THE PHILOSOPHY OF MANUAL TRAINING. 147 



science which embodies the largest a 'priori elements with the least 

 possible external elements. 



I have said that education is a purely deductive science, and the 

 reason now becomes plain. It is necessarily a secondary science, 

 since it depends, not upon any self-contained principles which may 

 be brought to light by careful inductive reasoning, but solely 

 and entirely upon external considerations — that is to say, upon 

 the social ideals growing out of our accepted ethics and philosophy, 

 and upon the methods which our current psychology suggests as the 

 proper means of realizing those ideals. It is for this reason impos- 

 sible to study education, and much less any specific scheme of educa- 

 tion, such as manual training, at first hand, as a thing in itself. 

 Education can not evolve its own laws, can not be said to have any 

 definitely discernible end and purpose of its own. It is purely a 

 process — a delicate, subtle process by which psychological methods 

 are made use of to attain social ends. ' In saying this, one does not 

 belittle the function of education; one magnifies it. I should then 

 be treating manual training in a most superficial way, alike unjust to 

 it and to the reader, if I considered it other than I propose to con- 

 sider it — as a part of a larger plan. 



Emerson, and others less inspired than he, have repeatedly 

 pointed out to us how prone we are to mistake the means for the end. 

 And this is nowhere more marked than in education. We start out 

 very badly as students of education when we erect it into an end in 

 itself. It is very far from being an end. It is simply a means, the 

 servant of a higher science, the servant of the social ideal. 



I have always cherished a sympathetic interest in the progress 

 of American architecture. It is an interest that survives the years, 

 and I constantly find myself looking at new buildings and at old 

 with half-closed eyes, and through my lashes — which they tell me 

 is a sure sign of the artistic temperament. But, be this as it may, 

 what I see, even with half -closed eyes, does not, in the main, please 

 me. I see a dreary succession of unbeautiful buildings. And I 

 ask myself the cause. The American schools of architecture are 

 admirable. The work done in several of them will bear comparison 

 with the best work done at the Ecole des Beaux- Arts in Paris, and the 

 lUcole des Beaux- Arts is, I believe, the Mecca of all our young 

 architects. And in contemporary architecture it is not boastful, I 

 think, to say that America is abreast of the world. ISTowhere in 

 Europe will you find more beautiful modern buildings than the 

 Public Library in Boston, the Madison Square Garden in New York, 

 or the Pennsylvania Station, before it was spoiled, in Philadelphia. 

 And yet the mass of our buildings are hopelessly ugly. Many of 

 these aberrations are due to poor architects, for the profession is not 



