of these characteristics to matters of education is so important that 

 I shall venture briefly to speak of them. 



During the middle ages the work of the schools was limited to 

 the education of those who were to go into the learned professions. 

 It is even a matter of some doubt whether the great Charles, the 

 organizer of schools in France and Germany could himself write or 

 read. It is certain that one of the greatest of French military lead- 

 ers, as late as the time when the Renaissance was beginning to dawn, 

 was absolutely illiterate. 



Nor was this condition of affairs a singular one, or one that should 

 excite our surprise. Before the introduction of the Baconian philos- 

 ophy, the methods of looking at the problems of life were the reverse 

 of the methods that have now come to prevail. Aristotle said, " Look 

 into your own minds, study the nature of thought, look into the nature 

 of things, and thus you will be able to reason out the course of con- 

 duct you ought to pursue." The Aristotelian philosophy prevailed 

 until the seventeenth century. At length came Bacon and Descartes. 

 Their methods were the opposite. They said, study things not so 

 much in their nature, which you cannot know anything about by a 

 process of reasoning as in their characteristics and relations. You 

 are to reason from their external appearance and characteristics which 

 everybody can investigate and in some sense at least understand into 

 their internal natures. Thus it was that the Baconian or inductive 

 philosophy had for its aim the setting of all thinking beings to the 

 examining of the things everywhere about them. It taught not only 

 that the domain of thought, but also that the domain of action, was 

 open to the scrutiny of human intelligence. It exhorted everybody 

 to pry into whatever there was within the range of observation. 

 Examine the methods of nature, in order to discover the laws of 

 nature. Examine the habits of animals in order to become acquainted 

 with the laws of their development. Study the rocks, the trees, the 

 plants, the flowers, in fact, study all the domain of nature, in order 

 to discover the secrets of nature. The exhortation was followed in 

 the course of the last century by the birth of what are called the Nat- 

 ural Sciences. 



It is not singular that this method immediately began to insist on 

 the examination of institutions as well as the things of nature. Here- 

 tofore, the rights of the church, the rights of the king, the rights of 

 all governing powers, rested, not on any evidence that such forms 

 and methods by actual experience had been shown to conduce to the 



