[6] A knowledge of the mental and moral condition of savages serves the invaluable purpose of showing what education has accomplished for the human race. There would be much less grumbling at the tax-gatherer if men could clearly conceive the condition of societies where no taxes are levied. To know what education has actually done we need to know the condition of societies unaffected by systematic education. Such a book as Lubbock’s _Origin of Civilization_ is a helpful introduction to the history of education. Whoever reads such a book carefully will be confronted with this problem: How is it that intellectual inertness, amounting almost to stupidity, is frequently the concomitant of an acute and persistent sense-training? Besides, savage tribes are historical illustrations of what has been produced on a large scale by “following Nature.” (P.) [7] There is an argument for caste in the modern fiction of a “beautiful economy of Nature,” which plants human beings in society as it does trees in the earth, and thus makes education consist in the action of environment upon man and in the reaction of man upon his environment. To support existence, man needs certain endowments; but the force of circumstances creates these very endowments. One man is predestined to be a Red Indian, another a Bushman, and still another an accountant; and in each case the function of education is to adapt the man to the place where Nature has fixed him. This modern justification of caste is adroitly worked out by Mr. Spencer in the first chapter of his _Education_. (P.) [8] Dittes, _Histoire de l’éducation et de l’instruction_, translated by Redolfi, 1880, p. 38. [9] Burnouf, _Introduction à l’histoire du Bouddhisme_, p. 252. [10] Dittes, p. 49. [11] _L’éducation et l’instruction chez les anciens Juifs_, by J. Simon, Paris, 1879, p. 16. [12] Levit. xix. 2. [13] Prov. xiii. 24. [14] Prov. xxiii. 13, 14. [15] Prov. xix. 18. [16] On similar grounds, Alexander declared that he owed more to Aristotle his teacher, than to Philip his father. (P.) [17] What were the methods followed in teaching reading and writing? We are told by Renan in his _Vie de Jésus_ that “Jesus doubtless learned to read and write according to the method of the East, which consists in putting into the hands of the child a book which he repeats in concert with his comrades till he knows it by heart.” [18] This statement needs qualifying. “In nearly all the families of high rank,” says the _Dictionnaire de Pédagogie_ (1^{ere} Partie, Article JUIFS), “the daughters spoke Greek. The Rabbins did not look with any favor upon the study of profane philosophy; but notwithstanding their protests, there were many devoted readers of Plato and Aristotle. It is said that among the pupils of the celebrated Gamaliel there were five hundred who studied the philosophy and the literature of Greece.” (P.)