62 EDUCATIONAL THEORY 



In closing, let us consider the relations in which pedagogy stands 

 to other sciences. It clearly is indebted to several constituent and 

 auxiliary sciences, the results of which it makes effective in a manner 

 adapted to its own sphere of investigation. Hence we must describe 

 it as an applied science, classing it with medicine, with agricultural 

 science, etc. ; it is erected on the basis of ethics and psychology. It 

 has close relations also with medicine, and points of contact with 

 politics and theology. 



As an applied science it also has many opportunities to enrich 

 the disciplines on which it is founded. Not only can it suggest new 

 lines of investigation to ethics and psychology; it can also make 

 independent contributions thereto; for example, in research that 

 seeks the foundations of morality as they are revealed in the develop- 

 ment of children, or in investigations into the physical and psychical 

 growth of children. It can offer valuable assistance to theology in 

 a practical way, in so far as it provides a method of instruction 

 that is based on psychology, one that should give new interest to 

 catechetics. 



Because of this close relation between pedagogy and several other 

 sciences it has been denied that it itself has an independent existence, 

 and its field has been split up in the following fashion. The history 

 of education is assigned to the history of civilization; educational 

 organization is a matter of politics; the determination of the ends 

 of education is the concern of ethics, since that would establish the 

 end of human existence in general; the investigation of the human 

 mind, of its knowledge, and of its activities, that is the work of 

 psychology; hygiene deals with the care of the body; while the 

 method of instruction in the several sciences is best left to the 

 several sciences themselves, since they are most competent to point 

 the way in the field of knowledge with which they deal. 



No doubt it is practicable thus to apportion the field. But no 

 one acquainted with the subject will maintain that it would aid the 

 educational progress of the nation. Through such a division we 

 necessarily should lose sight of the mental unity which embraces the 

 several factors that are associated in education, and which so regu- 

 lates their reciprocal influence that they do not hinder each other. 

 It is just because the field of education is so full and extensive, and 

 because in it there cross so many of the threads of individual and 

 social life, that there is pressing need for a philosophical reflection 

 upon it, so that we may secure unity in so much multiplicity, and 

 cooperation amid so much opposition. 



When we consider that the subject of pedagogical science is man 

 as a being susceptible to consciously directed influences, we find the 

 requisite material in his physical and psychical constitution. When 

 we consider the end for which man must strive we must turn to men 



