“I shouldn’t mind this if they kept on reasoning. But it’s a false start. After the wide generalizations of infancy have been forgotten, the youth begins to specialize. He takes a small slice of a subject, ignoring its more obvious features and its broader outlines. He has a contempt for general ideas. What we studied, he takes for granted. He’s very observing, but he doesn’t put two and two together. There they stand in his mind, two separate ideas, politely ignoring one another, because they have not been properly introduced. The result of all this is evident enough. How many people do you come across with whom it is a pleasure to hold an argument? Not many! They don’t know the rules of the game. You can’t enter a drawing-room without hearing questions discussed in a way possible only to those whose early education in the art of reasoning had been neglected. The chances are that every one of the fallacies we learned about in Whately could appear in good society without anybody being able to call them by their Latin names.
“‘Doesn’t this follow from that?’ the facile talker asks, as if that were all that is necessary to constitute a valid argument. Of course it follows; his assertions follow one another like a flock of sheep. But what short work our old Professor would have made with these plausible sequences!
“What a keen scent the old man had for fallacies! Even when the conclusion was obviously sound, he insisted that we should come by it honestly. He would never admit that in such matters the end justifies the means. I remember his merciless exposure of the means by which some unscrupulous metaphysicians accumulated their intellectual property. His feeling about the ‘Undistributed Middle’ was much the same as that of Henry George about the ‘Unearned Increment.’ How he used to get after the moonshiners who were distilling arguments by the illicit process of the major term! In these days the illicit process goes on openly. The growth of the real sciences does not in the least discourage the pseudo-sciences. It rather seems to stimulate them.
“For many persons, a newly discovered fact is simply a spring-board from which they dive into a bottomless sea of speculation. They pride themselves on their ability to jump at conclusions, forgetting that jumping is an exercise in which the lower orders excel their betters. If an elephant could jump as far, in proportion to his weight, as a flea, there would be no holding him on the planet. Every new discovery is followed by a dozen extravagances, engineered by the Get-wise-quick people. There is always some Young Napoleon of Philosophy who undertakes to corner the truth-market. It’s like what happened at the opening of Oklahoma Territory. Before the day set by the government when they all were to start fair in their race for farms, a band of adventurers called ‘Sooners’ smuggled themselves across the line. When the bona fide settler arrived on his quarter-section, he found an impudent Sooner in possession. You can’t find any fresh field of investigation that isn’t claimed by these Sooners. It all comes because people are no longer educated logically.”
******
When Scholasticus was in this mood, it was difficult to do anything with him. It was in vain to tell him that he was narrow, for, like all narrow men, he took that as a compliment. It is the broad way, he reminded me, that leads to intellectual destruction. Still, I attempted to bring him to a better frame of mind.
“Scholasticus,” said I, “the old order changes. You are a survivor of another period. You were educated according to a logical order. You learned to spell out of a Spelling Book, and to read out of a Reader, and to write not by following the dictates of your own conscience, but by following the copy in a Copy Book; and you learned to speak correctly by committing to memory the rules of grammar and afterwards the exceptions.”
“And it was a good way, too,” interrupted Scholasticus. “It gave us a respect for law and order, to learn the rules and to abide by them. Now, I understand, they don’t have grammar, but ‘language work.’ The idea is, I suppose, that if the pupils practice the exceptions they needn’t bother about the rules. When I studied geography, we began with a definition of the word geography, after which we were told that the earth is a planet, and that three fourths of its surface is water, a fact which I have never forgotten. Nowadays they hold that geography, like charity, should begin at home, so the first thing is to make a geodetic survey of the back yard. By the time they work up to the fact that the earth is a planet, the pupils have learned so many other things that it makes very little impression on their minds.”
“Scholasticus,” said I, “I was saying the old order changes lest one good custom should corrupt the educational world. They were great people for rules in your day. It was an inheritance from the past. You remember the anecdote of Ezekiel Cheever, head master of the Boston Latin School, who taught Cotton Mather Latin. A pupil writes, ‘My master found fault with the syntax of one word, which was not so used heedlessly, but designedly, and therefore I told him there was a plain grammar rule for it. He angrily replied that there was no such rule. I took the grammar and showed the rule to him. Then he said, “Thou art a brave boy. I had forgot the rule.”’ That takes us back to a time when there was a superstitious reverence for rules. We don’t reason so rigidly from rules now, we develop the mind according to a chronological rather than a logical order. We let the ideas come according to the order of nature.”
At this, the wrath of Scholasticus bubbled over. “‘The order of nature’! The nature of what? A cabbage head grows according to an order natural to cabbages. But a rational intelligence is developed according to the laws of reason. The first thing is to formulate the laws, and then to obey them. Logic has to do with the laws of rational thought, just as grammar has to do with the laws of correct speech. Nowadays, the teacher seems to be afraid of laying down the law. I visited a model school the other day. It wasn’t a school at all, according to the definition in the old-fashioned book I used to read: ‘A school is a place where children go to study books. The good children when they have learned their lessons go out to play, the idle remain and are punished.’ According to the modern method, it is the teacher who must remain to be punished for the idleness of her pupils. It’s her business to make the lessons interesting. If their attention wanders, she is held responsible. The teacher must stay after hours and plan new strategic moves. She must ‘by indirections find directions out,’—while the pupil is resisting one form of instruction, she suddenly teaches him something else. In this way the pupil’s wits are kept on the run. No matter how they scatter, there is the teacher before him.”