6/4 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



If the student be ignorant of scientific method on leaving 

 school, he has not merely wasted precious years : what is far 

 worse is that he has not been disciplined as an observer and 

 experimentalist, as a logical thinker and worker; his mental 

 faculties will have been stunted rather than developed. Unless 

 the art and habit of inquiry be developed in the youthful mind 

 from the earliest days onwards, atrophy of the faculties inevitably 

 sets in, a state of mental inertia being engendered from which 

 it is very difficult to escape. The present system both at 

 school and college is one from which the student receives the 

 minimum of benefit — for the most part the training is not 

 such as to develop scientific habits of mind. 



We can apply our knowledge to secure the improvement of 

 appliances — hence the marvellous advance of our civilisation 

 during the past few decades ; we can apply it to the study of 

 agricultural problems — to the improvement of plants and brute 

 animals ; seemingly, however, we cannot apply it to ourselves. 

 The reason is plain. As Mr. Francis Galton tells us in his 

 Inquiries into Human Faculty : 



The vast majority of persons of our race have a natural tendency to shrink 

 from the responsibility of thinking and standing alone ; they exalt the vox populi, 

 even when they know it to be the utterance of a mob of nobodies, into the vox Dei 

 and they are willing slaves to tradition, authority and custom. The intellectual 

 deficiencies corresponding to these moral flaws are shown by the rareness of free 

 and original thought as compared with the frequency and readiness with which 

 men accept the opinions of those in authority as binding on their judgment. 

 I shall endeavour to prove that the slavish aptitudes in man are a direct con- 

 sequence of his gregarious nature, which itself is a result of the conditions both 

 of his primeval barbarism and of the forms of his subsequent civilisation. My 

 argument will be, that gregarious brute animals possess a want of self-reliance in 

 a marked degree ; that the conditions of the lives of these animals have made a 

 want of self-reliance a necessity to them and that by the law of natural selection 

 the gregarious instincts and their accompanying slavish aptitudes have gradually 

 become evolved. Then I shall argue that our remote ancestors have lived under 

 parallel conditions and that other causes peculiar to human society have acted up 

 to the present day in the same direction and that we have inherited the gregarious 

 instincts and slavish aptitudes which have been needed under past circumstances, 

 although in our advancing civilisation they are becoming of more harm than 

 good to our race. 



If science is to be of any value to us, it should enable us to 

 bring influences to bear to counteract the innate peculiarities 

 which tend to diminish human efficiency. At present, education, 



