[Transcriber's note]

This is derived from a copy on the Internet Archive:
http://www.archive.org/details/educationhowold00walsgoog
Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers enclosed in curly braces, e.g. {99}. They have been located where page breaks occurred in the original book.
Obvious spelling errors have been corrected but "inventive" and inconsistent spelling is left unchanged. Unusual use of quotation marks is also unchanged.
Extended quotations and citations are indented.
Footnotes have been renumbered to avoid ambiguity, and relocated to the end of the enclosing paragraph.

[End Transcriber's note]

EDUCATION
HOW OLD THE NEW

BY
JAMES J. WALSH, M.D., Ph.D., Litt. D.

Dean and Professor of the History of Medicine and of Nervous Diseases at Fordham University School of Medicine; Professor of Physiological Psychology at the Cathedral College, New York.

SECOND IMPRESSION
NEW YORK
FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS
1911
COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY
JAMES J. WALSH
Published October 20th, 1910
Second Impression March 20th, 1911
THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRESS
RAMWAY, N.J.

TO THE

Xavier Alumni Sodality

Most of the thoughts contained in this volume were originally
expressed at our breakfasts. It seems only fitting, then, that on
presentation to a larger audience they should be dedicated to you.
J. J. W.
Our Lady's Day. August 15, 1910

{v}

PREFACE

The reason for publishing this volume of lectures and addresses is the persuasion that present-day educators are viewing the history of education with short-sighted vision. An impression prevails that only the last few generations have done work of serious significance in education. The history of old-time education is neglected, or is treated as of at most antiquarian interest and there is a failure to understand its true value. The connecting link between the lectures and addresses is the effort to express in terms of the present what educators were doing in the past. Once upon a time, when I proclaimed the happiness of the English workmen of the Middle Ages, the very positive objection was raised, "How could they be happy since their wages were only a few cents a day?" For response it was only necessary to point out that for his eight cents, the minimum wage by act of Parliament, the workman could buy a pair of handmade shoes, that being the maximum price established by law, and other necessaries at similar prices. If old-time education is studied with this same care to translate its meaning into modern values, then the very oldest education of which we have any record takes on significance even for our time.

{vi}

While it is generally supposed that there are many new features in modern education, it requires but slight familiarity with educational history to know that there is very little that is novel. Such supposedly new phases as nature-study and technical training and science, physical as well as ethical, are all old stories, though they have had negative phases during which it would be hard to to trace them. The more we know about the history of education the greater is our respect for educators at all times. Nearly always they had a perfectly clear idea of what they were trying to do, they faced the problems of education in quite the same spirit that we do and often solved them very well. Indeed the results of many periods of old-time education are much better than our own, even when judged by our standards.

Unfortunately there exists a very common persuasion that evolution plays a large role in education and that we, "the heirs of all the ages in the foremost files of time," are necessarily in the forefront of educational advance. There has been much progress in education in the last century, but it would, indeed, be a hopeless world if there had not been progress out of the depths in which education was plunged in the eighteenth century. There were a number of reformers in education at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was rather easy to be an educational reformer at that time. The lowest period in the history of {vii} education was about the middle of the eighteenth century. It has been assumed that since we are far ahead of that generation we must be still farther ahead of the people who preceded them. That is the mistake. There are periods of education of very great significance centuries long before that time.

In educational lectures and addresses for the past five years, I have been trying to translate into modern terms the meaning of these old periods of education. A great many teachers have thought the ideas valuable and suggestive and so I am tempted to publish them in book form. There is an additional reason, that of wishing to create a bond of sympathy between the two systems of education that have grown up in this country. For some three generations now Catholic educators have been independently building up a system of education from the elementary schools to the university. The American world of education is coming to recognize how much they have accomplished. There has even been some curiosity expressed as to how it was all done in spite of apparently insuperable obstacles. One phase of Catholic education, its thorough-going conservatism and definite effort to value the past properly and take advantage of its precious lessons, is here represented.

My own educational interests have been taken up much more of late years with medicine than with other phases of this subject. Hence the {viii} volume contains certain addresses relating to the history of medical education. They are more intimately linked with the general subject of education than might perhaps be thought. We have had finely organized medical education at a number of times in the past, and, indeed, at the present moment can find inspiration and incentive in studying the legal regulation of medicine and of medical education in what might seem to be so-unpromising a time as the thirteenth century. For true educational progress there has always been need of close sympathy between the non-professional and the professional department of universities. Only when the professional schools are real graduate departments, requiring under-graduate training for admission, is the university doing its work properly. This was the rule in the past--hence the precious lessons for the present in the story of these old-time universities.

These lectures and addresses were actually delivered, not merely read. They were written with that purpose. Certain repetitions that would have been avoided if the articles had been prepared directly for reading and not for an audience, may be noted. Some of the subjects overlap and certain phases had to be treated usually in variant form in different lectures. For these faults the reader's indulgence is craved.

CONTENTS

EDUCATION, HOW OLD THE NEW

"Nothing under the sun is new, neither is any man able to say: Behold this is new: For it hath already gone before in the ages that were before us."
--Ecclesiastes i:10.
"Nullum est jam dictum, quod non dictum sit prius."
--Terence, Eun. Prol., 41.
[Nothing is now said which was not said before.]
St. Jerome relates that his preceptor Donatus, commenting on this passage of Terence, used to say: "Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt."
[May they perish who said our good things before us.]

[{3}]

EDUCATION, HOW OLD THE NEW [Footnote 1]

[Footnote 1: Material for this lecture was gathered for one of a course of lectures on Phases of Education delivered at St Mary's College, South Bend, Ind., at the Sacred Heart Academy, Kenwood, Albany, N. Y., and at St. Mary's College, Monroe, Mich, 1909. In somewhat developed form it was delivered to the public school teachers of New Orleans at the beginning of 1910. In very nearly its present form it was the opening lecture at the course of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, on "How Old the New Is," delivered in the spring of 1910.]

Popular lectures are usually on some very up-to-date subject. Indeed, as a rule they are on subjects that are developing at the moment, and the main aim of the lecturer is to forecast the future. It is before a thing has happened that we want to know about it now, and though, as not infrequently occurs, the lecturer's forecast does not in the event prove him a prophet nor the son of a prophet, for nature usually accomplishes her purposes more simply than the closet philosopher anticipates, at least we have the satisfaction for the moment of thinking that not only are we up to date but a little ahead of it. Unfortunately I have to claim your indulgence this evening in this matter, for taking just the opposite course. I am to talk about the oldest book in the world, its old-fashioned yet novel contents, its up-to-date applications, and its significance for the history of the race and, above all, the history of education. The [{4}] one interesting feature, as I hope, of what I have to say, is that old-time methods in education as suggested by this little volume are strangely familiar and its contents are as significant now as they were in the old time from which it comes. The book was written almost as long before Solomon as Solomon is before us, yet there is a depth of practical wisdom about it that eminently recalls the expression "there is nothing new under the sun."

So much attention has been given to education in recent years, we have made such a prominent feature of it in life, have spent so much money on it, have devoted so much time and thought to its development and organization, that we feel very sure that what we are doing now in every line of educational effort represents--indeed must represent--a great advance over anything and everything that was ever accomplished in the past. To say anything else would seem to most people pure pessimism. It would mean that in spite of all the efforts of men we were not making advances. As a matter of fact, all of us know that it is quite possible to make heroic efforts so sadly misdirected that they accomplish nothing and get us nowhere. Progress depends not on effort but on the proper direction of the effort. We are supposed, however, to represent one phase and that at the front rank of an inevitable advance in things human, pushed forward, as it were, by the wheel of evolution in its ceaseless progress, and bound [{5}] therefore to make advancement. It is with this idea, so commonly accepted, that I would take issue by showing how much was accomplished in the past that anticipates much of what we are occupied with at the present time, and that serves to show what men can accomplish at any time when they set themselves to doing things with high ideals, well-considered purpose and strenuous effort.

There are those who insist that unless men have the encouraging feeling that they are making progress, their efforts are likely to be less strenuous than would otherwise be the case. There are those who think apparently that compliments make the best incentive for successful effort. Some of us who know that the world's best work, or at least the work of many of the world's great men, has been done in the midst of opposition, in the very teeth of criticism, in spite of discouragement, may not agree with that opinion. The history of successful accomplishment seems to show, indeed, that incentive is all the stronger as the result of the opposition which arouses to renewed efforts and the criticism which strips whatever is new of errors that inevitably cling to it at the beginning. On the other hand, if there is anything that the lessons of history make clear it is that self-complacency is the very worst thing, above all for intellectual effort of any kind, and that criticism, when judicious, is always beneficial.

Above all, comparisons are likely to be [{6}] chastening in their effects to make us realize that what we are doing at any particular time does not mean so much more than what many others have done and may indeed even mean less. It is rather interesting, then, to set our complacent assurance that we are doing such wonderful work in education and represent such magnificent progress over against some of the educational work of the past. After all we are not nearly so self-congratulatory about our education, its ways and methods and, above all, its success as we were a dozen years ago. There are many jarring notes of discordant criticism of methods heard, there are many deprecatory remarks passed with regard to our supposed success, and there have been some educators unkind enough,--and, unfortunately, they are often of the inner circle of our educational life,--to say that we are lacking in scholarship to a great degree, and that much of our so-called educational progress has been a tendency toward an accumulation of superficial information rather than a training of the intellect for power. The absolute need of the distinction between education for information and for power has been coming home to us. Above all, we have felt that we were not a little deceived by appearances in education and so are more ready to listen to suggestions of various kinds.

Under these circumstances it has seemed to me, that a calling of attention to what was accomplished at certain long-past periods for [{7}] education, would not only be of interest as information for teachers, but might possibly be helpful or at least suggestive, in the midst of the somewhat disordered state of mind that has resulted from recent criticisms of our educational methods and success, by men whose interest in education cannot be doubted and whose opportunities for knowing are the best. For we are in a time when nearly every important educator, president of a university, dean of a department, old-time teacher or old, thoughtful pupil with the interest of Alma Mater at heart, who has had something to say with regard to education has said it in rather derogatory fashion. Perhaps, then, it will do us good to study the periods of the past and see what they did, how their methods differed or still more often were like our own, what their success was like and what we may learn from them. The surprising thing is the number of repetitions of present-day experiences in education that we shall find in the past. This is true, however, in every mode of thinking quite as well as in education, once careful investigation of conditions is made.

If we begin at the beginning and take what is sometimes called the oldest book in the world, we shall see how early definite educational ideas took form. It is a set of moral lessons or instructions given, or supposed to be given, by a father to his son. The father's name was Ptah Hotep. He was a vizier of King Itosi of the Fifth Dynasty in Egypt, some time about 3500 B.C. [{8}] The Egyptologists used to date him earlier than that, but in recent years they have been clipping centuries off Egyptian dates until perhaps King Itosi must be considered as having lived probably not earlier than 3350 B.C. That makes very little difference for our purpose, however. The oldest manuscript copy of the book was written apparently not later than 2900 b.c. It exists as the famous Prisse Papyrus in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. There is another copy in the British Museum. There is a pretty thorough agreement as to these dates, so that we can be sure that this little book which has come to be known as the Instruction of Ptah Hotep, or the Proverbs of Ptah Hotpu--another form of his name with a variation in the title--represents the wisdom of the generations who lived in Egypt about 5000 years ago. It was written, as I have said, almost as long before Solomon as Solomon is before us, so that the character of the moral instructions which it contains is extremely interesting.

There must have been a number of copies of it made. This and books like it were used as schoolbooks in Egypt. They were employed somewhat as we employ copybooks. The writing of the manuscript is the old hieratic, cursive writing of the Egyptians, not their hieroglyphics, and the children used portions of this book as copies, listened to dictation from it and learned to write the language by imitating it. Of books similar to it we have a number of manuscript copies. Some [{9}] of these copies preserved from before 2000 B.C. are full of errors such as school children would make in taking down dictation. This was their method of teaching spelling, and after the children had spelled the words the teacher went over them and corrected the mistakes. These corrections were made in a different colored ink from that used by the pupils! The whole system of teaching, as it thus comes before us, resembles our own elementary school teaching much more than we might think possible. Spelling, writing, composition are all taught in this way yet, or at least they were when I was at school, and while I have heard that some of the old-fashioned methods were going out, I have also received some hints of the reaction by which they are coming in again, so that the Egyptian methods take on a new interest.

Perhaps there is no more interesting feature of the education of that olden time than the fact that these books which were used as copybooks in the school contain moral lessons. We have been neglecting these in our schools and have come to recognize the danger of such neglect. Definite efforts at the organization of moral teaching in some form are being made by many teachers, and their necessity is recognized by all educators. All of these old Egyptian books, then, will have a special claim on our interest at the present time. Above all, the oldest of them, though it is literally the oldest book in the world, merits [{10}] our attention, because its moral teaching is very clear-cut and its emphasis on ethical precepts very pronounced.

We would be very prone to think that what an old father has to say to his boy over fifty centuries ago would have, at most, only an antiquarian interest for us. It is not easy even to imagine that the old gentleman could have known human nature so well and written from so close to the heart of humanity because of his love for his boy, that his words would always have a practical application in life. Such, however, is actually the case. Any father of the modern time would be proud to be able to give to his boy the eminently practical maxims that this old father has written down. If there is any advice that will be helpful for youth, for the young usually demand that they shall have their own experience and not take it at second hand, this is the advice that is of value. Only fools, it is said, learn by their own experience, but then there is good Scripture warrant for believing that they were not all wise men in the olden time, and we are pretty well agreed that all the fools are not dead yet. If advice can be of service, however, from one generation to another, then here is the wisdom of age for the inexperience of youth. At least it will serve after the event to show youth that it was properly warned and that it is entirely its own fault if it has been making a fool of itself--as other generations have done before.

[{11}]

It might be expected that at least in form these old-time maxims would be rude and crude, expressed with an old man's loquaciousness and with many personal foibles. Fortunately for us, while to his son Ptah Hotep was very probably an old man, he was not what most of us would call old. In Egypt they married comparatively young. This boy was probably the oldest son. It is usually for the oldest that such advice is treasured up and written out. The father then, giving his advice just as his son was leaving the paternal household when he had married a wife and was about to set up a home of his own, was probably not more than forty. To seventeen or eighteen, forty is quite ancient. To most of the rest of us it is entirely too young to be trusted absolutely in serious matters. Aristotle declared that a man's body reaches physical perfection at thirty-five and his mind reaches intellectual maturity at forty-nine. His students were inclined to think that this age was entirely too old, his philosophic contemporaries of his own generation and the members of national academies and learned societies of most of the generations since, have been quite sure that the term set was entirely too young.

Ptah Hotep's son, then, very probably looked on his father as most sons under twenty are prone to do, as a dear old-fashioned gentleman (he does not like to use the word old fogy for his father, reserving it for the fathers of others), who would [{12}] be quite tolerable if he only had a little more sympathy with the wonderful advance that is in the world in this new generation. The real young man of the time, however, was the father who wrote his maxims, the condensed wisdom of his experience of life, with a directness, an absolute clarity, an occasional appeal to figures of speech and a variety of expression so striking as to make his work literature. As such it has come down to us. It is eminently human in every way, and while there is here and there an unfortunate tendency to repeat words of similar sound and different meaning, after the fashion of what we call punning, this is pardonable enough since so many of our friends indulge in it and give us practice in pardoning, while, on the whole, the old man wrote as wisely as Polonius, and in a style not quite as artificial as that which Shakespeare has invented as suitable to the old Danish Prime Minister, whom the ancient vizier of Egypt recalls so vividly in many ways.

No idea is probably more ingrained in modern thinking, no opinion is more generally accepted, no conclusion is surer to most people, than that we are in the midst of marvellous progress in this little world of ours, and that our generation is somewhere at the apex of the Pyramid of Progress, elevated thereto by the attainments of the generations that have preceded us. As the Poet Laureate put it at the close of the nineteenth century, "we are the heirs of all the ages in the [{13}] foremost files of time"; and because we have the advantage of our predecessors' progress in their time, we are, of course, in all that makes for human happiness and fulness of life, very far ahead of those gone before us. The farther back we go in history, then, the lower down men are supposed to be found in all that stands for intellectuality and in all that represents the possibilities of human achievement at its best. It is now well understood that the generations of the past are not so much to be blamed for their backwardness as to be pitied for the misfortune that, having come earlier in the world's history, they could not have the advantages that we enjoy, and therefore could only attain much lower stages in human progress than ours.

Apparently, there are very few people who do not share in the opinions thus expressed. The nineteenth century has been proclaimed the century of evolution; and the idea of evolution has become so much a part of the thought of our time that man also is assumed to be in the midst of it, and history is presumed to show distinctly the wonderful advance that humanity has made. As a matter of fact, it is extremely difficult to point out definitely where progress in humanity may be observed. Ambassador Bryce was asked, two years ago, to deliver an address before Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard, and took for his subject "What is Progress?" Phi Beta Kappa is the fraternity that admits into its classes only the best [{14}] students,--men who have proved their ability by success. Mr. Bryce, speaking to the most intelligent university graduates, might be expected to make much of our wonderful recent progress. The address subsequently appeared in the Atlantic Monthly for August, 1907. Far from any glorification of progress, the historian of the American Commonwealth, who has demonstrated his breadth of view and his notable lack of British insularity by the large way he has written about us, so that we have adopted his work as a text-book of information about ourselves, is very dubious as to whether there is any progress in the world. There is certainly no progress in man's highest expressions of his intelligence. As Mr. Bryce says: "The poetry of the early Hebrews and of the early Greeks has never been surpassed and hardly ever equalled. Neither has the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, nor the speeches of Demosthenes and Cicero." No one pretends that there is any progress in art. The masterpieces of architecture, sculpture, and painting date as a rule from long before our time, some of them nearly twenty-five hundred years back.

As has been very well said, the man who talks much about progress in our time usually knows only the history of human thought in his own generation, and not very much about that. In nearly every important phase of human achievement, we are, in present accomplishment, far behind the great predecessors. In our generation, [{15}] we are confessedly imitators in every phase of aesthetic expression. In painting, sculpture, art and literature, our models are all in the past, and we are quite frank in confessing that we are doing no work at all so good as the work of our forefathers of many generations and sometimes many centuries ago. Whence, then, comes the idea of progress? It has obtained most of its vogue from the theory of evolution; and the lack of evidence for evolution in general, in spite of the persuasion on the part of many educated people that there are proofs for it, can be very well judged from the corresponding lack of evidence with regard to progress in humanity. There is complete absence of proof for this latter, when the situation with regard to human achievement in the really great things of human life is examined. Indeed, it would be amusing were it not amazing to think how readily we have come to accept notions for which there is so little substantiation. To many this will doubtless seem a surprising declaration to make, after all that has been written, and universally accepted as most people think, with regard to evolution by the great minds of the nineteenth century. What evolution means, however, is summed up in the theory of descent, that is that living things as we know them now, have all come from simpler forms and perhaps all from a single form. The only other phase of interest in evolution is what concerns the theory of natural selection, which is supposed by many people to [{16}] have been demonstrated in the nineteenth century. It may be well for those who think thus to have recalled to them what a recent writer on the subject, himself a distinguished investigator in biology, a professor at Leland Stanford University, where under the influence of President Jordan biology is thoroughly yet conservatively cultivated, has to say with regard to these theories and the objective evidence for them. Professor Vernon L. Kellogg in his "Darwinism To-day," [Footnote 2] p. 18, though himself an evolutionist and a Darwinian, says: "What may for the moment detain us, however, is a reference to the curiously almost completely subjective character of the evidence for both the theory of descent and natural selection. Biology has been until now a science of observation; it is beginning to be one of observation plus experiment. The evidence for its principal theories might be expected to be thoroughly objective in character; to be of the nature of positive, observed and perhaps experimentally proved, facts. How is it actually? Speaking by and large, we only tell the general truth when we declare that no indubitable cases of species forming or transforming, that is of descent, have been observed; and that no recognized case of natural selection really selecting has been observed. I hasten to repeat the names of the Ancon sheep, the Paraguay cattle, the Porto Santo rabbit, the Artemias of Schmankewitch and the de Vriesian [{17}] evening primroses to show that I know my list of classic possible exceptions to this denial of observed species forming, and to refer to Weldon's broad-and-narrow fronted crabs as a case of what may be an observation of selection at work. But such a list, even if it could be extended to a score, or to a hundred, of cases, is ludicrous as objective proof of that descent and selection, under whose domination the forming of millions of species is supposed to have occurred." (Italics mine.)

[Footnote 2: Henry Holt and Co., New York, 1907.]

Mr. Kellogg, as might be expected from this, objects very much to the application that has been so heedlessly made of certain supposed principles of evolution to pedagogy. In practically every science to which Darwinian principles have been applied it is the weakest of the principles that have been appealed to as the foundation for presumedly new developments in the particular science. With regard to the so-called science of education Professor Kellogg says:

"In Pedagogy it is also the theory of descent rather than the selection theory which has been drawn on for some rather remarkable developments in child study and instruction. Unfortunately it is on that weakest of the three foundation pillars of descent, namely the science of embryology with its Müllerian-Haeckelian capitulation theory or biogenetic law, that the child-study pedagogues have builded. The species recapitulates in the ontogeny (development) of each of its individuals the course or history of its [{18}] phylogeny (descent or evolution). Hence the child corresponds in different periods of its development to the phyletic stages in the descent of man. As the child is fortunately well by its fish, dog and monkey stages before it comes into the care of the pedagogue, he has to concern himself only with safe progress through the various stages of prehistoric and barbarous man. Detect the precise phyletic stage cave-man, stone-age man, hunter and roamer, pastoral man, agriculturalist, and treat with the little barbarian accordingly! What simplicity! Only one trouble here for the pedagogue: the recapitulation theory is mostly wrong and what is right in it is mostly so covered up by the wrong part, that few biologists longer have any confidence in discovering the right. What, then, of our generalizing friends, the pedagogues?"

It is in educational matters, above all, then, that we must be careful about assumptions with regard to evolution and supposed inevitable progress because we must, forsooth, be taking advantage of the accumulated experience of previous generations. There is no inevitability about progress in any line. The attainment of any generation depends absolutely on what that generation tries to do, the ideals that it has and the fidelity with which it sets itself to work. We can make just as egregious mistakes, and we have made them, as any generation of the past. We can foster delusions with regard to our all-knowingness just as [{19}] many another foolish people before us have done, and our one hope of real accomplishment for ourselves and our generation is to choose our purposes carefully and then set about their accomplishment with strenuous effort. The lessons of the past in history are extremely precious not only because they show us where others made mistakes but also because they show us the successes of the past. The better we know these, the deeper our admiration for them, the better the outlook for ourselves and our accomplishment. This is the ideal that I would like to emphasize in this series of lectures and addresses and in this, far from there being any pessimism, there is, as it seems to me, the highest optimism. Any generation that wants to can do well, but it must want to do efficaciously.

Any one who thinks that education, in the sense of training of character or advice with regard to practical, every-day life, has evoluted in the course of time, should read this little book that I bring to you this evening. Indeed, it is as the first chapter in the history of education that it finds its most valuable place in literature. This teacher of the old-time, who had his boy's best interest at heart, not only knew what to say but how to say it so as to attract a young man's attention. Of course it is probable that, even with all this good advice, the young man went his way in his own fashion; for that is ever the mode of the young. But, so far as the experience of another [{20}] could supply for that personal experience which every human being craves, and will have, no matter what the cost, surely this oldest book in the world supplies the best possible material. As literature, it has a finish that is quite surprising. Art is said to be the elimination of the superfluous. Surely, then, this is artful, in the best sense of that word, to a supreme degree. It is surprising how few repetitions there are, how few tergiversations, how few unnecessary words; and yet the style is not so austere as to be dry and lacking in human interest.

Probably the most interesting feature of the book is the fact that in it God is always spoken of in the singular. It is not the "gods" who help men, who punish them, who command and must be obeyed, whose providence is so wonderful, but it is always "God." The latest editor,[Footnote 3] Mr. Battiscombe G. Gunn, in his version always inserts the definite article before the word God because, he says, in different places there were different local gods, and the idea of the writer was to emphasize the fact that the god of any particular locality would act as he declared in his instructions. There are many distinguished Egyptologists, however, who insist that the expression "the God," which occurs not only in this but in many other very early Egyptian writings, is a [{21}] monotheistic deity whose name is above all names, and transcends all the power of humanity to name him, and hence is spoken of always without a name but with the definite article.

[Footnote 3: "The Instructions of Ptah Hotep." Translated from the Egyptian, with an Introduction and an Appendix, by Battiscombe G. Gunn. E. P. Dutton & Co. Wisdom of the East Series, 1909.]

It is curious indeed to find that the very first bit of instruction given to his son by this wise father is, not to be conceited about what he knows. How striking the expression of his first sentence of this oldest book: "Be not proud because thou art learned." And the second is like unto the first: "But discourse with the ignorant man as with the sage." And then at the end of this very first paragraph comes the first figure of speech in human literature that has been presented for us. It is as beautiful in its simplicity and illuminating quality as any of the subsequent time. "Fair speech" (by which is meant evidently kindly speech toward those who know less than we do) "is more rare than the emerald that is found by slave maidens on the pebbles." Then there comes a series of directions as to how the young man should treat his superiors, his equals and his inferiors. If in argument he is worsted by some one who knows more than himself, he is cautioned. "Be not angry." If some one talks nonsense. "Correct him." If an ignorant man insists on arguing, "Be not scornful with him, but let him alone; then shall he confound himself"; for "it is shameful to confuse a mean mind."

