ave learnt well in our youth that
lasts, we should take the greatest possible advantage of this precious
gift. If we picture to ourselves how deeply engraven on our memory the
people are whom we knew during the first twelve years of our life, and
how indelibly imprinted are also the events of that time, and most of
the things that we then experienced, heard, or learnt, the idea of
basing education on this susceptibility and tenacity of the youthful
mind will seem natural; in that the mind receives its impressions
according to a strict method and a regular system. But because the years
of youth that are assigned to man are only few, and the capacity for
remembering, in general, is always limited (and still more so the
capacity for remembering of the individual), everything depends on the
memory being filled with what is most essential and important in any
department of knowledge, to the exclusion of everything else. This
selection should be made by the most capable minds and masters in every
branch of knowledge after the most mature consideration, and the result
of it established. Such a selection must be based on a sifting of
matters which are necessary and important for a man to know in general,
and also for him to know in a particular profession or calling.
Knowledge of the first kind would have to be divided into graduated
courses, like an encyclopaedia, corresponding to the degree of general
culture which each man has attained in his external circumstances; from
a course restricted to what is necessary for primary instruction up to
the matter contained in every branch of the philosophical faculty.
Knowledge of the second kind would, however, be reserved for him who had
really mastered the selection in all its branches. The whole would give
a canon specially devised for intellectual education, which naturally
would require revision every ten years. By such an arrangement the
youthful power of the memory would be put to the best advantage, and it
would furnish the faculty of judgment with excellent material when it
appeared later on.

* * * * *

What is meant by maturity of knowledge is that state of perfection to
which any one individual is able to bring it, when an exact
correspondence has been effected between the whole of his abstract ideas
and his own personal observations: whereby each of his ideas rests
directly or indirectly on a basis of observation, which alone gives it
any r