Principles of Education, Intellectual, Moral, and Physical

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1820 edition. Excerpt: ... Insanity, melancholy, epilepsy, palsy, and a whole train of evils, are the attendants upon an undue, excessive, and long-continued excitement of the nervous sensibility; and it should be one leading object of education, among females in particular, so to direct their employments, their amusements, their diet and temperature, their waking and their sleeping hours, that their constitution may be hardened, their bodies and minds invigorated, and the best chance given them for meeting the unavoidable evils of life, so that these may promote their moral improvement, without inflicting upon them unnecessary sufferings, or destroying their power of usefulness. With this view, it may be laid down as a maxim in education, that whatever strongly excites the sensibility, without connecting it with active exertion, whatever, in short, increases the disposition to passive pleasure, is, and must be, injurious, --injurious to the health of the mind, and alike injurious to the health of the body. To make such sickly sensibility the subject of approbation is folly in the extreme. How the sensibility, in its natural state, should be turned into the channel of benevolence, we have endeavoured to show in Moral Education and the reader will find some judicious observations on the same topic in Mrs. More's Strictures. With respect to girls, what in general is most wanting is, to check their sensibility, or at least to give it its proper direction. With respect to boys, it may sometimes be necessary to excite their mental sensibility; but in general, where proper pains have been taken early in life, the benevolent affections will have sufficient vividness and vigour: and at any rate they should never be enlivened by stimulating the sensibility of the nervous..