Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/720

700 or two who can be trusted to put that and that together." Well, "putting that and that together" simply means mentally recognizing a fact and perceiving its significance. It is not the science of logic that is required in every-day affairs; it is the faculty or habit of seizing main points and holding them as long as may be necessary. The truly superior man, the man who counts, is he who is thus able to take a grip of things, of that which is substantial, vital, pertinent, organic.

Self-interest is supposed to be a great sharpener of the mental faculties; but nothing is commoner than to find people ignoring the very facts on which their happiness chiefly depends. They live according to the impulse and humor of the moment, in a hind of disjointed, inconsequent fashion. They do not know the great facts of life; and the truth that their life, as a whole, should present a certain organic unity, and should then itself become a great fact, has never been revealed to them. Here is a man who is "all out of sorts." He wants change, he says; the desperate monotony of his existence is killing him. He can not understand how it is that he should have to be always running to the doctor and dosing himself with tonics and alterativesalternatives [sic]. He likes to throw the blame on circumstances; he likes to think there is something mysterious or at least altogether special in his case; the last thing he wants to hear is that probably his condition is due to the neglect of certain important facts of his physical, perchance, also, of his moral, nature. He willingly lends himself to the nostrums of the quack; but a simple account of the general principles upon which Nature works is nowise to his taste. He does not like to think that certain penalties are irrevocable, or that the only course by which partial relief can be obtained is one of careful submission to law for the future.

We see substantially the same condition of mind in many a man whose business career has been one of failure. He likes to think that success in this world is mainly a matter of accident, and that "luck" was against him. That one word, "luck," is the whole philosophy of some men: it does not explain anything, but it does what is more pleasing to persons of their disposition, enables them to dispense with explanations. We may say in general that there is a fatal disposition in most men not to recognize facts, not to perceive that things are woven together in the iron bands of law, and that nothing stands wholly out of relation to any other thing. This is the tendency which it should be the chief object of education to combat. What we require to do is to build up in the mind, little by little, but with undeviating purpose, the belief that things hang together, and that the business of the intellect is to discover the laws or principles of their association. We should teach that there is order in the universe, which should and must—unless our lives are to be marred by failure—be responded to by a certain order in our thoughts. We should teach on every occasion, and with every possible variety of illustration, that nothing can be done wisely or well that is not done upon system; that random words are vain; that random thoughts are vain; that no mental effort is worth anything that is not dominated by some clear purpose, and that does not connect itself with previously acquired knowledge.

We find ourselves here face to face with the principle of evolution. If evolution means anything, it means the unity of the universe; it means the construction of a path along which thought can travel from the infinitely small to the infinitely great, from forms of the last degree of simplicity to forms of the highest degree of complexity; it means, finally, the blending of subject and object in one all-embracing synthesis. Well, this, according to the measure of our opportunities, is what we have to teach to the young. It will be