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Passing from generalities to special considerations, it is to be remarked that in practice the Pestalozzian system seems scarcely to have fulfilled the promise of its theory.  We hear of children not at all interested in its lessons,—­disgusted with them rather; and, so far as we can gather, the Pestalozzian school have not turned out any unusual proportion of distinguished men:  if even they have reached the average.  We are not surprised at this.  The success of every appliance depends mainly upon the intelligence with which it is used.  It is a trite remark that, having the choicest tools, an unskilful artisan will botch his work; and bad teachers will fail even with the best methods.  Indeed, the goodness of the method becomes in such case a cause of failure; as, to continue the simile, the perfection of the tool becomes in undisciplined hands a source of imperfection in results.  A simple, unchanging, almost mechanical routine of tuition, may be carried out by the commonest intellects, with such small beneficial effect as it is capable of producing; but a complete system—­a system as heterogeneous in its appliances as the mind in its faculties—­a system proposing a special means for each special end, demands for its right employment powers such as few teachers possess.  The mistress of a dame-school can hear spelling-lessons; and any hedge-schoolmaster can drill boys in the multiplication-table.  But to teach spelling rightly by using the powers of the letters instead of their names, or to instruct in numerical combinations by experimental synthesis, a modicum of understanding is needful; and to pursue a like rational course throughout the entire range of studies, asks an amount of judgment, of invention, of intellectual sympathy, of analytical faculty, which we shall never see applied to it while the tutorial official is held in such small esteem.  True education is practicable only by a true philosopher.  Judge, then, what prospect a philosophical method now has of being acted out!  Knowing so little as we yet do of psychology, and ignorant as our teachers are of that little, what chance has a system which requires psychology for its basis?

Further hindrance and discouragement has arisen from confounding the Pestalozzian principle with the forms in which it has been embodied.  Because particular plans have not answered expectation, discredit has been cast upon the doctrine associated with them:  no inquiry being made whether these plans truly conform to the doctrine.  Judging as usual by the concrete rather than the abstract, men have blamed the theory for the bunglings of the practice.  It is as though the first futile attempt to construct a steam-engine had been held to prove that steam could not be used as a motive power.  Let it be constantly borne in mind that while right in his fundamental ideas, Pestalozzi was not therefore right in all his applications of them.  As described even by his admirers, Pestalozzi