446 Edivard Livingston Youmans. 



taneity, and therefore a hindrance to acquisition : agreeable 

 emotions, on the other hand, are stimulating, and favour 

 nervous impressibility and spontaneous impulsion. The 

 instinctive love of pleasurable activity which is so marked 

 in youth becomes therefore a most powerful means of men- 

 tal improvement. Government appeals to the dread of 

 punishment as a motive to right conduct; but who will 

 compare the influence it thus exerts upon the beneficent 

 activities of society with the general stimulation to this 

 result which springs from the desire of happiness ? A 

 scientific system of culture, which deals with the imme- 

 diate objects and the living agencies of the world, is suited 

 to employ this higher class of motives. The interest of an 

 unperverted mind in the things of twenty centuries ago can 

 never equal its interest in the things of to-day. It can- 

 not for a moment be admitted that an empty and useless 

 shell of a fact has the same relation to the mind that a liv- 

 ing and applicable one has. Nothing can arouse, quicken, 

 and mould it like the realities with which it has to deal. It 

 has been well said that " everywhere throughout nature we 

 find faculties developed through the performance of those 

 functions which it is their office to perform, not through 

 artificial exercises devised to fit them for those functions." 

 A system of culture, therefore, which ignores the thou- 

 sand immediate pressures and solicitations upon feeling and 

 thought, by which human beings are stirred, can neither 

 shape the mind into harmony with its actual circumstances, 

 nor reach the deepest springs of impulse and exertion. 

 The intellect follows the lead of the heart; and with the 

 slow emergence of right ideas respecting the uses of the 

 world, we shall discover that the real scene of human 

 action and enjoyment is also the true source of inspiration 

 and of the noblest incentives to effort. The end of a 

 rational culture being to adjust the student's relations to 

 his own age, it will employ for the purpose all those sub- 



