es and our earthly
circumstances. It is a faculty which will protect us against all harmful
suggestion. "We are all critical against the results reached by others
and uncritical against our own results."[2214] To act by suggestion or
autosuggestion is to act by impulse. Education teaches us to act by
judgment. Our education is good just so far as it produces
well-developed critical faculty. The thirteenth century had no critical
faculty. It wandered in the dark, multiplying errors, and starting
movements which produced loss and misery for centuries, because it dealt
with fantasies, and did not know the truth about men or their position
in the world. The nineteenth century was characterized by the
acquisition and use of the critical faculty. A religious catechism never
can train children to criticism. "Patriotic" history and dithyrambic
literature never can do it. A teacher of any subject who insists on
accuracy and a rational control of all processes and methods, and who
holds everything open to unlimited verification and revision is
cultivating that method as a habit in the pupils. In current language
this method is called "science," or "scientific." The critical habit of
thought, if usual in a society, will pervade all its mores, because it
is a way of taking up the problems of life. Men educated in it cannot be
stampeded by stump orators and are never deceived by dithyrambic
oratory. They are slow to believe. They can hold things as possible or
probable in all degrees, without certainty and without pain. They can
wait for evidence and weigh evidence, uninfluenced by the emphasis or
confidence with which assertions are made on one side or the other. They
can resist appeals to their dearest prejudices and all kinds of
cajolery. Education in the critical faculty is the only education of
which it can be truly said that it makes good citizens. The operation of
the governmental system and existing laws is always "educating" the
citizens, and very often it is making bad ones. The existing system may
teach the citizens to war with the government, or to use it in order to
get advantages over each other. The laws may organize a big "steal" of
the few from the many, and they may educate the people to believe that
the way to get rich is to "get into the steal." "Graft" is a reaction of
the mores on the burdens and opportunities offered by the laws, and
graft is a great education. It educates faster and deeper than all the
schools