It seeks to make our knowledge of common things exact and
precise, that exactness and precision may be translated into action.
The ultimate end of science, as well as its initial impulse, is the
regulation of human conduct. To make right action possible and
prevalent is the function of science. The "world as it is" is the
province of science. In proportion as our actions conform to the
conditions of the world as it is, do we find the world beautiful,
glorious, divine. The truth of the "world as it is" must be the
ultimate inspiration of art, poetry, and religion. The world as men
have agreed to say it is, is quite another matter. The less our
children hear of this, the less they will have to unlearn in their
future development.
When a child is taken from nature to the schools, he is usually brought
into an atmosphere of conventionality. Here he is not to do, but to
imitate; not to see, nor to handle, nor to create, but to remember. He
is, moreover, to remember not his own realities, but the written or
spoken ideas of others. He is dragged through a wilderness of grammar,
with thickets of diacritical marks, into the desert of metaphysics.
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