1342 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



most children, and provides delight for leisure hours, but because 

 Animate Nature is not only beauty-feast, but offers a wonderful 

 new Euclid for the speculative reason. Again biology leads on 

 naturally to an informed enthusiasm for health, and even to "health- 

 conscience" as regards the community. Above all, in oiu- predomi- 

 nantly mechanical age and its "pecuniary culture", it is — liter ally 

 — of life- and- death importance, to keep alive, in the mind of citizen 

 and statesman alike, the ideas of growth, development, heredity, 

 variation, evolution. 



Our main thesis — in these times beginning to be submitted by 

 biologists for criticism and application more than heretofore — 

 involves that pupils leaving school should have gained a living 

 feeling for human pre-history and history, and thus a knowledge of 

 the steps of progress that have counted for most in civilisation. 

 With this, of course, a personal ability to find their way about (not 

 less, but even more than do Boy Scouts) in Nature, with its funda- 

 mental occupations, and thus with introduction to the Order of 

 Nature; whence comes a tingling awareness of the possibilities 

 opened to them of increasing control of bodily and mental life. In 

 so far as these essentials are missed, or deficient, our system of 

 education, in school and university, remains an endeavour whose 

 success is far from corresponding to the pupils' industry and their 

 teachers' good intentions. 



Some say to us — You are knocking at open doors. History, 

 Nature Study, and Hygiene are all being taught in schools: what 

 more do you want? Now there was never more instruction than 

 there is to-day; and it is compulsory. Never was education more 

 instinct with good will; though at great periods it was more thrilled 

 by brains. This is true, and yet wherever we turn, and whether 

 upon ourselves or on our neighbours, we discover mis-instruction 

 and lack of education. We find thick clouds of ignorance hiding the 

 sun, sluggish and flabby mental processes, a lack of understanding 

 of even the biggest things that are happening, a submission to all 

 manner of conventional superstitions and outworn catchwords. 

 With these, too, an unconsidering submission to suggestions from 

 the Unconscious in its lower forms especially, and thus without 

 developing its multitude of sleeping buds to leaves and flowers. 

 And it is to be feared that the interest in brain-stretching problems 

 is for the time dwindling, while too many have practically come to 

 believe in the uselessness of the soul. But it is not too late to mend; 

 and the forces that are for us are greater than those that be against 

 us, since mechanism is for life, not life for mechanism. 



Before we close let us try to anticipate other obvious criticisms. 

 It is plain, however, that the best criticism is experiment; and the 

 biologist's proposal of concentration on the essentials of life has 

 hardly been tried — since early days at least. So he must ask fair trial. 



