Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/159



T is said of a well-known American Hegelian and educator that he always starts out with Adam and Eve. The method is thorough, but it gives a long preface. I may seem guilty of the same tendency when in writing about manual training I appear to write about everything else, and very seldom directly about the subject in hand. But this is precisely what I expect to do, and I expect to do it for the sole purpose of throwing light on manual training.

No scheme of education has any serious claim upon our attention unless it is founded upon some rational system of ethics—that is to say, upon some rational view of the proper conduct of life. And the foundations of any acceptable scheme of ethics must be laid deep in the broadest generalization of all, in our philosophy of life.

Education then, is not an inductive but a purely deductive science.

It is true that every primary science, in the course of its historical development, passes through two distinct stages: the stage of induction, in which from the study of special cases we are led to the perception of a general law or principle; and the stage of deduction, in which from this body of general principles we work out a whole series of special and important conclusions. This double course of development is now so well recognized that we are withholding the name of science from those branches of inquiry which have not yet reached the deductive stage. Comte's test of science was the power