Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/237

Rh having body, mind and spirit. Why should we, in educating him, ake least thought for the flower? Why should we take less thought for the flower than for the roots? Because without the roots there can be no flower? But so also with the roots it may chance that there shall be no flower. There is many a splendid body with soul so small that Omniscience scarce could find it. If we look primarily to the roots, think constantly of the roots, make the roots uppermost in all endeavor, we shall develop roots and nothing else. Existence is, indeed, a struggle. Shall we not, then, educate men for their immediate task? Most certainly. Shall we forget, or put at all into the background, the fact that men have a spiritual nature, and that in this lies their highest and fullest measure of being? This, to some, may savor of cant and of the seminaries. Let it, however, be settled, apart from sects or creeds, whether there are such excellences as sincerity, purity, truthfulness, self-forgetfulness in the desire to be and to do good. Let it also be settled in what relation these stand to the other excellences of man's nature. Let it be seen whether they are not supreme in the sense of making up his worth, in the sense, that is, of giving value to all his other attainments, physical and intellectual. These important matters being settled in the affirmative, as very many would settle them even in our so-called materialistic age, education would at least proceed in a different spirit. While it would not be the business of education to make men and women good, it would be impossible to call those educated who had never so much as thought on goodness, or never considered themselves in the light of their highest possibilities and duties.

With respect to the subject-matter of education Mr.Spencer offers this delicious bit of satire: "Men who would blush if caught saying Iphigënia instead of Iphigënia show not the slightest shame in confessing that they do not know where the Eustachian tubes are located, what are the actions of the spinal cord, what is the normal rate of pulsation, or how the lungs are inflated." This sentence may be turned about and made to utter truth as follows: Men who would blush in not knowing where the Eustachian tubes are located, what are the actions of the spinal cord, what is the normal rate of pulsation, or how the lungs are inflated, show not the slightest shame, not the very slightest shame, in confessing that they do not know when Plato lived or what he thought, when Goethe lived or what he thought, when Angelo lived or what he wrought. The entire duty of man is not to locate the Eustachian tubes. The entire duty of man is not to know the actions of the spinal cord, or how the lungs are inflated—not one particle more than it is bis entire duty to say Iphigënia. It is not what a man knows, but how he knows what he knows, that determines the character of his education. This thought, in the writer's opinion, is fundamental. To lead up to it and to give it full emphasis has been the special object of all remarks here made upon Mr.