WHAT A COMPLETE HISTORY OF EDUCATION WOULD BE.--In writing an elementary history of pedagogy, I do not pretend to write a history of education. Pedagogy and education, like logic and science, or like rhetoric and eloquence, are different though analogous things. What would a complete history of education not include? It would embrace, in its vast developments, the entire record of the intellectual and moral culture of mankind at all periods and in all countries. It would be a _résumé_ of the life of humanity in its diverse manifestations, literary and scientific, religious and political. It would determine the causes, so numerous and so diverse, which act upon the characters of men, and which, modifying a common endowment, produce beings as different as are a contemporary of Pericles and a modern European, a Frenchman of the middle ages and a Frenchman subsequent to the Revolution. In fact, there is not only an education, properly so called, that which is given in schools and which proceeds from the direct action of teachers, but there is a natural education, which we receive without our knowledge or will, through the influence of the social environment in which we live. There are what a philosopher of the day has ingeniously called the _occult coadjutors_ of education,--climate, race, manners, social condition, political institutions, religious beliefs. If a man of the nineteenth century is very unlike a man of the seventeenth century, it is not merely because the first was educated in a Lycée of the University and the other in a college of the Jesuits; it is also because in the atmosphere in which they have been enveloped they have contracted different habits of mind and heart; it is because they have grown up under different laws, under a different social and political _régime_; because they have been nurtured by a different philosophy and a different religion. Upon that delicate and variable composition known as the human soul, how many forces which we do not suspect have left their imprint! How many unobserved and latent causes are involved in our virtues and in our faults! The conscious and determined influence of the teacher is not, perhaps, the most potent. In conjunction with him are at work, obscurely but effectively, innumerable agents, besides personal effort and what is produced by the original energy of the individual. We see what a history of education would be: a sort of philosophy of history, to which nothing would be foreign, and which would scrutinize in its most varied and most trifling causes, as well as in its most profound sources, the moral life of humanity.