Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/772

752 Michael Angelo, Mozart, and the rest of the masters never needed them and would have wasted their time in studying them.

When educational institutions are being founded and a curriculum organized, men will and must take the best material to be had. With such data the educational scheme of the old universities was organized and it became assimilated with the religious institutions already present, and out of them grew a philosophy of education which was theological at its base. Man was a fallen being; he had originally been perfect and upright. He was not an integral part of the universe and necessarily related to it, but was a new creation, endowed in a supernatural way, but who had, unfortunately for him, lost apart of his original patrimony. If he was to better his condition his efforts must be directed to making himself like the best models of men who had lived, which could be done by becoming acquainted with their works and imitating them as closely as possible. The ideal man was the man of the past, and nothing of great importance to character was to be learned by giving attention to things not directly related to humanity. It might be convenient to know something of other matters, but it was not essential to the attainment of character or needed for the ideally perfect man. The so-called humanities consisted of a series of studies into the things that had interested the men of the past, to the end that men might become great and learned and wise and eloquent and good. In that way men could, in a degree, recover their lost estate while in this life, and be fully redeemed in the life to come.

The educational institutions became strong allies of the religious institutions, but the former were subservient to the latter. Any man who attempted to teach differently or who taught matters that were plainly at variance with such principles, though only by implication, met instant hostility from both, and the history of the times is the history of martyrdom.

Vested interests are essential to institutions of any sort and serve as their protectors. Although we can not see how it could be otherwise, yet because of it hundreds of thousands of the choicest of the race have been tortured and have perished in dungeons and in fire.

About two hundred years ago Newton published his Principia. It dealt with physical forces and their laws. It was what we would call to-day a treatise on mechanics. He discovered and formulated the laws, and, after no great contentions, they were quite generally adopted and taught as a branch of learning which it was useful to know. As it was mathematical in its character, it was of a sort that compels assent by the one who understands it; but it was adopted for what it then appeared to ho, not for what was necessarily implied in its acceptance. The