It is only as we recognise our limitations that our work becomes effective: when we see definitely what we are to do, what we can do, and what we cannot do, we set to work with confidence and courage; we have an end in view, and we make our way intelligently towards that end, and a _way to an end_ is _method_. It rests with parents not only to give their children birth into the life of intelligence and moral power, but to sustain the higher life which they have borne. Now that life, which we call education, receives only one kind of sustenance; it grows upon _ideas_. You may go through years of so-called “education” without getting a single vital idea; and that is why many a well-fed body carries about a feeble, starved intelligence; and no society for the prevention of cruelty to children cries shame on the parents. Only the other day we heard of a girl of fifteen who had spent two years at a school without taking part in a single lesson, and this by the express desire of her mother, who wished all her time and all her pains to be given to “fancy needlework.” This, no doubt, is a survival (not of the fittest), but it is possible to pass even the Universities’ Local Examinations with credit, without ever having experienced that vital stir which marks the inception of an idea; and, if we have succeeded in escaping this disturbing influence, why we have “finished our education” when we leave school; we shut up our books and our minds, and remain pigmies in the dark forest of our own dim world of thought and feeling. What is an idea? A live thing of the mind, according to the older philosophers, from Plato to Bacon, from Bacon to Coleridge. We say of an idea that it strikes us, impresses us, seizes us, takes possession of us, rules us; and our common speech is, as usual, truer to fact than the conscious thought which it expresses. We do not in the least exaggerate in ascribing this sort of action and power to an idea. We form an _ideal_--a, so to speak, embodied idea--and our ideal exercises the very strongest formative influence upon us. Why do you devote yourself to this pursuit, that cause? “Because twenty years ago such and such an idea _struck_ me,” is the sort of history which might be given of every purposeful life--every life devoted to the working out of an idea. Now is it not marvellous that, recognising as we do the potency of an idea, both the word and the conception it covers enter so little into our thought of education? Coleridge brings the conception of an “idea” within the sphere of the scientific thought of to-day; not as that thought is expressed in _Psychology_--a term which he himself launched upon the world with an apology for it as an _insolens verbum_,[1] but in that science of the correlation and interaction of mind and brain, which is at present rather clumsily expressed in such terms as “mental physiology” and “psycho-physiology.”