a child also.  They have forgotten that a generalisation is simple only in comparison with the whole mass of particular truths it comprehends—­that it is more complex than any one of these truths taken singly—­that only after many of these single truths have been acquired does the generalisation ease the memory and help the reason—­and that to a mind not possessing these single truths it is necessarily a mystery.  Thus confounding two kinds of simplification, teachers have constantly erred by setting out with “first principles”:  a proceeding essentially, though not apparently, at variance with the primary rule; which implies that the mind should be introduced to principles through the medium of examples, and so should be led from the particular to the general—­from the concrete to the abstract.

4.  The education of the child must accord both in mode and arrangement with the education of mankind, considered historically.  In other words, the genesis of knowledge in the individual must follow the same course as the genesis of knowledge in the race.  In strictness, this principle may be considered as already expressed by implication; since both, being processes of evolution, must conform to those same general laws of evolution above insisted on, and must therefore agree with each other.  Nevertheless this particular parallelism is of value for the specific guidance it affords.  To M. Comte we believe society owes the enunciation of it; and we may accept this item of his philosophy without at all committing ourselves to the rest.  This doctrine may be upheld by two reasons, quite independent of any abstract theory; and either of them sufficient to establish it.  One is deducible from the law of hereditary transmission as considered in its wider consequences.  For if it be true that men exhibit likeness to ancestry, both in aspect and character—­if it be true that certain mental manifestations, as insanity, occur in successive members of the same family at the same age—­if, passing from individual cases in which the traits of many dead ancestors mixing with those of a few living ones greatly obscure the law, we turn to national types, and remark how the contrasts between them are persistent from age to age—­if we remember that these respective types came from a common stock, and that hence the present marked differences between them must have arisen from the action of modifying circumstances upon successive generations who severally transmitted the accumulated effects to their descendants—­if we find the differences to be now organic, so that a French child grows into a French man even when brought up among strangers—­and if the general fact thus illustrated is true of the whole nature, intellect inclusive; then it follows that if there be an order in which the human race has mastered its various kinds of knowledge, there will arise in every child an aptitude to acquire these kinds of knowledge in the same order.  So that even were the order intrinsically indifferent,