Dr. Steven Cain: Magistri Est Ordinare

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Dr. Steven Cain
Tutor Talk
Thomas Aquinas College, New England
October 8, 2025
 

I gave a version of this talk at a conference on St. Thomas in Poland. It was given to professors, teachers, and so deals with matters from the teachers’ point of view. In spite of this, I wanted to give this talk here, to give it to students as well as teachers. This seemed reasonable to me because learning follows upon teaching, and those who learn can be helped by reflections on how they ought to be taught. And I wanted to give it so that I could discuss it with those, both teachers and students, who are thoughtful and can help me come to a better understanding of these things.  And so, I would like to reflect today on what St. Thomas can teach us about teaching. Not all of what he can teach, but some fundamental matters that have to do with the relation of the mind to its objects and its beginnings. It is right to turn to St. Thomas for this because he is the Universal Doctor of the Church, he was himself a magister, and he was a son of St. Dominic, whose Order is characterized by the motto contemplari et aliis tradere contemplata: to contemplate and to hand on to others the fruit of one’s contemplation. This motto describes well the art of teaching, especially when that art is aiming at handing on speculative truths, which are the perfection of the human mind. It points to the beginning of the art as regards its source, which is the contemplation of the highest things. This act of contemplation consists in knowing the truths in which the mind can rest, and in that rest seeing them as good, and so loving them. It is from this knowledge and love that the desire arises to share with others what has been contemplated, that is, the desire to teach. The wise man most of all, then, will be the one most able to teach and most desirous to do so. In fact, as we shall see, it is only insofar as one is wise, and only to the degree that one is wise that one is able to teach.

And so, in the title of this talk, I have paraphrased St. Thomas’s characterization of the wise man, sapientis est ordinare.[1] It belongs to the wise man to order. First, in discovering the order in things, especially the order of causes, then in ordering well his thoughts about those things, and then in ordering his actions. It is because he perceives the order in things, and has ordered well his thoughts about those things, recognizing what comes before and what comes after, that he is able to teach. Hence is it a mark of the wise man that he can teach,[2] for having in himself the order and connection of things, he is able to bring that order into the soul of the student.

Since the teacher acts upon the student and in that act is productive of knowledge, teaching is an art. In considering how the teacher will exercise his art, it is important to realize what kind of art it is. It is an art that produces truth in the mind of the student. But, as St. Thomas states in his Question on the Teacher,[3] a ministerial art, like the art of medicine that the magister employs. It is not really he that brings about the truth in the mind; rather the mind of the student itself, influenced through the signs that the teacher gives, comes to understand something through its own intellectual power. Unlike the art of carpentry, by which the carpenter is able to make whatever his fancy devises, as long as the matter is able to be so worked, a ministerial art is there to aid another to do what that other intends to do but is impeded from doing. In medicine, it is the nature of the man that works to maintain its health. Medicine does not produce, and ought not attempt to produce, an artifact of human imagination and choice; rather, its aim is to help the living body produce or restore health to itself. The perfection of the art is measured by the health of the body, and the act of the doctor is judged good or bad inasmuch as what is brought forth in the body of the patient is in accord with that of a healthy body.

Likewise, the teacher, who ought not to bring the mind of the student to think just anything, is tasked with aiding the mind of the student to come to truth. There is much that is implied in this rather simple, and hopefully obvious, statement. What I aim to do in this talk is to unfold something of what is there, especially as it bears on the question of order, to which the teacher ought to attend in bringing another human mind from ignorance to knowledge.

The importance of this question can be seen in light of the good at which the art of teaching aims. Men by nature desire to know, as Aristotle observes at the beginning of his Metaphysics.[4] We desire this even more than we desire to be healthy, for knowledge is the perfection of our soul, while health is a perfection of the body. Therefore, to the extent that the soul is more excellent than the body, to the extent that its perfection is a greater perfection than that of the body, so is teaching aimed at a greater good than medicine. Plato brings this out nicely in his dialogue, The Protagoras.

