Note 162 — XVI. PESTALOZZI. 1746-1827. (continued 2)

Did Pestalozzi make due allowance for the system of thought which every child inherits? Croom Robertson in “How we came by our Knowledge” (Nineteenth Century, No. 1, March, 1877), without mentioning Pestalozzi, seems to differ from him. Croom Robertson says that “Children being born into the world are born into society, and are acted on by overpowering social influences before they have any chance of being their proper selves.... The words and sentences that fall upon a child’s ear and are soon upon his lips, express not so much his subjective experience as the common experience of his kind, which becomes as it were an objective rule or measure to which his shall conform.... He does, he must, accept what he is told; and in general he is only too glad to find his own experience in accordance with it.... We use our incidental, by which I mean our natural subjective experience, mainly to decipher and verify the ready-made scheme of knowledge that is given us en bloc with the words of our mother-tongue” (pp. 117, 118).