IV. LIFE AND EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM OF PESTALOZZI.

BY CARL VON RAUMER,

(Continued from VOL. III., p. 416.)

For seventeen years after the publication of Leonard and Gertrude, Pestalozzi continued to drag on his needy and depressed existence at Neuhof, where he spent altogether thirty years. Of his outward life during those seventeen years, we learn little else, besides the general fact just stated. It is worthy of mention, that in this period he entered the order of Illuminati, an order which was characterized by infidelity, exaggerated ideas of enlightenment, and destructive but not reconstructive principles, and that he even became eventually the head of the order in Switzerland. He soon discovered his mistake, however, and withdrew from it. "That which is undertaken by associations," he says, " usually falls into the hands of intriguers."

In this period he wrote several books.

In the year 1782, he published "Christopher and Alice." He himself relates the origin of this work. People had imbibed from Leonard and Gertrude the idea, that all the depravity among the common people proceeded from the subordinate functionaries in the villages. "In Christopher and Alice," says Pestalozzi, "I wished to make apparent to the educated public the connection of those causes of popular depravity which are to be found higher in the social scale, but which on this account are also more disguised and concealed, with the naked, undisguised, and unconcealed causes of it, as they are manifested in the villages in the persons of the unworthy functionaries. For this purpose, I made a peasant family read together Leonard and Gertrude, and say things about the story of that work, and the persons introduced in it, which I thought might not occur of themselves to everybody's mind."

So says Pestalozzi in the year 1826; but he spoke otherwise in the preface to the book when it first appeared, in 1782. "Reader!" he says, "this book which thou takest into thy hand is an attempt to produce a manual of instruction for the use of the universal school of humanity, the parlor. I wish it to be read in every cottage." No. 10.-[VOL. IV., No. 1.]—5.

This wish was not accomplished, as we learn from the preface to the second edition, (1824,) which commences thus, "This book has not found its way at all into the hands of the people. In my native land, even in the canton of my native town, and in the very village in which I once lived, it has remained as strange and unknown, as if it had not been in existence."

In the same year, 1782, and the one following, Pestalozzi edited "A Swiss Journal," of which a number appeared every week. In this Journal, he communicated, among other things, memoirs of deceased friends. Thus he wrote the memoirs of Frölich, the pastor of Birr, who had died young. Pestalozzi says of him, "he dedicated himself to the work of the great divine calling, but eternal love dedicated him to the liberty of eternal life." The way in which he speaks of the excellent Iselin, who had died in 1782, is particularly affecting. "I should have perished in the depths into which I had fallen," he says, "if Iselin had not raised me up. Iselin made me feel that I had done something, even in the poor school."

The discourse "on Legislation and Infanticide" also appeared in 1782.

About 1783, Pestalozzi contemplated the establishment of a lunatic asylum and a reformatory institution, and wrote upon the subject; the manuscript, however, was lost.

In the years between 1780 and 1790, in the days of the approaching French revolution, and in the first symptoms of the dangers which its influence on Switzerland might entail," he wrote "The Figures to my ABC-Book; they were not published, however, till 1795: a new edition, under the title of "Fables," came out in 1805. relate principally to the condition of Switzerland at that time.

They

In the summer of 1792, he went to Germany, at the invitation of his sister in Leipzig, and became acquainted with Göthe, Herder, Wieland, Klopstock, and Jacobi; he also visited several normal schools.

In 1798 appeared Pestalozzi's "Researches into the Course of Nature in the Development of the Human Race." He says himself, speaking of this book, "I wrought at it for three long years with incredible toil, chiefly with the view of clearing up my own mind upon the tendency of my favorite notions, and of bringing my natural feelings into harmony with my ideas of civil rights and morality. But this work too is, to me, only another evidence of my inward helplessness, the mere play of my powers of research; my views were

*Pestalozzi's words in the preface to the "Figures."

altogether one-sided, while I was without a proportionate degree of control over myself in regard to them, and the work was left void of any adequate effort after practical excellence, which was so necessary for my purpose. The disproportion between my ability and my views only increased the more. The effect of my book upon those by whom I was surrounded was like the effect of all that I did; scarcely any one understood me, and I did not find in my vicinity two men who did not half give me to understand that they looked upon the entire book as so much balderdash."

Pestalozzi here assumes three states of man: an original, instinctlike, innocent, animal state of nature, out of which he passes into the social state, (this reminds us of Rosseau ;) he works himself out of the social state and raises himself to the moral. The social man is in an unhappy middle condition between animal propensities and moral elevation.

The original animal state of nature can not be pointed to in any one individual man; the innocence of that state ceases with the first cry of the new-born child, and "animal depravity arises from whatever stands opposed to the normal condition of our animal existence." Against this depravity, man seeks for aid in the social state, but finds it not; it is only the moral will that can save him, "the force of which he opposes to the force of his nature. He will fear a God, in order that the animal instincts of his nature shall not degrade him in his inmost soul. He feels what he can do in this respect, and then he makes what he can do the law to himself of what he ought to do. Subjected to this law, which he imposes upon himself, he is distinguished from all other creatures with which we are acquainted."

