ABSTRACT
Theodor Wilhelm is the only one who has gone right back to the earliest uses of the term, and he quotes the first example of it from the work of an American who in 1859 spent a year at a German secondary school: 'The German Government did not encourage reasoning. All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes. The German machine was terribly efficient. Its effect on the children was pathetic.'! Of course this does not really involve fieldtheory in the sense we have been discussing; on the contrary it is more of a metaphorical remark.
