Even with this reserve, the teaching of pedagogy is destined to render important services to the cause of education, and education, let us be assured, is in the way of acquiring a fresh importance day by day. This is due to the fact, first, that under a liberal government, and in a republican society, it is more and more necessary that the citizens shall be instructed and enlightened. Liberty is a dangerous thing unless it has instruction for a counterpoise. Moreover, we must recollect that in our day, among those occult coadjutors of which we have spoken, and which at all times add their action to that of education proper, some have lost their influence, while others, so far from co-operating in this movement, oppose it and compromise it. On the one hand, religion has seen her influence curtailed. She is no longer, as she once was, the tutelary power under whose shadow the rising generations peacefully matured. It is necessary that education, through the progress of the reason and through the reflective development of morality, should compensate for the waning influence of religion.
On the other hand, social conditions, the very progress of civil and political liberty, the growing independence accorded the child in the family, the multiplication of books, good and bad, all these collateral agents of education are not always compliant and useful aids. They would prove the accomplices of a moral decadence did not our teachers make an effort as much more vigorous to affect the will and the heart, as well as the mind, in order to establish character, and thus assure the recuperation of our country.
A SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF GABRIEL COMPAYRÉ.[5]
Gabriel Compayré was born Jan. 2, 1843, at Albi, a city of Southern France, containing about fifteen thousand inhabitants, and the capital of the province of Tarn. His early education was received from his father, a man of sterling character, and the author of a book entitled, Historical Studies Concerning the Albigenses.
He passed from his father’s care to the collège of Castres, then to the lycée of Toulouse, and finally to the lycée Louis-le-Grand at Paris. His fellow-pupils recall with pleasure his triumphs at these institutions of learning. His brilliant intellectual powers, his vivid imagination, his well-stored memory, and his unwearied industry, marked him as destined to render signal services to his race.
He entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1862. His tastes led him to philosophical studies; indeed, he had already manifested a strong tendency to moral and intellectual science. Yet his intensely practical nature could not long remain satisfied with metaphysical subtleties where he found no sure foot-hold. He became a warm advocate of experimental methods, and of the Baconian philosophy. He set himself to a study of man as he appears in society and in the family; to the analysis of his emotions and his acts, and to the deduction, from these analyses, of those rules which ought to preside over his conduct and his intellectual and moral development.
He graduated from the normal school in 1865, and was immediately appointed professor of philosophy at the lycée of Pau. A lecture upon Rousseau, which he delivered here, brought upon him the severe condemnation of the ultramontane party, and involved him in a controversy which has continued to the present time.