The advice may be summed up. Do not argue with your superiors, it does no good; nor with [{22}] your equals, state your case and let it go; but above all, not with your inferiors; let them talk and they will make fools of themselves.

Kindness is always insisted on as the quality most indispensable to a man. "Live therefore," says the father, "in the house of kindliness, and men shall come and give gifts of themselves." There are lessons in politeness as well as in kindliness. For instance: "If thou be among the guests of a great man, pierce him not with many glances. It is abhorred of the soul to stare at him. Speak not till he address thee. Speak when he questioneth thee; so shalt thou be good in his opinion." Again, he wants his son not to eat the bread of idleness: "Fill not thy mouth at thy neighbor's table." He insists much on the lesson that God helps those who help themselves. "Behold," he says, "riches come not of themselves. It is their rule to come to him that actively desires. If he bestir him and collect them himself, God shall make him prosperous; but He shall punish him if he be slothful." On the other hand, the gaining of riches for riches' sake is not worth the while. "When riches are gained, follow the heart; for riches are of no avail if one be weary." As much as to say, after having gained a competency, do not spend further time in amassing wealth, but enjoy in a reasonable way that which has been obtained.

There are certain things, however, that a man should not follow; they are unworthy of his [{23}] nature as a man. "As to the man whose heart obeyeth his belly, he causeth disgust in place of love. His heart is wretched, his body is gross. He is insolent toward those endowed by God. He that obeyeth his belly hath an enemy." While the old man warns his son against gluttony and against sloth, he has much to say with regard to covetousness: "If thou desire that thine actions may be good, save thyself from all malice, and beware of the quality of covetousness, which is a grievous inner malady." This expression is rendered still more striking by what is added to it; for the father insists that it is particularly relatives-in-law who quarrel over money. "Covetousness setteth at variance fathers-in-law and the kinsmen of the daughter-in-law. It sundereth the wife and the husband; it gathereth unto itself all evils. It is the girdle of all wickedness." It needed only the next sentence to make these expressions supremely modern: "Be not covetous as touching shares, in seizing that which is not thine own property."

The God of this earliest book that we have from the hand of man has nearly all the interesting and important qualities that we refer to the Deity. He is looked up to as the giver of all good things. He loves his creation, and above all loves man, and observes men's actions very carefully, and rewards or punishes them according to their deserts. He desires men to be fruitful, and to multiply upon the earth for their own good and [{24}] for his glory. Nothing unworthy of the Deity, as he is known by the most educated people, is attributed to this God, who transcends a personal name. There is an utter disregard of all trivial mythology and of all mysterious riddles, though these trimmings of truth are to be found constantly in other Egyptian works of later date. Indeed, the picture of God is as striking a presentation of the fatherliness and the providence of the Almighty and of most of the lovable characteristics of the Deity as there is to be found anywhere in literature until the coming of the Saviour.

One might think that after having warned his son about most of the Seven Deadly Sins as we know them--pride, covetousness, gluttony, envy, sloth and anger,--at least we should not find lust touched on in the modern way. There is, however, in this matter an extremely chaste bit of advice that sums up the whole situation as well as a father can tell his son. The writer says: "No place prospereth wherein lust is allowed to work its way. A thousand men have been ruined for the pleasure of a little time short as a dream. Even death is reached thereby. It is a wretched thing. As for the lustful liver, every one leaveth him for what he doeth; he is avoided. If his desires be not gratified, he regardeth no laws."

The father tells his son, straightforwardly and emphatically, that indulgence in this vice inevitably leads to loss of friends, of health, of [{25}] everything that the world holds good; and that once a man has started down this path he has no regard for law or order or decency or self-respect. This eighteenth paragraph on a thorny subject is probably one of the most wonderful passages in this advice of a father to his son. Fathers of the modern time ask what shall they say to their boys. Here is something to tell them that does not excite pruriency, that does set the full state of the case before them and represents probably all that can be said with assurance and safety.

In recent years we have heard much of moral and social prophylaxis and the necessity for giving precious information with regard to this subject that may prove helpful to young people. Most people are sure to think that this is the first time in the history of the race that there has been an awakening to the necessity for this. Of course there is no doubt that owing to delayed marriages and unfortunate social conditions in our large cities we have more need of it than past generations, yet here in this old schoolbook from Egypt we have very definite and very wise teaching in the matter. A physician is prone to wonder what did the old man mean by "a thousand men have been ruined for the pleasure of a little time short as a dream. Even death is reached thereby." Is it possible that he knew something of the physical, or let us rather say, the pathological dangers of the vice? In the discussion of the pictures of old-time surgery in [{26}] The Journal of the American Medical Association I suggested that these generations seem to have known more about this phase of pathology than we are inclined to admit.

On the other hand, the father emphatically warns his son that his happiness will depend on loving his wife and caring for her to the best of his ability; though some of the details of that advice are so naively modern in their expression that it seems almost impossible to believe that they should have been spoken nearly six thousand years ago. He says: "If thou would be wise, provide for thine house, and love thy wife. Give her what she wants to eat, get her what she wants to wear [literally, fill her stomach, clothe her back]. Gladden her heart during thy lifetime, for she is an estate profitable unto its lord. Be not harsh, for gentleness mastereth her more than strength."

There is a variant translation of this passage quoted in Maspero's "The Dawn of Civilization," which brings out even more clearly the ideas that seem most modern, and which makes it very sure that it is not the translator who has found in vague old expressions thoughts that, when put into modern words, have modernized old ideas. Maspero reads: "If thou art wise, thou wilt go up into thine house and love thy wife at home; thou wilt give her abundance of food; thou wilt clothe her back with garments; all that covers her limbs, her perfumes, are the joy of her life. As [{27}] long as thou lookest to this, she is as a profitable field to her lord [master]."

The old gentleman's idea evidently was that, looked at merely from a material standpoint, it was worth a man's while to spend as much time caring for his wife as for his estate. She meant just as much for his happiness in the end and might mean probably more for his unhappiness. It is a very practical way of looking at the subject and perhaps the romancists might think it sordid. It must not be forgotten, however, that this is only the secondary motive suggested. At the beginning he commands him to love his wife for her own sake, and then, after suggesting the material benefit that comes from caring for her, he says that "gentleness mastereth her more than strength."

Immediately after this valuable advice with regard to the care of the principal member of his household the old man turns to the question of the care of his servants. We are surely prone to think that the servant problem at least is a new development in this little world of ours. Many literary works serve to foster the impression that in the old days servants were easy to obtain, that they were always respectful, that they could readily be managed and life with them was, if not one sweet song, at least a very smooth course. Men, however, have always been men, and women and even servants have always had minds of their own, and strange as it may seem to us there has always [{28}] been a servant problem and there was one in Egypt 5,500 years ago.

Ptah Hotep said: "Satisfy thine hired servants out of such things as thou hast; it is the duty of one that hath been favored of God. In sooth, it is hard to satisfy hired servants. For one saith, 'he is a lavish person; one knoweth not that which may come from him.' But on the morrow he thinketh, 'he is a person of exactitude (parsimony), content therein.' And when favors have been shown unto servants, they say 'we go.' (Italics mine.) Peace dwelleth not in that town wherein dwell servants that are wretched."

A difficult problem; presents will not solve it but only complicate it, exact justice is necessary, but the peace that follows is worth the trouble it entails. The principle would be valuable in many a squabble of corporate employer and hosts of servants in the modern time.

For domestic happiness, it needed only the advice given a little later in this instruction: "Let thy face be bright what time thou livest. Bread is to be shared. He that is grasping in entertainment himself shall have an empty belly. He that causeth strife cometh himself to sorrow. Take not such a one for thy companion. It is a man's kindly acts that are remembered of him in the years after his life."

There is one phase of life in which Ptah Hotep differs entirely from the present generation,--at least if we are to judge the present generation [{29}] from its results in this matter. Of course there are many of us who consider that, in spite of six thousand years of distance in time, the old Egyptian prime minister is far ahead of our contemporaries in this important subject. He thought that obedience was the most important thing in life. For him independence of spirit, in a young person particularly, was an abomination. In spite of the tendency to loquacity and to repeat itself, often said to be so characteristic of old age, the father, who in all his instructions has never sinned against this literary canon, almost seems to do so when it comes to the question of obedience. Over and over again he insists that obedience is the one quality that must characterize a man if he is to get on in life, and if he is to secure happiness, and have a happy generation of his own group around him. The sentences read more like à Kempis or some mediaeval writer on spirituality, and seem meant for monks under obedience rather than for a young man of the world, the son of a prime minister, just about to enter on his life work in business and politics. Two of the paragraphs are well worth quoting here:

"A splendid thing is the obedience of an obedient son; he cometh in and listeneth obediently. Excellent in hearing, excellent in speaking, is every man that obeyeth what is noble. The obedience of an obeyer is a noble thing. Obedience is better than all things that are; it maketh good will. How good it is that a son should take [{30}] that from his father by which he hath reached old age [obedience]! That which is desired by the God is obedience; disobedience is abhorred of the God. Verily, it is the heart that maketh its master to obey or to disobey; for the safe-and-sound life of a man is his heart. It is the obedient man that obeyeth what is said; he that loveth to obey, the same shall carry out commands. He that obeyeth becometh one obeyed. It is good indeed when a son obeyeth his father; and he (his father) that hath spoken hath great joy of it. Such a son shall be mild as a master, and he that heareth him shall obey him that hath spoken. He shall be comely in body and honored by his father. His memory shall be in the mouths of the living, those upon earth, as long as they exist.
"As for the fool, devoid of obedience, he doeth nothing. Knowledge he regardeth as ignorance, profitable things as hurtful things. He doeth all kind of errors, so that he is rebuked therefor every day. He liveth in death therewith. It is his food. At chattering speech he marvelleth, as at the wisdom of princes, living in death every day. He is shunned because of his misfortunes, by reason of the multitude of afflictions that cometh upon him every day."

Of one thing the old prime minister was especially sure. It was that employment at no single occupation, no matter what it was or how interesting soever it might be, could satisfy a man or even keep him in good health. He felt, [{31}] probably by experience, the necessity for diversity of mind and of occupation, if there was to be any happiness or any real success in life. He has a quiet way of putting it, but he says, as confidently as the most modern of pedagogues, that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, and all play and no work makes it impossible for Jack to get on. But a proper mixture of both makes life livable; and if a man has only the work that he cares for, and can get some of his pleasure in life out of his work, then is all well. "One that reckoneth accounts all the day passeth not an happy moment. One that gladdeneth his heart all the day provideth not for his house. The bowman hitteth the mark, as the steersman reacheth land, by diversity of aim. He that obeyeth his heart shall command."

There are some conclusions in the philosophy of life that we are very much inclined to think are the products of modern practical wisdom, and it is rather surprising to find them stated plainly in this old-time advice of the father to his boy. If there is one idea more than another that we are confident is modern, and are almost sure to attribute to the social development of our own generation, it is that riches do not belong to the man who makes them to be used for his own purpose alone, but their possession is justified only if he uses them for the benefit of the community. This is so up-to-date an idea indeed that it is startling to find it expressed in all its [{32}] completeness in this oldest of books. Ptah Hotep said: "If thou be great after being of no account, and hast gotten riches after poverty, being foremost in these in the city, and hast knowledge concerning useful matters so that promotion is come unto thee, then swathe not thine heart in thine hoard, for thou art become the steward of the endowments [of God]. Thou art not the last; another shall be thine equal, and to him shall come the like [fortune and station]."

After all this it may be necessary to trace the pedigree of the book, since it might seem to be possible that it was a modern invention. The original of it is the so-called "Prisse Papyrus," which is well known by name to all students of archaeology and especially of Egyptology, and the contents of which are familiar to all who are acquainted with Egyptian history and literature. It appears to have been found at Thebes, but the exact place is not known. M. Prisse d'Avennes, the well-known French archaeologist after whom it is named, is said to have bought it from one of the Egyptian native workmen, or fellahin, whom he had hired to make excavations in the tombs of Thebes. Egyptologists generally have accepted the idea that it was actually taken by this workman from the tomb of one of the Kings Entef, who were of the Eleventh Dynasty and reigned about 3000 B.C. This is not certain, however. After publishing a translation in 1847, M. Prisse presented the precious papyrus to the [{33}] Bibliothèque Royale (now Nationale). There it may still be seen. Spread out flat, it measures about twenty-four feet in length and six inches in width. There are about eighteen pages of clear red and black writing in the Hieratic character.

The first part of this manuscript is a portion of another book, the so-called "Instructions of Ke'gemni." [Footnote 4] This is, however, only a short fragment, though probably of even older date than the "Instructions of Ptah Hotep." This work we have in its entirety. Doubtless its preservation was due to the fact that many copies of it had been made, though only two have come down to us.

[Footnote 4: These Egyptian names are spelled differently by different modern scholars, according to their idea of the value of certain sounds of the older language as they should be expressed in the modern tongue to which they are most familiar. Many English scholars spell this as I have done, Ke'gemni. Maspero, however, and most of the French scholars, spell it Qaqimni. Maspero prefers the form Phtah-Hotpû to that of Ptah Hotep, which has been adopted by English scholars.]

There is a second manuscript of the "Instructions of Ptah Hotep,"--or the "Proverbs of Phtahhotpû," as the book is called by Maspero. This was discovered not long ago in the British Museum, by Mr. Griffith; and, while it is not so complete as the French copy, there is such an agreement between the two manuscripts that there is no doubt about the authenticity of the book and of the fact that it represents the oldest book in the world.

Its date would be about 3650 B.C. if we were [{34}] to follow,--as does the translator of the most easily procurable English edition, Mr. Gunn,--the chronology of Flinders Petrie. Recent advances in our knowledge of Egyptology, however, have brought the dates nearer to us than they were placed before. Such men as Breasted of Chicago, and Maspero, would probably take from three hundred to five hundred years from this date. There is a definite tendency in all the histories to bring dates much nearer to the present than before. For a time, the older one could place a date the more scholarly seemed to be the appeal of such an opinion. Now the tendency is all the other way. Even the latest date that can be given for Ptah Hotep, or Phtahhotpû, would still make his little book the oldest book in the world, however.

Fortunately for us the manuscripts of the instructions of Ptah Hotep that have come down to us are in much better condition than those of most of the other instructions of similar kinds formerly used in the schools that have been preserved. In some of these there are a great many errors of writing, spelling and grammar with the corrections of the master above in a different-colored ink. Verily, education has not changed much in spite of six millenniums, or very nearly so, of supposed progress since these were written, for the whole process is as familiar as it can be. As Mr. Battiscombe Gunn says in his Introduction to his edition "a schoolboy's scrawl over 3,000 years [{35}] old is no easy thing to translate." We would seem, however, to have been blessed in the preservation of this oldest book in the world, either of the original copies set by the masters or of such copies as were made by advanced students. The series of lucky chances that have combined to bring to us, in the comparatively perfect form in which it exists, this oldest book in the world is interesting to contemplate. Without them we would have no idea of how closely the first people of whom we have any definite records in history resembled us in every essential quality of humanity, even to the ways and modes by which they tried to lift humanity out of the barbaric selfishness inherent in it to what is higher and nobler in its nature.

With this surprising resurrection of our school-teaching methods from the past it is interesting to study other phases of the education of these early times, and at the same time to note the accomplishments of the men, of the period, their tastes, the state of their culture as regards the arts and crafts and personal adornment and the decoration of their houses and buildings of various kinds. Flinders Petrie, the distinguished English Egyptologist, in an article on "The Romance of Early Civilization," printed recently in The Independent (New York), said:

"We have now before us a view of the powers of man at the earliest point to which we can trace written history, and what strikes us most is how very little his nature or abilities have changed in [{36}] seven thousand years; what he admired we admire; what were his limits in fine handiwork are also ours. We may have a wider outlook, a greater understanding of things, our interests may have extended in this interval; but as far as human nature and tastes go, man is essentially unchanged in this interval."

We have enough of the products of the arts and crafts of these early Egyptian generations to show us that there must have been no inconsiderable training of the men of this time in the making of beautiful art objects. For instance, the interior decoration of their tombs shows us men skilled as designers, clever in the use of colors, with a rather extensive knowledge of pigments and with a definite tendency not to repeat designs but to create new ones. Most of the diapered designs of modern interior decorations were original with the Egyptians, and some of those found in the tombs uncovered in recent years have been adopted and adapted by modern designers. It is in the matter of jewelry particularly that the ability and the training of the old Egyptian workmen are most evident. It would be quite incredible to think that these workmen developed their artistic craftsmanship without training, and therefore there was at least the germ of a technical school or set of schools in oldest Egypt. It would be quite impossible to believe this only that we know so much more about other features of Egyptian education as anticipations of our own. [{37}] A special word about their jewelry then, because it illustrates a definite training quite different from that of our time, will not be out of place.

Their jewelry, it may be said at once, is in striking contrast with what we call jewelry in our time. It is true that we are in the midst of one of the worst periods of jewelry-making, but then we are so prone to think of anything very modern as representing the highest evolution, that the contrast is chastening and illuminating. Mr. Petrie has insisted on the beautiful jewelry, carved precious stones and gold ornaments of the very early period in Egypt. In our time we have no jewelry that deserves the name. I doubt whether we even know the real definition of jewelry, so I venture to repeat it. Jewels are precious stones themselves of value, usually of a high degree of hardness so that they do not deteriorate with time or wear, to which a greatly enhanced value is added by the handiwork of man. Jewels are made by artistic carving and cutting so that besides their precious quality as beautiful colored stones, they have an added charm and interest from human workmanship. We wear no such jewelry in our generation. What we have are merely precious stones. These by an artificial rigging of the market and a combination of the great commercial agencies that control the sale of diamonds and other precious stones, remain very expensive in spite of their comparative abundance. They are worn only because they are a display of the [{38}] amount of money that a person can afford to spend for mere ornaments.

There is nothing in these precious stones themselves that carries an appeal to the educated mind. It is true that they are pretty, but only with the prettiness of the play of rainbow colors that delights a childish or uncultured eye. It requires no taste to like them, no culture to appreciate them, and their cost alone gives them value. This is so true that those who possess a magnificent parure of diamonds often also have an imitation of them in cheaper stones that may be worn on most occasions. The danger of loss or the risk of robbery is so great that it has seemed worth while to have this imitation made in many cases. No one except an expert will recognize the difference, and if you are known to possess the real stones it will of course be supposed that you are wearing them. What gives them value as an adornment in the eye of the possessor, and presumably also of the onlookers, is the fact that they must have cost such a large sum of money. They are a vulgar display of wealth. They are typically barbaric and, worn in the profusion now so common, carry us back to the uncultured peoples who like to wear gaudy things. The taste is perhaps a little better, but the essential quality of mind that dictates the wearing of heavy brass rings and strings of beads and that which impels to the display of many diamonds, is hard to differentiate.

Artistic objects produce a sense of pleasure in [{39}] the beholder, an appreciation of the beautiful handiwork of man. Precious stones worn as is now the custom produce only a sense of envy. Of course envy comes only to baser minds, but it is perfectly clear that most of those who are supposed to be affected by the sight of diamonds worn in profusion have this particular quality rather well developed. This distinction is often forgotten. Personal adornment as well as the adornment of one's house should be in order to give pleasure to others, and not merely a display of wealth for wealth's sake in such a way as is likely to produce envy. The old Egyptians made their jewelry with the true artistic sense. Flinders Petrie has told how beautifully they carved hard gems of various kinds and how the remains of these show us a people of good taste, even though their technique in the manufacture of such objects may have left something to be desired. In connection with this oldest of books it is important to recall this, for it shows that not alone in the applied wisdom of life and the knowledge gained from personal experience were these Egyptians of over 5,000 years ago brothers and sisters beyond whose wise saws we have not advanced, but also in the realm of art their work takes its place beside what is best in the modern time.

Some may be inclined to say that while the Egyptians may, as indeed we must admit they did, know many things about art and literature and practical wisdom, yet they did not have exact [{40}] knowledge. Their knowledge, though large and liberal, had not become scientific. This will scarcely be maintained, however, by any one who realizes how much of applied science there was in the building of the old temples and pyramids and how much they must have developed mechanics, applied and theoretic, in order to accomplish the tasks they thus set themselves. Cantor, the German historian of mathematics, acknowledged this and paid a worthy tribute to the old Egyptians' development of mathematics, pure and applied, in discussing the expression that had been used by Democritus, the early Greek geometer, who once declared that "In the construction of plane figures with demonstrations no one has yet surpassed me, not even the rope fasteners (harpedonaptai) of Egypt." For a long time this word harpedonaptai was a mystery, but Professor Cantor cleared it up, and explaining for us the exact meaning of the compound which means literally either rope fasteners or rope stretchers, he says, "There is no doubt that the Egyptians were very careful about the exact orientations of their temples and other public buildings. Old inscriptions seem to show that only the North and South lines were drawn by actual observation of the stars. The East and West lines were drawn at right angles to the others. Now it appears from the practice of Heron of Alexandria and of the ancient Indian and probably also the Chinese geometers, that a common method of [{41}] securing a right angle between two very long lines was to stretch round three pegs a rope measured in three portions which were to one another in the ratio 3:4:5. The triangle thus formed is right-angled. Further the operation of rope stretching is mentioned in Egypt, without explanation, at an extremely early time (Amenemhat I). If this be the correct explanation of it, then the Egyptians were acquainted 2,000 years B.C., with a particular case of the proposition now known as the Pythagorean theorem."

This may not seem to mean very much. Yet what it illustrates is just this. These men wanted a certain development of mathematics. They needed it for the work that they were engaged at. They set themselves to the solution of certain problems and in doing so evolved a theorem in pure mathematics and an application of it which greatly simplified construction and gave an impetus to mechanics. In so doing they anticipated the work of a long after time. This is what I would insist is always true with regard to man. When he needs some intellectual development he makes it. When he requires an application of it he succeeds in working it out. Later ages may go farther, but had he needed further developments he evidently had the power to make them and probably would have made them.

The old Greeks had a much better opportunity to study Egyptian remains than we have, and especially was this true after the foundation of [{42}] Alexandria. There must have been a lively interest in things Egyptian aroused in the Greek minds by this Greek settlement in old Egypt. It is not surprising, then, to find some magnificent compliments to the old Egyptians in the mouths of some of the writers about the time of the foundation of Alexandria. Eudemus, for instance, the pupil of Aristotle, wrote the history of Geometry in which he traces its invention to the Egyptians, and states that the reason for its invention was its necessity in the remeasurement of land demanded after the removal of landmarks by the annual rise of the Nile. Always does one find this, that when there is a serious demand for an invention in theory or practice men make it. It is not a change or development in man that brings about inventions, but a change in his environment which causes new necessities to arise, and then he proceeds with an ability always the same to respond properly to those necessities.

Eudemus says: "Geometry is said by many to have been invented among the Egyptians, its origin being due to the measurement of plots of land. This was necessary there because of the rising of the Nile, which obliterated the boundaries appertaining to separate owners. Nor is it marvellous that the discovery of this and other sciences should have arisen from such an occasion, since everything which moves in development will advance from the imperfect to the [{43}] perfect. From mere sense-perception to calculation, and from this to reasoning, is a natural transition."

The old Egyptians made some fine developments of arithmetic. These were afterwards lost and were reinvented probably several times. I have already quoted from Cantor the opinion that the Egyptians were familiar with the properties of the right triangle whose sides were in the ratio 3:4:5 over 4,000 years ago. In the Papyrus of Ahmes, whose contents probably come from before 2400 B.C., there are the solutions of many problems which show how far the Egyptians had gone in arithmetical calculations. For instance, there are methods of calculating the solid contents of barns. The solutions are not absolute but are very closely approximate. Ahmes has problems that were solved in connection with the pyramids, which make it very clear that the old Egyptians had more than a little knowledge of the principles of proportion, of certain geometrical figures and probably were familiar also with the simpler phases at least of trigonometry. The area of a circle is found in Ahmes by deducting from the diameter one-ninth and squaring the remainder, which gives a value for the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle much more nearly correct than that used by most writers until comparatively recent times.

As a teacher of the history of medicine with certain administrative functions in a medical [{44}] school, I have been very much interested in the old-time medicine and above all the details of medical education that we find among the Egyptians. Ordinarily it would be assumed that there was so little of anything like medical education that it could be scarcely worth while talking about it. On the contrary, we find so much that is being constantly added to by discoverers, that it is a never-ending source of surprise. There is a well-grounded tradition founded on inscriptions that Athothis, the son of Menes, one of the early kings, wrote a work on anatomy. This king is said to have died about 4150 B.C. There are traces of the existence of hospitals at that time in which diseases were studied and medical attendants trained. Even earlier than this there was a great physician, the first physician of whom we have record in history, whose name was I-Em-Hetep, which means "the Bringer of Peace." He had two other titles, one of which was "the Master of Secrets," partly because he possessed the secrets of health and disease, very probably also because so many things had to be confided to him as a physician. Another of his titles was that of "The Scribe of Numbers," in reference, doubtless, to the fact that he had to use numbers so carefully in making out his prescriptions.

His first title, that of the bringer of peace, shows that very early in the history of medicine it was recognized that the physician's first duty was to bring peace of mind to his patients. A [{45}] distinguished French physician (Director) of the department of physiology of the University of Paris, Professor Richet, said not long since, that physicians can seldom cure, they can often relieve, but they can always console, and evidently this oldest physician took his duty of consolation seriously and successfully. He lived in the reign of King Tehser, a monarch of the Third Dynasty in Egypt, who reigned about 4500 B.C. or a little later. How much this first physician was thought of will be best appreciated from the fact that the well-known step pyramid at Sakkara, the old cemetery near Memphis, is called by his name. So great indeed was the honor paid to him that after his death he was worshipped as a god, and so we have statues of him seated with a scroll on his knees, with an air of benignant knowledge, a placid-looking man with a certain divine expression of sympathy well suited to his name, the bringer of peace. While they raised him to their altars he does not wear a beard as did all their gods and their kings when they were raised to the godly dignity, but evidently they felt that his humanity was of supreme interest to them.

