394 HERMANN VON HELMHOLTZ 



intellectual development of the human race of this subtly 

 elaborated art of transmitting and receiving the accumulated 

 wisdom of others, and with all deference to the importance 

 of the classics in the evolution of the moral and aesthetic sense > 

 and in the development of an intuitive knowledge of human 

 sensations, ideas, and conditions of civilization, we must 

 nevertheless insist that this exclusively literary and logical 

 method of education fails in one essential point. This is the 

 methodical training of the faculties, by which we subject the 

 unorganized material, governed apparently more by chance 

 than by reason, which we encounter in the real world, 

 to the organizing concept, after which it is capable of linguistic 

 expression. The methodical development of this art of obser- 

 vation and experiment has hitherto been confined almost 

 exclusively to the natural sciences ; any hope that the psycho- 

 logy of individuals and of nations might be directed to the 

 same goal, along with the practical sciences of education and 

 of social and political organization which should be based upon 

 it, seems for the present to be relegated to a distant future. 



'This new task, pursued by scientific workers along new 

 ways, resulted promptly enough in new, and, after their kind, 

 unprecedented consequences, a proof of what achievements the 

 human mind is capable when enabled to traverse the entire 

 path from the facts to the complete knowledge of the law, 

 under favourable conditions, self-conscious, and itself testing 

 all things. The simpler relations, those of inorganic nature in 

 particular, permit us to obtain such an exact and penetrating 

 knowledge of their laws, such far-reaching deductions of the 

 consequences to which these lead, and then again to test and 

 confirm these deductions by so exact a comparison with 

 reality, that the systematic evolution of these concepts (e.g. 

 the deduction of astronomical phenomena from the law of 

 gravitation) can be compared to no other product of human 

 thought, in respect at once of consistency, certainty, exactitude, 

 and fecundity. 



' I only refer to these facts in this connexion in order to 

 point out in what sense the natural sciences have become 

 a new and essential element in human civilization, of inde- 

 structible significance to its whole future development, so 

 that the complete education of the individual, as of the nations, 



