Science and Art 113 



be settled until one has made up one's mind about various 

 other questions. 



All, then, that I have to ask for, on behalf of the scien- 

 tific people, if I may venture to speak for more than 

 myself, is that you should put scientific teaching into what 5 

 statesmen call the condition of " the most favored nation " ; 

 that is to say, that it shall have as large a share of the 

 time given to education as any other principal subject. 

 You may say that that is a very vague statement, because 

 the value of the allotment of time, under those circum- 10 

 stances, depends upon the number of principal subjects. 

 It is AT the time, and an unknown quantity of principal 

 subjects dividing that, and science taking shares with the 

 rest. That shows that we cannot deal with this question 

 fully until we have made up our minds as to what the 15 

 principal subjects of education ought to be. 



I know quite well that launching myself into this dis- 

 cussion is a very dangerous operation; that it is a very 

 large subject, and one which is difficult to deal with, how- 

 ever much I may trespass upon your patience in the time 20 

 allotted to me. But the discussion is so fundamental, 

 it is so completely impossible to make up one's mind on 

 these matters until one has settled the question, that I 

 will even venture to make the experiment. A great 

 lawyer-statesman and philosopher of a former age I mean 25 

 Francis Bacon said that truth came out of error much 

 more rapidly than it came out of confusion. There is a 

 wonderful truth in that saying. Next to being right in 

 this world, the best of all things is to be clearly and 

 definitely wrong, because you will come out somewhere. 30 

 If you go buzzing about between right and wrong, vibrat- 

 ing and fluctuating, you come out nowhere ; but if you are 

 absolutely and thoroughly and persistently wrong, you 

 must, some of these days, have the extreme good fortune 



