98 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



powers must be also taken into account. He comes to us 

 as a bundle of inherited capacities and tendencies, labelled 

 " from the indefinite past to the indefinite future ; " and he 

 makes his transit from the one to the other through the 

 education of the present time. The object of that educa- 

 tion is, or ought to be, to provide wise exercise for his ca- 

 pacities, wise direction for his tendencies, and through this 

 exercise and this direction to furnish his mind with such 

 knowledge as may contribute to the usefulness, the beauty, 

 and the nobleness of his life. 



How is this discipline to be secured, this knowledge im- 

 parted ? Two rival methods now solicit attention — the one 

 organized and equipped, the labor of centuries having been 

 expended in bringing it to its present state of perfection ; 

 the other, more or less chaotic, but becoming daily less so, 

 and giving signs of enormous power, both as a source of 

 knowledge and as a means of discipline. These two 

 methods are the classical and the scientific method. I wish 

 they were not rivals ; it is only bigotry and short-sighted- 

 ness that make them so ; for assuredly it is possible to give 

 both of them fair play. Though hardly authorized to ex- 

 press any opinion whatever upon the subject, I nevertheless 

 hold the opinion that the proper study of a language is an 

 intellectual discipline of the highest kind. If I except dis- 

 cussions on the comparative merits of popery and Protes- 

 tantism, English grammar was the most important discipline 

 of my boyhood. The piercing through the involved and 

 inverted sentences of " Paradise Lost ; " the linking of the 

 verb to its often distant nominative, of the relative to its 

 distant antecedent, of the agent to the object of the transi- 

 tive verb, of the preposition to the noun or pronoun which 

 it governed — the study of variations in mood and tense, the 

 transformations often necessary to bring out the true gram- 

 matical structure of a sentence — all this was to my young 

 mind a discipline of the highest value, and, indeed, a source 



