eams of muscular energy and more vivid flashes of spiritual force!

As it is, we too nearly put the pupil's intellect asleep by our false
method; and he endures it because of his unnatural condition. He thinks
he 'gets on' with it; and in an imperfect way and degree does so.
Rarely, we find, does such a one get so far as into the 'conics;' and he
is not certain to be in the habit of reading reviews: if we were sure,
however, that he could comprehend and would meet with our simile, we
would say to him, that the tardy inclination up which he now plods
painfully, must, if graphically represented, be shown by an oblique line
_descending_, in fact, below the curve of his possibilities, more
rapidly even than it _ascends_ above the horizontal cutting through the
point of his setting out. True, with pupils who are spontaneously
active-minded from the first, or who at some point in their course
become positively awakened to brain-work, very much of the repressive
influence of imperfect methods is prevented or overcome. The number of
those so fortunate is doubtless small in the comparison. The few who
_would_ know, by a necessity as imperative as that by which they _must_
feed, and sleep, and probably toil with hands or head for subsistence,
are able to supplement many of the deficiencies, and supersede some
erroneous processes of our methods, by the play of their own powers of
investigation upon and about their subject. To these, a false method can
bring perplexity and delay, but not repression nor veritable
intellectual torpor.

We assert, then, that from a course or manner of instruction from which
those characteristics of true study--real work of the learner's
faculties, and a just consecution of steps--are largely omitted or
excluded, the best sort of intellectual education can not, in the
majority of instances, accrue. On the other hand, the method embodying
these characteristics must present that unity, certainty, and guiding
force hinted at in the outset. Concisely summed up, it is a method
proceeding throughout by discovery, or, as we may say, by _re-discovery_
of the truths and results to be acquired in each department of knowledge
undertaken by the learner. In the absence of the one true method of
intellectual advance, what should we expect but a confusion of clashing,
imperfect, or tentative processes of instruction? He who could, to-day,
ciceroned by some pedagogic Asmodeus, visit one hundred of our schools,
or lis