30 LAY SERMOiVS, ESSAYS, AND REVIEWS. [m. 



Those who take honours in Nature s university, who learn the 

 laws which govern men and things and obey them, are the 

 really great and successful men in this world. The great mass 

 of mankind are the &quot; Poll,&quot; who pick up just enough to get 

 through without much discredit. Those who won t learn at all 

 are plucked ; and then you can t come up again. Nature s pluck 

 means extermination. 



Thus the question of compulsory education is settled so far as 

 Nature is concerned. Her bill on that question was framed and 

 passed long ago. But, like all compulsory legislation, that of 

 Nature is harsh and wasteful in its operation. Ignorance is 

 visited as sharply as wilful disobedience incapacity meets with 

 the same punishment as crime. Nature s discipline is not even 

 a word and a blow, and the blow first ; but the blow without the 

 word. It is left to you to find out why your ears are boxed. 



The object of what we commonly call education that 

 education in which man intervenes and which I shall distinguish 

 as artificial education is to make good these defects in Nature s 

 methods ; to prepare the child to receive Nature s education, 

 neither incapably nor ignorantly, nor with wilful disobedience ; 

 and to understand the preliminary symptoms of her displeasure, 

 without waiting for the box on the ear. In short, all artificial 

 education ought to be an anticipation of natural education. 

 And a liberal education is an artificial education, which has not 

 only prepared a man to escape the great evils of disobedience to 

 natural laws, but has trained him to appreciate and to seize upon 

 the rewards, which Nature scatters with as free a hand as her 

 penalties. 



That man, I think, has had a liberal education, who has been 

 so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, 

 and does with ease and pleasure all the work that, as a 

 mechanism, it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold, 

 logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth 

 working order ; ready, like a steam engine, to be turned to any 

 kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors 

 of the mind ; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of the 



