Nothing to be Taken upon Authority.
Learning from the Pupil's own Necessities.
As the child's understanding matures, other important considerations demand that we choose his occupations with more care. As soon as he understands himself and all that relates to him well enough and broadly enough to discern what is to his advantage and what is becoming in him, he can appreciate the difference between work and play, and to regard the one solely as relaxation from the other. Objects really useful may then be included among his studies, and he will pay more attention to them than if amusement alone were concerned. The ever-present law of necessity early teaches us to do what we dislike, to escape evils we should dislike even more. Such is the use of foresight from which, judicious or injudicious, springs all the wisdom or all the unhappiness of mankind.
We all long for happiness, but to acquire it we ought first to know what it is. To the natural man it is as simple as his mode of life; it means health, liberty, and the necessaries of life, and freedom from suffering. The happiness of man as a moral being is another thing, foreign to the present question. I cannot too often repeat that only objects purely physical can interest children, especially those who have not had their vanity aroused and their nature corrupted by the poison of opinion.
When they provide beforehand for their own wants, their understanding is somewhat developed, and they are beginning to learn the value of time. We ought then by all means to accustom and to direct them to its employment to useful ends, these being such as are useful at their age and readily understood by them. The subject of moral order and the usages of society should not yet be presented, because children are not in a condition to understand such things. To force their attention upon things which, as we vaguely tell them, will be for their good, when they do not know what this good means, is foolish. It is no less foolish to assure them that such things will benefit them when grown; for they take no interest in this supposed benefit, which they cannot understand.
Let the child take nothing for granted because some one says it is so. Nothing is good to him but what he feels to be good. You think it far sighted to push him beyond his understanding of things, but you are mistaken. For the sake of arming him with weapons he does not know how to use, you take from him one universal among men, common sense: you teach him to allow himself always to be led, never to be more than a machine in the hands of others. If you will have him docile while he is young, you will make him a credulous dupe when he is a man. You are continually saying to him, "All I require of you is for your own good, but you cannot understand it yet. What does it matter to me whether you do what I require or not? You are doing it entirely for your own sake." With such fine speeches you are paving the way for some kind of trickster or fool,—some visionary babbler or charlatan,—who will entrap him or persuade him to adopt his own folly.
A man may be well acquainted with things whose utility a child cannot comprehend; but is it right, or even possible, for a child to learn what a man ought to know? Try to teach the child all that is useful to him now, and you will keep him busy all the time. Why would you injure the studies suitable to him at his age by giving him those of an age he may never attain? "But," you say, "will there be time for learning what he ought to know when the time to use it has already come?" I do not know; but I am sure that he cannot learn it sooner. For experience and feeling are our real teachers, and we never understand thoroughly what is best for us except from the circumstances of our case. A child knows that he will one day be a man. All the ideas of manhood that he can understand give us opportunities of teaching him; but of those he cannot understand he should remain in absolute ignorance. This entire book is only a continued demonstration of this principle of education.
Finding out the East. The Forest of Montmorency.
I do not like explanatory lectures; young people pay very little attention to them, and seldom remember them. Things! things! I cannot repeat often enough that we attach too much importance to words. Our babbling education produces nothing but babblers.
Suppose that while we are studying the course of the sun, and the manner of finding where the east is, Émile all at once interrupts me, to ask, "What is the use of all this?" What an opportunity for a fine discourse! How many things I could tell him of in answering this question, especially if anybody were by to listen! I could mention the advantages of travel and of commerce; the peculiar products of each climate; the manners of different nations; the use of the calendar; the calculation of seasons in agriculture; the art of navigation, and the manner of travelling by sea, following the true course without knowing where we are. I might take up politics, natural history, astronomy, even ethics and international law, by way of giving my pupil an exalted idea of all these sciences, and a strong desire to learn them. When I have done, the boy will not have understood a single idea out of all my pedantic display. He would like to ask again, "What is the use of finding out where the east is?" but dares not, lest I might be angry. He finds it more to his interest to pretend to understand what he has been compelled to hear. This is not at all an uncommon case in superior education, so-called.
But our Émile, brought up more like a rustic, and carefully taught to think very slowly, will not listen to all this. He will run away at the first word he does not understand, and play about the room, leaving me to harangue all by myself. Let us find a simpler way; this scientific display does him no good.
We were noticing the position of the forest north of Montmorency, when he interrupted me with the eager question, "What is the use of knowing that?" "You may be right," said I; "we must take time to think about it; and if there is really no use in it, we will not try it again, for we have enough to do that is of use." We went at something else, and there was no more geography that day.
