Still farther, educational activity may manifest itself in different ways, either in doctrines and theories or in methods and practical applications. The historian of pedagogy has not merely to make known the general conceptions which the philosophers of education have in turn submitted to the approbation of men. If he wishes to make his work complete, he must give a detailed account of what has been accomplished, and make an actual study of the educational establishments which have been founded at different periods by those who have organized instruction. Pedagogy is a complex affair, and there are many ways of writing its history. One of these which has been too little considered, and which would surely be neither the least interesting nor the least fruitful, would consist in studying, not the great writers on education and their doctrines, not the great teachers and their methods, but pupils themselves. If it were possible to relate in minute detail, supposing that history would furnish us the necessary information on this point, the manner in which a great or a good man has been educated; if an analysis could be made of the different influences which have been involved in the formation of talent or in the development of virtue in the case of remarkable individuals; if it were possible, in a word, to reproduce through exact and personal biographies the toil, the slow elaboration whence have issued at different periods solidity of character, rectitude of purpose, and minds endowed with judicial fairness; the result would be a useful and eminently practical work, something analogous to what a history of logic would be, in which there should be set forth not the abstract rules and the formal laws for the search after truth, but the successful experiments and the brilliant discoveries which have little by little constituted the patrimony of science. This perhaps would be the best of logics because it is real and in action; and also the best of treatises on pedagogy, since there might be learned from it, not general truths, which are often of difficult application and of uncertain utility, but practical means and living methods whose happy and efficient applications would be seen in actual use.