"First Book" attempts to make a beginning only, yet it claims to begin right, and to teach botany as it should be taught, by making the mind thoroughly familiar with the actual characters of plants. Training in observation, for its mental advantages, was an accompanying purpose, because the conditions of the two perfectly coincide.
Again, in her question, "Why is it so necessary to become familiar with hundreds of specimens in a given time?" Mrs. Jacobi would commit me to the worst folly of current education—the time-limit in acquisition, or what may be called "fourteen-weeks" science. From the outset, and constantly, I have resisted this tendency, and have claimed that the fullest time should be taken as the first condition of real and permanent acquisition. As to the fourth proposition, I am quite content to leave it as it was presented in my article in the October Monthly.
Fifthly, and finally, Mrs. Jacobi ascribes to me as "an axiom that can not be disputed, that mental effort should advance from the simple subject to the more complex"; and she adds, that this proposition "is the one with which I most decidedly disagree." In arguing the point, Mrs. Jacobi maintains that the historic advance of knowledge has not always conformed to this principle. Very likely; but I have never said the law is everywhere observed. There are plenty of teachers who have not the slightest idea of it, and plenty of school-books which violate it, by putting the complex first, instead of leading up to it by simple steps. But where ideas are perfectly clear, as with the relations of number, experience enforces the principle; every arithmetic proceeds from the simple to the complex. All this, however, is aside from the question; my contention has been simply that the principle should not be violated in the mental cultivation of children. By the title of her first articles, "An Experiment in Primary Education," and the comments which followed, the difference between us related only to the mental conditions of childhood; but she here commits me to a statement concerning mental effort in general. Had she introduced the term juvenile to qualify "mental effort," she would have properly described the case, and made superfluous much that she says on the order of the evolution of knowledge. Assuming that there are stages in the progress of the individual mind, the question is as to the nature and educational significance of these successive stages, and what kind of study is appropriate at one stage and inappropriate at another. I see no way of getting light upon this matter and the practical points in issue, but by referring to the nature and constitution of the mind and the laws of mental growth. Mrs. Jacobi maintains that young children can profitably occupy their mind with things, facts, data, but are mentally unfit for the study of relations in which science consists; an examination of the part played by relations in mental structure and growth will therefore have an essential bearing upon this discussion.
