interrelations are investigated, and this leads to a knowledge of forces and influences which produce or modify those objects that have been inventoried in the first stage of science. This is the dynamic stage, the discovery of forces and laws connecting each fact with all other facts, and each province of nature with all other provinces of nature. The goal of this second stage of science is to make each fact in nature throw light on all the other facts, and thus to illuminate each by all. Out of this arises the system of the whole and the third stage of science is reached. Science in its third and final stage learns to know everything in nature as a part of a process which it studies in the history of its development. When it comes to see each thing in the perspective of its evolution it knows it and comprehends it.

Natural science as a whole is not very old, but it has resulted in an age of invention and productive industry. The third epoch of its development is but begun, and only on some lines of investigation. Is there any doubt that so great an instrument of human progress should have a prominent place in school instruction?

In order to look at this subject in some of its details let us consider first the grand divisions under which it falls.

cesses.

Nature is in time and space, and these furnish, so to speak, the logical conditions of existence for all its objects and all their proMatter and movement involve space and time. Inasmuch as the human mind knows space and time a priori, and can think out their laws without first having to collect examples and generalize from facts, it has invented the science of mathematics, the most wonderful of the tools of thought in the investigation of nature. Mathematics tells us what must be, not merely what has been so far as we have experience of it. By its aid man assumes a commanding attitude towards nature. He can enounce laws of existence and action which nature must obey. The three angles of a plane triangle are equal to two right angles, and it is impossible for nature ever to furnish a plane triangle with a greater or a less sum for its three angles.

Pure mathematics is a priori or independent of experience it studies what may be called the general form of the possibility of nature. Applied mathematics inventories facts regarding matter and motion, and interprets these facts in the light of mathematics. This forms the science of physics, or "Natural Philosophy," as it used to be called. With chemistry which deals with compo

sition and combination, it gives us two branches of physics, molar and molecular the science of matter as masses and molecules,

and as movements of the same.

Mathematics and physics treat of nature as inorganic; even so-called organic chemistry treats all bodies as inorganic and reduces them to their organic constituents and tells us nothing of the organic principle as such.

The first phase of natural science deals with the inorganic, the second deals with organic nature — plants, animals, and formative processes like meteorology and geology, and cyclical processes like astronomy. This is the total survey of natural science. The method of study of the inorganic is chiefly mathematical and relates to measurement of quantity of matter and quantity of motion, and quantity of force manifested as qualities and as movements. The method of study of organic nature is historic an inventory of things and a record of their metamorphoses.

Science study in schools as a matter of instruction involves, first, the presentation of results, interesting details reached, practical applications, all seen in their relations to the general principles ascertained. Secondly, instruction should involve the method of investigation; the student is to learn the methods of making experiments and of verifying results recorded. He learns how as specialist to make additions to the existing stores of science.

By reason of its importance the study of natural science should begin quite early in school. But on account of its methods, which require maturity in the student, as well as because of the fact that the study of nature is only a small portion of human learning, it must not occupy a large space on the program. It is quite sufficient for common district schools to devote one hour each week to the purpose, beginning in the lowest grade of the primary school. This hour should not be divided into fifteen minute recitations or object lessons, and scattered through the week, but should be one undivided lesson. In it there should be taken up in systematic order the important results of science. There should be description, illustration by pictures, models and natural objects, a conversation with the pupils, drawing out what they have already learned on the subject, and a critical comparison made with a view to verify or correct their previous knowledge and thereby teach critical alertness in observation; pupils should be set to work illustrating and verifying the results presented, in their leisure

hours during the week, and lastly, their knowledge should be tested and made exact by short essays written on the contents of the lesson.

Three courses arranged spirally in the eight years of the district schools will be found advantageous. For each child ought to see nature in all its departments and not sink himself into a specialist in some one department when he has not yet seen all departments. For the lowest three years I have found it best to have for the first year a study of plants, their structure and habits, and interesting phases; animals for the second year; and for the third year such glimpses of physics as are involved in explaining the structure of playthings and familiar tools and machines, also the phenomena of the elements of nature. This is the first course taking up organic nature and inorganic.

The second course of three years studies botany more scientifically the first year, learning something of classification and much more of structure; also learning the useful plants for food, clothing, shelter, and medicine. The second year of this course should take up animals and devote one half of the lessons to human physiology. The third year takes up physics or natural philosophy, some typical experiments in chemistry, an outline of astronomy. A third course of two years follows in oral lessons the arrangement of topics usual in the textbooks on physical geography, containing an outline of the sciences of organic nature and a survey of inorganic nature such as is found in the usual textbook on natural philosophy.

