No language could bring out more clearly the inferiority of Locke’s standpoint to that of later thinkers. He makes little account of our common nature and wishes education to be based upon an estimate of the peculiarities of the individual pupil and of his social needs. And no one with an adequate notion of education could ever compare the young child to “white paper or wax.” Perhaps the development of an organism was a conception that could not have been formed without a great advance in physical science. Froebel who makes most of it learnt it from the scientific study of trees and from mineralogy. We need not then be surprised that Locke does not say, as Pestalozzi said a hundred years later, “Education instead of merely considering what is to be imparted to children ought to consider first what they already possess.” But if he had read Comenius he would have been saved from comparing the child to wax or white paper in the hands of the educator. Comenius had said: “Nature has implanted within us the seeds of learning, of virtue, and of piety. The object of education is to bring these seeds to perfection.” (_Supra_, p. 135.) This seems to me a higher conception than any that I meet with in Locke. § 15. But if our philosopher did not learn from Comenius he certainly learnt from Montaigne.[117] Indeed Dr. Arnstädt (_v. supra_, p. 69) has put him into a series of thinkers who have much in common. This succession is as follows: Rabelais, Montaigne, Locke, Rousseau; and, according to Mr. Browning’s division, they form a school by themselves. “Thinkers on education,” says Mr. Browning,[118] “are 1st those who wish to educate through the study of the classics, or 2nd those who wish to educate through the study of the works of Nature, or 3rd those who aim at an education independent of study and knowledge, and think rather of the training of character and the attaining to the Greek ideal, the man beautiful and good.” To the three schools Mr. Browning gives the names Humanist, Realist, and Naturalist, (“nos autres naturalistes,” Montaigne says). Locke he considers one of the principal writers of the “naturalistic” school, and says, Locke “has given a powerful bias to naturalistic education both in England and on the Continent for the last 200 years.” (_Ed. Theories_, p. 85.) This use of the word “naturalistic” seems to me somewhat misleading, or at best vague, and it is a word overworked already: so I should prefer to speak of the “developing” or “training” school. The classification itself certainly has its uses but it must be employed with caution. If caught up by those who have only an elementary acquaintance with the subject a class of persons apt to delight in such arrangements as an aid to memory, these divisions may easily prove a hindrance to light.