The once universal practice of learning by rote, is daily falling more into discredit.  All modern authorities condemn the old mechanical way of teaching the alphabet.  The multiplication table is now frequently taught experimentally.  In the acquirement of languages, the grammar-school plan is being superseded by plans based on the spontaneous process followed by the child in gaining its mother tongue.  Describing the methods there used, the “Reports on the Training School at Battersea” say:—­“The instruction in the whole preparatory course is chiefly oral, and is illustrated as much as possible by appeals to nature.”  And so throughout.  The rote-system, like ether systems of its age, made more of the forms and symbols than of the things symbolised.  To repeat the words correctly was everything; to understand their meaning nothing; and thus the spirit was sacrificed to the letter.  It is at length perceived that, in this case as in others, such a result is not accidental but necessary—­that in proportion as there is attention to the signs, there must be inattention to the things signified; or that, as Montaigne long ago said—­Scavoir par coeur n’est pas scavoir.

Along with rote-teaching, is declining also the nearly-allied teaching by rules.  The particulars first, and then the generalisation, is the new method—­a method, as the Battersea School Reports remarks, which, though “the reverse of the method usually followed, which consists in giving the pupil the rule first,” is yet proved by experience to be the right one.  Rule-teaching is now condemned as imparting a merely empirical knowledge—­as producing an appearance of understanding without the reality.  To give the net product of inquiry, without the inquiry that leads to it, is found to be both enervating and inefficient.  General truths to be of due and permanent use, must be earned.  “Easy come easy go,” is a saying as applicable to knowledge as to wealth.  While rules, lying isolated in the mind—­not joined to its other contents as out-growths from them—­are continually forgotten; the principles which those rules express piecemeal, become, when once reached by the understanding, enduring possessions.  While the rule-taught youth is at sea when beyond his rules, the youth instructed in principles solves a new case as readily as an old one.  Between a mind of rules and a mind of principles, there exists a difference such as that between a confused heap of materials, and the same materials organised into a complete whole, with all its parts bound together.  Of which types this last has not only the advantage that its constituent parts are better retained, but the much greater advantage that it forms an efficient agent for inquiry, for independent thought, for discovery—­ends for which the first is useless.  Nor let it be supposed that this is a simile only:  it is the literal truth.  The union of facts into generalisations is the organisation of knowledge, whether considered as an objective phenomenon or a subjective one; and the mental grasp may be measured by the extent to which this organisation is carried.