Science in National Education 



of tracing connections between cause and effect, 

 and to inspire them with a real desire to get to 

 the bottom of things. Thus the fundamental 

 issue is that of truthfulness easy to speak about, 

 most difficult of all things to practise in some of 

 the intellectual questions with which the teacher 

 deals and in the circumstances in which the 

 teacher has to work. And yet the touchstone 

 of the noblest, and of all memorable, teaching 

 is unflinching veracity. This it is that forms 

 character, because it is the expression of the 

 sincere character of the teacher character, as 

 Goethe said, forming character. 1 



The spirit of the scientific method spreads, of 

 course, far beyond the teaching of the physical 

 sciences. Mr. Spenser Wilkinson, to whose un- 

 flinching thought on national questions a great 

 debt of gratitude is due, has recently pointed out 

 the influence of the scientific method upon classical 

 studies. The following passages are quoted from 

 an article contributed by him to the Morning Post 

 of November 24, 1905 : 



" The change required in the public schools is not, as some 

 people suppose, the substitution of a scientific for a classical 

 curriculum. It is a change in the spirit governing the in- 

 struction given. . . . 



"... The old academical training, with its accurate scholar- 

 ship, its habit of concise thinking, its assimilation of Greek 

 thought, of Roman statesmanship, and of Roman law, turned 



1 " That fanaticism of veracity, a nobler gift than the power 

 of increasing knowledge, by so much greater as the moral 

 nature of man is greater than the intellectual ; for veracity is 

 the heart of morality." T. H. Huxley, " Life and Letters." 



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