Mental Discipline in Edtication. 443 



A common form of misapprehension is that which limits 

 science to the consideration of "mere matter," and then 

 reproaches it with being a cold materializing pursuit. But 

 science deals with forces as well as matter ; and when those 

 who make this reproach will indicate just how much re- 

 mains when the actions of power upon matter are exhausted, 

 they will, perhaps, widen their conceptions upon the sub- 

 ject. Not only do the great lines of scientific thought con- 

 verge to the supreme end of elucidating the regnant sub- 

 jects of man and society, but its influence is powerfully felt 

 even in the highest regions of philosophical speculation.* 



■* Prof. Masson, in his lively little work, Recent British Philosophy, 

 remarks : " In no age so conspicuously as in our owii has there been a 

 crowding in of new scientific conceptions of all kinds to exercise a perturb- 

 ing influence on Speculative Philosophy. They have come in almost too 

 fast for Philosophy's powers of reception. She has visibly reeled amid 

 their shocks, and has not yet recovered her equilibrium. Within those 

 years alone which we have been engaged in surveying there have been de- 

 velopments of native British science, not to speak of influxes of scientific 

 ideas, hints, and probabilities from without, in the midst of which British 

 Philosophy has looked about her, scared and bewildered, and has felt that 

 some of her oldest statements about herself, and some of the most impor- 

 tant terms in her vocabulary, require re-explication. I think that I can 

 even mark the precise year 1848 as a point whence the appearance of an 

 unusual amount of unsteadying thought may be dated — as if, in that year of 

 simultaneous European irritability, not only were the natioivs agitated 

 politically, as the newspapers saw, but conceptions of an intellectual kind 

 that had long been forming themselves underneath in the depths were shaken 

 up to the surface in scientific journals and books. There are several vital 

 points on which no one can now think, even were he receiving four thou- 

 sand a year for doing so, as he might very creditably have thought seventeen 

 years ago. There have been during that period, in consequence of revela 

 tions by scientific research in this direction and in that, some most notable 

 enlargements of our views of physical nature and of history — enlargements 

 even to the breaking down of what had formerly been a wall in the minds 

 of most, and the substitution on that side of a sheer vista of open space. 

 But there is no need of dating from 1848, or from any other year in par- 

 ticular. In all that we have recently seen of the kind there has been but 



