————- | 
ee ee 
es 
L.—EDUCATIONAL SCIENCE. 263 
that the corporate strength of society should be exerted to secure for 
him actual as well as theoretical possession of his title. How the 
moyement based upon that belief will ultimately affect the happiness 
of our people no one can with certainty foresee; nevertheless, if one is 
interested in the wider educational issues one must define one’s own 
attitude towards it. I am, therefore, bound to record my opinion that 
in its main tendency it ought wholeheartedly to be accepted. I think 
this chiefly because it seems to be inspired by the Christian principle of 
the immense value of the individual life, or, if you prefer to put it 
so, by the Kantian principle that no man ought to be treated merely as 
a means but always also as an end in himself. But if the movement 
is accepted, public education must correspondingly assume a character 
which would follow neither from the principle of subordination nor 
from the principle of laissez faire. The view I submit is that the educa- 
tion of the people should aim at enabling every man to realise the 
greatest fullness of life of which he is by nature capable—‘ fullness ’ 
being, I add, measured in terms of quality rather than of quantity, by 
perfection of form rather than by amount of content. That view is the 
basis of all I have to say. 
Having adopted it, I am compelled at once to face the question, 
What are the essential qualities of a full life? It is just here that the 
judgment of the phronimos would be invaluable. In his absence 1 
must hazard the conjecture that he would-approve of at least the 
general drift of the following observations. During the last century 
we learnt, following Darwin, to look upon all biological phenomena 
as incidents in a perpetual struggle wherein the prizes to be won or 
lost were the survival of the individual and the continuance of his 
species. From this point of view there could be only one object of 
life, one causa vivendi, namely, to continue living, and the means by 
which it was to be attained were adaptations to environment achieved 
by an individual, and perhaps handed on to its offspring, fortunate 
germinal variations, or lucky throws of the Mendelian dice. It was 
natural, if not logically necessary, that the doctrine should fuse with 
the view, as old as Descartes, that life is but an intricate complex of 
physico-chemical reactions. Upon that view, even to speak of a 
struggle for existence, is to use a metaphor admissible only on account 
of its picturesque vigour; when we study the forms, processes, and 
evolution of living beings we are spectators merely of the operation 
of physical and chemical laws in peculiar forms of matter. Thus the 
occurrence and the phenomena of life are finally and wholly to be 
explained in terms of the statistical distribution of positive nuclei and 
their satellite electrons. 
These ideas, in either their more moderate or their more drastic 
form, affected the attitude of men towards matters lying far outside the 
special province of biology. National policies have been powerfully 
influenced by them, and it has been widely held that the education of 
children should be shaped mainly if not solely with a view to 
‘ efficiency ’ in the struggle for existence. It is, therefore, relevant to 
point out what tremendous difficulties are involved in their thorough- 
going application. JI will not speak of those which have driven 
