736 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



mode of education ; and that is the methodical discipline of the ac- 

 tivity by which we reduce the confused material which meets us in 

 the actual world, apparently (at first sight) ruled by wild chance rather 

 than reason, to clear conception, and thereby make it fit for expression 

 in speech. Such an art of observation and experiment, methodically 

 developed, we have hitherto found in the natural sciences alone ; and 

 our hope, that the psychology of individuals and peoples, with the 

 practical sciences of education and of social and political government 

 based upon it, will attain the same end, can only be fulfilled in a dis- 

 tant future. 



This new enterprise, prosecuted by natural science on new paths, 

 has quickly enough yielded fresh and, of their kind, unheard-of results, 

 evidencing what achievements human thought is capable of, where it 

 can go the whole way from the facts to the full knowledge of the law 

 under favorable conditions, testing and knowing every thing for itself. 

 The simple relations, especially those of inorganic Nature, permit of 

 our possessing such a penetrating and accurate knowledge of their 

 laws, such far-reaching deduction of inferences from them, and the 

 testing and verification of these by such an exact reference to fact, 

 that, with the systematic unfolding of such conceptions (e. g., with the 

 deduction of astronomical phenomena from the law of gravitation), 

 there is hardly any other edifice of human thought which, for strict 

 logic, certainty, correctness, and productiveness, can at all be com- 

 pared with it. 



I point out these relations merely with the view of showing in what 

 sense the natural sciences are a new and essential element of human 

 education ; of indestructible importance, also, for all further develop- 

 ment of this in the future ; and that a complete education of the indi- 

 vidual man, as of nations, will no longer be possible without a union 

 of the past literary-logical with the new natural-science direction of 

 study. 



ISTow, the majority of the educated hitherto have been instructed 

 only in the old way — have hardly at all come into contact with the 

 work of thought in natural science ; at the most, perhaps, a little with 

 mathematics. It is men of this kind of education that our govern- 

 ments appoint, by preference, to educate our children, to maintain 

 reverence for moral order, and to preserve the treasures of knowledge 

 and wisdom of our forefathers. It is they, too, who must organize 

 the changes in the mode of education of the rising generation ; where 

 such changes are required they must be encouraged or compelled 

 thereto by the public opinion of the intelligent classes of the whole 

 community, both men and women. 



Apart from the natural impulse of every warm-hearted man to lead 

 others to that which he has found to be true and right, there will be 

 in every friend of natural science a strong motive to share in such 

 work, in the reflection that the further development of these sciences 



