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each individual a resistance which varies with that individual's nature. Not only are there differences between Lian and man, but in the same individual there are the most astonishing inequalities of development between the diverse faculties. A man may reach a high degree of intellectual culture whose feelings and sentiments are still in an embryonic state of development. An artist of genius may be a child in character; a mathematician may be destitute of æsthetic taste; a man capable of heroic self-sacrificing actions may yet be unable to restrain his temper. One man requires strong effort to resist a temptation which would not disturb the equanimity of another. It has been said that there are among our contemporaries people who are still in the thirteenth century, and there are waste places in the depths of the most cultivated minds which form a singular anachronism with the rest. The much spoken of harmonious development of the faculties is only a pious wish, and this is perhaps one of the principal reasons why we should be tolerant, never despair of a person utterly, and never despise or hate. To an eye which could penetrate everything there would be few souls so saintly as not to have some sinful stains, and none so defiled as not to have preserved some spots of divine purity intact. If we can not expect grown men to remember the things they have had no time to hear, let us remember this fact always in our dealings with children, and instead of being vexed at the sudden lapses, want of equilibrium, shocking absence of harmony in the little ones, let us rather study how far each has progressed in the different parts of his development and rely upon the more advanced faculties to stimulate the others.

(4.) Psychology does not stop at demonstrating to us the general fact of a transition from instinct to effort and from effort to habit. It points out the consequences of this transition and shows how this rhythm is the condition of progress. When we have reached the state of habit or training in any of the mental faculties, this higher state becomes the point of departure for a new series. This is because habit has made us masters of one part of the domain to be conquered, which we can make our base for a further effort. If habit had not, as it were, transformed the moving sands of individual efforts into solid ground we could never advance. We can say of these fixations and acquisitions due to exercise what economists say of capital, that it is accumulated labor and is for that reason the means of producing new work. Capital is not created simply for idle enjoyment, but becomes an implement and works in its turn. In the same way the moral or physical qualities which we have acquired are not mere ornaments or a source of satisfaction to us, but they are means for our doing more and better. We understand easily to-day what was unintelligible yesterday and can consequently apply our thoughts to new objects, which, in their turn, seem as difficult now as the others did formerly. Reason triumphs over passion, and conscience, having become more delicate, no longer hesitates at junctures in which it would have been in great straits some time ago. But will there ever be an end to the struggle? No; the strife is only carried a little farther on. Conscience demands more of us because it now sees more clearly and can no longer content itself so easily. When we climb the long sloping terraces of a high mountain we find ourselves higher at every stop, but we also find that we must start again and climb still higher and more vigorously.

If this is the way of life, so ought it to be of education. We must habituate the child to the real view of progress, the real measure of duty; duty increases as we mount upward in life. Progress is not a movement up to a certain point, but is movement itself. When movement ceases, progress ceases. Let the school, then, from its first beginnings, initiate the child to the evolutive and progressive conception of moral life, and not imprison him within a narrow horizon nor atrophy in him the sense of progress which is like that of infinity. Undoubtedly an immeED 1902-17

diate object, a clear and near limit which he can attain, must be pointed out to the short sight of the child. But it is not necessary to make him believe that after attaining this first plane all his work will be done. We must not kill in him the instinct for something better, but, on the contrary, we should habituate him to look far ahead, to put his object always higher, and never let him believe that he will ever be able to close his account with his conscience. And in connection with this point of view, let us take care that certain school methods, which are excusable, useful, and even necessary, perhaps, for a time, do not become dangerous from being continued beyond the period of infancy. We must, perhaps, provoke and stimulate effort in very young children by indirect means, by the inducement of a reward or the fear of the punishment conventionally attached to such or such an act. All that should disappear with the toys of infancy. If the pupil should leave the school or lycée with a puerile notion of a very correct set of moral account books, keeping a debit and credit account of so many good marks, so many prizes and occasions of honorable mention, he would have a most wretchedly mean idea of his duty and his destiny. The more good one has done the more remains to do. In this domain there is no end of learning.

And he alone is a man who, not making life a mere close calculation of interests of longer or shorter range, allows himself to be carried away toward an ideal by some inspiration of generosity, without being able to say exactly what he gains by it. who loves the good because it is good, the beautiful because it is beautiful, the true because it is true, without first reckoning what he will make by it. To live as a man ought, his heart should beat with all noble emotions, his thoughts turn to all truths; he should devote his will to all noble causes. As to the rest he should confide in and refer all final results to One who is mightier than we, who has placed all these instincts in our hearts and who beyond doubt knows whither they will tend. And this is the spirit which the liberal education should resolutely oppose to the other.

