With that I left, having learnt a very interesting lesson from the Argentinos, whom so many Europeans are generously ready to teach.
FOOTNOTES:
[12] The census of 1909 showed that public instruction had since 1895, the date of the last census, made great progress. In these ten years the Argentine has opened 2000 new schools. In 1895, 30 per cent. of the population were in the schools; in 1909, 59 per cent.
The Lainez Act enjoined on the National Educational Council the duty of opening elementary schools, giving the minimum of instruction, wherever they were needed.
In the census of 1909 every child from five to fourteen years was made the subject of a separate card of psychophysical details on the initiative of Dr. Horacio G. Pinero. This card contained twenty-one questions: age, nationality, parentage, height, weight, thoracic measurements, size of the head, weight of the body, anomalies, deformities, stigmata, anterior diseases, sight, hearing, objective perception, attention, memory, language and pronunciation, affectionateness, excitability, temper.
[13] "If the idea of liberty be in itself a force, as Fouillée maintains, that force would be scarcely less if some wise man should one day demonstrate that it rested on illusion alone. This illusion is too tenacious to be dispelled by reasoning. The most convinced of determinists will still continue to use the words 'I will' and even 'I ought' in his daily speech, and moreover will continue to think them with what is the most powerful part of his mind—the unconscious and non-reasoning part. It is just as impossible not to act like a free man when one acts as it is not to reason like the determinist when one is working at science" ("La Morale et la Science," by Henri Poincaré, La Revue, June 1, 1910).
[14] "If some day morality were forced to accept determinism, would it not perish in the effort to adapt itself thereto? So profound a metaphysical revolution would doubtless have less influence on our manners than might be thought. Penal repression is not of course in question; what we now call crime and punishment would be known as disease and prevention, but society would preserve intact its right which is not to punish but simply to defend itself" (Henri Poincaré, loc. cit.).