These are all matters of experience. We need only call to mind the popular expression, "The stupid quarter of a year," which ends with the child's first smile, that beam of consciousness which is greeted with infinite joy. The child has at this period the ordinary vicissitudes and excitements of its nervous life in pleasure and pain, as well as the wonderful modifications of them in its sense-organs. It hears a fondling voice, looks into a faithful eye, tastes the sweet milk, feels the mother's breast, the gentle lifting and carrying of the arms, and the swinging motion of the cradle. These are the sense-impressions, or sensations, which flow towards him daily during the short moments of wakefulness.

With admirable wisdom, nature has so regulated the organism of the child that it passes these first days and weeks in the arms of sleep; for could it immediately, like the young lambkin or colt, use its limbs, such an immeasurable, incomprehensible world of impressions would stream in upon its inner being, that self-consciousness, unable to master them, would be forever overcome and unable to develop itself. Do not we teachers have the corresponding experience daily in the dissipated and distracted youth of our great cities? Do we not have it hourly when, in the presentation of a new subject, we give too much at once, and overstep the limits which lie in the power of self-consciousness?

But the child has not merely sense-impressions or sensations, which bear the token of individuality; it has also sense-intuitions, that is, a multiplicity of sensations which are united together into a unit by the synthesis of the interior sense, (named by Kant "the table of the inner sense," of which the five senses are only radiations.)

The beast also shares in both the sense-impressions and the sense-intuitions, and indeed, as we must confess, possesses these to a higher degree than does man, since it belongs entirely to the world of sense, and is endowed with sharper organs of sense, so that it may exist in that world. When, for instance, the ape is busy with an apple, he has, in the first place, the sense-impression of sight, by means of his eye; in the second place, that of feeling in his hand; in the third place, the impression of smell, if he holds it to his nose; in the fourth place, that of taste upon tongue; and, finally, also that of hearing, if the fruit falls to the ground, or seeds rattle. But these five different impressions do not remain in him as one multitude, but are united upon the table of his inner sense without his participation, and yet with infallible certainty, so that he has the unity comprehended within itself of the sense-impression of the apple.

his

Let us look at the horse. He hears the crack and swing of the whip; he has often enough felt the smarting impressions of it, and sees it immediately when the coachman has the instrument in his hand; but these three sense-impressions remain in him, not as any thing isolated, but blend into the unity of a sense-intuition.

The child is similarly circumstanced in relation to the external world. As soon as longer pauses of wakefulness take place, the eye follows the movements of the mother, and the impressions of her friendly face, of her tender voice, of the nourishment she gives, of the lifting and carrying and

other cares she bestows upon him, unite in a total picture, in a unity of the sense-intuition.

The sense-impressions are the first, the sense-intuitions the second, and the latter mark already a step of the greater powerfulness of life in gen eral, and of the development of sense in particular.

But, while the animal rises up into the world of sense-impressions and sense-intuitions, the power of the inborn and now gently moving selfconsciousness raises the sense-impressions into perceptions, and thereby raises also the sense-intuitions into intellectual intuitions.

The perceiving is next becoming a surety of something, and in itself is yet an undefined, general turning or application of the subjectivity to an object, a direction of the spirit to an outside thing, a consciousness of parts, character, and differences now becoming clear. But if a conception is internally grasped and worked up, and the perception takes place with a more decided consciousness, then the occurrence becomes a spiritual intuition.

Intellectual intuition (or intuition absolutely) is each conscious, more distinct perception or unity of several perceptions, with an internal summary. Intuition is quite a significant word. To look (or to inspect) expresses subjective activity, not mere seeing, as the eye of the animal may be said to attach itself to the external object attracting the senses, but expresses the act of sounding it. Intuition signifies such inspection as exalts the object to the contemplator's real objectivity.

An intuition presupposes :

1. An immediately present object.

2. The influence of the same upon one or several sense-organs.

3. A spiritual activity, to bring this influence to the consciousness; therefore the active directions of the spirit, and the grasping of the same.*

The mind of the child now incessantly works on. He obtains mastery more and more swiftly, and more and more victoriously over the senseimpressions and sense-intuitions; the wealth of perceptions and intellectual intuitions, and his self-certainty in them, becomes ever greater; finally, the power of intuitive thinking becomes so great that single intellectual intuitions become IDEAS. It is these which have always left behind in the child's soul the deepest traces, and they become ideas as soon as the mind has power to objectivate them; that is, to dispose of them as of things owned, and, independently of the world of sense, to be able at will to call them forth out of itself, or to thrust them back.

