On the Scientific Study of Human Nature. 481 



electrical state ; an affair of food, digestion, and nutrition ; 

 of the quantity, quality, and speed of the blood sent to the 

 brain ; of clothing and exercise, fatigue and repose, health 

 and disease ; of variable volition, and automatic nerve ac- 

 tion ; of fluctuating feeling, redundancy and exhaustion of 

 nerve power ; an affair of light, colour, sound, resistance ; 

 of sensuous impressibility, temperament, family history, 

 constitutional predisposition, and unconscious influence ; 

 of material surroundings, and a host of agencies which 

 stamp themselves upon the plastic organism, and reappear 

 in character ; in short, that it involves that complete ac- 

 quaintance with corporeal conditions which science alone 

 can give when we hint of these things, we seem to be 

 talking in an unknown tongue, or, if intelligible, then very 

 irrelevant and unpractical. 



That our general education is in a deplorably chaotic 

 state, presenting a medley of debased ideals, conflicting 

 systems, discordant practices, and unsatisfactory results, 

 no observing person will question ; that this state of 

 things is to last forever, we all feel to be impossible ; 

 and that its future removal can only come through that 

 powerful instrumentality to which we owe advancement 

 in other departments of social activity, is equally clear to 

 the reflecting. The imminent question is, How may the 

 child and youth be developed healthfully and vigorously, 

 bodily, mentally, and morally ? and science alone can 

 answer it by a statement of the laws upon which that de- 

 velopment depends. Ignorance of these laws must inevi- 

 tably involve mismanagement. That there is a large 

 amount of mental perversion, and absolute stupidity, as 

 well as of bodily disease, produced in school, by measures 

 which operate to the prejudice of the growing brain, is not 

 to be doubted ; that dulness, indociiity, and viciousness, 

 are frequently aggravated by teachers incapable of dis- 

 criminating between their mental and bodily causes, is also 



