SUPERINTENDENT GREENWOOD, of Kansas City.-I wish we might have a definition from the speaker as to his meaning in the remark that a specialist in a normal-school faculty is a menace. It does not follow because one is a specialist that he is ignorant of other subjects. Those who believe in the subjects they teach and are well-bred people, good thinkers and good workers, are a help and an inspiration to all the students in a normal school. I stand for that kind of specialist. The great danger is that persons who are teaching in the normal school may lack both scholarship and inspiration. The specialist is worth a great deal if he does not insist on putting his drawing harness on all the children.

MISS M. ELIZABETH FARSON, district superintendent of Chicago.- The normal school is in need of open vision. We believe that the normal-trained school-teacher should come to us able to see things from every point of view.

THE DANGER OF USING BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES IN REASONING ON EDUCATIONAL SUBJECTS

WILLIAM T. HARRIS, UNITED STATES COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION, WASHINGTON, D. C.

For many years I have been attracted and afterwards repelled by one theory and another relating to education, which undertook to reason from the body to the mind-from the brain to the soul-from the events of animal life to the events of spiritual life, and to explain the latter thru the former. The attempt to reform the school in some particular by the light of physiology, or by phrenology, or by the study of prehistoric beginnings of civilization, has often been successful; but quite as often it has been unsuccessful. In the former case some waste of bodily power has been prevented; in the latter case some more important spiritual power has been dwarfed or paralyzed to gain some less valuable advantage for the body.

When one first begins to think on a subject which has hitherto been purely a matter of routine and tradition with him, he falls too readily into a habit of criticism of the established order and condemns with undue haste. As a consequence his corrections and would-be reforms all need readjustment to prevent them from doing more harm than good. For he has seen only one evil out of many, or only one phase of an evil instead of the whole of it. On this account he may, by removing one evil, let in another and worse evil that has been held in check by the choice of the less noxious one.

I must confess, with a degree of sadness, that I have become from year to year more skeptical in regard to reforms advocated in the name of school hygiene. Not that I doubt the importance of hygiene, but rather that I doubt the attainments of those who talk so glibly about it. For I see them unduly securing minor advantages at the expense of great and permanent injuries to health and normal growth.

The schoolhouse, at first, was only a slight modification on the dwelling-house. There was light and ventilation sufficient for two, three, or four persons in the room. The dark parts of the room were light enough for many purposes of housework, and if one wished to read or to sew or perform the work of cleansing or separating such articles of food as had been ground and needed sifting, or as were composed of small grains or kernels and needed picking over, a seat near the window secured the requisite light.

But the school needed a room lighted in all parts as nearly equally as possible, and with a constant supply of fresh air, heated properly. It was gradually discovered that the room of the dwelling-house was poorly. adapted for school purposes. Some pupils got too little light and became near-sighted by holding their books too close to their eyes; some came to have weak eyes by having too much light. For the glare of a page on which the sunlight falls is sufficient to produce partial blindness. Even pure sky light, without the direct rays of the sun, will tend to do this. Many have been the so-called improvements which, in correcting the evil of insufficient light, ignored entirely the great injury done to those pupils who sat in the full glare of the sun or of the clear sky, and for hours, each day, tried their eyes on perceiving letters and figures in small print. I need not speak here of the various attempts to light the room from the front of the pupil, forcing him to strain his eyes in order to make out the words of the page when seen in the direction of the source of light; the experiment of lighting from two sides, the left and the right, with its attendant impossibility of getting the light upon the book from either side without at the same time facing the light of the other side. The light was tried from the right side alone, and the pupil had to have the shadow of his hand on the place where he was writing. Light from the left and rear came at last to be adopted with much unanimity by educational experts in this country in 1876. But the tendency to make large buildings has since that time permitted and encouraged the construction of schoolhouses with one-half of the rooms lighted from one side only; this, too, without due consideration of the relation between the height of the tops of the windows and the width of the room. The consequence of this is that most of our cities have schoolrooms in which there is a row of desks where pupils sit in a twilight and acquire the habit of holding their books too near the eyes; and another row of desks where the pupils have the glare of light that I have described, and the effort of nature to adjust the retina to the overplus of light dims the power of vision below the normal standard.

In the schoolroom of a building altered over from a dwelling-house there is also another attendant evil. The pupils in a row of seats placed directly under the windows are exposed in cold weather to chilling currents of air which are constantly flowing down the sides of the wall and

especially down the window surface. Children not of robust constitution often lay the foundation of much bodily disease in this way. Improper lighting, by reason of the sympathy of the eyes with the stomach, produces in pupils of delicate constitution a tendency to nervous dyspepsia. Indeed, the errors in lighting and in avoiding drafts of cold air seem to me so serious that I cannot listen patiently to those who praise the countless devices which are invented for one and another trifling advantage in the hygiene of the schoolroom. For it were better that they had not been discovered than to distract, as they do, the attention from the far weightier matters of light and temperature and ventilation.

One idea crowds out another in some cases, altho in other cases one idea leads to or brings in another. The general idea suggests its appli cations. But the particular idea having small scope may get in the way of more fruitful ideas. We have to measure ideas as to their relative value and decide for ourselves which may properly give way to the other. For example, take the unhygienic school as it existed and now exists in the countries that are backward in this matter of school architecture, and we must admit that the great purposes of the school were secured and are secured in the log schoolhouse, in the dark, ill-ventilated tenement building rented for a school in a slum district, or in a mere shanty school in the west of Ireland. The great purpose of learning to know printed language; to become eye-minded instead of ear-minded; to gain besides one's colloquial vocabulary also a vocabulary of science and literature and philosophy; to become able to understand and use technical language— all these things came then and come now to the gifted youth without the improvements in hygiene that we clamor for. Abraham Lincoln read by the firelight of the blazing hearth and fed his mighty mind.

