Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/346

330 First and last and always, the problem is human. Manual training has but the one purpose, the development of the child, and it can only carry out this purpose by learning how the child develops. Every organism—and manual training, as we have seen, considers the child to be a unit organism—is in contact with an outer world, with something which is not self. This contact produces sensations. We can not know the outer world, can not know whether indeed there be an outer world. We can only know our sensations and the stream of thought into which they merge. As soon as we begin to think, we are forced into some stage of idealism, but whether we take the moderate, in a sense realistic, ground, that there is an outer world, but that we have no knowledge of it except as a mental experience; or the middle ground, that there may or may not be an outer world, that we have no warrant for either affirming or denying its existence, but that the one undeniable reality is consciousness; or the extreme ground, that there is no outer world at all, but that the drama of life is a drama carried out simply and solely in consciousness, it makes, happily, little difference in the practical methods of education, provided we do not vivisect the child, and get something out of him other than a unit. What we have to deal with in any case is human consciousness, and our work is to unfold and perfect that.

These sensations, whatever their origin and precise nature, are certainly the primary material of thought. Knowledge is a perception of relations. The process of thinking is a process by which we bring our sensations into relation with one another, or bring a sensation into relation with some concept, which is the abstract of a previous group of related sensations, or bring one concept into relation with another. Knowledge, then, is the result of thinking, and it is only by thinking that we can grow wise. Experience being the best teacher, it is commonly stated that knowledge is the result of experience. But this is not strictly true. It is only true when you specify what sort of experience you mean. If the experience has resulted in an embarrassing wealth of sensations, and has created little disposition to bring these sensations into relation with one another, the product is not knowledge. Globe trotters are not proverbially wise people. But if the experience has taken. an inner turn, and has consisted in a careful and luminous working up of the crude materials of consciousness, the product is knowledge of the highest sort. This accounts, I think, for the fact that some of our most profound philosophers have been men of somewhat limited experience. But there are cautions in both directions. If the omnivorous reader and globe trotter stand at one extreme, no less does the closet philosopher, building tremendous structures out of