CHAPTER XIV.

THE great aim of education is clearly to make each pupil contribute as much as possible to the happiness, future and present, of himself and his fellow-creatures. Rightly understood, therefore, the science of education embraces all the mental philosophy of every age, and, if it were possible, all truth; and not until the human mind shall have attained its culminating point, will the worldly acme of education have been reached.

This is an assertion which may fairly be made without any ascription of perfectibility to the human race, and it is without any such homage that I now make it. Dividing education into four main branches, we find that physical, moral, (including religion as the highest of all moral obligations.) social and political, are the terms which most readily express the bounds of educational prospects. From the physical I shall pass on to the moral, and this may be divided into religious, domestic, and scientific or technical, which last division must be considered as including all matters of inquiry into the processes of nature and the means by which man has endeavored to familiarize himself with them.

Now, in Moral Education, whatever the human mind appropriates amongst the received truths of the world, or from amongst its prevalent errors, is gained by experiment or doctrine, or by the hazard of a guess.

What experience proves to be true is knowledge, and the properties of the object correspond with our ideas.

What we assume by guess, is entirely suppositious, and the properties of the object may or may not correspond with our ideas-very often they do not; and every instance of disappointment in the world is an evidence of this truth. The fact that men are often wedded to false notions in which they implicitly place confidence, and which they conscientiously believe, ought to make us careful to trace the modes by which the introduction of error (whether in the lonely hovel, or the troubled street,) may be as much as possible avoided.

What then, to use the words of Mr. Mill, is that which we experience with regard to the human mind, and what is that which we guess? We have experience of ourselves when we see, when we hear, taste, imagine, fear, love, desire, and so on, and we give names accordingly, to distinguish what we experience of ourselves on one of those occasions, from what we experience on another. Other men exhibit signs of similar experience. When we see, hear, &c., certain actions of ours commonly follow; we know that if any one observing those actions were to infer that we had seen or heard, the inference would be just. As often as we observe similar actions in other men, we infer that they too have seen and heard, and thus we come to regard the action as the sign.

Having got names to distinguish the state or experience of ourselves when we say I see, I hear, &c., we find occasion for a name which will distinguish the having of any (be it what it may) of those experiences, from the being altogether without them; and for this purpose we say I feel, which will apply generally to any of the cases in which we say, I see, I hear, &c., and comprehends the meaning of them all. The term I think, is commonly used for a purpose nearly the same, but is not so comprehensive. There are several things

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which we should include under the term our experience of our mind, to which we should not extend the term I think, but there is nothing included under it to which we should not apply the term I feel; this is truly, therefore, a generic term.* All our experience being thus limited to the term I feel, what does it amount to? What knowledge does it afford? First, it is a knowledge of the feelings themselves; we can remember what they were, one by one. Next, it is a knowledge of the order in which the feelings follow one another; and this is the sum of our experience.†

But this description is too general to afford much instruction; language is ill-adapted to describe feelings correctly, and we must advert to a knowledge of the feelings themselves. This, in simple cases, is easy; the feeling is distinct at the moment of experience, and is afterwards distinctly remembered; but the difficulty lies in the complex cases. It is found that a great number of simple feelings are apt to become so closely united as often to assume the appearance of only one feeling, and to render it difficult to distinguish the component simple feelings; and the distinction between the complex and simpl feeelings or sensations of the mind has given rise to much controversy. All philosophers, however regard the feelings which we are conscious of when we say, I hear, see, feel, taste, smell, as simple; and their results as comprehended or retained by the mind fall within the same category. The impression made is simple; the consequent idea in the mind is also simple; the idea not being the same as the original impression, but bearing a certain resemblance to it. Thus when we look at the light of the moon, the feeling we have is an impression, of light; if we close our eyes, we still have a feeling, which is the type of the impres

* The use of the term "feeling" as denoting the process of abstraction or reflection, has been often objected to, but no more concise mode of expression seems to have been authorized by custom. Brown uses it as well as Mill.

+ In preference to the use of the term association of ideas, Brown, the latest of our metaphysical writers, prefers to follow another though not a newer classification, under the term contiguity. Either arrangement will suit the purposes of the text.

sion; we do not see the light, nor have we a present impression of it; but we conceive, or have an idea, or reflect upon it.

Impressions then, and correspondent ideas, are simple feelings; and their being so, is not a subject of controversy; but there have been, and are, numerous writers who will not allow that all our feelings are derived from the above simple elements; they assert that there are original feelings besides impressions and ideas, and they allege by way of proof those sensations which we ascribe to the words remember, believe, judge, space, time, &c. It is useless here to occupy time in a discussion of the point thus mooted: whether we could remember without a receipt of impressions during time past, whether we could believe or judge without having had any impression of facts, whether we could entertain notions of space if we had never been placed in it, or of time without having had any opportunity of observing or hearing of its effects, or whether space and time exist, as Kant believed, only in our own minds, I shall leave the learned pens of Hume, Kant, Reid, Hobbes, Descartes, Brown, Condillac, Hartley, Locke, Whewell, and John Stuart Mill, to explain; and shall confine myself to embodying here the ingenious and subtle mode by which Mr. James Mill shows the theory of the order of succession of ideas, and the results which may be apprehended in society, if care be not taken to prevent the predominance of error in the nature of the impressions in which those ideas have their origin. At the same time I must guard against being considered an advocate of his general mode of thinking, on which I do not here touch. Firstly, we have a knowledge of events; secondly, of the order of their succession.

The expression in words, of the first, is history; of the second, philosophy; and to render that expression short and clear is the ultimate aim of philosophy.

The first steps, in ascertaining succession of events, are familiar and easy. One occurs, then another, then a third, &c.; but it is at first uncertain whether this order is not accidental, and such as may never recur. After a time it is observed that similar events occur again and again. It is next observed, that these events have each their regular consequents, similar time after time, and there is thus an endless round of the same sequences. If the order of events were always different (instead of similar in certain cases,) we could know events only one by one, and they would be too numerous to receive names. If events were in couples, or pairs, they would still be too numerous to be named. The history of the human mind informs us that the sequences which men first observe are but short; they are still, therefore, too numerous to receive names. But men compound the matter. They generalize. They give names to those sequences which they are most interested in observing, and they leave the rest unnamed. Then, when they have occasion to speak of the unnamed successions, they apply as well as circumstances permit, some of the names already in use; endeavouring to make a partial naming serve an universal purpose; and thus arises much of the confusion prevalent in language and thought.

The great object is, therefore, to ascertain sequences more or less extensive, till at last the succession of all events may be reduced to a number of sequences sufficiently small for each of them to receive a name; and then only will speech be wholly free from confusion.

Language itself affords an instructive example of this mode of ascertaining sequences; in language, words are the events. When an ignorant man first hears another speak a language unknown to the hearer, he distinguishes sounds one by one, but observes no sequence; at last he gathers a knowledge of the use of a few words, and then he has observed a