on it by this or that treatment.  What can be more inevitable than the disastrous results we see hourly arising?  Lacking knowledge of mental phenomena, with their cause and consequences, her interference is frequently more mischievous than absolute passivity would have been.  This and that kind of action, which are quite normal and beneficial, she perpetually thwarts; and so diminishes the child’s happiness and profit, injures its temper and her own, and produces estrangement.  Deeds which she thinks it desirable to encourage, she gets performed by threats and bribes, or by exciting a desire for applause:  considering little what the inward motive may be, so long as the outward conduct conforms; and thus cultivating hypocrisy, and fear, and selfishness, in place of good feeling.  While insisting on truthfulness, she constantly sets an example of untruth by threatening penalties which she does not inflict.  While inculcating self-control, she hourly visits on her little ones angry scoldings for acts undeserving of them.  She has not the remotest idea that in the nursery, as in the world, that alone is the truly salutary discipline which visits on all conduct, good and bad, the natural consequences—­the consequences, pleasurable or painful, which in the nature of things such conduct tends to bring.  Being thus without theoretic guidance, and quite incapable of guiding herself by tracing the mental processes going on in her children, her rule is impulsive, inconsistent, mischievous; and would indeed be generally ruinous were it not that the overwhelming tendency of the growing mind to assume the moral type of the race usually subordinates all minor influences.

And then the culture of the intellect—­is not this, too, mismanaged in a similar manner?  Grant that the phenomena of intelligence conform to laws; grant that the evolution of intelligence in a child also conforms to laws; and it follows inevitably that education cannot be rightly guided without a knowledge of these laws.  To suppose that you can properly regulate this process of forming and accumulating ideas, without understanding the nature of the process, is absurd.  How widely, then, must teaching as it is differ from teaching as it should be; when hardly any parents, and but few tutors, know anything about psychology.  As might be expected, the established system is grievously at fault, alike in matter and in manner.  While the right class of facts is withheld, the wrong class is forcibly administered in the wrong way and in the wrong order.  Under that common limited idea of education which confines it to knowledge gained from books, parents thrust primers into the hands of their little ones years too soon, to their great injury.  Not recognising the truth that the function of books is supplementary—­that they form an indirect means to knowledge when direct means fail—­a means of seeing through other men what you cannot see for yourself; teachers are eager to give second-hand facts in place of first-hand