founded on sun-myths. The conclusion was drawn by many devotees to philology that the basis of religion is only a personification of natural phenomena, and that there is no reality corresponding to religious conceptions. It was said that the sun-myth is a disease of language. Then religion came to be regarded also by this school of philologues as also a disease of language. Outsiders who observed this extension of the sunmyth theory began to expect that sooner or later the theory would be carried one step farther, and that philosophic thought would be declared to be a disease of language; and, sure enough, this appears to be the upshot of the book of Professor Max Müller on the Science of Thought. This is made plausible by the following step: The words of a language stand for classes and species of objects, and not for mere individuals. John is a boy says that John belongs to the class of beings known as boy. The word "is" has universal significance as copula expressing subsumption; the article "a" expresses the general concept one of," and even the word "John" says any boy who is called John. We have to add to language a meaning of our own to make it apply to a particular individual being, and no one person's meaning of a word is absolutely what another person means by it.

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Now, add to this view another one with reference to the nature of objects that exist – namely, that all that exists is composed of some one or more definite things; that only particular individuals exist; and that language has made all its words stand for general classes of beings, actions, and relations, and in so doing has made it entirely symbolic, instead of corresponding, literally and in detail, to reality—and we now begin to see where we are going. It is only one step to the conclusion that all general thought relations rest on the scaffolding of language, and are baseless as regards their truth. Generalizations of thought regarding the world and its destiny are the product of a disease of language. In fact, we might as well call language itself a disease.

But where can we stop? If the anthropoid ape invented the disease of language, his animal relatives who could not yet talk were not for that reason any more healthy. For all animal life is a disease as compared with plant life. The animal feels, perceives with his senses, and acts by impulse or instinct. To feel is to set up an activity within a self and after a sort to make one's self an object, or, so to speak, to exist for one's self. Hence to perceive other beings is to represent them by one's own activity, and thus to create within one's self a semblance of other realities. Perception thus rests upon creating within the perceiving being an appearance or semblance of a reality.

This is almost as bad a disease as language is, and we may see that the misfortune of language goes farther back and attaches to sense-perception itself. For the animal that feels or perceives makes for himself an image or representation, in fact, a seeming or make-believe, or some sort of untruth, to stand for the reality.

The plant, it would seem, does not feel nor perceive nor move itself. It does not, like the animal, “dally with false surmise." It feeds on its environment, however. Its life is a life of assimilation and nutrition The plant is engaged in seizing upon its environment, and converting it into vegetable cells, and adding them to its own structure. Here we have reached soundness and health at last, for we have realities at every step. We have the plant a reality which acts upon inorganic substances in the soil and the air, and gathering them to itself makes them over into vegetable cells of its own kind or species. But after the plant has thus acted, it has destroyed the individuality that previously existed in that part of its environment now appropriated for food. It has annulled other individuality to build up its own. What was real as carbon and oxygen and silica and soda no longer is real in that form. As real they are united and converted into organic compounds that form the cells of the plant. As ideal they may be still only carbon and oxygen and silica and soda. If the plant dies, its vegetable cells will be captured by inorganic forces, and these elements (carbon, oxygen, silica, and soda) will reappear in their old form.

Here we have to ask whether the plant life is not itself also a disease. Is it not a masquerade? Does it not act to enshroud the inorganic matter in new forms, making it as vegetable cells possess entirely new properties and lose its old properties? Does it not, after the death of the plant, let the old individuality of the elements reappear? But which is the true reality under the appearance? Is it the inorganic elements, or the organic compounds? Why should we not say that the inorganic is a state of helpless abstraction in which it does not realize its true being? And is it not the life of the plant that lifts up the inorganic into a higher and more concrete and perfect form of existence wherein the inorganic elements reveal the wondrous possibilities that were in them, but not made manifest or brought into actual reality?

