“We live by Admiration, Hope, and Love, And e’en as these are well and wisely fixed, In dignity of being we ascend.”
So says Wordsworth, and if this assertion cannot be verified, no more can it be disproved; that the words have become almost proverbial shows that it commends itself to the general consciousness. Whatever knowledge we may acquire, it will have little effect on our lives unless we can “relate it” (again to use Matthew Arnold’s words), “to our sense of conduct and our sense of beauty.” (_Discourses in America._ “Literature and Science.”) So long as we retain our sense for these, “the humanities” are safe. Like Milton we may have no inclination to study “modern Januas,” but we shall not cease to value many of the works which the Janua of Comenius was supposed to have supplanted.[83]
§ 51. “Analogies are good for illustration, not for proof.” If Comenius had accepted this caution, he would have escaped much useless labour, and might have had a better foundation for his rules than fanciful applications of what he observed in the external world. “Comenius” as August Vogel has said, “is unquestionably right in wishing to draw his principles of education from Nature; but instead of examining the proper constitution and nature of man, and taking that as the basis of his theory, he watches the life of birds, the growth of trees, or the quiet influence of the sun, and thus substitutes for the nature of man nature _without_ man (_die objective Natur_). And yet by Nature he understands that first and primordial state to which as to our original [idea] we should be restored, and by the voice of Nature he understands the universal Providence of God or the ceaseless influence of the Divine Goodness working all in all, that is, leading every creature to the state ordained for it. The vegetative and animal life in Nature is according to Comenius himself not life at all in its highest sense, but the only true life is the intellectual or spiritual life of Man. No doubt in the two lower kinds of life certain analogies may be found for the higher; but nothing can be less worthy of reliance and less scientific than a method which draws its principles for the higher life from what has been observed in the lower.” (A. Vogel’s _Gesch. d. Pädagogik als Wissenschaft_, p. 94.)