has ever been yet; what
religions are made of and are going to be made of, nor am I dating my
mind three hundred years back and trying to pick a quarrel with Lord
Bacon. I am merely wondering whether, if science is to be taught at all,
it had not better be taught, in each branch of it, by men who are
teaching a subject they have conceived with their minds instead of a
subject which has been merely unloaded on them, piled up on top of their
minds, and which their minds do not know anything about.

No one seems to have stopped to notice what the spectacle of science as
taught in college is getting to be--the spectacle of one set of minds
which has been crunched by knowledge crunching another set. Have you
never been to One, oh Gentle Reader, and watched It, watched It when It
was working, one of these great Endowed Fact-machines, wound up by the
dead, going round and round, thousands and thousands of youths in it
being rolled out and chilled through and educated in it, having their
souls smoothed out of them? Hundreds of human minds, small and sure and
hard, working away on thousands of other human minds, making them small
and sure and hard. Matter--infinite matter everywhere--taught by More
Matter,--taught the way Matter would teach if it knew how--without
generalising, without putting facts together to make truths out of them.

It would seem, looking at it theoretically, that Science, of all things
in this world, the stuff that dreams are made of; the one boundless
subject of the earth, face to face and breath to breath with the Creator
every minute of its life, would be taught with a divine touch in it,
with the appeal to the imagination and the soul, to the world-building
instinct in a man, the thing in him that puts universes together, the
thing in him that fills the whole dome of space and all the crevices of
being with the whisper of God.

But it is not so. Science is great, and great scientists are great as a
matter of course; but the sciences in the meantime are being taught in
our colleges--in many of them, most of them--by men whose minds are mere
registering machines. The facts are put in at one end (one click per
fact) and come out facts at the other. The sciences are being taught
more and more every year by moral and spiritual stutterers, men with
non-inferring minds, men who live in a perfect deadlock of knowledge,
men who cannot generalise about a fly's wing, bashful, empty, limp, and
hopeless and dodder