And again, if the inorganic is only itself a masquerade, hiding its higher life until by the aid of the plant it comes to actualize or make real its true self, why shall we not say that the plant, also, takes on a higher form of realization when it in turn becomes feeling, perceiving, and willing, on being taken up into the animal organism? For the representation of another existence than one's own is, after all, a higher form of reality for the being that represents. For the inorganic does not fully realize itself until it comes in the plant and the animal to show what syntheses it is capable of, and in what ways it can be instrumental in the process of self representation. Self-representation in the form of feeling is, indeed, something that belongs to the order of the miraculous, as looked at from the standpoint of the inorganic - it stubbornly resists a mechanical explanation.

But now, if we admit this new view of the subject, we must go farther

and claim that man, by inventing language, creates a still more wonderful reality. For he produces a sort of counterpart to the general process that appears in chemism, in plant life, and in animal sensation. He gives an appropriate form to universals. Words make fast the fleeting manifestation that goes on in the lower orders of being. Words as tools of thought make possible the grasp of a deeper reality in the universe, which the inorganic cannot compass, nor the plant, nor the mere animal. For thought can grasp the process in which the individuality of the lower order of beings is immersed. Thought can perceive particular things in their causes, and it can think a unity of all causes in a final cause.

We have to return to our first statement, or the statement of the philologist, and entering our protest say, therefore, that religion is not a disease of language nor a disease of any kind. But religion is an insight into the final and deepest order of being-the truth which is under all seeming or imperfect being, whether inorganic, or plant, or animal, or human.

Neither is thought to be called a disease of language because it deals with generalities. For the general process which is revealed in the changes that inorganic matter undergoes, and which take on new forms in plant and animal life, is first seized as the deeper reality by philosophic thought become possible thru language. Thought reaches this deeper reality underlying all actualities, and it joins the voice of religion in saying that the deeper reality is a divine personal reason that reveals itself in the world. That absolute reason has a divine purpose which is the creation of personal beings-training them to individuality in the cradle of time and space.

In the light of this divine purpose, all imperfect realizations, such as the inorganic, may be seen to be more or less appearances having each some fragmentary or imperfect form of being that does not fully and adequately explain itself, altho each step above the inorganic is a nearer approach to the absolute reality. Reversing the biologic standpoint, those lower forms of existence may be called disease. Plants, just because they do not possess feeling and sensation, may be said to be diseased. Then, too, the animal that is less deeply diseased because he possesses sensation and locomotion as well as nutrition - the animal is diseased because he does not possess language. He cannot reach religion or thought.

But man is more healthy and less diseased than any other being on earth, because he can form some adequate idea of the divine purpose of the world, and by that reach ultimate ideals thru which to guide his life. By his thought he can see what the fullness of reality means.

According to biology as it is, many, or indeed all, of the higher facts and activities of man may be regarded as diseases of vital functions. But, on the same ground, life itself may be regarded as a disease forced on the inorganic.

This use of the analogy, however, which makes life itself a disease, leads us to suspect the truth of the biologic view of religion and philosophy, and suggests to us the necessity of turning around the measuring process. We must interpret the lower from the standpoint of the higher. The lower is the incomplete and imperfect being. The higher is the more realized being, the more perfect, and it explains to us the existence of the lower by showing its purpose.

The analogy of the lower order of being does not suffice to explain the higher orders of being. The scale must be inverted before the human can be understood.

DISCUSSION

DR. G. STANLEY HALL followed Dr. Harris' paper in discussion, saying first that he failed to see in it any practical application to the work of superintendents. Again, he believed that modern psychology today almost repudiated the old phrenology of bumps. Expert students of brain localization still differ much as to the extent of even the centers for the upper and lower limbs, eye, and speech, which are best established, and some reject all further localization; but, despite Hollander's absurd book to the contrary, there is essentially nothing in common between modern brain studies and phrenology, which is essentially dead today so far as localization of function is concerned, while its conception of faculties is, if possible, more outgrown and worthless.

