s for sages.

For protection against all these follies which so soon fall into vices,
or decay into insanity, we must look to the schools. A sound
recognition of cause and effect in human affairs is our best safeguard.
The old common sense of the "un-high-schooled man," aided by
instruments of precision, and directed by logic, must be carried over
into the schools. Clear thinking and clean acting, we believe, are
results of the study of nature. When men have made themselves wise, in
the wisdom which may be completed in action, they have never failed to
make themselves good. When men have become wise with the lore of
others, the learning which ends in self, and does not spend itself in
action, they have been neither virtuous nor happy. "Much learning is a
weariness of the flesh." Thought without action ends in intense
fatigue of soul, the disgust with all the "sorry scheme of things
entire," which is the mark of the unwholesome and insane philosophy of
Pessimism. This philosophy finds its condemnation in the fact that it
has never yet been translated into pure and helpful life.

With our children, the study of words and abstractions alone may, in
its degree, produce the same results. Nature-studies have long been
valued as a "means of grace," because they arouse the enthusiasm, the
love of work which belongs to open-eyed youth. The child _blase_ with
moral precepts and irregular conjugations turns with delight to the
unrolling of ferns and the song of birds. There is a moral training in
clearness and tangibility. An occult impulse to vice is hidden in all
vagueness and in all teachings meant to be heard but not to be
understood. Nature is never obscure, never occult, never esoteric.
She must be questioned in earnest, else she will not reply. But to
every serious question she returns a serious answer. "Simple, natural,
and true" should make the impression of simplicity and truth. Truth
and virtue are but opposite sides of the same shield. As leaves pass
over into flowers, and flowers into fruit, so are wisdom, virtue, and
happiness inseparably related.

[1] Read before the National Educational Association at Buffalo, New
York, 1896.

THE HIGHER SACRIFICE.[1]

Each man that lives is, in part, a slave, because he is a living being.
This belongs to the definition of life itself. Each creature must bend
its back to the lash of its environment. We imagine life without
conditions--life free fro