46 NECESSITY OF INSTRUCTION TO GUARD AGAINST ERROR.

Anatomy, has sufficed to banish from this part of the world astrology, divination, sorcery, witchcraft, and magic. What an encouragement does this fact afford to perseverance in that course which, within the narrowest limits, has proved so successful! But there are still delusions remaining to be banished by the extension of sound knowledge. Does the favour extended by the public to clairvoyance, table-turning, and spirit-rapping tell of the advancement of our age beyond the standard of a former one? The age should blush for itself, and take to study. Such study would not only teach what to believe in matters of science, but put it fairly on its guard against blind guides, who every now and then arise, like ignes fatui, to mislead the unwary. There are two brilliant examples of these in the present day, who may serve as lessons to the public in the time to come, as having led many astray from the simplicity of truth. They are distinguished men, too - the one an eminent chemist of Germany, the other, one of the greatest men Scotland has produced. The public should prize both these men much, but truth more. It is melancholy to think that such men should outlive their faculties; but it is still more melancholy to think that the public should be so little instructed as not to distinguish true from false science.

Statistic Fallacies.-The tendencies of the present age have caused exactness, where men must think without sensible forms before them, to be so generally neglected, that authors who would lose caste and reputation for bad spelling, and still more, for errors in grammar, may violate with impunity the rules of logic, so essential to the teaching of truth. In no department are these rules so often grossly violated as in statistical subjects, where we should certainly expect something like mathematical accuracy. Mr. Farr, the able medical assistant of the Registrar-General, has pointed out a most ludicrous mistake of a logical kind, which cannot be too widely exposed in an age when every man appeals to statistics, and deems himself competent to deal with them. The annual mortality in prison-life being required, the statist takes the number of persons who have sojourned in a particular prison during the year, and also the number of deaths that have occurred. He then divides the former by the latter, and points to the result. Such logic is the same as if an innkeeper should boast of the healthiness of his house, as compared to the rest of the town, on the ground that he had, during the year, entertained a thousand guests, of whom only one had died; whereas, the mortality for the rest of the town had been at the rate of twelve per thousand. On this kind of logic, however, Mr. Farr tells us that a French minister pronounced prisons to be the healthiest places in the world; and an English inspector gravely affirmed, that in very few situations in life is an adult less likely to die than in a well-conducted prison!

OBSERVATION TO BE GUIDED BY KNOWLEDGE.

47

False Induction. In the ridiculous book of one of the persons to whom we have referred, translated by an eminent professor of chemistry, there is a most unpardonable abuse of the term "induction." One of the purposes of the work is to maintain that some people can see lights assuming the form of human bodies in churchyards, and other places where persons have been buried; and we are told that the evidence on which the German author rests this statement is an induction of particulars.

Now, what is this so-called induction of particulars? A lady repeatedly says that she sees luminous forms over the graves of the newly-buried. Each repetition of the assertion is gravely set down as one of such a series of particulars, as upon which it is allowed to found an induction. In the first place, there is no evidence of even one of her assertions being founded upon anything but a vagary of the imagination. It is a correct induction, from the particular instances referred to, to say that the lady in question asserts such things; but here the induction ends, and, as regards the reality of the things seen, one assertion is as good as a thousand.

It is melancholy to think that such credulity should exist among men of eminence in special departments of human knowledge; but still more melancholy to reflect that the very terms of exact logic should be misunderstood by an eminent professor of an important department of Physical Science.

Education. The sentiment, so long tolerated in this country, that education might prove hurtful to the masses of society, and unfit them for their ordinary occupations, has long since either died a natural death, or, if not dead, is content to hide its diminished head in some unvisited corner of the land. Nevertheless it is not altogether a settled point what kind of education should be provided for the public. Some simple-minded people limit their notion of education to the humble acquirements of reading and writing; and persons of this stamp are often heard to express their surprise when they discover that a large portion of our criminal population are masters of these accomplishments. Reading and writing are but the instruments by which education is acquired. And it has been a strange oversight that so much pains have been bestowed in providing our population with the instruments of education, while so few have taken thought to put within their reach the books from which the knowledge yearned after could be reached. To supply in part this want is the great purpose of our present undertaking; and if those who express their surprise that there are among public criminals persons who can read and write, would extend their ideas of education to what includes some acquired knowledge of God, of Man, and of Nature, they would confess that crimes are seldom committed by sound-minded and educated people.

48

OBSERVATION TO BE GUIDED BY KNOWLEDGE.

We have asserted that reading and writing are not education, but rather the instruments by which knowledge is to be acquired. It must be admitted, however, that some limitation may be required to this sentiment; since it might be contended that reading and writing. stand, in some measure, on the same footing as the several branches of what has been termed "industrial education." But although industrial education, in its special sense, signifies merely that sort of training by which a person may be rendered more apt to learn the kind of occupation which is to be his calling throughout life, and more capable of attaining excellence in it; yet such an education has an additional influence in developing the faculties, both intellectual and moral, far beyond what the mere accomplishments of reading and writing can produce.

Important as industrial education is, for the simple purpose of aiding the development of industry, we must never lose sight of its subsidiary effect in exalting the intellectual and moral character of the individual; nor is it to be doubted that the very best effects may be anticipated from mingling in all schemes of industrial education such studies as belong to Physiology and Psychology, together with those of a directly industrial character, in order to secure a more immediate influence upon the moral character.

