March 28, 1902.] 



SCIENCE. 



483 



are, unfortunately, an inheritance from 

 the language of scholasticism. 



4. Education is often unconscious. 



One may be educated without Icnowing 

 it. The teacher who guides instead of 

 driving is nearest the method of nature. 

 The best of all training is that which is 

 acquired with least effort, and some of the 

 choicest fruits of intellectual activity have 

 come when effort and self were lost in the 

 inspiration of creative genius. 



The untrained muscles of the infant are 

 educated through exercise, but it is not 

 in self-consciousness that the child and the 

 kitten and the colt and the calf delight in 

 frolics and gambols and sports and games. 

 It is only after the human infant has spent 

 weeks in experimenting that it acquires 

 the useful art of moving its eyes together, 

 and of seeing objects single and solid, 

 instead of flat and tremulous. I do not 

 know whether the child is conscious or un- 

 conscious of this lesson in the physiology 

 of vision, but it is, assuredly, not through 

 induction from particulars and deduction 

 from laws that the nutritive and nervous 

 changes come about, through which the 

 muscles of the eyeball become coordinated, 

 yet these are educational changes. So far 

 as education is shown by doing the things 

 that are advantageous, and in avoiding 

 those that are injurious, the ancestral 

 rhizopod, which extends its pseudopodia 

 under the stimulus of fit food, and retracts 

 them on the approach of danger, is edu- 

 cated, for our biological education begins 

 long before our birth, and we are born 

 educated. It is this truth, no doubt, Avhich 

 has led some to the strange notion that life 

 is memory. 



5. The things ive do most easily, or 

 most naturally, are not alivays the wisest 

 things. 



The history of our minds, like that of 

 our bodies, has been such that the things 

 we do most naturally are not in all respects 



the best for our present needs. Just as 

 there are bodily parts which, while fitted 

 for past conditions, are no longer useful, 

 and just as we have natural impulses and 

 appetites which now call for repression, so 

 it is also with our minds ; for we are in con- 

 tinual danger of a logical fallacy which it 

 is the peculiar work of natural science to 

 correct, since it is an incidental result of 

 our natural history. This is the fallacy 

 loiown to logicians as the fallacy of the 

 undistributed middle— the fallacy which 

 consists in mistaking a part for a whole. 



6. The fallacy of the undistributed mid- 

 dle is constitutional. 



Our bodies are so constituted that an 

 action which is at first performed with 

 difficulty becomes easier with each repeti- 

 tion, while departure from established cus- 

 tom at the same time grows harder. It is 

 this peculiarity which fits our bodily frame 

 for improvement by practice and training. 

 In tliis, our minds are like our bodies, for 

 a path which our thoughts have once 

 traversed becomes easier with each new 

 venture, while it grows harder for us to 

 consider what lies beyond the borders of 

 this path. 



The facts of nature do not all interest 

 us equally. Some are more attractive to 

 us than others, and we must specialize to 

 make progress in knowledge, so we are con- 

 tinually and unconsciously fixing attention 

 upon some part of nature, for some pur- 

 pose of our own, and considering it 'in 

 itself,' to the neglect of that which does 

 not interest us, nor seem to concern us. 



Our minds, as they have come to us in 

 course of nature, are so constituted that, 

 when we consider a part as if it were the 

 whole, we are in danger of forgetting that 

 it is but a part and not the whole; and if 

 we make this mistake, we may be led into 

 opinions which seem to be the logical con- 

 clusions of sound reasoning when they are 

 nothing more than new illustrations of the 



