CHAPTER IV 

 COMENIUS 



A quarter of a century after Francis Bacon was working at 

 his encyclopaedic attempt to cover the whole field of knowledge 

 and of scientific investigation, John Amos Comenius (1592-1670) 

 was seeking to accomplish somewhat the same thing in education. 

 Bacon tried to make science universal in its service to humanity ; 

 Comenius aimed at a no less universal service on the part of 

 education. In this movement he was not alone : Wolfgang Ratke 

 (1571-1635), John Valentine Andreae with his " Reipublicae 

 Christiano-Politicae Descriptio," and John Alsted with his " En- 

 cyclopaedia Scientium Omnium" (1630), were all exponents of 

 this same pansophic idea. 



Previous to the development of the schools of the Jesuits, 

 method in the education offered by the schools of Europe had 

 not been a conscious process. Bacon's "Advancement of Learn- 

 ing " (1605) and his " Novum Organum " (1620), together with 

 some influence from Vives (1492-1540) and Campanella (1568- 

 1639) with their insistence upon scientific method, gave an im- 

 pulse to educational thought which bore fruit in the work of 

 Comenius. Just as Bacon, in his "New Atlantis" (1617), had 

 dreamed of a " Salomon's House " devoted to the knowledge of 

 causes, to the enlargement of the bounds of human thought, and 

 to the effecting of all things possible, so Comenius in his Panso- 

 phiae praeludiuni. quo Sapientiae universalis necessitas, possi- 

 hilitas facilitasquc {si ratione certa ineatur) hreviter ac dUcuide 

 demonstratur (1639), expresses his belief in the necessity 

 of a systematisation of human learning, and for the or- 

 ganisation of a Pansophic College, which would be an in- 

 stitution of universal knowledge. The two streams of medieval 

 Humanism and of modern Realism united to form the current of 

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