By such a course of study in the district schools, with one lesson each week for the eight years, each child has learned something of the different departments of science, their systems of classification, their methods of investigation, their applications to the explanation of phenomena.

The question that next arises relates to the psychologic value of the study of natural science. For we have justified scientific instruction solely on its significance as a factor in civilization. It is well known that each branch of study in the schools opens some window of the soul. These are grammar, geography, and history, arithmetic and literature - each one gives some new faculty of observation to the mind of the youth. What, we ask, does natural science give?

First, let us consider the view of the world as a whole that sci

ence has furnished, and inquire whether it be a spiritual or a materialistic view.

According to the current evolutionary view all nature is a struggle for survival of forms. The inorganic forms go down before the organic forms. Of the organic forms the plant serves the animal and yields to him. The animal in turn yields to man. Man in fact conquers all nature. Here the law of survival of the fittest comes to mean the survival of individuals that have most intelligence. All nature it would seem, is a process for originating individuality and developing it into rational being. Looked at theologically this is satisfactory. Nature is the creation of souls. It implies, of course, the supremacy of mind, since all its lower processes exist for the production of spiritual beings; they depend on mind, so to speak, and demonstrate the substantiality of mind. Mind is the final cause and purpose of nature. again implies that mind creates nature to reflect it. God creates nature, and through nature creates spiritual beings who participate in his blessedness. Hence, nature presupposes a God of grace and good will towards his creatures.

This

This, I repeat it, is satisfactory as a world-view, and it harmonizes with the view taken in religion. But it does not follow from this that the methods of science-study have a spiritualizing tendency, and in fact the opposite is the case. The method of external observation is sharply in contrast with the method of internal observation or introspection. When we look within we behold self-activity as feeling, thinking, and willing; when we look out upon the material world with our sense-perception we seem to see that everything is under fate or external necessity. Everything, in short, is regarded as having an environment of outside conditions or relations upon which it depends: the totality of its conditions completely controls it and makes it what it is and necessitates all its changes. Fate or necessity prevails universally according to such a view. But this is the view taken by external observation.

The category of quality according to philosophy is that form of thinking which looks upon everything as related to other things -everything is dependent on an environment. This we see is precisely the attitude of external observation, and external observation prevails in the practical work of the natural sciences. Quality, it is true, is not the only category used in natural science that

of quantity is also used, and to some extent also others. Quantity regards everything as one and many, or as unit and aggregate of units. Each quantity is composed of like units, and is therefore divisible; it is also one unit of a number of other like units, which form an aggregate.

In natural science each object is regarded according to quantity as an aggregate of like parts and as a part of a larger whole. Quantity is thus a form of thought which is specially characteristic of external observation because it deals exclusively in externality and ignores internality entirely. For each thing is part of an external aggregate or larger quantity, and it is likewise itself an external aggregate of quantitative parts external to each other. Now if one will take the trouble to consider how natural science does its thinking with these two categories of quality and quantity, he will be led to expect from it a denial of self-activity in all its forms. He will understand how it is that natural science is sceptical of spiritual truths and ready to deny the doctrine of the soul and mind as independent, immortal existences. If it does not go so far as to deny spiritual entities it will at least be agnostic and affirm the unthinkableness of such entities. For how can it think any self-active being with such categories as quality and quantity? All beings are what they are, and they move or change as they do, because impelled by external environment, the totality of conditions." This is its view of the world; and to assume any self-active being is to deny the absolute validity of quality and quantity and affirm that there is being which is neither qualitative nor quantitative. For a self-active being originates action itself and it does not act because impelled from outside. There are many forms of self-activity - the plant, the animal, and man, and besides these the divine. The lowest form may be characterized as follows: the plant has life; it reproduces its species and sustains itself by nutrition; it grows. This is self-activity, first, in the form of reaction or environment, and secondly, in the form of assimilation or digestion of the external material seized or appropriated by the plant in its reaction. Omitting for the present a consideration of the animal, human, and divine forms of selfactivity in so far as peculiar and different from that in the plant, let us stop to inquire how science with its categories of external observation deals with self-activity in the plant - what account does it give of it?