sented the weariness of
words, phrases, and vain subtleties which had been gradually growing in
strength since the time of Montaigne, Ludovicus Vives, and Erasmus. The
poets, also, had been placing nature before the minds of men in a new
aspect. The humanists, as we have said, while unquestionably improving
the aims and procedure of education, had been powerless to prevent the
tendency to fall once more under the dominion of words, and to revert to
mere form. The realism of human life and thought, which constituted
their _raison d'etre_, had been unable to sustain itself as a principle
of action, because there was no school of method. It was the study of
the realities of sense that was finally to place education on a
scientific basis, and make reaction, as to method at least, impossible.

The thought of any age determines the education of the age which is to
succeed it. Education follows; it does not lead. The school and the
church alike march in the wake of science, philosophy, and political
ideas. We see this illustrated in every epoch of human history, and in
none so conspicuously as in the changes which occurred in the philosophy
and education of ancient Rome during the lifetime of the elder Cato, and
in modern times during the revival of letters and the subsequent rise of
the Baconian induction. It is impossible, indeed, for any great movement
of thought to find acceptance without its telling to some extent on
every department of the body politic. Its influence on the ideas
entertained as to the education of the rising generation must be, above
all, distinct and emphatic. Every philosophical writer on political
science has recognized this, and has felt the vast significance of the
educational system of a country both as an effect--the consequence of a
revolution in thought--and as a cause, a moving force of incalculable
power in the future life of a commonwealth. Thus it was that the
humanistic movement which preceded and accompanied the Reformation of
religion shook to its centre the mediaeval school system of Europe; and
that subsequently the silent rise of the inductive spirit subverted its
foundations.

Bacon, though not himself a realist in the modern and abused sense of
that term, was the father of realism. It was this side of his teaching
which was greedily seized upon, and even exaggerated. Educational zeal
now ran in this channel. The conviction of the churches of the time,
that one can make men what one