Education should not be a simple acquisition of knowledge, but a cultivation of living powers for the purpose of assuring the preference of the highest idea-forces.
After psychological selection, internal to the individual, we have to consider social selection, which takes place between different individuals, or between races or peoples. There are, for any race, physiological and psychological essential conditions of superiority. The race must first of all be physiologically strong, and here only are the ordinary laws of selection applicable, because we are in the domain of life. The sound mind can not exist except in the sound body; all the delicacies of mind are not worth as much to a race as health, vigor, and fertility. Even geniuses can not be born except of a strong race; the intellectual faculties can not be kept up long and advance, except among a vigorous people, and selection can not be efficient and produce the best by nature—a necessary condition of all progress—except in a fruitful and numerous and consequently strong race. Whenever, therefore, we overwork the mind at the expense of the body, we lower the physiological, and therefore the intellectual, level of the race; for generations physiologically weakened will sooner or later suffer the weakening, with their cerebral power, of their mental capacity. The laws of heredity are fatal: to bequeath impoverished organs to children is to prepare for what Pascal would call the stultification of the race at a more or less distant epoch. In the struggle and selection of peoples as recorded in history, when young and perhaps barbarian blood has not been infused with the aged body of a nation, it has fallen steadily, become sterilized, and disappeared or declined, while other peoples were ascending.
Instruction may, we think, lead to two kinds of results: either in dynamic effects—that is, augmentation of cerebral force—or in purely mechanical effects; like scientific and literary routine. In the former case, it acts upon heredity and can produce a hereditary transmission of cerebral force; in the second case, it does not act, or it acts mischievously to the exhaustion of the nervous system. It is intellectual force, not acquired knowledge, that is transmitted by heredity from one generation to another. Hence the criterion which we propose for estimating methods of education and teaching; if there is an augmentation of mental, moral, and æsthetic force, the method is good; if a simple storing up in the memory, the method is bad, for the brain is not a storehouse to be filled, but an organ to be fortified.
The physical and mental inconveniences of overwork may, therefore, very properly occupy attention at this time. Good scholars—those who wish to succeed in an examination or enter certain schools—are the ones who are overworked under our present systems; for the majority of pupils there is no overwork, but
