His Encyclopædic Arrangement of Knowledge.—The rest of the works of Comenius may be regarded as amplifications of various parts of this Great Didactic. Besides the Janual series, which he seems to have written for the Latin school, he produced a set of texts for the vernacular school, which soon disappeared, and a handbook for the lowest work, called The School of Infancy. Pansophic training at every stage of education. But the phase of the Great Didactic most often elaborated was the realistic one of pansophia or ‘universal knowledge.’ This principle was not only exemplified in such works as the Janua and Orbis Pictus and in treatises he wrote upon astronomy and physics, but in various educational institutions that he undertook to found, and it remained the ruling passion throughout his life. In the Great Didactic he went so far as to hold that an encyclopædic training should be given at every stage of education,—mother school, vernacular school, Latin school, and university.

But, while even in the mother school the infant was to make a beginning with geography, history, and various sciences, grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, and the rudiments of economics, politics, ethics, metaphysics, and religion, his attainment was not expected to be as formidable as the names of the subjects sound. It was to consist merely Each succeeding stage to enlarge the body of knowledge. in understanding simple causal, temporal, spatial, and numerical relations; in distinguishing sun, moon, and stars, hills, valleys, lakes, and rivers, and animals and plants; in learning to express oneself; and in acquiring proper habits. It was, in fact, not unlike the training of the modern kindergarten. In a similar way each succeeding stage is to enlarge the body of knowledge along all these lines. “The different schools are not to deal with different subjects, but should treat the same subjects in different ways; throughout graduating the instruction to the age of the pupil and the knowledge that he already possesses. In the earlier schools everything is taught in a general and undefined manner, while in those which follow the information is particularized and exact.” Moreover, beyond the university, which, like the lower schools, was to make teaching its chief function, Comenius held it to be important that somewhere in the world The ‘didactic college’ for all nations. there should be a ‘didactic college’ devoted to scientific investigation, in which learned men from all nations should coöperate. Such an institution would form a logical climax to his system of schools, bearing the same relation to them that the stomach does to the other members of the body by “supplying blood, life, and strength to all.”

The Method of Nature.—The way in which this pansophic instruction should be given, Comenius also intended to have in full accord with sense realism. He insists that the ‘method of nature’ must be observed and followed, and then shows how nature accomplishes all things ‘with certainty, ease, and thoroughness,’ in what respects schools have deviated from the principles of nature, and how they can be rectified only by following her plans. These principles concerning the working of nature were laid down a priori, but it is probable that they had been previously worked out inductively from his schoolroom experience. At times, though, they Often fanciful analogies, were put in the form of fanciful analogies. For example, he declares that because a bird by nature hatches her young in the spring or early part of the year, schools have erred (1) in not requiring education to begin in the springtime of life, or boyhood, and (2) in not selecting the springtime of the day, or the morning hours, for study.

But it is not remarkable that, with all his realistic tendencies, Comenius did not consistently employ induction. The natural sciences were young in his day, so that he did not altogether grasp their content and method, and he had partially inherited the scholastic notion that truth cannot be fully secured through the senses or by reason. It is sufficient merit that Comenius, for the first time in history, applied anything like induction but more fully inductive elsewhere. to teaching. Moreover, in the application of his general method to the specific teaching of various lines,—sciences, reading, writing, singing, languages, morality, and piety, he utilized more fully the induction of Bacon. For example, after showing the necessity for careful observation in obtaining a knowledge of the sciences, he gives nine useful precepts for their study that are clearly the inductive result of his own experience as a teacher. Likewise, he insists that, in teaching the sciences, in order to make a genuine impression upon the mind, one must deal with realities rather than books. The objects themselves, or where this is not possible, such representations of them as can be conveyed by copies, models, and pictures, must be studied. After the same principle he formulates inductive rules and methods for instruction in the other subjects.

The Influence of Comenius upon Education.—Thus the work of Comenius was based primarily upon sense realism, but he added many modifications and new elements of his own. He may in the fullest sense be considered the great educational theorist and practical reformer of the seventeenth century. His practical ability Popularity of his Latin text-books, is especially shown in the series of Latin text-books, which far excelled the works of several contemporaries on similar lines. The Janua was translated into a dozen European, and at least three Asiatic languages; the Orbis Pictus proved even more popular, and went through an almost unlimited number of editions in various tongues; and the whole series became for many generations the favorite means of introducing young people to the study of Latin. But the remarkable theoretical work of Comenius had little effect upon the schools of but ignorance of the Great Didactic, the period, and until about the middle of the nineteenth century the Great Didactic was scarcely known. At that time, when this treatise of Comenius was brought to light by German investigators, it was discovered that the old realist of the seventeenth century had been the first to deal with education in a scientific spirit, and work out its problems practically in the schools. And the principles of Comenius were at the time unconsciously taken up by others and indirectly became the basis of which was the indirect basis of modern education. modern education. His spirit appeared not only in the ideas of subsequent theorists—Francke, Rousseau, Basedow, Pestalozzi, Herbart, Froebel—but even in the actual curricula and methods of educational institutions.

