plane. Personal bias is weakened; individual eccentricity modified. The God with us is translated into the God in us, and then the teacher has reached the altitudes of enthusiasm. "Teaching is such a grind," said a teacher to me a little while ago. So it is when the work lies between the millstones, but not when we are above them. With ripening experience; with widening knowledge of child nature, its capacities and vagaries; with the ever-changing values of subject-matter to the child's powers and the child's needs, method keeps the teacher out of the desert land of grind and on the heights of enthusiastic service.

The real province of method as regards the teacher leads to the correlating of studies and to developing concentration of attention on the part of the child. In the province of method, the time element and the effort element and the accruing strength must ever be the considerations. The grouping power and the grasping potentiality are great factors in the time element. The comprehensive sweep of vision, the focalizing power, are the richest products of the perceptive faculties. The repeating process is not of necessity the strengthening process. The dictum of the repeating element as laid down in the answer given to Wesley by his wife, when he asked why she had the child repeat an answer twenty times, and she replied because nineteen times was not enough, is false in theory and vicious in practice. Correlate the fact to the child's experience or acquisitions, and you abridge time without loss of strength. A child does not necessarily grow skillful in picking apples because he goes down the ladder to carry separately each apple picked. Gather all within reach before moving and move only when all within reach are gathered, is the more practical way, is the more rational process. In the mental-gathering process, the true method will always detect the waste brought about by changing and multiplying of subjects. When the teacher is skillful in reading into a study greater riches than the subject seems to possess, it is by the suggestiveness of the subject and the correlation of thoughts and ideas in the teacher's mind; "That reminds me," is always summoned into existence, and the greater the frequency the stronger the correlation. This outlook that must come to the teacher, not of necessity as a new discovery in pedagogy or a new utterance of philosophy, will be found within the confines of the real province of method as a practice and the creation of a theory of true method.

Method is not of the man, but is in the man; resting on principles that shall direct processes; and such direction shall abridge effort, add pleasure, increase strength, widen opportunity, and emphasize truth. The province of method is such that it shall widen the horizon of the child's knowledge, concentrate his effort, illumine

his purposes, and direct his doings; and to the teacher it shall be, not alone a way of life but as well a light in the way.

Method, in brief, rests on the assumption that life is fragmentary unless connected with the past. Knowledge of the way,-whence its coming and whither its going,-knowledge of failures, is needful; for even failures are partial successes, and ultimate success is simply crowned failure. Rediscovery is not so needful as to know the limits of discovery, and our investigations must reach back to first principles. In the language of Phillips Brooks: "If the teacher's art be in any sense a high art at all it must have a philosophy behind it. If you would not allow it to sink into a mere set of rules, and depend for its success on certain mere tricks or knacks, it must forever refresh itself out of the fountain of first principles, and inspire itself with the contemplation of ever-unattainable ideals."

THE REAL PROVINCE OF METHOD.

BY HOWARD SANDISON, TERRE HAUTE, IND.

In this case the mere title is itself significant. It implies that the boundary line between the realm of method and that of something else is indistinct. That something else may be scholarship; it may be the realm of means, of external appliances, of devices. In the title there is the implication that method is, or has been, occupying an unreal, fictitious province. This fictitiousness may arise from the fact that scholarship is wanting, and that the attempt to determine a set of principles to control in that given realm in which scholarship is wanting results in an unreal province for method. Outer doing, devices, external means, with little or no attention to the truths that underlie them, may be pressed to the front as method. This would constitute a fictitious province for method. Scholarship alone may be exalted, as if it were all in all. In that case method would not possess its real province. Of all these things the mere title is significant. It means that an indistinctness prevails as to the true realm of method. To remove this indistinctness is the problem of this discussion.

It is but natural that a certain indefiniteness-that a given degree of indistinctness-should prevail as to the real province of method, in distinction from that of both scholarship and mere external means. The reason for this is that activity is the one thing to be found in the universe. Sometimes one speaks of a thing, and of activity upon it. But what is the thing itself other than activity? A block of the most

compact steel seems perfectly motionless; yet every atom in it has a space of its own, and exists in a continual dance. Thus it is with every atom in the hardest granite. It seems that only activity is. This activity rises from its most passive form in space until it becomes an activity that can become aware of itself, as in consciousness. Scholarship, then, concerns itself with activity, and with activity only. Method, too, must deal with activity, and with that alone. The realm of device, of external means, is also one of doing-of activity. In this fact that device is activity; that method deals with activity; that the subject-matter of scholarship is activity-rests the source of the indistinctness as to their respective provinces. The activity that scholarship investigates appears in ever-recurring types. This activity may, therefore, appropriately take unto itself the term method. Every branch of study investigates activity as type or law; and law is method, and method is law. The past makes us its debtor by handing over to us this thought in the very term method itself. The word method signifies "according to a way." But what is it that is according to a way? And what is meant by a way? If the thought above presented, viz., that there is nothing in the universe other than activity, be true, then it must be activity that is according to a way. And, moreover, the way itself is necessarily an activity. Then it becomes clear that the past transfers to us this thought which it had garnered from the fields of experience: A method is an activity according to, or in harmony with, an activity. The first activity mentioned must be the real one, the one actually occurring-the one exhibiting itself in some product. The second activity referred to must be the ideal one, the typical activity, the norm; it is both the end and the criterion of the real activity, of the one that is actually occurring. A method, then, is a real activity according to, or in harmony with, an ideal activity. It now becomes somewhat more clear that close thought only will render distinct the provinces of scholarship, method, and devices, and likewise their unity.

