BUT this unfitness and unseasonable ness of studies are not our worst sins. Common as it is to overtax the mind by severity, it is, if possible, still more common to overwhelm it by multiplicity of studies. Great evil is undoubtedly resulting to education from the number and variety of subjects that solicit the student's attention. Since the beginning of the present intellectual era, sciences have multiplied so much, that we may now say of them what was once said of books. There have come to be so many things of which we think we must learn a little, that we can afford time to learn but a little of anything. Streams for us to fish in have got so abundant, that we go chasing from one to another, contenting ourselves with a few "glorious nibbles" in each, but catching nothing. We seem, often, to think it enough, to place ourselves where the words of knowledge may visit the ear, and form themselves in the memory, without the labor of thought. It is thus that we acquire a sort of tip-of-the-tongue knowledge, and the language of intelligence comes to drop from our mouths as fluently, and almost as thoughtlessly, as words drop from the mouth of a parrot. We do not so much learn to think, as to make others believe we have thought, by smattering and smuggling the thoughts of others. Among us practical men, a certain stump or drawingroom flippancy, or counting-house dexterity, is, for most part, the beau-ideal of intelligence. This may, indeed, be a good enough way to develope the tongue; and such knowledge may be justly called a cox et preterea nihil: but we should recollect, that if the tongue grow too large it will push out the brains. He who would stub and totter slowly along beneath a full head, can, of course, hop, and skip, and dance to admiration beneath an empty one. To say this is not education is not enough; it unfits us for education: for it takes away the shame of ignorance, without removing the ignorance itself, and

leaves us without either knowledge or docility.

It is curious to observe how much false philosophy, as well as practical error, there is on this subject. People not only act, but speak as if each study were exercise but for a single faculty of the mind; they therefore huddle together as many studies as they can reckon up different susceptibilities. It requires but a moment's reflection to see that the very reverse of this is the true course; for the business of educa tion is, to form the mind, not to fill it;

not to accumulate stores, but to build up a capacity. Its whole process, therefore, may be expressed in two words, development and discipline. To unfold, and deepen, and strengthen the faculties, is the first and last of its duty; and it is by concentration, not by dispersion of them, that this is to be done. Non multa, sed multum, is, undoubtedly, the best maxim that was ever given for a student; for it is not how many things we learn something about, but how much we learn about one thing, that determines our real progress. To exercise all the faculties on one subject is infinitely better than to exercise one of the faculties on all subjects, for the latter only tends to mar that harmony and integrity of mind from which true wisdom springs. Surely, too, everybody must know that when we attempt to look over many things, we cannot look into, or look through, any of them. In the words of Bishop Taylor, a mind entertained with seve ral objects is intent upon neither, and, therefore, profits not. One subject thoroughly understood-exhausted-is far better than fifty, or five hundred, subjects merely glanced at and guessed at; for the habit of glancing and guessing thus formed, casts a blight on whatever promise there may have been of something better. Neatness, precision and depth of thought, in a very limited sphere, involve such a development and discipline of mind as will best prepare us for a due understanding of what

ever subject may come before us. Moreover, there is no field so narrow but that it has an infinite extension upwards; and he who piles thought upon thought, within a very small circle, will of course build much higher and much firmer than he who scatters himself and his efforts over all creation.

To disperse the faculties, then, over a multitude of studies, is to dissipate, not discipline, the mind; a course that tends only to make scatter-brains and mountebanks and blue-stockings. The long pull, and strong pull, and pull altogether, of all the powers, is what brings success and triumph. It is at the focus and convergence of all the faculties that their power becomes effectual, so that the object kindles and blazes up into the light of true intelligence. Separate any one of the elementary rays from the solar combination, and there is no light about it, but only darkness and discoloration. Our first business, then, plainly is, to fix upon some subject that will give due exercise to all the faculties as soon and as fast as they may be developed, and then to bring them all to bear upon it, so as not merely to see it, but to see into it, and see through it-to separate it into its parts, and reproduce it as a whole. It would not be unsafe to assert, that generally, and within very moderate limits, the quality of an education will be in inverse proportion to the quantity of studies pursued. In the best European institutions, where education is now carried to greater perfection, perhaps, than at any other place or time whose voice has reached us, young men spend the best part of seven or eight years on three studies; while, among us democrats, lads and misses, too green to be trusted away from home, must despatch three times as many studies in about one-third of the time. Parents have boasted to us, that their sons, before the age of twelve, had read through more Latin books than we ever read in. Upon inquiry, however, we found they always studied with translations. What astonishing creatures mankind have become by crossing the Atlantic Ocean! If they go as much farther west, matters will doubtless be completely reversed, and men will be wisest at birth. Of the teachers who lack the power to detect, or the principle to forbid, such practices, of course nothing is to be said.

