DEPARTMENT OF PEDAGOGY.

[Conducted by ARNOLD TOMPKINS.]

THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD.

Of all words currently used to describe method in teaching the word scientific is the best, for it expresses a method of thought; while the others express some external accompaniment of the process. Such external devices as the topical method, the library method, the laboratory method, the seminar method, the method by travel are not vital in the process of teaching; are variable and may be exchanged for others; in fact must be so exchanged when conditions vary. If some circumstance should deprive a teacher of his seminar method he would shift to some other device; and certainly without loss if he had seized the spirit which suggested and animated the seminar. A teacher who feels put out and disabled because his device is taken from him has not yet anchored himself in the method of learning, expressed by the word scientific.

The scientific method must not be restricted to the study of natural objects; which is apt to be done from the fact that of recent years the method has been best exemplified and emphasized by teachers of natural science. Of course such method has not been confined to these, either in theory or practice; and I am not sure that they first insisted on it as the correct method of study. But perhaps no class of teachers has done so much to establish the scientific method as a working doctrine as the natural scientists.

Now the method is advocated and practiced in every field of investigation more or less, in history, political economy, sociology, psychology, politics, ethics, literature, etc. the study of religion is pursued by the scientific method, as eloquently indicated by Dr. Barrows's introductory address to his course of lectures on religion in Chicago University. Its universality proves its validity. It is applicable to all subjects, and to every phase of teaching from the primary grade through the university.

The method requires that the student form his own conclusion from his own observation of facts; must be first hand

with what he knows, and not try to abbreviate the legitimate process of thought in knowing by substituting ready made products of others. The method respects the self activity of the learner, and recognizes that the knowledge which the pupil really has he must construct for himself. It is opposed to the old theory and practice which regarded the mind as a receptacle to be filled by something ready made elsewhere.

The first step in the process is observing individual objects or phenomena. And this must not be restricted to sense observation; and not to the outer sense alone. The inner facts of consciousness must be observed by the inner sense. Thus we have outer and inner observation. The psychologist must observe facts and phenomena just as truly as does the chemist or biologist. And further. with the present extension of the method, observation must be extended to the exercise of the imagination on objects not present to the senses. In history by means of original documents, the pupil observes the event as if he were an eye witness. The fullness and accuracy of his observation will have much to do with the value of his subsequent procedure. In geography he must substitute description and imagination for immediate observation. In political and social science, he does not directly observe the facts himself, but substitutes the observation of others. If the method requires requires direct sense-observation it is partial and cannot apply to the teaching of any subject. The natural scientist, who is most prone to insist on direct observation, continually leaps the limit he himself sets; for the scope of his investigation lies outside the field of possible individual observation. So that the scientific method comes to mean in practice that the first movement of thought in studying any subject is the gathering of facts, individual things, phenomena, by whatever means it may be done; for, as Kant puts it, concepts without precepts are empty. All one's thinking is directly or indirectly about individuals; and the method insists on not omitting the basis; that one thinks he should think about something something, of course. Yet if the public school teacher will set to work to have his pupils rise to conclusions on the basis of their own observations, the chances are that his work will change front; and that the

most obvious of truths in statement is not the most obvious in general practice.

When facts are collected, or rather while they are being collected, comparison and contrast begin to discriminate and set them in order to note the differences which separate and the likenesses which bind together. This element is sometimes so prominent in the process that it passes under a new name the comparative method. Such phrases comparative anatomy, comparative psychology and comparative religion are common. Philology is largely a comparative study; but what is not? This is a form which every line of investigation inust assume in the second stage of its progress. It is nothing to be used in a specially large and distinguished way; it is only a recognition of the mind's inherent law of knowing, as is employed by the kindergartner as well as the professor in the university. It might sound big for the six year old pupil to say that he was studying anatomy or philology by the comparative method; but that is just what he is doing.

While the process of comparison is going on, the student by emphasizing likenesses, generalizes individuals into groups and sub-groups, until all the facts are systematized. Thus he formulates the law which is essential to the individual, and at the same time which binds individuals into unity.

