The Discovery Of The Child

CRITICAL CONSIDERATIONS 5

scientists, such as assistants and laboratory staff, who, rather
than the scientists, are the greatest experts in experimental tech-
nique.

He is a scientist who has found out a way leading to an
understanding of the profound truths of life and has learnt how
to raise the veil covering its fascinating secrets. He is one who
through such research has felt coming to life within him so passion-
ate a love for the mysteries of nature that he forgets himself. The
scientist is not the man. who knows the instruments thoroughly;
he is the man who knows nature. This sublime lover displays.,
as does a monk, the external signs of his passion. We call him
a scientist who lives his life in his study quite oblivious of the out-
side world; who sometimes dees eccentric things such as being
careless about his dress, because he gives no thought to himself;
who works so unremittingly with a microscope that he loses his
eyesight; who inoculates himself with tuberculosis and who infects
himself with cholera, in his anxiety to learn the carriers by which
diseases are transmitted; and who knowing that a certain chemical
substance may be explosive, yet carries out the preparation of it
and is blown up.

That is the spirit of the man of science to whom nature reveals
her secrets, crowning him with the glory of discovery.

There exists then a spirit in a scientist, surpassing any mechan-
ism belonging to science. And a scientist has reached the
height of his glory when the spirit has triumphed over the mechan-
ism. For him science will not only have new revelations of nature,
but also philosophic theories of thought.

I consider that we ought to infuse in teachers the spirit rather
than the mechanism of the scientist; that is, the aim of training
ought to be directed towards the spirit instead of towards the
machinery. We must create in the soul of the teacher interest
in the phenomena of nature in general, till he becomes one of
those who love nature, and realizes the anxious expectation of the
man who makes experiments and waits for the revelation which
they may give. ,