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J. P. Gordy’s statement.

Pestalozzi’s reform.

Dr. J. P. Gordy, to whom credit is due for the preceding quotation, further says, “Words are like paper money; their value depends on what they stand for. As you would be none the richer for possessing Confederate money to the amount of a million dollars, so your pupils would be none the wiser for being able to repeat book after book by heart, unless the words were the signs of ideas in their minds. Words without ideas are an irredeemable paper currency. It is the practical recognition of this truth that has revolutionized the best schools in the last quarter of a century.... In what did the reform inaugurated by Pestalozzi consist? In the substitution of the intelligent for the blind use of words. He reversed the educational engine. Before his time teachers expected their pupils to go from words to ideas; he taught them to go from ideas to words. He brought out the fact upon which I have been insisting,—that words are utterly powerless to create ideas; that all they can do is to help the pupil to recall and recombine ideas already formed. With Pestalozzi, therefore, and with those who have been imbued with his theories, the important matter is the forming of clear and definite ideas.”[4]

Sight and insight.

It was a remark of Goethe that genius begins in the senses. With equal truth we may say that thinking begins in the senses. Like unto the genius, the thoughtful man perceives and interprets what has escaped the notice of other people. To sight he adds insight. That which he sees is subsumed under the proper class or category, and is viewed from different sides until its significance is discovered, and a place is assigned to it in the intellectual horizon and in the external world. Every fact thus seen in its relation to other facts serves as a basis for further observation, reflection, and comparison. Not merely the genius, but every other person whose thinking is above the average in vigor and accuracy, has the power to perceive things which escape the eyes and ears of other people. Through habits of careful and correct observation he fills his mind with images, ideas, concepts of the objects of thought and of the relations which exist between these objects, and thereby acquires the materials for the comparisons which constitute the essence of good thinking. If the strength of a student is exhausted in gathering and storing the materials for thought, his mind becomes a wilderness of facts; if he reasons without the facts, his conclusions are more unreal than the figments of the imagination.

Truth the proper thought-material.

Truth is the best thought-material for the mind to act upon. The possession of truth is the aim and the goal of all correct thinking. Knowledge of the truth implies the conformity of thinking with being. The world within should be made to correspond with the world outside of us.

The laboratory and the library.

Aristotle.

Fortunately, the self-activity of children is towards the objective world of things which they can see, hear, smell, taste, and handle. From inner impulse their thinking is directed towards the cognition of objects. One of the functions of nature study is to beget habits of careful and accurate observation. This is a characteristic feature of the laboratory method as distinguished from the library method. A training in both is essential to a complete education. The library stores the treasures of knowledge which the human race has gathered and makes them accessible to the learner. The laboratory shows him by what methods truth is discovered and tested and verified. The German professor who declined to visit a menagerie, asserting that he could evolve the idea of the elephant from his inner consciousness, may have spent much time in reading books and in speculation; but he certainly never worked in a laboratory; nor had he taken to heart the lessons which he might have learned from the sages of antiquity. Aristotle knew the importance of asking nature for facts, and he induced his royal pupil, Alexander the Great, to employ two thousand persons in Europe, Asia, and Africa for the purpose of gathering information concerning beasts, birds, and reptiles, whereby he was enabled to write fifty volumes upon animated nature. After teachers had forgotten his methods they still turned to his books for the treasures which he had gathered. In the ages in which men hardly dared to ask nature for her secrets, fearing that they might be accused of witchcraft, they turned to Aristotle as if he were an infallible guide—so much so that when Galileo announced the discovery of sun-spots a monk declared that he had read Aristotle through from beginning to end, and inasmuch as Aristotle said nothing about spots on the sun, therefore there are none. This book-method of studying science has not entirely disappeared from the seats of learning. Books like Tyndall’s “Water and the Forms of Water,” Faraday’s “Chemistry of a Candle,” and Newcomb’s “Popular Astronomy” may, indeed, be read or studied as literature, and thus prove a means of culture; but to accept the facts and statements of a text-book without verification is the lazy man’s method of studying science; and as a method it fails to lay the foundation upon which a solid superstructure can be built. The correct method starts with observation of the things to be known, develops the basal concepts which lie at the foundation of the science under consideration, ends by teaching the pupil how to make independent investigations, how to utilize the treasures which have been preserved in our libraries, thereby furnishing an adequate supply of proper materials for thought.

Productive minds.

The habits of men who have surprised the world by their intellectual and professional achievements are very suggestive. Spurgeon kept his mind filled by constant reading. Goethe was fond of travel and utilized what he learned from others. Emerson visited the markets regularly, conversed with the men and women from whom he bought, and sought to learn their views on current events. Study the greatest thinkers the world has known, and you will find their memories to have been a storehouse of thought-materials which they analyzed, sifted, compared, and formulated into systems that win the admiration of all who love to think.