THE PHILOSOPHY OF MANUAL TRAINING. 639 



qualified to develop the individual and national life, and yet in the 

 hands of men and women who did not understand its end and pur- 

 pose, to give results so meager and undesirable as to make the whole 

 scheme seem to stand self -convicted. 



And I find lurking somewhere in the corner of my mind a second 

 reason for this disclaimer. I should be unwilling to have the manual 

 training movement, which seems to me so full of seriousness and of 

 promise, suffer in your esteem by reason of the aberrations of any of 

 its less enlightened exponents. "We are sometimes murdered in the 

 houses of our friends. And manual training, sloyd, and the kinder- 

 garten have suffered much at the hands of their friends. The real 

 justification for manual training, let me repeat, is to be found, not 

 in any aspect of its practice or results, but in a far deeper sense in 

 that system of social ethics which growls out of an evolved philosophy 

 of life. If this has seemed to you sound ground, the results flowing 

 out of it must be equally sound. This may seem a somewhat sophis- 

 ticated way of escaping a dilemma, but, believe me, it is nothing so 

 trivial as that. It is a strong desire that your judgment should be 

 on the essential and not on the accidental features of manual train- 

 ing, righteous judgment and not judgment according to appearances. 



The human race is very old and human effort is very old; and 

 education, whether systematic or unconscious, has been going on ever 

 since the hand of man fashioned the little black tablet recently found 

 by Dr. Hilprccht in Babylonia, and dating back to the sixth mil- 

 lennium before Christ. Education is a very old process, certainly eight 

 or ten thousand years old, and probably very much older. It is, there- 

 fore, I think, entirely modest and reasonable, in speaking of anything 

 so very modern as manual training, which in America can not yet 

 claim a score of years in the matter of age, to speak both of the 

 actual and possible results, since manual training has not been in. 

 existence long enough to have come to anything like its full powers. 

 And yet these actual results have already attained very respectable 

 dimensions. I feel constrained to add still one more word of caution. 

 Not only has manual training not yet perfected itself as a tool, but 

 even as an imperfect tool its term of service is at present limited 

 to about three years, and the actual results, under the most favorable 

 conditions, can not be regarded as more than a mere fragment of the 

 possible results. 



Knowledge is a perception of relations. We have agreed upon 

 this, I think, as a sound definition. The coming into knowledge is 

 the coming into a perception of these relations. The coming into 

 life is a coming into a realization of self, and of one's relation to 

 all that is not self — to other individuals, to the social order, to Nature, 

 and to the Supreme Intelligence of the world. All that helps on thia 



