420 Edward Livingston Youmans. 



mains now to indicate how these errors and defects may be 

 remedied by scientific education. 



Let it be remembered that this culture does not deny 

 the importance of mental discipline, but only the wasteful 

 policy of vicarious discipline. The question has three as- 

 pects. The ancients employed the useless fact A for dis- 

 ciplinary purposes, and ignored the useful fact B. The 

 adherents of the current theory propose to learn first the 

 useless fact A to get the discipline necessary to acquire 

 the useful fact B ; while a rational system ignores useless 

 A and attacks B at once, making it serve both for knowl- 

 edge and discipline. The ancient view was more reason- 

 able than that which has grown out of it. It wanted one 

 acquisition, and it made it ; the prevailing method wants 

 one, and makes two ; and as it costs as much effort to 

 learn a useless fact as a useful one, by this method half 

 the power is wasted. 



The moment that the conception of value attaches to 

 power, the idea of its economy inevitably arises, and this is 

 fatal to its vicarious application. Hence gymnastics are 

 never thought of as a preparation for industrial occupation. 

 The employer who should resort to them would quickly 

 come to bankruptcy, for he knows that the laborer has 

 but a limited amount of power, all of which it is necessary 

 to utilize ; and he understands that the needed aptness 

 comes in the regular course of occupation, and in that way 

 alone. In the world of business, where results become 

 quickly apparent, and a wrong policy works speedy disas- 

 ter, the notion of discipline for a special activity, and not 

 through it, could not be entertained, and it only lingers in 

 the world of mind and education because there effects are 

 more remote, complex, and indefinite, and the conse- 

 quences of a wrong principle are less readily detected. 

 With the growing perception of the relation between 

 human thought and human life, it will be seen that by far 



