Liberal Education 203 



the aptitude, for either literary or scientific or artistic pursuits ; 

 nor, indeed, for excellence of any sort. Their ambition is to go 

 through life with moderate exertion and a fair share of ease, 

 doing common things in a common way. And a great blessing 

 and comfort it is that the majority of men are of this mind ; 

 for the majority of things to be done are common things, and 

 are quite well enough done when commonly done. The great 

 end of life is not knowledge but action. What men need is as 

 much knowledge as they can assimilate and organise into a 

 basis for action ; give them more and it may become injurious. 

 One knows people who are as heavy and stupid from undi- 

 gested learning as others are from over-fulness of meat and 

 drink. But a small percentage of the population is born with 

 that most excellent quality, a desire for excellence, or with 

 special aptitude of some sort or another. . . . Now, the 

 most important object of all educational schemes is to catch 

 these exceptional people, and turn them to account for the 

 good of society. No man can say where they will crop up ; 

 like their opposites, the fools and the knaves, they appear 

 sometimes in the palace, and sometimes in the hovel ; but the 

 great thing to be aimed at, I was almost going to say, the most 

 important end of all social arrangements, is to keep these 

 glorious sports of Nature from being either corrupted by luxury 

 or starved by poverty, and to put them into the position in 

 which they can do the work for which they are specially 

 fitted. . . . I weigh my words when I say that if the nation 

 could purchase a potential Watt or Davy or Faraday, at the 

 cost of a hundred thousand pounds down, he would be dirt 

 cheap at the money." 



The beginning and end of the whole matter was that 

 a national system of education was above all things a 

 " capacity-catcher," designed to secure against the loss 

 of the incalculable advantages to be gained by ctilti- 

 vating the best genius born in the land. 



