7 5 8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tional system which proceeded upon no other plan than the develop- 

 ment of man's capacities be other than false, disastrous, condemn- 

 able ? Comenius saw clearly this opposition between his fundamental 

 principle and orthodoxy, and endeavored to meet the difficulty by 

 saying that man's fall did not utterly destroy his original powers, but 

 weakened them, leaving it possible to secure a beneficial development. 

 This reconciliation was no reconciliation, and the fault lay in the 

 nature of the case, not in Comenius ; all adjustment between these 

 opposing views is impossible. 



The words of Comenius, respecting the education of woman, are 

 of special significance, and this alike from their time and their char- 

 acter. He said : " There is no reason why woman should be excluded 

 from culture, either from that which comes through the Latin lan- 

 guage or through the native tongue. Women also are images of the 

 Godhead, and possess spiritual receptivity and capacity for training, 

 often more than we they too are often summoned to great work. 

 Why should we let them come to the alphabet and then cast them 

 away from books ? Do we fear superficiality ? But, the more thoughts 

 a person gains, the less room is there for superficiality which always 

 comes from spiritual emptiness." When we ask how Comenius dealt 

 with education, we are to remember that he proceeded according to a 

 philosophy of the matter. He had something to say about man before 

 giving rules for his training. He consciously adopted that principle 

 which we have affirmed to be essential, viz., that the idea man has 

 of himself must determine his education. Comenius had an idea of 

 man, and made it the guiding principle in his system. Man, so he 

 maintained, lives a threefold life, a vegetative, an animal, and a ra- 

 tional or spiritual life. He has a threefold home the mother, the 

 earth, the heaven. By birth he enters his second home, by death and 

 resurrection his third and eternal home. In the first we receive sim- 

 ply life with its movements and senses, in the second we gain life and 

 the senses with rationality, in the third we reach the fulfillment of all 

 things. That first life is a preparation for the second, the second a 

 preparation for the third, the third is without end. Compare this un- 

 derstanding of man with the middle-age teaching. Here man is incar- 

 cerated in a body and dungeoned on the earth ; for Comenius, man is 

 provided with an organism and placed at school for the unfolding of 

 his nature in an endless progress. According to the one view, man is 

 to cast away his body as a thing accursed ; according to the other, he is 

 to use it as an instrument unto life. 



Careful study of the writings of Comenius can not fail to impress 

 one with the naturalness, that is, the truth of his method. From be- 

 ginning to end his thought is an attempt to follow Nature, and this not 

 after the impossible manner of Rousseau's "Emile," but by a patient 

 scrutiny of natural processes everywhere appearing. Man is one with 

 Nature, and,. as so, Nature will show him how to educate himself not, 



