When a method is applied to any positive science, it results in giving that science a new direction, that is to say, a new avenue of progress: And it is precisely in the course of advance along that avenue that the content of the science is formed: but if we never made the advance, the science would never take its start. Thus, for example, when the microscope revealed to medicine the existence of micro-organisms, and bacteriology arose as the positive study of epidemiology, it altered the whole procedure in the cure and prophylaxis of infective maladies. Prior to this epoch people believed that an epidemic was a scourge sent by divine wrath upon sinners; or else they imagined it was a miasma transported by the wind, which groves and eucalyptus trees might check; or they pictured the ground ejecting miasmatic poisons through its pores:—and humanity sought in vain to protect itself with bare-foot processions and religious ceremonies, attended by jostling throngs and cruel flagellation; or else they betook themselves to the shade of eucalyptus trees, in the midst of malarial lowlands. Entire cities were destroyed by pestilence, and malarial districts remained uncultured deserts, because entire populations, in the brave effort to perform their work, were destroyed by successive impoverishment of the blood.
It is bacteriology that has put to flight this darkness of ignorance that was the herald of death, and has created the modern conditions of environment, which, by a multitude of means, defend the individual and the nation from infective diseases; so that to-day civilised society may be said to be advancing toward a triumph over death.
But the microbes have not all of them been discovered; bacteriology and general pathology are still very far from having completed their content. If we had been obliged to wait for such completion, we should still be living quite literally in the midst of mediæval epidemics; or, to state the case better, where in the world would the science of medicine ever have attained its new content? For it has been building it up, little by little, by directing medicine upon a new path. It was the introduction of this new method of investigating the patient and his environment that experimentally reaped the fruit of new etiological discoveries, and new means of defence: the microscope became perfected because it came into universal use in practice; bacterial cultures owe their perfectionment to the fact that they became the common means of investigation for the purpose of diagnosis; just as tests in clinical chemistry have become perfected through practical use. Without which, who would ever have perfected the microscope, or the science of bacteriology? In a word, whence are we to get the content of any positive science, if not from practical application?
A direction and an applied method represent a triumph of progress; and in progress, a content cannot have defined limits. We do not know its goal; we know only that at the moment when it finds its goal, it will cease to be progress.
It is many years since medicine abandoned the speculative course, and we see it to-day hourly enriching itself with new truths; its triumphal march is never checked, and it moves onward toward the invasion of future centuries. In the wake of its progress, that frightful phenomenon which we call mortality tends to fall steadily to a lower level; giving rise to the hope that through future progress it will cease to be the mysterious, menacing fate, ever watchful and ready to sever the invisible threads of human life. These threads are to-day revealing themselves as the resistant fibres of a fabric; because, humanity by engaging collectively in the audacious search after truth, and by thus protecting the interests of each individual through the common interests, has succeeded in offering a powerful resistance to the mysterious sheers.
Accordingly, we may say that the substitution to-day of an anthropological development of pedagogy, in the place of a purely philosophical and speculative trend, does not offer it merely an additional content, an auxiliary to all the other forms of teaching on which it now comfortably reposes; but it opens up new avenues, fruitful in truth and in life; and as it advances along these avenues, regenerated from its very foundations upward, it may be that pedagogy is destined to solve the great problem of human redemption.
The Method to be Followed in These Lectures
Lastly, just one more word regarding the didactic method that I intend to follow, in delivering this course of lectures. From the purpose already stated, it follows that this Course in Anthropology must be eminently practical. Of the three weekly lectures, only one will be theoretical; that is to say, only one in which I shall expound the content of our science; a second lecture will treat of the technique of the method; that is to say, I shall devote it to describing the practical way of gathering anthropological data, and how we must study them and re-group them in order to extract their laws; and finally, the third lecture will be practical and clinical; I shall devote it to the collection of anthropological data from human subjects, and little by little I shall try to work toward the individual study of pupils, until we reach the compilation of biographic charts. At the lectures of the third type, we shall have present subjects who will be, for the most part, normal, but some of them will be abnormal, and all will be drawn from the elementary schools of Rome.
Finally, in further illustration of our course, we shall make excursions, visiting certain schools that offer some particular interest from our scientific point of view; to the end that we may supply what is lacking and what is needed to complete a University Course in Scientific Pedagogy, namely a "Pedagogical Clinic," where pupils of the widest variety of types might be educated, and where it might be possible to lay practical foundations of a far-reaching reform in our schools.
Accordingly, I shall repeat myself three times, in these lectures; first, by setting forth the scientific content, secondly, by expounding the methods of investigation, and thirdly, by applying in practice what I have already taught in theory. The didactic method of repeating the same instruction under different forms, is also a feature of scientific pedagogy, because it represents the method by which positive science must be taught and acquired; and furthermore, it is the method that deserves to be applied wherever instruction of any sort is to be given.