August 7, 1896.] 



SCIENCE. 



153 



in small things. It is not often that a man 

 who knows that there is a right does the 

 wrong. Men who do wrong are either 

 ignorant that there is ar right or else they 

 have failed in their orientation and look 

 upon right as wrong. It is the clinching 

 of good purposes with good actions that 

 makes the man. This is the higher heredity; 

 that is not the gift of father or mother, but 

 is the man's own work on himself. The 

 impression of realities is the basis of sound 

 morals as well as of sound intellect. By 

 adding near things to near, the child tends 

 to grow into wisdom. ' Knowledge set in 

 order ' is science. 



Nature study is the beginning of science. 

 It is the science of the child. To the child 

 training in methods of acquiring knowledge 

 is more valuable than knowledge itself. In 

 general throughout life sound methods are 

 more important than sound information. 

 Self-direction is more important than inno- 

 cence. The fool may be innocent ; only the 

 sane and the wise can be virtuous. 



It is the function of science to find out 

 the real nature of the universe. Its pur- 

 pose is to eliminate the personal equation 

 and the human equation in statements of 

 truth. By methods of precision of thought 

 and instruments of precision in observation 

 it seeks to make our knowledge of the 

 small, the distant, the invisible, the myste- 

 rious, as accurate as our knowledge of the 

 common things men have handled for ages. 

 It seeks to make our knowledge of common 

 things exact and precise that exactness and 

 precision may be translated into action. 

 The ultimate end of science, as well as its 

 initial impulse, is the regulation of human 

 conduct. To make right action possible 

 and prevalent is the function of science. 

 The ' world as it is ' is the province of 

 science. In proportion as our actions con- 

 form to the conditions of the world as it is 

 do we find the world beautiful, glorious, 

 divine. The truth of the ' world as it is ' 



must be the ultimate inspiration of art, 

 poetry and religion. The world, as men 

 have agreed to say it is, is quite another 

 matter. The less our children hear of 

 this, the less they will have to unlearn in 

 their future development. 



When a child is taken from nature to the 

 schools he is usually brought into an at- 

 mosphere of conventionality. Here he is 

 not to do, but to imitate ; not to see nor to 

 handle, nor create, but to remember. He 

 is, moreover, to remember not his own re- 

 alities, but the written or spoken ideas of 

 others. He is dragged through a wilder- 

 ness of grammar with thickets of diacritical 

 marks into the desert of metaphysics. He 

 is taught to do right, not because right 

 action is in the nature of things, the nature 

 of himself and the things about him, but 

 because he will be punished somehow if he 

 does not. 



He is brought into a medley of words 

 without ideas. He is taught declensions 

 and conjugations without number in his 

 own and other tongues. He learns things 

 easily by rote, so his teachers fill him with 

 rote learning. Hence grammar and lan- 

 guage have become stereotyped as educa- 

 tion, without a thought as to whether un- 

 digested words may be intellectual poison. 

 And as the good heart depends on the good 

 brain, undigested ideas become moral poison 

 as well. 



In such manner the child is bound to 

 lose his orientation as to the forces which 

 surround him in life. If he does not re- 

 cover it he will live in a world of mixed 

 .fancies and realities. Nonsense will seem 

 half truth, and his appreciation of truth 

 will be vitiated by its lack of clearness of 

 definition, by its close relation to nonsense. 

 That this is no slight defect can be shown 

 in every community. There is no intellec- 

 tual craze so absurd as not to have a follow- 

 ing among educated men and women. 

 There is no scheme for the renovation of 



