, instead of being, as it ought to be, 
 a mode of organising emulation. It may be said that 
 it is not a bad thing that men should from time to 
 time come to the top, but it is a bad thing that men 
 should ever be at the bottom. The Bachelor's 
 degree ought to be nothing but the last of the pass 
 examinations, as it was once happily defined, the 
 pass examination from the college to the " Faculty." 
 Custom has made something else of it ; too often 
 success is attained by artificial and hasty means of 
 preparation. Troubles of every kind are the natural 
 result ; numbers of students willingly flatter them- 
 selves that it will be possible to make up in rhetoric 
 and philosophy for the time lost or wasted since they 
 left the sixth. A number of masters are led to con- 
 sider the requirements of the examination as guiding 
 their teaching, of which they thus diminish the 
 liberty, the elevation, and the general and generous 
 scope. Certain eager spirits can see only one hope 
 of safety — the extinction of the baccalaureat. They 
 wish to replace it by special entrance examinations 
 to the great schools, Faculties, and government offices. 
 This solution of the problem would only accelerate 
 the ruin of classical education. The scholars would 
 cease to be interested in anything but the particular 
 subjects required at the entrance to the different 
 
HIGHER EDUCATION. 25 I 
 
 professions. The unity of secondary education would 
 be broken, the college would be transformed into 
 a confused group of preparatory schools in which 
 primary knowledge would be the only connecting 
 link. We must clearly combine the Bachelor's 
 degree with a pass examination, as in Germany. 
 
 VI. Higher Education, 
 
 According to the theory adopted in Germany, the 
 technical schools only take up one part of knowledge, 
 whereas the universities have as their object the 
 bringing together of all those parts and making a 
 synthesis of them. The schools take up applied 
 science; the universities aspire to pure science; the 
 schools turn out the workmen who apply discoveries; 
 the universities train the inventors who make the 
 discoveries. " Schools are the realm of action, univer- 
 sities are the realm of light," said P^re Didon in his 
 book on the Germans. In an age when the limits of 
 knowledge are ever receding, an isolated mind would 
 despair, unaided, of discovering the unity of science; 
 the universities, a body of men associated for this 
 purpose, make this unity visible to every eye. " As 
 the convolutions of the brain fold upon each other 
 and eventually form the organ of thought, the different 
 sciences ought to be combined into one single body 
 called the Faculties, which are united in the univer- 
 sities, to form the great organ of collective and 
 national science." 
 
 Of this ideal the German universities are beginning 
 to lose sight. Every university, says Deputy Lasker, 
 is dismembered by its division into special schools, 
 
252 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 even the special subjects themselves are parcelled out. 
 "The student becomes a scholar, and as obligatory- 
 lessons are abolished he silently acquiesces with his 
 professor on the scanty syllabus of general subjects 
 indispensable in examinations. He does not want to 
 be dragged in several different directions at once, and 
 afraid of discursive study in work of which the subject 
 matter is ever increasing, he narrowly confines himself 
 to a course which will be directly practical. Whoever 
 does no natural science, leaves the university without 
 the slightest idea of the most important discoveries 
 in Nature. The elementary principles of political 
 economy, of literature, of history, are amazingly 
 unfamiliar to most of those whose special work has 
 not embraced them. The class-rooms are side by 
 side ; the institutions belong to one great whole ; the 
 professors are still connected by the Faculties, the 
 Senate ; the general staff by the statutes and external 
 organisation ; but the intellectual bond is wanting ; 
 personal relations are relaxed, and the students are as 
 separate as if the university were already divided into 
 a system of special schools — each entirely distinct 
 from the rest." ^ Another writer, who, though anony- 
 mous, is known to be a professor at one of the great 
 German universities, has confirmed Lasker's state- 
 ment. According to him, the professorial lectures no 
 longer bring together different classes of students ; 
 each Faculty has its distinct audience. Go into a 
 lecture-room where the " gentleman " is much in 
 evidence, and you are in the Faculty of Law. In 
 another room you see " a queer mixture of sheep's 
 heads, with here and there a face showing character," 
 — you are among the theologians. In a third, nearly 
 
 ^ Deutsche Rundschau , 1874. 
 
HIGHER EDUCATION. 253 
 
 every one wears spectacles ; the cut of the hair varies 
 between being brushed far back like a sheep's, or 
 curled d la Raphael ; here is no ambition to lead the 
 fashion ; but the audience is unfortunate enough to 
 present an almost complete collection of the fashions 
 of the last fifteen years. Hats brown with wear, 
 rebellious shirt-fronts and cravats, great ears, high 
 cheek-bones, long elbows. There are exceptions, but 
 they are rare. These men are attending courses on 
 philology, history, mathematics, or the natural sciences. 
 They belong to the Faculty of Philosophy, which 
 corresponds to our two Faculties of Science and Litera- 
 ture ; these students are future teachers in the gym- 
 nasiums. Each one lives apart from his fellows ; even 
 this Faculty is divided and sub-divided ; philologists 
 do not study literature, history students do not take up 
 philology; and d fortiori literary and scientific men 
 are entirely separated from each other. Thus the 
 university, which, as its name indicates, should tend 
 to the universality of knowledge, tends to exclusive 
 specialisation. 
 
 In France, until lately, our Faculties had no regular 
 pupils. Now each has its own clientele. Hence the 
 quarrel about open or closed lectures which divides 
 the teaching staff. Some pronounce in favour of 
 courses open to the general public ; others propose to 
 reserve lectures for students alone. The two things 
 are not irreconcilable — nay, they have been recon- 
 ciled. Public teaching " invites the whole nation, and 
 even foreigners, to the study of science and literature 
 — a study ever rejuvenated and renewed by the influ- 
 ence of the world of intellect. A public course of 
 lectures is an intellectual school with its doors thrown 
 open." 
 
254 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 In the German universities the professor works 
 surrounded by pupils and disciples. Several times a 
 week he gathers them together to listen to his lessons, 
 which he can multiply without any effort, because 
 they are really only familiar conversations on the 
 science which is his forte ; he widens or contracts his 
 syllabus, and is not worried by any programme but 
 the interest of the audience. This frequent, often 
 daily contact of master and pupils, in the opinion of 
 M. Breal, leads to the rapid attainment of great 
 results. At first this system was introduced into the 
 Ecole pratique de hautes Etudes ; it has now spread 
 into most of our Faculties. Now it has only to be 
 generalised by combining public courses with private 
 meetings, the special subject of which the professor 
 may be at liberty to decide, and of which he may 
 also have the power to fix the number and duration. 
 The Faculty of Literature in Paris has not changed 
 its old habits ; it has proceeded " by addition," not 
 feeling compelled to suppress anything. Once it had 
 nothing but an audience, or rather it did not recognise 
 the "legal existence" of the bona fide students, lost in 
 the crowd ; now it has organised those students into 
 a regular body. The credit set down in the budget 
 to meet the expenses of scholarships " de Hcence et 
 d'agregation " has ensured the existence and develop- 
 ment of an institution which will do good service, 
 even if it only amounts to a higher standard in the 
 recruits of the teaching staff of the country. But, 
 says M. Breal, unfortunately these audiences are not 
 yet students ; they are always candidates. " They 
 are called students ; they have a restless spirit, a want 
 of mental freedom, a longing to finish and be off." 
 While in other countries the time spent at the 
 
HIGHER EDUCATION. 255 
 
 university is the happiest of one's life, while that life is 
 willingly prolonged and entered upon with joy, " our 
 scholars in for licentiate or fellowship examinations 
 have but one idea — to pass their examination as 
 quickly as possible." Thus the Faculties become 
 merely combinations of special schools. 
 
 Again, in addition to the students who form the 
 nucleus of the whole body, we must leave room for 
 young people who have joined of their own accord. 
 A large number of young people do not know how to 
 employ their leisure time when they leave the lyceum. 
 " He will study the law," says a father, speaking of 
 his son, " and then we shall see ! " That is how many 
 young men take up law, says M. Lavisse, from 
 inability to do anything else, although they are not 
 destined for a legal career, and although a scientific 
 or literary training would have been much more 
 useful to them, " Every one knows a number of 
 farmers, manufacturers, merchants, and idlers, who 
 have in their youth crowded, if not the lecture-rooms, 
 at any rate the registered lists of the Faculty of Law, 
 whose proper place would have been in the labora- 
 tories or lecture-rooms of the Sorbonne. There they 
 would have received not merely notions of more 
 practical utility in after life, but that general culture 
 which is only too rare in this country." 
 
 Our classification of the Faculties is artificial ; to 
 divide them into groups with distinct lines of demar- 
 cation is harmful to science. In literature and 
 science we must return to the old custom still obtain- 
 ing in most foreign universities ; we must combine 
 the Faculties, at present separated, into one Faculty of 
 Arts, as it used to be called, or into a Faculty of 
 JPhilosophy^ as it is termed by the Germans. The 
 
256 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 separation of the Faculties first took place in the 
 Napoleonic university ; it seriously injured nearly all 
 teaching, and produced a kind of anarchy. 
 
 VII. The Great Schools, 
 
 The great schools are both necessary and dangerous. 
 At the Ecole Polytechnique they go in for nothing 
 but pure science ; the lectures form a great physico- 
 mathematical encyclopaedia ; the instruction given is 
 general instruction, expected to develop the scientific 
 spirit, and to furnish each individual with the tools 
 which will be most useful to him in his own work. 
 In a word, the school produces neither engineers nor 
 officers ; its role is at once higher and more restricted 
 than that of its neighbours ; it simply has to prepare 
 boys for the special training schools for engineers 
 and officers. Technical instruction is given in these 
 special schools, in the Ecole de Fontainebleau, in the 
 iScole du g^nie Maritime, etc., a two years' course ; in 
 the schools " des mines, ponts, et chaussees," a three 
 years' course. 
 
 Unfortunately the polytechnicians are overworked 
 before and during their stay at the school. It is a 
 good thing to make a selection, but this selection 
 ought not to end in a physical extermination. M. 
 Lagneau tells us that a remarkably large number of 
 invalids and insane has been produced by the 
 regime of the school. Further, in the competition 
 chance comes into play as well as capacity. Once 
 in the school, the students rarely keep their first 
 order of merit ; sometimes the lists are almost 
 inverted. The requirements of the syllabus ever 
 
THE GREAT SCHOOLS. 257 
 
 increase, and now they are so great that exhaustion 
 must necessarily follow if a student passes. It is not, 
 say MM. Cournot and Simon, that the school itself 
 needs all this knowledge, but the examiner, finding 
 choice difficult, increases the play of chance to lessen 
 his own trouble. If there are only twenty questions, 
 everybody will try them ; if there are two hundred, 
 the best pupil will be equal to one hundred and fifty. 
 It is certainly awkward for him if he comes on any- 
 thing he does not know, but the conscience of the 
 judge is free from blame. So little by little the 
 examiners get the habit of setting the most "catch- 
 ing" questions, which are by no means the most 
 important. 
 