Realistic Tendencies in Elementary Schools.—While the effect of sense realism upon the schools seems to have been slow and indirect, the movement was obvious even in the seventeenth century. In Germany there came a decided tendency throughout the elementary schools to Slow and indirect, but the vernacular and elementary science introduced. increase instruction in the vernacular, as recommended by Ratich and Comenius, and to learn first the German grammar rather than the Latin. With this movement was joined the increase in universal and compulsory education urged by the reformers, and an introduction of elementary science, in addition to reading, writing, arithmetic, religion, and singing. At Weimar in 1619, through a pupil of Ratich, a new school system was organized; and in 1642, under the order of Duke Ernst, Andreas Reyher prepared a new course for Gotha, which afforded elementary instruction in the natural sciences, as well as the rudiments and religion. This work included teaching the children to measure with the hour-glass and sun-dial, to observe the ordinary plants and animals, and to carry on other objective studies of a simple character. Many other attempts at instruction in science were made elsewhere in the German states, both in private and public education, and the same tendency appeared in the states of Italy, and in France, Holland, and England.

Secondary Schools.—But the new realistic tendencies appeared also in secondary education. While in Germany it was not until the eighteenth century that there were any evidences of sense realism in the gymnasia, languages of neighboring countries and considerable Science in the Ritterakademien, science appeared in the Ritterakademien (see p. 157) by the middle of the seventeenth, and toward the end of the century in the schools of Francke and other ‘pietists’ at Halle were embodied all the realistic elements of Comenius. While the pietists adopted these ideas largely for their religious side, as a protest and reaction to the rationalistic Ritterakademien, they did not hesitate also to stress the science content and the study of the vernacular. In the secondary school known as the Pädagogium, Pädagogium, which he had started for well-to-do boys, Francke included training in the vernacular, mathematics, geography, natural science, astronomy, anatomy, and Realschule, and materia medica; and the Realschule, established by his colleague, Semler, went even more fully into the vernacular, mathematics, and the sciences, pure and applied. This realistic instruction of the pietists was brought by Hecker to Berlin, where he started his famous Realschule in 1747, and similar institutions soon spread and in grammar schools and academies. throughout Prussia. In England, while very few of the grammar and public schools (see p. 120) as yet introduced even the elements of science into their course, the academies (see p. 157) were rich in sciences, mathematics, and the vernacular. This was also true of the academies that sprang up in America (see p. 158).

The Universities.—The universities were slower in responding to the movement of sense realism. As the result of its pietistic origin, however, the University of Sciences in Halle, Göttingen, and other universities, Halle was realistic almost from its beginning in 1692. Göttingen, the next institution to become hospitable to the tendency, did not start it until 1737. But soon afterward the movement became general, and by the end of the eighteenth century all the German universities—at least, all under Protestant auspices—had created professorships in the sciences. While the English universities, and in Oxford and Cambridge. Oxford and Cambridge, were much slower than those of Germany in adopting the new subjects, and it was a century and a half before these institutions became known for their science, during the professorship of Isaac Newton (1669-1702) considerable was done toward making Cambridge mathematical and scientific, and in the course of the eighteenth century several chairs in the sciences were established. Besides formulating Great work of Newton. the law of gravitation, Newton lectured and wrote at Cambridge upon calculus, astronomy, optics, and the spectrum. He became one of the greatest mathematicians and physicists the world has known, and he did much to create a scientific atmosphere in other educational institutions, as well as Cambridge. America also felt the scientific impulse in its higher institutions. Some Science in American colleges. study of astronomy, botany, and physics was possible at Harvard even in the seventeenth century, and during the eighteenth Yale, Princeton, King’s (afterward Columbia), Dartmouth, Union, and Pennsylvania all came to offer a little work in physics, and at times in chemistry, geology, astronomy, and biology. In his proposals for the prospective ‘seminary’ in New York (1753), which was destined to become Columbia University, and in the actual course of the academy at Philadelphia (later the University of Pennsylvania), over which he presided, Dr. William Smith put a most progressive program of sciences, including the rudiments of mechanics, physics, chemistry, geology, astronomy, botany, zoölogy, and physiology. But for half a century after this American institutions did little with the sciences as laboratory studies.

SUPPLEMENTARY READING

Graves, During the Transition (Macmillan, 1910), chap. XVIII; and Great Educators of Three Centuries (Macmillan, 1912), chaps. II, IV, and VI; Monroe, Text-book (Macmillan, 1905), pp. 461-501. The following works are standard for the authors mentioned: Adamson, J. W., Pioneers of Modern Education (Macmillan, 1905), chap. III (Bacon); Barnard, H., German Teachers and Educators, pp. 343-370 (Ratich); Fowler, T., Bacon’s Novum Organum (Oxford, Clarendon Press); Laurie, S. S., John Amos Comenius (Bardeen, Syracuse, 1892); Monroe, W. S., Comenius (Scribner, 1900); and Quick, R. H., Educational Reformers (Appleton, 1896), chap. IX (Ratich) and X (Comenius). An account of sense realism is afforded by Adamson, op. cit., chap. I, and of its effect upon the schools by Barnard, op. cit., pp. 302-317, and by Paulsen, F., German Education (Scribner, 1908), pp. 117-133.