§ 28. A variety of influences had combined, as they combine still, to draw attention away from the importance of physical training; and by placing the child’s bodily organs and senses as the first things to be thought of in education, Rousseau did much to save us from the bad tradition of the Renascence. But there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in his philosophy, and whatever Rousseau might say, Émile could never be restrained from inquiring after them. Every boy will _think_; _i.e._, he will think _for himself_, however unable he may seem to think in the direction in which his instructors try to urge him. The wise elders who have charge of him must take this into account, and must endeavour to guide him into thinking modestly and thinking right. Then again, as soon as the child can speak, or before, the world of sensation becomes for him a world, not of sensations only, but also of sentiments, of sympathies, of affections, of consciousness of right and wrong, good and evil. All these feelings, it is true, may be affected by traditional prejudices. The air the child breathes may also contain much that is noxious; but we have no more power to exclude the atmosphere of the moral world than of the physical. All we can do is to take thought for fresh air in both cases. As for Rousseau’s notion that we can withdraw the child from the moral atmosphere, we see in it nothing but a proof how little he understood the problems he professed to solve.[145] § 29. Although the governor is to devote himself to a single child, Rousseau is careful to protest against over-direction. “You would stupify the child,” says he, “if you were constantly directing him, if you were always saying to him, ‘Come here! Go there! Stop! Do this! Don’t do that!’ If your head always directs his arms, his own head becomes useless to him.” (_Ém._, ij., 114). Here we have a warning which should not be neglected by those who maintain the _Lycées_ in France, and the ordinary private boarding-schools in England. In these schools a boy is hardly called upon to exercise his will all day long. He rises in the morning when he must; at meals he eats till he is obliged to stop; he is taken out for exercise like a horse; he has all his indoor work prescribed for him both as to time and quantity. In this kind of life he never has occasion to think or act for himself. He is therefore without self-reliance. So much care is taken to prevent his doing wrong, that he gets to think only of checks from without. He is therefore incapable of self-restraint. In the English public schools boys have much less supervision from their elders, and organise a great portion of their lives for themselves. This proves a better preparation for life after the school age; and most public schoolmasters would agree with Rousseau that “the lessons the boys get from each other in the playground are a hundred times more useful to them than the lessons given them in school: