Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/66

54. The mistake is difficult to rectify. These imaginary causes must first be swept away. The true science comes only when the true and adequate cause is discovered.

We are witnessing to-day the rehabilitation of the sciences of the human spirit. In all of them the reforming process is the same. It is the mending of the old mistake; the getting rid of the fictitious causations, and the search for the true ones. Thus, for example, the fertile thought in modern sociology is the growing recognition of the fact that national characteristics are the direct outgrowth of the material conditions surrounding the nation—the climate, the soil, the food. The evil of intemperance is being met and vanquished on the same ground, not by prohibitions and pledges, but by the substitution of such a rational diet and such rational life conditions that an exhausted physical system will no longer crave the false stimulus of intoxicants. If a young man drinks to excess we no longer put the blame upon the devil, although in giving up this cause we have certainly dispensed with a great convenience. We put the blame nearer home. The careful housekeeper, overbusy with much scrubbing, has had something to do with it, if in her eager pursuit of dust she has forgotten to provide wholesome, nutritious food for the vigorous, healthy organisms committed to her charge. The home conditions have had something to do with it if they have offered attractions so meager as to be quite outweighed by the anæsthesia of drunkenness.

This modern search after true causation is merciless in its operation. It is a two-edged sword. It is tracing home the source of social distempers to men and women who have hitherto been complacently patting themselves upon the back and putting the blame upon the world, the devil, God, Providence—in a word, upon anything rather than upon their own ignorance.

Among the many activities concerning themselves with the welfare of the human spirit, there is none more complex, more difficult, or more important than that activity which we sum up under the name of education; but the history of its growth is much the same history as that of the sciences, "natural" and "human," which we have just been sketching. If it is to become a science, it is to become one by precisely the same process as these have done—that is to say, by the establishment within itself of true causal relations.

In all of this, one is but the chronicler of the obvious, and says nothing that is new. But probably the verities are mostly old. It is only their restatement that is new. Let us be honest. Let us acknowledge that what we most need is, not so much any fresh accession of truth, as a more sincere and persistent effort to live up to such measure of it as we have.