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A JOURNAL FOR THE PROGRESSIVE TEACHER.

Vol. I.

IN

AUGUST. 1895.

THE REAL PROVINCE OF METHOD.

BY HOWARD SANDISON.

N this case the mere title is itself significant. It implies that the boundary line between the realm of method and that of something else is indistinct. That something else may be scholarship; it may be the realm of means; of external appliances; of devices. In the title there is the implication that method is, or has been occupying an unreal, fictitious province. This fictitiousness may arise from the fact that scholarship is wanting, and that the attempt to determine a set of principles to control in that given realm, in which scholarship is wanting, results in an unreal province for method. Outer doing, devices, external means, with little or no attention to the truths that underlie them, may be pressed to the front as method. This would constitute a fictitious province for method. Scholarship alone, may be exalted as if it were all in all. In that case method would not possess its real province. It means that an indistinctness prevails as to the true realm of method. To remove this indistinctness is the problem of this discussion.

It is but natural that a certain indefiniteness, that a given degree of indistinctness should prevail as to the real province of method, in distinction from that of both scholarship and external means. The reason for this is that activity is the one thing to be found in the universe. Sometimes one speaks of a thing and of activity upon it. But what is the thing itself other than activity? A block of the most compact steel seems perfectly motionless, yet every atom in it has a space of its own, and ex

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ists in a continual dance. Thus it is with every atom in the hardest granite. It seems that only activity is. This activity rises from its most passive form in space, until it becomes an activity that can become aware of itself as in consciousness. Scholarship, then, concerns itself with activity, and with activity only. Method, too, must deal with activity, and with that alone. The realm. of device, of external means, is also one of doing; of activity. In this fact that device is activity, that method deals with activity, that the subject-matter of scholarship is activity-rests the source of the indistinctness as to their respective provinces. The activity that scholarship investigates appears in ever-recurring types. This activity may, therefore, appropriately take unto itself the term method. Every branch of study investigates activity as type or law; and law is method, and method is law. The past makes us its debtor by handing over to us this thought in the very term method itself. The word method signifies according to a way. nifies according to a way. But what is it that is according to a way? And what is meant by a way? If the thought above presented, viz., that there is nothing in the universe other than activity, then it must be activity that is according to a way. And, moreover, the way itself is necessarily an activity. Then it becomes clear that the past transfers to us this thought which it had garnered from the fields of experience a method is an activity according to, or in harmony with, an activity. The first activity mentioned must be the real one, the one actually occurring; the one ex

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