Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/778

758 system which proceeded upon no other plan than the development of man's capacities be other than false, disastrous, condemnable? Comenius saw clearly this opposition between his fundamental principle and orthodoxy, and endeavored to meet the difficulty by saying that man's fall did not utterly destroy his original powers, but weakened them, leaving it possible to secure a beneficial development. This reconciliation was no reconciliation, and the fault lay in the nature of the case, not in Comenius; all adjustment between these opposing views is impossible.

The words of Comenius, respecting the education of woman, are of special significance, and this alike from their time and their character. He said: "There is no reason why woman should be excluded from culture, either from that which comes through the Latin language or through the native tongue. Women also are images of the Godhead, and possess spiritual receptivity and capacity for training, often more than we—they too are often summoned to great work. Why should we let them come to the alphabet and then cast them away from books? Do we fear superficiality? But, the more thoughts a person gains, the less room is there for superficiality which always comes from spiritual emptiness." When we ask how Comenius dealt with education, we are to remember that he proceeded according to a philosophy of the matter. He had something to say about man before giving rules for his training. He consciously adopted that principle which we have affirmed to be essential, viz., that the idea man has of himself must determine his education. Comenius had an idea of man, and made it the guiding principle in his system. Man, so he maintained, lives a threefold life, a vegetative, an animal, and a rational or spiritual life. He has a threefold home—the mother, the earth, the heaven. By birth he enters his second home, by death and resurrection his third and eternal home. In the first we receive simply life with its movements and senses, in the second we gain life and the senses with rationality, in the third we reach the fulfillment of all things. That first life is a preparation for the second, the second a preparation for the third, the third is without end. Compare this understanding of man with the middle-age teaching. Here man is incarcerated in a body and dungeoned on the earth; for Comenius, man is provided with an organism and placed at school for the unfolding of his nature in an endless progress. According to the one view, man is to cast away his body as a thing accursed; according to the other, he is to use it as an instrument unto life.

Careful study of the writings of Comenius can not fail to impress one with the naturalness, that is, the truth of his method. From beginning to end his thought is an attempt to follow Nature, and this not after the impossible manner of Rousseau's "Émile," but by a patient scrutiny of natural processes everywhere appearing. Man is one with Nature, and, as so, Nature will show him how to educate himself—not,