Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/719

Rh elements of a true science of life are unknown, and who, with all their literary, professional, and social acquirements, are willing to descend in their daily practice to the lowest depths of infamy. Think of the two things—"education" and brutal, merciless vice—going hand in hand! Alas! it is not education; it is that wretched, sophistical veneering of accomplishments which usurps the name of education. It may embrace—in the case of medical men must embrace—a certain amount of scientific instruction; but what it lacks is the true scientific grasp of life as a whole. We are no fanatical believers in the saving efficacy of a little smattering, nor even of much special knowledge, of physics and chemistry; but we are firm believers in the moralizing effects of a true philosophy of life, supported and illustrated by constant reference to verifiable facts. All sciences are but parts of one great science, and the highest function of universal science is to teach us how to live. The state, in so far as it undertakes to fit the young for "positions in life," acts upon the old sophistical idea of education as a thing of accomplishments designed to promote individual success. Such education can not of itself have any moralizing effect, and may have a demoralizing. The change that is needed is to abandon that view, and to make education a preparation for life in the broadest sense. Whether the state can adopt the latter principle, and bring its teaching up to the proper level, remains to be seen. If it can not, its condemnation is definitively pronounced, for no other conception of education will meet the requirements of the future.

subject of education has been treated from many points of view, but we do not know that it can be more profitably considered than in its bearing upon the power of recognizing and dealing with facts. The educated man, according to our conception, is he who knows a fact when he sees it and knows what to do with it. The educated man is the man who has an instinct for facts, who searches for them as for hidden treasure, and, having got them, knows how to set them in logical and luminous order. It is the man who knows and feels that facts make up the very backbone of human life and of everything else, and that to ignore them, or to play fast and loose with them, is simply to court failure and loss.

The true fact corresponds with the true idea; and the man of facts is therefore a man of ideas. He constantly seeks to see the relations of things, and only when he discerns relations does he feel himself to be in the presence of facts. To have an appetite for unrelated facts is as unwholesome as to have an appetite for slate-pencils. "Grad-grind" is not the type of the man of facts: he is rather the type of a man who does not know what a fact is, who is all unconscious that our knowledge in regard to anything has to round itself to some completeness and symmetry before we can claim to possess facts. A true fact is a living, not a dead, thing; and it proves that it is alive by bearing fruit: it produces something, and, like wisdom, it is justified of its children.

What we have in view, however, on the present occasion is, not to pronounce a eulogium on facts—after all, they can take pretty good care of themselves—but to draw attention to the extent to which, in spite of all that has been done for "education," an inability to discern and do justice to facts still prevails in the world. Ask any intelligent business man what the chief trouble is that he encounters among his employés, or what it is that impairs the usefulness of most of them; and he will tell you, not in so many words, but in substance, that it is their imperfect apprehension of facts, and consequent inability to draw conclusions that common sense itself dictates. He will say, perhaps, "Out of a score of men I can only find one