 The first of the harmful results of this is the 
 invention of the " art of preparing for examinations," 
 which takes the place of the *' art of teaching science." 
 While the examiner tortures the candidate and sets 
 him enigmas in the form of questions, he is himself 
 examined, studied, and seen through, by the pre- 
 paratory teachers who form his audience. His wiles 
 are discovered, his formulas noted down, his whims 
 anticipated. If the same individual is always 
 examiner, the success of the coach is certain. The 
 coach no longer teaches science, but the art of answer- 
 ing a special person. Thus students are sent to the 
 school that obtains most passes. They commence 
 all the subjects very early, and go up before they are 
 ready, so as to get accustomed to the examination. 
 As M. Jules Simon says, " A boy is nearly certain 
 to get into the Ecole Polytechnique by this triple 
 receipt : he must not be decidedly stupid, he must 
 not fall ill, he must not be very unlucky." The 
 university has professors, not coaches ; but if it 
 
 17 
 
^S8 EDUCATION AND Heredity. 
 
 refuses to adapt itself to this system of training, it 
 will lose the student preparing for State schools ; it is 
 therefore imperatively obliged to follow the example 
 of the rest. M. Cournot points out the singular con- 
 tradiction that ensues : — " The State pays coaches to 
 put examiners on the wrong scent as to the relative 
 worth of the examinees, and pays examiners to baffle 
 the craft of the 'crammer/" It is said by some 
 that competition is a good thing, that it is a spur to 
 each of the competitors, and obliges each to do his 
 best. M. Simon retorts that this is not quite so 
 certain as they would like to make out, especially as 
 far as teaching is concerned. As far as "cramming" 
 is concerned it is absolutely false ; for there is no 
 contest as to who will turn out the best pupils, but as 
 to who will get the most candidates through. Here 
 the university submits to a regime for which it is not 
 responsible. Unfortunately the Ecole Polytechnique, 
 like the Ecole de Saint-Cyr, is under the control of 
 the War Minister, who is not, as a rule, an authority 
 in matters of instruction. All parents will bless the 
 advent of one reform — the increasing the maximum 
 age by two or three years. The Minister of War 
 refuses it now because he refused it before. We can 
 understand a rigid limit of age in the navy, because 
 of the importance of becoming early accustomed to 
 the sea ; nevertheless, the young people who become 
 first-class students when they leave the Ecole Poly- 
 technique are not necessarily bad sailors in conse- 
 quence. But why should they not enter other 
 professions two or three years later? No student 
 under twenty-one is received in the Ecole Poly- 
 technique unless he has had two years' effective 
 military service ; and in the latter case he is allowed 
 
THE GREAT SCHOOLS. 259 
 
 to enter if no more than twenty-five on July ist of 
 the year of the examination. Now no harm can 
 accrue to the Ecole Polytechnique from receiving 
 students at that age ; and therefore it is a mistake to 
 fix twenty as the limit of age, to the detriment alike 
 of the work and the health of the students.^ These 
 two or three years would not be wasted, if they gave 
 time for a solid instead of a hasty preparation. " The 
 State schools would gain by it ; and it would be an 
 immense benefit to our colleges, for we should be free 
 to study for the sake of study. Instead of, as at 
 present, students for the civil professions going 
 through the same mill as candidates for the State 
 schools, both would escape methods of cramming and 
 forcing, and would be instructed and brought up like 
 men."2 The Ecole Polytechnique wants a picked set 
 of boys ; for that purpose it eliminates as many as it 
 can, but under the guise of an elaborate syllabus, by a 
 series of questions, problems, and, as the boys call 
 them, "colles."^ It would be far better to choose this 
 dite, not from those who have overloaded their 
 memories, but from those who have most talent, and 
 who are not high-minded. The simplest remedy is 
 for the Ecole Polytechnique to admit only bacca- 
 lauriats es lettreSy and then to draw up its own 
 scientific programme of subjects for examination. 
 
 ^ Vide]\x\Q% Simon, Riforme de V Enseignementy p. 361. 
 a Ibid. 8 "Stumpers" (?). (Tr.) 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS AND HEREDITY. 
 
 The whole question of the education of women 
 seems to be governed by the following principles : — 
 
 1st. Woman is physiologically weaker than man; she 
 has but a small reserve of energy to make up for the 
 considerable expenditure entailed by brain-work carried 
 beyond certain limits. 2nd. The generative function 
 occupies a far more important place in the female than 
 in the male organism. Now this function, according to 
 all physiologists, is antagonistic to brain expenditure; 
 the disequilibration produced in the woman by intel- 
 lectual work will therefore be necessarily greater than 
 in man. 3rd. The consequences to the race of this 
 disequilibration are much more serious in the case of 
 the woman than in the case of the man. The life 
 of woman, generally sedentary and under more or 
 less unhealthy conditions, gives no time for recupera- 
 tion to a constitution exhausted by an irrational 
 education, whereas in the case of man recuperation 
 may take place ; on the other hand, the mother's 
 health is of much more importance to the child than 
 the health of the father. The man's expenditure in 
 paternity is insignificant compared to the woman's; 
 the latter needs a considerable reserve of physical and 
 moral energy during gestation, maternity, and after- 
 wards during the early education of the child. The 
 mothers of Bacon and Goethe, though both very 
 remarkable women, could not have written either the 
 
THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS AND HEREDITY. 26 1 
 
 Novum Organum or Faust; but if they had ever so 
 little weakened their generative powers by excessive 
 intellectual expenditure, they would not have had a 
 Bacon or a Goethe as a son. If during life the 
 parents expend too much of the energy they have 
 drawn from their environment, so much the less will 
 be left for their children. Coleridge, with all the 
 gravity in the world, observed: "The history of a 
 man in the nine months before his birth would 
 probably be more interesting, and would contain 
 events of greater importance than any that may 
 occur in after life." 
 
 High authorities are of opinion that the more 
 refined a woman's education becomes, the weaker her 
 children will be. 
 
 Spencer, in his Principles of Biology^ asserts that 
 physical labour makes woman less fertile '} and adds 
 that the same relative or absolute sterility is generally 
 also the result of overtaxing the brains. " If we con- 
 sider that the regimen of girls of the upper classes is 
 much better than that of girls belonging to the poorer 
 classes, while in most other respects their physical 
 treatment is not worse, the deficiency of reproductive 
 power among them may be reasonably attributed to 
 the overtaxing of their brains — an overtaxing which 
 produces a serious reaction on the physique. This 
 diminution of reproductive power is not only shown 
 by the greater frequency of absolute sterility, nor is it 
 only shown in the earlier cessation of child-bearing, 
 but it is also shown in the very frequent inability of 
 such women to suckle their infants. In its full sense 
 
 ^ Spencer, however, says: **To prove much bodily labour renders 
 women less prolific requires more evidence than is obtainable."— Vol. 
 ii, p. 484. (Tr.) 
 
262 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 the reproductive power means the power to bear a 
 well-developed infant, and to supply that child with 
 the natural food for the natural period. Most of the 
 flat-chested girls who survive their high-pressure 
 education are incompetent to do this. Were their 
 fertility measured by the number of children they 
 could rear without artificial aid they would prove 
 relatively unfertile."^ Dr. Hertel,^ a Dane, has ascer- 
 tained that in the higher schools in his country 
 twenty-nine per cent, of the boys and forty-one per 
 cent, of the girls are in a precarious state of health 
 from over-work : anaemia, scrofula, and headache are 
 the most prevalent scourges. Professor Bystroff, of 
 St. Petersburg, has collected information of the same 
 purport. From these and many similar facts it may 
 be concluded that the excessive work entailed by 
 competition and examinations in higher education, 
 dangerous as it is to the race in the case of boys, is 
 infinitely more so in the case of girls. Fatigue of 
 this kind, repeated for several successive generations, 
 would eventually absolutely unfit the woman for her 
 duties as a mother. The danger of too scientific a 
 ] \ form of instruction is much greater for girls ; for, 
 , being more disposed to sedentary work than boys, 
 they devote themselves entirely to mental work, and 
 as a rule display more assiduity. Not merely intel- 
 lectual work, but also close confinement, bad food, 
 and insufficient exercise are equally responsible for 
 these derangements of health. To this must be 
 added the evenings spent in soirees among the upper 
 classes, and in work of every kind by the poorer 
 
 ^ Principles of Biology y vol. ii. pp. 485, 486. (Tr.) 
 2 Overpressure in High Schools in Denmark (Macmillan & Co.). 
 Dr. Hertel adds chorea to anaemia, etc. (Tr.) 
 
THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS AND HEREDITY. 263 
 
 classes. Mr. Clark, an American, concludes that if 
 this goes on for half a century it needs no prophet to 
 predict, from the laws of heredity, " that the mothers 
 of our future generations will have to be brought 
 from beyond the Atlantic." By heredity, therefore, a 
 kind of retrograde selection is produced, which is 
 disastrous in its consequences ; for the young girls of 
 the educated classes, who might fairly be expected to 
 raise the level of future generations, are either quite 
 incapable of becoming mothers, or bring into the 
 world puny beings, and thus leave to less cultivated 
 but more robust women the care of perpetuating the 
 human race. 
 
 " Mammas anxious to make their daughters attrac- 
 tive could scarcely choose a course more fatal than 
 this, which sacrifices the body to the mind. Either 
 they disregard the tastes of the opposite sex, or else 
 their conception of those tastes is erroneous. Men 
 care little for erudition in woman ; but very much for 
 physical beauty, good nature, and sound sense. What 
 man ever fell in love with a woman because she 
 understood Italian? Where is the Edwin who was 
 brought to Angelina's feet by her German ? But rosy 
 cheeks and laughing eyes are great attractions. . . . 
 The liveliness and good humour that overflowing 
 health produces go a great way towards establish- 
 ing attachments. Every one knows cases where bodily 
 perfections, in the absence of all other recommenda- 
 tions, have incited a passion that carried all before it ; 
 but scarcely any one can point to a case where intel- 
 lectual requirements, apart from moral or physical 
 attributes, have aroused such a feeling. . . . Out of 
 the many elements uniting in varying proportions to 
 produce in a man's breast the complex emotion we 
 
264 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 call love, the strongest are those produced by physical 
 ^ attractions ; the next in order of strength are those 
 produced by moral attractions ; the weakest are those 
 produced by intellectual attractions ; and even these 
 are dependent less on acquired knowledge than on 
 natural faculty — quickness, wit, insight. If any think 
 this assertion a derogatory one, and inveigh against 
 the masculine character for being thus swayed, we 
 reply that they little know what they say. . . . One 
 of Nature's ends, or rather her supreme end, is the 
 welfare of posterity ; further, that in so far as posterity 
 are concerned, a cultivated intelligence based on a bad 
 > physique is of little worth, since its descendants will die 
 out in a generation or two ; and conversely, that a 
 good physique^ however poor the accompanying mental 
 endowments, is worth preserving, because through 
 future generations the mental endowments may be 
 indefinitely developed ; we perceive how important is 
 the balance of instincts. . . . But, advantage apart, 
 the instincts being thus balanced, it is folly to persist 
 in a system which undermines a girl's constitution 
 that it may load her memory." ^ 
 
 Does it follow that woman should not be educated ? 
 So far from that being so, we shall even assert that she 
 ought to be educated as far as possible within the 
 limits of strength at her disposal. But instruction 
 is one thing, and intellectual waste another. The 
 problem in all education, and especially in the educa- 
 tion of women, is to communicate the maximum of 
 necessary and ornamental knowledge with the mini- 
 mum waste of cerebral power in the child. Woman 
 has in domestic life a role to play which she can never 
 shirk ; she has to morally and physically educate her 
 
 ^ Spencer, Education^ pp. 187, 188, 
 
THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS AND HEREDITY. 265 
 
 children. It is for this function we have to give 
 her the best preparation. Practical pedagogy, with 
 domestic hygiene, is almost the only knowledge 
 necessary to woman, and it is literally the only 
 training she does not get. Moreover, pedagogy, 
 being the art of teaching, implies ipso facto the 
 knowledge of subjects to be taught ; and if it is 
 further admitted that, to give an accurate idea of 
 things, her knowledge of them must be thorough, the 
 way is at once opened wide to the activity and intel- 
 lectual expansion of young girls. 
 
