In the above essay I have not treated of Locke as a methodizer; but he advocated teaching foreign languages _without grammar_, and he published “Æsop’s Fables in English and Latin, interlineary. For the benefit of those, who not having a master would learn either of these Tongues.” When I edited the _Thoughts_ for Pitt Press I did not know of this book or I should have mentioned it. XIV. JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU. (1712-1778). § 1. The great men whom we meet with in the history of education may be divided into two classes, thinkers and doers. There would seem no good reason why the thinker should not be great as a doer or the doer as a thinker; and yet we hardly find any records of men who have been successful both in investigating theory and directing practice. History tells us of first-rate practical schoolmasters like Sturm and the Jesuits; but they did not think out their own theory of their task: they accepted the current theory of their time. On the other hand, men who like Montaigne and Locke rejected the current theory and sought to establish a better by an appeal to reason were not practical schoolmasters. Whenever the thinker tries to turn his thought into action he has cause to be disappointed with the result. We saw this in the disastrous failure of Ratke; and even the books in which Comenius tried to work out his principles, the _Vestibulum, Janua_ and the rest, with the exception of the _Orbis Pictus_, were speedily forgotten. In the world of education as elsewhere it takes time to find for great thoughts the practice which gives effect to them. The course of great thoughts is in some ways like the course of great rivers. Most romantic and beautiful near their source, they are not most useful. They must leave the mountains in which they first appeared, and must flow not in cataracts but smoothly along the plain among the dwellings of common men before they can be turned to account in the every-day business of life. § 2. The eighteenth century was soon distinguished by boundless activity of thought; and this thought was directed mainly to a great work of destruction. Europe had outgrown the ideas of the Middle Age, and the framework of Society, which the Middle Age had bequeathed, had waxed old and was ready to vanish as soon as any strong force could be found to push it out of the way. As Matthew Arnold has described it— “It’s frame yet stood without a breach “When blood and warmth were fled; “And still it spake it’s wonted speech— “But every word was dead.”