174 SCIENCE AND ART AND EDUCATION VII 



age I mean 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. If you go 

 buzzing about between right and wrong, vibrating 

 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 of knocking your head against 

 a fact, and that sets you all straight again. So I 

 will not trouble myself as to whether I may be 

 right or wrong in what I am about to say, but at 

 any rate I hope to be clear and definite ; and then 

 you will be able to judge for yourselves whether, in 

 following out the train of thought I have to intro- 

 duce, you knock your heads against facts or not. 



I take it that the whole object of education is, 

 in the first place, to train the faculties of the young 

 in such a manner as to give their possessors the 

 best chance of being happy and useful in their 

 generation ; and, in the second place, to furnish 

 them with the most important portions of that 

 immense capitalised experience of the human race 

 which we call knowledge of various kinds. I am 

 using the term knowledge in its widest possible 

 sense ; and the question is, what subjects to select 

 by training and discipline, in which the object I 

 have just defined may be best attained. 