 Another class of knowledge corresponds to the role 
 of woman, not in the family, but in society. Woman 
 represents in human psychology the being in whom 
 reside all the most energetic and powerful sentiments 
 — pity, affection, " altruism," devotion ; she ought to 
 be the embodiment of tenderness, the sister of mercy 
 of mankind. To woman politics would be barren 
 and unpractical ; but philanthropy is quite within her 
 reach. Now the philanthropy of the day is a science 
 closely bound up with the essential parts of political 
 economy. It is the science which is the basis of all 
 benevolent institutions ; it is the science teaching us 
 the direction in which we must proceed to assuage 
 the evils of humanity, to alleviate in some degree the 
 misery that seems eternal. By the pathway of philan- 
 thropy woman must approach political economy. 
 
 On the mother in particular rests the task of 
 developing the heart. Maternal religion is the most 
 inoffensive and most useful of religions. The tender 
 reverence of the child is an act of piety. In the 
 evening let the child kneel down ; examine its con- 
 science (a minute is quite long enough) : " I am 
 ashamed of my child ; I want to be proud of you 
 
266 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 to-morrow." After correction the mother should be 
 more pained at having inflicted than the child at 
 having undergone the punishment. The mother's 
 great art is to condense all morality into filial love, 
 which is necessarily its first form. The fear of giving 
 pain to its mother is the first, and for a long time the 
 only remorse felt by the child ; this nafve remorse 
 must be refined by the mother, made as deep as love 
 itself, and the loftiest sentiments must enter into this 
 formula. The mother's heart is the child's conscience; 
 that heart should therefore be the human conscience 
 in miniature. 
 
 In the education of woman we have to conciliate 
 two opposing principles. On the one hand, having 
 at her disposal less strength than man, woman cannot 
 restore her energy after an equal expenditure of 
 mental work ; on the other hand, being destined to 
 be man's companion and the educator of his children, 
 she ought not to be a stranger to any of his occupa- 
 tions or sentiments. 
 
 It is only because intellectual labour is more and 
 more imposed on young men that it is also imposed in 
 the same way on young girls. To wish to suppress it 
 almost totally in the case of the latter, for fear of check- 
 ing her physical development, and with the object of 
 restoring to man, by means of his mother, the bodily 
 strength lost by the mental culture of his father, is to 
 dream an idle dream. The child inherits not only the 
 good but the bad qualities of its father and mother, and 
 in many cases we should run the risk of adding to the 
 delicate health of the father the mental lethargy of 
 the uncultured mother. The mother who transmits 
 to her child a robust constitution certainly gives him 
 an inestimable gift, but if she knows how to develop 
 
THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS AND HEREDITY. 267 
 
 his natural good health, and how to bring intellect, 
 energy, and will into existence from the vital powers 
 of the child, her gift is doubled in value. Now this 
 second maternity — a maternity of the heart and mind 
 — is more difficult to prepare for than the first ; and 
 therefore it ought to occupy the attention of the 
 educator at least in an equal degree. Before thinking 
 of the future sons of a little girl, it is but rational to 
 think about the girl herself, and that from every side, 
 from a triple point of view — intellectual, moral, and 
 physical. " If we dance faster than the violins we 
 lose time," says the popular proverb ; if we look too 
 far ahead we may imagine what we shall never see. 
 Besides, let those who think of nothing but the roses 
 in a girl's cheeks remember that it is imperatively 
 necessary, at least in the leisured classes, to open a field 
 of activity wide enough for the intellect of a young 
 girl — that intellect which nature has not refused her, 
 and which will be turned to account one way or other, 
 if it be only in the thousand trivialities and frivolities 
 of which a worldly life consists. Now we become as 
 exhausted, and we grow pale as much and even more 
 if our life is idle, as if we led a serious and reflective 
 existence. Further, the widening of the intellect cannot 
 but give a point of support and a fresh impetus to the 
 development of moral qualities which are more in 
 evidence than we imagine beneath the freshness of 
 a girl of eighteen. It is mere folly to suppose that 
 an educated man will be content for long with a rosy- 
 cheeked companion ; with familiarity the brilliancy of 
 the complexion loses its charm ; but, on the other 
 hand, moral qualities are always welcome ; the cul- 
 tivated mind insensibly becomes the daily companion. 
 Long ago it was said that woman's true ro/e scarcely 
 
268 EDUCATION -AND HEREDITY. * 
 
 begins till she is married.^ Let us no longer forget 
 > that many sons will resemble their mothers ; the 
 moral and intellectual worth of the latter is not 
 therefore without importance in the development of 
 the child's character. From these considerations it 
 follows that the real point is to reform and direct, not 
 to check, the education of girls. We have subjected 
 boys and girls alike to the rigime of extreme intel- 
 lectual labour without troubling ourselves to repair 
 
 ^ "What an excellent adviser," says Stendhal, **a man would find in 
 his wife if she knew how to think ! " ** The ignorant are the enemies 
 of the education of women." ** The basest of men, if he be only twenty 
 and have ruddy cheeks, is dangerous to a woman who knows nothing, 
 for she has nothing but instinct to guide her ; on a woman whose mind 
 has been cultivated he has no more effect than a handsome lackey." 
 "Comparatively often a pretty young girl has a bad character, and 
 turns out to be lazy. She soon becomes aware that her face gives her 
 rights and privileges in the eyes of men, and that it is useless for her to 
 attempt to acquire other qualities than the beauty she is so fortunate as 
 to possess." " The desire to please places modesty, delicacy, and 
 every feminine grace for ever beyond the disturbing influence of any 
 possible education. It is as if we were afraid of teaching a bird not to 
 sing in the spring." " Womanly graces are not due to ignorance; take, 
 for example, the worthy village tradesmen's wives, or in England the 
 wives of the wealthy merchants." "Most men have one period in their 
 lives when they can do great things: nothing then seems to them im- 
 possible. The ignorance of women loses this magnificent chance for 
 humanity. Love at the most gives a man a good mount, and makes 
 him choose a better tailor." "All early experience must necessarily 
 contradict the truth. Enlighten a young girl's mind, form her char- 
 acter, give her, in fact, a good education in the true sense of the word ; 
 sooner or later she is aware of her superiority to the rest of her sex, and 
 becomes a pedant — ?'.<?., the most disagreeable and degraded person in 
 the world. Rather than spend a lifetime with her, there is not one of 
 us who would not prefer a servant to a learned woman. Plant a young 
 tree in the centre of a thick forest, where its neighbours deprive it of 
 light and air; its leaves will become sickly, it will assume a lanky, 
 ridiculous, and unnatural appearance. A whole forest must be planted 
 at one and the same time. What woman would be conceited because 
 she knows how to read? " 
 
THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS AND HEREDITY. 269 
 
 the expenditure of strength involved in such con- 
 tinuous effort : this is tantamount to embarking for 
 far-off seas without providing for any emergency. 
 Bad hygiene is prevalent nearly everywhere, but 
 among the middle classes, precisely where girls have 
 to work most earnestly (for it is a matter of bread- 
 winning with them), they are ignorant of the very 
 elements. Hence the systematic exhaustion of boys 
 and girls who have to provide for the twofold develop- 
 ment of mind and body. Now the remedy is simple. 
 If rules are presented to a woman as absolute, no ^ 
 one is stricter in their observance. Teach hygiene 
 just as you teach housekeeping, and you will see 
 woman as sternly opposed to any breach of the laws 
 of health as to the presence of dust on her furniture. 
 To give little girls every possible opportunity of 
 regaining on the one hand what they lose on the 
 other — good food, varied open-air exercise, plenty of 
 sleep — will be in itself an enormous benefit, for it 
 is a natural law that in healthy individuals all expen- 
 diture of energy has only to be replaced. The 
 moralising influence of examinations, for boys and 
 girls alike, in our present organisation of instruction, 
 consists in the assigning of a definite object to the 
 work of the young, and in accustoming them to effort, 
 and to continuous effort; they must display power c 
 of will and perseverance, and that in itself constitutes 
 superiority in all who are capable of it. Only it must 
 be understood that the total result leaves much to be 
 desired, if numbers of our young folk, especially girls, 
 sacrifice the flower of their strength to obtain generally 
 useless certificates. 
 
 If we are right at all in protesting against over- 
 pressure, it is certainly here where we have to 
 
270 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 deal with young girls who have little strength to spare. 
 The protest must be raised against all knowledge not 
 of general utility. Besides, nothing is so fatiguing 
 as the irrational or the fastidious, for the mind ceases 
 to feel interest in it ; and when no curiosity is felt 
 effort alone remains, thus doubling the sense of 
 tedium. A young girl, whose sphere in life is not 
 determined beforehand, ought to acquire a general 
 view of the main lines of human knowledge, 
 and ought not to be limited to an arduous, and 
 necessarily restricted, erudition. The object of her 
 education is to make no subject unfamiliar to her, 
 so that as occasion arises she may apply her education 
 to the given object. For the young girl knows even 
 less than the young man in what direction life will 
 carry her. A woman may be called upon to help 
 her husband in his work, to watch over the studies 
 of her sons, — at any rate in their early stages, — ^to 
 educate her daughters : in addition we must reckon 
 with the chances of life, and she may even have to 
 bring up her young family by her own exertions. 
 But it should be clearly understood that we have 
 not to teach her everything, but to fit her to learn 
 everything, by giving her a taste for study and an 
 interest in every subject. 
 
 Similar emotional motives, says M. Rochard, urge 
 children of both sexes to excessive intellectual 
 work. Young men have diplomas to win, they have 
 in view the laurels of the great competitions, or 
 admission into a State school. Girls have their 
 teaching certificate, and admission into the normal 
 schools. The development of primary instruction 
 during the last few years has created an attractive 
 career, especially in the large towns. Primary 
 
THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS AND HEREDITY. 2/1 
 
 instruction affords to young girls a means of raising 
 themselves above their condition in life, of leaving the 
 condition of inferiority in which their family happens 
 to be, of gratifying *^ the taste for pleasure that every- 
 thing contributes to develop in them, and which we 
 seem to make it our business to over-excite." To 
 attain this end, there are no efforts or sacrifices which 
 they will not gladly make. They abandon household 
 cares, and devote themselves with increasing ardour to 
 studies which only exhaust them, and very often end 
 in delusion. From the attractions it offers, the pro- 
 fession of teaching is so overcrowded that it is nothing 
 but a decoy. On January ist, 1887, there were in 
 France 12,741 young girls looking forward to this 
 career ; 4,714 out of this number — i.e.^ nearly a third 
 — were from the Department of the Seine. Now in 
 Paris, in 1887, there were only sixty vacancies, of 
 which twenty-five were allotted in advance to pupils 
 leaving the Ecole normale. The rest had to be divided 
 among the assistants receiving a fixed salary, and they 
 were not less than forty. From this we may form an 
 opinion as to the fate which awaited the 8,567 young 
 girls who were candidates for similar posts in the 
 provinces. The ever-increasing number of applicants 
 has forced the University to increase the difficulties. 
 At every stage examinations have to be passed, and 
 the curricula bristle more and more with subjects. 
 The young girls who aspire to the Ecole normale lead 
 the same life as the candidates for the technical 
 schools. The same anguish, the same emotions, the 
 same desperate efforts at the supreme moment of the 
 struggle ; and they have less strength to bear it 
 Four or five hundred girls, from 15 to 18 years old, 
 present themselves every year for admission to the 
 
27^ EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 Ecole normale of the Department of the Seine, and there 
 are only twenty-five vacancies. As the pupils in this 
 case are boarders, and all expenses are defrayed, and 
 as a situation in the primary schools of the depart- 
 ment is guaranteed on leaving, we may imagine 
 the eagerness displayed in the competition for 
 admission. 
 
