Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/778

758 has not yet been written, and can only be known to one who is well grounded, in modern psychology.

At the outset I spoke of education as fitting a man for his environment. Every man ought to know what kind of a universe he is in, what his relations to it are, what and where invariable conditions are imposed, what in the nature of things is possible and what impossible, within what limits all his achievements must be, and hence what ideals he may consistently cherish that his work may not be in vain. It hardly needs to be said that neither literature nor art nor history nor theology can acquaint a man with these. Only science can do it—science not as a mass of facts, but as a body of relations. If there be anything that the ordinary man is markedly deficient in, and which the best schooling has not added to his mental equipment, it is his failure to see the necessities of relation. Exercises in logic and the study of mathematics have been supposed to qualify a man to be logical, but if by this is meant that for every effect to be explained an adequate cause must be assigned, then most men are unequal to the occasion. What should be thought of the man who believes that the character of the weather for the next month is determined by the position of the horns of the new moon, or of the supporters of the pretensions of Dr. Gary and of Keely—some of them are not only college-bred but have reputations for business sagacity quite out of proportion to their knowledge of possibilities. Now, the study of mathematics as it is conducted to-day fails to develop a very strong sense of the necessities of mathematical relations, for the reason that most of it is symbolic and the symbols are not translated into experience. On the other hand, geometry is well calculated to induce in one an unshakable belief in such necessities; but this subject is neglected, while algebra and other symbolic processes engross the time and attention to the detriment of the student who goes no further than his prescribed studies. I know of a college president who a few years ago denied the validity of simple arithmetic processes when the numbers rose to millions! Now, most men have beaten into them in their business lives these necessary relations about which I am speaking, so far as their own business is concerned, and there is no trusting to superstitious factors, for superstition is but a belief in an inadequate cause; outside of their business their judgments are untrustworthy. But physics and chemistry, when pursued in the laboratory, present in a tolerably simple form relationships in an invariable and quantitative way, and the student learns by experience that, where .certain conditions are, a certain result will follow with rigorous exactitude. Familiarity with facts of this class leaves him with the consciousness that among physical and chemical phenomena, wherever they occur, there is always a quantitative as well as a