Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/720

700 stimulation of virtue or the building of character?

Still, we quite hold with those who consider that the schools ought to aim at the production of good citizens, and that, for this purpose, they should teach, with such resources as they can command, the principles of right conduct. The book before us will be useful to those who desire help in this direction. Mr. Gilman has excellent chapters on "Life under Law," "Obedience to Moral Law," "Self-control," "Truthfulness," etc., etc.; and Mr. E. P. Jackson, who contributes the second half of the book, throws his discussion of very much the same topics into the form of a series of dialogues between a teacher and his pupils. Each writer has done his work well, and the teacher who has the will to teach his or her scholars what is right will find the whole book very profitable.

We return, however, to the point with which we set out, that parental influence to-day in the moral education of children counts for too little. Mr. Gilman tells us that "numerous educators" object to giving any special instruction in morals, alleging that that is the parent's business. He might have told us, we are persuaded, from his own knowledge, that still more parents are disposed to shuffle off all responsibility for the moral education of their children on the schools. What the effect of the double disclaimer of responsibility is likely to be may readily be determined. If the clergy, instead of making futile demands for the teaching of theological dogmas in the schools, would try to rouse the minds of their adherents and followers to a sense of their personal responsibility for their children's characters, they might accomplish a more useful work. This is something which they should preach in season and out of season; and if they would do so with the earnestness which the occasion demands, the effect might in a few years be seen in the altered moral tone of a portion of the public-school teachers themselves; and thus, concurrently with the elevation of the home, we should have a notable improvement in the work of moral education as carried on in the schools. Reform the home, and the whole face of society will be reformed.

publish in another column a letter from a correspondent who thinks that, in our article entitled Evolution and its Assailants, in the January Table, we cast a slur upon the intelligence of those who do not, in the fullest sense, accept the doctrine of evolution. The following is the statement to which our correspondent objects: "Every man within certain limits is an evolutionist, and we have little hesitation in saying that the limits within which each man is an evolutionist are the real limits of his intelligence." We hardly thought this would be misunderstood, but it evidently has been by one person at least. The word "intelligence" has two very familiar meanings. In one application it means the power a given individual has of comprehending things in general, and thus expresses a personal quality. This is the sense in which we did not employ the word. Again, it may mean the act or function of understanding, and this was the sense in which we did employ it. To say in this sense that "the limits within which each man is an evolutionist are the real limits of his intelligence," is to say that beyond those limits he ceases to understand. We wonder that a man who professes to be so widely read In philosophy and science as our correspondent should not have perceived that this was our meaning, and not that a man begins to be stupid just where he ceases to believe in evolution. The passages which our correspondent cites from some of his favorite authorities prove that we were exactly right in the position we took up, for they all go to show that, in the chain of events which make up the