ON BRAIN-FORCING. 221 



quantity, without stifling quality and variety, and how are we to use 

 these virtues in the riper man without disabling him ? 



Quality, as I have said, cannot be had for the asking ; it is fitful in 

 its growth, and often born out of due time. It should be favored by 

 the continuous inheritance of culture, but the mode of its epiphany lies 

 in the same darkness with that developmental nisus which lies behind 

 the advance of life upon the globe. Inherited, as it doubtless must be, 

 yet its arising cannot be foreseen in the span of human generation. In 

 the past it has more often burst forth from obscurity as the Greek and 

 Arab from the Orient, the Roman from the Latin, the Pisan, the Geno- 

 ese, the Venetian from Byzantium, the Tudor English from the Eng- 

 land of Lancaster and Plantagenet. Men of high quality do not seem, 

 even generally, to have sprung, like Pallas, from the brain of their 

 fathers, but conceived in the dark womb of time to have lighted upon 

 the world in companies. How then education, by taking thought unto 

 itself, is to breed or make men of great initiative is a hard question. 

 It seems clear, however, that it is not to be done simply by the wed- 

 ding of brain to brain, but that for its generation may be needed some 

 barbarous and even gross admixture, some strange coition between the 

 sons of God and the daughters of men. But that which they who 

 govern education can do is, to give to genius and to character a free 

 way for expansion and action. We cannot make such a man as Ed- 

 wards the naturalist of Banff, and the more sad is it that such men 

 when born to us are too often maimed or driven by circumstance, and 

 their gifts despoiled. That many mute, inglorious Miltons are buried 

 in our churchyards, I venture to doubt ; the fire of a Burns is not easily 

 hidden under a bushel, but some smaller lights may thus be quenched, 

 and the best of such men, like Burns himself, may be thwarted or broken 

 in heart. Some may aver, and not without seeming of truth, that trial 

 is to genius as the furnace to noble metal. But, surely, this world will 

 always offer to its children a front stern enough for their chastisement, 

 and a law hard enough for their contrition there needs not the imposi- 

 tion of fetters of ours, nor the devices of our caprice or austerity. One 

 born before his time, in the inertia of his own generation, will find 

 resistance enough to try his steel. Moreover, as I have said, great 

 quality of brain may not be associated to high tension, and a moderate 

 resistance may be fatal to achievement. A man may not be a Luther, 

 a Cromwell, or a Knox, but he may be a Melanchthon, a Cranmer, or a 

 Wishart, and in favoring days may do the work which was done by the 

 former in virtue of high tension as well as of genius. 



It is too certain, on the other hand, that by stress of circumstance, 

 zeal may be turned into fierceness, reason into tyranny, and strength 

 into brutality ; it is well, therefore, we should see that in our scheme 

 of education we are mindful of two things : 1. That we secure per- 

 fect freedom for the individual and toleration for all opinions, and this 

 must be done partly by the repeal of all legal privilege and partly 



