Septkmbee 28, 1906.] 



SCIENCE. 



393 



in this lies the great advantage which the 

 humanities so-called have over the natural 

 sciences in the curriculum. They all of 

 them belong to one piece of human experi- 

 ence, and it remains true nil humawiim 

 mihi alienum est, not simply because of the 

 immediate human sympathy which unites 

 men and women who are distant not only in 

 space, but also in time, not only in speech, 

 but also in state of civilization; there is a 

 still more important hold which the social 

 sciences and humanities have upon the in- 

 terest of the student. It is that human 

 history, human development, human insti- 

 tutions, its arts, its literature, its achieve- 

 ments, are so bound up together with each 

 other, with the languages in which thought 

 has been expressed, with the literature in 

 which achievements have been recorded, 

 with the movements of trade, commerce, 

 colonization and discovery which have 

 motived historic changes, that wherever one 

 begins, problems of all sorts arise at once, 

 interlacing with each other, so that the 

 pursuit of one subject reinforces the in- 

 terest in another, and vice versa. The 

 whole group represents one social world 

 which can not be picked up piecemeal nor 

 divided up into separate compartments, 

 but is bound to exist in the mind as a 

 whole. 



This is not simply an advantage of an 

 external sort. The logician tells us that, 

 if we would expand it, the subject of every 

 judgment would be found to be the uni- 

 verse itself, individualized in some imme- 

 diate experience, but implying the whole 

 world in its implicit relations. If we ex- 

 press this somewhat more modestly it would, 

 run, in educational terms, that it is only 

 the implicit relation to other things that 

 makes any subject teachable or learnable, 

 and that the more evident and more preg- 

 nant these relations are the more readily is 

 it assimilated. In a certain sense the more 

 complex a thing is the more readily it is 



acquired, while its simplicity leaves it bare, 

 without lines of connection, without retain- 

 ing points. Of course this would not be 

 the case if education were merely a process 

 of storing away, a process of piling learn- 

 ing into the mind. But as the theory of 

 science instruction, as well as scientific ad- 

 vance, is that of research, it is evident that 

 the richer an object is in relation to other 

 things the more suggestive it will be of 

 solutions for problems, the more fertile it 

 will be in arousing associations of kindred 

 data. To bring out a problem then in a 

 field which is already rich in interest is to 

 insure not only its immediate attractive- 

 ness, but to provide the ideas and connec- 

 tions through which the problem may be 

 studied and a solution reached. 



It is this wealth of associations, this com- 

 plex interrelation with a mass of other 

 things, which the student fails to secure 

 when he is introduced to modern science, 

 through one door at a time, and that door 

 leading into a specialized subject-matter 

 whose relations with immediate experience 

 are of the slightest character. A new sub- 

 ject should not be presented by itself, but 

 in its relation to other things. It must 

 grow in some fashion out of the student's 

 present world. 



The problem of college science is, there- 

 fore, very intimately connected with science 

 in the secondary school. If the child were 

 introduced to it in the proper way there 

 the situation, which has just been described, 

 would not exist in the college. He would 

 come up into the college with the world of 

 science already in existence, and that world 

 as a field of his own experience. He would 

 find problems arising there for whose solu- 

 tion he must look to the more specialized 

 sciences. But the opposite of this is the 

 case. Science in the high school, at the 

 present time, is in a more parlous condition 

 than it is in the college, because the child is 

 farther away from the field of exact science 



