Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: AUTHOR'S PREFACE. This collection of reflections and observations, without order and almost without connection, was begun to please a good mother, who knew how to think. My original purpose was to write only a memorandum of a few pages; but my theme led me on against my will, and that memorandum insensibly became a sort of book, too large, doubtless, for what it contains, but too small for the subject which it discusses. I hesitated a long time about publishing it; and I was often made to feel, while working at it, that the writing of a few pamphlets is not a sufficient preparation for composing a book. After making vain efforts to do better, I think it my duty to publish my book just as it is, judging that it is important to turn public attention in this direction, and that, even though my ideas are perchance bad, my time will not be wholly lost if I succeed by this means in stimulating others to produce better ones. A man who, from his retreat, casts his reflections before the public without puffers or partisans to defend them, without even knowing what is said or thought of them, has no reason to fear that, if he has deceived himself, his errors will be accepted without examination. Madame de Chenonceaux. I shall say little of the importance of a good education, nor shall I stop to prove that the education of the day is bad. Thousands of others have said this before me, and I have no desire to fill a book with things which everybody knows. I shall merely observe, that for countless ages there has been a perennial protest against the current practice, but no one has seen fit to propose a better. The literature and the learning of our century tend much more to destroy than to construct. Censure is administered in a tone of authority; but in order to bring about a reform...