of self-development, which requires the original exercise of the greatest number of them.

Supposing this to be admitted, which I think will not be denied, the question will arise what studies are best adapted to our purpose. This is a question which cannot be settled by authority. We are just as capable of deciding it as the men who have gone before us. They were once, like ourselves, men of the present, and their wisdom has not certainly received any addition from the slumber of centuries. They may have been able to judge correctly for the time that then was, but could they revisit us now, they might certainly be no better able than ourselves to judge correctly for the time that now is. If any of us should be heard of 200 years hence, it would surely be strange folly for the men of A.D. 2054 to receive our sayings as oracles concerning the conditions of society which will be then existing. God gives to every age the means for perceiving its own wants and discovering the best manner of supplying them; and it is, therefore, certainly best that every age should decide such questions for itself. We cannot, certainly, decide them by authority.

There are two methods by which we can determine the truth in this matter. First, we may examine any particular study and observe the faculties of mind which it does and which it does not call into action. Every reasonable man, at all acquainted with the nature of his own mind, will be able to do this. Take, for instance, the studies which are pursued for the sake merely of discipline. Do they call into exercise one or many of our faculties? Suppose they cultivate the reasoning power, and the power of poetic combination; do they do anything else? If not, what have we by which to improve the powers of observation, of consciousness, of generalization, and combination, these most important and most valuable of our faculties? If, then, their range be so limited, it may be deserving of inquiry whether some studies which can improve a larger number of our faculties might not sometimes take their places; and yet more, whether they should occupy są large a portion of the time devoted to education.

But we may examine the subject by another test. We may ask what are the results actually produced by devotion to those studies which are allowed to be merely disciplinary. We teach the mathematics to cultivate the reasoning power, and the languages to improve the imagination and the taste. We then may very properly inquire, are mathematicians better reasoners than other men, in matters not mathematical? As a student advances in the mathematics, do we find his powers of ratiocination, in anything but the relations of quantity, to be visibly improved? Are philologists or classical students more likely to become poets, or artists, than other men; or, does their style by this mode of discipline approach more nearly to the classical models of their own, or of any other language?

It is by such considerations as these that this question is to be

prepared for this affirmation, unless it could be supported by the following observation :

In the nervous apparatus of animals, the sensory ganglia are Targer than the hemispheres in proportion to the development of their respective functions; sensorial perceptions being in them more extensive than the ideal products of comparison. On the contrary, in our human nervous system, the intellectual ganglia are larger than the sensorial ones in proportion to the predominance of the reflective and willed above the perceptive faculties.

The following remarks constitute the psychological corollary to this observation.

The motor of life in animals is mostly centripetal; the motor of life in man is mostly centrifugal. But how many uneducated, or viciously educated men display none but the ferocious centripetal power of the beast: while a dog shall affront death to defend his master, that master may work the ruin of twenty families to satisfy a single brute appetite; nevertheless, the motor in the beast is called instinct, in man soul. Well, we will say yes; instinct, when a wild, uneducated, or uneducable stock; soul, when engrafted by education and revelation. As a generality, however, animals have only a centripetal or individual life; men, educated and participating in the incessant revelation, have a social and centrifugal existence also, being, feeling, thinking, in mankind, as mankind is, feels, and progresses in God. What can be done to a certain extent for brutes, may be done for idiots and their congeners; their life may be rendered more centrifugal, that is to say more social, by education.

True, this view of our subject and of our race would not deprive animals of some kind of soul. But our mind must have already become familiar with that sort of concessions; since women, Jews, peasants, Sudras, Parias, Indians, negroes, imbeciles, insane, idiots, are not now denied a soul, as they were once by religious or civil ordinances. Nations have perished by the over-educating of a few; mankind can be improved only by the elevation of the lowest through education and comfort, which substitute harmony to antagonism, and make all beings feel the unity of what circulates in all, life.

Contrarily to the teachings of various mythologies of the brain, and with the disadvantage of working against the prevalent anthropological formula, we were obliged at the same time to use most of its terms; we have developed our child, not like a duality, nor like a trinity, nor like an illimited poly-entity, but, as nearly as we could, like a unit. It is true that the unity of the physiological training could not be gone through without concessions to the language of the day, nor to necessities of analysis, quite repugnant to the principle; it is true that we have been speaking of muscular, nervous, or sensorial functions, as of things as distinct for us as muscles, nerves, and bones are for the anatomist; but after a long struggle with these difficulties, psycho-physiology vindicated its

rights against the feebleness of our understanding, and the mincing of our vocabularies.

We looked at the rather immovable, or ungovernable mass called an idiot with the faith that where the appearance displayed nothing but ill-organized matter, there was nothing but ill-circumstanced animus. In answer to that conviction, when we educated the muscles, contractility responded to our bidding with a spark from volition ; we exercised severally the senses, but an impression could not be made on their would-be material nature, without the impression taking its rank among the accumulated idealities; we were enlarging the chest, and new voices came out from it, expressing new ideas and feelings; we strengthened the hand, and it became the realizer of ideal creations and labour; we started imitation as a passive exercise, and it soon gave rise to all sorts of spontaneous actions; we caused pain and pleasure to be felt through the skin or the palate, and the idiot, in answer, tried to please by the exhibition of his new moral qualities: in fact, we could not touch a fibre of his, without receiving back the vibration of his all-souled instru

ment.

