Paul R. Shipman

“ If I had my way in the halls of education, I would not only dismiss Latin and Greek, but send off packing along with them the historical and comparative study of English itself, and, bringing to the front, say, mathematics, chemistry, physiology, and philosophy, natural, moral, and mental, put the whole training squad under the immediate command of Captain English—not the fossil infant of the Cædmon age, but the living man of the nineteenth century, with whom we all have a speaking acquaintance at least. Glossology is important in its place, but it has no proper place in a scheme of education. ”

“ Finally, the hypothesis, if admitted, would not explain the phenomena, since it merely refers them to a power of which confessedly we can know neither the existence nor the laws, assuming to explain that which we do not know now by that which we can never know or so much as represent in thought; and it goes without saying that an hypothesis which explains nothing is good for nothing. In branding it with illegitimacy, science but renews the stigma that common sense had set on it. ”

“ Erudition, it should never be forgotten, is not education, nor the means to it; on the contrary, education is the means to erudition, as to every other spoil of intellect. And education, it can not be too often repeated, is essentially and preeminently the mastery of one's own language; for which the masterpieces of the language are not merely indispensable but enough. Sufficient for the mastery of English is the study thereof. ”

“ The mind has no portal through which a fourth dimension can enter, no chamber in which it may lodge. To assume that, because the contradictions in question are irreconcilable, they ipso facto present to our mind a new dimension of space, in the perception of which only they become reconcilable, is to make the simple inexplicability of a problem not only the verification of a given solution of it, but the occasion of a new experience in sense, and a new form in thought—a change, that is, in the constitution of our faculties. If a theory explains a phenomenon, the theory is so far confirmed ”

“ Professor Zöllner will pardon a little rigor in the interpretation of figures employed to throw light on a theory so occult. For the purpose he has in hand, which lies considerably deeper than the lowest foundation of mathematical reasoning, we are bound to demand that his diagrams shall represent in reality exactly what they purport to represent; that, in plain words, they shall stand for real surfaces without thickness, and real lines without breadth or thickness. But these things do not exist for the human mind. They are incapable of representation in thought. ”

“ Beale adds: "It may be freely admitted that, if we attribute to vital power certain phenomena of the living world which have not been, and can not be, explained or accounted for by any physical laws yet discovered, we thereby assume an agency which we are unable to isolate or demonstrate, and the existence of which we can not in any way prove. On the other hand, it is only fair to observe that, if we assume that phenomena peculiar to life will some day be explained by physics, we certainly act in a manner which is not sanctioned by science—we assume, we prophesy ”

“ Yes, it all depends on experience, which, as every good Kantist will tell you, furnishes the matter of our cognitions, while the mind furnishes the form, the two elements uniting in the act of cognition; insomuch that the form without the matter is void, as the matter without the form is undetermined. Wherefore, we can have no conception the matter of which has not been furnished by experience, or, as a strict Kantist would say, by sensibility. But what experience, known or conceivable, can furnish the matter of the conception of a fourth dimension? ”

“ Whatever the value of the knowledge, who, for the sake of getting it, could reasonably spend the best years of his life, or any of his years, in trying to make himself a Roman and a Greek rolled into one? And who of all this breathing: world has tried it and succeeded? ”

“ Greek, Latin, French, German, mathematics, natural and physical science, metaphysics, history, and aesthetics are all profitable and delightful, both as training and as acquisitions, to him who studies them with intelligence and love, but not one of them has the least claim to be called an acquisition essential to a liberal education, or an essential part of a sound training." He adds: "The fruit of liberal education is not learning, but the capacity and desire to learn; not knowledge but power." ”

“ This is the general movement, subject to diversions, checks, stops, reversals, renewals—all, indeed, proceeding according to the self-same tendency as the general movement, but out of which, together with that movement, comes in the long run true advancement—the cloth of gold of civilization; for it would be a grave mistake, as I have implied, to suppose that this propensity is not of capital importance to the development of man. Without imitativeness, the first and most fruitful years of life would be a blank, to say nothing of the loss to every later year ”

“ Only by means of it can we even self-alienate ourselves. A dead language is a counteractive instrumentality; for which reason we can no more develop our minds freely in Greek or Latin than we can develop our muscles in "twisted gyves." Studying to think in a dead language is shackling the mind, instead of liberating it, and must lead not to a free but to an arrested development. "Self-alienation," if I may be allowed to aphorize a little, too, is self-repression, which will stunt the developing intellect, though it may stimulate the developed one. ”

“ To be sure, he is a man with a theory, and that means a good deal; but it does not cover the whole ground. He, above all, is a man with an impossible fact. By this he has fallen. Theorizing to explain a fact is hazardous enough, and theorizing to prove a fact more hazardous still, but the man who theorizes to prove a fact beyond the bounds of human knowledge is lost; and this is the predicament of our worthy professor. Through his zealous efforts to prove a fourth dimension he has got psychology at sixes and sevens. ”

“ The evidence which, in the course of a single generation, has wrought this marvelous change in unwilling minds, and the more distinctly in the higher minds, goes in its full strength, I repeat, to support the special hypothesis in hand. Manifestly, the leaders of thought, in both hemispheres, estimate this evidence differently from Dr. Beale. It is truly irresistible to an open and enlightened mind. ”

