SCIENCE AND CULTURE 39 



education destroys the crudity of instinct, and increases 

 through knowledge the wealth and variety of the indi- 

 vidual's contacts with the outside world, making him 

 no longer an isolated fighting unit, but a citizen of the 

 universe, embracing distant countries, remote regions of 

 space, and vast stretches of past and future within the 

 circle of his interests. It is this simultaneous softening 

 in the insistence of desire and enlargement of its scope 

 that is the chief moral end of education. 



Closely connected with this moral end is the more 

 purely intellectual aim of education, the endeavour to 

 make us see and imagine the world in an objective 

 manner, as far as possible as it is in itself, and not merely 

 through the distorting medium of personal desire. The 

 complete attainment of such an objective view is no 

 doubt an ideal, indefinitely approachable, but not actually 

 and fully realisable. Education, considered as a process 

 of forming our mental habits and our outlook on the 

 world, is to be judged successful in proportion as its out- 

 come approximates to this ideal ; in proportion, that is 

 to say, as it gives us a true view of our place in society, 

 of the relation of the whole human society to its non- 

 human environment, and of the nature of the non- 

 human world as it is in itself apart from our desires and 

 interests. If this standard is admitted, we can return 

 to the consideration of science, inquiring how far science 

 contributes to such an aim, and whether it is in any 

 respect superior to its rivals in educational practice. 



II 



Two opposite and at first sight conflicting merits 

 belong to science as against literature and art. The one, 

 which is not inherently necessary, but is certainly 