As to biological analogies, Dr. Hall held that one of the greatest advances toward a spiritual conception of the universe was the slow but progressive substitution of these life-forms of thought for the old mechanical forms. To bring this about was one of the chief endeavors of Lotze, one of the greatest of modern philosophers. The study of life-forms has given man a vast number of new figures, tropes, forms of thought, terms by which we can both grasp and express the phenomena of life and mind with progressive clearness and accuracy. No one who knows biology can possibly speak of it as Dr. Harris does. For myself I will only say that I associate the divine logos, or word, more and more with the great bio-logos, or spirit of life, that has brooded over the universe and developed all the ascending orders of existence. The fact that students of the mind and soul are casting off the old mechanical conceptions of the world and the machine logic that hammered them out, substituting vital thought-forms, is an immense step upward and onward toward a true spiritual view of the universe.

DR. HARRIS.-The same old trouble that met the phrenologist comes now to the experimental psychologist. The question is: How much does the school exercise the brain? In how much does it give power for the solving of the problem of humanity? We should put the whole brain to school, as Professor Woodward would say if here. As manual training does much in that line, let us have manual training.

In the study of past life, the study of man as an animal, and of other animals in reference to man, is necessary to find what has been done in all these ages. The study of prehistoric man is good for many purposes, but not for the drawing of lessons in education. As we go back, we shall find a period of walking on all fours, a period of fish life perhaps man was a microbe some time.

The books of life are biological, of course. When the child comes to school, the teacher asks him what he has been learning in reading, arithmetic, etc., and wishes him to go on getting power. He does not care so much about his age or really how far he has advanced. If the child is nine, and understands algebra and geometry, the teacher

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does not say: “ You are in the period of arithmetic." Neither would the teacher undertake to grade a person anywhere on the basis of age. In the grammar school are those who do not seem able to get hold of geometry or algebra, and yet they may be mature in body.

There is a great deal written about adolescence as extending from the age of twelve to thirty, more or less. It is evident that it is not possible to tell much from a biological classification what you should put in the course of study. In the writings I have read it is suggested that this period is the period of sentiment. Would the psychologist say that adolescence is the period of the imagination? Children from the age of one to twelve are more imaginative. Adolescence is the age of thinking. From the standpoint of biology, one to twelve is the age of dolls, and, therefore, to be consistent, every child should be put to playing with dolls. I think the good teacher carefully avoids the imaginative with the adolescent children.

ROUND TABLE PAPERS AND DISCUSSIONS

A. ROUND TABLE OF STATE AND COUNTY
SUPERINTENDENTS

FIRST TOPIC: INSTRUCTION IN THE ELEMENTS OF AGRICULTURE IN RURAL COMMUNITIES

L. D. HARVEY, STATE SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION, MADISON, WIS.

[AN ABSTRACT]

This question is one that is attracting attention in a number of states, especially of the north-central group. There is a general feeling that elementary agriculture should be made a part of the course of study in rural schools. Last winter a bill was introduced into the legislature of Wisconsin making such instruction compulsory. This bill was quietly killed. The amount that can be accomplished in this line in rural schools is very limited, for two reasons: in the first place, the majority of children are too young to comprehend the subject; in the second place, teachers lack sufficient training to accomplish practical results. This may not seem a very optimistic view, but it is based on results in countries where it has been tried; for in not one instance has it been a success. In 1872 Canada tried the plan, which proved a dismal failure. Later it was tried again, with like result because of lack of preparation of teachers. Ireland, France, Prussia, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, and Finland have had nearly the same experience. But in these countries the work done in schools higher than the elementary grades has been successful.

In the north-central states there is at present a feeling of unrest in rural communities, often a demand for elements of agriculture. The farmers themselves do not know exactly what they want, but ask for something practical. There is a feeling that the pupils of rural schools (and 90 per cent. of them complete their education here) are not fitted adequately to meet the responsibilities of life, especially farm life. A number of the strongest educational men of Wisconsin insisted that a compulsory law be enacted for securing this instruction in rural schools. But this would amount to nothing unless teachers were trained to make the work efficient.