164 



burned by Calvin ; while others would have burned Calvin in his 

 turn if they had had the opportunity of doing so. So it was that 

 juries were found to convict and judges to condemn poor igno- 

 rant women as witches ; that within the last two centuries well- 

 educated men believed that they might read their destiny in the 

 stars ; and that as lately as the year 1638, on the occasion of the 

 birth of Louis XIV., Richelieu compelled the dungeons of the 

 Inquisition to give up the astrologer Campanella, in order that he 

 might cast the horoscope of the future king ; and so it is that at 

 the present day grown-up ladies and gentlemen occupy themselves 

 with the humbler and less romantic mysteries of turning and rapping 

 tables. Cooperating with a purer religious faith, the advancement 

 of knowledge has humanized our institutions. It has banished 

 slavery ; it has caused our laws to be more merciful, and the ad- 

 ministration of them more just ; it has promoted religious and po- 

 litical freedom, and, with one or two miserable exceptions, it has 

 rendered even despotic governments more attentive to the claims and 

 wishes of their subjects. If sanitary and other improvements 

 (these being the results of greater knowledge) have added to the 

 average length of human life, be it observed that this fact includes 

 another fact, namely, that they have added to human happiness ; for 

 true it is that the causes which tend to the shortening of life are, 

 with few exceptions, such as produce either physical pain or moral 

 suffering. 



The investigation of the physical sciences is especially favourable 

 to the training of some of the more important faculties of the mind, 

 so that we may well anticipate much ultimate advantage from the 

 movement which is already begun, having for its object, not to 

 supersede the study of ancient languages and ancient literature 

 (which at the present time, in addition to mathematics, are supposed 

 to form the staple of a first-rate education), but to add an elementary 

 knowledge of the principal physical sciences to the list. The in- 

 cluding of some of these at least in the instruction of early life will 

 operate beneficially in various ways. The first step in all physical 

 investigations, even in those which admit of the application of mathe- 

 matical reasoning and the deductive method afterwards, is the obser- 

 vation of natural phenomena ; and the smallest error in such obser- 

 vation in the beginning is sufficient to vitiate the whole investigation 



