largest happiness of man, but rather on some preconceived right that 

 was founded on authority either human or divine. But now came a 

 change. The Baconian philosophy taught that men might examine 

 the conduct of government ; and they drew the logical inference that 

 if they might examine, they might act on the results of examination. 

 This they did not hesitate to do. It is an interesting fact that the 

 immortal work of Bacon which embodied and put into permanent 

 scientific form the results of his studies and the substance of his phi- 

 losophy was published in 1620, the very year of the Pilgrims at Ply- 

 mouth, just twenty -two years before the vigorous outbreak of the 

 English Revolution. 



Now what was the educational significance of this movement? 

 Why, simply this. It opened the whole realm of nature as the legit- 

 imate field of investigation and study. Before this time the work of 

 the schools and universities had been confined to developing the minds 

 of the pupil and the teaching of the four learned professions theol- 

 ogy, medicine, law, and pedagogy. Universities had been established 

 in the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries in all 

 parts of Europe, but in no one of them were studies carried on in 

 accordance with the modern investigating spirit. This is not strange, 

 for the sciences had not yet been born. They could not come into 

 existence till the investigating or inductive methods of study had 

 come to prevail, and these methods it was that the Baconian philoso- 

 phy ushered in. 



A change of this nature was necessarily slow in making itself 

 observed. But there was here and there a man who caught the new 

 spirit and preached the new doctrine. The most enlightened man of 

 the next generation was Milton. He had in the vast stores of his 

 mind all the wealth of ancient learning. But he saw the full signifi- 

 cance of the new philosophy and so every page of his tractate on 

 Education is redolent with the modern spirit. Here are some of his 

 words, "I call therefore a complete and generous education, that 

 which fits a man to perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously all 

 the offices, both private and public of peace and war." This com- 

 prehensive definition might not inaptly be emblazoned as a motto 

 upon the walls of every one of the institutions founded by the Mor- 

 rill Grant of 1862. 



But the doctrine of Milton was slow in permeating educated soci- 

 ety. Institutions of learning are proverbially conservative. The 

 universities resisted all change until the necessity of change made 



