Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/527

Rh old and established opinion. The studies that have held their supremacy for ages, on the ground of their eminent suitableness for mental discipline, are at last losing their ascendency because of defects in this respect; and the studies which were long resisted because of their alleged unfitness to train the mind, are now coming into wide recognition as the best and indispensable means of attaining this end.

The educational advance here indicated is of the highest significance, for the old scholastic scheme which vaunted its perfect adaptation to the work of mental development was chiefly remarkable because it did not include a single branch of study which brought the mind into direct relations with Nature. It was, in fact, a scholastic curriculum in which Nature was entirely left out, and its discipline could hardly be other than partial and artificial. On the other hand, it now begins to be seen and acknowledged that the completest discipline of the human mind must come from the comprehensive and systematic study of Nature itself. This step is an immense gain to rational culture by putting an end to the old anomaly that the most valuable knowledge for application in life is antagonistic to that required for mental development. It is now perceived that "it would be utterly contrary to the beautiful economy of Nature if one kind of culture were needed for the gaining of information, and another kind were needed as a mental gymnastic. Everywhere throughout creation we find faculties developed through the performance of those functions which it is their office to perform; not through the performance of artificial exercises devised to fit them for these functions."

"With the growing study of Nature, and the creation of those perfected forms of knowledge which we call science, the grave defects of the old methods of study have become more and more apparent, and are affirmed with emphasis by men of broad cultivation and the highest intellectual eminence. Mr. Mill shows that logic, the very science by which truth is investigated, was paralyzed for two centuries by the habit, prevailing in the universities, of regarding logical propositions as involving the relations of ideas instead of the relations of the phenomena of Nature. So long as logic and the connected branches of mental philosophy assumed that the investigation of truth consisted merely in contemplating and handling ideas, little was done in the way of discovery. Mind wrongly trained was barren of valuable results. It was only by the inversion of this procedure, and the adoption of the scientific method of study which brought the mind face to face with natural phenomena and gave it a new discipline, that the great and fruitful truths of modern knowledge have been attained. Dr. Whewell, late Master of Trinity College, in the Cambridge University, and a man of high scholarship, in his various works upon education, protested strongly against the deficiencies of the old system in the matter of discipline, and demanded the larger introduction of the sciences to repair their defects. He said: "The period appears now to have arrived when we may venture, or rather when we are bound to endeavor to include a new class of fundamental ideas in the elementary discipline of the human intellect. This is indispensable if we wish to educe the powers which we know that it possesses, and to enrich it with the wealth which lies within its reach."

In an able lecture by Prof. Helmholtz, just published in this country, "On the Relation of Natural Science to General Science," he considers the several branches of study as exercises for the intellect, and as supplementing each other in that respect. Admitting that a certain kind of discipline is obtained by the study of grammar and philology, he shows that it is radically