political life his unconscious assumptions may be helpful; if he has not
they are certain to be misleading. Mr. Roosevelt's little book of essays
on _American Ideals_ is, for instance, useful, because when he thinks
about mankind in politics, he thinks about the politicians whom he has
known. After reading it one feels that many of the more systematic books
on politics by American university professors are useless, just because
the writers dealt with abstract men, formed on assumptions of which they
were unaware and which they had never tested either by experience or by
study.

In the other sciences which deal with human actions, this division
between the study of the thing done and the study of the being who does
it is not found. In criminology Beccaria and Bentham long ago showed how
dangerous that jurisprudence was which separated the classification of
crimes from the study of the criminal. The conceptions of human nature
which they held have been superseded by evolutionary psychology, but
modern thinkers like Lombroso have brought the new psychology into the
service of a new and fruitful criminology.

In pedagogy also, Locke, and Rousseau, and Herbart, and the many-sided
Bentham, based their theories of education upon their conceptions of
human nature. Those conceptions were the same as those which underlay
their political theories, and have been affected in the same way by
modern knowledge. For a short time it even looked, as if the lecturers
in the English training colleges would make the same separation between
the study of human institutions and human nature as has been made in
politics. Lectures on School Method were distinguished during this
period from those on the Theory of Education. The first became mere
descriptions and comparisons of the organisation and teaching in the
best schools. The second consisted of expositions, with occasional
comment and criticism of such classical writers as Comenius, or Locke,
or Rousseau; and were curiously like those informal talks on Aristotle,
Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, which, under the name of the Theory of
Politics, formed in my time such a pleasant interlude in the Oxford
course of Humaner Letters. But while the Oxford lecture-courses still, I
believe, survive almost unchanged, the Training College lectures on the
Theory of Education are beginning to show signs of a change as great as
that which took place in the training of medical students, when the
lecturers on