PROCEEDINGS OF THE POLYTECHNIC ASSOCIATION. 961 



youth whom at college he despised as frivolous or abhorred as 

 profligate. He is ordained, and takes charge of a parish, only to 

 be laughed at by the farmers, the trades people and even the old 

 women, for he can hardly talk of religion without betraying a 

 want of common sense." 



I know that with a pretty large class of educational philoso- 

 phers, when methods of education are under discussion, the word 

 usefulness has long been tabooed. I know that with such, to speak 

 of a subject of study as likely to be productive of direct and 

 practical and tangible benefit to the learner in the real business of 

 life, is to brijig that subject immediately under suspicion, if not 

 to insure its summary condemnation without any examination of 

 its claims. I cannot but hold, on the contrary, that if we can find 

 any subject which, while it is capable of affording the most salu- 

 taiy intellectual exercise, is also certain to enrich the student with 

 a store of knowledge of that very kind of which he is going to 

 feel the need every day of his life, then this subject should have 

 a place in our educational schemes in preference to any which 

 can only claim the first of these advantages Avithout possessing 

 the second at all. 



The kind of lofty contempt or aversion to subjects recommended 

 for their practical utility, which is manifested by the class of edu- 

 cators to which I have referred, appears to be founded upon an 

 assumption which has been so long taken for granted, that for 

 them it has passed into a kind of axiom, and that is, that a sub- 

 ject of knowledge which is adapted to educational uses cannot be, 

 or at least is extremely unlikely to be, of any other direct use in 

 the world ; and conversely, that a subject which is self-evidently 

 practically useful can by no possibility have any educational use 

 whatever. According to them, therefore, as it has been very well 

 remarked before, nature seems in respect to this particular matter 

 to have deviated from that rule of severe economy which distin- 

 guishes her everywhere else, and to have ordained a necessity for 

 two sets of machinery where one might have sufficed — ordained, 

 that is, that the mind shall require one class of studies for subjec- 

 tive culture, and another class for its furniture — one class to make 

 it fit for w'ork, and another class to provide for it material to work 

 upon. The fallacy of this doctrine has been so well exposed l)y 

 abler hands — notably by Dr. Hodgson, of England, and by INIr. 

 Atkinson in our own country — that I will not dwell upon it here. 

 [Am. Inst.] Ill 



