Not only should education be common to all classes of society, but the subjects of instruction should be common to the whole range of knowledge. Comenius holds that it is the business of educators to take strong and vigorous measures that no man in his journey through life may encounter anything so unknown to him that he will be unable to pass sound judgment upon it and turn it to its proper use without serious error. This desire for encyclopædic learning, as already noted, dominated his life and writings. But even Comenius recognized the futility of thoroughness in a wide range of instruction, and he expresses willingness to be satisfied if men know the principles, the causes, and the uses of all things in existence. It is general culture—something about a great many things—that he demands. Comenius clearly saw that the conditions of educational institutions were wholly inadequate for the realization of these purposes—(1) because of an insufficient number of schools, and (2) because of the unscientific character of current methods of instruction. The exhortations of Martin Luther, he observes, remedied the former shortcoming, but it remains for the future to improve the latter. The best intellects are ruined by unsympathetic and unpedagogic methods. Such great severity characterizes the schools that they are looked upon as terrors for the boys and shambles for their intellects. Most of the students contract a dislike for learning, and many leave school altogether. The few who are forced by parents and guardians to remain acquire a most preposterous and wretched sort of education, so that instead of tractable lambs, the schools produce wild asses and restive mules. Nothing could be more wretched than the discipline of the schools. “What should be gently instilled into the intellect is violently impressed upon it, nay, rather flogged into it. How many, indeed, leave the schools and universities with scarcely a notion of true learning.” Comenius laments that he and many thousands of his contemporaries have miserably lost the sweet spring-time of life and wasted the fresh years of youth on scholastic trifles. _Education according to Nature_ Comenius proposes to so reconstruct systems of education that (1) all shall be educated, except those to whom God has denied understanding, in all those subjects calculated to make men wise, virtuous, and pious; (2) the course of training, being a preparation for life, shall be completed before maturity is attained; (3) and schools shall be conducted without blows, gently and pleasantly, in the most natural manner. Bold innovator! How clearly he perceived the faults of the schools of his day; with what keen insight he formulated methods for their improvement; and with what hope in the reform which has gone forward steadily for these two hundred and seventy-five years, but which even now is far from being an accomplished fact!