There is another monument at Sakkara that is of special interest to us in its consideration of old-time medicine. I discussed it and its inscriptions in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Nov. 8, 1907). It is the tomb of a surgeon, decorated within with pictures of surgical operations. The grandeur of the tomb and its [{46}] location show us that the surgeon must have held a very prominent place in the community of that time. The date of this tomb is not later than 2500 B.C. Certain of the surgical operations resembled those done at the present time. There is the opening of a carbuncle at the back of the neck which shows how old are men's diseases and the modes of their treatment. After this the oldest monument in the history of medicine is documentary, the Ebers Papyrus, the writing of which is probably not much later than 1700 B.C. This consists, moreover, of a collection of older texts and suggestions in medicine, and some of the idioms are said to belong to several distant periods. It is probable that certain portions of this papyrus were composed not much later than the oldest book in the world, and that they date from nearly 3000 B.C. This papyrus is as interesting and as startling in its anticipation of some of our modern medical wisdom as is the Instruction of Ptah Hotep in the practical wisdom of life. This seems a good deal to say, but there is ample evidence for it.

According to Dr. Carl von Klein, who discussed the "Medical Features of the Ebers Papyrus" in some detail in the Journal of the American Medical Association about five years ago, over 700 different substances are mentioned as of remedial value in this old-time medical work. There is scarcely a disease of any important organ with which we are familiar in the modern [{47}] time that is not mentioned here. While the significance of diseases of such organs as the spleen, the ductless glands, and the appendix was of course missed, nearly every other pathological condition was either expressly named or at least hinted at. The papyrus insists very much on the value of history-taking in medicine, and hints that the reason why physicians fail to cure is often because they have not studied their cases sufficiently. While the treatment was mainly symptomatic, it was not more so than is a great deal of therapeutics at the present time, even in the regular school of medicine. The number and variety of their remedies and of their modes of administering them is so marvellous, that I prefer to quote Dr. von Klein's enumeration of them for you:

"In this papyrus are mentioned over 700 different substances from the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms which act as stimulants, sedatives, motor excitants, motor depressants, narcotics, hypnotics, analgesics, anodynes, antispasmodics, mydriatics, myotics, expectorants, tonics, dentifrices, sialogogues, antisialics, refrigerants, emetics, antiemetics, carminatives, cathartics, purgatives, astringents, cholagogues, anthelmintics, restoratives, haematics, alteratives, antipyretics, antiphlogistics, antiperiodics, diuretics, diluents, diaphoretics, sudorifics, anhydrotics, emmenagogues, oxytocics, ecbolics, galactagogues, irritants, escharotics, caustics, styptics, haemostatics, emollients, demulcents, protectives, antizymotics, [{48}] disinfectants, deodorants, parasiticides, antidotes and antagonists."

Scarcely less interesting than the variety of remedies were their methods of administration:

"Medicines are directed to be administered internally in the form of decoctions, infusions, injections, pills, tablets, troches, capsules, powders, potions and inhalations; and externally, as lotions, ointments, plasters, etc. They are to be eaten, drunk, masticated or swallowed, to be taken often once only--often for many days--and the time is occasionally designated--to be taken mornings, evenings or at bedtime. Formulas to disguise bad tasting medicaments are also given." We have no advantages over the early Egyptians even in elegant prescribing.

The traditions with regard to Egyptian medicine which came to the Greeks seemed so incredible as we found them in the older historians that they used to be joked about. Herodotus came in for a good deal of this scoffing. He was said to be entirely too credulous and prone to exaggerate in order to add interest to his history, but every advance in our knowledge in modern time has confirmed what Herodotus has to say. In the eighteenth century Voltaire said of him, "The Father of history, nay, rather the Father of lies." That was Voltaire's way. Anything that was above him he scoffed at. Homer was a wandering minstrel such as you might find in the streets of Paris, Dante was a mediaeval barbarian, [{49}] our own Shakespeare was a dramatic butcher, producing his effects by bloodshed and cruelty upon the stage. The nineteenth century has reversed Voltaire in every point of this, though some still listen to him in other matters. Above all, Herodotus has been amply justified by modern investigations. Herodotus tells us of the tradition of the number of different kinds of medical specialists in existence among the Egyptians. We are very prone to think that specialism is a development of modern medicine. What we know of Egypt shows us how old it is and makes it very clear that there must have been specialized modes of medical education for these many doctors who treated only very limited portions of the body and no other.

Herodotus tells us, to quote for you the quaint English of one of the old translations:

"Physicke is so studied and practised with the Egyptians that every disease hath his several physician, who striveth to excell in healing that one disease and not to be expert in curing many. Whereof it cometh that every corner of that country is full of physicians. Some for the eyes, others for the head, many for the teeth, not a few for the stomach and the inwards."

The Ebers Papyrus shows us that the specialties were by no means scantily developed. We have traditions of operations upon the nose, of remedies for the eyes there are many and the diagnosis and treatment of eye diseases are rather well [{50}] developed. The filling of teeth seems even to have been practised, [Footnote 5] and while the traditions in this matter are a little dubious, the evidence has been accepted by some good authorities. This specialism in Egyptian medicine probably existed long before Herodotus, for he seems to speak of it as a very old-time institution in his time, and indeed Egypt had degenerated so much that it would be hard to believe that there was any such development there in his time. In the old temples they seem to have used many modes of treatment that we are likely to think of as very modern. Music for instance was used to soothe the worried, amusements of various kinds were employed to influence the disturbed mind favorably. In many ways some of the old temples resembled our modern health resorts. To them many patients flocked and were treated and talked about their ailments and went back each year for "the cure" once more, all the while being more benefited, as is true also in our own time, by the regularity of life, the regulation of diet and the mental influence of the place, than by any of the drugs or even the curative waters.

[Footnote 5: Burdett: "History of Hospitals.">[

In a word, our study of old Egypt and Egyptian education shows us men doing things just about the way that our generation does them and succeeding just about as well as we succeed. They taught writing, spelling and composition as we do and the moral content of their teaching is admirable. They had training schools for the arts [{51}] and crafts, their taste is better than ours in many things, above all, they trained workmen very well, and the remains of their achievements are still the subject of our admiration. They solved mechanical problems in the building of the pyramids quite as well as we do. They made enough experiments that we would call chemical, to find enduring pigments for decorative purposes and they succeeded in making tools that enabled them to carve stonework beautifully. Even their professional education was not very different from our own and its results, particularly in the line of specialism, are startling anticipations of the most modern phase of medicine. They anticipated our interests in psychotherapy and some of them were mental healers, and more of them used the influence of the mind on the body than our physicians have been accustomed to until very recent years. Their physicians and surgeons were held in the highest veneration, and what we know of them shows that the judgment of the old Egyptians in this matter was very good and better than the average appreciation of physicians at the present time.

After all is said no one with any pretence to knowledge of the past would claim for a moment that we were doing better work in anything than men have done at many times in the history of culture. Our idea of progress is just one of these vague bits of self-sufficiency that each generation has had in its own time and that has made it feel [{52}] that somehow what it is accomplishing means much in the world's history. It is rather amusing to compare the estimate that any generation has of itself with the appreciation of it by succeeding generations. Especially is this true for generations separated by 100 years or more. Generations are only made up of men and women, and what man or woman is there who has not thought many times during life that though his or her work might not be estimated very highly by those close to it, this was due but to a sad lack of proper appreciation, since it represented certain qualities that well deserved admiration? We are all gifted with this precious self-conceit, which is not so bad a thing, after all, since it makes us work better than if we had a proper but much less exalted appreciation of our real worth. It is much easier to encourage people to do things than to scold or criticise them into doing them. We shall not quarrel with our generation, then, for being self-conceited,--it is made up of human beings,--but we shall try and not let a due appreciation of our accomplishment be smothered entirely, by this self-conceit.

After all, did not our favorite English poet of the late nineteenth century declare us to be "the heirs of all the ages in the foremost files of time," and how could it be otherwise than that we should be far ahead of the past, not only because the evolution of man made him more capable of handling difficult problems, but also because we [{53}] had the advantage of the accumulated wisdom such as it was of the past, of the observations and the conclusions of our forefathers and, of course, we were far ahead of them. This idea, however, so widely diffused that it might almost be spoken of as universal, has received many jolts in recent times, since we have come to try to develop the taste and the intellect of our people and not merely our material comforts and our satisfaction with ourselves. It has been pointed out, over and over again, in recent years that, of course, there is no such thing as progress in literature, that in art we are far behind many generations of the past, that in architecture there is not a new idea in the world since the sixteenth century, that in all these modes of human expression we are mere imitators and not originators. Our drama is literally and literarily a farce, and no drama that any one expects to live has been written for more than a century. Our buildings are replicas of old-time structures, no matter what their purpose, whether it be ecclesiastical, or educational, or municipal, or beneficiary.

Of course from the scientific standpoint this is, after all, what we might expect. In all the years of history of which we have any record there has been no change in the nature of man and no modification of his being that would lead us to expect from him anything different from what had been accomplished by man in the past. There is no change in man's structure, in the size of his [{54}] body in any way, in his anatomy or his physiology, in his customs, or ways of life, or in his health. The healthy still have about the same expectation of life, to use the life insurance term, and though we have increased the general average duration of life this has been at the expense of other precious qualities of the race. The healthy live longer, but the unhealthy also live longer. The weaklings in mind and body whom nature used to eliminate early are now a burden that must be cared for. In general it may be said, and Virchow, the great German pathologist, who was one of the world's great living anthropologists of his time--and that but a few years ago--used to insist, that man's skeleton and, above all, his skull as we can study them in the mummy of the olden time, were exactly the same as those that the race has now. Man cannot by thinking add a cubit to his stature, nor an inch to the circumference of his skull. The seventh generation of an academic family each member of which has been at the university in his time, is not any more likely to have special faculties for the intellectual life, indeed it is sometimes hinted that he has less of a chance than if his parents had been peasants for as long as the history of the family can be traced. Of course this has no proper bearing on evolution from the biological standpoint, for the length of time that we have in human history may be conceded to be entirely inadequate to produce any noticeable changes on man's body or mind, [{55}] granting that such were in progress. At the most we have 7,000 years of history and the evolutionists would tell us that this is as nothing in the unnumbered aeons of evolution. In the popular estimation, however, evolution can almost be seen at work just as if one could see blades of grass growing by watching them closely enough. This impression of man's progress supposed to be supported by the theory of evolution is entirely unfounded. Just as his body is the same and his brain the same size, and the relative proportion of brain weight to body weight or at least to skull capacity the same now as they were 6,000 years ago; and this is true for both sexes, so that because women have smaller bodies by one-eighth they also have smaller skulls, and this, too, occurs among the mummies in Egypt quite as in our own time; so in what he is able to do with body and mind man is unchanged. Something of dexterity, of facility, of self-confidence and assurance of results is gained from time to time in history, but lost as often, because a few generations fail to be interested in what interested their immediate predecessors immensely.

It is not surprising, then, that history should show us at all times men doing work about like that which they did at any other time--provided they were deeply interested enough. The wisdom of the oldest book in the world, a father's advice to his son, is as practical in most ways as Gorgon Graham's letters to his boy--and ever so much [{56}] more ethical and true to life. The decorations of the old Egyptian tombs, the architecture of their temples, their ways and habits of life so far as we know them, all proclaim them men and women just like ourselves, certainly not separated from us by any gulf or even streamlet of evolution. What are more interesting than any supposed progress in mankind, are the curious ups and downs of interest in particular subjects which follow one another with almost definite regularity in history as we know it. Men become occupied with some phase of the expression of life, literature, architecture, government, sometimes in two or three of these at the same time, and then there comes a wonderful period of development. Just when this epoch reaches an acme of power of expression there come a self-consciousness and a refinement, welcomed at first as new progress, but that seem to hamper originality. Then follows a period of distinct decadence, but with a development of criticism of what was done in the past, with the formulation of certain principles of criticism. Just when by this conscious reflection it might be expected that man would surely advance rapidly, further decay takes place and there is a negative phase of power of expression, out of which man is lifted by a new generation usually neglectful of the immediate past, sometimes indeed deprecating it bitterly, though this new phase may have been awakened by a further past, which gets back to nature and to expression for itself.

[{57}]

The most interesting feature of history is how men have done things, wonderful things that subsequent generations are sure to admire and continue to admire whenever they have sense and training enough, yet forget about them. This is true not only for artistic productions but also for practical applications in science, for inventions, useful discoveries and the like. In surgery, for instance, though we have a continuous history of medicine, all of our instruments have been re-invented at least three or four times. After the reinvention we have been surprised to discover that previous generations had used these instruments long before us. Even the Suez Canal was undoubtedly open at least once before our time. Personally I feel sure that America was discovered at least twice before Columbus' time and that during several centuries there was considerable intercourse between Europe and America. It is extremely important for us then to realize these cycles in human progress and not to deceive ourselves with the idea that because we are doing something that immediately preceding generations knew nothing of, therefore we are doing something that never was done in the world before. This is particularly important for us now, for in my estimation the eighteenth was one of the lowest of centuries in human accomplishment, and therefore we may easily deceive ourselves as to our place in human history in this century.

[{58}]

Reflections of this kind are, it seems to me, particularly important for educators, especially in the midst of our tendency to accept evolution unthinkingly in this generation. Man's skull has not changed, his body has not been modified, his soft tissues are the same as they used to be. His brain is no different. Why, then, should he not have done things in the olden time just about as he does them now? We do not think that acquired characters are inherited. Oliver Wendell Holmes talks of Emerson as the seventh generation of an academic family, but there are none of us who think that this made it any easier for Emerson to acquire an education, or gave him a better development of mind. Those of us who have experience in education know that the descendant of a family of peasants for centuries or of farmers for many generations, easily outstrips some of the scions of academic families in intellect. It is the man that counts and not his descent.

Just this is true of generations as well as of individuals. Whenever men have set themselves to doing things they have accomplished about as good results at any time in history as at any other. We apparently do not benefit by the accumulation of the experience of our predecessors. At least we can find no trace of that in history. For a certain number of enterprising generations there is manifest upward progress. Then something always happens to disturb the succession of ideas, sometimes it is nothing more than [{59}] an over-refinement that leads to bad taste, and decadence takes the place of progress. The accomplishment of any particular generation, then, depends not on its place in any real or fancied scheme of evolution, but on its own ideals and its determined efforts to achieve them.

There are people who insist that this doctrine is pessimistic and discouraging and that, if we do not keep before men the consoling feeling that they are advancing beyond their forebears, there is not the same incentive to work as there would be under other circumstances. On the contrary, as it seems to me, this other idea that everything depends on ourselves and not on our predecessors, constitutes the highest form of incentive. We at the present time are far below many preceding generations in art, literature, architecture, arts and crafts and many developments of taste. Here is no evolution, but the story of how each generation sets itself to work. Why, then, should we think that in education, one of the highest of the arts, the moulding of the human mind into beautiful shapes instead of the moulding of more plastic material, we should be far ahead of the past and, therefore, in a position to find no precious lessons in it? The history of education not alone of the last three centuries of education, but of at least 6,000 years of education, is worth while knowing and it magnificently exemplifies how old is the new in education.

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[{61}]

THE FIRST MODERN UNIVERSITY

[{62}]

"What is it that hath been? The same thing that shall be. What is it that hath been done? The same that shall be done." --Ecclesiastes i:10.
"To one small people . . . it was given to create the principle of Progress. That people was the Greek. Except the blind forces of nature, nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin." --Maine.

[{63}]

THE FIRST MODERN UNIVERSITY [Footnote 6]

[Footnote 6: The material for this address was gathered for lectures on the History of Education at St. Mary's Seminary, Scranton, Pa., and St. Joseph's College, Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia. It was largely added to for the introductory lecture in a course to the teachers of the parochial schools of Philadelphia, March, 1910. Very nearly in its present form it was delivered before the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences as the second lecture in the course on "How Old The New Is," April, 1910.]

We are very prone to think that our universities represent new developments in the history of humanity. We are aware that there were great educational institutions in the world at many times before the present, and that some of them profoundly affected the intellectual life of their time; we are likely to think, however, that these institutions were very different from our modern universities. They were not so well organized, they lacked endowments, their departments were not co-ordinated, they did not have the libraries and, of course, not the laboratory facilities that our modern universities have, and then, above all, they did not devote themselves to that one department of knowledge, physical science, in which absolute truth can be reached, and in which each advance in knowledge as made can be chronicled and set down as a sure basis for future work and workers in the same line for all time. [{64}] The older institutions of learning were given up to speculation, to idealism, to metaphysics, and, of course, therefore, their work, as many educated people are now prone to look at it, was too shadowy to last, too cloudy to serve as a foundation for any enduring scientific knowledge. I do not think that I exaggerate when I make this as the statement of the thought of a good many people of our time who are at least supposed to be educated and who consider that they are reasonably familiar with the educational institutions of the past.

It has seemed to me, then, that it would be interesting and opportune to trace the origin, the development and the accomplishments of the first institution of learning that is very similar to our own; and to retrace some of the achievements of its professors, the circumstances in which they were done and the conditions surrounding an ancient school which I think our study will make clear as well deserving of the title of the first modern university. This was not the collection of schools at Athens, though there is no doubt at all that great intellectual and educational work was accomplished there, but not in our modern university sense. The schools were independent, and while the rivalry engendered by this undoubtedly did good so long as genius ruled in the schools, it brought about a degeneration into sophistry, from here comes the word, and argumentativeness, once the great master had been [{65}] displaced by disciples who were sure that they knew their master's mind, and probably thought, as disciples always do, that they were going beyond their master, but who really occupied themselves with curious and trifling tergiversations of mind within the narrow circle of ideas laid down by the master,--as has nearly always been the case.

The first modern university was that of Alexandria. It was quite as much under Greek influence as the schools of Athens. There have been commentators on the story of Cleopatra, who have suggested that her African cast of countenance did not prove a deterrent to her success as a conqueror of hearts, and who argue from this to the fact that it is not physical charm but personality that counts in woman's power over men, quite forgetting, if they ever knew, that Cleopatra was a Greek of the Greeks, a daughter of the line of the Ptolemys, probably a direct descendant though with the bar sinister of Philip of Macedon, born of a house so watchful over its Greek blood and so resentful of any possible admixture of anything less noble with itself, that for generations it had been the custom for brother to marry sister, in order that the race of the Ptolemys might be perpetuated in absolute purity. Alexandria, while a cosmopolitan city in the inhabitants who dwelt in it and in the wide diffusion of commercial interests that centred there as a mart for East and West, was absolutely ruled by Greeks and represents for many centuries after [{66}] the decline of Athens had come, the brightest focus of Greek intellectual life, Greek culture and art, Greek letters and education and every phase of that Greek influence in aesthetics which has always meant so much in the world's history.

The interesting fact about Alexandria in the history of education, is that it was the home of a modern university in every sense of that term, having particularly the features that many people are prone to think of as representing modern evolution in education. The buildings of the university were erected practically by a legacy left by the great Conqueror himself, Alexander. The central point of interest in the university was a great library, the nucleus of which was the library of Aristotle, tutor of Alexander, which had been collected with the help of that great Conqueror and was the finest collection of books in the world of that time. The main subject of interest in the university was physical science and its sister subject mathematics, which raises mere nature-study into the realm of science, and this scientific physical education was conducted in connection with the great museum or collection of objects of interest to scientists that had also been made partly by Aristotle himself and partly for his loved tutor by the gratitude of Alexander during his conquering expeditions in the far East. Finally professors were attracted to Alexandria by the offer of a better salary than had ever been paid at educational institutions before this, and [{67}] by the additional offer of a palace to live in, supplied by the ruler of the country. It is no wonder, then, that in attendance also, as well as in the prestige of its professors, Alexandria resembled a modern university.

It was its devotion to science, however, that especially characterized this first great institution of learning of which we have definite records. This devotion to science went so far that even literature was studied from the scientific standpoint. Such details as we have of the instruction at Alexandria and the books that have come down to us, all show men interested in philology, in comparative literature, in grammar and comparative grammar, rather than in the idealistic modes of knowledge. We have commentaries on the great authors, but no great original works of genius in literature from the professors of Alexandria. The translation of the Septuagint version of the Old Testament is a typical example of the sort of work that was being done at Alexandria. They collected the documents of the nations and translated them for purposes of comparative study. It was an education for information rather than for power. The main idea of the time and place was to know as much as possible about literature, rather than to know what it represented in terms of life, and the real meaning of both literature and life was obscured in the study about and about them. People studied books about books rather than the books [{68}] themselves. There was much writing of books about books, and it was nearly always comparatively trivial things in the great authors that attracted most attention from the many scholiasts, critics, editors, commentators, lecturers of the time.

Personally I could well understand such an incident happening at Alexandria as is said to have happened at a well-known English (of course not American!) university not long ago. The class was construing Shakespeare and one of the students asked the professor what the meaning of a particular figure used by the great dramatist was. The professor replied that they were there to construe Shakespeare's language and not bother about his meaning--yet it was a class in literature. Literature in recent years as studied at the universities has come to be quite as scientific in its modes and methods as it was at the University of Alexandria. May I also add that it has become quite as sterile of results of any importance. There is very little real study of literature, practically no encouragement of the attempt to draw inspiration from the great authors, but all devotion to the grammar, to the philology, to comparative literature as exemplified in the old writers.

Books were the great essentials at Alexandria. This is not surprising seeing that the university was founded around a great library, and that this library continued to be the greatest in the world in its time. Every student who came to Alexandria bringing a book with him of which there was [{69}] no copy in the library, was required by a decree of the authorities to leave a copy behind him. In all the university towns of the times--and there were many founded in the rising eastern cities of Alexander's empire, as it gradually crumbled into smaller pieces providing new capitals with less power but with quite as much national feeling as the capital cities of larger states, libraries became the fashion and a city's main claim to prestige in education and the intellectual life was the number of its books. Antioch, Tarsus, Cos, Cnidos and Pergamos are examples of this state of affairs. Pergamos was so jealous of the prestige of the Alexandrian Library that it forbade the exportation of parchment, an invention of Pergamos which received its name from that city. Petty jealousies were quite as much the rule among educational institutions then as they have been at any time since.

To many people it will seem quite absurd to talk of Alexandria as having done serious scientific work because the methods of science and scientific investigation are supposed to have been, as they think, discovered by Lord Bacon in the seventeenth century. It is curious how many educated people, or at least supposedly educated people, have this as their basic notion of the history of science. Men wandered in the mazes of inductive reasoning utterly unable to bring observations together in such a way as to discover laws, utterly incompetent to note phenomena and [{70}] bring them into relations to one another so as to show their scientific bearing, until Queen Elizabeth's Lord Chancellor came to show the way out of the labyrinth and leave the precious cord through its corridors, by which others may easily thread their way into the free air of scientific truth. I know nothing that is more absurd than this. It is a commonplace among educators, however; it is frequently referred to in educational addresses as if it were a universally accepted proposition, and to dispute it would seem the rankest kind of scientific heresy to these narrow minds. Fortunately there are two writers, Macaulay and Huxley, to whom even these people are likely to listen, who have expressed themselves with regard to this precious historic superstition that Lord Bacon invented the inductive method of reasoning with what my long-worded friend would call appropriate opprobrium.

Macaulay says: "The inductive method has been practised ever since the beginning of the world by every human being. It is constantly practised by the most ignorant clown, by the most thoughtless schoolboy, by the very child at the breast. That method leads the clown to the conclusion that if he sows barley he shall not reap wheat. By that method the schoolboy learns that a cloudy day is the best for catching trout. The very infant, we imagine, is led by induction to expect milk from his mother or nurse, and none from his father. Not only is it not true that [{71}] Bacon invented the inductive method; but it is not true that he was the first person who correctly analyzed that method and explained its uses. Aristotle had long before pointed out the absurdity of supposing that syllogistic reasoning could ever conduct men to the discovery of any new principle, had shown that such discoveries must be made by induction, and by induction alone, and had given the history of the inductive process, concisely indeed, but with great perspicuity and precision."

And Huxley quite as emphatically points out: "The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind. It is simply the mode by which all phenomena are reasoned about--rendered precise and exact."

While the whole trend of education, even that of literature, was scientific at Alexandria, the principal feature of the teaching was, as we have said, concerned with the physical sciences and mathematics. It is in mathematics that the greatest triumphs were secured. Euclid's "Geometry," as we use it at the present time in our colleges and universities, was put into form by Euclid teaching at the University of Alexandria in the early days of the institution. Euclid's setting forth of geometry was so perfect that it has remained for over 2,000 years the model on which all text-books of geometry of all the later times have been written. There seems no doubt that [{72}] writers on the history of mathematics are quite justified in proclaiming Euclid's "Geometry" as one of the greatest intellectual works that ever came from the hand of man. The first Ptolemy was fortunate in having secured this man as the founder of the mathematical department of his university. His example, the wonderful incentive of his work, the absolute perfection of his conclusions, must have proved marvellous emulative factors for the students who flocked to Alexandria.

