Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/756

736 mode of education; and that is the methodical discipline of the activity by which we reduce the confused material which meets us in the actual world, apparently (at first sight) ruled by wild chance rather than reason, to clear conception, and thereby make it fit for expression in speech. Such an art of observation and experiment, methodically developed, we have hitherto found in the natural sciences alone; and our hope, that the psychology of individuals and peoples, with the practical sciences of education and of social and political government based upon it, will attain the same end, can only be fulfilled in a distant future.

This new enterprise, prosecuted by natural science on new paths, has quickly enough yielded fresh and, of their kind, unheard-of results, evidencing what achievements human thought is capable of, where it can go the whole way from the facts to the full knowledge of the law under favorable conditions, testing and knowing every thing for itself. The simple relations, especially those of inorganic Nature, permit of our possessing such a penetrating and accurate knowledge of their laws, such far-reaching deduction of inferences from them, and the testing and verification of these by such an exact reference to fact, that, with the systematic unfolding of such conceptions (e. g., with the deduction of astronomical phenomena from the law of gravitation), there is hardly any other edifice of human thought which, for strict logic, certainty, correctness, and productiveness, can at all be compared with it.

I point out these relations merely with the view of showing in what sense the natural sciences are a new and essential element of human education; of indestructible importance, also, for all further development of this in the future; and that a complete education of the individual man, as of nations, will no longer be possible without a union of the past literary-logical with the new natural-science direction of study.

Now, the majority of the educated hitherto have been instructed only in the old way—have hardly at all come into contact with the work of thought in natural science; at the most, perhaps, a little with mathematics. It is men of this kind of education that our governments appoint, by preference, to educate our children, to maintain reverence for moral order, and to preserve the treasures of knowledge and wisdom of our forefathers. It is they, too, who must organize the changes in the mode of education of the rising generation; where such changes are required they must be encouraged or compelled thereto by the public opinion of the intelligent classes of the whole community, both men and women.

Apart from the natural impulse of every warm-hearted man to lead others to that which he has found to be true and right, there will be in every friend of natural science a strong motive to share in such work, in the reflection that the further development of these sciences