[7] "The picture shown in Leonard and Gertrude is very crude. Everywhere is visible the rough hand of the painter, a strong, untiring hand, painting an eternal image, of which this in paper and print is the merest sketch…. Read it and see how puerile it is, how too obvious are its moralities. Read it a second time, and note how earnest it is, how exact and accurate are its peasant scenes. Read it yet again, and recognize in it the outpouring of a rare soul, working, pleading, ready to be despised, for fellow souls." (J. P. Monroe, The Educational Ideal, p. 182.)
[8] "When I now look back and ask myself: What have I specially done for the very being of education, I find I have fixed the highest supreme principle of instruction in the recognition of sense impression as the absolute foundation of all knowledge. Apart from all special teaching I have sought to discover the nature of teaching itself, and the prototype, by which nature herself has determined the instruction of our race." (Pestalozzi, How Gertrude teaches her Children, X, Section 1.)
[9] "What he did was to emphasize the new purpose in education, but vaguely perceived, where held at all, by others; to make clear the new meaning of education which existed in rather a nebulous state in the public mind; to formulate an entirely new method, based on new principles, both of which were to receive a further development in subsequent times, and to pass under his name; and finally, to give an entirely new spirit to the schoolroom." (Monroe, Paul, Text Book in the History of Education, p. 600.)
[10] In 1809 the German, Carl Ritter, a former pupil of Salzmann (see footnote 2, p. 538) and the creator of modern geographical study, visited Pestalozzi at Yverdon. Of this visit he writes:
"I have seen more than the paradise of Switzerland, I have seen Pestalozzi, I have learned to know his heart and his genius. Never have I felt so impressed with the sanctity of my vocation as when I was with this noble son of Switzerland. I cannot recall without emotion this society of strong men, struggling with the present, with the aim of clearing the way for a better future, men whose only joy and reward is the hope of raising the child to the dignity of man.
"I left Yverdon resolved to fulfill my promise made to Pestalozzi to carry his method into geography…. Pestalozzi did not know as much geography as a child in our Primary Schools, but, none the less, have I learned that science from him, for it was in listening to him that I felt awaken within me the instinct of the natural methods; he showed me the way." (Guimps, Baron de, Pestalozzi, his Aim and Work, p. 167.)
[11] The young German student of geology and mineralogy, Karl George von Raumer (1783-1865), was in Paris, in 1808. While there he read Pestalozzi's How Gertrude teaches her Children, and what Fichte had said of his work in his Addresses to the German Nation (see chapter xxii). These sent him to Yverdon to see for himself. He remained two years, and returned to Germany as a teacher. In 1846 he published his four-volume Geschichte der Pädagogik, the first important history of education to be written.
[12] In 1814 King Frederick William III himself visited Pestalozzi, at Neufchatel. His queen, Louise, was deeply touched by reading the Émile, and frequently spent hours in the Prussian schools witnessing work conducted after the ideas of Pestalozzi.
CHAPTER XXII
[1] One of the first acts of the reign of Frederick the Great was to recall Wolff from banishment. In doing so he said: "A man that seeks truth, and loves it, must be reckoned precious in any human society."