EDUCATION THE NURTURE OF THE MIND.*

I TRUST, Mr. President, that I shall not be thought an intruder, in rising to take some part in this interesting debate. It is made the duty of the Board of Education, of which I have the honor to be officially a member, to promote, as far as practicable, the objects for which the Board was established, by a participation in these meetings. Even if no such call of duty warranted me, in thus presenting myself before you, at this time, I am persuaded that this is a cause in which you would not reject the services of a volunteer, however humble.

I do not rise however, sir, to attempt to convey any information, on the great subject of Education. I speak in the presence of many practical persons, before whom it would be arrogant, in me, to attempt to use the language of authority, on this subject. There is, however, a single illustration of the nature of education, which constantly presents itself to my mind, and which I deem so important, as to warrant me in dwelling, for a few moments, upon it, however obvious and trite the general proposition which I would endeavor to establish.

The point, sir, to which I refer, is the importance of education, as the means by which the mind of man, or rather let me say, by which man himself, considered as an intellectual and moral existence, attains his formation and growth.

There are many very striking truths, which, on account of their familiarity, fail to affect us as powerfully as they ought. The unusual and the irregular arouse our attention; the habitual passes before us, surrounds us, dwells within us, and we do not notice it, do not

*Substance of Remarks, made at the County Convention of the friends of Education, held at Tisbury, on the island of Martha's Vineyard, August 16, 1838.

reflect upon it. The multitude runs to gaze at any departure from the laws of Nature, but casts a vacant eye on the wonder and beauty of its daily miracles. How little are we affected by the divine faculty of vision, by which the entire external world is successively pictured, as it were, upon the everchanging tapestry which hangs around the inner chambers of the soul! But, if it is reported that an individual can see with the back of his head or the pit of his stomach, the community is alive at the tidings. Men, who have been blessed, all their lives, with the glorious gift of speech; who have been accustomed, without reflection, by a few slight movements of the lips and tongue, to give a vibration to the air, which carries intelligence, expresses the finest shades of thought, awakens sympathy and kindles passion in other minds; men, who have seen their little children, they know not how, without books and without a teacher, acquire this heavenly endowment of articulate speech,—will travel miles, to behold the performance of a ventriloquist; and think they have made a good bargain, when they have paid a dollar, to hear him throw a voice into a chest of drawers.

I am not disposed, sir, to play the austere censor, and to quarrel with this eager passion for novelty. It leads, I am aware, if well directed, to improvement. It nourishes the spirit of observation. But I would have it accompanied with the habit of sober and thoughtful reflection on the world of greater wonders, which surrounds us, which we carry about within us, in the frame of our being and the constitution of our nature. The truly wonderful is not that which breaks out into astonishing novelties and fantastic peculiarities; it is the inimitable contrivance and the miraculous proportion, resource, and harmony, of our existence. Imagination and romance, in their wildest freaks, credulity, in its greediest cravings for excitement, has n er caught at any thing of monstrous or fairy crea which parallels those quiet mysteries of our na which make up the the daily round of

The most important of these mysterics (humanly speaking) is, the formation and growth of the mind of man, considered as a real substantive being; and the point of view, in which I have wished to present the subject of education to you, on this occasion, is that of being, in ordinary cases, the appointed means of the formation and growth of this invisible and mysterious substance, which we call the mind: that formless essence, which gives life to all the forms of humanity; that unseen thing, which, through the animated eye, beholds all the qualities of external Nature; that undying thing, which, with perishable organs, and failing limbs, and fainting senses, erects its perennial monuments on earth, and climbs the paths of an immortality, which shall endure, when the earth, and all that encumbers and adorns it, shall pass away. In a word, I could wish, were it possible for me to do it, to present to the understandings of those whom I have the honor to address, the impression, which dwells upon my own, of the nature and importance of education, considered as the name we give to the care and nourishment of our minds.

