ing neglect of what they are to carry, is chargeable with an analogous folly. So much of the study of language, and in such forms as are necessary to its intelligent use, is demanded in education; but while this places the study upon explicit grounds of utility, by the principle of utility should it be limited. But the lingual student, captivated by the interest of word-studies, loses the end in the means. A plough was sent to a barbarian tribe: they hung it over with ornaments, and fell down and worshipped it. In much the same manner is language treated in education.*

The old scholasticism sported with symbols, ideal and verbal; science makes a serious inquest into the realities for which they stand. The greatest secular event in history was this inversion of values among subjects of thought, and the rise of science and conquest of nature which followed; and an event of no less moment will be the carrying out of this great intellectual movement in education.

As respects discipline, these considerations present the question thus: shall it consist in the mere futile flourishing of the instruments of inquiry, or shall it be obtained by their employment upon the ends for which they are designed ?

In this discussion I use the term Science in its true and largest meaning, which is nothing less than a right interpretation of nature-a comprehension of the workings of law wherever law prevails. Knowledge grows. Its germs are found in the lowest grades of ignorance, and develop first into the improved form of common information,

* "There is no study that could prove more successful in producing often thorough idleness and vacancy of mind, parrot-like repetition and sing-song knowledge, to the abeyance and destruction of the intellectual powers, as well as to the loss and paralysis of the outward senses, than our traditional study and idolatry of language."—Professor Halford Vaughan.

which then unfolds into the definite and perfected condition of science. It matters nothing whether the subjects are stones or stars, human souls, or the complications of social relation ;-that most perfect knowledge of each which reveals its uniformities constitutes its special science, and that comprehensive view of the relations which each sustains to all in the cosmical order, realizes the broadest import of the conception. Science, therefore, is the revelation to reason of the policy by which God administers the affairs of the world. But how inadequate is the conception of it generally entertained, even among men of eminent literary cultivation, who seem to think the highest object of understanding the things of nature is merely to slake a petty curiosity! *

A common form of misapprehension is that which limits science to the consideration of mere matter,' and then reproaches it with being a cold materializing pursuit. But science deals with forces as well as matter; and when those who make this reproach will indicate just how much remains when the actions of power upon matter are exhausted, they will, perhaps, widen their conceptions upon

*Mr. Carlyle writes: "For many years it has been one of my constant regrets, that no schoolmaster of mine had a knowledge of natural history, so far at least as to have taught me the grasses that grow by the wayside, and the little winged and wingless neighbors that are continually meeting me, with a salutation which I cannot answer, as things are! Why didn't somebody teach me the constellations, too, and make me at home in the starry heavens, which are always overhead, and which I don't half know to this day? I love to prophesy that there will come a time, when not in Edinburgh only, but in all Scottish and European towns and villages, the schoolmaster will be strictly required to possess these two capabilities (neither Greek nor Latin more strict!) and that no ingenuous little denizen of this universe be thenceforward debarred from his right of liberty in these two departments, and doomed to look on them as if across grated fences all his life!" No hint is here given of that transcendent order of truth to which surrounding objects are but the portals.

the subject. Not only do the great lines of scientific thought converge to the supreme end of elucidating the regnant subjects of man and society, but its influence is powerfully felt even in the highest regions of philosophical speculation. Yet it is by denying this, and insisting that science consists in collecting stones, labelling plants, and dabbling in chemical messes, that the adherents of tradition. strive to render it obnoxious to popular prejudice. In defending the policy of the Great English Schools which contemptuously ignore almost the whole body of modern knowledge, the able Head-master of Rugby puts the case

