he has followed, but he is among those who pre-eminently have no business to follow bad examples, either in practice or in precept. But the Paterson Principal will search a long time before finding a precedent as bad as that which he himself has set. He goes voluntarily into the business of robbing foreign authors when nearly everybody else is trying to stop it; he cuts up his book at his own caprice while the author is himself revising and condensing it; and then he plots with other educators to secure the adoption of the dishonest edition, to the exclusion of the honest and superior book. Such things might be expected of a sordid and unprincipled huckster in the publication business, but they are to be reprobated in the principal of a high-school. That he is backed by other teachers does not help the matter, but only still further exemplifies the lax and dull state of mind in regard to right and wrong which they thus evince, and which goes far to explain the backwardness and neglect of moral education in our schools.
STABILITY IN SYSTEMS OF THOUGHT.
In the "Commercial Advertiser" of January 14th there is an able article, evidently from the master-mind of that journal, on Spencer's evolution philosophy, which, from the interest of the questions raised, as well as its very decided views, deserves some critical notice. After passing encomiums on Mr. Spencer for his noble and disinterested aims, the comprehensiveness of his work, his immense results considered as an intellectual achievement, his painstaking industry, and indefatigable persistency of purpose, the writer remarks that, admirable as it all is, it still has about it "a touch of the pathetic." Not that it may never be finished, as many fear, but that, even if completed, it will quickly take its place among the systems of futile speculation with which the human mind has teemed for these thousands of years. After referring to the sad experience of Buckle, the writer says: "Mr. Spencer's case is different; he may be able to finish his work, but the view of it that comes to us is, that when it is finished it may prove, in scope and substance, no more than a brilliant dream. The theory of evolution, in the construction of which he has spent so many laborious days and nights, lavished such wonderful powers of observation and generalization, and exhibited such an ingenuity of fancy, collecting such masses of knowledge and scintillating such flashes of suggestion, will, after all, share the fate of other merely speculative fabrics, and, like them, in spite of a certain color of science which he has been enabled to give it, fade away in the advancing light of real knowledge."
We can not help thinking that this judgment manifests an imperfect appreciation of the intellectual revolution which marks off ancient and mediæval from modern thought, in so far as this represents a new era of science. It can hardly be contended that science in the present state of its development counts for nothing in its influence upon systems of thought; nor is it difficult to see in what way it acts and must increasingly act in future to discredit or to conserve such systems. The old schemes of speculation and schools of philosophy ran their transient course under the influence of great teachers, and then declined and gave place to others, because they had no basis in any real knowledge of Nature. In metaphysics and religion, the two great spheres of mental activity, imagination went riot for lack of restraining data. They had no element that could give them permanent value; one man's opinion was as good as another's, and systems multiplied with the common and inevitable character of instability. Some were preserved by favoring accidents. The system of Plato, as intrin-
