SECTION J. 
MENTAL SCIENCE AND EDUCATION. 
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 
By Proressor ARNotp Watt, M.A., 
POETRY AS A FACTOR IN EDUCATION. 
THE subject of my present paper is one of such wide im- 
portance and interest, and seems to me to bear so deeply 
and strongly and in so many different directions upon the 
springs of character and conduct, that.my chief difficulty in 
treating it is to compress what I must say upon the subject 
into the limits allotted me. I have thought it best, there- 
fore, to narrow the field somewhat by dealing with a con- 
crete case first. I do not think that in doing this I shall 
lose anything by taking the case of a man of such excep- 
tional experience in the matter of education as John Stuart 
Mill. His is, it is true, an extreme case; but I think that 
the study.of it will tend to throw my subject into very 
strong relief, and thus to make its treatment easier for 
myself and my hearers. 
Mill tells us in his Autobiography that he became a prey, 
at the age cf twenty, to a strange mental disease, a hideous 
apathetic melancholy, which he can only describe in the 
words of Coleridge : — 
“A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear ; 
A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief, 
Which finds no natural outlet or relief 
In word or sigh or tear.” 
He describes how a small ray of light broke in upon his 
gloom from reading a passage in Marmontel’s Memoirs, and 
how this brought him some relief. It hardly concerns us to 
inquire what this passage was; it is sufficient to say that it 
moved him to tears. Nor do I intend to dwell upon the 
first of the two lessons which Mill tells us he learned from 
this terrible experience of his youth; it is sufficient to 
observe that Mill now found himself to be the victim of a 