There can be no doubt that it is possible so to direct industrial education as to destroy much of the benefit which it is capable of conferring. There is nothing in the study of abstract science and physical knowledge which should withdraw the mind from an acknowledgment of the existence of the SPIRITUAL in the economy of nature. But there is a mode of studying these subjects which makes the properties and laws of matter terminate too much in themselves, without sufficient reference to the power of the INFINITE INTELLIGENCE by which they are maintained and supported.

In all systems of industrial education it should be a first principle that the power which operates in the workings of nature should stand forth acknowledged as the POWER OF GOD; and that man's power of thinking should be confessed as being the foundation of all that his mere senses seem to have discovered of the course of nature.

The term observation is likely to mislead the unwary, who are so often told that all human advancement depends upon observation that they are apt to forget that observation may serve to perpetuate error as readily as to advance truth. They lose sight of the essential maxim that it is instructed observation that at once discards error and establishes truth. It is indeed difficult for an enthusiastic student, amid the profusion of knowledge now set before him, not to believe that all that is necessary to enable an unprejudiced person to understand the order and course of nature, is simply to open his eyes

OBSERVATION TO BE GUIDED BY KNOWLEDGE.

49

and look around him. It is, then, an instructive lesson for him to discover that, by the same exercise of the senses which seems at once to have laid open the secrets of the universe, all those phantoms, which for so many centuries deluded the human mind, took their origin.

What we bere desire to insist upon is, the paramount influence of the state of man's spiritual development at any one time upon his capability of apprehending the economy of nature, with regard to the axiom-that the study of the agency by which knowledge is acquired should never be severed from the study of the things which are made the objects of knowledge.

It is a common idea that the rapid progress of modern science has arisen entirely from a diligent use of the senses, in obedience to the precepts of the Baconian Philosophy. The vast progress of human thought, previous to the possibility of this advantageous use of the senses, is too often altogether overlooked. Thus sense is exalted at the expense of the higher faculties of the mind, and the conclusion arrived at, that the education of the sentient part of our nature is all in all. How erroneous is this idea, will at once appear from the briefest retrospect of the history of man's progress. In man's rudest state there is no want of what passes for knowledge; and his mind is so far from being barren in that stage of progress, or his memory destitute of ideas, that he positively bends under the burden of his thoughts and recollections. Nevertheless, the greater part of this profusion of apparent knowledge with which his mind is filled is entirely false. In a somewhat later stage of progress, this early mass of delusion is represented by the more refined but equally worthless products of sorcery, magic, witchcraft, divination, and astrology.

When we look to the history of man in the first rude ages, we discover an appalling amount of delusion, which we admit has arisen from this tendency to account for what he sees; but, side by side with this heap of rubbish, we find surprising proofs of the exactness with which he has gathered up such laws of nature as are most essential to his every-day well-being. It is when the phenomena are of rarer occurrence, or when they are complex, or when they seldom arise under exactly the same form, that he falls into error. On the contrary, when phenomena come frequently under his notice, if he has erred at first, he commonly obtains the means of rectifying his error. As soon as he discovers distinctly that the succession is not invariable, he ceases to regard the two events as standing in the relation of cause and effect.

It would be easy, then, to show that no just reproach can be thrown against this principle of man's mental constitution. All that he knows of cause and effect he has acquired by a reliance on this

50

FUTILITY OF HYPOTHESIS

part of his mental endowments; and we may justly remark that, in the early stages of his progress, he must have been led to expect, through this principle, the discovery of things placed beyond his reach, owing to the great success with which he had applied the same to the acquisition of knowledge fit for the supply of his everyday wants.

Astrology, divination, sorcery, witchcraft, and magic, are all pursuits seeking to attain a knowledge and power forbidden to man. To these pursuits, doubtless, he was led by this belief, that when two events stand in immediate succession, the first is the cause of the second. By these studies he sought an unattainable knowledge of the future, and an unattainable power over the future; he was dealing with obscure phenomena; he could not readily discover the test afforded by a distinct failure in the succession; and hence these subjects grew to the extent in which history exhibits them. But, during all that while, the knowledge of real causes and real effects was accumulating; and as this real knowledge successively laid open the true order and course of nature, the supposed means of gaining knowledge and power, as respects the future, began to decline.

What we contend for is, the necessity of directing education to the knowledge of the workings of the human mind, as well as to the study of the laws of nature. This we must repeat in season and out of season ; and we think we have just shown, by a sufficient detail of facts, that man's knowledge of the course of nature is correct only in so far as he understands the real character of that intelligent agency, his own mind, by which alone, upon earth, the operations of nature are fathomed.

It is a great error to attempt to reduce popular education to a low standard. The power of thinking, and even of thinking deeply, naturally belongs to all sound-minded men. It is the complexity of many subjects of knowledge that have risen up among men which creates the chief difficulty in popular education; and that difficulty is, above all, aggravated by the technicalities of words and symbols, which have been perhaps unnecessarily affected, particularly by those who ridicule the idea of popular education in the profounder parts of knowledge. It is quite true that access to the most profound and exact parts of Physical Science can only be obtained through the abstruse means of mathematical investigation. But there is no room for despair. Although it is impossible, without the application of more time and labour than can be spared by the busy world, to gain a practical acquaintance with the profound means of mathematical investigation, it is within the reach of every one to gain tolerably just ideas of the nature of those powerful instruments of research. All mathematical truth rests, as we have seen, on intuitive principles