That science develops the intellectual qualities, such as judgment, memory, reasoning, we admit; that it develops them better than the study of the languages, let even this be granted! But it is impossible for us not to protest when Mr. Spencer represents science as endowed with the same efficacy for inspiring moral qualities, such as perseverance, sincerity, activity, resignation to the will of nature, piety even, and religion. Science appears to us an infallible means of animating and exciting the different energies of the soul; but will it also have the quality of disciplining them? Thanks to science, man will know that which it is proper to do, if he wishes to be a workman, a parent, or a citizen, but on this express condition, that he wills; and this education of the will, is it still science which shall be charged with it? We may be allowed to doubt it.
Mr. Spencer himself now seems to share this doubt, if we may trust one of his recent works.[282] “Faith in books and in nature,” it is there said, “is one of the superstitions of our times.” We deceive ourselves, says the author, when we establish a connection between the intelligence and the will, for conduct is determined not by knowledge but by emotion.
“He who would hope to teach geometry by giving lessons in Latin, would scarcely be more unreasonable than those who count on producing better sentiments by means of a discipline of the intellectual faculties.”
To tell the truth, Mr. Spencer has here fallen into another extreme, and he seems to us at one time to have granted too much, and at another too little, to the influence of instruction on morality.
645. Intellectual Education.—So far we have examined along with Mr. Spencer only the nature of the objects and of the knowledge which befit the education of man. It remains to inquire how the mind can assimilate this knowledge. Pedagogy has not only to draw up in theory a brilliant programme of necessary studies, but it also searches out the means and the methods to be employed, in order that these studies may be presented to the mind, and may have the greater chance of being thus presented with profit.
In this somewhat more practical part of his work, Mr. Spencer thinks that pedagogy should be guided by the idea of evolution; that is, of the progressive course of a being who makes himself, who creates himself little by little, and who develops in succession, according to fixed laws, powers originally enveloped in the germs that he has received from nature, or that have been transmitted to him by heredity.
646. Laws of Intellectual Evolution.—In other terms, Mr. Spencer shows that the precepts of pedagogy cannot be definitely deduced until the laws of mental evolution have been accurately established, and he attempts to determine some of these laws.
He proves that the mind passes naturally from the simple to the complex, from the indefinite to the definite, from the concrete to the abstract, from the empirical to the rational; that the genesis of the individual is the same as the genesis of the race; that the intelligence assimilates by preference that which it discovers for itself; finally, that all culture which profits the pupil is, at the same time, an exercise which stimulates him and delights him.