VOL. XVII.-NO. LXXXV.

Doubtless they labor for wages, and are too philanthropic to peril their own interest by holding back their pupils.

So great, indeed, and so general is this rage for quickness and universality of scholarship, that it has deeply vitiated our means of education. Almost all our popular text-books are purposely made superficial, to meet our unnatural and extravagant demands. The utmost efforts are constantly put forth to divest them of that wholesome severity which makes it impossible to proceed in them without insight and understanding. They are not so much aids and stimulants to thought as substitutes for it. It is doubtless grateful to our indolence, to think that knowledge is made easy; but we ought to reflect, that when made too easy, it ceases to be knowledge: and so much has been done of late to make knowledge easy, that it is truly high time something were done to make it hard; for nothing can be vainer than the notion that it may be had without work. As teachers we have, ourselves, been plagued with books so outrageously easy, that they could not possibly be understood. Do we not know how much easier it is to grasp a club, than a grain of silk ? and that if we attenuate things into spider's web, they become so very easy, as to be invisible? If we wish to feed the mind, we had best give it something big enough and hard enough to masticate. Nature, (and she is the best teacher and textbook we know of) nowhere attempts to instruct us with perfectly simple substances. All her works are highly complex; nay, they are instructive chiefly in virtue of their complexity: and a mind at all conversant with them, especially if it be in any degree genial in its structure and movements, is rather blown out than fed by perfect simplicity of object. Even the air we breathe is a compound substance; analyze it into its constituents, and it will kill us.

How many teachers have felt themselves encumbered with the help of our popular text-books, it is of course impossible to tell; that some have, there is no sort of doubt. For students will not, perhaps cannot, stop to understand a thing, when they can recite through the whole without understanding it. It is like attempting to chew water; we cannot choose but swallow it without grinding; and if we try to chew it, it runs either out of our mouth, or down 4

our throat. We speak with the more positiveness on this subject, because we speak from bitter experience. The truth is, we may as well despair at once of ever seeing a railroad to the land of knowledge; and while there are so many railroads which seem to lead there, students will hardly endure to trudge slowly and painfully thither on their own feet, as mankind always have done, and always must do. It is only of its own free, vital activity, that the mind can be either enriched or invigorated; and our case is nearly hopeless when the natural stimulants to effort are turned into narcotics. All true knowledge implies growth and development of mind; and that sort of knowledge, which can be taught by book or voice, and passively received into the memory, is as worthless as it is easy. Even the contents of memory must be taken up and reproduced by the free activity of higher powers, before they deserve the name of knowledge; for it is just as impossible that another should think for us, as that another should digest for us and if our food be digested before we eat it, it will not feed us at all, but only starve us to death. Of our so much puffed and boasted facilities of education, we may safely say, that instead of making knowledge easy, they are only making students indolent. Intellectually and morally we are all of us born into a wilderness, where each has to cut and pave his own road. To acquire strength, and skill, and courage for this task, is, indeed, our chief errand here. Of course others can lend en couragement and guidance to our efforts; but they can no more supersede them, than they can do our eating and sleeping for us. The only true course, therefore, for students, is, first, to do one thing; to do it. They will thereby gain strength and skill to do many things, so that they will really do more things, within a reasonable length of time, by first perfecting one, than by doing at a multitude at once and thus perfecting none. The purpose of education is, universality of mind, not universality of acquirement; the former is practicable, the latter is not even possible and universality of mind comes rather by singleness than by multiplicity of subject. A Burke puts his whole being into every paragraph he utters; a Parr puts but a fraction of his being into a cart-load of volumes; and a para

graph of the former is worth a volume of the latter.

