At a more advanced period during childhood and youth, we find the cultivation of the mind still depending upon the same principle. It is not enough that numerous objects be presented to the senses of the pupil; or that numerous words or sounds be made to vibrate in his ears; or even that he himself be made mechanically to utter them. This may be done, and yet the mind may remain perfectly inactive with respect to them all:--Nay, experience shews, that during such mechanical exercises, his mind may all the time be actively employed upon something else. There must therefore, not only be a hearing, or a reading of the words which convey an idea, but he must make the idea his own, by thinking it over again for himself. Hence it is that mental vigour is not acquired in proportion to the number of pages that the pupil is compelled to read; nor to the length of the discourses which are delivered in his hearing; nor to the multiplicity of objects placed before him. It is found entirely to depend upon his diligence in thinking for himself;--in reiterating in his own mind the ideas which he hears, or reads, or which are suggested to his mind by outward objects. This is still the same act of the mind which we have described in the infant, with this very important difference, however, that a large portion of his ideas is now suggested by _words_, instead of _things_; but it is the ideas, and not the words, that the mind lays hold of, and by which its powers are cultivated. When this act therefore is successfully forced upon a child in any of his school operations, the mind will be disciplined and improved;--but wherever it is not produced, however plausible or powerful the exercise may _appear_ to be, it will on scrutiny be found to be totally worthless in education,--a mere mechanical operation, in which, there being no mental exertion, there can be no mental culture.