Mental Discipline in Education. 433 



action on sanitary subjects. And the importance of understanding 

 the true conditions of health and disease — of knowing how to acquire 

 and preserve that heahhy habit of body which the most tedious and 

 costly medical treatment so often fails to restore when once lost, 

 should secure a place in general education for the principal maxims 

 of hygiene, and some of those even of practical medicine. For those 

 who aim at high intellectual cultivation, the study of physiolog}- has 

 still greater recommendations, and is, in the present state of advance- 

 ment of the higher studies, a real necessity. The practice which it 

 gives in the study of Nature is such as no other physical science 

 affords in the same kind, and is the best introduction to the difficult 

 questions of politics and social life. Scientific education, apart from 

 professional objects, is but a preparation for judging rightly of Man, 

 and of his requirements and interests, But to this final pursuit, 

 which has been called /^r excelle7ice the proper study of mankind, 

 physiology is the most serviceable of the sciences, because it is the 

 nearest. Its subject is already Man : the same complex and manifold 

 being, whose properties are not independent of circumstance, and 

 immovable from age to age, like those of the ellipse and hyperbola, 

 or of sulphur and phosphorus, but are infinitely various, indefinitely 

 modifiable by art or accident, graduating by the nicest shades into 

 one another, and reacting upon one another in a thousand ways, so 

 that they are seldom capable of being isolated and observed sepa- 

 rately. With the difficulties of the study of a being so constituted, 

 the physiologist, and he alone among scientific inquirers, is already 

 familiar. Take what view we will of man as a spiritual being, one 

 part of his nature is far more like another than either of them is like 

 anything else. In the organic world m i study Nature under disad- 

 vantages very similar to those which affect the study of moral and 

 political phenomena : our means of making experiments are almost 

 as limited, while the extreme complexity of the facts makes the con- 

 clusions of general reasoning unusually precarious, on account of the 

 vast number of circumstances that conspire to determine every result- 

 Yet, in spite of these obstacles, it is found possible in physiology to 

 arrive at a considerable number of well-ascertained and important 

 truths. This, therefore, is an excellent school in which to study the 

 means of overcoming similar difficulties elsewhere. It is in physiol- 

 ogy, too, that we are first introduced to some of the conceptions 

 which play the greatest part in the moral and social sciences, but 



