Now, among the forces expended, the most important to take into account is the time and attention of the pupil, the sum of his efforts, this or that quantity of mental energy; he has only a limited provision of this, and, not only is the proportion of this which the system consumes excessive, but, again, the application of it which the system enforces is not remunerative. The provision is exhausted and by a wrong use of it, with scarcely any profit.--In our lycées, the pupil sits at his task more than eleven hours a day; in a certain ecclesiastical college it is twelve hours, and, from the age of twelve years, through the necessity of being first in competition as well as for securing the greatest number of admissions through various examinations.--At the end of this secondary education there is a graduated scale of successive test, and first the baccalauréat. Fifty out of one hundred candidates fail and the examiners are indulgent.[6376] This proves, first of all, that the rejected have profited by their studies; but it likewise proves that the program of the examination is not adapted to the general run of minds, nor to the native faculties of the human majority; that many young men capable of learning by the opposite method learn nothing by this one; that education, such as it is, with the kind and greatness of the mental labor it imposes, with its abstract and theoretical style, is beyond the capacity of the average mind.--Particularly, during the last year of classical studies, the pupils have had to follow the philosophy lectures: in the time of M. Laromiquière, this might be useful to them; in the time of M. Cousin, the course, so far, did but little harm; at the present day, impregnated with neo-Kantism, it injects into minds of eighteen, seventeen, and even sixteen years, a metaphysical muddle as cumbersome as the scholasticism of the fourteenth century, terribly indigestible and unhealthy for the stomachs of novices; the swallow even to bursting and throw it off at the examination just as it comes, entirely raw for lack of the capacity to assimilate it.--Often, after failure at the baccalauréat, or on entering the preparatory or Grande Écoles, the young people go into, or are put into, what they call "a box" or an "oven" a preparatory internat, similar to the boxes in which silkworms are raised and to the ovens where the eggs are hatched. In more exact language it is a mechanical "gaveuse"[6377] in which they are daily crammed; through this constant, forced feeding, their real knowledge is not increased, nor their mental vigor; they are superficially fattened and, at the end of the year, or in eighteen months, they present themselves on the appointed day, with the artificial and momentary volume they need for that day, with the bulk, surface, polish and all the requisite externals, because these externals are the only ones that the examination verifies and imposes.[6378] Less