Understanding well how the teacher stands to the student  helps us to see why he needs to attend to order, and to what orders he must attend. First, of course, he must understand the nature that he is trying to help. To do this, there are two aspects of the mind that are especially important to grasp. The first is that the mind is a nature, or perhaps better, is a thing of nature. The second is that it is first a knower in potency and must come to be a knower in actuality.[5]

The mind is often opposed to nature because, unlike nature, the mind is open to opposites. When a thing moves by nature, it is determined to move in one way. A rock, when it is thrown up, will always come down (even if it is thrown up 10,000 times[6]), and man always begets man. The mind, however, can be moved in opposite directions. Before it knows, the mind is indifferent to the opposite sides of a contradiction, and even when it is moved to one or the other side by opinion or belief, it is still not entirely turned away from the other. It is not until it has science in Aristotle’s sense of the word (or follows an infallible authority) that it is no longer open to opposites. In fact, it is this very openness that leads the mind to inquiry, to wonder. For wonder seizes us when we are faced with evidence for both sides of a contradiction. This is why the disputed question, giving arguments on both side of a proposition, as St. Thomas does in his Summa Theologiae is appropriate even for beginners.

However, this seeming indifference to one side or the other of a proposition before being determined by argument makes the mind appear to be something wholly other than nature. Hence, St. Thomas, when objecting to God’s existence in Question 2, art. 3 of the Summa, distinguishes between nature, on the one hand, and intellect and will, on the other, as principles of “all things that appear in the world.”[7] He is arguing from the principle that where fewer principles can give an account of a thing, there is no need to introduce another. The argument concludes that there is no need to introduce God as a principle, but St. Thomas cannot reduce all that appears in the world to just one principle. This is because of the difference in kind between the effects of nature on the one hand and intellect and will on the other. This is especially evident in artifacts, in which the order that is in the matter is not from the intrinsic principles (i.e., nature) of the parts, but from outside, namely from the will of the maker, as in a watch. And the maker is able to be such a principle precisely because, in the order of his actions, and in the order of his choices, he is indeterminate and can invent for himself the order that is needed to satisfy his desires. This is a real distinction, but overemphasizing it can lead one to see such an extreme opposition that one loses sight of the connection between our mind and the natural world.

However, the mind is not wholly indeterminate. There are certain things that it knows ‘by nature,’ such as the natures of things and the first axioms, such as the principle of contradiction. In order to deny this principle, as Aristotle shows, one has to lower oneself even below the animals, for even they, in their voluntary pursuit of the sensible good are implicitly asserting as true one side of a contradiction, namely, this is something to pursue. So, if one wants to deny this principle, one must not only not speak to avoid its implication, one must not even move, and so one is reduced to the level of the plant.[8] And so, the mind must deny its own nature to deny this. Moreover, it is not only in things it knows that the mind is not indeterminate, but it also has a motion that is natural to it, like the downward motion that is natural to a rock. And this is the motion through argument. It is interesting to note that in the Prior Analytics, in his discussion of the figures of the syllogism, Aristotle argues for the validity of the other figures, but gives no defense of the universals of the first figure. He seems to have recognized that no one can see an argument in that figure and fail to see that the conclusion follows necessarily. One can still ask whether the conclusion is true, but not whether it follows.

In its ability to know things by nature (the first things of our knowledge cannot be taught), and its ability to move itself through argument, the mind shows itself to be an ‘active power’ as St. Thomas calls it, that is, a power that in a way can reduce itself to act.[9] Because it is such a power, it is able to discover for itself the truths that it is meant to know. But because of its openness to opposites, it is much more apt to fall into error than the body is to fall into sickness. And therefore, it is more often in need of a teacher to minister to it on its way to truth than the body is in need of a doctor. The teacher aids the student by removing obstacles and introducing order so that the student, through his own power, is able to move from what he knows to what he does not know. And this knowledge is its perfection, as health is the perfection of the body.

Now, if the mind is moved to know certain things by nature and has a natural way to move from these things to the knowledge of other things that it must come to know by learning, it cannot be wholly indeterminate to what it knows. That is, there must be truths about things that it is naturally aiming at, toward which it is intended to move, and which constitute its perfection independent of its choice or desires. And because of this, not only is it able to know, it is also truly able to err.

