330 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



First and last and always, tlie problem is human. Manual train- 

 ing has but the one purpose, the development of the child, and it can 

 only carry out this purpose by learning how the child develops. 

 Every organism — and manual training, as we have seen, considers the 

 child to be a unit organism — is in contact with an outer world, with 

 something which is not self. This contact produces sensations. We 

 can not know the outer world, can not know whether indeed there 

 be an outer world. We can only know our sensations and the stream 

 of thought into which they merge. As soon as we begin to think, we 

 are forced into some stage of idealism, but whether we take the 

 moderate, in a sense realistic, ground, that there is an outer world, 

 but that we have no knowledge of it except as a mental experience; 

 or the middle ground, that there may or may not be an outer world, 

 that we have no warrant for either affirming or denying its exist- 

 ence, but that the one undeniable reality is consciousness; or the 

 extreme ground, that there is no outer world at all, but that the 

 drama of life is a drama carried out simply and solely in conscious- 

 ness, it makes, happily, little difference in the practical methods of 

 education, provided we do not vivisect the child, and get something 

 out of him other than a unit. What we have to deal with in any 

 case is human consciousness, and our work is to unfold and perfect 

 that. 



These sensations, whatever their origin and precise nature, are 

 certainly the primary material of thought. Knowledge is a percep- 

 tion of relations. The process of thinking is a process by which we 

 bring our sensations into relation with one another, or bring a sen- 

 sation into relation with some concept, which is the abstract of a 

 previous group of related sensations, or bring one concept into rela- 

 tion with another. Knowledge, then, is the result of thinking, and 

 it is only by thinking that we can grow wise. Experience being the 

 best teacher, it is commonly stated that knowledge is the result of 

 experience. But this is not strictly true. It is only true when you 

 specify what sort of experience you mean. If the experience has 

 resulted in an embarrassing wealth of sensations, and has created 

 little disposition to bring these sensations into relation with one 

 another, the product is not knowledge. Globe trotters are not 

 proverbially wise people. But if the experience has taken. an inner 

 turn, and has consisted in a careful and luminous working up of 

 the crude materials of consciousness, the product is knowledge of 

 the highest sort. This accounts, I think, for the fact that some of 

 our most profound philosophers have been men of somewhat limited 

 experience. But there are cautions in both directions. If the 

 omnivorous reader and globe trotter stand at one extreme, no less 

 does the closet philosopher, building tremendous structures out of 



