28 EMILE BOUTROUX 



and behaves itself as provisional. The science 

 useful in education is not a science fixed in 

 rigid definitions with a view to teaching and 

 examinations, it is the living science, grasped 

 in the very act of making itself in the labora- 

 tories. 



The first sort of science is easily accepted 

 by professors and students whose laziness it 

 flatters; it favors dogmatism, routine, aprior- 

 \ ism, the assumption of ability to judge all 

 things according to exact and absolute rules. 

 The man who has allowed himself to be 

 moulded in this way by his scientific studies, 

 beholds with impatience the complexity and 

 the obscurities of real things, the secret spring 

 of life and activity which makes them rebel- 

 lious against arrangement in a logical system. 

 He likes to treat qualities like quantities, re- 

 alities like abstractions, and to believe that a 

 problem is resolved the moment; eliminating 

 every thing that cannot be reduced to exact 

 and clear concepts, he has deduced from cer- 

 tain principles, plausible in themselves, con- 

 sequences logically correct. 



Living science on the other hand — the 