Commonly mathematicians are said to be impractical geniuses so occupied with mathematical ideas that their influence in other ways counts for little in university life. If we are to believe the stories that come to us with regard to Euclid, however, and there is every reason to believe them, for some of them come from men who are almost contemporaries, or from men who had their information from contemporaries, Euclid's influence in the university must have been for all that is best in education. Proclus tells the story of King Ptolemy once having asked Euclid, if there was any shorter way to obtain a knowledge of geometry than through the rather difficult avenue of Euclid's own text-book, and the great mathematician replied that there was "no royal road to geometry." Stobaeus relates the story of a student who, having learned the first theorem, asked "but what shall I make by learning these things?" The question is so modern that Euclid's [{73}] answer deserves to be in the memory of all those who are interested in education. Euclid called his slave and said, "Give him twopence, since he must make something out of everything that he does, even the improvement of his mind."

Probably even more significant than the tradition that Euclid did his work at this first modern university, and that besides being a mathematician he was a man of very practical ideas in education, is the fact that he was appreciated by the men of his time and that his work was looked up to with highest reverence by his contemporaries and immediate successors as representing great achievement. It is not ever thus. Far from resenting in any way the magnificent synthesis that he had made of many rather vague notions in mathematics before his time, his contemporaries united in doing him honor. They realized that his teaching created a proper scientific habit of mind. Pappus says of Apollonius that he spent a long time as a pupil of Euclid at Alexandria and it was thus that he acquired a thorough scientific habit of mind. After Euclid's time the value of his discoveries as a means of training the mind was thoroughly appreciated. The Greek philosophers are said to have posted on the doors of their schools "Let no one enter here who does not know his Euclid." In the midst of the crumbling of old-fashioned methods of education in the introduction of the elective system, in the modern time, many of our best educators have insisted [{74}] that at least this portion of mathematics, Euclid's contribution to the science, should be a required study, and most educators feel, even when there is question of law or medical study, that one of the best preparations is to be found in a thorough knowledge of Euclid.

Almost as wonderful as the work of Euclid was that of the second great mathematician of the Alexandrian school, Archimedes, who not only developed pure mathematics but applied mathematical principles to mechanics and proved besides to have wonderful mechanical ability and inventive genius. It was Archimedes of whom Cicero spoke so feelingly in his "Tusculan Disputations," when about a century and a quarter after Archimedes' death, he succeeded in finding, his tomb in the old cemetery at Syracuse during his quaestorship there. How curious it is to think that after so short a time as 127 years from the date of his death Archimedes was absolutely forgotten by his fellow-Syracusans, who resolutely denied that any trace of Archimedes' tomb existed. This stranger from Rome knew much more of Archimedes than his fellow-citizens a scant four generations after his time. Not how men advance, but how they forget even great advance that has been made, lose sight of it entirely at times and only too often have to rediscover it, is the most interesting phase of history. Cicero says, "Thus one of the noblest cities of Greece and one which at one time had been very [{75}] celebrated for learning, knew nothing of the monument of its greatest genius until it was rediscovered for them by a native of Arpinum"--Cicero's modest designation for himself.

We have known much more about Archimedes' inventions than about his mathematical works. The Archimedian screw, a spiral tube for pumping water, invented by him, is still used in Egypt. The old story with regard to his having succeeded in making burning mirrors by which he was enabled to set the Roman vessels on fire during the siege of Syracuse, used to be doubted very seriously and, indeed, by many considered a quite incredible feat, clearly an historical exaggeration, until Cuvier and others in the early part of the nineteenth century succeeded in making a mirror by which in an experiment in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris wood was set on fire at a distance of 140 feet. As the Roman vessels were very small, propelled only by oars or at least with very small sail capacity, and as their means of offence was most crude and they had to approach surely within 100 feet of the wall to be effective, the old story therefore is probably entirely true. The other phase of history according to which Archimedes succeeded in constructing instruments by which the Roman vessels were lifted bodily out of the water, is probably also true, and certainly comes with great credibility of the man of whom it is told that, after having studied the lever, he declared that if he only had [{76}] some place to rest his lever, he could move the world.

The well-known story of his discovery in hydrostatics, by which he was enabled to tell the King whether the royal goldsmiths had made his crown of solid gold or not, is very well authenticated. Archimedes realized the application of the principle of specific gravity in the solution of such problems while he was taking a bath. Quite forgetful of his state of nudity he ran through the streets, crying "Eureka! Eureka! I have found it! I have found it!" There are many other significant developments of hydrostatics and mechanics, besides specific gravity and the lever, the germs of which are at least attributed to Archimedes. He seems to have been one of the world's great eminent practical geniuses. That he should have been a product of Alexandria and should even have been a professor there would be a great surprise if we did not know Alexandria as a great scientific university. As it is, it is quite easy to understand how naturally he finds his place in the history of that university and how proud any modern university would be to have on the rolls of its students and professors a man who not only developed pure science but who made a series of practical applications that are of great value to mankind. Such men our modern universities appropriately claim the right to vaunt proudly as the products of their training.

When we analyze something of the work in [{77}] pure mathematics that was accomplished by Archimedes our estimation of him is greatly enhanced. His work "On the Quadrature," that is the finding of the area of a segment of the parabola, is probably his most significant contribution to mathematical knowledge. His proof of the principal theorem in this is obtained by the "method of exhaustion," which had been invented by Eudoxus but was greatly developed by Archimedes. This method contains in itself the germ of that most powerful instrument of mathematical analysis in the modern time, the calculus.

Another very important work was "The Sphere and the Cylinder." This was more appreciated in his own time, and as a consequence, after his death the figure of a sphere inscribed in a cylinder was cut on his tomb in commemoration of his favorite theorem, that the volume of the sphere is two-thirds that of the cylinder and its surface is four times that of the base of the cylinder. It was by searching for this symbol, famous in antiquity, that Cicero was enabled to find his tomb according to the story that I have already related.

Within the last few years the reputation of Archimedes in pure mathematics has been greatly enhanced by the discovery by Professor Heiberg of a lost work of the great Alexandrian professor in Constantinople. Archimedes himself stated in a dedication of the work to Eratosthenes the method employed in this. He says: "I have thought it well to analyze and lay down for you [{78}] in this same book a peculiar method by means of which it will be possible for you to derive instruction as to how certain mathematical questions may be investigated by means of mechanics. And I am convinced that this is equally profitable in demonstrating a proposition itself, for much that was made evident to me through the medium of mechanics was later proved by means of geometry, because the treatment by the former method had not yet been established by way of a demonstration. For of course it is easier to establish a proof, if one has in this way previously obtained a conception of the questions, than for him to seek it without such a preliminary notion. . . . Indeed, I assume that some one among the investigators of to-day or in the future, will discover by the method here set forth still other propositions which have not yet occurred to me." On this Professor Smith comments: "Perhaps in all the history of mathematics no such prophetic truth was ever put into words. It would almost seem as if Archimedes must have seen as in a vision the methods of Galileo, Cavalieri, Pascal, Newton, and many other great makers of the mathematics of the Renaissance and the present time."

Many other distinguished professors of mathematics have, since this declaration of Archimedes came under their notice, declared that he must have had almost a prophetic vision of certain developments of mathematics and especially applied [{79}] mathematics and mechanics and their relation to one another, that were only to come in much later and indeed comparatively modern times. Undoubtedly Archimedes' works proved the germ of magnificent development not only immediately after his own time but in the long-after time of the Renaissance, when their translation awakened minds to mathematical problems and their solutions that would not otherwise have come.

We know much less of the life of the third of the great trio of teachers and students of Alexandria, Apollonius of Perga. Perhaps it should be enough for us to know that his contemporaries spoke of him as "the great geometer," though they were familiar with Euclid's book and with Archimedes' mighty work. Apollonius was surely a student of Alexandria for many years and he was probably also a professor of mathematics there. He developed especially what we know now as conic sections. His book on the subject contains practically all of the theorems to be found in our text-books of analytical geometry or conic sections of the present time. It was developed with rigorous mathematical logic and Euclidean conclusiveness. These three men show us beyond all doubt how finely the mathematical side of the university developed.

After Archimedes the greatest mechanical genius of the University of Alexandria was Heron. To him we owe a series of inventions and discoveries in hydrostatics and the [{80}] construction of various mechanical toys that have been used in the laboratories since. There is even a little engine run by steam--the aeolipile--invented by him, which shows how close the old Greeks were to the underlying principles of discoveries that were destined to come only after the development of industries created a demand for them in the after time. Heron's engine is a globe of copper mounted on pivots, containing water, which on being heated produces steam that finds its way out through tubes bent so as to open in opposite directions on each side of the globe. The impact of the escaping steam on the air sets the globe revolving, and the principle of the turbine engine at work is clear. We have used steam for nearly 200 years always with a reciprocating type of movement, so that to apply energy in one direction the engine has had to move its parts backwards and forwards, but here was a direct-motion turbine engine in the long ago. Our great steamboats, the Lusitania and the Mauretania, now cross the ocean by the use of this principle and not by the reciprocating engine, and it is evident that it is along these lines the future developments of the application of steam are to take place.

Another extremely interesting invention made by Heron is the famous fountain called by his name, and which still is used to illustrate principles in pneumatics in our classrooms and laboratories. By means of condensed air water is made [{81}] to spring from a jet in a continuous stream and seems paradoxically to rise higher than its source. Probably his best work in the domain of physics is that on pneumatics in which are given not only a series of discussions, but of experiments and demonstrations on the elasticity of air and of steam. These experiments could only have been conducted in what we now call a physical laboratory. Indeed these inventions of his are still used in laboratories for demonstration purposes. While we may think, then, that the foundation of laboratories was reserved to our day, there is abundant evidence for their existence at the University of Alexandria. We shall return to this subject a little later, when the evidence from other departments has been presented, and then it will be clear, I think, that the laboratory methods were favorite modes of teaching at the University of Alexandria and were in use in nearly all departments of science both for research and for demonstration purposes.

The work of the other great teacher at Alexandria which was to influence mankind next to that of Euclid, was not destined to withstand the critical study of succeeding generations, though it served for some 1,500 years as the basis of their thinking in astronomy. This was the work of Ptolemy, the great professor of astronomy at Alexandria of the first century after Christ. It is easy for us now to see the absurdity of Ptolemy's system. It is even hard for us to [{82}] understand how men could have accepted it. It must not be forgotten, however, that it solved all the astronomical problems of fifteen centuries and that it even enabled men, by its application, to foretell events in the heavens, and scientific prophecy is sometimes claimed to be the highest test of the truth of a system of scientific thought. Even so late as 1620 Francis Bacon refused to accept Copernicanism, already before the world for more than a century, because it did not, as it seemed to him, solve all the difficulties, while Ptolemy's system did. As great an astronomer as Tycho Brahe living in the century after Copernicus still clung to Ptolemy's teaching. It must not be forgotten that when Galileo restated Copernicanism, the reason for the rejection of his teaching by all the astronomers of Europe almost without exception, was that his reasons were not conclusive. They preferred to hold on to the old which had been so satisfying than to accept the new which seemed dubious. Their wisdom in this will be best appreciated from the fact that none of Galileo's reasons maintained themselves.

Though his system has been rejected, still Ptolemy must be looked up to as one of the great teachers of mankind and his work the "Almagest" as one of the great contributions to human knowledge. The fact that he represented a climax of astronomical development at Alexandria some four centuries after the foundation of [{83}] that university, serves to show how much that first modern university occupied itself for all the centuries of its highest prestige, with physical science as well as with mathematics. Astronomy, physics, especially hydrostatics and mechanics, were all wonderfully developed. Generations of professors had given themselves to research and to the publication of important works quite as in the modern time, and Alexandria may well claim the right to be placed beside any university for what it accomplished in physical science, and rank high if not highest in the list of great research institutions adding new knowledge to old, leading men across the borderland of the unknown in science and furnishing that precious incentive to growing youth to occupy itself with the scientific problems of the world around it.

The most important part of the scientific work of the University of Alexandria to my mind remains to be spoken of, and that is the medical department. It is a well-known law in the history of medicine that, whenever medical schools are attached to universities in such a way that students who come to the medical department have been thoroughly trained by preliminary studies and have such standards of scholarship as obtain in genuine university work, then great progress in medicine and in medical education is accomplished. This was eminently the case at Alexandria. The departments of the arts, of linguistics and of philosophy were gathered [{84}] around the great building known in Greek as the Mouseion, a word that has come to us through the Latin under the guise of Museum. This temple of the Muses contained collections of various kinds and near it was situated the great library. Not far away was the Serapeum, or Temple of Serapis, the Goddess of Life, around which were centred the biological sciences, and close by was the medical school. As teachers for this medical school some of the greatest physicians of the time were secured by the first Ptolemy and a great period in medical history began.

The practical wisdom guiding the Ptolemys in the organization of this medical school will be best appreciated from the fact that they took the first step by inviting two distinguished physicians, the products of the two greatest medical schools of the time, to lay the foundations at Alexandria. They were probably the best investigators of their time and they had behind them fine traditions of research, thorough observation and conservative reasoning and theorizing on scientific subjects. Erasistratos was a disciple of Metrodoros, the son-in-law of Aristotle. He had studied for a time under another great teacher, Chrysippos of Cnidos. We are likely to know much more of Cos than of Cnidos because of the reputation in the after time of Hippocrates, whose name is so closely connected with Cos that the two are almost invariably associated, but Cnidos was one of the great university towns of the later Greek [{85}] civilization. Eudoxus the astronomer, Ctesias the writer on Persian history, and Sostratos the builder of the great lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the world, the Pharos at Alexandria, were products of this university. Its medical school was famous when Cos had somewhat declined, and Chrysippos was one of the leading physicians of the world and one of the acknowledged great teachers of medicine when Erasistratos studied under him at Cnidos, and obtained that scientific training and incentive to original research which was to prove so valuable to Alexandria.

His colleague, Herophilos, was quite as distinguished as Erasistratos and owed his training to the rival school of Cos. Whether it was intentional or not to secure these two products of rival schools for the healthy spirit of competition that would come from it, and because they wanted to have at Alexandria the emulation that would naturally be aroused by such a condition, is not known, but there can be no doubt of the wisdom of the choice and of the foresight which dictated it. Herophilos had studied medicine under Praxagoras, one of the best-known successors of Hippocrates. While distinguished as a surgeon he had more influence on medicine than almost any man of his time, except possibly Erasistratos. He was, however, a great anatomist and, above all, a zoologist who, according to tradition, had obtained his knowledge of animals from the most [{86}] careful zootomy of literally thousands of specimens. His fair fame is blackened by the other tradition that he practised vivisection on human beings--criminals being turned over to him for that purpose by the Ptolemys, who were deeply interested in his researches. The traditions in this matter, however, serve to confirm the idea of his zeal as an investigator and his ardent labors in medical science. Tertullian declares that he dissected at least 600 living persons. We know that he did much dissection of human cadavers and there is question whether Tertullian's statement was not gross exaggeration due to confusion between dissection and vivisection.

Both of these men did some magnificent work upon the brain. This being the first period in the history of humanity when human beings could be dissected freely, it is not surprising that they should take up brain anatomy with ardent devotion, in the hope to solve some of the many human problems that seemed to centre in this complex organ. Before this anatomy had been learned mainly from animals, and as human beings differ most widely from animals by their brain, naturally, as soon as the opportunity presented itself, anatomists gave themselves to thorough work on this structure where so many discoveries were waiting to be made. After the brain and nervous system the heart was studied, and Erasistratos' description of its valves, of its general structure and even of its physiology, show how much he [{87}] knew. To know something of the work of these two anatomists is to see at once what is accomplished in a university medical school where medical science, and not the mere practice of medicine alone, is the object of teachers and students. I have told the story of this in my address before the graduates of the St. Louis Medical University Medical School, and here I shall simply refer you to that. [Footnote 7]

[Footnote 7: The details of what was accomplished in the Medical Department at Alexandria were given to some extent at least in the lecture in Brooklyn, but are omitted here in order to avoid repetitions in the printed copy.]

Of course all these studies at the university could not be conducted without laboratory equipment. Of itself the dissecting room is a laboratory and until very recent years it was the only laboratory that most of the medical schools had. The numerous experiments in vivisection, if they really took place, required special arrangements and could only be conducted in what we now call a laboratory of physiology. This is not idle talk but represents the realities of the situation. Other laboratories there must have been. It would be quite impossible to conceive of a man like Archimedes carrying on his work, especially of the application of mathematical principles to mechanics, of the demonstration of mechanical principles themselves and of the invention of the many interesting machines which he made, without what we call laboratory facilities. The Ptolemys were [{88}] interested in his work, they supplied him with a place to do it, many of his advanced students at least must have been interested in this work so that, as I see it, there was what we would now call a physical laboratory in connection with his teaching at the University of Alexandria.

What we know about the development of zoology under Erasistratos and Herophilos would seem to indicate that there must have been such special facilities for the investigation of zoological problems as we would call a laboratory of physiology. A magnificent collection of plants was made for the university and these were studied and classified, and while we hear nothing of their dissection, there were at least botanical rooms for methodical study, if not botanical laboratories. Ptolemy's work represented the culmination of astronomical information which had been gathered for several centuries. This could only be brought together in what we would now call an observatory and this represents another laboratory of physical science. Our laboratory work, therefore, must have been anticipated to a great extent. We must not forget that our university laboratories are only a couple of generations old altogether and that they represent a very recent development of educational work. It is extremely interesting, therefore, to find them anticipated in germ at least, if not in actuality, at the first modern university of which we have sufficiently complete records to enable us to [{89}] appreciate just the sort of work that was being done and the ways and modes of its education.

I think that even this comparatively meagre description of the first university of which we have knowledge makes it very clear that Alexandria deserves the name of the First Modern University. It resembled our own in so many ways that I, for one, find it impossible to discover any essential difference between them. At Alexandria they anticipated every phase of modern university education. Their literature was studied from a scientific standpoint. They devoted themselves to an overwhelming extent to the study of the physical sciences and mathematics, their professors were inventors, developers of practical applications of science, experts to whom appeal was made when important scientific questions had to be settled, and their teaching was done with demonstrations and a laboratory system very like our own. Nothing that I know illustrates better the tendency of human achievement not to represent advance but to occur in cycles than the story of this first modern university. That is why I have tried to tell it to you as an exquisite illustration of How Old the New Is in Education.

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[{91}]

MEDIAEVAL SCIENTIFIC UNIVERSITIES

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"Qui ad pauca respiciunt faciliter pronuntiant." --AN OLD PHILOSOPHER.
[Those who know little readily pronounce judgment.]

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MEDIAEVAL SCIENTIFIC UNIVERSITIES [Footnote 8]

[Footnote 8: The material for this address was originally gathered for a lecture in a course on the History of Education delivered to the Sisters of Charity of Mount St. Vincent's, some 500 in number; teachers in the Catholic public schools of New York City, and for corresponding lectures to the Academy of the Sacred Heart, Kenwood. The address was delivered substantially in its present form at the Catholic Club of Cornell University, under the title "The Relations of the Church to Science.">[

Probably nothing is more surprising to any one who knows the history of science and of scientific education than the attitude of mind of the present generations, educated as they are mainly along scientific lines, toward the supposed lack of interest of preceding generations in science. Our scholars and professors seem to be almost universally of the opinion that the last few generations are the first who ever devoted themselves seriously to the study of science, or who, indeed, were free enough from superstitions and persuasions and beliefs of many kinds to give themselves up freely to scientific investigation. In the light of what we know or, perhaps I should say, what we are coming to know now with regard to the educational interests of the men of the various times, this would be an amusing, if it were not an amazing, presumption on our part. Over and over again in the world's history men have been [{94}] interested in science, both in pure science and in applied science, in the culture sciences and in the practical sciences.

Apparently men forget that philosophy is science and ethics is science and metaphysics is scientific and logic is science and there is a science of language. Of course the protest that will be heard at once is that what we now mean by science is physical science. Even taking the word science in this narrower sense, however, how can people forget that our mathematics comes to us from the old Greeks, that old Greek contributions to medicine and, above all, to the scientific side of it still remain valuable, that physical science, pure and applied, developed wonderfully at the University of Alexandria, that there was a beginning of chemistry and the great foundations of astronomy laid in the long ago, and that men evidently were quite as much interested in the problems of nature around them as they have been at any time: Archimedes insisting that if he only had some place to rest his lever he could move the world, inventing the screw pump, fashioning his great burning-mirrors, and a little later Heron inventing the first germ of the turbine engine, while all the time their colleagues and contemporaries were developing the mathematics in connection with them, are studying both pure and applied science. It is simply failure to state in terms of the present what was accomplished in the past, that has permitted people to retain [{95}] curious notions of the absence of science in antiquity.

Probably most people would be quite ready to concede, and especially after even a brief calling to their attention of some educational facts, that the old Greeks did enjoy a scientific educational development; it would probably even be admitted that the traditions of science of various kinds from Egypt, from Chaldea, from Babylonia point to previous eras of scientific development. They would probably still insist, however, that there had been a long interval of utter neglect of science lasting nearly 2,000 years and that our interest is properly a resurrection of science-study after a long burial. They do not even hesitate to blame the educational authorities of the interval for their failure to occupy themselves with scientific ideas and are prone to find reasons of various kinds to account for this failure. As the Church was dominant in education during the Middle Ages this makes a ready scapegoat, and so we have heard much of the repression of scientific study by the ecclesiastical authorities, and the determined effort made to keep men from inquiring about the problems of nature around them, because this would lead them to think for themselves and have doubts with regard to faith. Indeed this attitude of mind in the history of science is so usual that it is a commonplace, and men who are supposed to be scholars talk off-handedly of direct Church opposition to science.

[{96}]

There is no doubt at all that the Church was the commanding influence in education during the Middle Ages. Whatever was studied was taken up because the Church authorities were interested in it. Whatever was not studied was absent from the curriculum because of their lack of interest. While study was magnificently encouraged there were many subjects, though not near so many as is often thought, that were repressed. The Church must certainly be held responsible in every way for the teaching of the Middle Ages, both as regards its extent and its limitations. The charters of the universities were granted by the Popes. The universities themselves usually were cathedral schools which had developed, and to which had become attached various graduate departments. The ecclesiastical authorities were in control of them. The rector of the university was usually the archdeacon of the cathedral or the chancellor of the diocese. The professors at the universities were practically all of them in clerical orders, and the great body of the students were clerics, in the sense that they had assumed at least minor orders and were supposed to be in preparation for a clerical life. This was, indeed, the one sure way to secure exemption from the military duties of the time and to prevent interference of various kinds by the civil power with the leisure necessary for study. No man had any essential rights in the Middle Ages except such as were conferred on him by some organization [{97}] to which he belonged, and the clerical order was particularly powerful.

Now the interesting phase of the education afforded by these universities under ecclesiastical control with clerical students and professors constituting the large majority of members, with the influence of the religious orders paramount for centuries, is that it was entirely scientific in character and largely occupied with the physical sciences, though the culture sciences formed the basis of it. Huxley, though he is surely the last man of recent times who would be suspected for a moment of exaggerating the scientific significance of mediaeval education, recognized this fact very well and stated it very emphatically. In his Inaugural Address on Universities Actual and Ideal, delivered as Rector of Aberdeen University after discussing the subject with evident careful preparation, he said:

"The scholars of the mediaeval universities seem to have studied grammar, logic and rhetoric; arithmetic and geometry; astronomy, theology and music. Thus, their work, however imperfect and faulty, judged by modern lights, it may have been, brought them face to face with all the leading aspects of the many-sided mind of man. For these studies did really contain, at any rate in embryo, sometimes it may be in caricature, what we now call philosophy, mathematical and physical science and art. [{98}] And I doubt if the curriculum of any modern university shows so clear and generous a comprehension of what is meant by culture, as this old Trivium and Quadrivium does." (Italics mine.)

Of course Huxley says, "sometimes it may be in caricature." We must not forget, however, that first even Huxley hesitates to say that it is caricature, for he knows how easy it is to be mistaken in our estimation of the true significance of an old-time mode of thought, and then, too, he knew comparatively how little we were sure of the real thoughts and conclusions of these men of the olden time because of defective sympathy and even defective knowledge of their work. Our knowledge in this matter has greatly increased since his time. As a matter of fact, the more we know about these old masters and the mediaeval universities the less are we likely to think of their work as lacking in seriousness in any sense. The quarter of a century that has elapsed since Huxley so cogently urged this at Aberdeen has brought many facts unknown to us before and has shown us what good work, even in the physical sciences, was accomplished in these old-time universities.

For instance, nothing is more common in the mouths of certain kinds of scholars than the expressions of wonder as to why men did not study nature more assiduously before our time. Here is a magnificent open book full of the most alluring lessons which any one may study for himself, and that somehow it is presumed men neglected [{99}] down to our time. We are the age of nature students, and preceding times are looked at askance for having neglected the opportunities that lay so invitingly open to them in this subject. It has always been a wonder to me how people dare to talk this way. Our old literatures are full of observations on nature. In my book on "The Popes and Science" I take Dante as a typical product of the universities of the thirteenth century, and show without any difficulty as it seems to me, that there is no poet of the modern time who can draw figures from nature which demand even a detailed knowledge of nature with so much confidence as Dante. He knows the most intimate details about the birds, about many animals, about the ways of flowers, about children, describes some experiments in science, has a wide knowledge of astronomy and in general is familiar with nature quite as much if not more than any modern writer not ex professo a naturalist. He describes the metamorphosis of insects, how the ants communicate with one another, knows the secrets of the bees and exhibits wide knowledge of the secrets of bird life.

