150 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. IY. No. 84. 



by feeling, nor by suggestion. Nature 

 study if it be genuine is essentially doing. 

 This is the basis of its effectiveness as a 

 moral agent. To deal with truth is neces- 

 sary if we are to know truth when we see 

 it in action. To know truth precedes all 

 sound morality. There is a great impulse 

 to virtue in knowing something well. To 

 know it well is to come in direct contact 

 with its facts or laws ; to feel that its quali- 

 ties and forces are inevitable. To do this is 

 the essence of natures study in all its forms. 

 The claim has been made that history 

 treats of the actions of men, and that it 

 therefore gives the student the basis of 

 right conduct. But neither of these pro- 

 positions is true. History treats of the 

 records of the acts of men and nations. But 

 it does not involve the action of the student 

 himself. The men and women who act in 

 history are not the boys and girls we are 

 training. Their lives are developed through 

 their own efforts, not by contemplation of 

 the efforts of others. They work out their 

 problem of action more surely by dissect- 

 ing frogs or hatching butterflies than by 

 what we tell .them of Lycurgus or Joan of 

 Arc. Their reason for virtuous action 

 must lie in their own knowledge of what is 

 right, not in the fact that Lincoln or Wash- 

 ington or "William Tell or some other half- 

 mythical personage would have done so 

 and so under like conditions. The rocks 

 and shells, the frogs and lilies, always tell 

 the absolute truth. Association with these, 

 under right direction, will build up a habit 

 of truthfulness, which the lying story of the 

 cherry tree is powerless to effect. If history 

 is to be an agency for moral training it 

 must become a nature study. It must be 

 the study of original documents. When it 

 is studied in this way it has the value of 

 other nature studies. But it is carried on 

 under great limitations. Its manuscripts 

 are scarce, while every leaf on the tree is 

 an original document. When a thousand 



are used or used up, the archives of nature 

 are just as full as ever. From the intimate 

 affinity with the problems of life, the prob- 

 lems of nature study derive a large part of 

 their value. Becfiuse life deals with reali- 

 ties, the visible agents of the overmastering 

 fates, it is well that our children should 

 study the real rather than the conven- 

 tional. Let them come in contact with the 

 inevitable instead of the made-up, with 

 laws and forces which can be traced in ob- 

 jects and forms actually before them rather 

 than with those which seem arbitrary or 

 which remain inscrutable. To use concrete 

 illustrations, there is a greater moral value 

 in the study of magnets than in the dis- 

 tinction between shall and will, in the 

 study of birds or rocks than in that of 

 diacritical marks or postage stamps, in 

 the development of a frog than in the longer 

 or the shorter catechism, in the study of 

 things than in the study of abstractions. 

 There is doubtless a law underlying ab- 

 stractions and conventionalities, a law of 

 catechisms, or postage stamps, or grammati- 

 cal solecisms, but it does not appear to the 

 student. Its consideration does not 

 strengthen his impression of inevitable 

 truth. There is the greatest moral value 

 as well as intellectual value in the inde- 

 pendence that comes from knowing, and 

 knowing that one knows and why he knows. 

 This gives a spinal column to character, 

 which is not found in the flabby goodness of 

 imitation or the hysteric virtue of sugges- 

 tion. Knowing what is right and why it is 

 right before doing it is the basis of great- 

 ness of character. 



The nervous system of the animal or the 

 man is essentially a device to make action 

 effective and to keep it safe. The animal 

 is a machine in action. Toward the end of 

 motion all other mental processes tend. 

 All functions of the brain, all forms of 

 nerve impulse, are modifications of the sim- 

 ple reflex action, the automatic transfer of 



