view which continued to be held until modern times. Through a
thousand daily secret influences, our feelings and ideas have
been so transformed that these crude conceptions have
disappeared, to the great advantage of society and the
individual. But it may be hard to awaken a pedagogical savage
to the conviction that, in quite the same way, a thousand new
secret and mighty influences will change our crude methods of
education, when parents once come to see that parenthood must
go through the same transformation as marriage, before it
attains to a noble and complete development.

Only when men realise that whipping a child belongs to the same
low stage of civilisation as beating a woman, or a servant, or
as the corporal punishment of soldiers and criminals, will the
first real preparation begin of the material from which perhaps
later an educator may be formed.

Corporal punishment was natural in rough times. The body is
tangible; what affects it has an immediate and perceptible
result. The heat of passion is cooled by the blows it
administers; in a certain stage of development blows are the
natural expression of moral indignation, the direct method by
which the moral will impresses itself on beings of lower
capacities. But it has since been discovered that the soul may
be impressed by spiritual means, and that blows are just as
demoralising for the one who gives them as for the one who
receives them.

The educator, too, is apt to forget that the child in many
cases has as few moral conceptions as the animal or the savage.