the realism
which ought to characterize all rational and sound instruction. The
question rather is as to the field in which the real is to be sought--in
the mind of man, or in external nature. As the former may be called
humanistic-realism, so the latter may be called sense- or
naturalistic-realism. Of the latter, Comenius is the true founder,
although his indebtedness to Ratich was great. Mere acquisition of the
ordered facts of nature, and man's relation to them, was with him the
great aim--if not the sole aim--of all purely intellectual instruction.
And here there necessarily entered the governing idea, encyclopaedism or
pansophism. Let all the sciences, he said, be taught in their elements
in all schools, and more fully at each successive stage of the pupil's
progress. It is by knowledge that we are what we are, and the necessary
conclusion from this must be, let all things be taught to all.

It is at this point that many will part company with Comenius. The mind
stored with facts, even if these be ordered facts, will not necessarily
be much raised in the scale of humanity as an intelligence. The natural
powers may be simply overweighted by the process, and the natural
channels of spontaneous reason choked. In education, while our main
business is to promote the growth of moral purpose and of a strong sense
of duty, we have to support these by the discipline of intelligence, and
by training to power and work rather than by information. On the other
hand, only those who are ignorant of the history and the recognized
results of education will wholly abjure realism in the Comenian sense;
but it has to be assigned its own place, and nothing more than this, in
the education of a human being. The sum of the matter seems to be this,
that while a due place in all education is to be assigned to
sense-realistic studies, especially in the earlier years of family and
school life, the humanistic agencies must always remain the most potent
in the making of a man.

Comenius and his followers again confound knowledge with wisdom. He
affirms that "all authors are to be banished from school except those
that give a knowledge of useful things." Wisdom is certainly not to be
opposed to knowledge, but it depends more on a man's power of
discrimination, combination, and imagination than on the extent of his
mental store of facts. Were it not so, our whole secondary education,
and all the purely disciplinal part of our university instruc