 In Paris, where the new laws are bearing their first 
 fruit, the administration annually disposes of fifty 
 places ; there are already three thousand applicants. 
 What will become of the nine-tenths of these girls, 
 whose future the State seemed to guarantee when it 
 awarded them their certificates ? It must undertake 
 to create posts for women everywhere where they can 
 with advantage replace men, which is now of rather 
 frequent occurrence. They must be awarded a larger 
 share in primary and secondary instruction. Nothing 
 stands in the way of their employment in post offices, 
 telegraph offices, etc., except that it is contrary to 
 custom. It is desirable that more employment should 
 be found for women in industry or commerce. First, 
 competition for government appointments would 
 become less keen : we should not have to fear the yearly 
 increase in numbers of these poor girls who, having 
 worked in vain, are without resources, and who have 
 become unclassed. Many a tear has been shed for 
 the little work-girl in her garret. The teacher 
 without a situation and without hope is no less to be 
 pitied, and must we not regret the new laws dealing 
 with instruction of girls if the necessary consequence 
 is that they "are taken from their own rank and 
 made into governesses " ? Instruction, no doubt, is an 
 excellent thing when it prepares us for the work we 
 have to do, but it ought not to give us a distaste for the 
 
THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS AND HEREDITY. 2/3 
 
 only duties which fall to our lot and are within our 
 reach. Education, which would be a means of im- 
 provement and progress if things were well managed, 
 ought not, by swelling the numbers of the unclassed 
 and discontented, to become a cause of moral corrup- 
 tion and social disturbance. If the instruction so much 
 complained of — of which we fear the evil effects — 
 produce bad results, it is because it is not what it 
 ought to be. Instruction should be of such a 
 character as to usher and lead into real life, 
 with better equipment and more skill, those whom 
 its mission was to prepare for that life, instead of 
 giving them a distaste for it, and making them seek 
 to escape from it ; less refinement in the ideas is 
 needed, less erudition in the memory, less history and 
 literary theories ; more moral and aesthetic ideas, more 
 manual training, more energy in the will, more practi- 
 cal worldly wisdom, more talent for invention. 
 
 The Berlin Gegenwart is of opinion that although 
 the education of German girls has made immense 
 progress, still it leaves much to be desired. " They 
 are taught far too many useless things, dates, names, 
 and rules, which will be of no use to them later, while 
 we neglect what is of incomparably greater import- 
 ance — to form and develop the future mother." We 
 turn out "walking encyclopaedias," and sometimes 
 intellectual women, but never women really useful to 
 society. 
 
 There is only one remedy for this state of things — 
 to suppress a good half of the subjects at present in 
 the curriculum, and to substitute for them subjects of 
 really fundamental importance. 
 
 One of the prejudices, now become classical, is 
 to assume that education is rigidly bounded by a 
 
 i8 
 
274 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 fixed end or limit, and that it ends in an examination, 
 beyond which the educator has nothing to desire, 
 beyond which the pupil has no further ambition. 
 This difficulty is far more apparent in the case of the 
 girl than of the boy, for if the examination usually 
 opens out a career to the latter, it is generally 
 perfectly fruitless to the former. After having taken 
 her work at school in earnest, and devoted herself to 
 it heart and soul, directly she has left school the girl 
 feels the impulse given her suddenly checked ; hence 
 a void in her life, a sudden suppression of all ambition 
 but that of coquetry, of all recreation but the gossip 
 of middle-class society. It is therefore essential, in 
 the case of both sexes, to represent education as 
 continuous, uninterrupted, and to be ended only with 
 life. 
 
 There should be no time when we cease to learn. 
 Examinations, which are only a rough process to 
 ascertain with more or less certainty what we know, 
 ought especially to be a means of showing us what 
 we do not yet know. A syllabus is only good as 
 long as it is not taken too much in earnest, as long 
 as it is not a barrier to the student, a limit to 
 intellectual growth. Bodily growth continues often 
 after twenty; intellectual growth should have abso- 
 lutely no limit but death. Inspire children, and 
 especially young girls, with a taste for reading, study, 
 works of art, and elevated amusements ; this taste will 
 be worth far more than all knowledge, strictly so 
 called, artificially implanted in them ; instead of a 
 mind furnished with lifeless knowledge, you will have 
 a mind at once living, moving, and progressive. 
 Instead of allowing the brain to become atrophied by 
 excess of expenditure, you will have a larger and 
 
THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS AND HEREDITY. 27 S 
 
 larger brain, capable of transmitting to the race 
 loftier moral and intellectual dispositions, and that 
 without prejudice to what is the basis of all the rest — 
 physical and vital energy. 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 EDUCATION AND "ROTATION OF CROPS" IN 
 INTELLECTUAL CULTURE. 
 
 Danger of maintaining a race under the same social conditions, 
 especially in a high state of civilisation— Necessity for change of 
 occupation and environment — How intellectual superiority may be 
 dangerous to a race — "Rotation of crops" in intellectual culture — 
 The choice of professions. 
 
 The prolonged continuance of a race under the same 
 social conditions is generally fatal to the life of that 
 race. In fact, every social condition involves some- 
 thing conventional, and if the sum total of conven- 
 tions is opposed to the healthy development of life in 
 one single pointy even if it be favourable on all other 
 points, this harmful action, increased by time, will 
 disequilibrate the race with a certainty proportional 
 to the degree of its adaptation to this artificial 
 environment. The result will be insanity, or the 
 extinction of the race. Accordingly, since it is 
 impossible to meet with a social environment perfect 
 in every detail from the hygienic point of view, the 
 only hope for the vitality of a race lies in a change 
 of environment, which corrects the evil influence by 
 influences in a contrary direction. Improved means 
 of communication, by facilitating, so to speak, com- 
 bustion and ventilation in the great social furnaces, 
 only makes the danger more pressing. One of the 
 results is the frightful increase of madness in towns. 
 
EDUCATION IN INTELLECTUAL CULTURE. 277 
 
 There are 530 cases of madness to every 100 of 
 tubercular meningitis.^ London, in this respect, 
 exceeds the average by 39 per cent. Similarly, 
 suicides increase in number daily: the suicides at 
 Paris are one-seventh of the suicides in the whole of 
 France, and those of the Department of the Seine a 
 tenth. Excessive strain in the struggle for existence, 
 toil in unhealthy workshops, alcoholism, debauchery 
 made easy, nervous contagion, an impure atmosphere 
 — these are the perils. The life of the social organism, 
 like that of all other organisms, is maintained by 
 combustion ; and it is not foreign material that is 
 burned in the most active furnaces of life, but the 
 living cellules themselves. The present social order 
 creates on the one hand an idle class, on the other 
 an overworked class, and holds out to the overworked, 
 by way of ideal, the state of the idle — a state not 
 altogether to be envied. To do nothing leads to 
 wanting everything, without having the power of 
 accomplishing anything ; hence the fundamental 
 immorality of the idle, — that is to say, of a whole 
 class of society. The best means of limiting and 
 regulating passion is continuous action ; and at the 
 same time this action is the means of satisfying 
 whatever there may be in passion reasonable and 
 conformable to social laws. 
 
 It may not be intellectual superiority in itself which 
 is dangerous to a race, for, on the contrary, this 
 superiority gives the race an advantage in natural 
 
 ^ There is a general opinion that there is more tuberculosis of the 
 lungs in the insane than in the sane. Dr. Clouston found an hereditary 
 predisposition to insanity in seven per cent, more of the insane who 
 were tubercular than in the insane generally. — Vide Maudsley, 
 Mind and Body, pp. 97-99. — Mercier, Sanity and Insanity , pp. 184- 
 233. (Tr.) 
 
278 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 selection. The danger is in no superiority, whatever 
 it may be, but in the temptations of every kind that 
 superiorities bring in their train. The temptation 
 most difficult to resist in our modern society is that 
 of completely exploiting our talents, of extracting 
 from them every particle of practical profit, and of 
 bartering them for the maximum money and honour 
 they can give. It is this unlimited exploiting of 
 superiorities which renders them perilous. The fact 
 is so incontestable that we may see it verified in the 
 very forms of superiority which seem the most cer- 
 tain guarantee of survival — those of physical and 
 muscular strength. If a man is so remarkably strong 
 that he thinks he can turn his strength to account 
 and become an athlete, he considerably diminishes 
 the chances of existence for himself, and conse^ 
 quently for his race. Physical strength is blended 
 to some degree with the very conditions of life ; but 
 to wish to exploit the conditions of life is to alter 
 them. The best principle of all moral hygiene would 
 therefore be to persuade the individual to spare him- 
 self, not to consider any talent in himself or his 
 children as a goose laying golden eggs, and finally 
 to look upon life as having to be, not exploited^ but 
 preserved, increased, and propagated. 
 
 The consequence of this principle of physiological 
 economy in education is the art of measuring and 
 directing culture, especially intellectual culture ; of 
 not making it too intense, too limited to a single 
 point of the intellect, but of always proportioning its 
 extension and intension. The alternation of culture 
 in the race should be a principle of no less import- 
 ance. Rotation of crops ought to be as elementary a 
 rule in education as in agriculture, for it is absolutely 
 
EDUCATION IN INTELLECTUAL CULTURE. 279 
 
 impossible to successfully cultivate for an unlimited 
 period a given plant in the same soil, or a given apti- 
 tude in the same race. Some day perhaps a distinc- 
 tion will be drawn between the occupations likely to 
 exhaust or improve a race, just as a distinction is 
 drawn between plants that exhaust or improve the 
 soil. The most healthy occupation, beyond dispute, 
 is clearly that of the labourer or country gentleman ; 
 and the way to preserve a succession of generations 
 at once robust and brilliant would be to make them 
 live alternately a town and country life ; to make 
 them recuperate in the vegetative life of the peasant 
 whenever they are exhausted by the nervous and 
 intellectual life of the inhabitants of towns. This 
 ideal, which is far from being attained in France, 
 might be easily realised, for we see it very 
 often in England, where the importance of landed 
 property, and the habits of a life a little less 
 refined than ours, make the English aristocracy 
 and middle class pass the greater part of their 
 whole existence in their mansions or cottages, and 
 give themselves up to those rural occupations which 
 are an outlet for the energy of the whole organisation. 
 Without in the least wishing to trace the line of 
 conduct to be followed in so complex a juncture as the 
 choice of a profession, I think that it is the educator's 
 duty never to press the son to follow his father's pro- 
 fession, at least whenever that profession, as that of 
 the artist, politician, savant, or simply man of business, 
 or man of eminence, requires very considerable nervous 
 expenditure. There is nothing more naive, considered 
 from the higher point of view, than the dread of 
 obscurity, the dread of being " a nobody." The real 
 qualities of a race are not lost because they are not 
 
28o EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 immediately exposed to view ; on the contrary, they 
 accumulate, and genius only proceeds from the boxes 
 in which the poor have day by day hoarded up their 
 talents instead of squandering them in follies. It is 
 not without reason that the Chinese decorate and 
 ennoble the fathers instead of the sons ; celebrated 
 children are prodigal, and the capital they expend 
 is not theirs. Nature acquires her greatest riches 
 when she is asleep. Now, in our impatience, we 
 cannot sleep; we want to see the generations always 
 awake, always at work. Once more, the only way of 
 permitting this restless effort and constant expendi- 
 ture to continue is to vary it incessantly ; we must 
 resign ourselves to our sons being other than we are, 
 or to their ceasing to exist. 
 
