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§ 5. The remarkable feature in Rabelais’ curriculum is this, that it is concerned mainly with things. Of the Seven Liberal Arts of the Middle Ages, the first three were purely formal: grammar, logic, rhetoric; while the following course: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, were not. The effect of the Renascence was to cause increasing neglect of the Quadrivium, but Rabelais cares for the Quadrivium only; Gargantua studies arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, and the Trivium is not mentioned. Great use is made of books and Gargantua learned them by heart; but all that he learned he at once “applied to practical cases concerning the estate of man.” It was the substance of the reading, not the form, that was thought of. At dinner “if they thought good they continued reading or began to discourse merrily together; speaking first of the virtue, propriety, efficacy, and nature of all that was served in at that table; of bread, of wine, of water, of salt, of flesh, fish, fruits, herbs, roots, and of their dressing. By means whereof he learned in a little time all the passages that on these subjects are to be found in Pliny, Athenæus, &c. Whilst they talked of these things, many times to be more certain they caused the very books to be brought to the table; and so well and perfectly did he in his memory retain the things above said, that in that time there was not a physician that knew half so much as he did.” Again, out of doors he was to observe trees and plants, and “compare them with what is written of them in the books of the ancients, such as Theophrastus, Dioscorides, &c.” Here again, actual realism was to be joined with verbal realism, for Gargantua was to carry home with him great handfuls for herborising. Rabelais even recommends studying the face of the heavens at night, and then observing the change that has taken place at 4 in the morning. So he seems to have been the first writer on education (and the first by a long interval), who would teach about things by observing the things themselves. It was this Anschauungs-prinzip—use of sense-impressions—that Pestalozzi extended and claimed as his invention two centuries and a half later. Rabelais also gives a hint of the use of hand-work as well as head-work. Gargantua and his fellows “did recreate themselves in bottling hay, in cleaving and sawing wood, and in threshing sheaves of corn in the barn. They also studied the art of painting or carving.” The course was further connected with life by visits to the various handicraftsmen, in whose workshops “they did learn and consider the industry and invention of the trader.”