defects of contemporary school practice. But it was Bacon’s Instauratio Magna that opened his eyes to the possibilities of our knowledge of nature and its place in the educational scheme.”[1] This obligation to his predecessors Comenius was the first to recognize. And he recognized it often and specifically by his willing tributes to the help received by him from Vives, Bacon, Ratke, and others.
Vives
“Comenius received his first impulse as a sense-realist,” says Raumner, “from the well-known Spanish pedagogue John Lewis Vives, who had come out against Aristotle and disputation in favor of a Christian mode of philosophizing and the silent contemplation of nature.” “It is better for the pupils to ask, to investigate, than to be forever disputing with one another,” said Vives. “Yet,” adds Comenius, “Vives understood better where the fault was than what was the remedy.” In the preface to the Janua, Comenius quotes Vives among others as opposed to the current methods of language teaching.
The Spanish educator was born a hundred years before Comenius, of poor, but noble parentage. When fifteen years old he was considered the most brilliant pupil in the academy at Valencia. Two years later he was matriculated in the University of Paris, where, as his biographers tell us, he was surrounded by the Dialecticians, whose theology was the most abstruse and whose Latin was the most barbarous. This con-
- ↑ The place of Comentus in the history of education. By Nicholas Murray Butler. Proceedings of the National Educational Association for 1892.