 The end of every social and pedagogic reform 
 ought not to be the decrease in human society of 
 effort — that essential condition of all progress — but 
 on the contrary the increase of productive effort by a 
 better organisation and distribution of forces, as we 
 often increase the amount of work done in a day by 
 reducing the hours of labour from twelve to ten. 
 For that purpose the first thing to be done is to 
 place humanity, and especially children, under better 
 hygienic conditions — the sanitation of houses and 
 workshops, decrease of mental and physical labour, 
 etc. Secondly, we must substitute among the masses 
 for a certain space of time well-directed intellectual 
 work for material work. Among the wealthy classes 
 a minimum of material work must counterbalance the 
 disequilibration entailed by exclusively intellectual 
 work or by idleness. Unfortunately, nowadays 
 increase of social foresight is produced mainly in 
 economics, and economic foresight is often opposed 
 
EDUCATION IN INTELLECTUAL CULTURE. 28 1 
 
 to really social and hygienic foresight. Saving a 
 capital of money, and even of honours, is often the 
 exact contrary of saving health and strength for the 
 race. Take the case of a poor young man who 
 hopes to get married as soon as his social position is 
 sufficiently improved, and who overburdens himself 
 with work (examinations, preparation for State 
 schools, etc.). He is already an old man when he 
 marries, with an overworked nervous system, and 
 with a constitution best adapted for the degeneration 
 of his race. Further, in virtue of the economic 
 foresight which has guided him hitherto, he will 
 restrict the number of his children — another chance 
 of degeneration, the first-born being as a rule far 
 from being the best endowed. The conclusion is 
 that there is often an antinomy between economic 
 foresight, which has two terms — extreme parsimony 
 with regard to money, and extreme expenditure with 
 regard to strength — and hygienic or moral foresight, 
 which consists in sparing one's health, and only 
 expending strength in proportion as the expendi- 
 ture, rapidly recuperated, constitutes exercise and not 
 exhaustion. 
 
 As we have seen, the too rapid growth of economy, 
 which represents a certain amount of physical work 
 thrown out of employment, is always dangerous 
 in a race, when it is not accompanied by a 
 proportional increase of intellectual and moral 
 capacity, which permits the physical strength set 
 free by economy to be used in some other 
 way. All economy of material wealth may be 
 an occasion of moral prodigality. True progress 
 consists in the methodic transformation of physical 
 labour into well-regulated intellectual labour, and not 
 
282 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 in the cessation or decrease of work. If rotation were 
 properly understood and applied, the social ideal would 
 consist in an absolute and increasing production, 
 whereas the purely economical ideal is only the decrease 
 of the necessity of production, which generally leads to 
 an actual decrease in production. We have to substitute 
 for the external necessities (hunger and misery), which 
 have hitherto been man's taskmasters and have often 
 enforced excessive toil, a series of internal necessities, 
 of intellectual and moral needs, corresponding to new 
 capacities, which will urge him to regular work in 
 proportion to his strength. This would be the trans- 
 formation of physical effort and muscular tension 
 into a nervous tension and attention^ but into attention 
 regulated, varied, and applied to different objects, 
 with intervals for rest. 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE AIM OF EVOLUTION AND EDUCATION. IS IT 
 CONSCIOUSNESS, OR THE AUTOMATISM OF 
 HEREDITY ? 
 
 Some partisans of evolution, pushing to an extreme 
 the thesis of Maudsley and Ribot, and even Spencer 
 himself, come to the conclusion that the most elevated 
 stage of perfection for man, and consequently the 
 most perfect type of the moral ideal, and the aim of 
 education, would be a complete state of automatism, 
 in which intellectual acts and the most complicated 
 sentiments would be alike reduced to purely reflex 
 actions. " Every conscious act," they say, " every 
 thought, every sentiment, presupposes an imperfec- 
 tion, a delay, a check, a want of organisation ; if, 
 therefore, to form the type of ideal man we take the 
 quality which all others presuppose, and which does 
 not itself presuppose any other — viz., organisation — 
 and if we think of it as raised to the highest possible 
 degree, our ideal of man is an unconscious automaton 
 marvellously complicated and unified."^ This theory 
 of the ideal human being is, in my opinion, based 
 upon an inaccurate conception of the world and 
 mind. 
 
 Unconscious automatism could only be the perfect 
 organisation of past experiences or perceptions ; but 
 
 ^ Paulhan, " Le Devoir et la Science Morale," Reime Philosophique^ 
 December 1886. 
 
284 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 these past perceptions cannot, in the individual and 
 the race, entirely coincide with future perceptions, 
 unless we suppose that man is placed eternally in the 
 same environment — that is to say, that the world is 
 arrested in its evolution. Now, such a cessation of 
 progress is neither admissible from the scientific, nor 
 desirable from the practical, point of view ; it offers 
 none of the characteristics of the ideal. Hence the 
 ideal for man is not the adaptation to his environment 
 once for all^ an adaptation which would in fact issue 
 in automatism and unconsciousness ; it is an increasing 
 facility of readaptation to the changes of the environ- 
 ment, a flexibility, an educability which is nothing 
 but an intellect and a consciousness ever becoming 
 more perfect. If, in fact, adaptation to things is a 
 work of unconscious habit, incessant readaptation is 
 the characteristic of the conscious intellect and of the 
 will, the work of education. Consciousness is not 
 purely and simply an arrested reflex action, as 
 contemporary psychologists so often define it ; it is a 
 corrected reflex action, brought into correspondence 
 with the changes of the environment, wound up 
 anew rather than stopped. And the ideal is not to 
 suppress this readaptation to the environment, but to 
 make it continuous by the conscious prevision of 
 those changes that may bring about the double 
 evolution of the man and the world. This conscious 
 prevision will suppress shocks, surprise, and anguish, 
 increasing the part played, not by automatism, but by 
 the intellect ; the intellect alone can prepare us for 
 the future, and can adapt us to the partial unknown 
 of time and space. This unknown, although not yet 
 present with us, is prefigured by ideas and. senti- 
 ments ; hence a moral and intellectual environment, — 
 
AIM OF EVOLUTION AND EDUCATION. 285 
 
 a conscious environment from which we cannot escape, 
 and which will always protect us from automatism. 
 
 It is very superficial to suppose that science and 
 scientific education tend to automatism because they 
 use the memory for the storing up and organising 
 of facts, and that on the other hand the memory, 
 being automatic, reaches its perfection in unconscious 
 recollection, in habit ; in other words, in reflex 
 action. Science would thus have as its ideal 
 routine — that is, its own antithesis. We forget 
 that science is not constituted merely by the 
 knowledge acquired, but by the manner in 
 which this knowledge is constantly employed to 
 gain further knowledge and to turn it into new 
 channels of action. Progress constantly increases 
 the number of machines and instruments at man's 
 disposal, and among the instruments, knowledge 
 organised into a habit — Le.^ instruction — takes the 
 first rank. But the possession of machines ever more 
 and more complicated by no means tends to turn 
 man into a machine ; on the contrary, the more the 
 number of our internal and external instruments is 
 increased, the more the mass of our unconscious 
 perceptions and stored-up knowledge increases, the 
 greater is our power of voluntary attention : power 
 and consciousness are developed simultaneously. To 
 think, for example, that the role of the unconscious is 
 larger in the savant than in the peasant would be 
 naive ; unconsciousness in the savant is no doubt 
 much more complicated, presenting, like the brain, 
 countless convolutions and windings, but the con- 
 sciousness is at the same time developed in an 
 even greater proportion. In a word, it is strange 
 to be called upon to prove that ignorance alone, 
 
286 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 and not science, is routine. As the sphere of 
 knowledge widens, and the points of contact with 
 the unknown increase, it follows that every 
 adaptation of the intellect to the known only 
 makes a readaptation to more extended knowledge 
 easier and more necessary. To know is to be led as 
 a whole to learn more and to be able to do more. 
 That is why curiosity increases with knowledge and 
 instruction : an inferior man is not curious in the real 
 sense of the word — curious as to new ideas and 
 higher generalisations. What will save science is 
 what has constructed it, and what will again construct 
 it — insatiable curiosity. And although science tends 
 to make more and more use of habit and reflex action, 
 to widen its substructure in the unconscious, as we 
 extend the foundations of a lofty building, we may 
 assert that science is the extending and luminous 
 consciousness of the human race, that the practical 
 knowledge and power of man will always be measured 
 by his power of inner reflexion. 
 
 M. Ribot maintains that our pedagogy is based 
 entirely upon a colossal blunder, because it looks for 
 the improvement of a country by a better organisation 
 of education. Action, he adds, does not depend upon 
 the intellect, but upon the will and sentiment, and 
 instruction has no hold on one or the other. M. 
 Fouillee, on the contrary, attributes force to ideas, 
 and thinks that every idea corresponding to a senti- 
 ment tends to some action. In the same way, accord- 
 ing to M. Espinas, when the will and emotions in a 
 people are affected by incurable diseases — diseases 
 connected with organic waste or with some deeply 
 rooted change of temperament — in that case it is no 
 doubt chimerical to hope that health will come from 
 
AIM OF EVOLUTION AND EDUCATION. 287 
 
 what is taught at school ; but, as long as a vestige of 
 hope remains (and no one has a right to despair of his 
 country), if an effective influence can be exercised on 
 this people, if its will can become strengthened, and 
 the play of the emotions once more become normal, 
 it is by ideas — true ideas, i.e.y science — that cure and 
 improvement can be attained.^ Let us therefore 
 examine more closely the rble of the consciousness in 
 psychical evolution in general, and moral evolution in 
 particular. 
 
 The term consciousness is used to designate a 
 
 * "What is sentiment," says M. Espinas, **if it be not the excite- 
 ment resulting from a more or less obscure view of the dangers or advan- 
 tages which may accrue to us ? What is the will, however instinctive 
 we suppose it to be, if it is not the impulse of that part of our ideas to 
 which heredity or habit has attached the strongest sentiment ? Now, 
 does it not, in a certain measure, depend upon the educator to give to 
 certain ideas a preponderating force, by showing their connection with 
 the most pressing interests, and then by habit to bend the will to sub- 
 mit to the influence of those ideas ? And may not the character — nay, 
 the temperament — be thus modified in the long run, as far as the vitality 
 transmitted to the race permits ? If this be untrue, point out the way 
 to act directly on the will and its emotional source ! It may perhaps be 
 said that new sentiments may be aroused by the communicated emotion 
 springing from inspired speech, by example, by authoritative accent or 
 gesture, and by the fine arts ; but here again it must be admitted that 
 poetry and eloquence count among the fine arts, that the accent is that 
 of a voice using words, that example is interpreted by language, that 
 the emotion of the educator moves the heart of the disciple, having first 
 reached it by way of his thoughts. If this were not so, we should be 
 confronted by a mysterious pedagogy, which would operate in silence 
 like grace, and would abandon teaching and take to praying. The 
 choice must be made ; we must either try to modify the will by the 
 idea, or give up trying to reform the will. It follows that to bring 
 up youth, to institute methods of education, psychological and social 
 science — i.e,^ the exact knowledge of the laws of the mind and the con- 
 ditions of existence under which it moves — cannot do all things, but it 
 can do all that is possible. Science will turn out to be powerless only 
 where there will be no room for its application. It is not the fault of 
 the crow-bar if the arm that wields it finds it too heavy. " 
 
288 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 mental state which, in its physiological conditions, is 
 certainly more complex than the state of uncon- 
 sciousness ; this state, when once produced, forms a 
 new unit of force (even from the physiological point 
 of view) among the component forces acting within 
 us. That is the basis of the theory of " idea- 
 forces," to which the following pages are a con- 
 tribution. 
 
 A conscious phenomenon does not act absolutely 
 in the same way in the chain of physiological 
 phenomena as a purely unconscious phenomenon, 
 and it introduces into that chain a new force. 
 
 In fact : — 1st, the consciousness is primarily a more 
 complete organisation, by which one phenomenon 
 becomes attached in time to another as antecedent or 
 consequent. The idea of time clearly presupposes 
 the existence of consciousness. Now, there is no 
 complete organisation, even in an intellect conceived as 
 purely automatic, apart from time, which introduces 
 sequence into phenomena, at any rate apparently of 
 the nature of empirical causality.^ The fact that we 
 have consciousness allows us "to recognise pheno- 
 mena as having occupied a clearly-defined position 
 among other states of consciousness." ^ In fact, it 
 furnishes us with the essential idea, that what has 
 been done once may be done again, that we are 
 capable of self-imitation, self-differentiation, or self- 
 modification. 
 
