It should be as broad as interest and should continually broaden interest. The mind that is filled but not nourished is subject to dyspepsia. Nourishment includes vastly more than the mere acquisition of food, it involves such exercise as shall change the food into brawn. That is, the function of knowledge is to supply, not power, but stuff which may be worked up into power. This exercise may not be merely the effort necessary to acquisition. The body will not thrive thru exercising the digestive organs alone, it will be fat and flabby like the swine which, while fattening, is not allowed to roam at will for exercise. The exercise must be of the organs in which we desire to produce stength. This is the argument against extreme isolation, in school life, and for allying the school as closely with the abounding life of the world as possible..

The fattening animal is isolated from his ordinary natural activities that he may stuff and grow fat. But the animal which is to be trained to service is exercised in activities as nearly as possible like those in which he is to be employed.

The athlete is isolated only from what is harmful, not from activities. He is not shut up in the dining-room. School is life to prepare for life. Knowledge is always the basis-wide, varied, multitudinous knowledge - but as acquired it must be employed.

The test of the value of a theory regarding education and of the sincerity with which it is held is found in the kind of school produced. There are instances enough of the truly educative school to serve as criteria. In this school the children are the first consideration, not merely theoretically and sentimentally, but truly and thoughtfully. Their needs are the basis of all the instruction, and these are determined by the careful study, first of the children themselves, second of the world around them in which they must live, and they are studied together, with the aim that each child may grow into social efficiency, which is the end of education.

Thoroness is not in this school a fetich; only so much of a branch of knowledge is given at a time as can be digested and assimilated. To expect a little child to know thoroly any subject is as absurd as to expect him to consume all the bread in the house before eating any meat. Yet his knowledge is not a smattering. What he knows is thoro in one sense because it is vital. He knows thoroly what he knows, for it is a part of him, after the biological analogy.

The elementary school in which the teachers sincerely and intelligently believe that the educative function of knowledge is to nourish the mind, is the school in which children live a real life of joyful activity. They go to their work with an eagerness comparable only to that with which they approach the dinner table, or play, or any of the many natural activities of body or mind.

There is always a motive inherent in the work, it supplies a felt need.

The activities employed in the process of education are no more unnatural than those essential to physical,growth. The mind is surely as natural as the body, and when healthy and normal requires no more a violation of nature for its growth than does the body. But the work of the school is the work of children, and not of adults cut to a smaller pattern. There are activities suitable to children, and they all have an obvious purpose acceptable to the childish mind. Tasks dictated for an end obvious to the teacher alone, altho that end may be the future welfare of the children, do not appeal to them. They certainly do not cultivate that most necessary of powers, the power to labor, to drudge even, for a high tho remote end; for this power comes only from an appreciation of the worth of this remote end, not from blind obedience to another's will.

It is this appreciation of the worth of the end that supplies the inspiration necessary to carry us thru long years of dreary drudgery toward a sought goal, and this end is evident in the true school, resting, according to the biological analogy, upon the belief in the living, growing mind requiring nourishment. It is lacking in all schools founded upon any other basis.

In this school the children acquire intelligence, for the air is charged with it. They not only know the common symbols of the eye-minded; they can apply them in a thousand ways not dreamed of in the "practical" school. They can read and write and cipher, for they continually use these arts to express the thoughts suggested by the countless things. learned in their school life, and their intelligence is real, not verbal.

The children in this school receive discipline, for they work as they never do in the other schools. They work with a will, because they work with a motive. They get the kind of discipline that the man gets who toils night and day to perfect an invention for the advancement of civilization. The motive is inherent in, and consistent with, the work itself. It is not foreign and artificial, like a mark or a prize. This is the only true discipline. This develops self-direction, self-sacrifice, the subordi nation of ease and all lower pleasure to the higher joy of work for achievement. It cultivates moral power, inner law, in place of the hypocritical yielding to external force too often bred in the so-called disciplinary school.

This school also furnishes the higher intelligence, the broad culture, of the third class, but vastly richer and more real. The content of the curriculum in the nutritive school is as broad as civilization, as extensive as the world, and it is approached in such a way as to make the knowledge real.