The presumption that people did not study nature in the olden time is quite unjustified. They did not write long books about trivial subjects of nature-study. They did not conclude that because they were seeing something for the first time, that that was the first time in the world's history it had ever been seen. They were gentle, [{100}] kindly scholars who assumed that others had eyes and saw too, and as fortunately there was no printing press there was not that hurried rushing into print, with superficial observations and still more superficial conclusions, which has characterized so much of our recent literature of nature-study and that has been so well dubbed "nature faking." Of course we have had faking of the same kind in nearly everything else: we have history faking in our supposed historical romances, science faking in our pseudo-science, science-history faking in our ready presumption that the men of the olden time could not have had our interests, and, above all--may I now say it?--in our cheap conclusion that there must have been some reason for their lack of interest in science, and then the assumption without anything further, that it must have been because of the Church.

Just as soon as there is question of there having been any serious scientific study during the Middle Ages, in the sense of observations in physical science, investigation of the physical phenomena of nature and the drawing of conclusions from them and the evolving of laws, there are a large number of people who consider themselves very well informed, who will at once object that this must be quite absurd, since at this time Lord Chancellor Bacon had not as yet laid down the great foundations of the physical sciences in his discussion of inductive reasoning. I have already [{101}] ventured to suggest, in the address on "The First Modern University," how utterly ridiculous any such notion is. I have quoted Lord Macaulay and Huxley as ridiculing those who entertained such an idea. Here I may be permitted to recur to the subject by quotations from the same authorities. I have often found that anything I myself said in this matter was at once considered as quite incredible, since my feelings were entirely too favorable toward the Middle Ages and then my religious affiliations are somehow supposed to unfit me for scientific thinking. Fortunately Macaulay and Huxley have expressed themselves in this matter even more vigorously than I would be likely to, and so I may simply quote them.

As Lord Macaulay wrote in his well-known essay:

"The vulgar notion about Bacon we take to be this, that he invented a new method of arriving at truth, which method is called induction, and that he detected some fallacy in the syllogistic reasoning which had been in vogue before his time. This notion is as well founded as that of the people who, in the Middle Ages, imagined that Virgil was a great conjurer. Many who are far too well informed to talk such extravagant nonsense entertain what we think incorrect notions as to what Bacon really effected in this matter."

Still more apposite is what Professor Huxley has to say. Discoursing on the phenomena of [{102}] organic nature, after warning his auditors not to suppose that scientific investigation is "some kind of modern black art," he adds: "I say that you might easily gather this impression from the manner in which many persons speak of scientific inquiry, or talk about inductive and deductive philosophy, or the principles of the 'Baconian philosophy.' To hear people talk about the great Chancellor--and a very great man he certainly was--you would think that it was he who had invented science, and that there was no such thing as sound reasoning before the time of Queen Elizabeth.

"There are many men who, though knowing absolutely nothing of the subject with which they may be dealing, wish nevertheless to damage the author of some view with which they think fit to disagree. What they do is not to go and learn something about the subject; . . . but they abuse the originator of the view they question, in a general manner, and wind up by saying that, 'After all, you know, the principles and method of this author are totally opposed to the canons of the Baconian philosophy.' Then everybody applauds, as a matter of course, and agrees that it must be so."

Lord Bacon himself so little understood true science that he condemned Copernicanism because it failed to solve the problems of the universe, and condemned Dr. Gilbert, the great founder in Magnetism, whose work was the best [{103}] exemplification of inductive science of that time. Of course Bacon did not invent science nor its methods. He was only a publicist popularizing them. They had existed in the minds of all logical thinkers from the beginning. His great namesake, Friar Bacon, much better deserves to be thought a pioneer in modern physical science than the chancellor,--and he was a mediaeval university man.

We are prone to think of the old-time universities as classical or literary schools with certain limited post-graduate features, more or less distantly smacking of science. The reason for this is easy to understand. It is because out of such classical and literary colleges our present universities, with their devotion to science, were developed or transformed during the last generation or two. It is to be utterly ignorant of mediaeval education, however, to think that the classical and literary schools are types of university work in the Middle Ages. The original universities of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries paid no attention to language at all except inasmuch as Latin, the universal language, was studied in order that there might be a common ground of understanding. Latin was not studied at all, however, from its literary side; to style as such the professors in the old mediaeval universities and the writers of the books of the time paid no attention. Indeed it was because of this neglect of style in literature and of the niceties of classical Latin that the university men of recent centuries before our own, [{104}] so bitterly condemned the old, mediaeval teachers and were so utterly unsympathetic with their teaching and methods. We, however, have come once more into a time when style means little, indeed, entirely too little, and when the matter is supposed to be everything, and we should have more sympathy with our older forefathers in education who were in the same boat. We have inherited traditions of misunderstanding in this matter, but we should know the reasons for them and then they will disappear.

As a matter of fact, exactly the same thing happened in our modern change of university interests during the latter half of the nineteenth century as happened in the latter half of the fifteenth century in Italy, and in the next century throughout Europe. With the fall of Constantinople the Greeks were sent packing by the Turks and they carried with them into Italy manuscripts of the old Greek authors, examples of old Greek art and the classic spirit of devotion to literature as such. A new educational movement termed the study of the humanities had been making some way in Italy during the preceding half-century before the fall of Constantinople, but now interest in it came with a rush. The clergymen, the nobility, even the women of the time became interested in the New Learning, as it was called. Private schools of various kinds were opened for the study of it, and everybody considered that it was the one thing that people who [{105}] wanted to keep up to date, smart people, for they have always been with us, should not fail to be familiar with. The humanities became the fashion, just as science became the fashion in the nineteenth century. Fashion has a wonderfully pervasive power and it runs in cycles in intellectual matters as well as in clothes.

The devotees of the New Learning demanded a place for it in the universities. University faculties perfectly confident, as university faculties always are, that what they had in the curriculum was quite good enough, and conservative enough to think that what had been good enough for their forefathers was surely good enough also for this generation, refused to admit the new studies. For a considerable period, therefore, the humanities had to be pursued in institutions apart from the universities. Indeed it was not until the Jesuits showed how valuable classical studies might be made for developmental purposes and true education that they were admitted into the universities.

Note the similarity with certain events in our own time in all this. Two generations ago the universities refused to admit science. They were training men in their undergraduate departments by means of classical literature. They argued exactly as did the old mediaeval universities with regard to the new learning, that they had no place for science. Science had to be learned, then, in separate institutions for a time. The scientific [{106}] educational movement made its way, however, until finally it was admitted into the university curricula. Now we are in the midst of an educational period when the classics are losing in favor so rapidly that it seems as though it would not be long before they would be entirely replaced by the sciences, except, in so far as those are concerned who are looking for education in literature and the classic languages for special purposes.

It will be interesting, then, to trace the story of the old mediaeval universities as far as the science in their curriculum was concerned, because it represents much more closely than we might have imagined, or than is ordinarily thought, the preceding phase of education to the classical period which we have seen go out of fashion to so great an extent in the last two generations. We shall readily find that at least as much time was devoted in the mediaeval universities to the physical sciences as in our own, and that the culture sciences filled up the rest of the curriculum. Philosophy, which occupied so prominent a place in older university life, was not only a culture science, but physical science as well, as indeed the name natural philosophy, which remained almost down to our day, attests.

Physical science was not the sole object of these mediaeval institutions of learning, but they were thoroughly scientific. The main object of the universities in the olden time was to secure such [{107}] discussion of the problems of man's relation to the universe, to his Creator, to his fellow-creatures and to the material world as would enable him to appreciate his rights and duties and to use his powers. Huxley declared that the trivium and quadrivium, the seven liberal arts studied in the mediaeval universities, probably demonstrate a clearer and more generous comprehension of what is meant by culture than the curriculum of any modern university. Language was learned through grammar, the science of language. Reasoning was learned through logic, the science of reasoning; the art of expression through rhetoric, a combination of art and science with applications to practical life. Mathematics was studied with a zeal and a success that only those who know the history of mediaeval mathematics can at all appreciate. Cantor, the German historian of mathematics, in hundreds of pages of a large volume, has told the story of the development of mathematics during the centuries before the Renaissance, that is from the thirteenth to the fifteenth, in a way that makes it very clear that the teaching at the universities in this subject was not dry and sterile, but eminently productive, successful in research, and with constant additions to knowledge such as live universities ought to make.

Then there was astronomy, metaphysics, theology, music and law and medicine. The science of law was developed and, above all, great [{108}] collections of laws made for purposes of scientific study. Of astronomy every one was expected to know much, of medicine we shall have considerable to say hereafter, but in the meantime it is well to recall that these mediaeval centuries maintained a high standard of medical education and brought some wonderful developments in the sciences allied to medicine and above all in their applications to therapeutics. Surgery never reached so high a plane of achievement down to our own time, as during the period when it was studied so faithfully and developed so marvellously at the mediaeval universities. It was inasmuch as a knowledge of physics was needed for the development of metaphysics that the mediaeval schoolmen devoted themselves to the study of nature. They turned with as much ardor and devotion as did Herbert Spencer in the nineteenth century, to the accumulation of such information with regard to nature as would enable them to draw conclusions, establish general principles and lay firm foundations for reasonings with regard to the creature and the Creator. It is, above all, this phase of mediaeval teaching work, of the schoolmen's ardent interest that is misunderstood, often ignored and only too frequently misrepresented in the modern time.

For instance, in the discussion of the status of matter in the universe the scholastics and notably Thomas Aquinas had come to the conclusion that matter was absolutely indestructible. He [{109}] even went so far as to say that man could not destroy it, and God would not annihilate it. Nihil omnino in nihilum redigetur--nothing at all will ever be reduced to nothingness, was his dictum as the conclusion of a course of lectures on this subject. He saw the changes in matter all round him that were supposed to be destructive, the burnings, the vaporizations, the solutions, the putrefactions and all the rest, but he knew that these only brought changes in matter and not destruction of the underlying substance. For him, as for all the scholastic philosophers, matter was composed of two principles, as they were called. One of these was prime matter and the other form. To prime matter, one of these, matter or substance owed all its negative qualities, inertia and the like. To form, the dynamic element or principle, it owed all its individuating qualities. Prime matter was the same in all things. Form was the energy or bundle of energies, the dynamic principle, as we have said, which entering into prime matter, made the different kinds of matter that we speak of.

It is extremely interesting to compare this old scholastic teaching with the modern ideas of the composition of matter and especially the notions which have come to us from researches in physical chemistry in recent years. Our scientists no longer believe that we have some eighty different elements, essentially different kinds of matter, that cannot by any chance or process be changed one [{110}] into another. We have seen one form of elementary matter changing into another, helium emanations becoming radium, have heard of Professor Ramsay's transmutation of various elements, and have about come to the conclusion that in the radio-active substances we have a wonderful transmuting power. A prominent American professor of chemistry declared not long since that he would like to treat a large quantity of lead ore in order to extract from it all the silver which so constantly occurs in connection with it in the natural state, and then having put the lead ore aside for a score of years, would like to examine it again, confident that he would find traces of silver in it once more, which had developed as a consequence of the radio-activity present in the substance and which is constantly changing lead into silver in small quantities. Newton's declaration, when he saw crystals of gold in connection with copper, that gold had been developed from the copper, seemed very foolish a century ago, but no one would consider it so at the present moment.

We are prone to think that these old mediaeval philosophers accepting to some extent at least the philosopher's stone with its supposed capacity for changing baser metals into precious, and with their acceptance of the transmutation of substances, cannot have had any real scientific bent of mind. We are coming to the realization, however, that in many ways by pure reasoning, in [{111}] conjunction with such observation as they had at hand, they anticipated our most recent conclusions in very marvellous ways. We know now that radium, or at least radio-active substances, represent the philosopher's stone of the olden time. We are not surprised at the transmutation of metals and of substances, on the contrary, we are looking for it.

I remember once stating the old theory of matter and form to a distinguished professor in chemistry in this country, and he was struck by the similarity of it to what are the present accepted ideas of the composition of matter. He asked why this teaching was not more generally known. I had to tell him that in every Catholic school of philosophy, it was taught as a basic doctrine, and that far from being concealed it was the very touchstone of Catholic philosophic teaching, and had often been the subject of deprecation and contemptuous remarks on the part of those who thought that it represented somewhat foolish old-fashioned teaching handed down to us from the backwardness and abysm of time.

We have demonstrated the indestructibility of matter in modern times by experimental methods. The mediaeval schoolmen reached similar conclusions, however, by strict reasoning from the premises of observation that they had in the olden times. We may be apt to think that they knew very little about nature and the details of physical science, but that will be only because we do not [{112}] know their great books. Albertus Magnus is a typical example of a renowned teacher of the thirteenth century who was, however, at the same time a highly respected member of his order, holding important official positions in it and thoroughly honored and respected by his ecclesiastical superiors so that he was made a bishop, yet writing volumes of observation with regard to nearly every phase of physical science. A list of his books reads like a section of a catalogue of a library of physical science. I have told the story of his career in the second series of "Catholic Churchmen in Science," but the names of his volumes are sufficient to show what sort of work he was doing. He has volumes on chemistry, botany, on physics, on cosmography, on animal locomotion, on respiration, on generation and corruption, on age and death and life, on phases of psychology, the soul, sense and sensation, memory, sleep, the intellect and many another subject. Those who think that there was no attention paid to science in the Middle Ages must know nothing at all of Albertus Magnus' work.

Above all, those who talk thus are entirely ignorant of all that Roger Bacon did. Roger Bacon himself was a student of the University of Paris. He was a professor there. He corresponded with the scientists of Europe quite as frequently or at least as significantly as professors of the modern time do with each other. Students submitted their discoveries to him. We [{113}] have Peregrinus' letter to him with regard to magnetism and electricity and know of others. We have his own books, in which he treats not only the scientific problems, but inventions and applied science of all kinds. At the present time his interest in aeronautics has a special appeal to us. He was sure that men would sometime make a successful airship. He even thought that he could make one himself, but his experiments proved unsuccessful. His theory of it was very interesting. In his work "De Secretis Artis et Naturae Operibus" he writes that a machine could be constructed in which a man sitting in the centre might move wings by means of a crank and thus, quite after the fashion of birds, fly through the air. It was he who wrote that the time would come when carriages would move along the roads without men or horses to pull them. At the moment he was experimenting with gunpowder. He realized, therefore, that sometime men would harness explosives and use them for motor purposes. That is, of course, just what we are doing with gasolene.

He suggested that boats would run over the water without oars and without sails. He was anticipating our motor boat. He taught that light moves with a definite rate of velocity, though that fact was not demonstrated for several centuries after his time. He worked out most of the theory of lenses as we have it at the present time. He was sure that experiment and [{114}] observation constituted the only way by which knowledge of nature could be obtained. In this he was but following his great teacher Albertus Magnus, who insisted that in natural philosophy experiment alone brought sure knowledge; "Experimentum solum certificat in talibus." are his own words. Roger Bacon's devotion to mathematics shows how thoroughly scientific was the trend of his mind. Without mathematics he was sure that one could not reach scientific knowledge, or that what one did get was without certainty. Some of his expressions in this matter are strikingly modern. It is no wonder that his writings and teachings were so great a surprise to his generation that the Pope ordered him to write out his knowledge in books. Without this order we would not have had Roger Bacon's great works, for his vow of poverty voluntarily taken forbade him to be possessed of sufficient money to enable him to purchase writing materials, which were then very expensive.

Indeed the mathematics of the mediaeval universities is the best proof of the seriousness of their devotion to science and, may it also be said, of their success. Cantor, in his "History of Mathematics," and he is the great authority in the matter, devotes nearly 100 pages of his second volume to the mathematicians of the thirteenth century alone, two of whom, Leonard of Pisa and Jordanus Nemorarius, did so much in arithmetic, in the theory of numbers, and in geometry, [{115}] as to work a revolution in mathematics. They had great disciples like John of Holywood (probably a town near Dublin), Johannes Campanus and others. No wonder that at the end of the century Roger Bacon said, "For without mathematics nothing worth knowing in philosophy can be obtained," and again, "for he who knows not mathematics cannot know any other science; what is more, he cannot discover his own ignorance or find its proper remedy." The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw even more important work done. Cantor has half a dozen men in the fifteenth century to whom he devotes more than twenty-five pages each. How the place of this in mediaeval teaching can have escaped the notice of those who insist so much on the neglect of science during the Middle Ages, is hard to understand. This alone would convict them of ignorance of what they are talking about.

The educational genius of the great university century, the thirteenth, the man who influenced his contemporaries and succeeding generations more than any other, was Thomas Aquinas, to whom the Church, for his knowledge and goodness, gave the title of saint. If any further proof that these centuries were interested in science were needed, or that the universities in which he was the leading light as scholar and professor in the thirteenth century, and as the great master to whom all looked reverentially after, were developing scientific studies, it would be found in [{116}] his works. Philosophy is developed scientifically in his "Contra Gentes" and theology, scientifically in his great "Summa." It is the very austerity of the scientific qualities of these books that have made them forbidding for many modern readers, who, therefore, have failed to understand the scientific spirit of the time. St. Thomas Aquinas, however, was, as I suggested at the beginning of this, deeply interested in every form of information with regard to what we now call physical science. He evidently drank in with avidity all that had been observed with regard to living creatures and, when we come to analyze his works with care and read his books with the devotion of his own students, we find many anticipations of what is most modern in our science.

The indestructibility of matter, matter and form, that is the doctrine of the unity of the basis of matter, the conservation of energy in the sense that the forms of matter change but do not disappear, all these were commonplaces in his thought and teaching. I have recently had occasion to point out how close he came to that thought in modern biology which is probably considered to be one of our most modern contributions to the theory of evolution. It is expressed by the formula of Herbert Spencer, "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." According to this the completed human being repeats in the course of its development the history of the race, that is to say, the varying phases of foetal development [{117}] in the human embryo, from the single cell in which it originates up to the perfect being as it is born into the world, retrace the history by which from the single-cell being man has gradually developed. The whole theory of evolution is supposed by many people to be modern, but of course it is not. This particular phase of it, however, is thought surely to be modern. It is sometimes spoken of as the fundamental law of biogeny. In recent years serious doubts have been thrown on it, but with that we have nothing to do here.

It is very curious to find, however, that St. Thomas, in his teaching with regard to the origin and development of the human being, says, almost exactly, what the most ardent supporters of this so-called fundamental biogenetic law proclaimed in recent years. He says that "the higher a form is in the scale of being and the farther it is removed from mere material form, the more intermediate forms must be passed through before the finally perfect form is reached. Therefore, in the generation of animal and man--these having the most perfect forms--there occur many intermediate forms in generations and consequently destruction, because the generation of one being is the destruction of another." St. Thomas does not hesitate to draw his conclusions from this doctrine without hesitation. He proclaims that the human material is first animated by a vegetative soul or principle of life, and then by an animal soul and only ultimately, when the matter has [{118}] been properly prepared for it, by a rational soul. He said:

"The vegetative soul, therefore, which is first in the embryo, while it lives the life of a plant, is destroyed, and there succeeds a more perfect soul, which is at once nutrient and sentient, and for that time the embryo lives the life of an animal: upon the destruction of this there succeeds the rational soul, infused from without."

His discussion of the position of the Church and of faith to science is extremely interesting, because here once more he faces a modern problem. Aquinas was very sensitive with regard to the imposition upon Christians of things which supposedly they had to believe on the score of faith, though they were really not of faith at all. Some of his expressions in this matter are very strong and he was especially fond of quoting St. Augustine, who was very emphatic on this point. One of these typical passages deserves to find a place here because, while the word philosophy is used, it is evidently science in our modern sense of the word that is intended. Augustine talks of what the philosophers have said of the heavens or the stars and the motion of the sun and moon, meaning of course the astronomers, who were in the old days classed as natural philosophers. This passage, then, which contains the opinions of the two greatest teachers of the Church in the West may well serve as a guide for those who are interested in science, and a warning for those who would [{119}] obtrude faith too far into scientific questions, and thus limit investigation and hamper that freedom of intellect which is so important for the development of science. St. Thomas said in his introduction to the reply to Master John of Vercelli:

"I have endeavored to reply but with this protest at the outset, that many of these articles do not pertain to the teachings of faith, but rather to the dogmas of the philosophers. But it works a great injury either to assert or deny as belonging to sacred doctrine such things as do not bear upon the doctrine of piety. For Augustine says, 'When I hear certain Christians ignorant of those things (namely, what philosophers have said of the heavens, or the stars, or the motion of the sun and moon) or misunderstanding them, I look with patience upon such men: nor do I see any reason to hinder them, when of thee, Lord Creator of all things, they do not believe unworthy things, if perhaps they be ignorant of the structure, and condition of corporal creatures. But they are a hindrance if they think these things belong to the very doctrine of piety; and more, pertinaciously, dare to affirm that of which they are ignorant.' But that they may be the cause of injury Augustine shows. 'It is very disgraceful,' he says, 'and pernicious and especially to be avoided, that a Christian speaking of these things as though according to Christian teaching should so rave that any infidel may hear; so that, as it is said, seeing him altogether in the wrong, he may [{120}] scarcely contain his mirth. And it is not so hurtful that one man should be seen to err, as that our writers are believed by those who are without [the Church] to have such opinions, and to the ruin of those whose salvation is our care they are scorned and contemned as unlearned.' Whence it seems safer to me that those things which philosophers have commonly held, and are not repugnant to our faith, should neither be asserted as dogmas of faith, although at times they may be introduced under the names of the philosophers, nor so denied as contrary to the faith, as to give occasion to the wise of this world of contemning the teaching of the faith."

Is it any wonder that Professor Saintsbury of the University of Edinburgh, whose training in the old Scotch universities has given him a breadth of sympathy not common in our time, and whose wide knowledge of the literature of that period as well as its philosophy and education, and whose training in the discussion of the criticism of all time in his "History of Criticism" has made his opinion of special value, should have sympathetically turned to these old teachers and deprecated a little bitterly the modern attitude towards them? He said:

"Yet there has always in generous souls who have some tincture of philosophy, subsisted a curious kind of sympathy and yearning over the work of these generations of mainly disinterested scholars, who, whatever they were, were [{121}] thorough, and whatever they could not do, could think. And there have even, in these latter days, been some graceless ones who have asked whether the science of the nineteenth century, after an equal interval, will be of any more positive value--whether it will not have even less comparative interest than that which appertains to the scholasticism of the thirteenth."

I have always considered, however, that the easiest way to show the modern student of science how supremely scientific in his temper was St. Thomas, is to quote for him the passage from that great teacher with regard to the Resurrection. In every way, that is typically modern. St. Thomas faces the question that after death men's bodies decay, the material of them is taken up and used in many other living beings, so that how can we dare to believe that we shall rise again on the last day with the same bodies that we now have? St. Thomas discusses this knotty problem straightforwardly and solves it more satisfactorily, even for all the knowledge that we have of it now, than has ever been done.

"What does not bar numerical unity in a man while he lives on uninterruptedly clearly can be no bar to the identity of the arisen man with the man that was. In a man's body while he lives there are not only the same parts in respect of matter, but also in respect of species. In respect of matter there is a flux and reflux of parts. Still that fact does not bar the man's numerical unity [{122}] from the beginning to the end of his life. The form and species of the several parts continue throughout life, but the matter of the parts is dissolved by the natural heat, and new matter accrues through nourishment. Yet the man is not numerically different by the difference of his component parts at different ages, although it is true that the material composition of the man at one stage of his life is not his material composition at another. Addition is made from without to the stature of a boy without prejudice to his identity, for the boy and the adult are numerically the same man."

The most important feature of the scientific teachings of the mediaeval universities has been left till the last because it is the clinching confirmation of a claim that these were essentially scientific universities. It is to be found in the position of the medical schools and the state of medical teaching during the Middle Ages. So curiously has the history of education been written, and, above all, of medical education, that to most people this would seem to be surely the department of education which would prove just the opposite. We have heard so much about Church opposition to anatomy and Church opposition to surgery, of its repression of the development of medical science and even medical art, because the Church wanted to make people believe in the value of masses, relics and prayers--and pay for them--that most people are quite sure that there [{123}] was no medical education of any significance in the Middle Ages. Nothing shows more clearly how viciously the history of education has been written than the existence of such false impressions. Not only are they utterly unfounded, but they are based on supreme ignorance of one of the greatest periods in the history of medicine that we have in all the world's history. Not only were the schools excellent and the teaching progressive, but there was a fine development of medical science and, above all, of surgery. Surgery is supposed to be particularly the department of medicine that did not develop. We have learned better in recent years, and now we know that there was no greater period in the history of surgery than that from 1200 to 1400 when, alas! following so-called history, we used to think there was no surgery.

The first question that any one who knows anything about the subject asks with regard to the progress in medicine of a particular time or country is, what was the standard of its medical education? What was the standard of admission to the medical schools, how many years of medical studies were required? To this question the Middle Ages have a wonderful answer that has not been realized until recent years. We now have Frederick II's famous law for the regulation of the practice of medicine and the maintaining of standards in medical schools. This law was promulgated in the Two Sicilies, the southern part of [{124}] Italy and Sicily proper. According to it no one was allowed to practise medicine who had not studied for four years in a recognized university and then practised for one year with a physician before receiving his license to practise by himself. If he wanted to practise surgery he had to spend an additional special year in the study of anatomy. The university medical schools were graduate schools and did not admit a student unless he had completed the undergraduate course.

Of course it may be thought that this was due entirely to the great Emperor Frederick, who was far ahead of his time and who, therefore, anticipated the progress of medical teaching by many centuries. We have, however, many other documents which illustrate the state of medical education at this time. The charters of the medical schools were granted by the Popes and were very explicit in what they required of the new faculties in order that standards might be maintained. Pope John XXII, for instance, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, issued charters for medical schools at Perugia and Cahors. He required that there should be four years of medical study and three years of preliminary work. He went into details to secure the maintenance of standards. The original faculties of these schools would all have to be doctors in medicine from either Paris or Bologna, and it must be their duty to establish in the new schools the standards of their [{125}] Almae Matres. Examinations were to be conducted under oath, men were not to be granted degrees unless they deserved them, the votes of professors rejecting candidates or graduating them were to be under oath-bound secrecy, so as to have them absolutely free from personal influence, and every precaution was taken to secure the highest possible standards.

