Success in every educational effort depends upon “rendering our measures subservient to that spontaneous unfolding which all minds go through in their progress to maturity” (7: p. 111). This natural sequence in the spontaneous unfolding of faculties Pestalozzi endeavored to find empirically in observing the individual minds of children. Spencer, on the contrary, would search for it in the course of the race development. This idea of general parallelism between the development of the individual and the race had already been held by Rousseau and the Herbartians. But Spencer seems to be ignorant of this: he only cites Comte as having reached the same view, in believing “that, rightly conducted, the education of the individual must have a certain correspondence with the evolution of the race.” The fundamental principle of Spencerian education is to “carry each child’s mind through a process like that which the mind of humanity at large has gone through.” The principle rests on two grounds: one is the law of hereditary transmission of acquired tendencies or qualities, and the other the necessary relationships, common to all ages, between the mind and its objects. From the former “it follows that if there be an order in which the human race has mastered its various kinds of knowledge, there will arise in every child an aptitude to acquire these kinds of knowledge in the same order. So that, even if the order were intrinsically indifferent, it would facilitate education to lead the individual mind through the steps traversed by the general mind.” The latter teaches us that the order of racial development has not been intrinsically indifferent, but “was in its main outlines a necessary one”; that “as the mind of humanity, placed in the midst of the phenomena and striving to comprehend them, has, after endless comparisons, speculations, experiments, and theories, reached its present knowledge of each subject by a specific route, it may rationally be inferred that the relationship between the mind and phenomena is such as to prevent this knowledge from being reached in any other route; and that, as each child’s mind stands in the same relationship to phenomena, they can be accessible to it only through the same route” (7: p. 123). Thus, according to Spencer, anthropology or developmental sociology as well as psychology are necessary bases for education, for lack of which our school curricula are burdened with useless learning. “Humanity has progressed solely by self-instruction,” so we must develop ourselves also by self-education. This is the central plea of our self-made philosopher. He writes: