METAMORPHOSES IN EDUCATION. 755 



sists in the discovery by the world in general that it is true. 

 Through enormous labors during the past thirty years the science 

 of biology has covered the ground once supposed to be peculiarly 

 the domain of mind, and the natural history of man, both body 

 and mind, are so well known in their most general features that 

 the biologists of every country are agreed that man is an evolved 

 animal, that his lineage can be traced back into the geologic past 

 and to an animal pedigree. In mind and body he has an ancestry 

 reaching into time indefinitely remote, and those who hate to 

 believe it are silenced by the evidence and no longer strive against 

 it. Their only hope is to show reasonable grounds for the belief 

 that Nature has in some way and at some time been supplemented, 

 and that man has some arbitrary mental gifts that can not be 

 deduced from his natural history. This acquired knowledge of 

 the natural history of man has revolutionized every former concep- 

 tion of him, and has rendered worthless absolutely worthless al- 

 most everything that has been written. Not only physical science, 

 but especially history, philosophy, psychology, ethics all had to be 

 rewritten, and all educational institutions founded upon these, as 

 most all have been, have got to be metamorphosed to adapt them to 

 the knowledge which has been acquired in this century and mostly 

 within the last half of it. The case is precisely similar to the 

 history of astronomy. After the Copernican theory was found to 

 be the true theory, the overthrow of the Ptolemaic was complete. 

 There could be no compromise between the two : if one was right 

 the other was absolutely and irredeemably wrong, and there was 

 nothing but complete surrender to the Copernican theory by 

 every one who had any knowledge of the Ptolemaic system. It 

 had to be complete and unconditional. The teachers of the 

 Copernican theory may have been wrong in many of their state- 

 ments concerning planetary matters, and some of the Ptolemaics 

 may have been able to point out such errors, but such failures 

 did not give any countenance to the Ptolemaic theory ; they only 

 showed that the details of the new science needed more careful 

 investigation. The whole of astronomy had to be rewritten ; the 

 only things of any value that had been recorded were that an 

 eclipse occurred on such a day at such a place, or a comet was 

 seen, or an occultation, but the reasonings and deductions by the 

 observers were of no account. 



So in like manner, if evolution be true, it follows that all 

 previous philosophizing upon history, philosophy, education, or 

 science, is of no more account than the reasonings of the Ptole- 

 maics. And one to-day will not be advancing himself in knowl- 

 edge by perusing the volumes of the pre-evolution age. They 

 can not help him, no matter how ably they are written. Nor does 

 it follow that because objectors are able to point to errors in the 



