=The Rise and Nature of Realism.=--By the seventeenth century it is obvious that humanism was everywhere losing its vitality and declining into a narrow ‘Ciceronianism,’ and that the Reformation was hardening once more into fixed concepts and a dogmatic formalism. The awakened intellect of Europe, however, was tending to find still another mode of expression in the educational movement that is usually known as ‘realism.’ The process of emancipating the individual from tradition and repressive authority had not altogether ceased, but it was manifesting itself mainly through a rather different channel. The movement of realism implied a search for a method by which ‘real things’ may be known. In its most distinct and latest form,--‘sense realism,’ it held that real knowledge comes through the senses and reason rather than through memory and reliance on tradition, and in this way it interpreted the ‘real things’ as being individual objects. Educational realism, therefore, concerned itself ultimately with investigation in the natural sciences; and it might well be denominated ‘the beginnings of the scientific movement,’ were it not that such a description neglects the earlier phases of the realistic development. [Sidenote: ‘Real things’ in ideas, rather than words.] [Sidenote: Milton’s _Tractate_ as an illustration.] =Humanistic Realism.=--For, even before objects were regarded as the true realities, there seems to have been an effort among some later humanists to seek for the ‘real things’ in the ideas that were represented by the written words. This broader type of humanism, in consequence, tended to break from a restriction to words and set forms and return to the interest in the content of classical literature that marked the Renaissance before its decline into formalism. It may, therefore, properly be called ‘humanistic realism.’ With its emphasis upon content usually went a study of social and physical phenomena, in order to throw light upon the passages under consideration. Illustrations of this humanistic realism are found in many writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Milton (1608-1674), for example, while a remarkable classicist himself, in his _Tractate of Education_ objects to the usual humanistic education with “its grammatic flats and shallows where they stuck unreasonably to learn a few words with lamentable construction”; and says of the pupil, “if he have not studied the solid things in them as well as the words and lexicons, he were nothing so much to be esteemed as any yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his mother dialect only.” And he would teach the Latin writers on agriculture, and the Greek writers on natural history, geography, and medicine for the sake of the subject-matter. [Sidenote: Preparation for living in a real world.] [Sidenote: Its content.]