scientist or philosopher. In short, nature educates by hereditary
laws and forces long before man takes up the problem, and it is
simply a matter of common sense insight that man recognizes the
pedagogue, nature, when he attempts to carry farther and im
prove her work. Otherwise education may be in the fix of the
worthy dame in one of Fritz Renter’s novels, who undertook to
write poetry as a mere deed of will: " Here I sit and sweat, and
bring nothing to pass.” As llamlet says: “ First know your in
strument if you would play upon it,” and then knowledge must
partially come about by pursuance of the internal factor iu edu
cation, original endowment, heredity (and the third to which we
now turn) temperament.
As original endowment is the race element and heredity, the
family element, so temperament is the individual or personal
element. Temperament is a sort of barometer by which each
person measures the currents about him. It is the coloring matter
in the glasses we wear. As this pigment is of grey, golden, red
or black, so will be our world-vision of men and things. Recall
how Shakespeare plays with his various temperamental beings;
how each acts consistently under given circumstances until we
feel that we can almost predict to a certantity just how the
individual will continue to act in the growing plot. So the
direction of the temperament of King Clovis betrayed itself, when
upon learning of a sore defeat among distant tribes, he exclaimed:
‘‘Oh that I had been there with my Franks.” In the main,
temperament appears more a birth of feeling than of intellect,
depending more upon how one ‘ ‘ feels ’ ’ the world than upon how
one thinks it. For example, Hartmann, the German philosopher,
is a pessimist of the deepest dye, the world was originally made
and is kept going by mistake, not life, but no-life is real happiness,
yet Hartman lives in his palatial residence outside of Berlin, sur
rounded by a large and happy family, a contented and prosperous
man, living a life of ease and joy which many a sentimentalist
would picture as an elysium.
We now turn our attention to the external factor in education,
and consider briefly its two elements, the physical and institutional
or social. Our problem now is this —Give the individual as a race
product, as a member of a family, and as the embodiment of a
mood or temperament, what further import and influence will the
environment under which he grows have for education?
As to physical effects, we may ask in the words of Goethe:
The Free Lance,
[May,