 2nd. The consciousness, constituting a better or- 
 ganisation, and in certain respects a concentration of 
 psychical phenomena, also constitutes a centre of 
 attraction for the psychical forces. As with sidereal 
 
 1 Vide my study on La Genese de t Idie de Temps, 
 
 2 Vide M. Ribot, Maladies de la M^moire, 
 
AIM OF EVOLUTION AND EDUCATION. 289 
 
 matter, which attracts in proportion to its condensa- 
 tion into a nucleus, so with the mind. Consciousness 
 is action concentrated, soHdified, and, in a measure, 
 crystalHsed. Further, this action is self-transparent : 
 it is a self-conscious formula ; now every act clearly 
 formulated ipso facto acquires new power of attraction 
 and selective affinity. Every temptation which is 
 vague and indeterminate to the consciousness is 
 easily overcome ; when it is determinate and formu- 
 lated, and assumes the outlines of a conscious act, it 
 may become irresistible.^ 
 
 3rd. The consciousness may act spontaneously as 
 a general exciting influence on the organism. M. 
 Fere has attempted to prove, by a series of psycho- 
 physiological experiments, that all sensation not 
 painful is a stimulant of energy. If we thus admit 
 that sensation has a dynamogenic power, it is not 
 illogical to admit that consciousness — which underlies 
 all sensations, and which is in its origin only sensa- 
 tion — shares in this dynamogenic power. " We like 
 sensations," said Aristotle ; if we like them, it is 
 because they seem to act like a tonic ; but we also 
 like to have consciousness, and it is probable that 
 from it we draw an immediate advantage in general 
 energy. 
 
 4th. The consciousness in a great measure simplifies 
 what I shall call the inner circulation and course of 
 ideas, and their relations one w^ith another, which make 
 it possible to compare and classify them. 
 
 As the idea constitutes the life of the intellect, it 
 also constitutes the life of the will, which is, properly 
 speaking, moral life. The force of an idea, in fact, is 
 in direct ratio to the number of states of consciousness 
 
 ' Cf. the previous chapter on "Suggestion." 
 
 19 
 
290 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 the* idea is able to dominate and regulate. When 
 a man acts conformably to an idea, his sense of that 
 intellectual and regulative force will be inversely pro- 
 portional to the purely blind and physical impulse to 
 action prompting him at the same moment. Now, 
 action, according to the ideas is ipso facto will — i.e.^ the 
 commencement of moral life. Thanks to the idea, 
 all action is immediately formulated within the 
 mental presence-chamber of the moral agent, and 
 classed by him ; it spontaneously takes its place in 
 the series of states of consciousness characterised by 
 this or that general tone of emotion or sensation, while 
 the individual and objective features of the action are 
 considered of secondary importance. This classifica- 
 tion becomes by force of habit almost instantaneous: 
 it takes place in the somnambulistic sleep as w^ell as 
 in the waking state. To think of an action is to 
 have already summarily judged it, to feel oneself 
 attracted or repelled by the whole group of 
 tendencies with which it is connected. The common 
 characteristic of very primitive races and children 
 of an early age is the want of constancy and 
 permanency in the moral impulses ; or, in other and 
 better words, they do not, as a rule, feel a constant 
 impulse to action ; and almost all those impulses 
 which do issue in action assume the intermittent 
 character of physical wants, such as hunger, thirst, 
 etc.; even love itself, as an exclusive and insatiable 
 passion, does not exist in them. All their emotions 
 are transient. It follows that they can only 
 exceptionally feel the influence of an idea-force, 
 the dictate of an " obligation." What we call the 
 moral sentiments are not absolutely wanting, but 
 they only act at the moment ; in fact, primitive man 
 
AIM OF EVOLUTION AND EDUCATION. 29I 
 
 has moral caprices, but no organised morality : it is 
 much easier for him to be heroic than straightforward 
 and equitable. And these caprices, whether satisfied 
 or not satisfied, tend to extinction, without leaving 
 any deep trace in him, because whatever prevents 
 him from exerting self-restraint under the pressure of 
 an emotional impulse, also prevents him from detain- 
 ing this impulse when present to his mind ; his 
 thoughts wander, because he is powerless and 
 incapable of effort : his consciousness is not complex 
 enough for these emotional influences to counteract each 
 other for long, so as to avert immediate expenditure 
 and exhaustion of energy in spontaneous movements. 
 He does not know what a line of conduct is, and he 
 will only learn it by a very slow evolution. 
 
 The progress which gradually substitutes the reign 
 of tenacious and harmonised impulses for this reign 
 of caprice, of transient and discordant impulses, tends 
 to form the character; and it is this progress which 
 also tends to the formation of morality. To have 
 character is to conform one's conduct to certain 
 empirical or theoretical rules, to certain idea-forces, 
 which may be good or bad, but which always intro- 
 duce harmony, beauty, and moral worth. 
 
 To have character is to experience an impulse so 
 strong and regular in its power as to subordinate all 
 others to itself In the individual such an impulse 
 may be more or less anti-social ; we may have 
 character, and so may present a certain inward beauty 
 and, ipso facto, present an elementary morality with 
 a regulated conduct, and nevertheless be but one of 
 the *'unclassed" in the race — perhaps a brigand. 
 On the other hand, when we have to deal with 
 a race, especially with the human race in general, 
 
292 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 the character and the triumph of the social instincts 
 ought in the main to coincide, for selection excludes 
 every individual realising an anti-social type of con- 
 duct. The poem of life excludes a Manfred and a 
 Lara ; it may at the present day be safely asserted 
 that men who have the most will have the best will ; 
 that the best co-ordinated lives are the most moral; 
 that the most admirable characters from the aesthetic 
 point of view are also, as a rule, the most admirable 
 from the moral point of view ; that, in fact, the reign 
 of morality is more or less partially established within 
 us as soon as we are able to establish any authority 
 or subordination within ourselves. 
 
 Consciousness, therefore, is not only a complication, 
 but, from certain points of view, a simplification ; that 
 is why it came into being, and that is why it cannot 
 disappear before the progress of mechanical organi- 
 sation. We may form for ourselves an impressive 
 picture of the struggle of unconscious tendencies and 
 impulses, by representing it as a hand-to-hand con- 
 flict between men fighting blindly in the dark : the 
 day breaks, discloses the respective conditions of the 
 armies, and at one stroke decides the battle. Even 
 though the result were the same, it is greatly 
 furthered, and a considerable expenditure of energy 
 and life is thus avoided : and this is precisely what 
 happens when consciousness brings to light the 
 obscure struggle of the propensities. It shows us the 
 respective powers of each — a power in most cases 
 proportional to the generality of ideas represented 
 by each propensity — and it spares us from being 
 inwardly torn and harassed by useless struggles. 
 It should also be noticed that unconsciousness, 
 like " darkness," is always a relative term ; as 
 
AIM OF EVOLUTION AND EDUCATION. 293 
 
 there is light in every shade, so it is probable that 
 there are everywhere lower phases of consciousness. 
 If the idea does not, properly speaking, create force, 
 it economises it to a great extent. Bwt it is perhaps 
 not enough to say merely that it accelerates the 
 result ; the idea may modify the relation of the forces. 
 The influence of an idea, or, to use a physiological 
 expression, of a certain vibration of the brain, is 
 habitually proportional to the number of states of the 
 nervous system by which it is escorted. Now, for an 
 unconscious being to experience this force belonging 
 to an idea, it has actually to pass through the 
 whole series of successive modifications of the 
 nervous system in which the vibration in question is 
 manifested. On the other hand, when the conscious- 
 ness intervenes, it is enough to imagine these states 
 to immediately grasp the real force of the idea. Now 
 we see what simplification the consciousness implies. 
 It is the future become present ; it is the period in 
 which the collective results of evolution are concen- 
 trated in a moment. Thought is evolution condensed 
 in some way or other. We may consider an idea as 
 the abstraction of a sentiment, and sentiment as an 
 abstraction of sensation, and finally sensation as an 
 abstraction and a scheme of a very general objective 
 state, of a kind of vital nisus more or less indeter- 
 minate in itself^ Thus, by a series of successive 
 abstractions, each of which is at the same time a 
 determination (for the abstract has its outlines always 
 more simply defined than the concrete, and the 
 difference between them is exactly the difference 
 between a sketch and a painting), we rise from 
 
 ^ Sensation is here used as equivalent to painful or pleasurable feel- 
 ing produced by sensory stimulation. (Tr.) 
 
294 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 more or less shapeless life to the most definite 
 thought, and all progress toward the abstract marks 
 an economy of force, a simplification of the internal 
 mechanism, in that " shifting and living number " 
 which constitutes life, and which Plato called xpvxr}. 
 Thought is the algebra of the world ; and this algebra 
 has made possible the most complex mechanism, has 
 placed the most colossal power in the hands of man. 
 The progress of evolution is measured by the increas- 
 ing share taken in it by the abstract as compared 
 with the concrete. The more the concrete is dis- 
 solved, effaced, subtilised, the more it gives place 
 to regular outlines ; thought, as such, is but a 
 sketch ; but by refining this sketch we approxi- 
 mate to the ideal masterpiece that nature strives 
 to attain. Every line clearly fixed in the con- 
 sciousness becomes a possible direction in action, 
 and every possibility is a force. So abstract 
 thought, — the supreme object of intellectual in- 
 struction, — which appears to be the most estranged 
 from the domain of vital forces, may nevertheless be 
 a very great force under certain relations, and may 
 even become the supreme force, provided that it 
 marks the straightest line and that of least resistance. 
 The paths traced out in the world by thought are 
 like the broad thoroughfares we see from a height 
 like bands across a large town : at first they seem 
 empty, but presently the eye distinguishes swarming 
 life : they are the arteries of the town, through which 
 the most intense circulation goes on. 
 
 If there be in the very consciousness of a pheno- 
 menon a certain additional force, increasing the 
 anterior force peculiar to that phenomenon, it follows 
 that " idea-forces " really do exist. We must 
 
AIM OF EVOLUTION AND EDUCATION. 295 
 
 understand by idea-force that surplus force added to an 
 idea by the mere fact of its reflexion in consciousness, 
 having for its physical correlative a surplus motor 
 force. The surplus force is the result of a comparison 
 of the idea with others present in consciousness. This 
 confronting of ideas, this inner balancing, is enough 
 to make some rise and others sink. Those which tend 
 to gain the mastery are always : — 1st. The most 
 general ideas, and therefore those most often asso- 
 ciated with the greatest number of other ideas, instead 
 of being repelled by them ; the idea-force is therefore 
 the force of which the power is proportional to its 
 degree of rationality and consciousness, and which 
 does not borrow that power from the domain of 
 unconscious habits, but from its relation to other 
 conscious ideas — from its very generality. 2nd. The 
 most effective ideas, which awaken the most active 
 sentiments without provoking by opposition any 
 depressive state. From these two laws follows a 
 simplification of inward difficulties to the advantage 
 of the most general or the most emotional ideas. 
 
 From the preceding considerations ensues the 
 confirmation not of the impotence of ideas, but of 
 the power of ideas and education. Thus, far from 
 every perfect organisation having to issue in the 
 unconscious, it is impossible to picture to oneself a 
 perfect and yet unconscious organisation. The state 
 of consciousness acts as a link interposed in partly 
 "unconscious " reasonings, which may operate during 
 an eclipse of the inner illumination. 
 
