alone are not enough to meet the
necessities in actual life.

In the first place the habit of using the scientific method in the
scientific laboratory does not in itself give assurance that the
person will apply this method in getting at the truth in problems in
his own personal life; and yet this is the essential object of all
this scientific training. In order to get the individual to carry over
this method,--especially where feelings and prejudices are
involved,--we must inculcate in him the scientific ideal and the
scientific attitude until they become general in their influence. To
do this he ought to be induced as a regular part of his early courses
in biology to practice the scientific method upon certain practical
daily decisions exactly with the same rigor that is used in the
biological laboratory. The custom of using this method in animal study
should be transformed into an _attitude of dependence upon it_ as the
only sound method of solving one's life choices. Only by carrying the
method consciously into our life's problems, _as a part of the
exercise in the course in biology_, can we break up the disposition to
regard the method as good merely in the biological laboratory. We must
generate, by practice and precept, the _ideal_ of making universal our
dependence upon our best instrument of determining truth. A personal
habit in the laboratory must become a general ideal for life, if we
hope to substitute the scientific method for prejudice in human
living. There is no department of learning so well capable of doing
this thing as biology.

In the second place, the scientific method standing alone, because of
its very excellence as a method, is liable to produce a kind of
over-sure dogmatism about conclusions, unless it be accompanied by the
scientific attitude or spirit of open-mindedness. The scientific
spirit does not necessarily flow from the scientific method at all,
unless the teacher is careful in his use of it in teaching. We make a
mistake if, in our just enthusiasm to impress the scientific method
upon the student, we fail to teach that it can give, at best, only an
approximation to truth. The scientific attitude which holds even our
best-supported conclusions subject to revision by new evidence is the
normal corrective of the possible dogmatism that comes from
over-confidence in the scientific method as our best means of
discovering truth.

The student at the end of the first year of biology ough