Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/383

Rh or to dwell upon as lie sees fit. No additional strength comes from dilution or repetition. Still less do the gigantic reasons why men should lead sober lives gain from association with arguments based on doubtful observations or spurious interpretations. In the sixty-seven pages of the other book I find about sixty different ideas, many of these not relevant to the subject in hand, the space being filled by repetition, quotation, and padding. Apparently this was not the author's original plan. It was forced upon him by the demands of the trade. A single collective paragraph, for example, would have covered the known effects of alcohol on most of the tissues; for alcohol does not affect the bones in one way, the muscles in another, and the stomach in a third. It confuses the nerves and poisons the blood, and these influences show themselves variously. The effects that concern us most are not the changes of tissue, but the changes of life.

Such a treatise as the New York law contemplates can not be written by a scientific man. The inclusion of "scientific temperance" in the course of study means the disappearance of scientific physiology. "It is insisted," says the writer from whom I have already quoted, "that in it shall be taught certain effects of alcohol on certain tissues and organs, when it is not known that such effects occur, and when some of them are known not to thus occur. Extravagant statements are demanded when only the most moderate ones can be made. If alcohol and its effects are mentioned at all, the true scientific spirit would demand that the whole truth and that only be told. This can not be done to meet the approval of the committee of censorship. These people demand this most monstrous thing, that there shall be a law compelling a scientific author in treating his subject to devote a certain prescribed amount of his space in such and such a way. They demand a large introduction of matter into the treatment of a subject that is wholly irrelevant to it. Indeed, they have the effrontery to demand of a scientific author in treating a certain scientific subject in the school courses that he shall introduce only so much of the subject as shall bear on a certain reform that they are advocating. Can even earnestness of purpose or the importance of the reform be a shadow of an excuse for such a course?"

The primary purpose of science teaching is to give not virtue but strength. The strong mind forms its own precepts of right action. The weak mind fails, whatever its memorized precepts. The methods favored by the advocates of scientific temperance must always fail of their purpose. No impulse to virtue is less effective than memorized statements of the evils of vice. Information learned by heart is never vital, least of all that which is given on doubtful authority, by methods not sanctioned by pedagogic experience. If such educational methods really led to