lo The Living Plant 



in our educational system, we should have less cause to complain 

 of the comparatively empty condition of our elective science 

 classrooms. It is not of course representative of the methods 

 whereby scientific investigation is successfully pursued ; but where 

 else in human affairs do we insist upon teaching all people the 

 technical methods or none? In large measure, Science, in order 

 to be advanced, must be dehumanized; but in order to be used, 

 it must be humanized. 



The fact is, the human mind is a very poor instrument for 

 scientific research, for which it was never developed. Unless all 

 of our knowledge is at fault, the mind of man was evolved under 

 stress of use as his chief weapon in the struggle for physical ex- 

 istence; naturally, therefore, all of its stronger traits are fitted 

 to that very concrete activity rather than to uses of an abstract 

 intellectual sort. Its power of concentration upon a single aim, 

 with determination to achieve it by any means: its instinctive 

 and partizan exaltation of its own case and minimization of its 

 opponent's: its tendency to warp all testmiony to its own credit: 

 its quick defense of its own caste or clan, right or wrong, with its 

 ready submission to the conventions thereof and contempt for 

 everything outside: its preference for keeping to beaten and safe 

 paths and for shunning the unknown, which it peoples with 

 mysteries and evil designs : its liking for following the most assert- 

 ive leaders and for leaning back upon their authorit}^; — all of 

 these are invaluable traits in the struggle of the individuals of a 

 social community for existence, but they form a very bad basis 

 for scientific investigation, which requires the opposite qualities 

 of disinterestedness, impartiality, and the judicial weighing of 

 evidence for the determination of the exact truth without any 

 regard to its effects upon persons, interests or dogmas. All men 

 have the primitive self-centering qualities highly developed; and 

 the scientific research of mankind is done upon a small residue 

 of the opposite qualities which a few of them happen to possess, 

 and which even in them are not so much natural as assiduously 



