20 ON THE RELATION OF 



As grammar is the staple of school education, legal 

 studies are used, and rightly, as a means of training per- 

 sons of maturer age, even when not specially required for 

 professional purposes. 



We now come to those sciences which, in respect of the 

 kind of intellectual labour they require, stand at the oppo- 

 site end of the series to philology and history ; namely, the 

 natural and physical sciences. I do not mean to say that 

 in many branches even of these sciences an instinctive 

 appreciation of analogies and a certain artistic sense have 

 no part to play. On the contrary, in natural history the 

 decision which characteristics are to be looked upon as 

 important for classification, and which as unimportant, 

 what divisions of the animal and vegetable kingdoms are 

 more natural than others, is really left to an instinct of 

 this kind, acting without any strictly definable rule. And 

 it is a very suggestive fact that it was an artist, Goethe, 

 who gave the first impulse to the researches of compara- 

 tive anatomy into the analogy of corresponding organs in 

 different animals, and to the parallel theory of the meta- 

 morphosis of leaves in the vegetable kingdom ; and thus, 

 in fact, really pointed out the direction which the science 

 has followed ever since. But even in those departments of 

 science where we have to do with the least understood 

 vital processes it is, speaking generally, far easier to 

 make out general and comprehensive ideas and prin- 

 ciples, and to express them in definite language, than in 

 cases where we must base our judgment on the analysis of 

 the human mind. It is only when we come to the experi- 

 mental sciences to which mathematics are applied, and 

 especially when we come to pure mathematics, that we 

 see the peculiar characteristics of the natural and physical 

 sciences fully brought out. 



The essential differentia of these sciences seems to me 

 to consist in the comparative ease with which the indi- 