Every branch of study has for its subject-matter certain particulars, certain phenomena that are essentially its own. These phenomena may appear in other branches of study as well as in this one, but they do not appear in those other branches in the same aspect that they do is this. The cotton plant appears as a fact in geography. It is also present as one of the phenomena considered in botany. As a geographical fact, however, it is not identical with itself as a botanical fact. If in this sense each branch of study has its own set of particulars, the activity that produces any one of these particulars must be typical. Why does one, in looking at a piece of sandstone, say, "This is not a good specimen?" It is because the activity that produced it was not according to the type, to the ideal. The activity that pro

duces the facts in history or in geology must be an activity according to the type, according to the ideal. Hence, in this sense, activity is a method. The activity that produces a grammatical fact, the activ ity that produces a geographical fact, the activity that produces an historical fact is a method, because it is an activity which has as its end and criterion an ideal. Identity with this ideal must be the end of the activity, and the ideal is its criterion. It is with such a thought in mind that one says: "This is not truly a geographical fact; that is not really a grammatical fact; that ought not to be termed an historical fact." There is, then, a method in the subject, and this method is the activity that produces the individuals composing the subject-matter. Such activity is in the realm of scholarship.

The problem in a given branch of study is to investigate the nature of the activity that produces its facts; to determine the various phases thereof and their relations to one another. For example, the noun is a fact in grammar. The activity that produces it is different from the activity that produces the lily of the valley. Grammar must investigate the first activity, botany the second. Each branch of study is, however, an investigation of the method that creates the individuals in its subject-matter. This activity may be termed the objective method.

Every branch of study, therefore, has its objective method. By this is meant the method, the activity, the force, the energy that produces the different individuals composing the subject-matter. For example, the subject of reading has what may be termed its objective method. This is the energy, the force, the activity required to produce the various individuals in the subject-matter, such as "Thanotopsis," "Evangeline," "The Burial of Sir John Moore," "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," etc. Grammar has its objective method. This is the activity, the energy, the force that creates the various individuals included in the subject-matter of grammar, as the noun, the adverb, the preposition, etc. History as a branch of study has its objective. method. This is the activity, the energy, the force that created the various individuals in the subject-matter, as "The Battle of Bunker Hill;" "The Hartford Convention;" "The Secession Ordinance," etc. The investigation of such activities and their products is within the realm of scholarship.

When scholarship has revealed the essential nature of this activity-this objective method of the subject-it has grasped the true basis from which may be inferred two important things. One of these is the scope of the subject-matter. It is the function of scholarship to determine this; to decide which facts belong within the range of the subject, and which ones are excluded. The other important thing that may be inferred is the divisions within this subject-matter. Scholar

ship takes upon itself the determination of these. In any branch of study, therefore, scholarship is to seek out and make clear the essential nature of the creative activity that produces the individuals of the subject. It is then to infer from the nature of this activity the scope, the extent of the subject-matter, the boundary lines of the subject.

Its third great line of work is to determine from the nature of this activity the divisions and subdivisions belonging to the subject-matter, carrying such down to the particulars.

It is then, in the fourth place, to investigate these particulars, marking their unities and distinctions. Such in any branch of study seems to be scholarship's province.

In such investigation the subject-matter is assumed to be a fact distinct from the examining mind; but there constantly arises a peculiar set of questions, such as: What is the relative value of this division compared with that? of this subdivision compared with that? of this particular compared with that? Then it at once becomes evident that there is a factor to be considered over against all this with which scholarship has seemed to concern itself, and this factor is the mind which is to do the investigating. When one says: "What is the relative value of this fact as compared with that?" he evidently means the relative value to him, the investigator, arising from making subjective-from making an element of his consciousness-this fact, as compared with doing the same with that fact. When this inquiry arises, one begins to pass from the realm of scholarship over into the real province of method. For, in such inquiry, what is it hinted? A second activity; a new activity. The activity that produces any fact in the subject of botany may be termed the objective method in botany. But here is another activity-the activity which renders this fact of botany subjective to the inquiring mind; the activity which transmutes the external fact of botany into self, into consciousness. This activity is distinctive; that is, the act of consciousness which transmutes a fact of botany into self has distinguishing marks that set it off from the activity which renders a fact of geology an element of consciousness. The activity that produces a fact, an individual, in the subject of physics is the objective method in physics; but the activity of the inquiring mind necessary to make this fact of physics subjective-necessary to make it an element of self, of consciousness-is the subjective method in physics.

Every branch of study, therefore, has both its objective method and its subjective method. The objective method is the activity, the energy, the force that produces the various individuals that constitute its subject-matter. The subjective method is the activity of mind necessary to transmute into the self any one of these facts of the sub