 In higher species the evolution and education of the 
 individual consciousness is much more vast and com- 
 plex, and is also much longer and more continuous; it 
 extends to the farthest limits of life. One of the traits 
 
296 EDUCATION AND HEREDITY. 
 
 characterising man as compared with the animal, and 
 the civilised man as compared with the savage, is that 
 his intellect is longer capable of new acquisitions, is not 
 checked in its growth, and does not close in upon the 
 knowledge acquired, as certain plants close in upon 
 the insects they stifle. In the same way, one of the 
 essential traits characterising the man of genius, 
 according to Galton and Sully, is that his intellect, 
 more perfect than the average, has a longer evolution. 
 Genius produces both sooner and later ; the brain of a 
 great man is fatigued less rapidly than his limbs ; his 
 fecundity is not suspended — it lasts up to the grave : 
 being, as it were, less prone to death, he is less con- 
 scious of its approach. The evolution of the human 
 consciousness, therefore, tends in the higher types of 
 humanity to fill the whole of existence. Thus nature 
 ever tends to diminish the long night of unconscious 
 childhood and imbecile old age which is to be found 
 in the lower stages of humanity. Further, when we 
 see the limits of fecundity and education recede for 
 the human consciousness, it may not be anti-scientific 
 to hope that perhaps one day, after many ages have 
 passed away, the limits of its existence may also 
 recede ; that the brain will have more vitality than 
 the rest of the body. Not only by its most universal 
 and impersonal ideas, but by the very curve of its 
 evolution, by the ever-increasing power and duration 
 of its inward fecundity, the human consciousness will 
 tend more and more to bring in its train a wider 
 immortality. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 ARTIFICIAL MODIFICATIONS OF CHARACTER IN 
 INDUCED SOMNAMBULISM. 
 
 Letter to the Editor of the " Revue PhilosophiqueP 
 
 February 1883. 
 I send you a few reflexions — suggested by an important 
 article of M. Richet's — on artificial modifications of the moral 
 character and moral tendencies in induced somnambulism. 
 
 L 
 
 M. Richet treats of two questions — amnesia of the person- 
 ality, and unconscious memory. 
 
 To completely demonstrate "amnesia of the personality " Tn 
 cases of induced somnambulism, we must effectually prove 
 amnesia of the moral character^ the essential mark of the 
 personality; this transformation of character is only partially 
 produced in the well-known case quoted by Dr. Azam, but I 
 can find it nowhere in the researches of M. Richet — that is to 
 say, presented in a sufficiently formal manner. For instance, I 
 should have been better satisfied if, when transforming Mme. 
 
 A into a general, he had placed before her some moral 
 
 alternative, and had given her the choice of two honourable 
 posts, one of which was a post of almost certain death ; we then 
 should have seen if feminine timidity would have prevailed. It 
 seems to me extremely probable that many somnambulists, 
 playing the same rdle again and again, would act differently 
 under the same circumstances, according to sex, education, 
 habits, etc. Probably the married woman of whom M. Richet 
 speaks would not have acquitted herself in her role of sailor 
 with the same crudity of expression as the second patient : she 
 
 19-1 
 
298 APPENDIX. 
 
 would probably have displayed hesitation in certain scenes of 
 rough action. In other words, the old personality ought not to 
 disappear totally and give place to a personality dropped from 
 the clouds ; the newly-awakened tendencies are, doubtless, only 
 a co7nposition of forces pre-existing in the organism, with the 
 new impulse implanted by the will of the magnetiser. 
 
 Perhaps M. Richet may have gone too far in drawing a fine 
 distinction between the "drama actually lived" by somnambu- 
 lists and the drama composed by dramatic authors, or played 
 by actors. Poets or musicians of a very impressionable and 
 nervous temperament have really lived the roles they com- 
 posed. Weber believed he saw the devil when he summoned 
 him in his music ; Shelley had hallucinations ; Flaubert 
 (according to M. Taine) had the taste of arsenic in his mouth 
 when he was describing the poisoning of M. Bovary; Malibian 
 at times thought she was Desdemona. In the same way, in 
 our dreams, we are each of us transformed into another human 
 being, or even a horse, or a bird, etc. Even in waking life there 
 are always within us, as in Maitre Jacques, several personalities, 
 whom the mere changing of garments may successively arouse. 
 The very timbre of the voice, which is so closely connected with 
 the personality, is changed in a most remarkable way as we 
 pass from one role to another, and a person has not the same 
 tone of voice in a drawing-room as in the bosom of his family. 
 If the proverb, " You never know a man until you have eaten a 
 bushel of salt with him," is eternally true; it is because, to know 
 a man thoroughly, we must have seen him play successively 
 every role in the drama of life. It is none the less certain that 
 in the case of persons differing in the widest degree, each 
 preserves intact the sum total of hereditary and acquired ten- 
 dencies which are his alone, and which constitute his indi- 
 viduality — his character. Whether these instincts are latent 
 and completely unconscious (as in dreams and somnambulism), 
 or remain vaguely conscious (as sometimes happens in the 
 waking state), is of secondary importance, provided they exist 
 and operate. Maitre Jacques is still Maitre Jacques, whether 
 he be coachman or cook; he will even entirely forget the former 
 part while playing the latter ; but he will no more, on that 
 account, lose all the traits of his moral character, or his inward 
 features, than he will absolutely change the features of his 
 face. We are never conscious of all our being, and it is easy to 
 
APPENDIX. 299 
 
 understand that in certain cases of delirium this always very 
 limited consciousness is still more narrowly limited so as to 
 include only the provisional personality assigned to the patient 
 at the time. But the totality of the person and of the character 
 still subsist in penumbra, and it remains a constant cause of 
 internal phenomena. When the fog covers the sea, and a 
 small ray of light, piercing a cloud, falls on the moving waters, 
 the circumscribed spot illuminated by it seems to move 
 spontaneously, and to be something distinct, separate, and 
 independent; but in reality this spot borrov^rs the quivering of 
 its surface from the undulating movement of the whole ocean. 
 Thus the habitual tendencies of our moral character and 
 personality ought to be re-discovered, even in the most 
 manifest disturbances which seem to suppress them. M. Richet 
 wishes to establish a distinction between the personality and 
 the ego, so as to reduce the former exclusively to a pheno- 
 menon of the memory; but does not he himself admit of 
 unconscious memory in the waking state ? This memory ought 
 also to exist in the somnambulistic state, and to closely link 
 together the different phases of transformation ; moreover, this 
 memory is largely conscious ; is there not in every instance 
 quoted a memory of words, and therefore of ideas and impres- 
 sions, and will not those impressions always bear the specific 
 mark of the individuality? It is probable that we may even 
 find in every somnambulist, as in every writer, a kind of 
 personal style^ and " the style is the man." The sum total of 
 mechanical phenomena, which are the basis of the individual 
 from the scientific point of view, cannot suddenly vanish ; new 
 combinations are produced, but there is nothing which could 
 resemble creation. 
 
 II. 
 
 What are certainly more remarkable in the cases quoted by 
 M. Richet are the instances of unconscious memory which 
 recall the marvellous and terrible legends about Cagliostro. In 
 these examples M. Richet seems to have been able to create in 
 every detail, by means of an external command, an inner 
 tendency, a propensity persisting in shadow after the return to 
 the waking state, and in some measure imposing itself on the 
 will of the patient. In these curious cases, the dream of the 
 
300 APPENDIX. 
 
 somnambulist seems still to dominate him and direct his life 
 after he is awake. The inverse had been noticed long ago. It 
 had been observed that we each can, more or less, regulate our 
 sleep, and in a certain measure control our dreams, and fix 
 beforehand the hour of awaking. In my own case, I have 
 often noticed this influence of the will over dreams — an 
 influence quite unconscious during the dream itself, and never- 
 theless easier to ascertain when awake ; I have very often half 
 awakened myself in the midst of melancholy dreams ; I have 
 willed to change their direction, and resuming the thread of 
 the same dream I have known it become cheerful. 
 
 I think that here is a fertile source of experiment which is 
 very curious and very important in the study of instincts.^ In 
 fact the commands of the magnetiser seem to arouse in the 
 midst of all the instincts of the being, a new tendency, a nascent 
 artificial instinct. 
 
 The most curious case related by M. Richet is in a previous 
 article (October 1880). It is about a woman who was naturally 
 a very small eater. One day, during her sleep, M. Richet told 
 her she must make heartier meals. When she awoke, she had 
 entirely forgotten the injunction ; however, a few days after, 
 the hospital nurse took M. Richet aside and told him she could 
 not understand the change that had been effected in the patient. 
 "Now," she said, "she is always asking for more food than I 
 give her." If this case has been accurately observed, this is 
 not only the carrying out of a particular command, but an 
 unconscious impulse closely akin to natural instinct. In fact 
 every instinct, natural or moral, is derived, as Cuvier points out, 
 from a kind of somnambulism, because it gives an order of 
 which we do not know the reason. We hear the " voice of 
 conscience" without knowing from whence it comes. To vary 
 the experiment, the patient should have been ordered not only 
 to eat, but, for example, to get up early in the morning, and to 
 work hard. We might eventually modify in this way the moral 
 character of individuals, and induced somnambulism might 
 assume an important place, as a means of action, in the moral 
 hygiene of humanity.^ All these tempting hypotheses remain 
 pending till the observations of M. Richet have been confirmed 
 with sufficient scientific accuracy. 
 
 ^ These experiments have since been made. 
 ^ Education and Heredity f okdiT^, i. 
 
APPENDIX. 301 
 
 If these experiments are confirmed, we might go further still, 
 and try if it be not possible to annihilate, by a series of repeated 
 commands, this or that natural instinct. It is said that a som- 
 nambulist may be made to lose her memory — for example, her 
 memory for names ; we may even, according to M. Richet, 
 destroy the whole memory {Revue Philosophique^ Nov. 1880); 
 he adds — "the experiment should be attempted with every 
 possible precaution; I have seen such terror and disorder in 
 the intellect supervene in a case of this kind, lasting for about 
 a quarter of an hour, that I would not willingly repeat this 
 dangerous experiment." If, with most psychologists, we iden- 
 tify memory with habit and instinct, we should imagine it 
 impossible to provisionally annihilate in the somnambulist this 
 or that instinct, even those of the most fundamental character — - 
 such as the maternal instinct, etc. Next, we ought to ascertain 
 if this suppression of the instinct leaves traces when the som- 
 nambulist is awakened. We might in all cases try the experi- 
 ment on hereditary habits or manias ; we might try if a series 
 of orders or admonitions repeatedly given during sleep could 
 diminish, for example, delusions of grandeur or of persecution. 
 In other words, we should try to counteract a natural by an 
 artificial mania. In this way somnambulism would be a richer 
 field than madness for moral and psychological observations. 
 Both are derangements of the mental mechanism ; but in 
 induced somnambulism the derangement may be measured 
 and regulated by the magnetiser. 
 
 We might conceive of an operation on the intellect and 
 moral sense analogous to the operation for strabismus : the 
 squint is cured, not by strengthening the weaker muscles, but 
 by relaxing those with sometimes more than their normal 
 powers. However that may be, the facts given by M. Richet, 
 if the result of accurate observation, certainly indicate a new 
 method of research, and perhaps a new means of action on the 
 human will, at least in its morbid state. 
 
