it would facilitate education to lead the individual mind through the steps traversed by the general mind.  But the order is not intrinsically indifferent; and hence the fundamental reason why education should be a repetition of civilisation in little.  It is provable both that the historical sequence was, in its main outlines, a necessary one; and that the causes which determined it apply to the child as to the race.  Not to specify these causes in detail, it will suffice here to point out that as the mind of humanity placed in the midst of phenomena and striving to comprehend them, has, after endless comparisons, speculations, experiments, and theories, reached its present knowledge of each subject by a specific route; it may rationally be inferred that the relationship between mind and phenomena is such as to prevent this knowledge from being reached by any other route; and that as each child’s mind stands in this same relationship to phenomena, they can be accessible to it only through the same route.  Hence in deciding upon the right method of education, an inquiry into the method of civilisation will help to guide us.

5.  One of the conclusions to which such an inquiry leads, is, that in each branch of instruction we should proceed from the empirical to the rational.  During human progress, every science is evolved out of its corresponding art.  It results from the necessity we are under, both individually and as a race, of reaching the abstract by way of the concrete, that there must be practice and an accruing experience with its empirical generalisation, before there can be science.  Science is organised knowledge; and before knowledge can be organised, some of it must be possessed.  Every study, therefore, should have a purely experimental introduction; and only after an ample fund of observations has been accumulated, should reasoning begin.  As illustrative applications of this rule, we may instance the modern course of placing grammar, not before language, but after it; or the ordinary custom of prefacing perspective by practical drawing.  By and by further applications of it will be indicated.

6.  A second corollary from the foregoing general principle, and one which cannot be too strenuously insisted on, is, that in education the process of self-development should be encouraged to the uttermost.  Children should be led to make their own investigations, and to draw their own inferences.  They should be told as little as possible, and induced to discover as much as possible.  Humanity has progressed solely by self-instruction; and that to achieve the best results, each mind must progress somewhat after the same fashion, is continually proved by the marked success of self-made men.  Those who have been brought up under the ordinary school-drill, and have carried away with them the idea that education is practicable only in that style, will think it hopeless to make children their own teachers.  If, however,