Failure to see this leads to a kind of arbitrariness in our thought (and teaching). For instance, Lobachevski can see no reason why the mind must admit the truth of Euclid’s 5^th postulate, and so sees the mind as free to assent to it or not. Choosing to assume that there are lines crossing a third line making angles with that line on one side that are less than two right angles and yet those lines will not meet, he then proceeds to build his geometry. I am not here asserting that his geomtery is itself false, but rather pointing out the fact that he sees the question of the truth of the 5^th postulate as subject to human choice. One can see this in a more radical way in Descartes, when he admits that he has no real reason to doubt the truth of his senses but chooses to doubt them simply because he can. This introduces an opposition between nature and the mind that finally reduces the mind to a means used by the will to attain its arbitrary desires. This is not to say that Descartes denies that the mind is not a kind of thing with acts proper to it. He sees the mind to be a res cogitans. But he does lose sight of it as a thing of nature, that it has an intrinsic relation to the things of nature that are joined to us by our sensations. Knowledge of those things, then, does not constitute the perfection of our mind, though they may be useful in the practical order.

In such a view, there is no need for the teacher to attend to order in his teaching. Hence, like the Sophists in Plato’s time, what they teach can even be determined by the whim of the student—their teaching becomes a commodity, to be bartered in the marketplace. It is true that once begun, there is something of an order that must be followed, an order intrinsic to what is taught. The teacher cannot depart entirely from the nature of the mind, or the student will not be moved to follow (except, perhaps, by excessive authority). And the wise man is reduced to another sense of the Greek word sophos, the clever man, or in English, the wit. This can be seen in a radical way in the character of Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias, in which our learning is reduced to turning the soul into a sieve, so that as many pleasures as possible can flow through it as quickly as possible.

We do know, then, first things first. And that implies that there are things that follow them, and in an order that will lead the mind to rest. As St. Thomas puts it:

There pre-exist in us certain seeds of the sciences, namely the first conceptions of the understanding, which are known at once by the light of the agent intellect through the species abstracted from sensible things, whether they be complex, as are the axioms, or they be incomplex [or simple], as the notion of being and of one and of things of this sort, which the understanding apprehends at once. And from these universal principles, all [other] principles follow as from certain seedling notions.[10]

They follow them because they are contained in them in a way, that is, they are known in ability in the knowledge of the ‘first conceptions.’ Thus, by argument, we are able to order our conceptions such that we can proceed from what is known to what is not known, drawing forth into actuality the truths that are contained in those first truths in ability. This the mind is able to do on its own, and is called discovery.

But such discovery is often difficult, and the mind often goes astray. But we are political animals and gifted with speech, and it is through speech that one who has come to undertand some truth is able to help another come to that same truth:

One is said to teach another in this, that, through signs, he lays out for the other that same discourse of reason that he makes in himself [through discovery], and in this way the natural reason of the student comes to knowledge of what he does not know through what has been proposed to him as through certain instruments.[11]

Thus, to be a teacher, one must have a clear knowledge of the order that is needed in our thought to come to know something. But that order begins with the first principles, which must already exist in the mind of the student, and this points us to a deeper order that is needed in teaching.

We have been considering the mind as a thing of nature to the extent that like other things of nature, it is determined in its acts. But there is another way that we must look at it in order to see fully what is contained in saying that it is a thing of nature. I hesitate to call it a natural thing, for that seems to imply that it is bodily. Rather what I am trying to bring out is that, though it is immaterial, and so not a natural thing, still it is essentially related to the natural or corporeal world. It is this that Descartes and others have failed to see. In order to avoid this mistake, one must reflect carefully on the fact that the mind is in itself only a knower in potency.

This is important because it bears on the grasp of the first principles of our knowledge, and, since the order of all subsequent knowledge depends on these beginnings, how our mind stands to them will influence the order that must be attended to in coming to know, and thus in teaching.

What it means to say that our minds are purely potential as knowers is in a way difficult to grasp, just as prime matter is difficult to grasp. (I am here discussing the nature of the possible intellect.) But one must see this about the soul, especially if one looks at it not so much as a part of the soul, but as it is an intellectual substance, as St. Thomas does in his consideration of intellectual being in the De ente et essentia, where he distinguishes the separated substances into “soul, intelligences, and the first cause.”[12] For immateriality is a condition for understanding, as is especially clear when he argues against the idea of spiritual matter, which some proposed to account for the composition in the intelligences.[13] But what does it mean for an immaterial substance to be in potency, let alone purely potential? And yet, that our minds are in potency is clear to us from our experience in coming to know. That we begin with them purely in potency is perhaps suggested to us in our experience of infants, in whom it is clear that their intellectual power is at least scarcely actual. In reflecting on our experience of coming to know things, we can see that in fact it must be wholly potential at the beginning of our life.[14]

