Household Science. 



97 



benefits may arise from this exalted state of intellectual 

 requirement we are far from doubting, and are conscious of 

 the danger of resting satisfied with anything short of per- 

 fect certitude, where that can be attained. But here again 

 there is possibility of error. Mathematical standards and 

 processes are totally inapplicable in the thousandfold con- 

 tingencies of common experience, and the mind which is 

 deeply imbued with their spirit is little attracted to those 

 departments of thought where, after the utmost labour, 

 there still remain doubt, dimness, uncertainty, and entangle- 

 ment. And yet such is precisely the practical field in which 

 our minds must daily work. The mental discipline we need, 

 therefore, is^hot merely a narrow deductive training of the 

 faculties of calculation, with their inflexible demand for 

 exactitude, but such a systematic and symmetric exercise 

 of its several powers as shall render it pliant and adaptive, 

 and train it in that class of intellectual operations which 

 shall best prepare it for varied and serviceable intellectual 

 duty in the practical affairs of life. 



He continues the argument by considering educa- 

 tion in its broad relations to liberty and progress : 



Education, from the earliest time, has been under the 

 patronage of civil and ecclesiastical despotisms, whose 

 necessary policy has been the repression of free thought. 

 The state of mind forever insisted on has been that of sub- 

 missive acceptance of authority. Instead of laying open 

 the limitations, uncertainties, and conflicts of knowledge 

 which arise from its progressive nature, the spirit of the 

 general teaching has been that all things are settled, and 

 that wisdom has reached its last fulfilment. Instead of 

 encouraging bold inquiry and inciting to noble conquest, 

 the effect has rather been to reduce the student to a mere 

 tame, unquestioning recipient of established formulas and 

 time-honoured dogmas. It is obvious on all sides that this 



