The materialists have not been slow to see their chance, to challenge the old tradition of literary education, and to urge the claims of science.  But the aim which they place before us is frankly stated—­it is the acquisition of wealth; they are “on manna bent and mortal ends,” and their conception of the future is a world in which one nation competes against another for the acquisition of markets and commodities.  In effect, therefore, materialism challenges the classics, but it accepts the self-seeking ideals of the past generations, and accepts also, as an integral part of the future, the scramble of conflicting interests, labour against capital, nation against nation, man against man.  Now the first characteristic of the genuine scientific mind is the power of learning by experience.  Real science never makes the same mistake twice.  Obviously the repetition of the past can only eventuate in the repetition of the present.  And that is precisely what education sets itself to counteract.  The materialist forgets three outstanding and obvious facts.  Firstly, science cannot be the whole of knowledge, because “science” (in his limited sense of the term) deals only with what appears.  Secondly, power of insight depends not so much upon the senses as on moral qualities, the sense of sympathy and of fairness; it needs self-discipline as well as knowledge both of oneself and one’s fellow-man.  “How can a man,” says Carlyle, “without clear vision in his heart first of all, have any clear vision in the head?” “Eyes and ears,” said the ancient philosopher, “are bad witnesses for such as have barbarian souls.”  Thirdly, the tragedy of the past generation was not its failure to accumulate wealth; in that respect it was more successful than any generation which preceded it.  The tragedy of the nineteenth century was that, when it had acquired wealth, it had no clear idea, either individually or collectively, what to do with it.

And yet the house of humanity faces both ways; it looks out towards the world of appearances as well as to the world of spirit, and is, in fact, the meeting-place of both.  Materialism is not wrong because it deals with material things.  It is wrong because it deals with nothing else.  It is wrong, also, in education because taking the point of view of the adult, it makes the material product itself the all-important thing.  In every right conception of education the child is central.  The child is interested in things.  It wants first to sense them, or as Froebel would say “to make the outer inner”; it wants to play with them, to construct with them, and along the line of this inward propulsion the educational process has to act.  The “thing-studies” if one may so term them, which have been introduced into the curriculum, such as gardening, manual training (with cardboard, wood, metal), cooking, painting, modelling, games and dramatisation, are it is true later introductions, adopted mainly from utilitarian motive; and they have been ingrafted on the original