rHE LOGIC OF EVOLUTION 81 



Is the chief characteristic of protoplasm its educability? 

 Huxley has told us in a remarkably brilliant and sane essay 

 that Nature is the great educator, and framed her bill of 

 compulsory education long before man arrived on the globe. 

 Life and experience are the great teachers, and the world is 

 the school of this grand system from which we are never 

 graduated. He says: " That man, I think, has had a liberal 

 education who has been so trained in youth that his body is 

 the willing servant of his will, and does with ease and pleas- 

 ure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; whose 

 intellect is a clear cold logic engine with all its parts of 

 equal strength and in smooth working order, ready like a 

 steam engine to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the 

 gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose 

 mind is stored with a knowledge of the great and funda- 

 mental truths of Nature and of the laws of her operations; 

 one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose 

 passions are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the 

 servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all 

 beauty, whether of Nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and 

 to respect others as himself. Such a man, and no other, I 

 conceive, has had a liberal education, for he is as completely 

 as a man can be in harmony with Nature. He will make the 

 best of her, and she of him. They will get on together rarely, 

 she as his ever beneficent mother, he as her mouth-piece, her 

 conscious self, her minister and interpreter. Education has 

 two great ends to which everything else must be subordinated. 

 The one of these is to increase knowledge; the other is to de- 

 velop the love of right and the hatred of wrong. With wis- 

 dom and uprightness a nation can make its way worthily, and 

 beauty will follow in the footsteps of the two, even if she be 

 not specially invited." ^. 



Future generations will care little about the number of our 

 automobiles, aeroplanes and telephones or of stories in our 

 sky-scrapers, for the size of our cities, ships and fortunes, 

 the number of horse-power developed from our rivers and 



