II. Educational
Superstition flourishes because knowledge is still the luxury of the few. By education alone can we hope to attain to the extinction of that phase of mind termed belief, or faith, which has always been inculcated as a virtue or a duty by the priest, and condemned as a vice of the intellect by the philosopher. In every age, the ability to discern the lines of demarcation which separate the known from the unknown is the initial stage of advancement; and in the training of youth, the prime object of the educator should be to confer this power on every individual; for in the uninformed minds of a great majority of mankind, fact and fancy are for the most part inextricably entangled. The efforts of authority to dispel or perpetuate error are most potent when acting on the impressionable faculties of early life. In a sane and progressive world the first conception to be engrafted in the expanding mind should be that knowledge has no foothold beyond the causeways pushed by science into the ocean of the unknown.[1]*
- ↑ There seems to be no good reason why children should not now be taught from a primer of scientific cosmology, and have a catechism of ethics as well to the exclusion of everything mythological. The human brain is a weak organ of mind, and requires, above all things, a tonic treatment. Nothing can be more enfeebling than any teaching which causes children to imagine that they are surrounded by unseen intelligences having the power to affect them for good or evil. In most instances, a mind so subdued never recovers its resiliency; liberty of thought is always hampered by dread of the invisible; and many of our greatest men have been unable in after life to free themselves from this fatuity. There should, however, be places of public assembly where people could resort for ethical direction and encouragement, without the lessons taught being vitiated or nullified by being made to depend on mythology. But the objectionable name "agnostic" should be discarded,
