It is not, in any case, the roots, and trunk, and main branches of philosophy, that should be offered to children; but merely its green leaves and blossoms. Digests, and compendiums, we should come to in education, as we come to the bones in a process of anatomical dissection, last of all. To hang up a grim skeleton before a child, and tell him, This, my dear, is your new acquaintancePhilosophy,is no very auspicious mode of commencing the friendship which we wish to induce.
Most of the modern writers who have laboured (and very commendably,) in providing elementary books for children, appear to have adopted the principle which, at a first glance, offers itself as natural and reasonable, namely, That the axiomatic rudiments, or comprehensive aphorisms of a science (because it is from them that every thing else results) are the first things to be taught to children; or, in other words, that what is last attained by the cultivators of any branch of knowledge, is what we should first impart in teaching it. But this principle, as it stands in contra-riety to the process of discovery, for we first employ our-selves upon unconnected and incidental facts, and, last of all, digest what we have learned in a systematic form, so is it, in practice, opposed to the order of nature, in developing the human faculties.
Generalized abstracts, and synoptical analyses of sciences, highly useful as they are when the learner has al-ready become familiar with a multitude of facts, are not merely useless, but utterly unintelligible beforehand, and while he has few or no stores to be classified. There is nothing the human mind grasps with more delight than generalization, or classification, when it has already made an accumulation of particulars; but nothing from which it turns with more repugnance, in its previous state of inani-tion.
Children will eagerly snatch up the bits and crumbs that
