490 EDUCATION 



ing to their co-existences and resemblances, but more especially, 

 as in the ordinary teaching of mathematics and physics, he is 

 trained how to arrange them according to their sequences. 

 Acquiring definite ideas as to what constitutes evidence and 

 what proof, he values his facts and hypotheses in proportion 

 as they are capable of verification and of being linked with 

 other facts and hypotheses. Thus, given the flatness of the 

 world as an initial fact, he may be told that it follows 

 necessarily that, if armed with a powerful telescope he stands 

 in clear weather on the seashore, a ship will never sink below 

 the horizon but will be visible from truck to waterline all 

 the way to America, that a ship that sails continually to the 

 West will never come back by the East, that the sun and 

 stars must revolve round the earth, and that, since they are so 

 many, since they rise and set in slightly different places every day 

 of the year, and since their apparent positions in relation to one 

 another are more or less fixed, it is likely that they must pass 

 beyond the edge of the flat earth and not through holes in its 

 surface ; and so forth. The initial statement made to the pupil is 

 untrue. He will start his reasoning from false premises. But, at 

 least, he will reason and will treat his apparently established fact as 

 material for thought and as the starting-point for the acquisition, 

 examination, and systematization of more facts and thoughts. 

 Moreover, facts and the thinking founded on them are distinct 

 things. As was often the case in Pagan Greece, very good thinking 

 may be founded on false premisses thinking so good that presently 

 the premisses are likely to be discerned as false, as not in accord 

 with reality. But, whether the premisses be true or false, the main 

 feature of this kind of teaching is that it tends to endow the pupil 

 with an acquisitive^ an open> a reflective habit of mind. Not only 

 is he left free to learn the real truth about the shape of the world 

 from others, but, because he will try to link up his belief with so 

 many phenomena, he is apt to discover it for himself. Not only 

 does he tend to think freely and carefully about his past experiences, 

 but he remains alive also to fresh experiences, which, again, he tends 

 to think about, and link up with, and use as a test for that which 

 he has already stored a mental attitude which tends continually 

 to increase his store of material for thought and his skill in using 

 it. He learns to remain a learner and become a thinker. He 

 takes every possible means to avoid error. The universe his mind 

 constructs tends continually towards that organized whole which 

 is the goal of all good thinking and all good science. 