(5) As to springs of action and rewards and penalties, psychology has some light which pedagogics can profit by. To attempt to direct the will through a single one of its powers, to exclude all incentives and promptings from consideration except rational motives alone, is to take a part for the whole, or, in other words, it is to forget that there are several ages in the will, several degrees of volition, that even the highest degree of the will is not free from all desire, all instinctive impulse, interest, or feeling, or, in a word, from all bond between it and the individual, and that in consequence any one of our determinations, which is in appearance the simplest, is never sufficiently so to exclude an admixture in different proportions of many affective, cognitive, and active elements. To separate these may be an exercise to be recommended to lovers of psychical analysis, but it is the act of the teacher to associate them and make them concur in an intimate and almost indivisible manner in the work of education. We can never tell how many rivulets contribute to make the great river of the moral life.

(6) Finally-and this last remark is of importance, for we must not think that we have nothing to do but to follow the natural inclinations-what is the essential and characteristic fact in the will according to psychology? The answer is quite simple-self-control. It consists in what M. Ribot very happily termed a power of coordination with subordination. Coordination is not possible unless there is a supreme and single principle of action to which all others are subordinate; each domain of activity supposes a central point to which everything is referred, a view of the whole which dominates all details, one end to which everything tends. Now we can not disengage this end, this law, this unity, and isolate it from the chaos of our sensitive life without great difficulty. It requires a strong effort to accomplish this. And herein the Christian doctrine of sin is nearer the truth than all the superficial and indulgent forms of optimism which, by declar

ing that man is good, would save the trouble, it would seem, of trying to make him good. He is not born good. Yet he can become so, but only by continuous effort, which is almost a miracle itself. The mass of our instinctive and animal inclinations is by far the largest and heaviest and the most invasive of all. In order that reason should shed light in this darkness, overcome the beast in human nature, and make mind prevail over matter, man's will must consent to choose, contrary to the natural course of things, what savants call the line of greatest resistance, and choose once, a hundred times, and always, the most difficult course of action. It has been said that the simplest criterion of morality is this: When hesitating between two courses, choose that which costs you the most sacrifice. This is the rôle of the will acting under the reason, that is to say, the action of the will at its highest power. Thus acting, the will converts a mere individual into a real person. Someone has said that only one man in a thousand is a person. And it is the peculiar province of the will to establish this self-mastery, both of mind and body, and in the mind itself the relative mastery of emotion by thought and of thought by action. Relative mastery, we say, and progressive, too, for our entire life is passed in winning from passion, foot by foot, a little ground for reason, little triumphs of duty over interest, and of free will over blind appetite.

This psychological definition inspires, it will be seen, an entirely new pedagogy. Of course the idea of obedience, the pivot of the old education, is not abolished, but except in infancy, when ideas can not be seized unless visibly presented by living beings, what should be taught is the obedience of the will to its own lawmoral autonomy. But we ought to have the courage to tell even children themselves the truth while teaching them self-control, which at first is manifested by obedience. Then they will come to obey, little by little, in the same way and for the same reasons that we do. They will learn to obey not force or custom, or the uncomprehended and inexplicable order of external authority, but will bend their will, as we do ours, before the universal will, which announces itself, under various names of nearly the same meaning, as reason, duty, truth, or justice.

XII.

In finishing this summary-I must beg your pardon, ladies and gentlemen, for having made it so long and yet so incomplete-I wish to ask you one question: Do you think that the doctrines we have been studying together contain the elements of an education of the will suited to our time and country? For my own part I thoroughly believe so, and I believe further that this pedagogy, adhering to those doctrines in broad lines, lies at the foundation of French State education from the primary school to the lycées and the university faculties. Others have extolled methods of education which are evidently imposed by distrust of human nature; they have required that the child, the woman, and even the man should be intrusted to them as needing tutelage. They have promised to exercise this tutelage for the good of humanity, and they think they are rendering a service to human nature by protecting itself against itself, by constituting themselves, especially through education, the intermediaries between God and man from the cradle to the grave. We do not accept this part of perpetual minor for mankind. We wish to place man as soon as possible in possession of his own will, his own reason, and his own conscience. We do not ignore the difficulties or dangers of the task. But no danger is so great as to surrender one's own self, and to think and will by proxy.