“ The Chinese, by the way, make dwarf trees, of which they are very proud, by cutting off the tap-roots, and resting the mutilated ends against stones, thereby striking at the seat of vigorous growth; but, taking no pride in dwarf intellects, their plan of education goes on the opposite principle—the tap-root of the mother-tongue being carefully preserved, never cramped, and continually nourished, the upshot of which is that, while they keep dwarfs in their flower-pots, they have giants in their councils. ”

“ But contradictions are objects not of the sensitive faculty but of the understanding, and, however amazing, do not furnish new matter of conception; they merely call for new applications or new combinations of the conceptions we have. A knot tied in an endless cord is, so far as presented to us, a phenomenon within three dimensions, and, though we may not know how the knot was tied, our ignorance of the way of tying it can give us no new matter of thought. It is an appeal to our sense, not to our senses ”

“ Professor Zöllner thinks "our present conception of space" has been derived from experience, "by means of the causal principle existing a priori in our intellect." Kant held, on the contrary, that our idea of space is not a mere conception, but a pure intuition; that it belongs to the faculty of sense; that it is in fact one of the necessary conditions of sensation, without which experience itself is impossible; and, finally, that the "causal principle" originates in the higher faculty of the understanding, to which sense delivers up its presentations ready cast in the mold of space. ”

“ At the bottom or near the bottom of our mental nature lies a propensity which, as related to the intellect, is called imitativeness, and, as related to the will, may be called sequaciousness. It is, we all have reason to know, an active agent in the formation of whatever we become—the shuttle, if I may so call it, of the loom of man, shooting its double thread back and forth through the warp of his existence. ”

“ Beale would solve the problem of life, by referring it out of hand to some agency beyond the bounds of human knowledge; but, as science is endowed with neither, it has, in general, no other course, certainly no better course, than to proceed tentatively by "prophetic assumptions," careful only, though rigorously careful, that these shall fulfill the acknowledged conditions of a legitimate hypothesis. As for such "assumptions" as Dr. Beale's, they are not "prophetic," it is true, but only because they forever renounce the hope of explanation. Science rejects them, as we have seen. ”

“ Professor Zöllner's theory, affirms as much explicitly. "The totality of all empirical experience," he states, doubtless repeating the language of his theorist, "is communicated to the intellect by the senses, i.e., by organs which communicate to the mind all the sensuous impressions which are received at the surface of our bodies. These impressions are a reality to us, and their sphere is two-dimensional, acting not in our body, but only on its surface. We have only attained the conception of a world of objects with three dimensions by an intellectual process. ”

“ It is a common saying that Shakespeare knew everything, and indeed he knew the human mind so well that he easily divined its possibilities, not simply beyond his own positive knowledge, but beyond the positive attainments of the race, the head-light of his genius having thrown a blaze along the track of human progress to the other side of stations that the imperial train has been generations in approaching and which it has not yet passed ”

“ Here, doubtless, I shall be confronted with the necessity of "self-alienation" as a means of knowing our mother-tongue itself, and not unlikely be reminded of Goethe's aphorism, of which Mr. Harris's is a tolerable equivalent: "He who is acquainted with no foreign tongue knows nothing of his own." To this there are two answers: it is irrational, and imposing facts contradict it. Strictly speaking, the converse of the proposition is true: he who knows nothing of his own tongue knows nothing of any. other, for it is through his own that he becomes acquainted with another. ”

“ A kindred presumption, throwing a kindred burden on the shoulders of whoever would rebut it, is the presumption that causes which increase an aggregate are competent to originate it. The forces which determine the growth of a crystal, to exemplify, are the forces which produce its embryo; and the like holds true of all other aggregates below the vital ones. Why not of these also? The forces which determine the growth of a plant or animal are physical forces; any assumption to the contrary, remember, even Dr. Beale avows that "we can not in any way prove." ”

“ The famous maxim, All life proceeds from life, is indeed necessarily true of all the more specialized forms of life, because the proceeding of any one of these directly from inorganic matter would necessitate a leap over the intermediate forms; and Nature, as in our day is realized more vividly than before, does nothing by leaps. The maxim, though reached inductively, may be explained deductively; it is itself, thus limited, a corollary from the general law of evolution. ”

“ Harris says of mathematics appears to me in itself to reduce his conclusion to something inconsistent with reason; not that he claims too much for mathematics in the sphere of physics, but that, in claiming as much for Latin and Greek outside of that sphere, he puts a contingent manifestation of mind on a level with the laws of mental processes, coördinating an artificial product with a formal science, two things of wholly different orders, and making the former a key to life as the latter is a key to nature. ”

“ In the Kantian theory causality has nothing special to do in any mode with the idea of space in any aspect. In common with the other categories, it is simply presupposed in every intuition of sense, that of space with the rest. It lies at the bottom of the possibility of experience in general. Moreover, an a priori principle, as already intimated, is not a germ susceptible of growth, but rather a die, which for ever impresses the same form. A new kind of impression necessitates a new kind of die, and, if you would have a new kind of determination, you must get a new a priori principle ”

“ If some order of superior beings, capable by hypothesis of anything, should take it into their heads to strike a medal expressive in a general way of their sense of human character, and drop it from the clouds, it would probably bear the image of a monkey on the obverse face, and on the reverse that of a sheep ”