It was as a consequence of their direct attachment to these old mediaeval medical schools that the medical schools founded here in America in the sixteenth century at once began with high standards. Three years of preliminary work was required and four years of medicine. In the United States no preliminary requirements were demanded; and for a full century only two years of medical study, which really consisted of but two terms of four months each, was the requirement. The old mediaeval medical schools were originally attached to the universities, and it is a well-known rule in the history of education that whenever the medical schools are independent then standards are sure to be low. Whenever the university controls the medical school and it is a real graduate department, then standards of admission and of graduation are properly maintained. It is surprising to think that the old mediaeval universities should be able to give us lessons in this matter and should put us to shame for our slip-shod nineteenth-century medical education in the United States, but this is a simple fact. Contrast [{126}] the South American countries where the mediaeval traditions with which they were founded constrained them to give four, five and even six years to medicine before granting a degree. Go a step further and see how devoted to science were the Universities of Lima (Peru) and Mexico, centuries before we did any serious scientific work in the United States, and all because they were direct descendants of the old mediaeval universities.

The feeling of certain modern educators would be that it did not matter how much time these mediaeval universities gave to medicine since, after all, they had nothing of any value to teach in medicine. Even educated people have been led to believe that there was nothing in medicine and, above all, in the surgery of those times to be of any value. Probably no opinion is more foolishly ignorant or more ridiculously absurd than this, though it is a commonplace among people who are sure they know something about history, and, above all, among those who consider themselves authorities in the history of education, and of the development of science. In surgery a magnificent development was made at this time of which I shall have something to say later. In medicine there was much less anticipation of our modern progress, but even here there was much that demands our respect. One of the university men, Simon of Genoa, worked out the dosage of opium and indicated its uses. Anodyne drugs were [{127}] employed much more generally and successfully than we are apt to think; various methods of anaesthesia, one of them by inhalation, of which I shall say more when talking of surgery, were invented and a large number of drugs and simples were experimented with. Down at Montpellier Bernard Gordon suggested red light for smallpox.

This is not much of a record, perhaps, but we must not forget what Professor Richet, the Director of the Physiological Laboratory of the University of Paris, said not long since in an article on "Physicians and Medicine" in La Revue de Deux Mondes. It is startling but chasteningly true. "The therapeutics of any generation has always been quite absurd to the second succeeding generation." Indeed it is one of the almost disheartening things in the history of medicine to see how treatments come in, are widely accepted and hailed as great advances in therapeutics and then gradually disappear. They bled a great deal and they purged not a little, in accordance with the teaching in the medical schools of the universities of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but then they bled a great deal and purged a great deal more, according to the teaching of the medical schools of the beginning of the nineteenth century. There have been many periods in the interval when purging and bleeding were, and very properly, not nearly so popular.

It was in preventive medicine particularly that [{128}] these progressive medical men of the early university days secured their triumphs. They made separate hospitals for the lepers all over Europe, and by segregation succeeded in wiping out that disease, though it was as widely spread as tuberculosis in our day and presented just as serious a problem. Indeed the most encouraging incentive for our present tuberculosis campaign is drawn by many authorities from the experience with leprosy, which was eventually obliterated as an endemic popular disease, by strict segregation methods. These same generations created special hospitals for erysipelas and thus prevented the spread of this disease in the ordinary hospitals, where it used to be so serious a factor for morbidity if not for mortality. Men forgot this later and the disease became a serious problem once more in all the hospitals of even a generation ago. The hospital organization worked out by these university men is the finest jewel in the crown of their accomplishment as applied scientists. Pope Innocent III, himself a University of Paris man, founded the Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome, summoning for that purpose the best authority on hospitals in Europe, Guy of Montpellier, and then required the bishops of the world to erect similar hospitals in their dioceses. This was done, and it is Virchow, whose sympathies were anything but favorable to the Popes, who has been most loud in his praise of the wonderful hospital organization of these centuries. Every town in [{129}] Europe of 5,000 inhabitants or more had a hospital, and there were hospitals in many of the smaller towns.

It would be easy to think that these hospitals were rudely built, were badly ventilated, were ill-arranged and, above all, were likely to be houses for the perpetuation of disease rather than for the regaining of health. We are prone to think that we are the first generation to solve the problem of hospital construction. We know what poorly-constructed, badly-planned institutions were the hospitals of three generations ago. What, then, must have been the hospital buildings of centuries ago? This argument has no place in history; the worst hospitals in the world and in history were erected at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Some of the best hospitals ever constructed date from the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This was a time when great architects were successfully solving the construction problems for cathedrals, municipal buildings, colleges and the like, and they solved them quite as successfully for hospitals. Some of these hospitals were models in their way. One of them, built toward the end of the thirteenth century, by the sister of St. Louis, Marguerite of Bourgogne, with its large windows high in the walls, in single-story buildings, with arrangements for the segregation of patients, with the kitchens in a separate building, with beautiful [{130}] frescoes on the walls so that patients' minds might be occupied and not left to their own often disturbing devices as with our bare wall, with a stream of running water divided so as to pass on both sides of the hospital, is a model of construction for all time.

It was in surgery rather than medicine, however, that these great mediaeval university medical schools left their impress upon the history of medicine. During the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries we have a series of wonderful teachers of surgery, whose achievements we know not by tradition nor by fragments of their writings, but by the text-books which they wrote and which constituted the teaching for generations and sometimes for centuries after their time. Gurlt, the great German historian of surgery, devotes some 300 pages of the first volume of his "History of Surgery" to the surgical accomplishments of the Middle Ages. He even protests that space compels him to abbreviate the story of what these old-time masters of surgery did to lay the foundation of modern surgical practices. It is a commonplace in the American writing of history that there was no surgery at this time. President White says that, "for over a thousand years surgery was considered dishonorable until the German Emperor Wenceslas, in 1403, ordered that it should be held in honor again." The two centuries immediately preceding this date represent the [{131}] greatest period in the history of surgery down to our own time, and because of its originality probably greater in real achievement than even our vaunted age.

It is sometimes the custom to say that this surgery was derived from the Arabs. This is supposed to rob the mediaeval universities of any prestige that may come to them for this marvellous progress. Gurlt, however, in his "History of Surgery," in his sketch of Roger (Ruggiero), who was the first of the great surgeons of the thirteenth century, who taught at the Italian universities, says: "Though Arabian writings on surgery had been brought over to Italy by Constantine Africanus 100 years before Roger's time, these exercised no influence over Italian surgery in the next century, and there is not a trace of the influence of the Arabs to be found in Roger's work." When Gurlt says this it is because he has deliberately studied the question, and we can be absolutely sure, therefore, that whatever we find in surgery at this time comes to us from these great mediaeval universities themselves, and is not imported from abroad.

After Roger, who was at Bologna for a time after having been in Paris, and who then became a Papal physician, there are a series of great names that deserve to be mentioned. Four names are connected together by association as master and pupil for what may be termed four generations of surgical progress. From the birth [{132}] of the first to the death of the last represents about 100 years. That 100 years is a gloriously fruitful century in the history of surgery. The first of the group is William of Salicet, of whom Professor Clifford Allbutt, the Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Cambridge, in his address on the "Historical Relations of Medicine and Surgery to the End of the Sixteenth Century," delivered by special invitation at the Congress of Arts and Sciences at the World's Fair in St. Louis in 1904, has the highest praise. Allbutt says: "Like Lanfranc and the other great surgeons of the Italian tradition, and unlike Franco and Paré, William had the advantage of the liberal university education of Italy; but like Paré and Wurtz, he had a large practical experience in hospitals and on the battlefield and fully recognized that surgery cannot be learned from books only." Allbutt praises him and rightly for his careful notes of cases and then tells us something of his accomplishments in surgery. He says: "William discovered that dropsy may be due to a durities renum six centuries before Bright; he substituted the knife for the Arabist abuse of the cautery; he investigated the causes of the failure of healing by first intention (Italics ours), he described the danger of wounds of the neck; he sutured divided nerves; he forwarded the diagnosis of suppurative diseases of the hip; and he referred chancre and phagedaena to their proper causes."

[{133}]

His pupil Lanfranc equalled his master in devotion to practical surgery and surpassed him in his development of the great science of medicine. Pagel, the well-known German historian of medicine, says that, in his text-book Lanfranc has excellent chapters on the affections of the eyes, the ears and mouth, the nose, even the teeth, and treats of hernia in a very practical common-sense way. He warns against the radical operation and says, in words that come home to us with strange familiarity at the present time, that many surgeons decide on operations too easily, not for the sake of the patient but for the sake of the money that is in them. Lanfranc's discussion of cystotomy, Pagel characterizes as prudent but rational, for he considers that the operations should not be feared too much but not delayed too long. In patients suffering from the inconvenience which comes from large quantities of fluid in the abdomen he advises paracentesis abdominis, but warns against putting the patient in danger from such an operation without due consideration. Pagel says that Lanfranc must be considered as one of the greatest surgeons of the Middle Ages and the real establisher of the prestige of the French school of surgery which maintained its prominence down to the nineteenth century.

Lanfranc had been invited to Paris to take the chair of surgery, because the authorities of the university wanted to add prestige to the medical school, which was not as well known as the school [{134}] of philosophy. The fame of William of Salicet had spread throughout academic Europe, and so Lanfranc was offered the chair at the University of Paris in order to carry his master's message there. The next in the succession of great teachers at Paris was Mondeville, who found less to do in an original way than his master Lanfranc and his protomaster William, but who accomplished much for surgery. All that he did was thrown into the shade by what was accomplished for succeeding generations by the next in the series, Guy de Chauliac, who studied for a time in Paris under Mondeville, though his early medical education was obtained at Montpellier, but had also had the advantage of spending a year in Italy at the various medical schools which were famous at that time. These two incidents, Lanfranc's invitation to Paris to be a teacher there from Italy more than a thousand miles away, and Guy de Chauliac's studies in all the important universities of Europe of the time before he took up his own work, illustrate better than any words of ours can the ardent enthusiasm for study, the thoroughgoing anticipation of our most modern methods in education. Mondeville, like Chauliac, had made very nearly the same round of the universities. It is a custom, not a chance incident, that we have to deal with here.

Guy de Chauliac has been given the name of the father of modern surgery. Any one who wants to see why should read the text-book on surgery that [{135}] Chauliac wrote and which for two centuries after his time (he died about the middle of the fourteenth century) continued to be the most used text-book of surgery in the medical schools of Europe. Chauliac, for instance, describes the treatment of conditions within all three of the important cavities of the body, the skull, the thorax and the abdomen. Pagel has three closely-printed pages in small type of titles alone of subjects in surgery which Chauliac treated with distinction. His description of instruments and methods of operation is especially full and suggestive. He describes the passage of a catheter, for instance, with the accuracy and complete technique of a man who knew the difficulties of it in complicated cases from practical experience. He even recognizes the dangers for the patient from the presence of anatomical anomalies of various kinds and describes certain of the more important of them. He has very exact indications for trephining. For empyema he advises opening of the chest and indicates where and how. He says very frankly that in wounds of the abdomen the patient will die if the intestines have been perforated and left untreated, and he describes a method of suturing wounds of the intestines in order to save the patient's life.

His treatment of bone surgery and of fractures and dislocations is especially interesting and shows how far these very practical men had reached conclusions resembling those of our time. [{136}] It was in hernia particularly that Chauliac's surgical genius manifested itself. He operated for hernia and its radical cure, placing the patient in an exaggerated Trendelenberg position, head down, feet fastened to a slanting board. For such work anatomy had to be known very well, and Chauliac had made special studies at Bologna under Bertruccio, the successor of Mondino. Chauliac once declared that the surgeon ignorant of anatomy carves the human body as a blind man would carve wood. Of ulcers of all kinds Chauliac writes from a knowledge evidently derived from experience. Of ulcers due to cancer he has much to say. He considers them hopeless unless they can be excised at a very early stage and the incision followed by caustics. For carcinomatous ulcers there is not much that we can do beyond this, even in our day. It is no wonder that the great historians of medicine have been unanimous in praise of this wonderful scientific genius. For my lecture on "Old-Time Medical Education," before the Johns Hopkins Historical Club, last year, I quoted some of those opinions. Portal, for instance, says of him, "It may be averred that Guy de Chauliac said nearly everything that modern surgeons say and that his work is of infinite price, but unfortunately too little pondered." Malgaigne declares Chauliac's "Chirurgia Magna," "A masterpiece of learned and luminous writing." Pagel says, "Chauliac represents the summit of attainment in mediaeval [{137}] surgery, and he laid the foundation of that primacy in surgery which the French maintained down to the nineteenth century." Professor Clifford Allbutt says of Chauliac's treatise, "This great work I have studied carefully and not without prejudice; yet I cannot wonder that Fallopius compared the author with Hippocrates or that John Freind calls him the prince of surgeons. The book is rich, aphoristic, orderly and precise." In a word it has all the qualities that are usually said to be lacking in the work of mediaeval scientists, and it is a standing reproach to those who ignorantly have made so little of the work of these wonderful men of the olden time, who anticipated so many of the features of our modern medicine and surgery that we are prone to think of as representing climaxes in human progress, indications of a wonderful human evolution.

Two other names of great professors of surgery deserve to be mentioned because they make it very clear that this wonderful development of surgery was not confined to France and Italy, but made itself felt all over Europe. One of these is John Ypermann, a surgeon of the early fourteenth century, of whom almost nothing was known until about twenty-five years ago, when the Belgian historian, Broeck, brought to light his works and gathered some details of his life. He was a pupil of Lanfranc, and at the end of the thirteenth century studied at Paris on a scholarship voted by his native town of Ypres, [{138}] which provided maintenance and tuition fees for him at the great French university expressly in order that he might become expert in surgery. We are likely to think of Ypres as an unimportant town, but it was one of the great industrial centres of Europe and one of the most populous, busy towns of Flanders in the Middle Ages, noted for its manufacture of linens and fine laces. The famous Cloth Hall, erected in the thirteenth century, one of the most beautiful architectural monuments in Europe, and one of the finest buildings of its kind in the world, was the result of the same spirit that sent Ypermann to Paris.

After his return Ypermann settled down in his native town and obtained great renown not only at home, so that in that part of the country an expert surgeon is still spoken of as an Ypermann, but he became famous throughout all the Teutonic countries. He is the author of two books in Flemish. One of these is on medicine. Pagel calls it an unimportant compilation. The terms that occur in it, however, are enough to show us how much more than we are likely to think, these old masters in medicine discussed problems that are still puzzling us. He treats of dropsy, rheumatism, under which occur the terms coryza and catarrh, icterus, phthisis (he calls the tuberculous tysiken), apoplexy, epilepsy, frenzy, lethargy, fallen palate, cough, shortness of breath, lung abscess, hemorrhage, blood-spitting, liver abscess, hardening of the spleen, affections of the kidney, [{139}] bloody urine, diabetes, incontinence of urine, dysuria, strangury, gonorrhea and involuntary seminal emissions--all these terms are quoted directly from Pagel.

His work in medicine, however, is as nothing compared to his writings on surgery. A special feature of his book is the presence of seventy illustrations of instruments of the most various kinds, together with a plate showing the anatomical features of the stitching of a wound in the head. Even Pagel's brief account of its contents will be a source of never-ending surprise for those who think that surgery has developed entirely in our time. Even in this work on surgery, however, there are many things that we now treat under medicine. As this gives us an opportunity to show how much more of medicine was known at this time than is usually thought, I venture to quote some of Pagel's brief resume of the contents of a single chapter. This is a chapter devoted to intoxications, which includes the effect of cantharides as well as alcohol, and treats of the bites of snakes, scorpions and of the fatal effects of wounds due to the bite of mad dogs.

The other great surgeon and surgical writer of the time, for there must have been many distinguished surgeons and only a few writers, if we can trust to common experience in that matter, was John Ardern, an English surgeon. He was educated in Montpellier, practised for a time in France, then settled for some years in the [{140}] small town of Newark in Nottinghamshire, and then for nearly thirty years in London. His "Practice of Surgery," as yet existing only in manuscript, is another one of these wonderful contributions to the applied sciences of anatomy and medicine at a time when such applications are often supposed to have been absent. He was an expert operator and had a wide reputation for his success in the treatment of diseases of the rectum. He was the inventor of a new clyster apparatus. Daremberg, the medical historian, who saw a copy of Ardern's manuscript in St. John's College, Oxford, says that it contained numerous illustrations of instruments and operations. We fortunately possess an excellent manuscript copy in the Surgeon General's Library at Washington, and sometime it is hoped this will be edited and published.

The most interesting feature of the work of all of these men is their dependence on personal observation and not on authority. Guy de Chauliac's position in this matter can be very well appreciated from his criticism of John of Gaddesden's book in which he bewails the blind following of those who had gone before. His bitterest reproach for many of his predecessors was that, "They followed one another like cranes, whether for fear or love he would not say." Pagel praises Ypermann for the well-marked striving which he has noted in him to free himself from the bondage of authority, and because most of his therapeutic [{141}] descriptions rest upon his own experience. William of Salicet, at the beginning of this great period of surgery, had insisted that notes of cases were the most valuable sources of wisdom in medicine and surgery. The last of them, Ardern, gave statistics of his cases and was quite as proud as any modern surgeon of the large number that he had operated on. He gives these carefully and accurately.

I have dwelt on the medical side of these universities mainly, of course, because this is more familiar to me as a historian of medicine than their work in other scientific departments, but also to a great extent because the medical schools gathered unto themselves nearly all the scientific knowledge of the time. Botany, mineralogy, climatology, meteorology were all studied for the sake of what could be learned from them for the benefit of medicine. Even astronomy which was then the old astrology, was cultivated seriously, because of the supposed effect of the stars on human constitutions. For this we surely cannot blame these mediaeval students of science since four centuries later Galileo and even Kepler were still making horoscopes for their patrons and laying down laws from astronomy that were supposed to be applicable to medicine. Even Copernicus studied astronomy and medicine side by side and this combination of studies was not at all infrequent.

The medical schools, then, are the real index of [{142}] the serious interest of the mediaeval universities in science. Our scientific departments in modern universities have developed other interests, because of various applications that these have to life and its concerns. Always in scientific universities applied science is sure to encroach upon the domain of pure science, and no one knows that better than we do, for we have been bewailing the presence of machine shops and boiler factories on the university grounds. The old universities did not teach applied mechanics or engineering, but that does not mean that these subjects were not taught. There were special technical schools conducted by the gilds by means of apprenticeship and the journeyman training, which enabled them to teach those who cared to have it all the knowledge necessary for construction work of various kinds. The wonderful architectural engineering exhibited in the cathedrals, university buildings, town halls and castles of this time, and the magnificent bridges, some of which are still in existence, show us that the technical subjects were by no means neglected. [Footnote 9] Our mediaeval forefathers in education had the wisdom not to let the technical subjects interfere with pure science too much, as they inevitably do whenever the two are brought too closely together. Culture is always overshadowed by the practical, but not to the ultimate benefit of the race.

[Footnote 9: See Address on "Ideal Education of the Masses.">[

The proof for us here in America, close at [{143}] hand, that these universities of the Middle Ages were thoroughly scientific in spirit and not only capable of, but actually active and successful in scientific investigation, is to be found in our earliest American universities. We are prone to think, because of the curiously defective way in which our histories of education have been written, that the only things worth while talking about in the origins of education here in America are to be found in English America. Recent investigations have shown how utterly deceived we were by foolish self-conceit in this matter. Long before the English-American universities were founded, and still longer before they began to do any serious work in education, there were important universities having literally thousands of students in attendance in the Spanish-American countries. The University of Mexico and the University of Lima in Peru were both founded about the middle of the sixteenth century. Harvard came nearly a century later, Yale a full century and a half, Princeton more than two centuries. The contrast between our English-American institutions of learning, however, and their Spanish-American rivals in accomplishment and numbers in attendance is still more striking than the mere dates of foundation.

Of course there were chairs of many sciences, strange as that may seem to us with our ridiculous traditions with regard to the history of education. These Spanish-American universities were [{144}] the direct descendants of the old mediaeval universities. They were in close relationship with Salamanca, Valladolid and Alcala. They were the progeny of scientific universities and they were, of course, occupied mainly with science. In spite of the fact that already the influence of the Renaissance, with its classical studies as the basis of education, had begun to make itself felt, these Spanish-American universities retained, to a great extent, the scientific curriculum. Nor must it be thought that they were shilly-shally institutions of learning, doing nothing in reality, but making a great pretence of studying many things. To know the very opposite we turn to Bourne, himself at the time a professor at Yale, and writing one of the volumes of a series edited by Professor Albert Bushnell Hart, who holds the chair of history at Harvard, to be told in very definite emphatic terms how successfully investigations in science and scientific education were carried on in Mexico. Professor Bourne says:

"Not all the institutions of learning founded in Mexico in the sixteenth century can be enumerated here, but it is not too much to say that in number, range of studies and standard of attainments by the officers they surpassed anything existing in English America until the nineteenth century. Mexican scholars made distinguished achievements in some branches of science, particularly medicine and surgery, but pre-eminently linguistics, history and anthropology. [{145}] Dictionaries and grammars of the native languages and histories of the Mexican institutions are an imposing proof of their scholarly devotion and intellectual activity. Conspicuous are Toribio de Motolinia's 'Historia de las Indias de Nueva España,' Duran's 'Historia de las Indias de Nueva España,' but most important of all Sahagun's great work on Mexican life and religion."

The scientific products of these universities in America are interesting because almost as a rule we know absolutely nothing about them in English America, and, therefore, conclude there must have been none. The first book written on a medical topic in America was the "Secretos de Chirurgia," written by Dr. Pedrarias de Benavides, which was published at Valladolid in Spain in 1567. The first book on medicine actually published in this country was "Opera Medicinalia," by Francisco Bravo. [Footnote 10] On Columbus' second expedition, however, a Dr. Chança who had been physician-in-ordinary to the King and Queen of Spain, was sent with the expedition as what we would now call a scientific attaché. On his return he wrote a volume of scientific observations that he had made in America. Some of these were doubtless written while he was over here, though the book was published in Spain. Dr. Ybarra of New York recently published a résumé of this in the Smithsonian Publications and an article on it in the Journal of the American Medical Association. [{146}] It shows very well how wide were the scientific interests of the physicians of the time and how ardent their investigation of science, for there is scarcely a phase of modern science that would be touched on by the corps of scientists now attached to such an expedition which does not receive some serious treatment in Dr. Chança's book. Thus early did the Spanish-Americans take up scientific investigation seriously.

[Footnote 10: Published in Mexico, 1570.]

Professor Bourne of Yale, in his chapter on the "Transmission of the European Culture," in the third volume of the American Nation Series, [Footnote 11] says (p. 17): "Early in the eighteenth century the Lima University [Lima, Peru] counted nearly 2,000 students and numbered about one hundred and eighty doctors [in its faculty] in theology, civil and canon law, medicine and the arts. Ulloa reports that 'the university makes a stately appearance from without, and its inside is decorated with suitable ornaments.' There were chairs of all the sciences, and 'some of the professors have, notwithstanding the vast distance, gained the applause of the literati of Europe.' The coming of the Jesuits contributed much to the real educational work in America. They established colleges, one of which, the little Jesuit College at Juli, on Lake Titicaca, became a seat of genuine learning."

[Footnote 11: Harpers, New York, 1908.]

A distinguished professor of medicine in this country to whose attention this state of medical [{147}] education in the Spanish-American countries, so different from what is thought, was called, said: "What a surprise it is to find that while we have been accustomed to think that the primum mobile [the active initiative] in education in this country came from the Anglo-Saxons, we now find that they were long anticipated in every department of education by the Spaniards, though we have been rather accustomed to despise them for their backwardness." With regard to the establishment of the first American medical school, it is no longer a surprise to find that it was established in Mexico, just as soon as we realize that the Mexican University was closely in touch with the traditions of the mediaeval universities generally and these all established medical schools as university departments. The standards of these mediaeval medical schools were transported to America and maintained. Our medical schools in the United States got away from the universities, became mere preparatory institutions, granted degrees for just as little study as possible, two terms of four months each in most cases, sometimes given in the same calendar year and requiring no preliminary training. We are reforming this now for a generation, but just inasmuch as we are, far from advancing, we are going straight back to the mediaeval universities and their standards and methods.

With all this evidence before us it seems perfectly clear that these old mediaeval universities [{148}] must be considered to have been scientific universities in our fullest modern sense of the term. They devoted all their time to the study of phenomena around them and the attempt to find the principles underlying them. They went at it somewhat differently in many departments of science than those which are now employed, but in all their practical work at least, they anticipated our methods as well as many of our results. The great professors wrote text-books and students who were ardent in the pursuit of knowledge copied out those text-books by hand. They had no way of easily multiplying them almost indefinitely, as we have at the present time. Probably nothing shows so well the enthusiastic zeal of these times in the pursuit of scientific knowledge as the fact that so many copies of these textbooks still remain for us. Much has been lost by war and fire, and still more by wanton destruction by people who could not understand, for there were many intervening generations that sold these old manuscripts by the ton for the use of grocers to wrap up butter and any other commodity. If we only had the wealth of manuscript that was originally created it would be easy to fill in the gaps in our knowledge, and show the wonderful scientific scholarship of these mediaeval universities.