If a waste of time and means were the worst result of this course, it would be comparatively harmless. But such is by no means the case. For, as we have already said, it takes away docility without giving knowledge, and drives out no-understanding to make room for mis-understanding. In other words, it leaves people in a sort of intellectual half-way house, without power either to finish their journey or to return home. Botching and blundering could be borne much better, if they did not tend to make confirmed botchers and blunderers. The marring of the work were a trifling matter, if it did not mar the workmen. Ignorance is at least silent, but misknowledge is always voluble, and very honestly thinks it is showing its wealth when only exposing its poverty; that is, it makes people conspicuous the wrong way. It hath been well said, that "a little learning is a dangerous thing;" for it takes men away from the light of nature without delivering them over to the light of reason, and leaves them in a state of spiritual betweenity, with too much pride to walk, and too little strength to fly. The darkness of mere instinct is obviously better than the twilight of half-knowledge; since the former, along with realities, hides the ghosts, and gob lins, and bug-bears, and humbugs, with which such twilight peoples them.There are, it is said, three classes of people in this country: a large class in total darkness; a still larger class in twilight; and a small class in daylight. Those in total darkness of course do not see the humbugs amongst us at all; those in daylight see through them, and therefore despise them; those in twilight see them, and are marvellously delighted with them.

But this is not all. In this age of Fastidious Feeble-wits, surely all must know what' Bellesletterism, or literary Brummelism, is. The process, however, by which it is generated, is not so well known, and we have been trying to explain it. Like its twin sister, Fashion, it is "gentility running away from vul garity, and afraid of being overtaken by it a sure sign that they are not far asunder." As fashion is the art of wearing clothes purely on their own account, so bellesletterism is the art of speaking merely for the sake of speaking. The dandiprat and the tickle

brain are the same soul, or rather want of soul, done up, now in cloth, now in words. Both imply a sort of inverted heroism; the heroism of vanity perfected into negation or oblivion of self. The lip-blossom and dress-wearing gentry are the two-fold efflorescence of van. ity, and agree in sacrificing truth to taste; excellence to elegance; whatever, in short, is to be looked into, for something to be looked at. Of course these bellesletterists are vastly given to flirtation with books; a pursuit which probably has fewer recommendations in proportion to its followers than any other now engaged in. Human life does not need the embellishment of literary coquetry. Flirts, as all must know, are those whose hearts are so full of self-love as to leave no room for the love of anybody or anything else; bookflirts differ from others only in the direction, not the nature, of the passion: and the surest way to make them is, to feed the vanity of people with the shows of knowledge, without jostling or disturbing it with the substance. True intelligence never feels itself above the proper tasks and services of human life; on the contrary, it always raises them up to itself. Those who are merely taught to flirt and coquet with knowledge, are of course always the last to get married to it. The best way, moreover, to keep people from babbling and blue-stockingism is, to give them something to say; for knowledge, like virtue, sufficeth unto itself, and rather shuns, than courts alliance with euphuism. He who has ideas will use language only as a vehicle of them; he who has not, will use it as a substitute for them; and it takes far fewer words to express ideas, than to hide the want of them.

Nor is this the worst. This frivolous bellesletterism, bad as it is, is far better than sneering sciolism. Now, he who is carefully taught to understand as fast and as far as he goes, will not readily forget to go no faster or farther than he understands. The very labor of penetrating through a subject makes him feel his ignorance of subjects over which he has not labored. Having found the heart of one object, he takes for granted that other objects are some thing more than skin. Knowing a few things, he therefore knows himself ignorant of many things. Having found a little light, he can of course distinguish light from darkness; and

On

therefore is in no danger of benighting others, when he means to enlighten them. Hence genuine knowledge always begets intellectual modesty; for such knowledge knows the depth of its objects, and therefore distrusts itself where it sees nothing but surface. the other hand, he who has never looked beneath the outside of a subject, of course, thinks he understands every subject whose outside he has seen. From studying nothing but the surface of things, he gets to presume that things themselves are nothing but surface. Equally ignorant of all, he therefore conceives himself equally master of all. A Newton, after "visiting the outskirts of creation, and carrying the torch of discovery round the universe," shall bear a heart as humble as the child that kneels beside its mother to repeat the infant's prayer. Though competent to originate what scarce any others are competent to understand, he shall yet bow with reverential awe before that book which an adroit and flippant Voltaire shall scoff at with shameless effrontery. But my Lord Surface must perforce wed my Lady Heartless; and Contempt, and Flippancy, and Presumption spring from the match at a birth. It is not strange, therefore, that a Voltaire, or a Paine, should boldly rush in, where a Milton or Newton would fear to tread. He, the man without eyes, is never dazzled by the sun, not he! Thus it is, that moral blindness and recklessness, and worthlessness, naturally spring from intellectual shallowness. Through the empty house the wind roars loudest." Fill up the drum, and it loses its great voice. Such, too, is the way that incipient mental instruction moulds and fashions the whole character. Surely, if it is not good for the soul to be without knowledge, it is far worse for it to have but the show and conceit of knowledge.