But here comes in the need of a sign; that is, of a word, not as if the

*REMARK. Intuition, in the narrower, original sense, is a conscious impression obtained through the sensation of sight. To intuit means, first of all, only the activity of the soul called forth by sight. But since the most distinct and the most surely defined impressions are called forth, and all other sense-perceptions are supported, perfected, and even corrected by the sight, the word intuition has, since the time of Kant, been extended to all sensuous perceptions. In the wider sense, every impression which is elevated by the sensibility (feeling) is an intuition; what is external thereby becomes internal.

word called forth the idea, not as if it were the creator of the idea, but it serves as the seal of the idea, as the signature of a mental possession. Long before the first attempts at speaking, a little hoard of ripening ideas has been formed, and a joy, a rapture accompanies the first efforts to speak, for the child has need of feeling itself and enjoying itself in its selfcertainty.

From the idea fixed in the word, man finally rises in maturer age to the conception, but let us add, only imperfectly. Few men who are accustomed to think, take the trouble so to shape the hoard of their ideas and undeveloped conceptions that they become fixed according to their contents and scope. The great multitude allow themselves to be satisfied with ideas and conceptions as nature and life obtrude them, as it were, and let us say just in this place object-teaching cannot and will not give an understanding of the external world, which will be clearly conformable to its contents. Whoever should aim to sharpen the formal side of this instruction in such a way, would, in consideration of the mental immaturity of the child, commit the severest mistake, and would give into the hands of the opponents of this system the sharpest weapons. Also exclusively to accentuate the material or practical side of this instruction, the exercise of the senses and the enrichment of the intuitions and ideas, would be censurable, since this instruction is only of value when opposites are connected.*

Where an extent of phenomena is given, an intent or content must also be sought. Where the external world is brought before the observation (too often, alas! only by pictures), the way to the understanding of it must also be opened, and the later grasping of the conception in due proportion to its contents must be prepared for.

Intuition without thinking would be blind, and thinking without intuition would be empty, dead, word-cram, trifling.

Luther, with all the force of his German nature, was zealous in his opposition to that dead, abstract teaching and learning, and urged on the intuitive method.

"Now," he said, "let us look directly upon the created things rather than upon popedom. For we are beginning, thank God, to recognize his glorious works and wonders in the little flower; when we think how powerful and beneficent God is, let us always praise and prize and thank him for it. In his creatures we recognize how powerful is his word, how prodigious it is." He also drew attention to the relation of the thing to the word, and considered the understanding of the word only possible by the understanding of the thing.

"The art of grammar," he says, "points out and teaches what the words are called and what they mean, but we must first understand and know what the thing or the cause is. Whoever wishes to learn and preach, therefore, must first know both what the thing is and what it is called before he speaks of it-recognition of two kinds, one of the word, the other of the thing. Now to him who has not the knowledge of the thing or action, the knowledge of the word is no assistance. According to an

* In other words, when the organ of comparison is brought into play.

old proverb, 'what one does not understand and know well, he cannot speak of well.'"

No creative transformation of the essence of education could, however, proceed from the school, which remained for centuries the serving-maid— less of the Church than of Churchdom. The British giant Bacon had first to give us his Novum Organum Scientiarum, that fiery token of a new time, which had its central point in the natural sciences, and to bring on the absolute break with the middle ages as well as with antiquity. As Luther came forth against a mass of human traditions by which the manifestations of God in the Holy Scriptures were disfigured, so Bacon appeared against the traditions of human institutions which darkened the manifestations of God in creation. Men were from that time forth no longer obliged to read the arbitrary and fanciful interpretations of both manifestations, but could read the manifestations themselves. He wished men to demand the immediate contemplation of creation.

