curiosity, interest, imagination and sympathy; we must begin from the
boy himself, and conduct him away from himself. What we really ought
to aim at is to give him the sense that he is surrounded by strange
and beautiful mysteries of nature, of which he can himself observe
certain phenomena; that human history, as well as the great world
about him, is crowded with interesting and animating figures who have
laboured, toiled, loved, acted, suffered, sinned, have felt the
impulse both of base and selfish desires, but no less of beautiful,
exalted, and inspiring hopes. We want to convince the young that it is
not well to be narrow, close-fisted, insolent, suspicious, petty,
self-satisfied. _Imaginative sympathy_, that is to be the end of all
our efforts. If we aim only at producing sympathy, we may get a vague
sentimentalism which is just distressed by apparent suffering, and
anxious to relieve it momentarily, without reflecting whether it is
not the outcome of perfectly curable faults of system and habit. If we
aim only at imagination, then we get a barren artistic pleasure in
dramatic situations and romantic effects. What we ought to aim at is
the sympathy which pities and feels for others, as well as admires and
imitates them; and this must be reinforced by the imagination which
can concern itself with the causes of what otherwise are but vague
emotions. We want to make boys on the one hand detest tyranny and
high-handedness and bigotry and ruthless exercise of power, and on the
other hand mistrust stupidity and ignorance and baseness and
selfishness and suspiciousness. The study of high literature is
valuable not as a mere exercise in erudition and linguistic nicety and
critical taste, but because the great books mirror best the highest
hopes and visions of human nature. The precise extent of the
intellectual range matters very little, compared with the
perceptiveness and emotion by which the realisation of other lives,
other needs, other activities, other problems are accompanied.