faculties together, what well-conducted object-lessons can and now do perform, mainly for the lower.  Of all school-method, this we conceive to be the true end and consummation.  This would be the ultimate fruitage of the Baconian philosophy, and of philosophy larger than the Baconian—­by as much as the whole is greater than any part—­in the school-life and work of every boy and girl admitted to the benefits of our courses of instruction.

Thus we have endeavored, with some particularity of examination and detail, to find and state not only what are, but what should be, the tendencies of educational thought and effort in our country and times.  And we seem to find that those tendencies are, in spite of a stand-still conservatism or perplexed doubt in some quarters, and of a conflict of views and practices in others, largely in the direction in which the ends to be sought show that they should be.  The Education to be, as far as the intellectual being is concerned, when time and study shall better have determined the conditions, and furnished the working instrumentalities, is to be, not in name merely, but in fact, an education by simply natural employment and development of all the perceiving, reasoning, originative, and productive faculties of the mind.  It is to be such, because it is to insist on proceeding, after proper age, and then upon every suitable topic, by observation and investigation, and so, by discovery of the principles and results the mind is desired to attain; because it will be an education by rigidly consecutive, comprehended and firm lines of advance, employing processes analytic and synthetic, inductive and deductive, each in its requisite place and in accordance with the nature and stage of the topics under investigation.  For the like reasons, it will have become, what we have long foreseen and desired that education should be, rightly progressive in form, and in character such as must develop, strengthen, and store the mind; such as must best fit, so far as the merely scholastic education can do this, for practical expression and use of what is learned, showing all our acquired knowledge in the light of its actual and various relationships, and conferring true serviceableness and the largest value, whether for enjoyment or execution.

Such an education would be real in its method as well as in its substance.  We have fairly entered upon the era in which education must be, and, spite of any temporary recoil of timorous despotisms, must continue to be, popular and universal.  But many are too apt to forget that, upon our planet, this thing of popular and universal education is comparatively a new and untried experience; that, so far as its mode and substance are concerned, it is, in truth, still in course of experiment.  There is at present a very general and but too just complaint of the popular education, as tending to inflate rather than to inform; as prompting large numbers of young men especially