And yet, St. Thomas still considers the human mind, the human soul to be an intellectual being. This is because the human soul is an intellect, even if that is not all it is. It is also a soul, and as such is the form of a material body. Though the intellect is a but part of the human soul, it is the principal part. And the soul itself is considered more perfect to the extent that it understands and understands the best things. This points to the soul being primarily an intellectual being and secondarily a soul. What I mean by this is that the human soul is a soul so that it can be an intellectual substance. This is suggested by the order among natural forms, which begin (from the bottom) with forms that are wholly immersed in matter, the forms of inanimate things. The form of a plant, the first that is worthy of the name soul, arises somewhat out of matter, inasmuch as it able to move in ways that inanimate things cannot, and is able to extend its being by making another like itself. Animal souls rise even more out of the confines of matter, as they are able to move even more freely, and can receive the forms of other things in an immaterial way, even if that way does not entirely rise above the limitations of matter. But the human mind does rise wholly out of matter in its act of knowing, grasping the natures of things by wholly abstracting them from their material conditions. This order among these forms points to a desire (forgive the metaphor) on the part of form to escape its material limitations.

Because the soul is primarily an intellect, its nature as a soul must come from the fact that it is an intellect. And though it is the highest of material forms (as a soul), it is the lowest of intellects. For, in intellects other than the first, which is being itself, there is necessarily some potency because they are dependent on the first for their being. It is according to their degree of  potency and act that they are distinguished from each other and ordered into a heirarchy. In this heirarchy, the human soul holds the lowest place.

There is, [says St. Thomas], a distinction of [intelligences] toward each other according to the grade of potency and act [they possess], so that a superior intelligence, which is nearer to the first, has more of act and less of potency, and so it is for the others. And this [distinction] is completed in the human soul, which holds the last place among intellectual substances. Whence the possible intellect of [the soul] stands to intelligible forms as prime matter, which holds that lowest grade among sensible being, stands to sensible forms…And therefore the Philosopher compares it to a tablet in which nothing is written.[15]

Thus, the human soul completes, on the one hand, the ascension of material forms toward immaterial being, and completes the descent of intelligences from the pure act of the first cause to lowest form of intellect. This may seem to be an odd place for a being to find itself, with one foot, as it were in the world of spirit and the other in the world of bodies. But in a way, it could hardly be otherwise. And in understanding this, we see how the mind, our spirit, is related to the natural world, the world of bodies.

That relation arises through the nearness to the material world that it has through its potency as a knower:

And because, among the other intellectual substances, [the soul] has more of potency, therefore it is brought into such proximity to material things that it draws a material thing into a participation in its own being, so that from the soul and body, there results one being in one composed thing, although that being, as much as it is of the soul, does  not depend on the body.[16]

It draws a material thing, the body, into a participation in its own being. There must be a reason for it to do that, a good that comes to the soul through this sharing of its being with the body. It must be so that the soul can share in the being of other material things as a knower. This needs some unfolding.

After the text quoted above, St. Thomas continues to show the order among forms that extend all the way to the elements:

After that form, which is the soul, there are found other forms having more of potency and are nearer to matter, so much so that their being is not without matter. Among them there is also found an order and gradation as far as the first forms of the elements, which are nearest to matter. Whence they do not have any operation except what accords with the needs of the active or passive or other qualities by which matter is disposed to form.[17]

Especially approaching these lower forms from the higher, it is surprising that they would be seen in a kind of continuity with subsisting, immaterial forms. First, they do not subsist; their being is not without matter. Even when speaking of the soul as drawing the body to share in its being, St. Thomas is careful to point out that: “that being [which belongs to the composite of soul and body], as much as it is of the soul, does not depend on the body.” Secondly, they do not, except for the animal souls, have an activity or operation that is knowing, which is what joins the first cause, the intelligences, and the soul together. And the knowing that the animals do is only knowing equivocally, as the forms they receive are still conditioned by matter. And yet, St. Thomas sees them all forming a kind of whole. This is because they are all actual, and so, even if they do not share in being intelligent, they are, even those of the elements, intelligible.

The intelligibility of material forms makes it possible for the human soul to be related to them as a knower. But why would the soul be dependent on things lower than itself for its activity of knowing? It is because of its nature as a knower in potency. All knowers are made to know and enjoy the first cause. But this is not the first thing that they know. They must rise from the things that they know most properly to see in those things the first cause, at least according to their natural knowledge of the first cause. If the human soul knew itself first, or some higher being, it would have to be an actual knower from the beginning. So, it would have to be of another nature, or incomplete in its nature (if its object were imposed upon it). As it is, it knows nothing actually, and so has to have an object that it can come to know somehow.

