CAUSE AND EFFECT IN EDUCATION. 53 



knew exactly where to point his great telescope, and, as we all 

 know, it pointed to Neptune. 



It was the same with geology. Sir Charles Lyell substituted 

 for the unimaginable cataclysms of the older geologists the slow 

 and simple operations of Nature's present forces. It was his 

 work which changed geology from a wild dream into an accurate 

 science, and to-day we hold this principle of causation as the 

 check and test of all geological speculations. 



The science of chemistry was born when the principle of the 

 conservation of matter became established, and men stood face to 

 face with the necessary relation between cause and effect ; when 

 they realized their own inability to bring matter out of nothing- 

 ness, or to make it pass into nothingness again. Similarly, phys- 

 ics, as a science, came only with the recognition of the principles 

 of the conservation of energy and the correlation of forces. It is 

 difficult for us, standing on the vantage ground of the present, to 

 realize into what an abyss we should suddenly plunge if we lost 

 sight for one moment of these gains and passed into a world of 

 thought in which energy came and went and matter appeared 

 and disappeared. It would practically be a world of insanities. 



Almost in our own generation we have seen the birth of the 

 science of biology, and we all remember very vividly the bitter 

 pain of its birth. As a branch of study, it has existed from the 

 very earliest days when man first began to observe animated Na- 

 ture ; but it remained a body of isolated facts until the work of 

 Darwin and Wallace established the causal relations involved in 

 evolution, and suggested the mode by which this process of un- 

 folding had been brought about. 



It would be very easy to enlarge these illustrations in what we 

 call the " natural " sciences, but it is hardly necessary. The point 

 is probably established. 



In those branches of inquiry which have to do with human 

 rather than with purely physical activities, we shall find precisely 

 the same thing ; but in this case their history is so complex that 

 the recognition of the principle of causation, and its application 

 to human affairs, have been correspondingly slower. Even now 

 it is far from comfjlete. Nevertheless, in this study of the human 

 spirit, we have all along been blindly trying to establish the prin- 

 ciple of cause and effect. In the half-science which has grown 

 out of this attempt, the failure has come, not from a wrong end 

 in mind and this is to be particularly noted but rather from 

 the establishment of fictitious causal relationships. In the com- 

 plex operations of the human spirit we have observed definite 

 results ; we have sought for causes ; we have not been wise enough 

 to find them ; but we have found something which we mistook 

 for causes, and so we have built up a system founded on false re- 