Where and when, for example, did Pestalozzi's man of nature ever exist-an innocent animal man, endowed with instinct? * This character does not apply to Adam in Paradise, who was not an animal, but a lord of the animals, and still less does it apply to any child of Adam. In how simple and sublime a manner, on the

Voltaire wrote the following characteristic letter to Rosseau about his discourse, prepared and offered for the prize proposed by the Academy of Dixon, on the origin of the inequality among men, and published in 1775:-"I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. You will please men, to whom you speak the truth, but not make them better. No one could paint in stronger colors the horrors of human society, from which our ignorance and weakness promise themselves so many delights. Never has any one employed so much genius to make us into beasts; when one reads your book, one is seized with a desire to go down on all fours. Nevertheless, as I have left off this habit already more than sixty years, I feel, unfortunately, that it is impossible for me to take to it again, and I leave this natural mode of walking to others who are more worthy of it than you and I. Neither can I take ship, in order to visit the savages of Canada, firstly, because the maladies to which I am condemned, render a European physician necessary to me; then again, because there is at present war in that country, and the examples of our nations has made the savages almost as bad as we are ourselves. I am content to live as a peaceful savage in the lonely district adjoining your native land, &c."

contrary, do the Holy Scriptures comprehend and characterize the whole human race.

Thus we see Pestalozzi but little or not at all engaged in educational undertakings during the eighteen years from 1780 to 1798; his writings too, during this time are mainly of a philosophical and political character, and relate only indirectly to education. But the French revolution introduced a new epoch, for Pestalozzi, as well as for Switzerland.

The revolutionary armies of France pressed into the country, old forms were destroyed, the whole of Switzerland was consolidated into an "inseparable republic," at the head of which stood five directors, after the model of the French directional government of that time. Among these was Legrand, a man of a class that is always becoming more rare. I visited the amiable octogenarian in Steinthal, where formerly, with his friend Oberlin, he had labored for the welfare of the communes. When the conversation turned on the happiness or the education of the people, or on the education of youth generally, the old man became animated with youthful enthusiasm, and tears started to his eyes.

ness.

Legrand was a friend of Pestalozzi's; no wonder, seeing that the two men very nearly resembled each other in their way of thinking, as well as in their enthusiastic activity and their unbounded hopefulPestalozzi joined the new republic, while, at the same time, he did all in his power to subdue the jacobinical element in it. He wrote a paper "On the Present Condition and Disposition of Mankind." In this paper, as also in the "Swiss People's Journal," which he edited at the instigation of the government, he pressed upon the attention of the people the necessity of a return to the integrity and piety of their ancestors; the instruction and education of youth, he represented, were the means for attaining this object.

Although, in pointing to an ennobling education of youth, and especially the youth of the people and the poor, as the securest guarantee of a lawfully ordered political condition, he only did that which he could not leave undone; still most people believed that he was speaking and writing thus industriously, merely with the view of procuring for himself an office under the new government, when an opportunity should arise. The government on whom he urged with far too much vehemence the importance of order, justice, and law, actu ally offered him an appointment, in the hope that he would then be quiet. But what was their astonishment, when, in reply to their inquiry as to what office he would be willing to accept, he said, “I WILL BE A SCHOOLMASTER." But few understood him, only those who,

like himself, were earnestly desirous for the foundation of a truly equitable political condition.

Legrand entered into the idea; and Pestalozzi was already about to open an educational institution in the canton of Argovia, when one of the misfortunes of war intervened. On the 9th of September, 1798, Stanz in Unterwalden was burnt by the French, the entire canton was laid waste, and a multitude of fatherless and motherless children were wandering about destitute and without a shelter. Legrand now called upon Pestalozzi to go to Stanz and undertake the care of the destitute children.

Pestalozzi went; what he experienced he has himself told us.

The convent of the Ursulines there was given up to him; he took up his abode in it, accompanied only by a housekeeper, before it was even put into a fit condition for the reception of children. Gradually he gathered around him as many as eighty poor children, from four to ten years old, some of them orphans, horribly neglected, infected with the itch and scurvy, and covered with vermin. Among ten of them, scarcely one could say the alphabet. He describes the educational experiments which he made with such children, and speaks of these experiments as a sort of feeler of the pulse of the science which he sought to improve, a venturesome effort." "A person with the use of his eyes," he adds, "would certainly not have ventured it; fortunately, I was blind."

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For example, under the most difficult circumstances, he wanted to prove, by actual experiment, that those things in which domestic education possesses advantages must be imitated in public education.

He gave the children no set lessons on religion; being suspected. by the Roman Catholic parents, as a Protestant, and at the same time as an adherent of the new government, he did not dare; but whenever the occurrence of daily life presented an opportunity, he would make them the groundwork of inculcating some religious or moral lesson. As he had formerly done at Neuhof, he sought to combine intellectual instruction with manual labor, the establishment for instruction with that for industrial occupations, and to fuse the two into each other. But it became clear to him, that the first stages of intellectual training must be separated from those of industrial training and precede the fusion of the two. It was here in Stanz also that Pestalozzi, for want of other assistants, set children to instruct children, a plan which Lancaster was similarly led to adopt in consequence of the inability of the teacher to instruct the large numbers of children who were placed under his charge.* Pestalozzi remarks, *Lancaster's monitors, i. e. children, set to teach and superintend other children. that time, (1798,)" says Pestalozzi, "nobody had begun to speak of mutual instruction."

"At