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It is not to be denied or concealed, however, that such is not always the result. There are minds of so much constitutional modesty, that pride and presumption find no place in their character. But in these cases the results, though less disgusting, are scarcely less unfortunate. Instead of conceit and inflation, there spring up a distrust of his powers, a vacillation of purpose, and a trembling apprehensiveness of mind, that forbid his attempting to walk.

without the aid of crutches and stays. Having no sufficient roots of his own, he becomes a mere parasite, and at taches himself to the nearest, perhaps the meanest thing he may find. Having experienced, perhaps, the instability of his foundations, he either builds not high enough to shelter himself, or lives in perpetual dread of dilapidation. What is really a defect of education, he attributes to a defect of nature; and ceases aspiring to be a man, because he has never been developed into the form of a man. Not having vigor and independence of mind enough to think for himself, he must of course have his thinking done up at his hands; and thus stands at the mercy of those who have the power or the presumption to manufacture opinions for such as are weak enough to patronise them. Irresolute, indecisive, impotent, having no centre of his own, and describing no orbit of his own, he stands ready to become the satellite of any one who has the ambition or arrogance to set himself for a primary. Equally capable, perhaps, of being made a tool for good or for evil ends, he is far more apt to be used for the latter; for those who have virtue enough to pursue good ends, have too much respect for human nature to use it as a tool for any end. In short, it is easy to see that self-dependence and self-reliance, kowever liable to abuse, are indispensable to excellence. Assuredly, there is no ignorance so mischievous or so deplorable, as that which springs from false or shallow instruction. With our load of responsibilities to carry, it is infinitely wiser and better to confine our movements to a rod of genuine known solidity, than attempt to walk over acres or miles of mere vapor

But let us not be understood to encourage the forming of low and limited hopes. It matters not how high and beautiful our hopes are, provided the ground we select for their basis be not so soft as to prove their grave. As suredly, it is not always the highest hopes that are the most delusive and extravagant. The lowest hopes are delusive and extravagant to him who builds on the sand. But we should remember, that if the world has many sand-banks, it has also many rocks; nay, that the sand-banks themselves rest upon rocks; which, if we but patiently and perseveringly dig, we shall be sure to find.

In instruction we say, therefore, be cautious, be thorough, be deep, be anything rather than hasty and shallow. Be wise, be judicious in selecting the means; be constant and faithful in employing them; and then wait, hopefully but patiently, for the result. Education, we repeat, is not a merc manufac ture, to be hastened and cheapened by labor-saving machinery; nor is it a mere superficial figure, to be fashioned and polished from without; but a development from within; a vital growth, an organic evolution of the germs which nature has wrapped up in the human constitution. Nor, yet, is it the quick product of any hot-house vegetation; but a verdant, blossoming growth in the open field of human life and action, where the suns, and rains, and tempests of human experience may all contribute their wholesome and invigorating influ ences.

In the art of education, our best guides are the manifold beautiful analogies which nature in her workings is ever affording us. Now, nothing but mushrooms and toadstools grow to perfection in a night; and the rest of their exist ence is spent in dying and rotting. The largest and beautifulest flowers are generally those whose riches and beauties have longest slumbered invisible in the bud: did they unfold themselves sooner, it were only because they had less to unfold. It must be a bloating, and no true growth, that immediately swells the infant up to the size and stature of a man; should we see it grow ing thus, we should take for granted that death was near. Fruit does not ripen till it has ceased to grow; ripening prematurely, it must prematurely fall and its precocity at once mars its quality, and hastens its decay. Seek not, then, to hasten the outward manifestations of mind; for you will thereby only stunt and impoverish the inward growth. Feed the mind as carefully as you feed the body, and even then you may count yourself fortunate if the former come to manhood as soon as the latter.

The business of education is, not to supplant or supersede nature, but simply to aid and encourage her growth and development. We may lend assistance and alleviation to her labors; we may furnish her with strength to endure and perform them; but we can provide no substitute for them. Even if we would