30 Education through Nature 



The struggle for existence in the commercial stage 

 of social development required this and much more. 

 Physical prowess was not now so essential as intellectual 

 acumen. The highest intellectual training was, there- 

 fore, sought as the one essential qualification for success. 



With the increased specialization of society and the 

 accumulation of wealth and luxury, the fine arts also 

 developed. Even amid such surroundings a human 

 struggle for existence, of a subtle kind, exists; but 

 the struggle is now transferred from the physical to 

 the intellectual. Men no longer use their fists as 

 weapons, but wound the sensibilities of their adver- 

 saries by secret thrusts and subtle sarcasm and win 

 their victories by shrewd diplomacy, clever calcula- 

 tion, and insidious connivances. Hence all those intel- 

 lectual accomplishments of oratory, dialectics, and 

 foreign languages which enable the possessor to 

 influence and control other men's minds became the 

 ideal of education. 



This was finally carried so far that a conventional 

 system of professions, beliefs, and practices having no 

 foundation in nature and often in direct violation of 

 fundamental natural laws, pervaded the school and 

 society alike. Labor and practical affairs were looked 

 upon as vulgar, and the secluded scholar delving in 

 old manuscripts within a monastery or writing Latin 

 sermons in prose or poetry for the edification of the 

 ignorant multitudes became the worshiped idol of the 

 hour. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that in 

 England, for instance, during the reign of Queen 

 Elizabeth, next to the court fool, the subtle masters 

 of dialectics and the most consummate diplomatists, 

 if not liars, were socially the elite of the realm. Hu- 

 manism had thus reached its climax. 



A few strong natures, either suffering the inevitable 

 consequences of this artificial and really unpractical 

 training in their struggle for existence, or else true to 



