Liberal Education. 259 



sected, or are parted from their neighbours, by 

 chains of mountains ; and this second class of 

 facts we are likewise called upon to master. But 

 we are not told that the two sets of phenomena 

 are inseparably related. We are not told that, 

 since all rivers must run down hill, therefore their 

 positions and courses must depend upon the posi- 

 tion of mountains, so that by knowing the latter 

 we may be helped to the knowledge of the former. 

 We are required to learn these facts as they stand 

 in the elementary text-books, in "godlike isola- 

 tion." We are compelled to take in a host of de- 

 tails by a sheer effort of unintelligent memory, 

 while the process of association, by appealing to 

 which alone is memory made serviceable, is ap- 

 pealed to as little as possible. So in grammar, 

 when by dint of irksome mechanical repetition 

 we have become able to state that " a verb must 

 agree with its nominative case in number and 

 person," we have learned a bare fact, which, apart 

 from its explanation, is a useless fact ; and that it 

 has or admits of any explanation we are rarely 

 led to suspect. 



In approaching foreign languages we become 

 immersed still deeper in the mire of elementary 

 unintelligibility. We commit to memory scores 

 of intricate paradigms, containing all possible 



