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EDUCATION OF THE FIVE SENSES.

THE sun is on his way through the heavens, diffusing his mighty influences abroad over the universe: tell us the great purpose of his magnificent mission. A few hours more, and the firmament will glow with the mild and mingled radiance of planet and star: "But wherefore all night long shine these?" Why has the earth, beneath, its profuse variety of surface, with rock and stream, plain, mountain, and valley, in combinations no where the same, but every where interesting; subject also to the imposing changes of the seasons, and now adorned with so grateful a green, relieved with thousands and thousands of flowers; and again here with the forest, and there with the harvest? The myriad substances of the material world are characterized each by its own dimensions, its own hardness or softness, its own asperity or smoothness, from the atom to the mountain, from the obdurate rock to the yielding fluid, from the rough bark of the oak to its polished leaves. Surely there is some good reason for all this diversity. Are not the powerful odors of Eastern spices, the breath of aromatic herbs, and the sweet scents of our own wild flowers floating on the gales of Heaven? Is not the table of nature now and always spread from pole to pole, with an infinite multitude of luxuries, with the fowls of the air, the fish of the sea, the beasts of the field, and the contributions of the vegetable

kingdom supplying the delicious and abundant fruits scattered from clime to clime? The birds pour forth their heaven-taught notes; the torrent, the tempest, and the ocean roar; and the human voice, with its tones of feeling and intelligence, utters music the divinest of all. But why is all this? Why indeed is the whole creation of God but one majestic assemblage and exhibition of objects of sense-of things appealing to the sight, and the smell, the taste, the hearing, and the touch? Is it not because the great design of the Deity in creating the universe was, so far as we can know, the education of the human soul by means of the bodily senses? This surely can be no disparagement from the dignity of his purposes, for we know of no created thing so precious or so noble as is the soul of man.

senses,

It is, then, no unworthy object of desire to know if the those material organs which the Deity has honored by associating them with the immaterial soul, and so curiously wrought them that they can be, and are the great conveyances of knowledge to the mind-if these can be improved by human interference; and if so, how that improvement can be effected. I acknowledge the subtile and difficult nature of this hitherto almost untouched inquiry, in the science of education. Few writers upon the human mind have thought it worth their while to trace the current of the intellect to its source, and to observe the place, where springs the sacred fountain and the influences, whether earthly or heavenly, which affect its early course. Scarcely one has entered upon such investigation for the high purposes of education. But to the teacher, who deals with the unformed mind, and presumes to shape the Parian marble, it is an imperative duty to study not only the finished statue, but also practically the block itself, that he may discover its original qualities, and ascertain what is necessary to transform and elevate the shapeless elements into the noblest image of man. And how feebly does a comparison of the teacher with the statuary, represent the obligations of the former. The importance of his making the greatest and best use of every influence he can exert upon that celestial

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spirit, which has been placed upon earth in a mortal body, for its education, and is destined to live forever and forever to be affected by his interference, does indeed transcend all human calculation, and runs beyond time far, far into eternity.

What then is the mind before its earliest sensation, before it holds its first beautiful but mysterious communion with inward wants, or with external nature? The senses, acting as interpreters between the material universe and the ethereal spirit, have not yet begun to dispense to the soul that divine knowledge, which is its life and its growth, and which is naturally destined to cease to be dispensed to it only at death, when that soul has already improved, or failed for ever to improve, its opportunities of receiving all the light and strength from the material world which that world can afford. What is the mind before this celestial machinery of sensation is first set in motion? We might almost say it is nothing,—the intellectugem is in the ore and in the mine: it is what Adam was before the Almighty breathed into his poor form of clay the awakening breath of life. The faculties of the mind are yet inanimate; the soul is still and dormant, and its deep sleep cannot be broken but by the talismanic power of a sensation. It is like the creation. "The earth is without form and void; darkness is upon the face of the deep; " but "the Spirit of God is moving upon the face of the waters;" and can alone effectually say, "Let there be light."

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A sensation is experienced, and the mind is now roused to action, and begins from a material impulse a spiritual career, destined to be eternal. The pure and undisciplined eye, which will in after life make the mind "creation's lord," and will look upon so many sights of happiness and misery, now dawns upon a mother's blessed smile, upon the kind countenances of relatives and friends, upon the infinite variety of the works of nature and of art. All is new, all interesting, to a degree absorbing beyond our conception as much as beyond our memory. The hand of the infant is raised to what the eye perceives; the eye turns to what the hand inadvertently

touches; and the taste, being one of the earliest senses that is gratified, the object is soon brought to its perception. The smell also provokes or prevents the taste, and all the senses are thus connected together in their operations upon the mind, for the valuable purpose of corroborating or correcting each other, as will hereafter be made to appear. Thus the senses are quickly in full and gratified action, and, like bees in spring, incessantly returning to the hive with fresh stores of sweetness, they impart to the mind continually their varied impressions, full of beauty and novelty, so that the soul is engaged in rapid succession in ten thousand acts of fond and admiring observation. Pleasure succeeds to pleasure, and wonder to wonder, while the mind, so soon to be master and disposer of senses and sensations, and of its own operations, is now lost and insensible to its own motions, amidst the numerous and variegated scenes exhibited before it, in the great theatre into which it has been introduced.

By and by something striking is presented for the second time or the third, and probably it may be still oftener before the infant intellect recognizes it as the same. But whenever it once recognizes an object, then it puts forth for the first time the faculty of memory. Memory begins her holy office, and the child becomes more the image of God in gaining something like one of his attributes-knowledge of the past as well as the present. The child takes a second step in mastering this precious faculty, when upon a repeated perception of an object he not only recognizes that object, but has suggested by it another, previously, but not now associated with it. He sees something belonging to his sweet smiling mother; and though she be no longer there, her affectionate look again gladdens his thoughts. Another victory over the memory is necessary to the mind before it has that faculty entirely productive; it is to have past perceptions or conceptions suggested by past perceptions, without the intervention of sensible objects. But such an exertion of mental power evidently belongs to a riper age than that now under consideration. It fully appears, then, that all the early