Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/267

Rh chemistry, should follow. It can not well be given before the period of youth, and should be associated with at least an elementary degree of knowledge of mathematics. Such teaching, properly presented, is adapted in the highest degree to shaping the intelligence and morals of the young man; because it furnishes him at once the precise idea of positive truth, that of the fact proved a posteriori, and the most general notion of natural law, or the relation between particular facts, which is determined not by reason or dialectics but by observation. Truth thus imposes itself with the irresistible force of an objective necessity, independently of our desires and our will. Nothing is better adapted than such demonstration to give the mind that modesty, seriousness, steadfastness, and clearness of convictions which raise it above the suggestions of vanity or personal interest, and are closely connected with the idea of duty. The habit of reasoning and reflecting on things, inflexible respect for the truth, and the obligation of always yielding to the necessary laws of the external world, communicate an indelible stamp to the mind. They accustom it to respect the laws of society as well as those of Nature, and to conceive of the rights of another and respect for him as a form, of one's own duty and of his own personal independence.

Thus science plays a most important part in the mental and moral education of man. Besides forming useful citizens it makes men free from the prejudices and superstitions of former times. It teaches them how to combat the fatal forces of Nature by labor and will power, resting on the knowledge and direction of the natural laws, rather than by mystic fancies. Hence science forms free spirits, energetic and conscientious, more efficaciously than any literary and rhetorical direction. When scientific education shall have produced all its effects, politics too will be transformed, as industry has already deeply been. Both will become, to use a familiar term, experimental.

Furthermore, and contemporaneously with this recognition of the laws of phenomena, observation and experiment give power over Nature. Through this fact, more than any other, youth can be engaged and drawn by an unconquerable enthusiasm into a really scientific education. To control physical and moral evil in industrial as well as economical life, to strive to diminish suffering, poverty, and misery of every kind, and to make the effort by virtue of the immanent laws of things, was the generous aim of philosophers of the eighteenth century, and they depended upon scientific conceptions, as they unceasingly proclaimed, for the attainment of it. The same end should be sought in our new education, and thereby science will become fully educational.

Scientific education has therefore its own peculiar virtue, and it is by a deep misconception of its character and effect that the