In opposition to this testimony of the unity of our nature given by idiots, since they receive a physiological education, might be arrayed the testimony of millions of children artificially developed by dualistic or other antagonistic systems; as millions of ox and horse teams testified to the powerlessness of steam. The fact that dualism is not in our nature but in our sufferings, is self-evident. Average men who oppose everything, were compressed from birth in some kind of swaddling bands; those who abhor study were forced to it as to punishment; those who gormandize were starved; those who lie were brought to it by fear; those who hate labour have been reduced,to work for others; those who covet were deprived everywhere oppression creates the exogenous element of dualism. Of the two terms of "the house divided against itself," one is the right owner, the other is evidently the intruder. We have done away with the last in educating idiots, not by repression, which would have created it, but by ignoring it.

:

One of the earliest and most fatal antagonisms taught to a child is the forbidding of using his hands to ascertain the qualities of surrounding objects, of which his sight gives him but an imperfect notion, if it be not aided by the touch; and of breaking many things as well, to acquire the proper idea of solidity. The imbecility of parents in these matters has too often favoured the growth of the evil spirit. The youngest child, when he begins to totter on his arched legs, goes about touching, handling, breaking everything. It is our duty to foster and direct that beautiful curiosity, to make it the regular channel for the acquisition of correct perceptions and tactile accuracy; as for breaking, it must be turned into the desire of preservation and the power of holding with the will; nothing is so simple, as the following example will demon

strate :

answered. We have long since abjured all belief in magical influences. If we cannot discover any law of nature by which a cause produces its effect, and are unable to perceive that the effect is produced, we begin to doubt whether any causation exists in the

matter.

If there be any truth in the foregoing remarks, they would seem to lead us to the following conclusions :—

First, that every branch of study should be so taught as to accomplish both the results of which we have been speaking; that is, that it should not only increase our knowledge, but also confer valuable discipline; and that it should not only confer valuable discipline, but also increase our knowledge; and that, if it does not accomplish both of these results, there is either some defect in our mode of teaching, or the study is imperfectly adapted to the purposes of education.

Secondly, that there seems no good reason for claiming preeminence for one study over another, at least in the manner to which we have been accustomed. The studies merely disciplinary have valuable practical uses. To many pursuits they are important, and to some indispensable. Let them, then, take their proper place in any system of good learning, and claim nothing more than to be judged of by their results. Let them not be the unmeaning shibboleth of a caste; but, standing on the same level with all other intellectual pursuits, be valued exactly in proportion to their ability to increase the power and range and skill of the human mind, and to furnish it with that knowledge which shall most signally promote the well-being and happiness of humanity.

And, thirdly, it would seem that our whole system of instruction requires an honest, thorough, and candid revision. It has been for centuries the child of authority and precedent. If those before us made it what it is, by applying to it the resources of earnest and fearless thought, I can see no reason why we, by pursuing the same course, might not improve it. God intended us for progress, and we counteract his design when we deify antiquity, and bow down and worship an opinion, not because it is either wise or true, but merely because it is ancient.

ON THOROUGHNESS OF INTELLECTUAL ATTAINMENT.

(Extract from a Lecture delivered at University College, London, by PROFESSOR A. DE MORGAN.)

THERE are two ways in which education is to be considered: that is to say, with reference to its effect upon the character and disposition of the individual, and also with reference to the degree of power and energy which is communicated to the mind. Now,

firstly, with respect to character as formed by education, it is hardly necessary to say that knowledge, to be useful in its effect upon habits, must be both liberal and accurate-must deal in reasoning and inference, and in sound reasoning and correct inference. So much is admitted by all; but I desire to be understood as going further. In looking over the various branches of human inquiry, I do not find that what is learned in a second period is merely a certain portion added to that which was acquired in the first. If I were to teach geometry for two months, I conceive that the geometry of the second month would not merely double the amount which the student gained in the first, but would be, as it were, a new study, showing other features and giving additional powers, with the advantage of its being evident that the second step is the development and consequence of the first. Suppose that, instead of employing the second month in geometry, I had turned the attention of the student to algebra, would he have been a gainer by the change? I answer confidently in the negative.

To carry this further, let us take the whole career of the learner, and apply the same argument. There is in every branch of knowledge a beginning, a middle, and an end: a beginning, in which the student is striving with new and difficult principles, and in which he is relying in a great measure on the authority of his instructor; a middle, in which he has gained some confidence in his own knowledge, and some power of applying his first principles. He is now in a state of danger, so far as the estimate which he is likely to form of himself is concerned. He has as yet no reason to suppose that his career can be checked-nothing to humble the high notion which he will entertain of himself, his teachers, and his 'subject. Let him only proceed, and he will come to what I have called the end of the subject, and will begin to see that there is, if not a boundary, yet the commencement of a region which has not been tracked and surveyed, and in which not all the skill which he has acquired in voyaging by the chart will save him from losing his way. It is at this period of his career that he will begin to form a true opinion of his own mind, which, I fully believe, is not done by many persons, simply because they have never been allowed to pursue any branch of inquiry to the extent which is necessary to show them where their power ends.

For this reason I think that, whatever else may be done, some one subject, at least, should be well and thoroughly investigated, for the sake of giving the proper tone to the mind upon the use, province, and extent of knowledge in general. I might insist upon other points connected with the disposition which a want of depth upon all subjects is likely to produce; but if what I have said be founded in reason, it is amply sufficient to justify my recommendation that, for character's sake, there should be in every liberal education at least one subject thoroughly studied. What the subject should be is comparatively of minor importance, and might, perhaps, be left in some degree to the student himself.