960 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXIX. No. 755 



authority outside the school. This is an 

 excellent example of the way in which such 

 regulations effectively block progress by 

 prohibiting the teacher who would study 

 education scientifically from trying experi- 

 ments, thus dwarfing him as a science 

 teacher by barring him from applying sci- 

 entific methods to the study of his teaching 

 problem. Until differences of this sort 

 have been settled by experiment, it is irra- 

 tional and very injurious to the students 

 to make regulations that decide such ques- 

 tions in advance on a priori grounds. 



This deductive, logical, abstract, defining- 

 without-concept habit in present physics 

 teaching has been inherited direct from 

 Newton. It is a habit of which Professor 

 Perry says:' 



I take it that the method of study into which 

 Newton, was forced, became, because of Newton, 

 the favorite English mathematical study, and we 

 know that it kept English mathematicians back 

 for a hundred years. In the shape of elementary 

 deductive geometry, it is keeping back every 

 schoolboy now. 



What does this mean? You recall that 

 Newton, when he presented some of his 

 optical discoveries to the Royal Society in 

 1672, was attacked by Hooke and others 

 and drawn into quite a controversy. This 

 was very distasteful to Newton; and so, 

 before presenting his "Principia," he put 

 it into such form that it would be unassail- 

 able. Euclid being the model of such 

 necessary reasoning, this was his model. 

 So we find that the "Principia" begins 

 with definitions, axioms, scholia and the 

 other paraphernalia of geometry. But it is 

 very clear that Newton did not reach his 

 definitions in any such way. They grad- 

 ually developed in his mind as the result 

 of long pondering over the phenomena, the 

 experiments, and the known data of me- 

 chanics. Any one of you who has seriously 

 tried to grasp the real meaning of his justly 

 celebrated "laws or axioms of motion," or 



''Mathematical Gazette, January, 1909, p. 5. 



who has read and pondered over the volu- 

 minous literature that has been written 

 about them, can not fail to be impressed 

 with the mighty genius of the man who 

 first formulated them. It was a very great 

 feat of the scientific imagination. And yet 

 we expect the average high-school pupil to 

 repeat that feat in three or four lessons, 

 and to have facility in the solution of ab- 

 stract problems involving these definitions 

 in less than a year ! And this without hav- 

 ing given him the full experimental basis 

 for those laws nor having taught him to 

 ponder scientifically so that he can follow 

 the reasoning by which Newton reached 

 his conclusions. 



I have already shown that in England 

 this fallacy of logical perfection in elemen- 

 tary physics has been exposed at the hands 

 of Professor Perry. In Germany the same 

 is true. That celebrated commission that 

 has been studying this matter there adopted 

 as one of its theses with regard to physics 

 the following: "In teaching, physics must 

 not be treated as a mathematical science, 

 but as a natural science." The meaning 

 of this is given in the following words : 



The specific value of the teaching of physics 

 for general culture has long been diminished be- 

 cause of the fact that physics is treated primarily 

 as a mathematical science. The chief reason for 

 this is that physics itself has long regarded it as 

 an ideal to present itself in deductive form after 

 the manner of a mathematical system. This is 

 particularly true of the fundamental portion of 

 physics, the mechanics, the construction of which 

 on a few axioms has been regarded as its chief 

 excellence. 



I am glad to be able to say that the 

 latest and best of the German elementary 

 texts— that of Poske — does not contain 

 Newton's second law of motion or the abso- 

 lute system. Professor Poske is editor of 

 the Journal for Physics Teaching, a mem- 

 ber of the celebrated commission and a 

 teacher of long experience. The book is 

 written for classes that correspond to those 