In no school is knowledge so highly valued-genuine, first-hand knowledge. The whole broadening of the curriculum, which is the most. noticeable phenomenon of our modern school, is due to the spread of the belief that the mind is to be nourished by knowledge. Literature, his

tory, science, music, art, sociology, manual training, domestic science, have come into the school thru this door. True, many have accepted them, not comprehending their educational value, but that does not affect the major fact.

In this true school children are made acquainted with their material, social, and spiritual environment as in no other, not primarily because there is such an environment, a knowledge of which is useful, but because this knowledge furnishes the best nutriment to a mind growing into organized society, a society whose subordination of its material environment to spiritual ends constitutes its chief claim to superiority.

This school is the school of expression. The children engage in numberless activities employing all the powers of their minds. They express in varied ways what they receive. Thus they make it their own, incorporate it into the very constitution of their minds. The knowledge is not stored up against the day of comprehension; but by the exercise attendant upon the various means of expression it grows into the fiber of their beings and makes them strong and adaptable, as the athlete by exercise makes his food a part of himself.

In this school is freedom and joy and hard work and discipline and abundance of knowledge, because the center is a child, a growing child, needing nourishment rich and varied, and every activity engaged in, and the knowledge imparted, is prepared to meet his needs. Thus and thus only is a child best fitted for social efficiency; and social efficiency is the end of education.

DISCUSSION

JOHN W. COOK, president Northern Illinois State Normal School. - One cannot listen to the strong and interesting paper of Superintendent Gilbert without finding much that will meet his approval. It is with the central doctrine of the discussion, however, that I desire to deal. I do not agree with the speaker in his assertion that we are shut up to a choice between a physical and a biological analogy in discussing psychical phenomena. Is it true that in the development of mental science there has been no creation of terms having only a psychical suggestion? Are we obliged to deal exclusively with simile or metaphor and to convey our meaning by illustrations derived only from the operations of inorganic agencies or those involved in vital phenomena? If such be the case, then we must commend those authors who have endeavored to illustrate the truths of pyschology by an appeal to the imaging activity and have illustrated their books with botanical monstrosities whose branches were labeled with the common terms employed in describing the various forms of mental activity.

I regret that Mr. Gilbert has not aided us by a clear definition of knowledge. Do I fail to understand him when I am unable to discover any distinction, in his treatment, between fact and knowledge? The terms seem to me to be widely apart in meaning. I am not unaware of the custom of using the word "knowledge" in an unscientific way, but, in a discriminating discussion, greater care is expected in the use of words. Common usage undoubtedly regards knowledge as objective. It thinks of it as having independent reality in the world. From this point of view, education is a process of going forth to find knowledge, as one would go to seek any created utility. Having found it,

one must become skillful in its use, for it is an instrument by which social needs may be satisfied. It is assumed that all that the mind lacks is skill in the employment of knowledge. There seems to be a complete overlooking of the fact that there is only the possibility of a mind before this experience with knowledge. Mind creates itself, and this it does by contact with this mystery that is named to us in a vague sort of way by this common word.

I am not one of those who deny any objective reality to knowledge. There is a sense, I think, in which it may be so regarded. The universe is instinct with thought that awaits interpretation by mind, an essence like unto that which is responsible for the substantial frame of things in which we find ourselves and whose offspring we are. Looked at in this way, knowledge may be thought of as objective, as having reality independent of any mind, except the infinite mind. In a truer sense, however, knowledge is a mental process in which universals come to have their real existence in individual minds and to constitute the content of those minds.

My objection to Mr. Gilbert's view of the function of knowledge has been stated with great precision in previous discussions in the Council. The assumed analogy is misleading and embarrassing. The physical organism attacks certain substances and reduces them to their primitive elements before employing them to create its own substance. In no sense is what I have called objective knowledge so treated. I am willing to concede that mind creates itself thru its activity with ideas, and that the body builds itself thru its treatment of food; but the two processes belong to such widely separated fields of activity that they lack a common factor by which they may be compared.