It is true that the average of life in those unhygienic days was far less than now. But the illiterate savage does not reach a life average so great as the unhygienic but civilized man, and, what is more to the point, fifty years of Europe is worth a cycle of Cathay. A rational life, growing in the production of science and art and literature, and in diffusing the blessing of civilization, is better than a savage life, even if the latter were to have an average of eighty years, while the former were to have an average of thirty years. According to the merely biologic point of view, life is life, whether of plant or animal or man, and the more of it the better. But such is not the spiritual point of view.

Some years ago Max Müller wrote up the theory of the sun-myth as found in the beginnings of mythology. The stories of the heathen gods were thinly veiled allegories of the solar year, or of the four seasons, or of the diurnal revolution. The words signifying divine things are originally words describing the phenomena connected with the progress of the sun in the equinox, or thru the hours of the day and night. Later on; the sun-myth theory was used to explain all religion. It is all

founded on sun-myths. The conclusion was drawn by many devotees to philology that the basis of religion is only a personification of natural phenomena, and that there is no reality corresponding to religious conceptions. It was said that the sun-myth is a disease of language. Then religion came to be regarded also by this school of philologues as also a disease of language. Outsiders who observed this extension of the sunmyth theory began to expect that sooner or later the theory would be carried one step farther, and that philosophic thought would be declared to be a disease of language; and, sure enough, this appears to be the upshot of the book of Professor Max Müller on the Science of Thought. This is made plausible by the following step: The words of a language stand for classes and species of objects, and not for mere individuals. John is a boy says that John belongs to the class of beings known as boy. The word "is" has universal significance as copula expressing subsumption; the article "a" expresses the general concept "one of," and even the word "John" says any boy who is called John. We have to add to language a meaning of our own to make it apply to a particular individual being, and no one person's meaning of a word is absolutely what another person means by it.

Now, add to this view another one with reference to the nature of objects that exist — namely, that all that exists is composed of some one or more definite things; that only particular individuals exist; and that language has made all its words stand for general classes of beings, actions, and relations, and in so doing has made it entirely symbolic, instead of corresponding, literally and in detail, to reality-and we now begin to see where we are going. It is only one step to the conclusion that all general thought relations rest on the scaffolding of language, and are baseless as regards their truth. Generalizations of thought regarding the world and its destiny are the product of a disease of language. In fact, we might as well call language itself a disease.

But where can we stop? If the anthropoid ape invented the disease of language, his animal relatives who could not yet talk were not for that reason any more healthy. For all animal life is a disease as compared with plant life. The animal feels, perceives with his senses, and acts by impulse or instinct. To feel is to set up an activity within a self and after a sort to make one's self an object, or, so to speak, to exist for one's self. Hence to perceive other beings is to represent them by one's own activity, and thus to create within one's self a semblance of other realities. Perception thus rests upon creating within the perceiving being an appearance or semblance of a reality.

This is almost as bad a disease as language is, and we may see that the misfortune of language goes farther back and attaches to sense-perception itself. For the animal that feels or perceives makes for himself an image or representation, in fact, a seeming or make-believe, or some sort of untruth, to stand for the reality.

The plant, it would seem, does not feel nor perceive nor move itself. It does not, like the animal, "dally with false surmise." It feeds on its environment, however. Its life is a life of assimilation and nutrition. The plant is engaged in seizing upon its environment, and converting it into vegetable cells, and adding them to its own structure. Here we have reached soundness and health at last, for we have realities at every step. We have the plant a reality which acts upon inorganic substances in the soil and the air, and gathering them to itself makes them over into vegetable cells of its own kind or species. But after the plant has thus acted, it has destroyed the individuality that previously existed in that part of its environment now appropriated for food. It has annulled other individuality to build up its own. What was real as carbon and oxygen and silica and soda no longer is real in that form. As real they are united and converted into organic compounds that form the cells of the plant. As ideal they may be still only carbon and oxygen and silica and soda. If the plant dies, its vegetable cells will be captured by inorganic forces, and these elements (carbon, oxygen, silica, and soda) will reappear in their old form.

Here we have to ask whether the plant life is not itself also a disease. Is it not a masquerade? Does it not act to enshroud the inorganic matter in new forms, making it as vegetable cells possess entirely new properties and lose its old properties? Does it not, after the death of the plant, let the old individuality of the elements reappear? But which is the true reality under the appearance? Is it the inorganic elements, or the organic compounds? Why should we not say that the inorganic is a state of helpless abstraction in which it does not realize its true being? And is it not the life of the plant that lifts up the inorganic into a higher and more concrete and perfect form of existence wherein the inorganic elements reveal the wondrous possibilities that were in them, but not made manifest or brought into actual reality?

And again, if the inorganic is only itself a masquerade, hiding its higher life until by the aid of the plant it comes to actualize or make real its true self, why shall we not say that the plant, also, takes on a higher form of realization when it in turn becomes feeling, perceiving, and willing, on being taken up into the animal organism? For the representation of another existence than one's own is, after all, a higher form of reality for the being that represents. For the inorganic does not fully realize itself until it comes in the plant and the animal to show what syntheses it is capable of, and in what ways it can be instrumental in the process of self-representation. Self-representation in the form of feeling is, indeed, something that belongs to the order of the miraculous, as looked at from the standpoint of the inorganic-it stubbornly resists a mechanical explanation.

But now, if we admit this new view of the subject, we must go farther