vated man but little advantage over the illiterate one. It is questionable, indeed, if the common sense of untaught people is not to-day quite as good a defense against preposterous pretensions, and the arts of skillful deception, as the elaborate cultivation of the schools. It is true that logic, as the art and analysis of reasoning, is more or less taught, but it is taught to but little practical purpose. Learning the rules of logic may assist to make a dexterous intellectual fencer, but it will no more make a circumspect and cautious thinker than learning the rules of morality will make a virtuous man. The darkest period of human credulity, when no extravagance was too gross to be greedily swallowed, was the golden era of the study of logic in all the schools of Europe.
It is often said that we are indebted to modern science for the emancipation of the human mind, but it is frequently forgotten in what its slavery consisted, and how science proceeded to set it free. The mental thraldom of the dark ages consisted in the submission of the mind to beliefs imposed on it by authority, and interpreted by authority; the effect of which was to make blind credence the universal mental habit. The influence of theology was by no means confined to religious opinions. Men accepted their views of Nature on the authority of Aristotle as much as their creeds on the authority of the Fathers. Holding it sinful to disbelieve, they avoided the sin in all things. Modern Science began by attacking this state of mind, and has won her great conquests on the principle of the supremacy of personal observation as against the weight of traditional belief. But there must be doubt of authority before there can be rebellion against it. The first step toward truth, or the verification of opinions, is therefore a skeptical state of mind in regard to what has hitherto passed as truth. The great poet missed the philosophy of the case when he said:
"Truth can never be confirmed enough,
Though doubts did ever sleep;"
for the slumber of doubt is not favorable to the confirmation of truth. There is but one thing that can protect people against the thousand-fold insidious and plausible impostures to which they are continually and everywhere exposed, and that is a resolute mood of skepticism, and an intelligent habit of sifting evidence that shall become a daily and constant practice. Our education is here seriously at fault. It neither provides for the requisite discipline, nor does it insist upon its necessity. The old universities were originally religious seminaries, and all teaching was at first in the hands of the clerical profession; while even yet our presidents of colleges are mainly doctors of divinity. The world owes much to the clergy as the conservators of learning in the past, and the teachers of mankind when there were no others to perform the office; but their service in this respect has not been an unmingled good: it has had its drawbacks which still survive. To this day there is an almost universal feeling that belief and disbelief answer to each other as virtue and vice. The very terms which indicate the state of mind preparatory to all rigorous investigation of truth are tainted with prejudice and held to involve an implication of criminality. With such a bias it is most difficult to train the mind to that healthy habit of doubt which shall give it protection against the thousand-fold impostures which assail it on every side.
Perhaps the evil here considered can never be wholly eradicated from society, but much can be done to diminish it, and it is the proper office of education to do it. And as science by its mental method has put an end to the grosser forms of credulous belief and blind superstition, so when that method is carried into general education we may expect still further advantages of the same kind. Scientific education, truly
