Spencer’s next plea is for a freer education, as opposed to the prevailing one of coercion. The nineteenth century was the age for the triumph of individual freedom. The infallible authority of the Church, of monarchs, of the head of the family, were thrown down, one after another, through revolution and through development. Society became free and democratic in its every phase and department. Thus it was quite natural that the systematic revaluation of educational spirit and method, on the basis of changed conditions of society, should be reiterated by him in whom the individualism of the nineteenth-century culminates in respect to personality as well as philosophy. Liberty for the nature of the educated, for his spontaneous activities and enjoyments, encouragement of his self-instruction and independent thinking; none of the unnecessary and harmful restraints, authoritative commands and rote learning--this must be the principle of reform toward “modern modes of culture corresponding to our more liberal religious and political institutions.” Indeed, the above is nothing but the principle advocated so forcibly by Rousseau and Pestalozzi. The ice was already broken by them, and on the Continent, especially in Germany, their followers marched on far along the opened course. But England needed an apostle of her own before she would accept this gospel of psychological naturalism. And what had appeared in Rousseau as educational Romanticism, and in Pestalozzi as educational Humanitarianism, took in Spencer the form of what we might call educational Liberalism and Evolutionism. In his emotional motive, Spencer’s theory is based on his political Liberalism; in his intellectual ground, on his conception of psychic and social evolution. He writes: “Thus, then, we are on the highway toward the doctrine, long ago enunciated by Pestalozzi, that alike in its order and in its methods, education must conform to the natural process of mental evolution--that there is a certain sequence in which the faculties spontaneously develop, and a certain kind of knowledge which each requires during its development; and that it is for us to ascertain this sequence and supply this knowledge” (7: p. 110).