INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.

EDUCATION, understood in its largest sense, comprehends all those influences by which the mind is enlightened, and the character formed. A larger proportion of these influences than is commonly supposed, are in their nature contingent or accidental; and are not, therefore, and cannot be included in any plan or system. For this reason I have thought it would be well, gentlemen, to introduce the present course of lectures on regular and systematic education by a few remarks on what may be denominated contingent or accidental education.

I am aware that of late years, a passion for system and artificial arrangements in education has been carried very far; the pupil being made not only to study, but to exercise and play, and eat and drink, and even to sleep by rule, and as much as possible under the eye of his instructers. Adopt any one of these plans, however, and refine upon it as much as you please, and make it extend as far as you can over the time, and motion, and even the thoughts of the child, and still the child will be constantly liable to impressions from accidental causes. Nay more; the impressions thus received from accidental causes, against which you did not, and could not guard, always may and sometimes will determine what is afterwards to distinguish his mind and fortunes. There is no calculating the effect of the slightest as well as most casual circumstances on the opening and susceptible mind, balancing, perhaps, at

that very moment, on some eventful question, and wanting but the weight of a single feather to incline it one way or the other. A word overheard by accident in the streets, the disappointment occasioned by a stormy day, a common story book read in a particular frame of mind, a fit of sickness, the sudden death of a schoolmate, even a remarkable dream— these are occurrences not to be excluded by the modern refinements in education; and yet any one of them is sometimes sufficient forever to fix, or entirely to reverse, a child's genius and prospects.

For obvious reasons the thoughts which are suggested accidentally, and pursued by the child voluntarily, crude and visionary as they will oftentimes be, are yet more likely to affect and determine the character than those taught in the regular exercises. Accidental suggestions not only increase the child's stock of thought, but what is of vastly greater importance, they set him a-thinking; and besides, the thoughts which he receives in this way, are his own, and not another's. It is true we can make the thoughts of other men our own by adopting them and acting on them; but a child will be slow to do this in regard to those lessons he is set to learn as a task, partly because he does learn them as a task, which will be likely to connect them with disagreeable associations, and make their recurrence unwelcome, and partly because when the lessons are recited, he will be apt to suppose the task done and think no more about them. Persons engaged in the business of instruction cannot be reminded too often, that "no complex or very important truth was ever yet transferred in full developement from one mind to another. Truth of this kind is not a piece of furniture to be shifted; it is a seed which must be sown and pass through the several stages of growth." Now as in the vegetable world, of the multitude of seeds, with which nature in her profusion strews the earth, not more perhaps than one in ten thousand strikes root, so of the multitude of thoughts suggested or communicated to the child, not more perhaps that one in ten thousand strikes root. Those, however, are

most likely to do so, to which the mind takes spontaneously. Hence it often happens that children at school are more affected in their intellectual as well as moral character, by the society of the place, the personal qualities of their teachers, their conversation with one another, and their own reflections on passing events, than by any thing taught them in formal lectures, or in the books given them to study, or by anything in the peculiar system of discipline or instruction.

This should lead us to put less confidence than most theorists are inclined to do in mere plans and systems of education, however recommended. Of course I do not mean to deny that many important improvements and facilities have been introduced of late years, applicable alike to all systems; such, for example, as respect the construction of schoolrooms, the use of apparatus, and the character and use of manuals. Neither am I disposed to call in question the actual efficiency of the systems most in vogue at the present day, if with Pestalozzi's system, for example, we can have a Pestalozzi, if with the Lancasterian system we can have a Lancaster, if with Jacotot's system we can have a Jacotot. I believe in the accounts of extraordinary proficiency made under all these different systems; which prove, as it seems to me, that one system is about as good as another, and that the extraordinary proficiency in the cases mentioned is to be ascribed not to the system, but to the personal qualities of the teacher, and the excitements of a new experiment, or, in other words, to accidental

causes.

We must not depend, at least not exclusively, or chiefly, on systematic instruction of any kind for the proper and full developement of the understanding and conscience. Many parents appear to think, that if they spare no expense in the education of their children, if they place them at the schools in highest repute and which are patronised by the best families, if they provide for them the best books and the best instructers, and put them under the newest and best systems of instruction, they have done all which, as parents, they are bound to do, or can do.

They forget how much depends on their own example, and on other domestic influences, going back as far as the personal character of the nurse, and the tales of the nursery; by which the future tastes and dispositions of their children are not unfrequently determined, before they are sent to school. Besides, if it were not so, they are not warranted in looking on certain processes in education as a kind of machinery by which characters can be moulded to order; or in thinking that mind in the hands of the schoolmaster is as marble in the hands of the statuary. They must not forget the original differences in children, and that the human mind from the beginning is essentially free, and that many of its operations, and many of the influences by which it is swayed, are in their own nature hidden, inextricable, contingent. Or, even if they take the ground that character is the creature of circumstances merely, and that it is formed for man and not by him, still as we know but a small part of these circumstances, and have control over but a small part of those which we do know, we can but guess at the final result of our endeavours in particular instances. And experience teaches us that children, especially in the early stages of their moral and intellectual culture, are liable at every step of their progress to extraneous and malign influences, which may traverse and defeat the best laid plans.

Here, as it seems to me, we detect one of the principal causes of the frequent and melancholy failures in education. A merchant, for example, who, beginning with barely learning enough to write his name, has gained wealth and rank, expends a fortune on the training of an only son, in the hope of making that distinction certain in regard to him, which in regard to himself he is willing to attribute, in part at least, to lucky coincidences. This son, however, after being made to pass through the customary forms and processes of what is called an accomplished education, comes out at last an incorrigible profligate and dunce. The father, in the bitterness of his disappointment, rails at schoolmasters, and schools, and systems of instruction, as if they alone had been in fault. If