For the soul, then, to be what it is and to hold its place as the lowest of knowers, it is necessary that it be ordered naturally to come to know something other than itself. Now, it is not possible for an intellect to exist in pure potency any more than it is possible for prime matter to exist without a form. In order for the human intellect to be, it must have some actuality (or rather be some actuality). Its actuality ought to be knowing, for it is an intellect. But it knows nothing actually. Hence it must have or be some other actuality and that other actuality must be ordered to its actuality as an intellect. So, it draws a material thing to have a share in its being:  it is the form or actuality of a natural organized body—a soul. It is the actuality of a body that is able to bring it into communion with other bodies, that is a body with sensation, and it is in this communion that it comes to the actuality of being a knower.

Aristotle grappled with the problem of our coming to know the first principles in the Posterior Analytics. The difficulty comes down to these principles being most known and certain to us, but not coming to us through reason or mind, the highest power in us. How can something be known to us most certainly, but not come to us through the mind? The partial answer is that they come to us through sensation, a power that in itself knows the accidental forms of material things, and only in their particularity in the here and now, but in receiving those forms, receives also in them, in potency, what is intelligible in the things it knows. The soul is able to act on those forms in such a way that what is potentially intelligible in them becomes actually so, and so can then reduce the possible intellect from potency to act; that is, through our encounter with the things of the material world in the power of sensation, we come to know the what-ness, the quiddity, the nature ot the things of sense. And in this way the mind is reduced to an actual knower. It comes to have the activity proper to it as an intellect.

Hence the human soul is a soul primarily so that it can come to know the natures of sensible things through its powers of sensation. And it comes to know them so that it can come to know their, and its, cause and rejoice in that knowledge.

If the soul is joined to a body so that it can come to know the natures of sensible things, it is through its experience of them that it comes to grasp the first principles of its knowledge. St. Thomas speaks of these principles as semina scientiarum.[18] This metaphor is instructive, for it gives us an image of how the sciences are contained in them. As the plant unfolds from the seed, so our knowledge unfolds from these first principles. And the teacher’s art comes to be likened not only to that of the medical doctor, but also to that of the gardener. This is a beautiful likeness, in that, while the healing that takes place in the one being healed by the doctor is fairly hidden, and the teaching that happens by the art of the teacher is hidden in the thoughts of the student, the growth that comes about through the help of the gardner is more evident to the senses. There is an order in which he must till, plant, water, and weed, but if he attends to these as he should, the seed grows in a fairly evident way until it reaches its full maturity and blossoms. And the comparison between a plant that had been tended to in this way and one that has not received such help is striking.

So, too, the teacher must look to the way in which the student’s mind grows from the reception of these seeds to its full fruition in wisdom in order to be the wise gardener that the student needs. He must not only tend to the plant as is develops from the seed, that is, know how to lead the student from the principles of a science to the perfection of that science, but he must know how prepare the soil to receive the seed so as to promote its growth, that is, to bring the student to an understanding of the principles themselves. Because these principles come to us through our power of sensation, they must necessarily come to us in a vague and confused way.[19] We draw them from our experience of sensible things, and this will necessarily be haphazard and incomplete. Hence our grasp of them will be somewhat imperfect. We will not see them in all their power; we will not see all that is contained in them. And so, part of the task of the teacher is to help the student grasp more perfectly the principles that come to it naturally. This is more difficult and requires a greater wisdom on the part of the teacher.

Recognizing these different needs of the student, St. Thomas describes the helps that the teacher can bring as generally divided into two kinds:

The magister leads the student from the things he knows first into things he does not know in two ways. First, by proposing to him some aids or instruments which [the student’s] intellect uses to acquire science, as when he proposes to the student certain less universal propositions which the student is able to judge from what he already knows, or when he proposes to him certain sensible examples, whether things like or opposed [to what he is attempting to teach], or other things of this sort from which the intellect of the learner is led by the hand [as it were] into the knowledge of an unknown truth. [He helps in] another way when he strengthens the intellect of the learner…insofar as he proposes to the student the order of principles to conclusions, because perhaps he would not himself have a great enough power of bringing things together to deduce the conclusions from the principles.[20]

The teacher uses the second of these to lead the student from the principles to conclusions, and this is the teaching of science most immediately. But the first has to do with strengthening the student in the principles themselves. The teacher looks to things closer to the sense experience of the student, either less universal statements of the principles, or likenesses in the sense experience of the student that can help him see that something falls under the principles he knows. This is in a way not teaching strictly (in the sense of helping the student to reason to conclusions), as one cannot reason to the principles. It is a way of helping the student attend to the things of his experience in such a way that he is strengthened to see the power of a principle to extend to something that he did not see before.

