=The Early Career and Writings of Herbart.=--Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841) both by birth and by education possessed a remarkable mind, and was well calculated to become a profound educational philosopher. He came of intellectual and educated stock, and at the gymnasium and university displayed a keen interest in philosophy, Greek, and mathematics. Each of these subjects, too, was destined to play a part in his educational theories. Just before graduation (1797), however, Herbart left the university to become private tutor to the three sons of the governor of Interlaken, Switzerland, and during the next three years he obtained in this way a most valuable experience. The five extant reports that he made on the methods he used and on his pupils’ progress reveal thus early the germs of his elaborate system. The youthful pedagogue seems to have recognized the individual variations in children, and to have shown a due regard for the respective ages of his pupils. He also sought, by means of his favorite work, the _Odyssey_, to develop in them the elements of morality and a ‘many-sided interest.’ This early experience, rather than his ingenious system of psychology and metaphysics, which he afterward developed in explanation, was the real foundation of his pedagogy, and furnished him with the concrete examples of the characteristics and individualities of children that appear in all his later works. He ever afterward maintained that a careful study of the development of a few children was the best preparation for a pedagogical career, and eventually made an experience of this kind the main element in his training of teachers. [Sidenote: Interpreted and supplemented Pestalozzi’s principles.] [Sidenote: _The Science of Education._] While still in Switzerland, Herbart met Pestalozzi and was greatly attracted by the underlying principles of that reformer. He paid a visit to the institute at Burgdorf in 1799, and during the next two years, while at Bremen completing his interrupted university course, he undertook to advocate and render more scientific the thought of the Swiss educator. Here he wrote a sympathetic essay _On Pestalozzi’s Latest Writing, ‘How Gertrude Teaches Her Children_,’ and made his interpretation of _Pestalozzi’s Idea of an A B C of Observation_ (see p. 286). Next Herbart lectured on pedagogy at the University of Göttingen. The treatises he wrote there seem to have become more critical toward the Pestalozzian methods, and he no longer strives to conceal their vagueness and want of system. Sense perception, he holds with Pestalozzi, does supply the first elements of knowledge, but the material of the school course should be definitely arranged with reference to the general purpose of instruction, which is moral self-realization. This position on the moral aim of education he made especially explicit and complete in his work on _The Science of Education_ (1806). [Sidenote: Seminary and practice school.]