ness, a species of spiritual pride; it is sacrificing the good of the boys to one's own moral complacency.

The difficulty of course is, that one cannot make one's mind into an interesting one by taking thought; a spontaneous, lively man, who neglects his routine work, may be shamelessly successful as a teacher, when compared with a dull duty-loving man. But if the dull man loves his duty, he may at least try to observe what is the kind of thing that arrests the attention of boys, and stimulates their interest. The worst of the heavy, conscientious teacher, the sound of whose voice seems to fill the air with falling dust, is that he is generally so secure in a sense of rectitude, that he cannot believe himself to be in the wrong; and thus he becomes a mere professional and not an artist. For teaching is, after all, an art and not a trade; and even the men to whom it is merely a trade may make it a little more artistic, if they will only try to practice an intelligent sympathy. It cannot be a mere series of chemical experiments; it is the play of mind upon mind. And thus, if a teacher has the interests of the boys at heart, he will do his best to make his own mind supple and agile.

It

There are many interesting technical points which I cannot here raise. But the great thing for a teacher to grasp is that his work cannot be well done, if it is done in a formal and solemn manner. must above all things be done in a brisk, generous, and enthusiastic spirit; and the dullest of all teachers may improve, if he will only set himself to analyse his own mistakes, instead of pinning his faith to a system and a method, even if that system or method be distinguished by association with the most scientific and metaphysical names.

VIII.

TEACHING TO THINK.

man."

By R. SOMERVELL.

MOST schoolmasters, I suppose, when driven to defend the system of education in which they take part, have had to fall back, at some time or other, upon the familiar argument from gymnastics. "Why should I do Euclid, sir? I am going to be a clergy"Why should I learn Greek? I am going to be a barrister." "What use will algebra be to me? I am going into business." So we have all been asked; for these difficulties occurred to many ordinary boys long before they were propounded as a problem in Imperial policy by Lord Rosebery. And I suppose we have answered that the study of algebra and Euclid and Greek and Latin is a species of mental gymnastics, fitted to strengthen the mind and to prepare it for service in the pursuit of more practical ends, just as the exercises of the gymnasium, though they form no abiding part of the physical pursuits of manhood, fit the body for all forms of exertion; that, as it is well to have the muscles developed even though we do not intend to go about the world vaulting "horses" or swinging on bars, so it is desirable to master the binomial theorem and the verbs in μ, even though on leaving school and college we turn our backs upon these things as completely as we do upon the vaulting horse and parallel bars. I will not pause to examine the validity of the

assumption upon which this argument rests; but I will content myself with pointing out that it bears directly upon the subject of "Teaching to Think." For this general intellectual result, at which we are professedly aiming by our mental gymnastics, is just the power and the practice of thinking. Only in so far as we are teaching boys to think are we really attaining the object we propose to ourselves.

We might, of course, propose other objects, and aim at other results. We might go with Lord Rosebery, in his Glasgow address, and base our syllabus of studies upon the future practical needs of our pupils in that fierce industrial competition of which he gave so vivid and impressive a picture. Or we might deliberately postpone all such practical studies, and, knowing how eagerly they will be pursued in later life and how narrowing and debasing they may become, we might try, while yet there is time, and before the hurly-burly of life begins, to plant deep in the minds of our pupils the sense of religion, the code of honour, the love of poetry and letters, of art and music and nature-of all the more refining and spiritual elements of life-in the hope of their surviving side by side with the engrossing pursuit of professional or mercantile success, or the baser pursuit of amusement, according to the noble ideal of Browning's quaint poem of "Shop "-" Sell and scud home be shop's affair ":

"But shop each day, and all day long!

Friend, your good angel slept, your star
Suffered eclipse, fate did you wrong!
From where these sorts of treasures are,

There should our hearts be-Christ, how far!'

But while in a half-hearted way we go a certain limited distance with Lord Rosebery, and a little way with Browning, on the whole we stick to the old lines, and train the mind upon subjects which bear directly neither upon business nor upon culture and, as long as we do this, "teaching to think " ought to be our prime concern.

Every subject we teach, and every lesson we give, should be approached from this point of viewHow can we stimulate and train the power of thought?

Now I wish to point out shortly two main hindrances to our doing this.

The first is the love of information. I take this both in the active and the passive sense. Actively, it is a great pleasure to a master to impart information. At lowest it is gratifying to his self-love. At best he feels he is interesting his pupils, and widening their minds. And then passively, all but a very few boys enjoy it. How quiet they become, and how seemingly attentive, when we drop the endless construe or too fatal repetition, and wander far afield when the mention of a siege leads us away to Paris or to Ladysmith, or a forced march of Cæsar's suggests an episode in Lord Roberts's march to Kandahar.

I suppose the late William Johnson of Eton to have been one of the first and greatest of those who deliberately pursue this method of education. "I lectured them," he says, "on Church history, on the Roman theory of development, the Anglo-Catholic theory of tradition, the rational theory of tradition compared with the undoubted writings of the

Apostles. We made references to the First Book of Corinthians, which we are supposed to be reading. I told them about Cassian, Jerome, Martin of Tours, Benedict of Nursia, Gregory the Great, and reminded them of Clemens Romanus, Diocletian, Constantine, Theodosius, Boëthius," &c. And again :-"The hardest lesson in the week-Cicero on the proofs of creative providence. I had glanced at Whewell's Bridgewater Treatise on Astronomy, and had found the place in Bentley's lecture, Confutations of Atheism,' where he follows Cicero's argument against Lucretius. So I had something to say; told them about Ptolemy, Copernicus, Newton, Laplace, &c. ; found that several of them gave all the credit to Galileo; told them about Bentley and Boyle, who endowed the lectures."

Few of us could follow such a teacher except at a very long interval, but we have all, I imagine, some experience of the pleasure of imparting information; though we do not possess the enormous stores of knowledge or the ready memory-or, perhaps, the intense application, for Johnson's flow of knowledge was carefully prepared and systematically directedthat make it a dangerous snare.

For tried by the standard of " teaching to think,” as a snare we must regard it, unless it be kept within rigid limits. I have said that almost all boys enjoy it. But they do so in very different ways. Perhaps two or three in a form fully profit by it. They have some previous knowledge to which the new information can be linked. A few more are really interested and learn something. A large number are impressed by our cleverness and like being talked to; but on the whole they belong to the majority, who regard this sort of thing as simply a welcome interruption of the labours of the hour.

It was my good fortune at Cambridge to be taught by a great teacher in two very different ways. On

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