And lastly, inductions are made concerning facts which can not be brought under observation. Although going beyond the scope of observation it does not violate the requirement of the method, for the inductions are made on the basis of observation. By far the larger part of scientific knowledge lies beyond the field of observation. By the examination of one human body laws are inferred which apply to millions of others. By the examination of the nervous action of a frog's leg or the circulation of blood in its foot, the law of such action is set up, not only for all frogs, but for a large section of the animal kingdom. Social phenomena are studied in one city, and other cities are therein supposed to be understood. that while the scientific method insists on observation as the starting point, it must not be supposed to restrict knowledge to the facts observed. The observed facts are means by which the unobserved facts are reached.

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And now, after trying to say that the scientific method is

universal, the suspicion arises that it omits one hemisphere of the world's thought; unless there can be assimilated to it another and quite diverse element. The scientific method deals with the world of fact; strives after laws which inhere in things as they are. But man is continually theorizing about things as they ought to be; and striving to reconstruct the world on his own idea. He turns his thought back upon the world and imposes law upon it. He has an a priori faculty of making a world of his own. In sociology he is not simply satisfied with ascertaining the facts and laws holding in the past and present, but strives to reconstruct it on an ideal of his own. This new society he can not observe, for it does not exist; neither can induction reach it, for it is applicable to existing things. In education, the scientific method gathers a wide range of facts, concerning schools, and learns what it can from these facts, but it will not do to rest easy under the condition of things disclosed by the facts. A president of a normal school may collect the facts about existing normal schools and generalize from them, finding the law which actually controls them; yet he will have to project his own law if he would rise above the general level. The scientist cannot make a laboratory to suit him unless he has in him a law which transcends that found in observed facts. If these things are not true what becomes of the whole world of art and duty? The scientific method holds for what is but it cannot give law to what ought to be-to the world of beauty and duty. But call it all scientific method if you wish; no matter about names, so that we recognize that in the rounded process of knowledge somewhere, man as well as the object he thinks gives law.

THE OTHER SELF, ETC.

To speak of the pupil's "other self," his "larger self," "finding himself," "identifying himself" with the world about him sounds a little awkward at first, if not meaningless and contradictory; but in this there is hope, for great truths come to us in paradoxes and contradictions. Those who use them may have some mighty truth to express about teaching which requires odd phrases. They sound deep, and may ex

press some hidden meaning. In either case, of course, they are sufficiently justified.

Suppose the finger of a child to have consciousness, and to be sent to school to be educated, developed, The teacher must recognize at every step, and as fundamental condition of his procedure, that its growth as a finger is in and through the life of the hand; that in fact it is not a finger at all without the hand. The finger would say that the life which is now in me is the hand; you may think of me as myself, yet the larger part of me is the hand, which is my larger self and it is there where I find myself. Whatever you do to educate me must be through the influence-the inflowing-of my larger self.

If we should now make a student of the hand, and strive to develop it into a good, strong, moral constitution, it would likewise insist on a larger self, another self, in which its little this-self lives, and moves, and has its being. Honestly and fairly and by any proper use of language, the hand, in its reality and its life, is as large as the whole body and as you like. It cannot be this-self without another self. The educa tion, the development, of the hand is in and through the larger whole of the hand--the body; it realizes itself in and through the larger self. This being the nature of its life and the law of its unfolding, such must be recognized by the teacher as the basis of any rational method of teaching hands.

The plant lives in its environment, and therefore includes its environments. Its smaller life is one term in a community of life with that which lies beyond. Life, we have heard, is a "continuous adjustment of internal relations to its external relations." Should the plant become conscious, it will thank its larger self for all it is and has. Whatever process of culture avails aught, must recognize the wholeness of life which includes both this and the other self of the plant. Isolation is death; nothing is by itself and of itself, but a member of an organic system whose life is in all and through all.

The child, as a physical being, is not quite so obviously bound into the larger whole as is the finger or the hand, and it has not, like the plant, the apparent physical connection of being rooted into the earth in a cooperative partnership; yet if you will make the effort to think it as isolated, as with