*Professor Masson, in his lively little work, "Recent British Philosophy," remarks: "In no age so conspicuously as in our own has there been a crowding in of new scientific conceptions of all kinds to exercise a perturbing influence on Speculative Philosophy. They have come in almost too fast for Philosophy's powers of reception. She has visibly reeled amid their shocks, and has not yet recovered her equilibrium. Within those years alone which we have been engaged in surveying there have been developments of native British science, not to speak of influxes of scientific ideas, hints, and probabilities from without, in the midst of which British Philosophy has looked about her, scared and bewildered, and has felt that some of her oldest statements about herself, and some of the most important terms in her vocabulary, require re-explication. I think that I can even mark the precise year 1848 as a point whence the appearance of an unusual amount of unsteadying thought may be dated-as if, in that year of simultaneous European irritability, not only were the nations agitated politically, as the newspapers saw, but conceptions of an intellectual kind that had long been forming themselves underneath in the depths were shaken up to the surface in scientific journals and books. There are several vital points on which no one can now think, even were he receiving four thousand a year for doing so, as he might very creditably have thought seventeen years ago. There have been during that period, in consequence of revelations by scientific research in this direction and in that, some most notable enlargements of our views of physical nature and of history-enlargements even to the breaking down of what had formerly been a wall in the minds of most, and the substitution on that side of a sheer vista of open space. But there is no need of dating from 1848, or from any other year in particular. In all that we have recently seen of the kind there has been but the prolongation of an action from Science upon Philosophy that had been going on for a considerable time before."

on the explicit ground that science deals only with the lower utilities, while classical studies carry us up to the sphere of life and man; that science only instructs, while they humanize. But we have seen that such a view is indefensible. Science being the most perfect form of thought, and man its proper subject, the sharply-defined question is, whether he is to be studied by the lower or the higher method. Is the most thorough acquaintance with humanity to be gained by cutting the student off from the life of his own age, and setting him to tunnel through dead languages, to get such imperfect and distorted glimpses as he may of man and society in their antiquated forms; or by equipping him with the best resources of modern thought, and putting him to the direct and systematic study of men and society as they present themselves to observation and experience. In all other departments it is held desirable, as far as possible, to place directly before the student his materials of inquiry: why abandon the principle in the case of its highest application?

Our question thus assumes another aspect: for the best discipline of the human mind, shall we make use of those higher forms and completer methods of knowledge which constitute the science of the present age, or shall we use the lower and looser knowledge and cruder methods of the past?

Science also has great advantage, as a means of mental discipline, in the incentives to which it appeals for arousing mental activity, its motives to effort being such as the pupil can be made most readily to appreciate and feel. The reasons for studying the dead languages are not such as to act with inspiring force upon beginners: hence motives to exertion have largely to be supplied by external authority,

which necessitates in the school-discipline a decided co ́ercive element, while those who administer it, having little sympathy with new-light' notions about making study pleasurable, lighten the student's tasks by the enlivening assurance that wearisome toil is evermore the price of great results.

This is the old ascetic misconception of the controlling aims of life-false everywhere, fatal in education. The free and healthy exercise of the faculties and functions is so pleasurable as to be universally spoken of as a 'play'; who then has the right to turn it into dreary and -repulsive task-work? The love of enjoyment is the deepest and most powerful impulse of our nature, and the educational system which does not recognize and build upon it violates the highest claim of that nature. The first thing to be done by the teacher is to awaken the pupil's interest, to engage his sympathies and kindle his enthusiasm, for these are the motors of intellectual progress; it is then easy to enchain his attention, to store his mind with knowledge, and carry mental cultivation up to the point of discipline.

This is of the first importance. Flogging has been the accompaniment of education for centuries; and although the humanizing agencies are slowly bringing us out of this barbaric dispensation, yet the penal policy, or that which makes the fear of pain, in one shape or other, the chief incentive to effort, is still prevalent. This not only appeals to the lowest motives, but is self-defeating. Painful feelings are anti-vital, depressing, fatal to mental spontaneity, and therefore a hindrance to acquisition: agreeable emotions, on the other hand, are stimulating, and favor nervous impressibility and spontaneous impulsion. The instinctive love of pleasurable activity which is so marked in youth becomes therefore a most powerful means of men