The Discipline of Consequences.

The idea of Rousseau that children, instead of being punished, should be left to the natural consequences of their disobedience, has much plausibility, and is taken up at the present day by educationists. Mr. Spencer has dwelt upon it with great emphasis.

One obvious limitation to the principle is, that the results may be too serious to be used for discipline: children have to be protected from the consequences of many of their acts.

What is intended is, to free parents and others from the odium of being the authors of pain, and to throw this upon impersonal agencies, towards which the child can entertain no resentment. But before counting on that result, two things are to be weighed. First, the child may soon be able to see through the device, and to be aware that after all the pain is brought about by virtue of a well-laid scheme for the purpose; as when the unpunctual child is left behind. Next, the personifying or anthropomorphic tendency being at its greatest in early years, every natural evil is laid at the door of a person-known or unknown. The habit of looking at the laws of nature in their crushing application, as cold, passionless, purposeless, is a very late and difficult acquirement, one of the triumphs of science or philosophy : we begin by resenting everything that does us harm, and are but too ready to look round for an actual person to bear the brunt of our wrath.

play or after hours, and of impositions in the way of drill tasks; while the language of censure may be so cutting as to be far worse than blows. What is maintained is, that these other punishments are not so liable to abuse, nor so brutalizing to all concerned as bodily inflictions.

NATURAL CONSEQUENCES.

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A further difficulty is the want of foresight and foreknowledge in children: they are unable to realize consequences when the evil impulse is upon them. This, of course, decreases by time; and according as the sense of consequences is strengthened, these become more. adequate as a check to misconduct. It is then indifferent whether they are natural or ordained.

Among the natural consequences that are relied on as correctives of misbehaviour in the family, are such as these going with shabby clothes, from having spoilt a new suit; getting no new toys to replace those that are destroyed. The case of one child having to make reparation to another for things destroyed, is more an example of Bentham's 'characteristical' punishment.

In school, the discipline of consequences comes in under the arrangements for assigning each one's merit on an impersonal plan; the temper or disposition of the master being nowhere apparent. The regulations being fixed and understood, non-compliance punishes itself.

CHAPTER IV.

TERMS EXPLAINED.

IN discussing Education-questions, there occur certain terms and phrases that suspend great issues, and yet are of ambiguous import. Some of these refer to faculties of the mind, as Memory, Judgment, and Imagination, whose scope needs to be clearly comprehended. Of equal importance is it to fix the meanings to be attached to the words-Training, Culture, Discipline-when opposed to what is expressed by Information.

MEMORY, AND ITS CULTIVATION.

Committing to Memory' is a phrase for learning or acquiring those parts of knowledge that are imbibed without apparently exercising the higher faculties called Reason and Judgment. Such are-names, word lists, in grammar, and in language generally. Likewise the events that we have witnessed impress themselves on our memory, by the mere fact of their having excited our attention. Again, a great part of the early education of children consists in acquiring the fixed arrangements of things that make up their habitual environment. Also, the simpler sequences of cause and effect are laid hold of at first by a mere act of memory.

MEMORY A LIMITED QUANTITY.

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In order that such acquisitions may proceed rapidly, certain conditions must be fulfilled, formerly described as the conditions of Retentiveness or Memory. The providing for these conditions is sometimes spoken of as exercising the Memory, or cultivating the Memory. Now the question is started-Can we by any artifices cultivate or strengthen the Memory, or the power of Retentiveness as a whole? We may acquire knowledge. Granted. Can we strengthen or increase the natural powers of acquisition? It is, no doubt, said with justice that every faculty can be strengthened by exercise; nevertheless, as regards mental power, the effect is by no means simple.

The absolute power of Retentiveness in any individual mind, is a limited quantity. There is no way of extending this limit except by encroaching on some of the other powers of the mind, or else by quickening the mental faculties altogether, at the expense of the bodily functions. An unnatural memory may be produced at the cost of reason, judgment, and imagination, or at the cost of the emotional aptitudes. This is not a desirable result.

The more common form of exalted memory is the memory for a special subject, which grows by devotion to that subject; being a result of the habits of attention that are engendered towards our leading studies. It is by this artificial strain, that an orator commits his speeches to memory with comparative ease. The memory for places is intensified by habitual attention, the consequence of our special avocations; an engineer or an artist remembers places, not by superior general memory, nor even by particular memory, but by

the strain and preference of attention, accompanied by neglect of other matters.

Instead, therefore, of speaking of the cultivation of the faculty of Memory, we should simply consider the means of fostering some definite class of acquisitions, according to the established laws of Retentiveness.

JUDGMENT, AND ITS CULTIVATION.

This is a word employed as a contrast to Memory, and as a synonym for Understanding and Reason. A teacher is expected to cultivate in pupils not only Memory, but also Judgment.

The simplest supposable act of Judging is the comparing of two things, as to their differences, or their agreements, or both. If they are objects of sense, as two shades of colour, it is mere sense discrimination, and depends upon the delicacy of the sense of sight, the amount of attention bestowed, and the close juxtaposition of the specimens. The very same conditions favour the discerning of agreements.

When the two things to be compared are complex objects of sense, as two machines, two houses, two trees, two animals, there are more points to be attended to, but the operation is otherwise the same. When the objects are given, partly by sense appearances, and partly by verbal description of experimental properties, as two minerals, the grasp required is still greater, and the precautions are more specific. It takes an effort to view the complex whole in the advantageous attitude for comparison; that is, by conceiving the properties of each in the same order. This kind of effort is the result