Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/771

Rh In discussing his second [third] problem, "From the Known to the Unknown," the author analyzes the process of the growth of knowledge; the operation called by logicians Judgment; the process of Ratiocination; Induction, Deduction, and Reduction. He points out the capital error of the subjective or speculative method of advancing from the known to the unknown, as distinguished from the objective or scientific method. The metaphysical thinker imposes his conceptions on phenomena, instead of observing them-; he trusts the validity of inferences he has not tested. The scientific thinker, on the contrary, is, or ought to be, on his guard against unverified deduction, and treats it as a tentative process. The process called by the author Reduction serves in the hands of the scientific investigator as a check, a test, of his Inductions and deductions. Deduction and induction extend knowledge by generalizing acquired results, but reduction criticises these results—retraces their formation step by step, and thus gives to inference a firm basis on sensation. Thus checked and tested at every step, induction and deduction become very serviceable instruments for the discovery of truth. Without such checks and tests their results are simply illusory.

But space fails us to follow the author in his discussion of the remaining three problems, "Matter and Force," "Force and Cause," and "The Absolute in the Correlations of Feeling and Motion." This work of Mr. Lewes is undoubtedly entitled to rank among the highest intellectual efforts of the age.

report would have been more satisfactory had it been prepared by some person familiar with the education of the blind. Some of its statements are so remarkable that we are unwilling to accept them until they have been indorsed by those actually engaged in the work of teaching the blind. In it we are informed that the blind acquire knowledge through reading "painfully," that "they study geography, algebra, and geometry under heavy disadvantages;" that "composition is for them very difficult because of the time and labor required for the mechanical operation of writing;" that "even the best-equipped asylums (sic) are but scantily provided with the most indispensable tools for studying geography and arithmetic." All this is contrary to the generally-received opinions in reference to the education of the blind. We have heard that blind children of tender years learn to read quickly and easily with their fingers; and that they enjoy "Robinson Crusoe" and the "Old Curiosity-Shop," for example, as much as any children. We had supposed, too, that in the study of mathematics the blind possessed some advantages. We had supposed that the art of composition was the hardest to teach to deaf-mutes, and that eminent blind writers as well as blind mathematicians were numerous. There is no other appliance for instructing children, whether sighted or blind, in geography, so complete as dissected relief-maps. We doubt whether in all the schools of New York such maps are to be found except in the two schools for the blind. Was it elsewhere than in a school for the blind that Mr. Ruggles conceived the ideas of his inventions for facilitating the education of the blind? For this report recommends the founding of an institution to devise and construct such appliances entirely separate from any school for the blind. And its authors find indorsement for this scheme in a resolution adopted by the Association of Teachers for the Blind, which, as we read it, simply declares that that Association had found it impossible to work with Mr. Ruggles. This report presents but one side of the case. We shall wait to hear the other side, that of the teachers of the blind, before we decide upon the subject.

1835 the present Astronomer Royal (then Director of the Observatory of the University of Cambridge, England) was called to fill the most important astronomical post in the world, namely, the