Excerpt from Addresses: Delivered at the Massachusetts Agricultural College, June 21st, 1887, on the 25th Anniversary of the Passage of the Morrill Land Grant Act

During the middle ages the work of the schools was limited to the education of those who were to go into the learned professions. It is even a matter of some doubt whether the great Charles, the organizer of schools in France and Germany could himself write or read. It is certain that one of the greatest of French military lead ers, as late as the time when the Renaissance was beginning to dawn, was absolutely illiterate.

No'r was this condition of affairs a singular one, or one that should excite our surprise. Before the introduction of the Baconian philos Ophy, the methods of looking at the problems of life were the reverse of the methods that have now come to prevail. Aristotle said, Look into your own minds, study the nature of thought, look into the nature of things, and thus you will be able to reason out the course of con duct you ought to pursue. The Aristotelian philosophy prevailed until the seventeenth century. At length came Bacon and Descartes. Their methods were the opposite. They said, study things not so much in their nature, - which you cannot know anything about by a process of reasoning - as in their characteristics and relations. You are to reason from their external appearance and characteristics which everybody can investigate and in some sense at least understand into their internal natures. Thus it was that the Baconian or inductive philosophy had for its aim the setting of all thinking beings to the examining of the things everywhere about them. It taught not only that the domain of thought, but also that the domain of action, was open to the scrutiny of human intelligence. It exhorted everybody to pry into whatever there was within the range of observation. Examine the methods of nature, in order to discover the laws of nature. Examine the habits of animals in order to become acquainted with the laws of their development. Study the rocks, the trees, the plants, the flowers, in fact, study all the domain of nature, in order to discover the secrets of nature. The exhortation was followed in the course of the last century by the birth of what are called the Nat ural Sciences.

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