Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/874

850 of education as, upon the whole, superior to the system which prevails in any one of the States. But the educational methods of both countries are closely associated with features of their political systems; and "neither the United States nor Canada can adopt, without radical changes of another kind, some of the admirable features of the educational system which exists on the opposite side of the international boundary line."

The office of education is, according to Dr. Harris, "to bring the child most expeditiously into a correct understanding of his relation to the race and into a helpful activity within civilization. The school with its various courses furnishes only one factor in this process; the institutions of family, church, and state, art and religion, play and work, each help in the development. The study of this mental unfolding and the influence of each modifying force is one of the provinces of psychology and one of great value to the educator. But of more importance to him than any theory of growth or classification of faculties is the profounder task accomplished by this science "in showing the ability of the mind to grasp ultimate reality." The old and new psychologies are sharply distinguished in methods and results. The former, whether rational or empirical, proceeds by introspection, and finds an independent self-activity with three modes of knowing: that of sense perception, which dwells upon things as realities; the understanding, which investigates relations; the reason, or insight, which apprehends absolute principles. The "new psychology," including physiological investigation and child study, exhibits the conditioning of man. As the old philosophies teach him what he is and should be, the new explain how he may grow to his full stature. There is also the dangerous possibility of arrested development, which further experiment may show him how to avoid. Too much memorizing or calculating at an early age brings the child into a rut of thought from which it is not easily extricated. Even scientific study may accomplish this by sharpening the mind to notice mere likeness or difference, and to search for causal relations. The new psychology has this field of research, and can also instruct in regard to the care of the nervous system, and give us a store of pathological knowledge, but Dr. Harris considers it "safe to assert that no positive results in pure psychology will ever be reached in its laboratories." It is by means of introspect tion alone that we arrive at the highest stage of thinking, θεωρεἳν, philosophic or theologic knowing. The old psychology thus attains the ideas of God, freedom, and immortality, "knows that the absolute is a person," and furnishes ideals of education, religion, and life. Unfortunately for the majority of scientific people, they flounder in the quagmire of the understanding and never reach the height of "angelic knowing." Isaac Newton is called the great schoolmaster in this secondary stage of thinking, which is exemplified in later times by the doctrine of the correlation of forces. Mr. Herbert Spencer, following the lead of Mansell and Sir William Hamilton, is dragged down by his theory of the relativity of knowledge and inconceivability of the infinite into an abyss of false psychology. Dr. Harris states that the trouble is "the confusion of mental images with logical thought." Agnostics, relativists, and all others must agree with him, "if we really can know the infinity of space and time and the absoluteness implied in causality, it is a matter of great concern." In his doctrine of persistent force, Mr. Spencer attains almost to the stage of insight, "it is the highest reach of the understanding, and a logical investigation would prove that Personal Being is presupposed as its true form. It is another phase of the negative unity of Spinoza and the Eleatics, and to fully realize it is to know its own futility." Among other conclusions which are doubtless reached through the higher knowing are the affirmations that man has "two selves," "is a spiritual being existing in opposition to Nature," "fate rules in Nature, but man emerges out of Nature in time and space into human nature," "human society is founded on the deep mystery of vicarious atonement which is announced in the creeds of Christendom." If these and similar dogmas prove difficult for the scientific mind to assimilate, it is not without warning from Dr. Harris. He tells us that methods of science study have not a