A LIBERAL EDUCATION' 43 



far as Nature is concerned. Her bill on that q xstion was 

 framed and passed long ago.^ But, like all compulsory 

 legislation, that of Nature is harsh and wasteful in its opera- 

 tion. Ignorance is visited as sharply as wilful disobedience 

 — incapacity meets with the same punishment as crime. 

 Nature's discipline is not even a word and a blow, and the 

 blow first; but the blow without the word. It is left to you 

 to find out why your ears are boxed. 



The object of what we commonly call education — that 

 education in which man intervenes and which I shall dis- 

 tinguish as artificial education — is to make good these 

 defects in Nature's methods; to prepare the child to receive 

 Nature's education, neither incapably nor ignorantly, nor 

 with wilful disobedience; and to understand the prelimi- 

 nary symptoms of her pleasure, without waiting for the box 

 on the ear. In short, all artificial education ought to be an 

 anticipation of natural education. And a liberal education 

 is an artificial education which has not only prepared a man 

 to escape the great evils of disobedience to natural laws, 

 but has trained him to appreciate and to seize upon the 

 rewards, which Nature scatters with as free a hand as her 

 penalties. 



That man, I think, has had a liberal education who has 

 been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant 

 of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work 

 that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; whose intellect is a 

 clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength, 

 and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam engine, 

 to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers 

 as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is 

 stored with a knowledge of the great and fundamental 

 truths of Nature and of the laws of her operations; one who, 

 no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions 



