Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/70

58 five short phrases, who should hinder? When D'Holbach, in France, and Büchner, in Germany, applying the same spirit to the supposed elementary principles of intellect and morality, resolved these also into movements among the brain-particles, who should hinder? No one should hinder either deism or materialism, if it but leads to the truth, to the real. What shall we say if the instrument come to be loved more than the truth it was designed to make known? What if denial become precious for its own sake? Here is calamity enough. Here is the extreme;—from credulity to incredulity—from omnivorous belief to omnivorous denial. That there lay in the eighteenth-century development both English deism and French sensualism is no more to constitute a final condemnation of scientific discovery than the monstrosities done in religion's name should be alowed to sweep away the beauties of a pure faith. When one concludes from inquisitions and witch-burnings that there is only evil in Christianity, it is as though he should deny all worth to science because of the critical spirit and its monstrosity, a love of denial.

English deism was applied to education in Defoe's remarkable book "Robinson Crusoe." Man is to be educated according to Nature rather should we say by Nature.

The contrast is sharp between the natural metbod of Comenius and this new appeal to Nature. Here society, school-systems, books, were to have no place. To Nature, as a sort of divine person, the child was surrendered for education. It was supposed that Nature would bring out the universal traits of mind, the universal religious ideas, the universal social laws. We find here a most instructive illustration of the tendency, so universal in human thinking, to personify our abstractions. Words such as nature, justice, virtue, law, are used by us to represent some independent entity or being. This ineradicable habit has been the source of desperate evils in all directions. We have now before us its application in education. We are told to follow Nature. This Nature, be it understood, is an all-wise being, independent of our activities, able to guide us with a perfect wisdom. Such was the phase through which education must pass before the true method of following Nature could appear. The sharply contrasted lines of training, now known as the scientific and the classical, are being differentiated at the time of which we write. More than this, if we look closely we shall find here a reason in history for regarding the scientific training as pre-eminently natural, as pre eminently obedient to the command "Follow Nature."

The critical spirit, applied to education, received brilliant expression in France and serious testing in Germany. I state some of the fundamental principles of Rousseau's "Émile": "Everything is good as it proceeds from the hand of the Creator, everything deteriorates in the hands of man. We are educated by Nature, by men, by things. The child should be educated for a common human calling, not for a