            But this task of tilling the soil is also a more difficult task because there is no real determination of the way to do this as there is when looking to the order in a particular science. It is relatively easy to see the order, say, of propositions needed when teaching plane geometry. But if the student has not had the experience necessary to see clearly the nature of continuity, for example, it is harder to see how to bring him to that. This is precisely because of the haphazard and various ways in which we gain the experience from which our minds draw out the principles of our knowledge. In some way, the teacher needs to see where the student is in his maturity, how he has formed phantasms in his soul from the experience of the world around him so that he can help the student to order these phantasms in such a way that they can reveal the principles they contain more perfectly.

Seeing the need of the student not only to grow in the conclusions he reaches but to grow more and more in his grasp of the principles from which he begins helps one to see the importance of the order of the sciences. If one were to try to lead the student right away to the most universal sciences, the student will be bewildered, not seeing the connection between the things being taught and what he knows, and so would only hold what is taught as a kind of opinion or faith.[21] Rather, one must begin with things closer to sense experience, and becoming strong in the application of the principles in those matters, in order to mount to the sciences that are more removed from sense.

Plato saw in some way the importance of this order, as can be seen in the education he lays out for the guardians in his Republic. He begins with gymnastic and music to teach the children to delight in orderly sensations and movements so that when they come to the more intellectual sciences, their imaginations will be formed in such a way that they are disposed for the order they will find there. They are then brought to mathematical sciences, arithmetic and geometry, whose subjects lie a little removed from sense (the third section of the Divided Line), and then they turn to the knowledge of the forms and the Good.[22]

But we are, I think, losing a sense of the need for this order. Having lost the sense of the mind’s relation to the sensible world and conceiving of the mind as something actual in itself, we come to see ourselves more and more as makers of our own understanding. This inclines us to think that we can devise our own order in the things we know. This inclination is only becoming stronger and more widespread due to our technical prowess, which we are able to use more and more to manipulate our experience of the world around us. As an example, consider the ubiquity of artificial visual experience. Though beginning as a mere record of the past (or something of the imagination like it), it has turned into a means of barraging ourselves with image after image, in quick succession and purposely with no connection between them. How is such experience affecting our imaginations, and in affecting them, affecting our grasp of first principles? Even without such experience, Hume was able to cause many to doubt what we grasp about causes, but when our imaginations are filled with a succession of images in which the one that follows has no connection with the one that went before, how much more will we be inclined to doubt that we can know the dependence of one thing upon another?

Though such things make the work of a teacher more difficult, still, our nature is such that our minds are naturally determined to understand the first principles. But teachers will have to work harder to find ways to order the minds of their students to get them to reflect on the right things in their experience of the world and help them see the truths that will give them a beginning on the road to wisdom.

As we are approaching the anniversary of the death of Dr. McArthur, I have been reflecting on the program of studies that he and the other founders have left for us, and have seen more clearly the wisdom with which they have ordered our program. They have found teachers for us to read that can order our thoughts in order to bring us to science; teachers like Euclid, Aristotle, and St. Thomas. They have ordered our studies so that we begin with what is less universal, and so more knowable by us, and proceed to the sciences, Metaphysics and Theology, that are more difficult for us, but more knowable in themselves. But in some ways more importantly, they have given us parts of our studies that are intended to help us order our experience of the world so that we are properly disposed to the higher studies. I think this is most evident in the Freshman Natural Science tutorial. Whenthe college began, did not spend as much time on natural history; following St. John’s College, we spent much more time thinking about measurement. However, a number of years ago, the course was re-ordered to place greater emphasis on bringing the student into a greater acquaintance with the natural world through nature walks, plant labs, and the other experiences of that class. This continues with the star projects in sophomore math and the other parts of the curriculum that help us to attend more determinately to our experience of the world in which we live. In all this, they showed themselves to be wise teachers, and we owe them gratitude. Please pray for the repose of their souls.

 

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