The next morning I proposed a walk before breakfast. Nothing could have pleased him better; children are always ready to run about, and this boy had sturdy legs of his own. We went into the forest, and wandered over the fields; we lost ourselves, having no idea where we were; and when we intended to go home, could not find our way. Time passed; the heat of the day came on; we were hungry. In vain did we hurry about from place to place; we found everywhere nothing but woods, quarries, plains, and not a landmark that we knew. Heated, worn out with fatigue, and very hungry, our running about only led us more and more astray. At last we sat down to rest and to think the matter over. Émile, like any other child, did not think about it; he cried. He did not know that we were near the gate of Montmorency, and that only a narrow strip of woodland hid it from us. But to him this narrow strip of woodland was a whole forest; one of his stature would be lost to sight among bushes.
After some moments of silence I said to him, with a troubled air,
"My dear Émile, what shall we do to get away from here?"
ÉMILE. [In a profuse perspiration, and crying bitterly.] I don't know. I'm tired. I'm hungry. I'm thirsty. I can't do anything.
JEAN JACQUES. Do you think I am better off than you, or that I would mind crying too, if crying would do for my breakfast? There is no use in crying; the thing is, to find our way. Let me see your watch; what time is it?
ÉMILE. It is twelve o'clock, and I haven't had my breakfast.
JEAN JACQUES. That is true. It is twelve o'clock, and I haven't had my breakfast, either.
ÉMILE. Oh, how hungry you must be!
JEAN JACQUES. The worst of it is that my dinner will not come here to find me. Twelve o'clock? it was just this time yesterday that we noticed where Montmorency is. Could we see where it is just as well from this forest?
ÉMILE. Yea; but yesterday we saw the forest, and we cannot see the town from this place.
JEAN JACQUES. That is a pity. I wonder if we could find out where it is without seeing it?
ÉMILE. Oh, my dear friend!
JEAN JACQUES. Did not we say that this forest is—
ÉMILE. North of Montmorency.
JEAN JACQUES. If that is true, Montmorency must be—
ÉMILE. South of the forest.
JEAN JACQUES. There is a way of finding out the north at noon.
ÉMILE. Yes; by the direction of our shadows.
JEAN JACQUES. But the south?
ÉMILE. How can we find that?
JEAN JACQUES. The south is opposite the north.
ÉMILE. That is true; all we have to do is to find the side opposite the shadows. Oh, there's the south! there's the south! Montmorency must surely be on that side; let us look on that side.
JEAN JACQUES. Perhaps you are right. Let us take this path through the forest.
ÉMILE. [Clapping his hands, with a joyful shout.] Oh, I see Montmorency; there it is, just before us, in plain sight. Let us go to our breakfast, our dinner; let us run fast. Astronomy is good for something!
Observe that even if he does not utter these last words, they will be in his mind. It matters little so long as it is not I who utter them. Rest assured that he will never in his life forget this day's lesson. Now if I had only made him imagine it all indoors, my lecture would have been entirely forgotten by the next day. We should teach as much as possible by actions, and say only what we cannot do.
Robinson Crusoe.
In his legitimate preference for teaching by the eye and hand and by real things, and in his aversion to the barren and erroneous method of teaching from books alone, Rousseau, constantly carried away by the passionate ardor of his nature, rushes into an opposite extreme, and exclaims, "I hate books; they only teach us to talk about what we do not understand." Then, checked in the full tide of this declamation by his own good sense, he adds:—
Since we must have books, there is one which, to my mind, furnishes the finest of treatises on education according to nature. My Émile shall read this book before any other; it shall for a long time be his entire library, and shall always hold an honorable place. It shall be the text on which all our discussions of natural science shall be only commentaries. It shall be a test for all we meet during our progress toward a ripened judgment, and so long as our taste is unspoiled, we shall enjoy reading it. What wonderful book is this? Aristotle? Pliny? Buffon? No; it is "Robinson Crusoe."
The story of this man, alone on his island, unaided by his fellow-men, without any art or its implements, and yet providing for his own preservation and subsistence, even contriving to live in what might be called comfort, is interesting to persons of all ages. It may be made delightful to children in a thousand ways. Thus we make the desert island, which I used at the outset for a comparison, a reality.
This condition is not, I grant, that of man in society; and to all appearance Émile will never occupy it; but from it he ought to judge of all others. The surest way to rise above prejudice, and to judge of things in their true relations, is to put ourselves in the place of an isolated man, and decide as he must concerning their real utility.