What we are seeking is, rather, that function of knowledge which should dominate the school. Knowledge is the indispensable guide to all intelligent activity. It is the nature of mind to manifest itself under the forms of knowledge, and all other manifestations of the intellect and will are aberrations; hence Mr. Gilbert's first function is not only a legitimate but a necessary end at which the school should aim. Unless men are to go thru life with a blundering touch and a halting step they must acquire skill in the control of ideas. This comes only thru mechanical repetition; hence the gymnastic function is also indispensable to any high development. As to the third view, Mr. Gilbert's treatment appears to me to be superficial. He looks upon the civilization of the time as lying, in some mystical way, in the mind as objects may lie in a receptacle. If I understand what is meant by "the civilization of the time" it is only the mental constitution, the mind-stuff, of the men and women of the time. It is not something selfexistent and objective, but is the soul-life, the mental habit, the essential constitution of spirit, of the time. Now, it is the purpose of education to organize mind in a rational way, to introduce reason to itself, and, so far as reason has found itself, it has manifested itself in "the civilization of the time." Unless one is to dwell in hermit solitudes there is no other alternative. To oppose such a view is to advocate an isolation from which there is no return.

SUPERINTENDENT GILBERT.- I must insist that I used "knowledge" accurately and in no material sense. The use of the term "body of knowledge" is clearly approved by the best lexicographers. I used it deliberately in preference to the term "fact,” as being broader and more comprehensive.

It is true, the term is also used as referring to the act of knowing, a mental process. I use it as the best term to describe that objective body of knowledge which constitutes the nutriment of the growing mind.

I desire utterly to disclaim any use of the term which could be taken to suggest that knowledge is a material thing. It is to protest against that proposition that this paper has been written.

I desired to make clear, and I believe I have made clear, that the mind in education is to be treated as an organism, and not as a receptacle; that it has life, is really a living

thing; and that nourishing a living thing is a better analogy for the process of education than filling a lifeless thing.

All language applied to the world of metaphysics is analogical. You cannot escape it. You cannot get away from your ancestors.

The question is: which analogy is more apt, more truly spiritual. We all believe, necessarily, that the soul should be regarded as living.

I am especially concerned in the character of the school which is the product of the analogy we choose; on the physical analogy, the school of force, of stuffing, of rank materialism; on the biological analogy, the school of self-activity, of freedom, of spiritual

life.

I believe that we agree on this in spite of quibbling on words.

THE DIFference BETWEEN EFFICIENT AND FINAL CAUSES IN CONTROLLING HUman freEDOM

W. T. HARRIS, UNITED STATES COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION,
WASHINGTON, D. C.

Too hot drink plate on the floor The scratching of

There are two kinds of causes with which we are familiar, namely, efficient causes and final causes. From earliest infancy we begin to recognize that the action of one object is followed by a change or modification in another object. The fire makes cold water hot. burns and gives pain to the mouth. The fall of a makes a noise; so does the heavy step of the servant. a match makes a light. Sugar makes a sweet taste in the mouth. A rose, a pink, or a violet produces an agreeable smell of some sort and a pleasant appearance to the eye. Eating and drinking sate hunger and quench

thirst.

Our earliest experiences, as well as our latest, deal with causal actions, not only of things upon our five organs of sense, but of things upon each other. Almost as early as our observation of this kind of causality, exerted by one thing upon another external to it, there enters into our experience a different order of causality, namely, the action for a purpose; the doing of something with an end and aim; the change of something to accomplish an object.

The child soon observes that he is moved for the purpose of bringing him to his food; or for the change of a garment; or for his bath. He is carried to the window to look at objects in the street; he hears soft voices addressed to him. His cries as some pain or discomfort are followed by things done to him with a purpose to relieve him. In short, he finds himself in a world of final causes.

Philosophy has called these "final," because they relate to ends; finis meaning an end not only of an extent or duration, but also an ena and aim, an object to be attained, and hence the purpose or motive of

an action.

The efforts of the people who have the care of the infant child are