206 
C. Judson Herrick 
practical educational work has centered almost exclusively about 
problems of nurture. Our entire educational system apparently 
developed upon the assumption that the child comes to school 
with no educational capital at all and that it is the function of the 
school to add to nature^ s physical endowment such mental and 
moral superstructure as the consensus of educational wisdom has 
decreed is best for mankind, the individuaks welfare not being 
taken into account, except as he is one unit in a homogeneous 
mass. 
In higher educational work we have in some measure advanced 
beyond this mechanical process of squeezing all men’s minds 
(and all women’s, too) into a single preformed mold by forcing 
them all through the same prescribed course of study and throwing 
out as defective or incorrigible all who cannot be made to fit with- 
out too great pressure. But in the elementary and secondary 
school the stuffing and squeezing process often goes on about as 
mechanically as in a brickyard. 
Let us look into this thing from the genetic standpoint. In the 
matter of origins, the poet tells us that 
Not in utter nakedness. 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
From God who is our home. 
On the other hand, it is charged against the biologists that by 
their emphasis on the descent of mankind from brutes they are 
dragging the race down from a position ‘^a little lower than the 
angels” to a stage but little higher than the monkeys. 
I do not feel myself competent to present a scientific defense 
of all parts of Wordsworth’s ^intimations of Immortality,” and 
yet I do not think that one violates the spirit of his reflections in 
maintaining that a critical examination of all the data regarding 
the evolution of man shows very clearly that the best as well as 
the worst elements of human character strike their roots down- 
ward into the common biological soil. This is not to deny that 
through many of the blind gropings of childhood, through 
Those obstinate questionings 
Of sense and outward things, 
there shines a light of heavenly origin; for 
Heaven lies about us in our infancy. 
