Viewed as an art, the success of education is almost impossible,
since the essential conditions of success are beyond our control.
Our efforts may bring us within sight of the goal, but fortune must
favour us if we are to reach it.

What is this goal? As we have just shown, it is the goal of nature.
Since all three modes of education must work together, the two
that we can control must follow the lead of that which is beyond
our control. Perhaps this word Nature has too vague a meaning. Let
us try to define it.

Nature, we are told, is merely habit. What does that mean? Are there
not habits formed under compulsion, habits which never stifle nature?
Such, for example, are the habits of plants trained horizontally.
The plant keeps its artificial shape, but the sap has not changed
its course, and any new growth the plant may make will be vertical.
It is the same with a man's disposition; while the conditions remain
the same, habits, even the least natural of them, hold good; but
change the conditions, habits vanish, nature reasserts herself.
Education itself is but habit, for are there not people who forget
or lose their education and others who keep it? Whence comes
this difference? If the term nature is to be restricted to habits
conformable to nature we need say no more.

We are born sensitive and from our birth onwards we are affected
in various ways by our environment. As soon as we become conscious
of our sensations we tend to seek or shun the things that cause
them, at first because they are pleasant or unpleasant, then because
they suit us or not, and at last because of judgments formed by
means of the ideas of happiness and goodness which reason gives