As it is, there cannot be the slightest doubt that these were great scientific universities. How, then, has the opposite tradition of science only [{149}] coming to cultivation in our time obtained a foothold; above all, how has it happened that men have insisted that there was no science in these old days because the Church was opposed to science and would not permit its study or allow of scientific investigation? If we were to believe many writers who have been taken very seriously, anatomy was conducted only under the pain of death, chemistry made one liable to all sorts of penalties and other forms of science were absolutely banned. There is no reason at all for any such declarations from what we know of the history of science. The place where such groundless assertions are found is in the so-called history of religion. The odium theologicum was very bitter, and ignorant men said things without knowing, and then their statements were copied by others who knew even less.

Probably there is no more serious blot on the history of education and, above all, the history of science, than the fact that men supposed to be scholarly have been so ready to accept absolutely ignorant statements with regard to the state of science during the Middle Ages. It would be amusing, if it were not so amazing, to recall the utter lack of scholarship that characterized the men who wrote such things, but above all the generations that accepted such history as solemn truth and even conferred academic dignities and degrees on such men. Take a book like Dr. Draper's "Conflict of Science and Religion." It [{150}] is founded on the uttermost lack of knowledge of the subjects of which he speaks. It is true that he has consulted historical writers. They were all secondary authorities. He had never gone back to look up a single original document of any kind. He was a physician; supposedly at least, then, he should know the history of medicine. He knows nothing at all about the great medical schools of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; of the great period of surgery that occurred at this time he has no inkling. Had he cared really to know anything about the period he could have seen some of the text-books written by these men. Instead we have an exhibition, in his book, of the most consummate assumption of knowledge associated with sublime ignorance and bitter condemnation for old institutions, educational and ecclesiastical, in matters of which he knows nothing, though if he did know, his opinion would surely be just the opposite to that he has expressed.

To a great degree this is true of President White's "A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology." Secondary authorities constantly figure in it, and they are quoted from, as a rule, with the definite idea of proving a particular thesis--that theology is opposed to science. Of course it is very different to that of Draper, there is much more of true scholarship in it, but it is sad to think that the prestige of a president of a great university who had been a professor of [{151}] history should have been lent to statements so egregiously misleading as those which are constantly to be found in his work. Even sadder it is to think that this has been accepted by many people as a scholarly work and as representing the last word on the subject.

The "Cambridge Modern History" in its preface said, that history has been a long conspiracy against the truth and that we must now go back once more to the original documents. "It has become impossible," the editors declare, "for the historical writers of the present age to trust without reserve even to the most respected secondary authorities. The honest student continually finds himself deserted, retarded, misled, by the classics of historical literature, and has to hew his own way through multitudinous transactions, periodicals and official publications in order to reach the truth." In no department of history is this expression more true than in that of education, and especially of science and the relation of educational institutions to scientific development. No man should now dare venture to say anything about the state of science at any time in the world's history who has not seen some of the books written at that time. Above all, no one should venture to make little of the past on the strength of what religiously prejudiced writers have said about it.

This story of the mediaeval universities is most illuminating from that standpoint. They were [{152}] scientific universities closely resembling our own. It has become the custom to talk of them as if they were institutions of learning that accomplished nothing, and wasted their time over trifles. We often hear of how much time was wasted in dialectics in the Middle-Age universities, but surely it was not more than is wasted over technics in our modern university. Hundreds of books were written about the quips and quiddities of logic, but thousands of volumes are full of technics and most of our scientific journals are crowded with it. Let us, then, if for no other reason than our fraternity with them, begin to do justice to these old universities. Their scholars were ardent and zealous, their professors were enthusiastic and laborious. The tomes they issued were larger and their writings more voluminous than those of our own professors. They are hard reading, but no one must dare to criticise them unless he has read them, and, above all, no one must make little of them without knowing something about them at first hand. This is scholarship; the secondary information that has been popular is sciolism. Let us get back to scholarship. That is what we need just now in America.

[{153}]

IDEAL POPULAR EDUCATION

[{154}]

"According to my view he who would be good at anything must practise that thing from his youth upwards, both in sport and earnest, in the particular way which the work requires: for example, he who is to be a good builder, should play at building children's houses; and he who is to be a good husbandman at tilling the ground; those who have the care of their education should provide them when young with mimic tools. And they should learn beforehand the knowledge which they will afterwards require for their art. For example, the future carpenter should learn to measure or apply the line in play; and the future warrior should learn riding or some other exercise for amusement, and the teacher should endeavor to direct the children's inclinations and pleasures by the help of amusements to their final aim in life. The sum of education is right training in the nursery. The soul of the child in his play should be trained to that sort of excellence in which, when he grows up to manhood, he will have to be perfected. Do you agree with me thus far?"--Plato, Laws (Jowett), Vol. IV, p. 173. Scribner, 1908.
"There will be gymnasia and schools in the midst of the city, and outside the city circuses (playgrounds) and open spaces for riding places and archery. In all of these there should be instructors of the young."--Plato, Laws (Jowett), Vol. IV, p. 82. Scribner, 1902.

[{155}]

IDEAL POPULAR EDUCATION [Footnote 12]

[Footnote 12: The material for this lecture was collected for a course on the History of Education delivered to the Sisters of Charity of Mount St. Vincent's, at St Stephen's Hall, New York City, in January and February, 1909. The material was subsequently developed for a similar set of lectures for the religious teachers in the parochial schools of Philadelphia in the spring of 1910.]

We have come to realize in recent years that in many ways our education of the masses is a failure. Teaching people to read and write and occupying them with books till they are fifteen years of age, when all that they will use their power to read for is to devote themselves to three or four editions of the daily paper and the huge, overgrown Sunday papers on their only day of leisure, with perhaps occasional recourse to a cheap magazine or a cheaper novel, in order to kill time, as they frankly declare, is scarcely worth while. Indeed we have even come to realize that such education gives opportunity rather for the development of discontent than of happiness. The learning to write which enables a man to be a clerk, or a bookkeeper, the occupations that are, as a rule, the least lucrative, that are so full that there is no question of organizing them, that confine men for long hours in dark rooms very often and furnish the least possible opportunity to rise, is of itself not ideal. With some rather [{156}] disconnected information this is practically all that our ordinary education teaches people, and yet we spend eight years and large sums of money on it. We are just beginning to realize that other forms of education and not these superficial introductions to supposed scholarship, which can mean so little, constitute realities in education.

We have come to realize that Germany, where it is said that more than sixty per cent. of the population has its opportunity for some technical training, so that men are taught the rudiments of a trade or a handicraft or some occupation other than that which shall make them mere routine servants of some one else, does far better than this. By contrast it is remarked that less than one per cent. of our children have the opportunity for such training. We are very prone to think, however, that the technical school is a modern idea. We assume that it owes its origin to the development of mankind in the process of evolution to a point where the recognition of the value of handiwork and craftsmanship has at length arisen. Nothing could well be less true than this. It is true that the eighteenth century saw practically no education of this kind and it was only at the end of the nineteenth century that any modern nation even began to wake up to the necessity for it. In the older times, however, and, above all, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, there was a magnificent training afforded the masses of the people in all sorts of arts and [{157}] crafts and trades and occupations, such as can now be obtained only in technical schools. They did not call these teaching institutions technical schools, but they had all the benefits that we would now derive from such schools.

This training the people of these times owed to the gilds. These were, of course, of many forms, the Arts Gilds, the Crafts Gilds, the Merchants Gilds, and then the various Trades Gilds. Boys were apprenticed to men following such an occupation as the youth had expressed a liking for, or that he seemed to be adapted to, or that his parents chose for him, and then began his training. It was conducted for five or six years usually in the house of the master or tradesman to whom he was apprenticed. The master provided him with board and clothes, at least, after the first year, and he gradually trained him in the trade or craft or industry, whatever it might be. After his apprenticeship was over the young man of eighteen or so became a journeyman workman and usually wandered from his native town to other places, sometimes going even over seas in order to learn the foreign secrets of his craft or art or trade, and after three years of this, when ready to settle down, presented evidence as to his accomplishments, and if this was accepted he became a master in his gild. If he were a craftsman or an artisan he made a lock or a bolt or some more artistic piece of work in the metals base or precious, and if this sample was [{158}] considered worthy of them by his fellow-gildsmen he was admitted as a master in the gild. This was the highest rank of workman, and the men who held it were supposed to be able to do anything that had been done by fellow-workmen up to that time. The piece that he presented was then called a masterpiece, and it is from this that our good old English word masterpiece was derived.

This might seem a very inadequate training, and perhaps appeal to many as not deserving of the name of technical training or schooling. The only way to decide as to that, however, is to appreciate the products turned out by these workmen. It was these graduates of the apprentice-journeyman system of technical training who produced the great series of marvellous art objects which adorn the English cathedrals, the English municipal buildings, the castles and the palaces and the monasteries of the thirteenth century. It was the graduates of these schools, or at least of this method of schooling, who produced the wonderful stained glass, the beautiful bells, the finished ironwork, the surpassing woodwork, the sculpture, the decoration,--in a word, all the artistic details of the architecture of the wonderful Gothic periods of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,--which we have learned to value so highly in recent years. If we wanted to produce such work in our large cities now, we would have to import the workmen. These wonderful [{159}] products were made in cities so small that we would be apt to think them scarcely more than insignificant towns in our time. No town in England during the thirteenth century, with the possible exception of London, had more than 25,000, and most of the cathedral towns were under 15,000 in population and many of them had less than 10,000.

The extent to which this teaching went and how much it partook of the nature of real technical training can be very well appreciated from recent studies of these early times. There has probably never been more beautiful handicraftsmanship nor better products of what we now call the arts and crafts than during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when this system of educating the masses became thoroughly organized. Any one who knows the details of the decoration of the great Gothic cathedrals or of the monasteries and castles and municipal buildings of these centuries will be well acquainted with these marvels of accomplishment, scattered everywhere throughout England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain in this period. Something of the story of it all I tried to tell, as far as the cathedrals are concerned, in my book, "The Thirteenth the Greatest of Centuries." Those who care to see another side of it will find it in Mr. A. Ralph Adams Cram's "The Ruined Abbeys of Great Britain." [Footnote 13] Mr. Cram, himself a [{160}] successful modern architect, does not hesitate to declare some of this work as among the most beautiful that ever was made, even including the ancient Greek and Roman productions. In his searches into the ruins of these old abbeys he has found mutilated fragments so consummate in their faultless art that they deserve a place with the masterpieces of sculpture of every age.

[Footnote 13: New York, The Churchman Company, 1905.]

It was not alone, however, in the arts of sculpture and decoration, that is in those finer accomplishments that would occupy only a few of the workmen, but in every detail of adornment that these artistic craftsmen excelled. The locks and bolts, the latches and hinges, the grilles, even the very fences and gates made in wrought iron, are beautiful in every line and in the artistic efficiency of their designs. The carved woodwork is in many places a marvel. When a gate has to be moved, or a hinge is no longer used, or a lock or even a key from these early times goes out of commission, we would consider it almost a sacrilege to throw it away; it is transported to the museum--not alone because of its value as an antique but, as a rule, also because of its charm as a work of art. When a bench-end is no longer needed it, too, finds its way into the museum. As Rev. Augustus Jessopp has shown very clearly in his studies of the old English parishes, these marvels of iron and woodwork were made, in most cases, respectively by the village blacksmith and the village carpenter. In the archives of [{161}] some of the parishes of the Middle Ages the accounts are found showing that these men were paid for them. When the village blacksmith and the village carpenter becomes the artist artisan capable of producing such good work, then indeed is there an ideal education at work and a technical training that may be boasted of.

The most important feature of this education remains to be spoken of, however. It consisted of the fine development and occupation of the mind that came from this system. Men found happiness in their work. In a population of less than 3,000,000 of people many thousands of workmen, engaged in building these magnificent monuments of that old time, reaped a blessed pleasure in the doing of beautiful things. They, too, had a share in the great monument of which their town was worthily proud and the opportunity to make something worth while for it. Instead of idly envying others they devoted themselves to making whatever their contribution might be as beautiful as possible. It might be only the hinges for the doors or the latch for the gates, it might be only the stonework for the bases of pillars, though it might be the beautiful decoration of their capitals; but everything was being done beautifully and an artist hand was required everywhere. Men must have tried over and over again to make such fine things. They were not done at haphazard nor at one trial. There must have been many a spoiled piece [{162}] rejected, not so much by the foreman as by the critical, educated taste of the workmen themselves who were able to make such beautiful things. Men who could make such artistic products must have labored much and begun over and over again. This must have made the finest occupation of mind that a great mass of people has ever had in all the world's history.

American millionaires model the gates of their parks and the grille doors of their palaces under the wise direction of modern architects who fortunately know enough to follow the designs created by these village workmen of the olden time. Modern palatial residences are glad to have samples of the wood-carving of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as models for their decoration, and as attractive pieces around which present-day work may be done. We have to import our workmen, even our large cities cannot supply all that we want of them, and yet little towns of a few thousand inhabitants had them in sufficient abundance in the olden time to enable them to make every portion of their great monumental buildings, cathedrals, abbeys, universities, castles and town halls beautiful in every way. This represents the triumph of a technical training afforded by the gilds of workmen of the olden time. We have to insist on this because our present generation has been so sure that ours was the first generation that gave any serious attention to the education of the masses, that it is important to show by [{163}] contrast how much of a mistake we have made and how well an older generation accomplished its purpose.

The chapter of the "Lost Arts" might well be told with regard to this old time. They had secrets in glass-making which were the tradition of the teaching of particular gilds that we have been unable to find again in the modern time. There is a jewel-like lustre to their colors that is sometimes simply marvellous in its depth and purity. At Lincoln the contrast between old and new glass can be seen very well. The old windows of the thirteenth century time were stoned out by the Parliamentarians when they captured the town, because forsooth they could have no such idolatry as that in their presence. The old sexton, who as man and boy for over sixty years had lived his life under the beautiful tints of the old glass, now saw it scattered upon the floor in fragments. He could not part with it thus and so he gathered it up into bags, broken to pieces though it was, and hid it away in the crypt. In the nineteenth century when they were restoring the cathedral they found these fragments of the old windows. They pieced them together and they proved to be so beautiful that, though they could not fit them as they were in the olden time, at least they succeeded in making a beautiful patchwork of colored glass.

Over on the other side of Lincoln Cathedral they then placed some new windows of the [{164}] modern time. These were made in France, I believe. They were made about the middle of the nineteenth century, when stained-glass making was almost at its lowest ebb. They were considered to be very beautiful, however, and something like £20,000 sterling was paid for them. The contrast between the two sets of windows is very striking. The old windows are so beautiful, the new ones are so commonplace. The visitor, even though he knows nothing about art, notices the contrast and, if he has an eye for color, views with something of a shock this attempt of the nineteenth century to do something that had been so well done by the gild-trained workmen of the technical schools of the Middle Ages. Though they are represented here only by patched fragments of their work he can scarcely repress a smile at the effect of their work in cheapening the modern. Everywhere it is the same way. Mr. F. Rolfe, writing from Venice, where he has been studying thirteenth-century glass, and talking of its wonderful beauty as compared to anything modern, says: "There are also fragments of two windows, pieced together and the missing parts filled in with the best which modern Murano can do. These show the celebrated Beroviero Ruby Glass (secret lost) of marvellous depth and brilliancy in comparison with which the modern work is merely watery. (The ancient is just like a decanter of port wine.)"

This is the story, no matter where one goes, [{165}] throughout Europe. At York they would not surrender the town to the Parliamentary army until a guarantee had been given them that their cathedral would not be devastated as had been the case elsewhere. Besides General Ireton was a friend of the Yorkists and he was ready to agree to the stipulation. The agreement was not fully carried out, fanatic soldiers could not be entirely restrained, but some of the old glass remains. There is probably nothing more beautiful in all the realm of artistic glass-making than the famous Five Sisters window at York. In France the Revolution repeated what the Puritans accomplished of ruin in England. Notre Dame has no trace of its old glass. In some of the cathedrals, however, there has fortunately been preserved for us enough of it to know how wonderfully the makers of it must have been trained, and to let us realize how much of experiment, of investigation, of study that we would now call applied chemistry must have gone to the making of this wonderful old glass. These technical schools were not merely passing on arts and crafts traditions, but each generation was adding to the secrets of the gilds by original research of its own. We are prone to think that such work of original investigation was reserved for our time, but that is only because of the foolish self-complacency which blinds us to what other generations did.

The stained glass of the cathedrals of Bourges [{166}] and of Chartres shows the marvellous success of these old workers in glass and their power to make enduring products. It is a mystery to see how their blues have lasted while the sun has shone through them all these years and caused no deterioration or only such as softens and adds to beauty but not really causes to fade. Blue had to be used in great profusion on the windows because the symbolism of color was well determined and blue stood for the virtue of purity and was the Blessed Virgin's color. It had to come in, therefore, on nearly all occasions. Usually by irradiation blue causes surrounding colors to lose something of their tint, and by contrast often spoils what would ordinarily be expected to prove beautiful color effects. These old workmen had found the secret of using it in such a way as not thus to spoil surrounding colors, not to permit it to be too assertive, yet we have wonderful enduring blues that have come down to us practically unchanged through all these centuries. Where the workmen of the old time set themselves producing pure color effects, their windows look like jewels and coruscate in the light of the setting sun--for their most charming effects were particularly obtained in the west windows--with a glorious beauty that has appealed to every generation since.

It was not alone in the building trades, however, that these fine things were accomplished. Bookmaking reached a degree of perfection that [{167}] has never been excelled. Humphreys, the authority on illuminated books, declares that the manuscript volumes of the thirteenth century, illuminated as they are by the patient labor and the finely developed taste of this time, are the most beautiful ever made. We have one example of the thirteenth-century illuminated book in the Lenox Library in New York for which, I believe, the museum authorities were quite willing to pay some $18,000, and it is worth much more than that now, for it is a wondrously beautiful example of the illuminations of the time. Like the glassmakers, these bookmakers had secrets that have been lost, and that we with all our knowledge of science and of art in the modern time, or at least our fondly complacent notion of our knowledge of art and science, are unable to find the formulas for. They used blues in their illuminating work that have never faded, though blues are so prone to fade on parchment. They managed their blues in wonderful way and they still are as fresh and as undisturbing of the harmony of other colors as in the long ago. They could burnish gold and it stays as bright as when it was first applied to the leaves, even after seven centuries. We have lost the art of burnishing gold in such applied work and ours becomes dull after a time.

Nor was this teaching of technics confined only to the men. From this period we have the most beautiful needlework in the world. The famous [{168}] Cope of Ascoli has recently attracted wide attention. Mr. Pierpont Morgan purchased it and was willing to pay $60,000 for it, though the jewels that had been on it originally had been removed. His experts assured him that it was the most beautiful piece of needlework in the world. Afterwards it was found to have been stolen, and so he restored it to the Italian Government, who did not return it to the little convent of Ascoli in North Central Italy, from which it had been stolen and where it was made at the end of the thirteenth century (1284), Elsewhere in Europe they were doing just as charming work with the needle. In fact England, not Italy, was the acknowledged home of it. The English Cope of Cyon is another notable example of needlework from this time. Thirteenth-century work with the needle is famous in the history of the art. It was the product of just the same forces that gave us the wonderful stained glass. They, too, used colors and applied great art principles to this unpromising mode of expression and accomplished great results. I have had the privilege of seeing the copy of the Cope of Ascoli that was made while in Mr. Morgan's possession, and, like the stained glass of York or Bourges or Chartres, it is one of the things not likely ever to be forgotten, so beautiful a realization is it of what is best in taste and art.

The supremely interesting feature of this popular education was its effect upon the lives, and [{169}] minds, and happiness of the workmen. Men got up to their work in the morning not as to a routine occupation in which they did the same things over and over again, until they were so tired that they could scarcely do them any more, and then came home to rest from fatigue in weariness of mind and of body. But they awoke from sound sleep with the memory that ideas had been coming to them the day before, and especially towards evening that, now with fresh bodies, they might be able to execute better, and that it would surely be a pleasure to work out. They came to their work with an artist's spirit, hopeful that they would be able to express in the material what they saw so clearly with their mind's eye. It was tiresome working but the hours were not long, and always there was the thought of accomplishment worthy of the cathedral or the abbey or the town hall, worthy to be placed beside the masterpieces in the best sense of that dear old word, that their fellow-workmen of the other gilds were accomplishing around them. They went to bed healthily tired but not weary, sometimes to dream of their work, not as a nightmare, but as something that represented possibilities of accomplishment. When technical schools can lift men up to this plane then, indeed, there is a chance for happiness even for the workmen.

Compare with this for a moment the lot of the modern workman. He goes out in the morning to work that seldom is interesting, that he [{170}] practically never cares to do only that he must get money enough to support himself and his family, and that requires the frequent repetition of routine movements until he is weary, body and soul. He must work or starve. He has very little interest in it as a rule, often none at all, and sometimes he is thoroughly disgusted with it. He must earn money enough to get bread to live to-day so that he shall be able to go and work again tomorrow. And so the humdrum round from day to day with nothing to relieve the prospect until the darkness comes when no man can work. As to dreams of accomplishment or pleasure in his work, as the artist has, there is practically none. He needs must go on, and that is all about it. Is it any wonder that this breeds discontent?

Happy is the man who has found his work. There is only one happiness in this little life of ours and that consists in having work to do that one cares to do, and the chance to do it in such order and with such rewards as make life reasonably pleasant, satisfying from the material side. There are no pleasures in life equal to the joy of the worker in his work when he cares for it. Pleasures are at most but passing incidents. The work is what counts. These workmen of the Middle Ages taught in the technical schools of that olden time had chances for happiness, chances that were well taken, such as perhaps no other generation of workmen could have.

Of course it may be said that, after all, there [{171}] were only opportunities for a few to work at the great architectural monuments of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In a sense this is true, but it must not be forgotten that without modern mechanical means and with the slow, patient laborious effort required to raise these huge edifices, much time and many men were required. Besides the cathedrals and the abbeys there were many private castles and town halls, and then in many places the homes of the gilds themselves, some of which, as, for instance, the famous hall of the clothmakers at Ypres, are among the most beautiful monuments of the architecture of that period. In everything, however, the workmen had a chance to do beautiful work. In the textile industries this is the time when some of the most beautiful cloth ever made was invented and brought to perfection. Linen was woven with wonderful skill, satin was invented and brought to perfection, silk brocades of marvellous designs of many kinds were made, threads of gold and silver were introduced into the textures, wonderfully fine effects were studied out and applied in the industries, and just as in the decorative arts so in the arts of cloth-weaving and of many other forms of human endeavor, there was an artistic craftsmanship such as we have lost sight of to a great extent in our age of machinery.

The Irish poet, Yeats, in bidding a group of American friends good-bye some five years ago, said that we had many opportunities for culture [{172}] in life here in America, but we must be careful to take them fully and not deceive ourselves with counterfeits, or we would surely miss something of the precious privilege and development that might be ours. Among other things he said, that we must not forget "that until the very utensils in the kitchen are useful as well as beautiful no nation can think of itself as really cultured." If men and women can bear without constraint to handle things that are merely useful without beauty in them, there is something seriously lacking in their culture. Whatever is merely useful is hideous. Nature never made anything that was merely useful in all the world's history. The things of nature around us are all wonderful utilities and yet charmingly beautiful. The pretty flowers are seed envelopes meant to attract birds and insects, so that the seeds may be scattered. The beautiful fruits are other seed envelopes meant to attract man and the animals, so that the seeds may be carried far and wide. The leaves of trees are eminently useful as lungs and stomach and yet are beautiful and have a wondrous variety and a charm all their own.

This precious lesson of nature they seem to have understood well in the Middle Ages and applied it with marvellous perfection. It has often been called to attention that portions of Gothic edifices in dark corners, out of the sight of the ordinary visitor, are just as beautifully decorated in their own way as those which are [{173}] especially on exhibition. The gravestones in their churches, though meant to be trodden under foot and often covered by the dirt from the shoes of passersby, yet had bronze ornaments that are so beautiful that in the modern time artists take rubbings of them so as to carry the designs away with them. While every portion of the church is beautiful, the same thing was true in the castles and to a great extent in their own homes. The furniture of that time, even in the houses of smaller tradesmen, was beautiful in its simplicity, its solidity, its charm of line, and then, above all, its absolute rejection of all pretence of seeming to be anything other than it was. Their drinking cups were beautiful, their domestic utensils of various kinds had charming lines and, though they did not have as many as we have in the modern time, what they had were so beautiful that now we find them on exhibition in museums, and we are beginning to imitate them in order that the wealthy may have as bric-à-brac ornaments in their houses, the utensils which were in ordinary use in the homes of the middle classes of the thirteenth century.

There was a satisfaction for the workman in making all these beauteous things. He knew, as a rule, for whom they were to be made. He knew where they were to be placed. He often saw his handiwork afterwards. His reputation depended on it. There was a happiness then in doing it well, and in taking his time to it, that surpasses [{174}] any idle pleasure away from his work, as happiness always surpasses pleasure. There was the joy of the doing, and joys we are coming to appreciate mean ever so much more than pleasures. What we want at the present time are more joys and less pleasures. How many men and women were blessed in that time because they had found their work. That is the only real happiness in life. How profusely it was scattered over the mediaeval world.

Almost nothing that was made was of a character that could be done by mere routine. A man had to occupy both mind and body in the making of the textiles, of the kitchen utensils, of the furniture, of the various metal utensils required for houses, and so for nearly everything else. It is the workman who has mere routine work that has opportunity to think about other things and brood over his lot and grow more and more dissatisfied. It is the man who does not have to give his mind to what he is doing, but who while his body grows more and more tired accomplishing a limited set of constantly repeated movements, may allow his mind to ponder gloomily over his condition, compare it with that of others and grow envious, who has the worst possible seeds of discontent in his occupation.

