Philosophy of Botany. 237 



cealed ways is presently waged the assault against freedom 

 of conscience and diffusion of knowledge. 



That the important results which followed the recent in- 

 vestigations, that discoveries which so irresistibly fascinate 

 botanical students, that such intellectual commotions excite 

 but little attention in wider circles of society, for that we need 

 not accuse the specific or abstruse character of the problem, 

 but rather hold the deplorable inadvertency of our educational 

 system responsible for it. 



Continually treading in the steps of antiquated methods, 

 the schools neglect to stimulate and encourage a love of nature 

 and its works, and withhold the necessary elementary in- 

 structions, without the aid of which a lively interest and intel- 

 ligent comprehension of scientific questions is not possible. 



Conditions and wants of society are changing, and methods 

 and maxims which formerly suited the political state have 

 lost their meaning. Modern thought leads to the conviction 

 that the interactions of conditions upon which depends the 

 status of society are governed by physical laws, definite and 

 unalterable, like those which control the development of 

 plants. How governments should direct those movements is 

 not a matter of sentiment and feeling, but a purely scientific 

 question. 



In the present educational system memory gets loaded with 

 a heavy charge of book learning, consisting of disconnected 

 doctrines, all of them necessary for the practical wants of our 

 times — the ideal demand of general culture. The want of 

 correlation between this heterogeneity, now divested of intel- 

 ligent means to bridge over the mental chasm, is a funda- 

 mental deficiency of our higher education. 



A philosophical method of thinking, the essential of which 

 is the endeavor to comprehend the interrelations of actions and 

 phenomena in the physical and ethical world, through which 

 the individual feels himself inseparably allied in harmonious 

 concert with Infinity, is needed. The reverse tendency, which 

 now pregnantly characterizes society, is a declared particular- 

 ism, a premature application to specialt}^ vocations, controlling 

 a narrow intellectual horizon. Hence originate the fluctua- 

 tions of opinions, and the diverse monomanias in religious, 



