IO.

State at length the educational value of arithmetic as a science. II. Why is its value often overrated?

12. What fallacy underlies the reasoning of Sir Joshua Fitch? 13. Is too much time given to arithmetic, and why?

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS.

1. Are all our concepts of a quantitative character?

2. Can arithmetic give definiteness to all our concepts without exception?

3. Can you make a quantitative statement of the value of arithmetic either as a science or as an art?

4. Can you make a quantitative statement of the educational value of any subject whatever?

5. Will psychology and pedagogy ever become exact sciences?

CHAPTER XXVI.

THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF NATURE STUDY.

Nature Study (1) Increases our Interest in Nature. The educational value of nature study is threefold: first, it increases our interest in nature; secondly, it develops a realization of law and cultivates a tendency to open-mindedness; thirdly, it makes those who have a special aptitude for it aware of the fact, and develops such an interest in the subject as tends to stimulate them to specialization in one or another of its phases.

As to the first point, it is of course evident that a scientific interest and an æsthetic interest in nature study are widely different things. The æsthetic interest is the result of the appeal Nature makes to our sense of beauty; the scientific, the result of the appeal she makes to our desire to know. If, in the case of the average man, we had to choose between them, it is at least doubtful whether it would not be wise to sacrifice the scientific to the æsthetic interest. The life of the average man is probably more enriched by the capacity to derive pleasure from listening to the knell of the parting day, from watching the lowing herd as it winds slowly over the meadow, than by a scientific interest in nature. But the two interests are in no wise antagonistic. And if the teacher of the nature subjects be herself a lover of nature, if she looks upon the changes that pass over the face of nature as spring blooms into summer, and summer fades into autumn, and autumn

gives way to winter, with something of the same fondness with which the mother watches the changes in her child as she traverses the road to womanhood, there is no danger that the æsthetic interest of her pupils will suffer through a development of their scientific interest. Not only will the bugs and grasshoppers and butterflies, the trees and leaves, the soil and minerals, claim her attention, but the broad valleys, the gently sloping hills, the sycamores bending over running streams and, as it were, gravely bowing to the trees on the other side; and her enthusiastic love of nature will be as contagious as her intense interest in science.

(2) Develops a Realization of Law and Cultivates Openmindedness. The study of nature is also valuable because it forces us to realize that there is such a thing as law, and makes us feel that in order to learn what the laws of nature are we must go to nature with the open-mindedness of little children. Every good, as we know, has its price. And part of the price we pay for the benefits of the study of literature is the tendency to blur the contrast between thought and fact, between opinion and reality, between what is and what seems to be. No one can help reading himself, so to speak, into an author. If he cannot do it, the author is unintelligible. Many able and cultivated men find Wordsworth's poem on Immortality meaningless because they have never had the experiences which the poem tries to describe. It is, of course, impossible to draw the line between experiences which really furnish the key to an author's meaning and those which merely seem to do And the author is never there to laugh at us for our blundering. Shakspere rests quietly in his grave while

So.

one critic says he means this, another that, a third something different, each confident that he is right.

Now this tendency to undue confidence in one's opinions, the inevitable result of undue specialization in literaature, is sternly repressed by the intelligent study of nature. Nature, unlike most authors whom the boy studies at school, is not dead. She stands face to face with him. If he forms an errroneous opinion of her meanings, that opinion will be discredited unless, indeed, like the people of the Middle Ages and some modern Rip Van Winkles, he is content to study nature from a book. There results, therefore, from the right sort of nature study a docility, an open-mindedness, a willingness to hold one's opinions in suspense, a sense of the difficulty of learning what is true, and of the great liability to error, which is an exceedingly valuable trait of mind. Few intellectual obstacles hinder the living of a rational life as greatly as does excessive confidence in one's own opinions. To live a truly rational life it is not only necessary to feel as well as know that we must be guided by the truth, but that the truth is difficult of access, and to be approached only by those who seek it with humility.

This lesson may be enforced not only by the pupil's own work, but by the biographical studies of scientific men which should accompany his nature study. For example, take Kepler, who formed seventeen different hypotheses and made seventeen sets of laborious observations and difficult computations before he discovered the shape of the path of the planets; or Newton, who set aside his hypothesis for fifteen years until reasoning from more accurate data convinced him that he had indeed discovered the law which governs the motions of the material universe.

(3) Incites to Specialization Along the Lines of Natural Bent. A third benefit to be derived from nature study is that those who have a special aptitude for it are incited to specialization in some department of natural science. That this is highly desirable is evident from three points of view. Ignore the pupil altogether, consider the matter simply from the point of view of society, and it is clear that society needs to have its work done by those who have a natural bent for it. All legitimate work is work which satisfies a need of society, and the more its needs are satisfied by those who have a special aptitude for it, the less the waste of energy, the greater the productivity, the less each member of society has to pay to have his wants supplied.

Ignore society in turn, and consider the matter from the point of view of the individual, and from that of the individual simply as desirous of promoting his material wellbeing. Evidently the best way for a man to earn money is to do the work he is best fitted to do. The briefless lawyers, the doctors who have no patients, the preachers without charges, are in the majority of cases men who are in the wrong occupation. They are trying to fill a rôle for which they have no capacity. They are working with a fraction of themselves, and that not the best. The work for which nature designed us is the work in which we can put the most of ourselves and in which, therefore, we can achieve the largest results.

Once more. Ignore the material interests of the pupil, assume that he has no livelihood to earn, and it is still true that the wisest course to pursue in promoting his interests is to have him do the work he is best fitted to do. His life of thought and feeling, his life as a human being, will