Disencumbered of its less profitable portions, this romance from its beginning, the shipwreck of Crusoe on the island, to its end, the arrival of the vessel which takes him away, will yield amusement and instruction to Émile during the period now in question. I would have him completely carried away by it, continually thinking of Crusoe's fort, his goats, and his plantations. I would have him learn, not from books, but from real things, all he would need to know under the same circumstances. He should be encouraged to play Robinson Crusoe; to imagine himself clad in skins, wearing a great cap and sword, and all the array of that grotesque figure, down to the umbrella, of which he would have no need. If he happens to be in want of anything, I hope he will contrive something to supply its place. Let him look carefully into all that his hero did, and decide whether any of it was unnecessary, or might have been done in a better way. Let him notice Crusoe's mistakes and avoid them under like circumstances. He will very likely plan for himself surroundings like Crusoe's,—a real castle in the air, natural at his happy age when we think ourselves rich if we are free and have the necessaries of life. How useful this hobby might be made if some man of sense would only suggest it and turn it to good account! The child, eager to build a storehouse for his island, would be more desirous to learn than his master would be to teach him. He would be anxious to know everything he could make use of, and nothing besides. You would not need to guide, but to restrain him.
Here Rousseau insists upon giving a child some trade, no matter what his station in life may be; and in 1762 he uttered these prophetic words, remarkable indeed, when we call to mind the disorders at the close of that century:—
You trust to the present condition of society, without reflecting that it is subject to unavoidable revolutions, and that you can neither foresee nor prevent what is to affect the fate of your own children. The great are brought low, the poor are made rich, the king becomes a subject. Are the blows of fate so uncommon that you can expect to escape them? We are approaching a crisis, the age of revolutions. Who can tell what will become of you then? All that man has done man may destroy. No characters but those stamped by nature are ineffaceable; and nature did not make princes, or rich men, or nobles.
This advice was followed. In the highest grades of society it became the fashion to learn some handicraft. It is well known that Louis XVI. was proud of his skill as a locksmith. Among the exiles of a later period, many owed their living to the trade they had thus learned.
To return to Émile: Rousseau selects for him the trade of a joiner, and goes so far as to employ him and his tutor in that kind of labor for one or more days of every week under a master who pays them actual wages for their work.
Judging from Appearances. The Broken Stick.
If I have thus far made myself understood, you may see how, with regular physical exercise and manual labor, I am at the same time giving my pupil a taste for reflection and meditation. This will counterbalance the indolence which might result from his indifference to other men and from the dormant state of his passions. He must work like a peasant and think like a philosopher, or he will be as idle as a savage. The great secret of education is to make physical and mental exercises serve as relaxation for each other. At first our pupil had nothing but sensations, and now he has ideas. Then he only perceived, but now he judges. For from comparison of many successive or simultaneous sensations, with the judgments based on them, arises a kind of mixed or complex sensation which I call an idea.
The different manner in which ideas are formed gives each mind its peculiar character. A mind is solid if it shape its ideas according to the true relations of things; superficial, if content with their apparent relations; accurate, if it behold things as they really are; unsound, if it understand them incorrectly; disordered, if it fabricate imaginary relations, neither apparent nor real; imbecile, if it do not compare ideas at all. Greater or less mental power in different men consists in their greater or less readiness in comparing ideas and discovering their relations.
From simple as well as complex sensations, we form judgments which I will call simple ideas. In a sensation the judgment is wholly passive, only affirming that we feel what we feel. In a preception or idea, the judgment is active; it brings together, compares, and determines relations not determined by the senses. This is the only point of difference, but it is important. Nature never deceives us; it is always we who deceive ourselves.
I see a child eight years old helped to some frozen custard. Without knowing what it is, he puts a spoonful in his mouth, and feeling the cold sensation, exclaims, "Ah, that burns!" He feels a keen sensation; he knows of none more so than heat, and thinks that is what he now feels. He is of course mistaken; the chill is painful, but does not burn him; and the two sensations are not alike, since, after encountering both, we never mistake one for the other. It is not, therefore, the sensation which misleads him, but the judgment based on it.
It is the same when any one sees for the first time a mirror or optical apparatus; or enters a deep cellar in mid-winter or midsummer; or plunges his hand, either very warm or very cold, into tepid water; or rolls a little ball between two of his fingers held crosswise. If he is satisfied with describing what he perceives or feels, keeping his judgment in abeyance, he cannot be mistaken. But when he decides upon appearances, his judgment is active; it compares, and infers relations it does not perceive; and it may then be mistaken. He will need experience to prevent or correct such mistakes. Show your pupil clouds passing over the moon at night, and he will think that the moon is moving in an opposite direction, and that the clouds are at rest. He will the more readily infer that this is the case, because he usually sees small objects, not large ones, in motion, and because the clouds seem to him larger than the moon, of whose distance he has no idea. When from a moving boat he sees the shore at a little distance, he makes the contrary mistake of thinking that the earth moves. For, unconscious of his own motion, the boat, the water, and the entire horizon seem to him one immovable whole of which the moving shore is only one part.
