54 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



lationsliips. The mistake is difficult to rectify. These imaginary 

 causes must first be swept away. The true science comes only 

 when the true and adequate cause is discovered. 



We are witnessing to-day the rehabilitation of the sciences of 

 the human spirit. In all of them the reforming process is the 

 same. It is the mending of the old mistake ; the getting rid of 

 the fictitious causations, and the search for the true ones. Thus, 

 for example, the fertile thought in modern sociology is the grow- 

 ing recognition of the fact that national characteristics are the 

 direct outgrowth of the material conditions surrounding the na- 

 tionthe climate, the soil, the food. The evil of intemperance is 

 being met and vanquished on the same ground, not by prohibi- 

 tions and pledges, but by the substitution of such a rational diet 

 and such rational life conditions that an exhausted physical sys- 

 tem will no longer crave the false stimulus of intoxicants. If a 

 young man drinks to excess we no longer put the blame upon the 

 devil, although in giving up this cause we have certainly dis- 

 pensed with a great convenience. We put the blame nearer home. 

 The careful housekeeper, overbusy with much scrubbing, has had 

 something to do with it, if in her eager pursuit of dust she has 

 forgotten to provide wholesome, nutritious food for the vigorous, 

 healthy organisms committed to her charge. The home condi- 

 tions have had something to do with it if they have offered at- 

 tractions so meager as to be quite outweighed by the anaesthesia 

 of drunkenness. 



This modern search after true causation is merciless in its 

 operation. It is a two-edged sword. It is tracing home the source 

 of social distempers to men and women who have hitherto been 

 complacently patting themselves upon the back and putting the 

 blame upon the world, the devil, God, Providence in a word, 

 upon anything rather than upon their own ignorance. 



Among the many activities concerning themselves with the 

 welfare of the human spirit, there is none more complex, more 

 difficult, or more important than that activity which we sum up 

 under the name of education ; but the history of its growth is 

 much the same history as that of the sciences, "natural" and 

 "human," which we have just been sketching. If it is to become 

 a science, it is to become one by precisely the same process as 

 these have done that is to say, by the establishment within itself 

 of true causal relations. 



In all of this, one is but the chronicler of the obvious, and says 

 nothing that is new. But probably the verities are mostly old. 

 It is only their restatement that is new. Let us be honest. Let 

 us acknowledge that what we most need is, not so much any fresh 

 accession of truth, as a more sincere and persistent effort to live 

 up to such measure of it as we have. 



