On the Scientific Study of Human Nature. 483 



The office of the teacher is thus narrowed but not 

 denied. If inherited organization is a factor of destiny 

 never to be cancelled, there is another factor in that culture 

 which rests upon a knowledge of the laws of life and 

 character. Science modifies the tutorial offices by disclos- 

 ing the direction of its real work, and guarding against 

 waste of effort, and specious and spurious results — by 

 showing that education does not consist in the acquisition 

 of knowledge to be siphoned into the intellectual receivers 

 of the schoolroom, but is rather to direct the working of a 

 mechanism over which neither its owner nor his teacher is 

 omnipotent — a mechanism in which effects follow causes, 

 and which always operates according to law. It shows the 

 instructor that he must take his pupil as he finds him ; not 

 a mental abstraction, to be classed with other "minds" 

 and worked by a universal formula, but a personal reality 

 — a part of the order of Nature, which never repeats itself 

 in a single case ; a being with individual attributes which 

 are inexorably bound within the limits of his organization. 

 It therefore demands of him to leave the lore which is 

 glorified by tradition until he has thoroughly grounded 

 himself in the elements of that knowledge of human nature 

 — of the springs of action and the conditions and possibili- 

 ties of real improvement, which alone can confer the 

 highest skill in quickening the intellect and moulding the 

 character. 



I have thus attempted to prove that only by inverting 

 the rule of the past, which exalted the mind at the expense 

 of the body, and bringing the resources of modern induc- 

 tion to the study of the corporeal organism, can we arrive 

 at that htgher and clearer knowledge of man, which will 

 make possible anything like a true Science of Human 

 Nature. I have pointed out the salutary results which 

 have already flowed from this method in the crucial test of 

 the treatment of the insane, and the vast benefits which 