The first time a child sees a stick half immersed in water, it seems to be broken. The sensation is a true one, and would be, even if we did not know the reason for this appearance. If therefore you ask him what he sees, he answers truly, "A broken stick," because he is fully conscious of the sensation of a broken stick. But when, deceived by his judgment, he goes farther, and after saying that he sees a broken stick, he says again that the stick really is broken, he says what is not true; and why? Because his judgment becomes active; he decides no longer from observation, but from inference, when he declares as a fact what he does not actually perceive; namely, that touch would confirm the judgment based upon sight alone.
The best way of learning to judge correctly is the one which tends to simplify our experience, and enables us to make no mistakes even when we dispense with experience altogether. It follows from this that after having long verified the testimony of one sense by that of another, we must further learn to verify the testimony of each sense by itself without appeal to any other. Then each sensation at once becomes an idea, and an idea in accordance with the truth. With such acquisitions I have endeavored to store this third period of human life.
To follow this plan requires a patience and a circumspection of which few teachers are capable, and without which a pupil will never learn to judge correctly. For example: if, when he is misled by the appearance of a broken stick, you endeavor to show him his mistake by taking the stick quickly out of the water, you may perhaps undeceive him, but what will you teach him? Nothing he might not have learned for himself. You ought not thus to teach him one detached truth, instead of showing him how he may always discover for himself any truth. If you really mean to teach him, do not at once undeceive him. Let Émile and myself serve you for example.
In the first place, any child educated in the ordinary way would, to the second of the two questions above mentioned, answer, "Of course the stick is broken." I doubt whether Émile would give this answer. Seeing no need of being learned or of appearing learned, he never judges hastily, but only from evidence. Knowing how easily appearances deceive us, as in the case of perspective, he is far from finding the evidence in the present case sufficient. Besides, knowing from experience that my most trivial question always has an object which he does not at once discover, he is not in the habit of giving heedless answers. On the contrary, he is on his guard and attentive; he looks into the matter very carefully before replying. He never gives me an answer with which he is not himself satisfied, and he is not easily satisfied. Moreover, he and I do not pride ourselves on knowing facts exactly, but only on making few mistakes. We should be much more disconcerted if we found ourselves satisfied with an insufficient reason than if we had discovered none at all. The confession, "I do not know," suits us both so well, and we repeat it so often, that it costs neither of us anything. But whether for this once he is careless, or avoids the difficulty by a convenient "I do not know," my answer is the same: "Let us see; let us find out."
The stick, half-way in the water, is fixed in a vertical position. To find out whether it is broken, as it appears to be, how much we must do before we take it out of the water, or even touch it! First, we go entirely round it, and observe that the fracture goes around with us. It is our eye alone, then, that changes it; and a glance cannot move things from place to place.
Secondly, we look directly down the stick, from the end outside of the water; then the stick is no longer bent, because the end next our eye exactly hides the other end from us. Has our eye straightened the stick?
Thirdly, we stir the surface of the water, and see the stick bend itself into several curves, move in a zig-zag direction, and follow the undulations of the water. Has the motion we gave the water been enough thus to break, to soften, and to melt the stick?
Fourth, we draw off the water and see the stick straighten itself as fast as the water is lowered. Is not this more than enough to illustrate the fact and to find out the refraction? It is not then true that the eye deceives us, since by its aid alone we can correct the mistakes we ascribe to it.
Suppose the child so dull as not to understand the result of these experiments. Then we must call touch to the aid of sight. Instead of taking the stick out of the water, leave it there, and let him pass his hand from one end of it to the other. He will feel no angle; the stick, therefore, is not broken.
You will tell me that these are not only judgments but formal reasonings. True; but do you not see that, as soon as the mind has attained to ideas, all judgment is reasoning? The consciousness of any sensation is a proposition, a judgment. As soon, therefore, as we compare one sensation with another, we reason. The art of judging and the art of reasoning are precisely the same.
If, from the lesson of this stick, Émile does not understand the idea of refraction, he will never understand it at all. He shall never dissect insects, or count the spots on the sun; he shall not even know what a microscope or a telescope is.
Your learned pupils will laugh at his ignorance, and will not be very far wrong. For before he uses these instruments, I intend he shall invent them; and you may well suppose that this will not be soon done.
