God does the rest. In teaching, he only is successful who supplies
the conditions of growth--that is all there is of the Science of
Pedagogics, which is not a science, and if it ever becomes one, it will
be the Science of Letting Alone, and not a scheme of interference. Just
so long as some of the greatest men are those who have broken through
pedagogic fancy and escaped, succeeding by breaking every rule of
pedagogy, as Wagner discarded every Law of Harmony, there will be no
such thing as a Science of Education.

Recently I read Aristotle's Essays on Rhetoric and Oratory, and I was
pained to see how I had been plagiarized by this man who wrote three
hundred years before Christ. Aristotle used charts in teaching and
indicated the mean by a straight horizontal line, and the extreme by an
upright dash. He says: "From one extreme the mean looks extreme, and
from another extreme the mean looks small--it all depends upon your
point of view. Beware of jumping to conclusions, for beside the
appearance you must look within and see from what vantage-ground you
gain the conclusions. All truth is relative, and none can be final to a
man six feet high, who stands on the ground, who can walk but forty
miles at a stretch, who needs four meals a day and one-third of his time
for sleep. A loss of sleep, or loss of a meal, or a meal too much, will
disarrange his point of view, and change his opinions," And thus do we
see that a belief in "eternal punishment" is a mere matter of
indigestion.

A certain bishop, we have seen, experienced a regret that Darwin
expended so much time on earthworms; and we might also express regret
that Aristotle did not spend more. As long as he confined himself to
earth, he was eminently sure and right: he was really the first man who
ever used his eyes. But when he quit the earth, and began to speculate
about the condition of souls before they are clothed with bodies, or
what becomes of them after they discard the body, or the nature of God,
he shows that he knew no more than we. That is to say, he knew no more
than the barbarians who preceded him.

He attempted to grasp ideas which Herbert Spencer pigeonholes forever as
the Unknowable; and in some of his endeavors to make plain the
unknowable, Aristotle strains language to the breaking-point--the net
bursts and all of his fish go free. Here is an Aristotelian proposition,
expressed by Hegel to make lucid a thing nobody comprehends: "Essential
being as be