30 



NATURE STUDY AND LIFE 



than the jail would be to start them raising peaches and 

 grapes of their own. Effort for the production of property 

 is ethical, and the moment the child engages in it he places 

 himself upon the side of law and order in the community. 

 To rear a flower is an ideally ethical thing and may ele- 

 vate the moral and aesthetic tone of a household. We 

 need this ethical training, not in the way of moralizing, 

 but in unconscious positive doing, as the warp of our edu- 

 cation, and nature study offers boundless opportunities for 

 its daily inculcation and practice. 



Religious. — Finally, no one can love nature and not 

 love its Author, and if we can find a nature study that 

 shall insure a sincere love, we shall be laying the surest 

 possible foundation for religious character. 



A good deal has been written of late about the child 

 repeating the history of the race, and it seems to have 

 been taken for granted that the nature worships of primi- 

 tive peoples form the normal stepping-stones for the child 

 to higher conceptions of religious truth. The reasons 

 that seem to render such suppositions unnecessary or 

 possibly untenable are stated more fully in the paper just 

 referred to.^ It is sufficient to say here that all the nature 

 worships of which we now have any knowledge are rela- 

 tively modern phenomena, terminal twigs on the evolu- 

 tionary tree, rather than fundamental elements in the 

 main trunk of human progress. They would thus have 

 no relation to the normal development of the child. 



Creative effort for good : this is the fundamental con- 

 ception of religious progress, aside from all matters 

 of race, creed, or sect, — " The character that creates 



^Pedagogical Seminary, vol. vii, p. 208. 



