, it is intellectual, fruitful; for we learn
from our failures when our endeavors are seriously thoughtful.

The experimental method is new as a scientific resource--as a
systematized means of making knowledge, though as old as life as
a practical device. Hence it is not surprising that men have not
recognized its full scope. For the most part, its significance is
regarded as belonging to certain technical and merely physical matters.
It will doubtless take a long time to secure the perception that it
holds equally as to the forming and testing of ideas in social and
moral matters. Men still want the crutch of dogma, of beliefs fixed
by authority, to relieve them of the trouble of thinking and the
responsibility of directing their activity by thought. They tend to
confine their own thinking to a consideration of which one among the
rival systems of dogma they will accept. Hence the schools are better
adapted, as John Stuart Mill said, to make disciples than inquirers. But
every advance in the influence of the experimental method is sure to
aid in outlawing the literary, dialectic, and authoritative methods
of forming beliefs which have governed the schools of the past, and to
transfer their prestige to methods which will procure an active concern
with things and persons, directed by aims of increasing temporal reach
and deploying greater range of things in space. In time the theory of
knowing must be derived from the practice which is most successful in
making knowledge; and then that theory will be employed to improve the
methods which are less successful.

2. Schools of Method. There are various systems of philosophy with
characteristically different conceptions of the method of knowing. Some
of them are named scholasticism, sensationalism, rationalism, idealism,
realism, empiricism, transcendentalism, pragmatism, etc. Many of
them have been criticized in connection with the discussion of some
educational problem. We are here concerned with them as involving
deviations from that method which has proved most effective in achieving
knowledge, for a consideration of the deviations may render clearer
the true place of knowledge in experience. In brief, the function
of knowledge is to make one experience freely available in other
experiences. The word "freely" marks the difference between the
principle of knowledge and that of habit. Habit means that an individual
undergoes a modification through an experience, which modi