164 SELECTED ESSAYS FROM LAY SERMONS 



selves whether, in following out the train of thought I have 

 to introduce, you knock your heads against facts or not. 



I take it that the w^hole 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 ques- 

 tion is, what subjects to select by training and discipline, in 

 which the object I have just defined may be best attained. 



I must call your attention further to this fact, that all the 

 subjects of our thoughts — all feelings and propositions 

 (leaving aside our sensations as the mere materials and 

 occasions of thinking and feeling), all our mental furniture 

 — may be classified under one of two heads — as either 

 within the province of the intellect, something that can be 

 put into propositions and affirmed or denied; or as within 

 the province of feeling, or that which, before the name was 

 defiled, was called the aesthetic side of oup nature, and which 

 can neither be proved nor disproved, but only felt and 

 known. 



According to the classification which I have put before 

 you, then, the subjects of all knowledge are divisible into 

 the two groups, matters of science and matters of art; for 

 all things with which the reasoning faculty alone is occupied, 

 come under the province of science; and in the broadest 

 sense, and not in the narrow and technical sense in which 

 we are now accustomed to use the word art, all things 

 feelable, all things which stir our emotions, come under 

 the term of art, in the sense of the subject-matter of the 

 aesthetic faculty. So that we are shut up to this — that the 