INDEX, 
 
 Aboulia, 25 
 
 Act, voluntary, 64 
 
 Action, representation of reflex, 49, 
 
 53 . 
 Adaptation, 49 
 Adults, hypnotising of, 17 
 Esthetics, 200 
 Aideism, 23 
 Alcoholism, 9 
 
 Anarchic schools of Tolstoi, 190 
 Anomia, religious, 185 
 Arnold, Matthew, 121 
 Art, 210 
 Assaults, evidence of children in 
 
 cases of indecent, 23 
 Atavism, 99 
 Athletics and morality, 122, vide 
 
 Physical Exercise 
 drovia, moral, 93 
 Attention, 165, 282 
 Authority, power of, explained, 16 
 Automatism, 283 e^ seq. 
 Auto-suggestions, vide Suggestion 
 
 Beaunis, 7 
 
 Belgium, conditional franchise in, 
 
 199 
 Bentham, 182 
 Bernheim, 55 
 Bersot, 124, 141, 247 
 Binet, 20 
 Bluntschli, 198 
 Boarding-schools, 113 
 
 morality in, 115 
 
 scholarships, 125 
 Boarding-out system, 125 
 Brahminism, 31 
 Braine, 3 
 
 Breal, 122, 126, 254 
 Buddhism, 60 
 
 Caravaftes scolaireSj 153 
 Ceremony, origin and value of, 52 
 Chad wick, Sir Edwin, 134 
 Children, bad-tempered, 41 
 
 corporal punishment, 35 
 
 evidence in courts of law, 23 
 
 fiction natural to, 203 
 
 generalisations of, 203 
 
 assume their good qualities, 26 
 
 hypnotisable, 23 
 
 auto-suggestion in, 23, 26 
 
 imagination of, 201, 213 
 
 impositions and tasks, 29, 139 
 
 lying of, 205 
 
 love for parents, 87 
 
 punishments, 29, 37, 38, 139 
 
 remorse in, 41, 76, 91 
 
 will to be trained, not broken, 34 
 Chinese, wisdom of, 31, 33, 183 
 Choice, liberty of, 61 
 Civic instruction, 197 et seq. 
 Classics, the, 235 
 Collins, Wilkie, 120 
 Commission on Hygiene, Report of, 
 
 139, 141 
 
 Competition, 249, 271, 281, vide 
 Hygiene 
 
 Confucius, morality of, 31 
 
 Consciousness, 284, 287-296 
 and pain, 50 
 power of, 60 
 of impulsive force, co 
 the result of a struggle, 70 
 of solidarity, 33, 40, 82, 83 
 
 Corporal punishment, 35 
 
 Cottinet, 153 
 
304 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Coubertin, 149 
 Coulanges, Fustel de, 241 
 Cramming, 218, 258 
 Cramp, writer's, 138 
 Crime, 100 
 
 effect of education on, 179 
 
 second offences, 27 
 Criminals, characteristics of, 13 
 Crops, rotation of, 277 et seq. 
 Culture, 74 
 Cuvier, 6 
 
 D'Alembert, 104 
 
 Darwin, 80, 82, 98 
 
 Day Schools, Hygienic blunders in, 
 
 139 
 
 Delboeuf, 6, 18 
 Depravity, moral, 95 
 Descartes, 176 
 Desires, 68 
 Development, of idea, 7 
 
 physical, 160 
 
 moral, 161 
 
 intellectual, 161 
 
 necessary to life, 73 
 Deville, 114 
 Discipline, 126, 188 
 Dostoieffsky, 13 
 Drawing, 215 
 
 Dubois-Reymond, 143, 146 
 Dupanloup, 149 
 Duties, defined, 72 ; creation of, 68 
 
 Education, inconsistency in, 38, 39 
 
 influence of, 105 
 
 object of, 112, 159 
 
 continuation in alter life, 174 
 
 the best, 176 
 
 inadequacy of purely intellectual, 
 178 
 
 duty of State in, 186 
 
 secondary, 234 
 
 classical, 234 
 
 higher, 251 
 
 of girls, 260 
 
 and rotation of crops, 277 
 
 and evolution, 106, 283-296 
 
 and morality, 106 
 England, manual training in, 151 
 
 gymnastics in, 144 
 Environment, adaptation to, 49 
 Epicurus, 182 
 
 Erudition, 175, 218 
 
 Espinas, 287 
 
 Ethics, in schools, 181 
 
 Eton, 117 
 
 Evidence, of children, 23 
 
 difficulty in estimating, 243 
 Evolution, moral, 96 
 
 and education, 106, 283-296 
 Examinations, 258, 274 
 
 their effect on memory, 172 
 
 competition and, 249, 271 
 Exercise, physical, 128, vide 
 Physical Training 
 
 of memory, 172 
 
 " Faculties," French and German, 
 
 253 ^/ seq. 
 Fatality, 63 
 Forces, idea, 64, 74, 89, 295, and 
 
 Preface, ix. 
 Frederick III., 180 
 Free will, 63, 84 
 French gymnastics, 148 
 
 Gall, 103 
 
 Gallon, 26 
 
 Games involve work, 164, vide 
 
 Physical Training 
 Garofalo, 95 
 Genius, 104, 296 
 Geography, 228 
 German, Universities, 252 
 
 gymnastics, 142 
 Girls, education of, 260 et seq, 
 Greek, 235 
 Gymnastics, vide Physical Training 
 
 Habits, 46-60 
 
 " Half-timers," 134 
 
 Harrow, 117, 150 
 
 Health and sins, 32 
 
 Herbart, 109, 163, 187 
 
 Heredity, 32, 44, ch. ii. passim, 97, 
 
 100- 1 10, ch. ix. passim 
 Hertel, 262 
 Higher Education, 251 
 Hindoos, their mysticism, 30 
 History, 219, 223, 241 
 Hoenig, 228 
 Holiday tours, 153 
 Hygienic conditions, 113, 139, 
 
 141, 150, 280 
 
INDEX. 
 
 30s 
 
 Hypnotism, vide Suggestion 
 
 Ideas, fixed, 44, 58 
 
 not sole motive in action, 84 
 
 of love, 85 
 
 as forces, 89, 64, 74, 295, and 
 Preface, ix. 
 
 development of, suggested, 7 
 Imitation, 14, 16 
 Impositions, 139 
 Infecundity, 158, 261 
 Inhibition, 55 
 Instincts, resistance of, 9 
 
 formula of, 28 
 
 moral stages of, 89 
 
 force of moral and social, 54 
 
 of rescue, 55 
 
 of a pointer, 55 
 
 warlike, 99 
 Instruction, 115 
 
 civil and moral, 188, 197 
 
 technical, 247 
 
 aesthetic, 200 
 
 [oubert, 43 
 
 Kant, 91, 109, 183 
 Knowledge, useful and ornamental, 
 173 
 
 Lagneau, 140 
 Laprade, 148 
 Lateau, Louise, 3 
 Latin, 235 
 Lavisse, 225, 255 
 Learning, love of, 175 
 Leibnitz, 169 
 Liebault, il 
 Locke, 169 
 Love, idea of, 85 
 of learning, 175 
 Lying, 205 
 Lyttleton, 121 
 
 Man, a social being, 32 
 
 the best, 33 
 Maneuvrier, 240 
 Manual training, 150 et seq. 
 
 hygienic effect of, 150 
 
 at Ithaca, 151 
 
 in England, 151 
 Maternal religion, 265 
 
 Mathematics, 245 
 Maximation, 109 
 Memory, loss of, 9 
 
 exhaustion of, 136 
 
 exercise of, 172 
 Methods, 162 
 Michelet, 169, 186 
 Monoideism, 14, 23 
 Montaigne, iii, 129 
 Montesquieu, 178 
 Moral, madness and idiocy, 94 
 
 good, 69 
 
 obligation, 79, 82, 88, 95 
 
 fecundity, 81 
 
 instincts, stages of, 89 
 
 instincts, origin, 96 
 
 wounds, 92 
 
 drovla, 93 
 
 depravity, 95 
 
 discipline, 188 e^ seq. 
 Morality, 69, 75 
 
 genesis of, 71 
 
 is the unity of the being, 79 
 
 and the social instinct, 81 
 
 negative, 92 
 
 dissolution of, 92 
 
 and education, 106 
 
 in boarding-schools, 114 
 
 of Confucius, 31 
 Morphinomania, 7 
 Movements, muscular, 14 
 Myers, 156 
 Mysticism, Hindoo, 30 
 
 Natural reactions, 188 
 Normal types, 75 
 Normality, 75, 78 
 
 Obligation, sense of, 88 
 
 formula of, 59 
 
 solidarity of moral, 82 
 
 moral, 95 
 Objectivation of types, 39 
 Obsession, defined, 57 
 Order, a habit, 51 
 Overpressure, intellectual, iii 
 
 physical, 120 
 
 general, 130 
 
 in lyceums, 134 
 
 in primary schools, 139 
 
 in great French schools, 256 
 
 sterility from, 261 
 
3o6 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Pain, 68 
 
 Pascal, 237 
 
 Patriotism, 224 
 
 Peter, 138 
 
 Pessimism, 156 
 
 Physical training, 160 
 
 Gymnastics, Swedish, 143 ; Ger- 
 man, 142 ; English, 144 ; 
 French, 148 
 inferiority to games, 147 
 compared with games, 120, 
 IJ59, 140 
 Games involve work, 164 
 
 Physical overpressure, 120 
 
 Plato, 209 
 
 Pleasure, 68 
 
 Population, growth of, 155 
 
 Power begetting duty, 72 
 
 Precocity, danger of, 80 
 
 Psittacism, 169 
 
 Punishment, 35, 37, 139 
 
 Ravaisson, 213 
 Reactions, natural, 188 
 Religion, maternal, 265 
 
 of the school, 185 
 Remorse, 76, 91 
 
 in children, 41 
 Renan, 115, 123 
 Representation of Acts, 64 
 Reversion, 99 
 Ribot, 99, 286 
 Richet, 9, 39, Appendices 
 Rochard, 270 
 Rochefoucauld, La, 84 
 Rousseau, 142, 151, 169, 188 
 Royer, Madame, 100 
 Rugby, 117 
 Russia, **real schools" in, 180 
 
 Salpetriere, il 
 Salvation, 31 
 Science, 245 
 
 Scholarships, boarding, 125 
 Schools and religion, 185 
 
 Russian, **real," 180 
 
 Anarchic, 1^0 eiseq. 
 Selection.. 80 
 Sentiments, suggestion of, 4 
 
 complexity ol, 28 
 Simon, 127, 128, 257 
 Singing, 215 
 
 Socrates, 86, 176 
 Somnambulism, vide Suggestion 
 Solidarity, consciousness of, 33, 40, 
 82,83 
 
 of responsibility, 90 
 
 of moral obligation, 82 
 Solitude, 76 
 Spencer, 80, 97, 112, 130, 152, 
 
 163, 188, 198, 247, 261, 283 
 Sterility, 158, 261 
 Stigmatics, 3 
 Suggestion, nervous, 2-12 
 
 psychological, moral, and social, 
 12 23 
 
 a means of moral education, 
 and an ' influence modifying 
 heredity, 23-46 
 
 a nascent instinct, 5 
 
 in therapeutics, 9-1 1 
 
 when irresistible, 14, 25 
 
 psycho- motor, 14 
 
 muscular, 21 
 
 auto-, 23, 24 
 
 effect upon the intellect, 29 
 Sully, 296 
 Swedish gymnastics, 143 
 
 Tasks, children's, 29, 139 
 Technical instruction, 247 
 Temper in children, 41 
 Tobacco, abuse of, cured, 7 
 Tolstoi, 188, 219, 229 
 Tuke, Dr. Hack, 2 
 Tyndall, 152, 168 
 Types, objectivation of, 39 
 normal, 75 
 
 Universities, German, 252 
 French, 253 
 
 Vice, 32 
 Voisin, 10 
 
 Volition, defined, 61 
 Voltaire, 166 
 
 Walks, 128 
 
 Will, to be trained, not broken, 34 
 
 creation of, 17 
 Words, power of, 17 
 
 are inceptive actions, 19 
 Writer's cramp, 138 
 Wundt, 97 
 
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