ater education was to learn that, after
all, the amount of real knowledge in this world, voluminous though it
seems, is after all pitiably small. Of opinion and speculation we have a
surplus, but of real, downright, hard fact, our capital is still most
insignificant. And I wonder if something could not be done in the high
school to teach pupils the difference between fact and opinion, and
something also of the slow, laborious process through which real facts
are accumulated. How many mistakes of life are due to the lack of the
judicial attitude right here. What mistakes we all make when we try to
evaluate writings outside of our own special field of knowledge or
activity. Nothing depresses me to-day quite so much as the readiness
with which laymen mistake opinion for fact in the field of psychology
and education,--and I suppose that my own hasty acceptance of statements
in other fields would have a similar effect upon the specialists of
those fields.

Can general education help us out at all in this matter? I have only
one or two suggestions to make, and even these may not be worth a great
deal. In the recent Polar controversy, the sympathies of the general
public were, I think, at the outset with Cook. This was perhaps,
natural, and yet the trained mind ought to have withheld judgment for
one reason if for no other,--and that one reason was Peary's long Arctic
service, his unquestioned mastery of the technique of polar travel, his
general reputation for honesty and caution in advancing opinions. By all
the lessons that history teaches, Peary's word should have had
precedence over Cook's, for Peary was a specialist, while Cook was only
an amateur. And yet the general public discounted entirely those
lessons, and trusted rather the novice, with what results it is now
unnecessary to review,--and in nine cases out of ten, the results will
be the same.

Could we not, as part of our work in training pupils to study, also
teach them to give some sort of an evaluation to the authorities that
they consult? Could we not teach them that, in nine cases out of ten, at
least, the man who has the message most worth listening to is the man
who has worked the hardest and the longest in his field, and who enjoys
the best reputation among his fellow-workers? Sometimes, I admit, the
rule does not work, and especially with men whose reputations as
authorities have outlived their period of productivity, but even this
mistake could be guar