[Sidenote: Æsthetic and scientific studies differ.]
Vast is the difference between the æsthetic and the scientific appreciation of nature. The scientist pulls the flower to pieces, analyzes its parts, imposes hard names, and destroys that about the flower which is most attractive to the child and the poet. The student of beauty admires it as it is in its original surroundings. He cultivates it to adorn the garden, the yard, the home, the school-room.
Very much, therefore, depends upon the way in which nature is studied. The study may be pursued to beget habits of observation or to cultivate a sense of the beautiful. It may be studied for the sake of ascertaining the laws which govern the growth of plants, the changes of the seasons, the movements of the heavenly bodies, the forces which give us light, heat, and all else we need for body and mind. When it is studied for the sake of truth and beauty, the effort lifts us into the domain of the higher life.
Why should any portion of our life, as compared with another, be styled the higher life? Because a man’s life may abound in some of the activities which are essential to his existence and still fail to realize the end of his existence. Take life on the farm with all its splendid opportunities for the study of nature and of all that is attractive in God’s universe. Which should be of most account in the education of the farmer’s sons and daughters,—mind or money, light or lucre, the soul or the soil, character or capacity for getting riches? The curse of wealth, fame, office, and the like is that, if they become the chief object of one’s ambition, they drag the soul into the dust of dishonor, if not the dust of the street.
“If the farmer boy has only been taught how to raise better stock, what will he do when that better stock ranges his farm? Will he be a happier father and a nobler citizen? Will his home life be any less coarse and dull? Will the possession of blooded stock make him any more honest than common stock? If that is all you have taught him, will he not still be a brute among his brutes? Indeed, just so far as you increase his money-making without increasing his true culture and manliness, you increase the probability that he will die a drunkard, his son a spendthrift, and his grandson a pauper. The supreme need is character to guide these resources.”[56]