Practical Education

Abstract

PLAINLY speaking, it must be admitted that to an impartial observer the great problem of anthropology is this: Is the mind, or soul, a mysterious and supernatural, yet at the same time a definite limited quantity, with certain set “spiritual” functions, or is it, being of material growth, capable of infinite development? The former is the metaphysical view of the subject, the latter that of the evolutionary physiologist. Without deciding which is the true school, it may be remarked that the metaphysicians have long ceased to teach anything new, while physiology gives us, almost daily, facts of an astonishing nature. Here and there in the works of Darwin, Carpenter, Haeckel, Huxley, Bain, Maudsley, Spencer, and David Kay, we find what would have been “conclusions most forbidden,” even to a Rosicrucian or Cabalist, in days of yore. And these are that man may develop his memory and other faculties in the simplest and most practical manner, as a bee builds its combs, grain by grain, until he shall far surpass what he has ever been. These discoveries as to man are in exact step with the stupendous revelations of the spectrum analysis, and the scientific reduction of the elements.