J. SULLY, THE TEACHER'S HANDBOOK OF PSYCHOLOGY. 579* educators !) ought to have some acquaintance with Psychology. However absurd this seems, I defend it on the ground that nothing else enables one to interpret the faint and fragmentary recollections of having been oneself a child : without which how can other children be known, and, if unknown, how trained? At school I often used to wonder whether the masters had ever been to school, they knew so little of what we boys were thinking, feeling and about to do. I have heard an educated woman say of her baby, squalling of course at six months old, " I believe he knows he's doing wrong". Heautornorphism, in default of science, is ever the first resource of explanation ; i.e., we judge of others by ourselves. Discipline without knowledge, and there- fore without sympathy, an outside wooden machinery, hampering and crushing, is the same in schools, in homes and in prisons. Science is certainly useful : yet it may be perverted by an ingenious mind. It has been urged that, according to the theory of evolution, education must with each generation become less, necessary : I suppose, because the amount of inherited faculty grows greater. But this inheritance is only potential : its realisation depends partly on education ; and the more of it there is, the more education is requisite. The truth which the above opinion has mistaken is, that the power of education is limited both for good and evil by the nature of a child. But this truth the world did not wait for the theory of evolution to reveal. The notion that character and understanding depend wholly on the experience and training of the individual was never adopted by common sense. It is everywhere recognised that no educa- tion, however good, can insure against taking one of the by- paths of the Pilgrim's Progress that man who has some deep ancestral taint " a bad avidge " one calls it in Cornwall (however that word should be spelt). On the other hand the first rule for a successful educator is to get a good pupil. But this does not conflict with the further truth that the greater natural potency of development which accompanies civilisation, makes the teacher's task not less necessary, but (as far as it goes) more exacting, requiring greater care and skill : since first the subject to be trained becomes more complex and delicate ; secondly, the time during which it requires supervision increases ; thirdly, the changes occurring in it during that time are more numerous and less predictable ; and lastly (not to seek further reasons), the world to which it is to be adapted grows far more complex and exigent. How rapidly the world has changed in the last 300 years, and how little scholastic education has tried to keep pace with it ! So much the more desirable is it that the changes now inevitable should be made in the light pf scientific criticism. To the scientific criticism of education Mr. Sully brings every requisite. A wide reputation as a psychologist guarantees the competence of his theoretical knowledge. A deep and varied culture in science, literature and art enables him to survey the
