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All this reversionary habit of old brains would have been offset by the “tendency to vary” in young ones; by the steady uplift of each new generation; but for the cumulative weight of our conscious efforts at education. Education, necessarily traditional at first, and instilling tremendous veneration for the ever-receding past,—especially in those earliest years when memory was the only record of events,—has steadily met the expansive tendencies of each new brain by the repressive weight of all foregoing centuries. The development of new brain tissue, and its expanding cellular arrangement, urges constantly to new discovery, and to a rearrangement of earlier impressions, but education has diligently endeavoured to enforce upon each brain precisely that mass and order of impression considered as beneficial in the past. To re-impress forever the same facts in the same relation, and to severely discourage and prohibit any reconsideration of this supply, has been for ages our method of education.