"Hence let us never turn the eyes of the mind," he says, "away from the things themselves, but take their images into us just as they are." He saw how in his time the physics of Aristotle were studied, but not Nature. Men read in books what the earth is, what their authors related about stones, plants, animals, &c.; but with their own eyes to investigate these stones, plants, and animals, occurred to no one's mind. And thus men were obliged to surrender at discretion to the authority of those authors, since they never thought of making a critical examination of their descriptions and stories by their own immediate experiments. But such a proving was so much the more necessary because these authors themselves had their information at third or fourth hand. It is incredible now what a mass of untruth and fable has been heaped up everywhere in books of natural history, what monsters their geology created, what magic powers they gave to stones, &c. (See Raumer's Päd.)

When Bacon summoned the world to turn their minds from the past and to look with open eyes into living nature, he not only gave to the experimental sciences (including also pedagogics) a new impulse in general, but he was also the father of realistic pedagogy. Ratichius and Comenius learnt from him, and the 'real' school, the industrial school, the polytechnic institutions, down to the object-teaching of Father Pestalozzi, have in him their foundation. When Bacon's pupil, John Locke, set up "the healthy soul in the healthy body" as the chief maxim in education, is it not the same thing as when Pestalozzi and Fræbel desired "the harmonious development of human nature," and preached conformity to nature in education and instruction?

In opposition to the empty, deadening word-teaching that grew rank in the schools, "the poisonous seed of scholasticism," Ratichius exclaimed : "Everything according to the ordering and course of nature, for all unnatural and arbitrary violent teaching is injurious and weakens nature. Let us have every thing without constraint and by inward necessity. First the thing itself, then the conception or meaning of the thing. No rule before we have the substance. Rules without substance lead the understanding astray. Every thing through experiment, minute investigation.

"No authority is good for anything, if there is not reason and a foundation for it. No rule and no system is to be allowed which is not radically explored anew, and really founded upon proof."

Truly when one hears such golden words, one is tempted to ask, "Why were those battles on the field of pedagogy necessary? Why must a Franke, a Rousseau, a Basedow, a Pestalozzi, a Diesterweg, a Froebel come, if, as Jean Paul said in his Levana, ' merely to repeat that a hundred times, which is a hundred times forgotten'

In the path which Ratichius had trodden, strode forward a sovereign, and with all the power and burning zeal of a reformer, Amos Comenius. the author of the first picture-book for children, the orbis pictus, in which every thing that can address the childish love of objects and representations of objects, whether in heaven or on earth, in the human or the animal world, is illustrated and explained by description and comment.

He is to be estimated, starting from a sound, compendious observation of human nature and its relations, as well as of pedagogic problems, as the spirited father of the so-called object-teaching as a special discipline. He says: "With real insight, not with verbal description, must the instruction begin. Out of such insight develops certain knowledge. Not the shadows of things, but things themselves, which work upon the mind and the imaginative powers, are to lie ever near to the young. Place every thing before the mind. Insight is evidence. Only where the things are actually absent, is one helped by the pictorial representation.

"Men must be led, as far as possible, to create their wisdom, not out of books, but out of the contemplation of heaven and earth, oaks and beeches; that is, they must learn to see and investigate the things themselves. Let the objects of physical instruction be solid, real, useful things, which affect the senses and the powers of the imagination. That happens when they are brought near to the senses, visible to the eyes, audible to the ears, fragrant to the nose, agreeable to the taste, grateful to the touch. The beginning of knowledge should be from the senses. What man has an insight into with his senses, impresses itself deeply on the memory, never to be forgotten.

"Man first uses his senses, then his memory, next his understanding, and lastly his judgment. Let us teach not merely to understand, but to express what is understood. Speech and the knowledge of things must keep step. Teaching of things and of speech must go hand in hand. Words without the knowledge of things are empty words."

This running parallel of the simultaneous learning of things and words was the deep secret of the method of Comenius.

In the time of Hermann Franke, who, as the noble friend of man, the father of the poor and the orphan, the great champion of the German people's-school, deserves to be called the forerunner of Pestalozzi, in organizing talent so far superior to him, - the elevation of bürger life had become so great, the relations of trade and commerce had been so widened, and the pedagogics of Comenius had created so much esteem and astonishment in the realists (physicists), that the Real'-School was able to blossom forth upon the ground of that truly practical piety which raised morality to a