When the history of work,
when the conditions of using the soil, forest, mine, of
domesticating and cultivating grains and animals, of manufacture
and distribution, are left out of account, history tends to
become merely literary -- a systematized romance of a mythical
humanity living upon itself instead of upon the earth.
Perhaps the most neglected branch of history in general education
is intellectual history. We are only just beginning to realize
that the great heroes who have advanced human destiny are not its
politicians, generals, and diplomatists, but the scientific
discoverers and inventors who have put into man's hands the
instrumentalities of an expanding and controlled experience, and
the artists and poets who have celebrated his struggles,
triumphs, and defeats in such language, pictorial, plastic, or
written, that their meaning is rendered universally accessible to
others. One of the advantages of industrial history as a history
of man's progressive adaptation of natural forces to social uses
is the opportunity which it affords for consideration of advance
in the methods and results of knowledge. At present men are
accustomed to eulogize intelligence and reason in general terms;
their fundamental importance is urged. But pupils often come
away from the conventional study of history, and think either
that the human intellect is a static quantity which has not
progressed by the invention of better methods, or else that
intelligence, save as a display of personal shrewdness, is a
negligible historic factor.
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