What labor and pains are not bestowed to clothe, and feed, and shelter, the body; to shield it from blight and disease; to rear it up into a healthy and well-proportioned frame of vigorous humanity! Now, suppose it were possible, (and, to some extent, it is possible,) that it were even quite easy, without actually starving a human creature to death, to keep him in being, for the usual term of existence, without that supply of accustomed food, which is necessary for health, strength, and comeliness. Suppose there was such a thing as a community of men, capable of subsisting and continuing their race, but who, from poverty, indolence, or the act of God; for want of means, or knowledge to use them; should pass through life, without any developement of the great vital powers; should just be alive, and no more; who should, in the language of Scripture, have eyes but see not, ears but hear not; their senses all tor

pid; their limbs feeble, nerveless, incapable of muscular movement; the entire system languid, pining, cataleptic; all but lifeless, and yet alive. What should we think of such bodies, of such existence, of such beings? What should we think of such fatuity and madness, if they knowingly and designedly reduced themselves, and kept themselves in such a state, living as they do on the fertile earth, lords of the subject animals, and able, if they were pleased, to seat themselves, every day, at the bountiful table of Providence, and receive nourishment, and health, and strength, from its liberal supplies?

Now, sir, I am coming to the point, which I wish to illustrate; and it is this:-What none but a madman would knowingly do to his body; what no known community of men, raised above the abjectest level of savage life, and placed on a soil and in a climate that yield a competent supply of wholesome food, has ever done to the perishing corporeal frame; what no father, in whose bosom the last drop of the milk of human kindness and parental love was not dried up, would do to his child;—that is done and permitted to be done, without scruple and without rebuke, to the immortal intellect: and this, in enlightened lands and in Christian communities, composed of men who know that they have not only minds to enlighten, but souls to save. say the monstrous and unnatural cruelty, never practised to himself or another, as far as the body is concerned, unless by an idiot or a savage, is daily, constantly, remorselessly, practised upon that which excels the body, by all the difference between mind and matter, spirit and clay, heaven and earth.

The body is not starved, except in cases of cruel necessity. Not starved? it is nourished and pampered, by whatever can provoke or satisfy the appetite; the healthy child is nursed and nourished up into the healthy man; the tiny fingers, which now weary with the weight of the rattle, will be trained up to a grasp of steel; and the little limbs will learn to stretch, unfatigued, over plain and mountain, while the inward intellectual being

will be allowed to remain unnourished, neglected, and stinted. A reason, capable of being nurtured into the vigorous apprehension of all truth, will remain uninformed and torpid, at the mercy of low prejudice and error; a capacity, which might have explored Nature, mastered its secrets, and weighed the orbs of heaven in the golden scales of science, shall pass through life, clouded with superstition, ignorant of the most familiar truth, unconscious of its own heavenly nature. There is the body of a man, sound, athletic, well-proportioned; but the mind within is puny, dwarfed, and starved. Could we perceive it with our bodily sight, we should pity it. Could the natural eye measure the contrast between a fully-developed and harmoniously-proportioned intellect, on the one hand, and a blighted, stinted, distorted, sickly, understanding, on the other, even as it compares a diseased and shrivelled form with the manly expansion and vigorous developement of health, we should be moved with compassion; but, so completely do we allow ourselves to be the slaves of material sense, that many a parent, who would feel himself incapable of depriving a child of a single meal, will let him grow up, without ever approaching the banquet of useful, quickening knowledge.

I know, sir, these are figures of speech. The mind does not grow by food, nor languish for the want of it; but these similitudes are the only means we have, of discoursing of the intellectual nature. I know not to what else we can better liken the strong appetence of the mind for improvement, than to a hunger and thirst after knowledge and truth; nor how we can better describe the province of education, than to say, it does that for the intellect, which is done for the body, when it receives the care and nourishment which are necessary for its growth, health, and strength. From this comparison, I think I derive new views of the importance of education. It is now a solemn duty, a tender, sacred trust. What! sir, feed a child's body, and let his soul hunger! pamper his limbs, and starve his faculties! Plant the earth,