August 7, 1896.] 



SCIENCE. 



155 



Eeality is what educates us, and reality 

 never comes so close to us witli all its 

 powers of discipline as wlien we encounter 

 it in action. In books we find truth in 

 black and white, but in the rush of events 

 we see truth at work. It is only when 

 truth is busy and we are ourselves person- 

 ally mixed up in its activities that we learn 

 of how much we are capable, or win the 

 power by which these capabilities can be 

 made over into effect." 



Mr. Jackman has well said : '' Children 

 alwaj^s start with imitation, and very few 

 people ever get beyond it. The true moral 

 act, however, is one performed in accord- 

 ance with a known law that is just as 

 natural as the law which determines which 

 way a stone shall fall. The individual 

 becomes moral in the highest sense when 

 he chooses to obey this law by acting in ac- 

 cordance with it." 



Conventionality is not morality and may 

 co-exist with vice as well as with virtue ; 

 for the obedience which lasts is the prod- 

 uct of individual knowledge and will. It 

 is the progressive response to higher and 

 higher laws and as the individual comes to 

 recognize them in his own experience. The 

 welfare of man is not primarily security 

 from deception and evil influences. It goes 

 with the growth of his power to recognize 

 illusions and to base his action on realities. 

 Obedience induced by deception cannot be 

 permanent. Wrong information, it is true, 

 may lead to right action, as falsehood may 

 secure obedience to a natural law which 

 would otherwise be violated. But in the 

 long run, men and nations pay dearly for 

 every illusion they cheHsh. For every 

 sick man healed at Denver or Lourdes, ten 

 well men will be made sick. Faith cure 

 and patent medicine feed on the same vic- 

 tims. For every Schlatter who is worship- 

 ped as a saint, some equally harmless lunatic 

 will be stoned as a witch. This scientific 

 age is beset by the non-science which its 



altruism has made safe. The development 

 of the common sense of the people has given 

 security to a vast cloud of follies, which 

 would be destroyed in the unchecked com- 

 petition of life. It is the soundness of our 

 age which has made what we call its deca- 

 dence possible. It is the undercurrent of 

 science which has given security to human 

 life, a security which obtains for fools as 

 well as for sages. 



For protection against all these follies 

 which so soon fall into vices or decay into in- 

 sanity, we must look to the schools. A 

 sound recognition of cause and effect in 

 human affairs is our best safeguard. The 

 old common sense of the ' unhighschooled 

 man,' aided by instruments of precision 

 and directed by logic, must be carried over 

 into the schools. Clear thinking and clean 

 acting, we believe, is a product of the study 

 of nature. When men have made them- 

 selves wise, in the wisdom which may be 

 completed in action, they have never failed 

 to make themselves good. When men 

 have become wise with the lore of others, 

 the learning which ends in self and does 

 not spend itself in action, they have been 

 neither virtuous nor happy. " Much study 

 is a weariness of the flesh." Thought, 

 without action, ends in intense fatigue of 

 soul, the disgust with all the '■ sorry scheme 

 of things entire,' which is the mark of the 

 unwholesome and insane philosophy of pes- 

 simism. This philosophy finds its condem- 

 nation in the fact that it has never yet been 

 translated into pure and helpful life. 



With our children the study of words and 

 abstractions alone may in its degreee pro- 

 duce the same results. Nature studies have 

 long been valued as a ' means of grace ' be- 

 cause they arouse the enthusiasm, the love of 

 work, which belongs to open-eyed youth. The 

 child blase with moral precepts and irregu- 

 lar conjugations turns with delight to the 

 unrolling of ferns and the song of birds. 

 There is a moral training in clearness and 



