INTRODUCTION xi 



which we need as men, by making it depend on 

 the knowledge which we need for the practical 

 purposes of life. 



Is, then, the imparting of a knowledge of nature 

 the one purpose of nature study ? To show that 

 it is not is one of the chief purposes of Dr. Bige- 

 low's book. He never tires of insisting upon the 

 difference between elementary science and nature 

 study, because the primary purpose of elementary 

 science is the imparting of scientific knowledge, and 

 the development of habits of scientific thinking, 

 while the primary purpose of nature study is the 

 development of a love of nature. Of course 

 knowing cannot take place apart from feeling, nor 

 feeling apart from knowing. But the cold love 

 of truth, the feeling that the teaching of science 

 seeks to awaken, is a vastly different experience 

 from the feeling of love or of admiration for an 

 animal, or an object, — which the teaching of na- 

 ture study seeks to awaken. And the concentra- 

 tion of the attention upon the universal aspects or 

 phases (the class relations) of objects, which the 

 teaching of science seeks to bring about, is an 

 entirely different thing from the concentration of 

 the attention upon an object as a whole, — upon 

 those characteristics which make it an individual^ 



