František Tilšer’s Place in the Struggle for a Progressive School and his Comeniological Works

K. Rýdl’s article contains information about the life and work of the nowadays unjustly ignored professor of the Czech Polytechnic, František Tilšer, who in the year 1883 was the only one of the Czech deputies to vote against the amendment to the Education Act, thus demonstrating his patriotic feeling and his sense of justice and honour.
Besides being a politician, Tilšer was a prominent geometrician, who developed Monge’s descriptive geometry in greater depth. By means of his ow n philosophy- based theory of imagery, the so-called iconognosis, and a system of sym bols, he endeavoured to show mankind a safe way towards eliminating so cial antagonisms and a decline of reason.
Tilšer was a very good educationist, teacher and students’ friend. His contacts with leading representatives of the Czech teaching profession got him to study the works of J. A. Comenius. It was especially in his pansophian writings that Tilšer found an identity of ideas with his ow n iconognosis and he elaborated this mutual relationship into a new theoretical system presenting reasons for a future harmony of mankind.
As a man of outstanding personal qualities and as an original thinker he should not be forgotten. The heritage he left to mankind has again, especially in recent years, become topical.