d
for the sake of wider and freer application in later concrete action.
There is a kind of idle theory which is antithetical to practice; but
genuinely scientific theory falls within practice as the agency of its
expansion and its direction to new possibilities.

3. Naturalism and Humanism in Education. There exists an educational
tradition which opposes science to literature and history in the
curriculum. The quarrel between the representatives of the two interests
is easily explicable historically. Literature and language and a
literary philosophy were entrenched in all higher institutions of
learning before experimental science came into being. The latter had
naturally to win its way. No fortified and protected interest readily
surrenders any monopoly it may possess. But the assumption, from
whichever side, that language and literary products are exclusively
humanistic in quality, and that science is purely physical in import,
is a false notion which tends to cripple the educational use of both
studies. Human life does not occur in a vacuum, nor is nature a mere
stage setting for the enactment of its drama (ante, p. 211). Man's
life is bound up in the processes of nature; his career, for success or
defeat, depends upon the way in which nature enters it. Man's power of
deliberate control of his own affairs depends upon ability to direct
natural energies to use: an ability which is in turn dependent upon
insight into nature's processes. Whatever natural science may be for the
specialist, for educational purposes it is knowledge of the conditions
of human action. To be aware of the medium in which social intercourse
goes on, and of the means and obstacles to its progressive development
is to be in command of a knowledge which is thoroughly humanistic in
quality. One who is ignorant of the history of science is ignorant of
the struggles by which mankind has passed from routine and caprice, from
superstitious subjection to nature, from efforts to use it magically,
to intellectual self-possession. That science may be taught as a set of
formal and technical exercises is only too true. This happens whenever
information about the world is made an end in itself. The failure of
such instruction to procure culture is not, however, evidence of the
antithesis of natural knowledge to humanistic concern, but evidence of a
wrong educational attitude. Dislike to employ scientific knowledge as it
functions in men's occupations is itsel