SCIENCE AND ART AND EDUCATION 163 



call the condition of "the most favoured 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 circumstances, depends 

 upon the number of principal subjects. It is x 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 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, however 

 much I may trespass upon your patience in the time allotted 

 to me. But the discussion is so fundamental, it is so com- 

 pletely 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 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 your- 



