rest.

In the wide sense in which it is proposed to consider the subject of
education, three things are pre-supposed--personal talents, personal
application, and the divine blessing. Without capacities to be
developed, or with very inferior capacities, education is either wholly
useless, or only partially successful. As it has no absolute creative
power, and is utterly unable to add a single faculty to the mind, so
the first condition of its success is the capacity for improvement in
the subject. An idiot may be slightly affected by it, but the feebleness
of his original powers forbids the noblest result of education. It
teaches men how most successfully to use their own native force, and by
exercise to increase it, but in no case can it supply the absence of
that force. It is not its province to inspire genius, since that is the
breath of God in the soul, bestowed as seemeth to him good, and at the
disposal of no finite power. It is enough if it unfold and discipline,
and guide genius in its mission to the world. We are not to demand that
it shall make of every man a Newton, a Milton, a Hall, a Chalmers, a
Mason, a Washington; or of every woman a Sappho, a De Stael, a Roland, a
Hemans.

The supposition that all intellects are originally equal, however
flattering to our pride, is no less prejudicial to the cause of
education than false in fact. It throws upon teachers the responsibility
of developing talents that have scarcely an existence, and securing
attainments within the range of only the very finest powers, during the
period usually assigned to this work. To the ignorant it misrepresents
and dishonors education, when it presents for their judgment a very
inferior intellect, which all the training of the schools has not
inspired with power, as a specimen of the result of liberal pursuits.
Such an intellect can never stand up beside an active though untutored
mind--untutored in the schools, yet disciplined by the necessities
around it. It is only in the comparison of minds of equal original
power, but of different and unequal mental discipline, that the result
of a thorough education reveal themselves most strikingly. The genius
that, partially educated, makes a fine bar-room politician, a good
county judge, a respectable member of the lower house in our State
Legislature, or an expert mechanic and shrewd farmer, when developed by
study and adorned with learning, rises to the foremost rank of men.
Great original