Page:Educational Review Volume 23.djvu/60

 of the common crowd happens to be, and from estimating it at the proper value for practical purposes.” These various opinions, when judiciously strained, leave a weighty deposit of truth; and they have a direct bearing upon the issues of right and wrong belief. They make it abundantly clear that the relations of right knowing to right doing as urgently demand illumination to-day as when Socrates mystified the Athenian youth by maintaining that no man would willingly do wrong or wittingly hold to error. On the one hand, we are told that for wild speculation and rash credulity the practical man takes the lead, whether it be by subscribing in coin to schemes for extracting gold from sea water, or “backing” the rain-makers or the “Keeley motor”; or in subscribing in faith to the reality of curative mental vibrations, the accounts of signaling with the inhabitants of Mars, the depositing of gray matter in Helen Keller’s finger-tips, or to any other of the items of the progress of science with which newspaper paragraphers regale their readers when copy is scarce. On the other hand, the men of books and apparatus are charged with the pursuit of fads, of a contempt for journals and ledgers, of an ignorance of business ways, and an incapacity to deal executively with men and things. The truth is that there are all shades and grades of men in both careers; and the important things to be observed are tendencies and their causes, not individuals and their peculiarities. It is these tendencies that are reflected in opinion and conduct indirectly, and directly in the relations that are entertained and acted upon, of theory to practice.

This relation—between the theoretical and the practical factors in the progress of knowledge—may be pictured as similar to that pertaining between master and dog. The dog runs ahead of the master, takes short excursions on his own account, comes to a turn of the road and wanders hesitatingly about until he detects the direction in which his master turns; then dashes confidently onward with an air of having intended to go that way all along, and probably imagines—and the appearances are in his favor—that he is leading the man. Yet the wise dog does not wander far out of scenting distance, is on the alert for the call of the master, and quickly retraces his steps