In accepting the mighty burden of liberty for ourselves and our pupils, we believe that we are performing not only a moral and philosophical work, but one profoundly religious as well. As the thinker whom we have so often met in this

course, M. Payot, used to say: "To have respect for human nature in ourselves and others is to realize in ourselves and others the Kingdom of God." We pity those who, being able to see God only through denominational forms and traditional ceremonies, do not see Him in our doctrines, and do not perceive that He is nowhere more present and more profoundly active than in that humble sanctuary of education which they call the school without God. We commiserate them for not perceiving that to bring up children in the constant, careful respect for their own nature, and a constant effort to rise toward the good, is to bring them up in the very atmosphere of the Divine, to make them breathe the gospel air and penetrate them with God. Not, indeed, with the God of images and formulas, but God in spirit and in truth. We have, at any rate, the advantage over our opponents that we take from their creed whatever of the Divine it contains and respect it in the highest degree, while they refuse to do the same with ours.

In all times the reigning religions have spoken of atheism as the religion of the future. Socrates and Jesus Christ were charged with no other crime than atheism. Let us allow ourselves to be called atheists, then, provided that our education, while awakening the sacred spark in the souls of our children, continues to make them adore the things of God instead of the word alone, and to put each one of them all the days of his life, face to face, in the secret places of his heart and conscience, in living contact with the Divine.

CHAPTER XVII.

EDUCATION IN ITALY."

I. Progress of public education in Italy. By Dr. Tullio de Suzzara-Verdi.

II. The Baccelli bill for the reform of higher education in Italy. By Prof. Alexander Oldrini.

1.-PROGRESS OF PUBLIC EDUCATION IN ITALY.

By TULLIO DE SUZZARA-VERDI, M. D., K. C. I.

CONTENTS.-Introduction-Organization-Functions of the ministry of education-Officers acting under the minister of education-Hygienic condition of the school buildings-Infant schools, infant asylums, and kindergartens-Elementary instruction-Effect of compulsory education on illiteracy-Complementary schools for girls-Normal schools-Cost of primary and normal schools-The teachers' pension fund-Physical education; gymnastics-Manual training-Agricultural schools-"Professional" schools-Technical schools-Secondary classical schools (ginnasii and licci)-Universities-Superior institutes-Convitti (boarding schools)-Colonial schools-Diplomatic colonial school-Other special educational agencies— Public libraries-Philological clubs-The Dante Allighieri Association-Special schools for adults in the agricultural districts-University extension.

In estimating the progress of a nation in education, the true test of intellectual improvement, one should take into consideration its history, political, religious, and economic, especially when that country is Italy, with its history of wars and revolutions, of invasions of barbarous foes, of religious fervor and repression, with its growth and decline of enlightenment; a country scarcely ever united, free, and independent, until King Victor Emmanuel entered Rome and from the terrace of the ancient capitol in 1870 sent forth his stirring message, "Ci siamo, e ci resteremo."

Yet how difficult to eradicate habits and customs which have taken root amid such eventful transitions and have crystallized by time into usages and practices that have almost acquired the attributes and observance of law. A young country like ours can hardly realize the difficulties in the way of the reformer in that old country, and judge of its progress, unless the comparison is made within the sphere of its own life, between periods of its own existence, instead of between it and other nations more or less fortunate. Moreover, progress in education is never by fitful changes, under the impulse of this or that legislator, philosopher, or political economist, but by a gradual and continuous process.

Italy, which in former times attained the highest pinnacle in the world of belleslettres, science, art, and philosophy, has sunk at other times to the depths of ignorance. Education became then the privilege of the few, an aristocracy of learning, as it were, from which the vulgar were excluded. These periods of obscurity have now passed away. Italy has entered into the ranks of competitors for more knowledge; the proof appears in the feverish desire for education and reform from the moment her unification and independence had been attained. Not one session of its Parliament has since taken place without some progressive

a For information relating to education in Italy in previous Reports of this Office, se. Report of 1890-91, vol. 1, pp. xviii-xxx and 319-339; 1893-94, vol. 1, pp. 325-383; 1894-95, vol. 1, pp. 543-552, and 1898-99, vol. 1, pp. 839-870.

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