counsel decide conscientiously, and err simply from human frailty. Most of their errors, indeed, are due to defective preparation. It is popularly supposed that these are just the men of highest education, and that on that very account they have the preference in nominations to different offices. However, this famed “legal education” is for the most part rather of a formal and technical character. They have but a superficial acquaintance with that chief and peculiar object of their activity, the human organism, and its most important function, the mind. That is evident from the curious views as to the liberty of the will, responsibility, etc., which we encounter daily. I once told an eminent jurist that the tiny spherical ovum from which every man is developed is as truly endowed with life as the embryo of two, or seven, or even nine months; he laughed incredulously. Most of the students of jurisprudence have no acquaintance with anthropology, psychology, and the doctrine of evolution—the very first requisites for a correct estimate of human nature. They have “no time” for it; their time is already too largely bespoken for an exhaustive study of beer and wine and for the noble art of fencing. The rest of their valuable study-time is required for the purpose of learning some hundreds of paragraphs of law books, a knowledge of which is supposed to qualify the jurist for any position whatever in our modern civilized community.

We shall touch but lightly on the unfortunate province of politics, for the unsatisfactory condition of the modern political world is only too familiar. In a great measure its evils are due to the fact that most of our officials are jurists—that is, men of high technical education, but utterly devoid of that thorough knowledge of human nature which is only obtained by the study of comparative anthropology and the monistic psychology—men without an acquaintance with those social relations of which we find the earlier types in comparative zoology and the theory of evolution, in the cellular theory, and the study of the protists. We can only arrive at a correct knowledge of the structure and life of the social body, the state, through a scientific knowledge of the structure and life of the individuals who compose it, and the cells of which they are in turn composed. If our political rulers and our “representatives of the people” possessed this invaluable biological and anthropological knowledge, we should not find our journals so full of the sociological blunders and political nonsense which at present are far from adorning our parliamentary reports, and even many of our official documents. Worst of all is it when the modern state flings itself into the arms of the reactionary Church, and when the narrow-minded self-interest of parties and the infatuation of short-sighted party-leaders lend their support to the hierarchy. Then are witnessed such sad scenes as the German Reichstag puts before our eyes even at the close of the nineteenth century. We have the spectacle of the educated German people in the power of the ultramontane Centre, under the rule of the Roman papacy, which is its bitterest and most dangerous enemy. Then superstition and stupidity reign instead of right and reason. Never will our government improve until it casts off the fetters of the Church and raises the views of the citizens on man and the world to a higher level by a general scientific education. That does not raise the question of any special form of constitution. Whether a monarchy or a republic be preferable, whether the constitution should be aristocratic or democratic, are subordinate questions in comparison with the supreme question: Shall the modern civilized state be spiritual or secular? Shall it be theocratic—ruled by the irrational formulæ of faith and by clerical despotism—or nomocratic—under the sovereignty of rational laws and civic right? The first task is to kindle a rational interest in our youth, and to uplift our citizens and free them from superstition. That can only be achieved by a timely reform of our schools.

Our education of the young is no more in harmony with modern scientific progress than our legal and political world. Physical science, which is so much more important than all other sciences, and which, properly understood, really embraces all the so-called moral sciences, is still regarded as a mere accessory in our schools, if not treated as the Cinderella of the curriculum. Most of our teachers still give the most prominent place to that dead learning which has come down from the cloistral schools of the Middle Ages. In the front rank we have grammatical gymnastics and an immense waste of time over a “thorough knowledge” of classics and of the history of foreign nations. Ethics, the most important object of practical philosophy, is entirely neglected, and its place is usurped by the ecclesiastical creed. Faith must take precedence over knowledge—not that scientific faith which leads to a monistic religion, but the irrational superstition that lays the foundation of a perverted Christianity. The valuable teaching of modern cosmology and anthropology, of biology and evolution, is most inadequately imparted, if not entirely unknown, in our higher schools; while the memory is burdened with a mass of philological and historical facts which are utterly useless, either from the point of view of theoretical education or for the practical purposes of life. Moreover, the antiquated arrangements and the distribution of faculties in the universities are just as little in harmony with the point we have reached in monistic science as the curriculum of the primary and secondary schools.

The climax of the opposition to modern education and its foundation, advanced natural philosophy, is reached, of course, in the Church. We are not speaking here of ultramontane papistry, nor of the orthodox evangelical tendencies, which do not fall far short of it in ignorance and in the crass superstition of their dogmas. We are imagining ourselves for the moment to be in the church of a liberal Protestant minister, who has a good average education, and who finds room for “the rights of reason” by the side of his faith. There, besides excellent moral teaching, which is in perfect harmony with our own monistic ethics, and humanitarian discussion of which we cordially approve, we hear ideas on the nature of God, of the world, of man, and of life which are directly opposed to all scientific experience. It is no wonder that physicists and chemists, doctors and philosophers, who have made a thorough study of nature, refuse a hearing to such preachers. Our theologians and our politicians are just as ignorant as our philosophers and our jurists of that elementary knowledge of nature which is based on the monistic theory of evolution, and which is already far exceeded in the triumph of our modern learning.

From this opposition, which we can only briefly point out at present, there arise grave conflicts in our modern life which urgently demand a settlement. Our modern education, the outcome of our great advance in knowledge, has a claim upon every department of public and private life; it would see humanity raised, by the instrumentality of reason, to that higher grade of culture, and, consequently, to that better path towards happiness which has been opened out to us by the progress of modern science. That aim, however, is vigorously opposed by the influential parties who would detain the mind in the exploded views of the Middle Ages with regard to the most important problems of life; they linger in the fold of traditional dogma, and would have reason prostrate itself before their “higher revelation.” That is the condition of things, to a very large extent, in theology and philosophy, in sociology and jurisprudence. It is not that the