Men who did this sort of work that required active mental attention, learned to think for themselves. When they had moments of leisure, not having newspapers and superficial shallow books [{175}] to waste their time on, they did some thinking. Any one who has had a little intimate contact with the old-fashioned artisans, the shoemakers, the harnessmakers, the cabinetmakers who work at benches, the woodcarvers, men who have real trades, knows how often one finds among them a deep, serious thinker with regard to the problems of life around. They do not drink in other people's opinions and then think that they are thinking, because they are able to repeat some formulas of words. Such men are not easily led. They make good jurymen, they have logic; above all, they are thoughtful. There must have been much of this in the old time among the handicraftsmen of the Middle Ages. It is doubtless to this that we owe the fact that these men were gradually organized in many wonderful ways into the basic democracy on which the liberties of the English-speaking people of the world are founded. We shall have much more to say of this in treating of the wonderful fraternal organizations, with solutions for nearly every problem of social need, which these men succeeded in working out for themselves in times considered to have been benighted.

There was another phase of the education of these members of the gilds that is even more interesting because it trenches particularly on the intellectual side of life, the provision of entertainment and solves an important social problem. This was the organization of dramatic [{176}] performances for the people in which the members of the gilds took part. The stories of the Old Testament and of the New, and of the lives of the Saints, and of various incidents connected with Church history, were worked up into plays and were presented in the various cities. We have the remains of many cycles of these plays. They represent the beginnings of our modern dramatic literature. They were simple and very naive, but they were interesting and they concerned some of the deepest and most beautiful thoughts with which man has ever been concerned. The members of the gilds and their families took part in them. The principal sets of plays were given in the springtime at the various festivals of the Church, so frequent then. Most of the spare time from Christmas on, especially the long hours of the winter evenings, were occupied in preparations of various kinds for these spring dramatic performances. It is impossible to conceive of anything more likely to give people innocent and joyful yet absorbing occupations of mind than these preparations.

Some of the young men and women were chosen as the actors and had to learn their parts and be rehearsing them. Choruses had to be trained, costumes had to be made, some scenery had to be arranged, everything was done by the members of the particular gild for each special portion of the cycle of the play assigned to them. Garments had actually to be manufactured out of the wool, [{177}] the dyeing of them had to be managed, spangles had to be made for them, there must have been busy occupation of the most interesting kind for many hands. Of course it is easy to say that these naive productions could not have meant very much for the people. Any one who thinks so, however, has had no experience with private theatricals, and above all has never had the opportunity to see how much they mean for the occupation of young folks' minds and the keeping of them out of mischief during the winter months when they are much indoors. When the Jesuits founded their great schools in Europe they laid it down as one of the rules of the institute to be observed in all their schools, that plays in certain number should be given every year, partly for the sake of the educational effect of such occupation with dramatic literature, but mainly because of the interest aroused by them and the occupation of mind for young folks which they involve.

As to how much they may mean, perhaps the best way for those of our day to realize it is to take the example of Oberammergau with its great Passion Play still given. Here we have a typical instance of a Passion play of the olden time maintaining itself. The preparations for it occupy the villagers in their mountain home not for months only, but for years before it is given. It represents the centre of the village life, is the main portion of its activities. The place of a [{178}] family with regard to the play constitutes its position in the village aristocracy. Something of this must have been true in the gilds of the Middle Ages in these dramatic performances. Just as at Oberammergau nearly every one of the villagers has something to do or is in some way connected with the preparation of the play, so most of the members of the particular gilds and probably their families had some connection with their plays. The children had their interest and curiosity aroused and were allowed to help in their measure, and then when the glorious day of the performance came, there must have been joy in the hearts of all and rejoicing over its success. This is the sort of occupation of mind that we would like to be able to provide for our people in the cities and towns, but circumstances are such that we cannot.

Those who would think that these old Passion and mystery plays meant very little for the people who did not take part in them and, above all, very little for the spectators, in an educational way, forget entirely that this side of the work of the old plays can also be studied at Oberammergau. This little town of 1,400 inhabitants occupies itself for years to such good effect that, when the performances are given crowds flock from all over the world to witness them. When I was there in 1900 I think that I saw the most cosmopolitan gathering that I had ever been in, though I have been to several International [{179}] Medical Congresses. There were Russians and Poles, and Scandinavians and Americans and Australians, and there stayed in the house with us a little party from Buenos Ayres, and our seat companions in the train were English, who had been born in India, and they pointed out to us some South Africans who had come to see the Passion Play. This village of 1,400 inhabitants succeeds in producing actors who are capable of arousing thus the interest of the world, and they have artistic taste enough to mount it well, and they manage their performances in thoroughly dignified fashion, and yet in many ways they have the simplicity and, above all, the dear old simple faith of the mediaeval people from whom they come. This is the best possible evidence that we could have of the place of the old plays in the life of the people.

We have another form of evidence that is extremely interesting. Out of these old mystery plays, dramas of the Nativity and of the Passion with the introductions and interludes to these central facts of creation, there developed first the morality plays and then the drama of the modern time. Twice in the history of the world, each time quite independent of the other, the drama has originated anew out of religious ceremonials. In old Greece this is the origin of the drama; in the Middle Ages exactly the same thing happened. Nor was this origin unworthy in any way of the great development that came. Some of the old [{180}] mystery plays were written with wonderful dramatic insight and with a capacity to bring out dramatic moments that is very admirable. As for the morality plays we have had one of them repeated to us in recent years, "Everyman," and well it has served to show how able was the genius of these old dramatic writers. People of the modern sordid time listened for two hours enraptured and then went away, paying the tribute of silence to this wonderful arrangement of the ideas connected with such a familiar theme as the four last things to be remembered--death, judgment, heaven and hell. Fine as is "Everyman," there are some critics who think the "Castle of Perseverance," written about the same time, the latter part of the fifteenth century, an even greater play.

The most important feature of this work in dramatics of the old gilds was not the entertainment, though with what we know of how low entertainment can sink and how much it can mean for degradation, surely that would be sufficient, but the fact that all of the workmen and their families in the towns were occupied with the high thoughts and the beautiful phrases and the uplifting motives and the deep significance of the Bible stories. These are so simple that no one could fail to understand. They are written so close to the heart of human nature that even the simplest child can appreciate their meaning. They are full of the most precious lessons, yet without [{181}] any of that moralizing that is often so sterile and so characteristic of what we call mere preaching. All the townspeople were occupied for months beforehand with these stories. They got ever closer and closer to the heart of the mystery in them. They got closer thus to the heart of the mystery of life. They were made to feel the presence of the Creator and of Providence while occupying themselves with thoughts that are the essence of deepest poetry. What would one not give to be able to occupy a great number of people, for many hours every winter, with such thoughts, not alone for their moral effect but their real educational value. They did not add useless information to useless information, but they did bring development of mind and, above all, heart. In my book "The Thirteenth the Greatest of Centuries," [Footnote 14] I tell the story of how the various trades gilds in the towns divided these phases of the mystery plays among themselves. Every one had an opportunity to do something. They were the tanners and the plasterers, the cardmakers and the fullers, the coopers, the armorers, the gaunters and glovers, the shipwrights, the pessners, fishmongers and mariners, the parchment-makers and bookbinders, the hosiers, the spicers, the pewterers and founders, the tylers and smiths, the chandlers, the orfevers, the goldsmiths, the goldbeaters, the money-makers, and then many other trades whose names sound curious to us of [{182}] the modern time. The bowyers or makers of bows; the fletchers or arrow featherers; the hay-resters or workers in horsehair, the bowlers or bowlmakers, the feystours, makers of saddle-trees; the verrours, glaciers; the dubbers, refurbishers of clothes; the lumniners or illuminators, the scriveners or public writers; the drapers, the mercers; the lorymers or bridle-makers; the spurriers, makers of spurs; the cordwaners; the bladesmiths; the curriers; the scalers, and many others, all had their chances to take part in these old plays.

[Footnote 14: Catholic Summer School Press, New York, 1907.]

They were not being entertained, but were themselves active agents in the doing of things for themselves and for others. This is what brings real contentment with it. Superficial entertainment that occupies the surface of the mind for the moment means very little for real recreation of mind. What men need is to have something that makes them think along lines different to those in which they are engaged in their daily work. This gives real rest. The blood gets away from parts of the brain where it has been all day, flows to new parts, and recreation is the result. Such entertainment, however, must occupy the very centre of interest for the moment and not be something seen in passing and then forgotten. The modern psychotherapeutist would say, that no better amusement than this could possibly be obtained since it brought real diversion of mind. Above all, we of the modern time who know how vicious, how immoral in its tendencies, how [{183}] suggestive of all that is evil, how familiarizing with what is worst in men until familiarity begets contempt, commercial entertainment in the shape of dramatics, so-called at least, may be, cannot help but admire and envy and would emulate, if we could, this fine solution of a very pressing social problem that the gilds found in an educational feature that is of surpassing value.

There are three post-graduate courses in modern life that are quite beyond the control of our educational authorities, though we talk much of our interest and our accomplishments in education. These three have more influence over the people than all of our popular education. They are the newspaper, the library and the theatre. Some of us who know what the library is doing are not at all satisfied with it. We are spending an immense amount of money mainly to furnish the cheapest kind of mere superficial amusement to the people of our cities. In so doing we are probably hurting their power of concentration of mind instead of helping it, and it is this concentration of mind that is the best fruit of education. This is, however, another story. Of the newspaper, as we now have it, the less said the better. It is bringing our young people particularly into intimate contact with many of the vicious and brutalizing things of life, the sex crimes, brutal murders and prize-fights, so that uplift and refinement almost become impossible. As for the theatre, no one now thinks of it as [{184}] educationally valuable. Our plays are such superficial presentations of the life around us that once they have had their run no one thinks of reviving them. This is the better side of the theatre. The worst side is absolutely in the hands of the powers of evil and is confessedly growing worse all the time.

Besides these indirect educational features the gilds encouraged certain formal educational institutions that are of great interest, and that have been misunderstood for several centuries until recent years. In many places they maintained grammar schools and these grammar schools were eminently successful in helping to make scholars of such of the sons of the members of the gilds as wanted to lift themselves above their trades into the intellectual life. We know more about the grammar school at Stratford-on-Avon than of any of the others. The reason for this is that we have been interested in the antiquities of Shakespeare's town and the conditions which obtained in it, before as well as during his lifetime. The Gild of the Holy Cross of Stratford maintained a grammar school in which many pupils were educated. That this was not a singular feature of gild work is evident from what we know of many other gilds. These gild schools were suppressed in the reformation time and then later had to be replaced by the so-called Edward VI grammar schools, in one of which it is usually said that Shakespeare was educated. As the English [{185}] historian Gairdner declared not long since in his "History of the Pre-Reformation Times in England," Edward has obtained a reputation for foundations in charity and in education that he by no means deserved. The schools founded by him particularly were nothing more than re-establishments of popular schools of the olden time whose endowment had been confiscated. The new foundations were makeshifts to appease popular clamor.

The old gilds did not believe in devoting all the early years of children to mere book-learning. Some few with special aptitudes for this were provided with opportunities. The rest were educated in various ways at home until their apprenticeship to a trade began, and then their real education commenced. Our own experience with education in the early years from six to eight or nine is not particularly favorable. Children who enter school a little later than the legal age graduate sooner and with even higher marks than those who begin at the age of six. This has been shown by statistics in England in many cities. What is learned with so much fuss and worry and bother for the children and the teachers from six to eight, is rapidly picked up in a few months at the age of eight or nine, and then is better assimilated. The grammar schools of the gilds took the children about the age of nine or ten and then gave them education in letters. That education, by the way, began at six in the morning and, [{186}] with two hours of intervals, continued until four in the afternoon. They believed in the eight-hour day for children, but they began it good and early so that artificial light might not constitute a problem.

The best schooling, however, afforded by the gilds, after that in self-help of course, was that in mutual aid. We are establishing schools of philanthropy in the modern time and we talk much about the organization of charity and other phases of mutual aid. In this as in everything else we map out, as George Eliot once said, our ignorance of things, or at least our gropings after solutions of problems, in long Greek names, which often serve to produce the idea that we know ever so much more about these subjects than we really do. The training in brotherly love and helpfulness in the old gilds was a fine school. Those who think that it is only now that ideas of mutuality in sharing responsibilities, of co-operation and co-ordination of effort for the benefit of all, of community interests, are new, should study Toulmin Smith's work on the gilds, or read Brentano on the foreign gilds. There is not a phase of our organization of charity in the modern time that was not well anticipated by the members of the gilds, and that, too, in ways such as we cannot even hope to rival unless we change the basis on which our helpfulness is founded. Theirs was not a stooping down of supposed better, or so-called upper classes, to help the lower, [{187}] but organization among the people to help themselves so that there was in no sense a pauperization.

Every phase of human need was looked to. We are just beginning to realize our obligations to care for the old, and the last twenty years has seen various efforts on the part of governments to provide old-age pensions. In the Middle Ages according to the laws of the gilds the man who had paid his dues for seven years would then draw a weekly pension equal to something more than five dollars now, for all the rest of his life if he were disabled by injury, or had become incapacitated from old age or illness. Then there were gilds to provide insurance against loss by fire, loss by robbery on land and also on sea, loss by shipwreck, loss even by imprisonment and all other phases of human needs. If the workman were injured his family nursed him during the day but a brother member of the gild, as we have said, was sent to care for him at night, and a good portion of his wages went on, paid to him out of the gild chest. If he died his widow and orphans were cared for by a special pension. The widow did not have to break up the family and send the children to orphan asylums. There were practically no orphan asylums. The gilds cared for the children of dead members. As the boys grew up special attention was given them so as to provide a trade for them, and they were given earlier opportunities than others to get on in life. [{188}] The orphans were the favorite children of the gilds, and instead of a child being handicapped by the loss of his parents when he was young, it sometimes happened that he got better opportunities than if his parents lived.

These gilds provided opportunities for social entertainment and friendly intercourse and for such acquaintanceship as would afford mutual pleasure and give opportunities for the meeting of the young folks,--sons and daughters of the members of the gild. They had their yearly benefit at which the wives of the members and their sweethearts were supposed by rule to come, and then they had other meetings and social gatherings--picnics in the country in the summer, dances in the winter time and all in a circle where every one knew every one else, and all went well. These are some social features of these gilds educational in the highest sense that we can well envy in the modern time, when we find it so difficult to secure innocent, happy pleasures for young people that will not leave a bad taste in the mouth afterwards. When a member of the gild died his brother members attended the Mass which was said for him and gave a certain amount in charity that was meant to be applied for his benefit. The whole outlook on life was eminently brotherly. There has never been such a teaching of true fraternity, of the brotherhood of man, of the necessity for mutual aid and then of such practice of it as makes it easy, as among these old gilds.

[{189}]

The finest result of this teaching is to be seen in the democratic spirit that gradually arose as a consequence of these gilds and their teaching of self-government in all local affairs to the people. The gilds were arranged and organized in the various parishes. These parishes were independent communities for local affairs who had charge of the police system, the health, the road-making, the path-keeping, the boundary-guarding and, in general, the comfort and convenience of the community. The gildsmen, more than any others, were the factors in these parishes. They accumulated money for the various purposes and had great influence in the development of the community life and the solution of local government problems.

It would be very easy to think that the gilds could not have fulfilled all these duties and subserved all these needs. If we recall, however, that there were 80,000 gilds in England at the end of the fifteenth century, when there were not more than 4,000,000 of people in the whole country, then we can see how much could be accomplished. Alas, at the beginning of the next century all their moneys were confiscated, and because they were Church societies, every one of them requiring attendance at Church duties and at Mass, as well as at the Masses for the dead, but, above all, for the crime of having money in their treasuries at a time when the King needed money and his appetite had been whetted by the spoil of the [{190}] monasteries and the churches, the gilds were obliterated. Only a few of them in London that had powerful protectors and that escaped on the plea that they were commercial organizations and not religious societies, were able to preserve something of their old-time integrity. These are now so rich that they are the wonder of those who know them. They give us a good idea, however, of the deep foundations that had been established out of the common chest in the purchase of property for these gilds.

In solving the problems of industrial insurance, of providing for the widows and the orphans, of securing annuities when they would be needed, these gilds set us an example that it would be well for us to follow. The insurance money was not accumulated in such huge sums that it would be a constant temptation for exploitation on the part of officials. It was distributed in comparatively small sums in many thousands of treasuries, and was under the surveillance of those most interested in it. The old-age pensions were not governmental, issued in large numbers and open to inevitable abuses, but were given by those who knew, to those whose necessities were well known.

No wonder that we find democratic government developing co-ordinately with these gilds. At the beginning of the thirteenth century Magna Charta was signed. About the middle of it the first English Parliament met, before the end of it the proper representation of the cities and [{191}] towns which were mainly controlled by the gilds was secured and during the last quarter of it the English Common Law came into effect so as to secure the rights of all. Bracton's great "Digest of the English Common Law" was written about 1280, and it is still the great sourcebook of the principles of law in English-speaking countries. In many of the States of our Union the Supreme Courts still make their decisions on the basis of the English Common Law, and until a decade or two ago all of them did. The people's rights were secured by the education of the people and the property laws and those for the guardianship of the person and for the prevention of autocratic interference with liberty were all of them put into effect as a consequence of this education in democracy.

This, then, was surely an ideal teaching of the masses, a teaching of the arts and crafts, a teaching of mutual aid, a teaching of true fraternity, a teaching of book-learning whenever that was considered necessary or advisable, a teaching of the rights of man and a wonderful development of laws as a consequence, and all of this accomplished not by the upper classes, stooping to lift the lower classes, but out of the conscious development of the lower classes themselves, so that there came a true evolution and not merely a superficial influence from without. If we want to know how to teach the masses and to help them to contentment, happiness, occupation of mind, [{192}] uplifting entertainment, cheerful amusement and, above all, to conscious democratic government, here is the model of it as it can be found nowhere else. I commend it to those who are teaching and who, realizing the failure of our modern education in many ways, are looking about for the remedies that will help to make our popular education more efficient.

The soul of this ideal education of the masses was the training of character. They had no illusions that the mere imparting of information would make people better nor that the knowing of many things would make them more desirable citizens. Probably they did not consciously reason much about these subjects, but their instincts led them straight. Mr. Edward O. Sisson, writing in the Atlantic Monthly for July, 1910, says that the final question regarding education is whether it avails to produce the type of character required by the republic (nation) and the race. To accomplish this we need to fit our practice to Herbart's great formula that, "the chief business of education is the ethical revelation of the universe." Take any part of this system of education that I have called the ideal education of the masses and try it by that standard and see how high its mark will be. Their handiwork is mainly an act of devotion to the God of the universe and its products are the most beautiful gifts that ever were offered to him. Cathedral stonework, glass-work, ironwork, beautiful sacred vessels, handsomest [{193}] vestments ever made, needlework, lacework, the beautiful setting of the cathedral; what an act of worship it all was! When it was finished, it belonged to no class but to the whole people. It was theirs to be proud of and to worship in.

Their very amusements were often acts of worship. Their plays concerned the revelations of God to man, for they were all founded on the Bible, and even for those who may not accept those revelations as divine the fact that the men and women, the masses, the handworkmen and the little traders, were for many months in each year engaged with the high ethical thoughts that constitute the greatest contribution to the ethical revelation of the universe that we have in literature, must of itself be an eminently satisfying feature of this old-time education. As regards the Creator, these people were constantly made familiar with Him, His works and ways. Their holidays were holy-days. They were anniversaries in the life of the God-Man or His chosen servants. The men and women whom they celebrated on those days were chosen characters who had devoted themselves unselfishly to others, so that the after-time hailed them as saints because of their forgetfulness of self. We know what this constantly recurring reminder of the lives of great men and women may be, and then we must not forget that on these days in their great cathedral they heard the story of the life of the saint of the day, and often a discourse on the qualities that [{194}] stamped him or her as worthy of admiration. Let us remember, above all, that there were as many women saints as men, and that these were held up for the admiration and emulation of growing youth. This was ethical training at every turn in life.

Above all, there was constant training in that thoughtfulness for others that means so much in any true system of education. When members of the gilds fell ill, their families nursed them during the day, but members of the gilds chosen for that purpose nursed them at night. It was felt that the family did quite enough not to exhaust itself by night watching. When brother members of the gild died their fellows attended their funeral in a body, and, above all, took part in the Mass for their souls. People who do not understand the Catholic idea of Mass for the dead will not appreciate this in the way that Catholics do, but at least they will understand the brotherliness of the act and the beautiful purpose that prompted so many to gather, in order that even after death they might do whatever they could for this departed brother. Besides the death of a brother gildsman was the signal for the giving of alms because the merit of these alms, it was felt, could be transferred to his account, and so the bond of fraternity continued even in the life beyond. The ethical effect of all this on the minds of people who sincerely believed can scarcely be exaggerated. Here is a training of the will and [{195}] of character, and a teaching of the relationship of man to man and of man to the Creator carried out into all the smallest details of life.

Above all, these generations had a training in personal service for one another. Every one exercised charity. It was not a few of the very wealthy who practised philanthropy. They had safeguards which, as far as is possible, prevented abuse of this charity. The alms, for instance, that was given on the occasion of a brother's funeral was not distributed hit or miss and all at one time, but members of the gild bought from the treasurer tokens which might be redeemed in bread and meat or in cast-off clothing or in some other way. These were distributed to the poor as they seemed to need them. If you met a poor man who seemed really in want you could give him one or more of these tokens and then be sure that while he would get whatever was necessary to supply his absolute needs, he would not be able to abuse charity. In our time we constantly have stories of large accumulations on the part of street beggars who own valuable property and have accounts in savings banks and the like. There was no possibility of this under the mediaeval system and yet charity was widely exercised, every one took some part in it, and there was that training, not only in effective pity for affliction, but also in helpfulness for others, which means so much more than the exercise of occasional charity, because, for the moment, one is touched by the [{196}] sight of suffering or has remorse because one feels that one has been indulging one's self and wants the precious satisfaction that will come from a little making up for luxurious extravagance.

In our time, when we have gradually excluded moral teaching and training almost entirely from our schools and our methods of education, this phase of the ideal education of the masses is particularly interesting. Milton declared that "the main skill and groundwork of education will be to temper the pupils with such lectures and explanations as will draw them into willing obedience, inflamed with the study of learning and the admiration of virtue, stirred up with high hopes of living to be brave men and worthy patriots." Their great stone-books, the cathedrals, where all who came could read the life of the Lord, the frequent reminders of the lives of the saints, doers among men who forgot themselves and thought of others, the fraternal obligations of the gilds and their intercourse with each other, all these constituted the essence of an education as nearly like that demanded by Milton as can well be imagined. It seems far-fetched to go back five, six, even seven centuries to find such ideals in practice, but the educator who is serious and candid with himself will find it easy to discover the elements of a wonderful intellectual and, above all, moral training of the people, that is the whole people from the lowest to the highest, in these early days.

[{197}]

CYCLES OF FEMININE EDUCATION AND INFLUENCE

[{198}]

"And if I am right nothing can be more foolish than our modern fashion of training men and women differently, whereby one-half of the power of the city is lost. For reflect--if women are not to have the education of men some other must be found for them, and what other can we propose?" --Plato, Laws (Jowett), p. 82. Scribner, 1902.

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CYCLES OF FEMININE EDUCATION AND INFLUENCE [Footnote 15]

[Footnote 15: The material for this was gathered for a lecture on the History of Education delivered for the Academy of the Sacred Heart, Kenwood, Albany, N. Y., and St. Joseph's College, Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, Pa. Very nearly in its present form the address was delivered before the League for the Civic Education of Women, at the Colony Club, New York City, in the winter of 1910.]

Nothing is commoner than to suppose that what we are doing at the present day is an improvement over whatever they were doing at any time in the past in the same line. We were rather proud during the nineteenth century to talk of that century as the century of evolution. Evolutionary terms of all kinds found their way even into everyday speech and a very general impression was produced that we are in the midst of progress so rapid and unerring, that even from decade to decade it is possible to trace the wonderful advance that man is making. We look back on the early nineteenth century as quite hopelessly backward. They had no railroads, no street-car lines, no public street lighting, no modes of heating buildings that gave any comfort in the cold weather, no elevators, and when we compare our present comfortable condition with the discomforts of that not so distant period, we feel how much evolution has done for us, and inevitably [{200}] conclude that just as much progress as has been made in transportation and in comfort, has also been made in the things of the mind, and, above all, in education, so that, while the millennium is not yet here, it cannot surely be far off; and men are attaining at last, with giant strides, the great purpose that runs through the ages.

Probably in nothing is the assumption that we are doing something far beyond what was ever accomplished before, more emphatically expressed than in the ordinary opinions as to what is being done by and for women in our generation. We have come to think that at last in the course of evolution woman is beginning to come into something of her rights, she is at last getting her opportunity for the higher education and for professional education so far as she wants it, and as a consequence is securing that influence which, as the equal of man, she should have in the world. Now there is just one thing with regard to this very general impression which deserves to be called particularly to attention. This is not the first time in the world's history, nor the first by many times, that woman has had the opportunity for the higher education and has taken it very well. Neither is it the first time that she has insisted on having an influence in public affairs, but on the contrary, we can readily find a very curious series of cycles of feminine education and of the exercise of public influence by women, with intervals of almost negative phases in these matters that [{201}] are rather difficult to explain. Let us before trying to understand what the feministic movement means in our own time and, above all, before trying to sum up its ultimate significance for the race, study some of the corresponding movements in former times.