This shall be the spirit of all my methods of teaching during this period. If the child rolls a bullet between two crossed fingers, I will not let him look at it till he is otherwise convinced that there is only one bullet there.
Result. The Pupil at the Age of Fifteen.
I think these explanations will suffice to mark distinctly the advance my pupil's mind has hitherto made, and the route by which he has advanced. You are probably alarmed at the number of subjects I have brought to his notice. You are afraid I will overwhelm his mind with all this knowledge. But I teach him rather not to know them than to know them. I am showing him a path to knowledge not indeed difficult, but without limit, slowly measured, long, or rather endless, and tedious to follow. I am showing him how to take the first steps, so that he may know its beginning, but allow him to go no farther.
Obliged to learn by his own effort, he employs his own reason, not that of another. Most of our mistakes arise less within ourselves than from others; so that if he is not to be ruled by opinion, he must receive nothing upon authority. Such continual exercise must invigorate the mind as labor and fatigue strengthen the body.
The mind as well as the body can bear only what its strength will allow. When the understanding fully masters a thing before intrusting it to the memory, what it afterward draws therefrom is in reality its own. But if instead we load the memory with matters the understanding has not mastered, we run the risk of never finding there anything that belongs to it.
Émile has little knowledge, but it is really his own; he knows nothing by halves; and the most important fact is that he does not now know things he will one day know; that many things known to other people he never will know; and that there is an infinity of things which neither he nor any one else ever will know. He is prepared for knowledge of every kind; not because he has so much, but because he knows how to acquire it; his mind is open to it, and, as Montaigne says, if not taught, he is at least teachable. I shall be satisfied if he knows how to find out the "wherefore" of everything he knows and the "why" of everything he believes. I repeat that my object is not to give him knowledge, but to teach him how to acquire it at need; to estimate it at its true value, and above all things, to love the truth. By this method we advance slowly, but take no useless steps, and are not obliged to retrace a single one.
Émile understands only the natural and purely physical sciences. He does not even know the name of history, or the meaning of metaphysics and ethics. He knows the essential relations between men and things, but nothing of the moral relations between man and man. He does not readily generalize or conceive of abstractions. He observes the qualities common to certain bodies without reasoning about the qualities themselves. With the aid of geometric figures and algebraic signs, he knows something of extension and quantity. Upon these figures and signs his senses rest their knowledge of the abstractions just named. He makes no attempt to learn the nature of things, but only such of their relations as concern himself. He estimates external things only by their relation to him; but this estimate is exact and positive, and in it fancies and conventionalities have no share. He values most those things that are most useful to him; and never deviating from this standard, is not influenced by general opinion.
Émile is industrious, temperate, patient, steadfast, and full of courage. His imagination, never aroused, does not exaggerate dangers. He feels few discomforts, and can bear pain with fortitude, because he has never learned to contend with fate. He does not yet know exactly what death is, but, accustomed to yield to the law of necessity, he will die when he must, without a groan or a struggle. Nature can do no more at that moment abhorred by all. To live free and to have little to do with human affairs is the best way of learning how to die.
In a word, Émile has every virtue which affects himself. To have the social virtues as well, he only needs to know the relations which make them necessary; and this knowledge his mind is ready to receive. He considers himself independently of others, and is satisfied when others do not think of him at all. He exacts nothing from others, and never thinks of owing anything to them. He is alone in human society, and depends solely upon himself. He has the best right of all to be independent, for he is all that any one can be at his age. He has no errors but such as a human being must have; no vices but those from which no one can warrant himself exempt. He has a sound constitution, active limbs, a fair and unprejudiced mind, a heart free and without passions. Self-love, the first and most natural of all, has scarcely manifested itself at all. Without disturbing any one's peace of mind he has led a happy, contented life, as free as nature will allow. Do you think a youth who has thus attained his fifteenth year has lost the years that have gone before?
[1] This might be carried too far, and is to be admitted with some reservations. Ignorance is never alone; its companions are always error and presumption. No one is so certain that he knows, as he who knows nothing; and prejudice of all kinds is the form in which our ignorance is clothed.
[2] The armillary sphere is a group of pasteboard or copper circles, to illustrate the orbits of the planets, and their position in relation to the earth, which is represented by a small wooden ball.
[3] The imaginary circles traced on the celestial sphere, and figured in the armillary sphere by metallic circles, are called culures.
[4] Rousseau here informs his readers that even these reproaches are expected, he having dictated them beforehand to the mountebank; all this scene has been arranged to deceive the child. What a refinement of artifice in this passionate lover of the natural!