the sciences.  Its function differs from that of science in the curriculum.  If there is a science of literature, that is not what we are teaching in the secondary schools, and that is not what most of us believe should be taught in the secondary schools.  We think that the study of literature should transmit to each generation the great ideals that are crystallized in literary masterpieces.  And we think that, in seeing to it that our pupils are inspired with these ideals, we should also teach literature in such a way that our pupils will be left with a desire to read good literature as a source of recreation and inspiration after they have finished the courses that we offer.  When I speak of “inspiration,” “appreciation,” the development of “taste,” and the like, I am using terms that have little direct relation to the scientific method; for, as I have said, science deals with facts, and the harder and more stubborn and more unyielding the facts become, the better they represent true science.  What right have I, then, to speak of the scientific study of the teaching of English, when science and literature seem to belong to two quite separate rubrics of mental life?

I refer to this point of view, not because its inconsistencies are not fully apparent to you even upon the surface, but because it is a point of view that has hitherto interfered very materially with our educational progress.  It has sometimes been assumed that, because we wish to study education scientifically, we wish to read out of it everything that cannot be reduced to a scientific formula,—­that, somehow or other, we intend still further to intellectualize the processes of education and to neglect the tremendous importance of those factors that are not primarily intellectual in their nature, but which belong rather to the field of emotion and feeling.

I wish, therefore, to say at the outset that, while I firmly believe the hope of education to lie in the application of the scientific method to the solution of its problems, I still hold that neither facts nor principles nor any other products of the scientific method are the most important “goods” of life.  The greatest “goods” in life are, and always must remain, I believe, its ideals, its visions, its insights, and its sympathies,—­must always remain those qualities with which the teaching of literature is primarily concerned, and in the engendering of which in the hearts and souls of his pupils, the teacher of literature finds the greatest opportunity that is vouchsafed to any teacher.

The facts and principles that science has given us have been of such service to humanity that we are prone to forget that they have been of service because they have helped us more effectively to realize our ideals and attain our ends; and we are prone to forget also that, without the ideals and the ends and the visions, the facts and principles would be quite without function.  I have sometimes been taken to account for separating these two factors in this way.  But unless we do distinguish sharply between them, our educational thinking is bound to be hopelessly obscure.