Instead of training children to interrogate nature for themselves, and to interpret the answers to these interrogations, instead of going straight to nature herself, the schools are forever teaching what others have thought and written on the subject. This procedure, according to Bacon, not only displays lack of pedagogic sense, but gives evidence of ignorance and self-conceit, and inflicts the greatest injury on philosophy and learning. Such methods of instruction, moreover, tend to stifle and interrupt all inquiry. We must, says Bacon, “come as new-born children, with open and fresh minds, to the observation of nature. For it is no less true in this human kingdom of knowledge than in God’s kingdom of heaven, that no man shall enter into it except as he becomes first as a little child.” Bacon’s notion, as summarized by Raumer, was that “man must put himself again in direct, close, and personal contact with nature, and no longer trust to the confused, uncertain, and arbitrary accounts and descriptions of her historians and would-be interpreters. From a clear and correct observation and perception of objects, their qualities, powers, etc., the investigator must proceed, step by step, till he arrives at laws, and to that degree of insight that will enable him to interpret the laws and to analyze the processes of nature. To this end Bacon proffers to us his new method—the method of induction. With the aid of this method we attain to an insight into the connection and natural relation of the laws of matter, and thus, according to him, we are enabled through this knowledge to make nature subservient to our will.” This was, according to Comenius, the true key to the human intellect. But he laments that Bacon should have given us the key and failed to unlock the door to the treasure-house. But Bacon did more than formulate the laws of scientific induction for pedagogic purposes: he made possible the enrichment of the courses of study by the addition of a wide range of school studies. His thrusts at the Latin and Greek, as the sole exponents of culture, were telling in their effect and made possible the recognition of the vernacular themes in Comenius’ day. “The wisdom of the Greeks,” he says, “was rhetorical; it expended itself upon words, and it had little to do with the search after truth.” Speaking again of classical culture, he says: “These older generations fell short of many of our present knowledges; they know but a small part of the world, and but a brief period of history. We, on the contrary, are acquainted with a far greater extent of the world, besides having discovered a new hemisphere, and we look back and survey long periods of history.”