this some one thing, and work out
from it to everything. Inasmuch as the chief working principle of human
nature is the principle of natural selection, the entire method of the
teacher of the future will be based on his faith in natural selection.
All such teaching as he attempts to do will be worked out from the
temperamental, involuntary, primitive choices of his own being, both in
persons and in subject. His power with his classes will be his power of
divining the free and unconscious and primitive choices of individual
pupils in persons and subjects.

Half of the battle is already won. The principle of natural selection
between pupils and subjects is recognised in the elective system, but we
have barely commenced to conceive as yet the principle of natural
selection in its more important application--mutual attraction between
teacher and pupil--natural selection in its deeper and more powerful and
spiritual sense: the kind of natural selection that makes the teacher a
worker in wonder, and education the handiwork of God.

In most of our great institutions we do not believe in even the theory
of this deeper natural selection: and if we do believe in it, sitting in
endowed chairs under the Umbrella of Endowed Ideas, how can we act on
that belief? And if we do, who will come out and act with us? If it does
not seem best for even the single teacher, doing his teaching unattached
and quite by himself, to educate in the open,--to trust his own soul and
the souls of his pupils to the nature of things, how much less shall the
great institution, with its crowds of teachers and its rows of pupils
and its Vested Funds be expected to lay itself open--lay its teachers
and pupils and its Vested Funds open--to the nature of things? We are
suspicious of the nature of things. God has concealed a lie in them. We
do not believe. Therefore we cannot teach.

The conclusion is inevitable. As long as we believe in natural selection
between pupil and subject, but do not believe in natural selection
between pupil and teacher, no great results in education or in teaching
a vital relation to books or to anything else will be possible. As long
as natural selection between pupil and teacher is secretly regarded as
an irreligious and selfish instinct, with which a teacher must have
nothing to do, instead of a divine ordinance, a Heaven-appointed
starting-point for doing everything, the average routine teacher in the
conventional school and col