Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/19

Rh inductive study of pedagogical problems which has made itself felt throughout the schools of the land. While Dr. Hall is one of few men who might have appropriately represented more than one of the great divisions of the congress, lie chose on this occasion to discuss particularly the leading problems and methods of psychology, in an address spoken from the heart, abounding in fertile suggestions and no less characteristically teeming with allusions—an address which insisted on the continuity if not the identity of life and mind, and emphasized the urgent need of an objective study, at once comprehensive and thorough, of every concrete phase of experience in all its heterogeneous richness, as a basis for subsequent generalization under the guidance of the principle of evolution.

The division of utilitarian sciences, giving shelter to medicine, technology and economics, was generalled by President David Starr Jordan, of Leland Stanford University, eminent as a systematic zoologist, especially in ichthyology, who has placed his special knowledge at the service of the state in relation to questions of international import, and has admirably exemplified in his career what, as educator, writer and publicist, he has enunciated in no uncertain terms—the union of theory with practice in intelligent, effective work. President Jordan pointed out the unity of all the so-called utilitarian sciences in that they have their common source in disinterested investigation, at the same time claiming for pure research and practical application a relation of reciprocal dependence. Science is the guide of life and pure science must precede its applications, yet the utilities of science may not only determine the direction of its efforts but must ultimately control its results, measuring their exactness by the relentless standard of consequences.

The general interests of social regulation—in the sphere of politics, of jurisprudence and of those human groups with the economy of which social science is concerned—were entrusted to Mr. A. Lawrence Lowell, a distingusheddistinguished [sic] member of a distinguished American family, professor of civil government in Harvard University, a scientific student of legislation, who has brought to the examination of political and legal institutions a ripe scholarship and an exceptionally critical mind. It is reported that in Professor Lowell's address the discussion took a somewhat practical turn, emphasizing especially the many-sided race problem, which was considered both historically and in relation to present-day conditions.

It almost goes without saying that the choice of a spokesman for social culture, through the great agencies of education and religion, fell upon the Honorable William T. Harris, U. S. Commissioner of Education, an alert survivor of the transcendentalist movement in America, celebrated for his learned familiarity with the history of civilization no less than for his indefatigable acuteness in the speculative interpretation of its principles after the manner of a philosophy