§ 38. In these essays I have done what I could to shew the best that each reformer has left us. In Rousseau’s case I have been obliged to confine myself to his words. “We attach far too much importance to words,” said Rousseau, and yet it is by words and words only that Rousseau still lives; and for the sake of his words we forget his deeds. Of the _Émile_ Mr. Morley says: “It is one of the seminal books in the history of literature. It cleared away the accumulation of clogging prejudices and obscure inveterate usage which made education one of the dark formalistic arts; and it admitted floods of light and air into tightly-closed nurseries and schoolrooms” (_Rousseau_, ij., 248). In the region of thought it set us free from the Renascence; and it did more than this, it announced the true nature of the teacher’s calling, “_Study the subject you have to act upon._” In these words we have the starting point of the “New Education.” From them the educator gets a fresh conception of his task. We grown people have received innumerable impressions which, forgotten as they are, have left their mark behind in our way of looking at things; and as we advance in life these experiences and associations cluster around everything to which we direct our attention, till in the end the past seems to dominate the present and to us “nothing is but what is not.” But to the child the present with its revelations and the future which will be “something more, a bringer of new things,” are all engrossing. It is our business as teachers to try to realize how the world looks from the child’s point of view. We may know a great many things and be ready to teach them, but we shall have little success unless we get another knowledge which we cannot teach and can learn only by patient observation, a knowledge of “the subject to be acted on,” of the mind of our pupils and what goes on there. When we set out on this path, which was first clearly pointed out by Rousseau, teaching becomes a new occupation with boundless possibilities and unceasing interest in it. Every teacher becomes a learner, for we have to study the minds of the young, their way of looking at things, their habits, their difficulties, their likes and dislikes, how they are stimulated to exertion, how they are discouraged, how one mood succeeds another. What we need we may well devote a lifetime to acquiring; it is a knowledge of the human mind with the object of influencing it. XV. BASEDOW AND THE PHILANTHROPINUM.