APPLETONS' 



POPULAR SCIENCE 



MONTHLY. 



JUNE, 1898. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF MANUAL TKAINING. 



By C. HANFOED HENDEESON, 

 lecturer in harvard university. 



IT is said of a well-known American Hegelian and educator tliat he 

 always starts out with Adam and Eve. The method is thorough, 

 but it gives a long preface. I may seem guilty of the same tend- 

 ency when in writing about manual training I appear to write about 

 everything else, and very seldom directly about the subject in hand. 

 But this is precisely what I expect to do, and I expect to do it for the 

 sole purpose of throwing light on manual training. 



No scheme of education has any serious claim upon our atten- 

 tion unless it is founded upon some rational system of ethics — 

 that is to say, upon some rational view of the proper conduct of 

 life. And the foundations of any acceptable scheme of ethics must 

 be laid deep in the broadest generalization of all, in our philosophy 

 of life. 



Education then, is not an inductive but a purely deductive 

 science. 



It is true that every primary science, in the course of its historical 

 development, passes through two distinct stages: the stage of induc- 

 tion, in which from the study of special cases we are led to the per- 

 ception of a general law or principle ; and the stage of deduction, in 

 which from this body of general principles we work out a whole 

 series of special and important conclusions. This double course of 

 development is now so well recognized that we are withholding the 

 name of science from those branches of inquiry which have not yet 

 reached the deductive stage. Comte's test of science was the power 



VOL. LIII. 12 



