General Aims of Nature Study 63 



evolution of the mind, which in its normal activity 

 passes from the particular to the general, from the 

 concrete to the abstract, by a process of elimination and 

 forgetting. The possibilities of such an overloaded 

 mind are not great. Dwelling continually on a mass 

 of details, it develops no regulating principles, no 

 rational basis for conduct. For these must be general 

 principles. The achievements of a mind dwelling 

 constantly on isolated facts must ever be a matter of 

 chance. No voluntary rational direction can be 

 given to its mental energies; and science in its true 

 sense, as systematized knowledge gathered in the 

 light of guiding principles and stimulated by a gen- 

 eral idea, must ever be foreign to it. " Mere observers" 

 are sometimes called scientists, but erroneously. The 

 ordinary teacher of nature study is doubtless aware 

 that books on nature study are usually made up of a 

 disconnected mass of curious observations, often in- 

 teresting, but extremely fatiguing to the mind, when 

 attempt is made to get any lasting information from 

 them. Often the sense of equilibrium is restored 

 only after most of the details are forgotten. It is 

 difficult to understand what use such mere observa- 

 tion can be except as it affords a pastime to those 

 who have nothing else to do. A false method may 

 lead to such mere observation of disconnected facts, 

 and develop a dilettanteism which, in the eyes of 

 those unfamiliar with natural science, has all the 

 appearances of a fad. 



Such may err in assuming that observed facts that 

 are apparently worthless must necessarily be so 

 intrinsically. It may be doubted if any fact, how- 

 ever insignificant, when impressed upon the mind, 

 does not in some way affect it; that the brain after 

 a stimulation becomes absolutely the same as it was 

 before that stimulation. 



Sense stimulation gives rise tojiftfiftftftdous indue- 



UNIVERSITY 



