institutions were to be remodelled, it was certain that the school
would be among the earliest objects to attract an experimental
reformer. Among the advanced minds of the time there had grown up a
deep dissatisfaction with the received methods of our schools, and
more especially of our universities. The great instaurator of all
knowledge, Bacon, in preaching the necessity of altering the whole
method of knowing, included as matter of course the method of teaching
to know.

The man who carried over the Baconian aspiration into education was
Comenius (d. 1670). A projector and enthusiast, Comenius desired, like
Bacon, an entirely new intellectual era. With Bacon's intellectual
ambition, but without Bacon's capacity, Comenius proposed to
revolutionise all knowledge, and to make complete wisdom accessible to
all, in a brief space of time, and with a minimum of labour. Language
only as an instrument, not as an end in itself; many living languages,
instead of the one dead language of the old school; a knowledge of
things, instead of words; the free use of our eyes and ears upon the
nature that surrounds us; intelligent apprehension, instead of loading
the memory--all these doctrines, afterwards inherited by the party
of rational reform, were first promulgated in Europe by the numerous
pamphlets--some ninety have been reckoned up--of this Teuto-Slav,
Comenius.

Comenius had as the champion of his views in England Samuel Hartlib,
a Dantziger by origin, settled in London since 1628. Hartlib had even
less of real science than Comenius, but he was equally possessed by
the Baconian ideal of a new heaven and a new earth of knowledge. Not
himself a discoverer in any branch, he was unceasingly occupied in
communicating the discoveries and inventions of others. He had an ear