SUMMARY 511 



displays a power of affirming contradictories which is not exceeded 

 by, and is much less excusable than that displayed by the 

 adherents of any of the creeds. The latter do not profess to be 

 guided solely by verified truth and pure reason. Moreover, in 

 many instances the statements of the biologist are judged on 

 grounds of pure prejudice by many of his fellows. 



832. Biologists often insist that 'the time has come' when the 

 traditional education of young adults shall be replaced by a training 

 in science. But of all modern sciences the most fundamentally im- 

 portant is the science of education ; and the training accorded to 

 young biological students is precisely that kind which is most con- 

 demned by modern educationalists who denounce, for example, tradi- 

 tional, classical, historical, and geographical teaching as consisting 

 too much in a mere learning and comparison of words, dates, lengths 

 of rivers, and the like. They insist that it is not enough to store 

 the memory with facts ; intelligence must also be developed ; and by 

 intelligence they always mean skill in thinking in terms of causation. 



833. Systematic knowledge is necessary to biologists, but, to 

 judge by what the students of other sciences consider essential, 

 it is not all that is necessary. If it be right that scientific men 

 shall have their powers of precise thinking about sequences 

 developed to the utmost by formal training ; if the most complete 

 science is created not merely by classifying facts according to their 

 co-existences and resmblances, but also by classifying them accord- 

 ing to their causal relations ; if the former method of classification 

 is the warp and the latter the woof of perfected science ; if facts 

 should be arranged not only according to one relation, but accord- 

 ing to every relation ; then there ought to be a considerable change 

 in biological education, and learners should receive a formal training 

 in the method of classification which Darwin has done so much to 

 introduce as well as in the method of which Linnaeus was so great 

 an exponent. 



834. It is not merely the education of biologists that is in question. 

 All education is in question. And very much more than education ; 

 for on its mental training depends almost absolutely, both in war 

 and in peace, the weal and woe of every human race. Whoever 

 has attempted to bring about any sort of reform from that of a 

 slaughter-house to that of a state, from that of a nursery to that 

 of a religion knows well that his chief difficulties lie, not in 

 the ignorance of those he would influence, for facts however 

 laboriously gathered are readily imparted, but rather in mental 

 states engendered by an education which does little to create a 



