Mental Discipline in Education. 449 



truth of Nature, armed with the appropriate knowledge, and 

 inspired with the hope of a better future, to which it sees 

 all things tending, enters the great field as properly its 

 own, and will train its votaries to that breadth of view, that 

 robust boldness of treatment, and that patient and dispas- 

 sionate temper which the imminent questions of the times 

 so decisively demand. 



In his late instructive lecture on the Development of 

 Ideas in Physical Science, Prof. Liebig shows that it has 

 been a slow organic growth, depending upon deeper con- 

 ditions than the mere favour or opposition of Church or 

 State. He shows that in Greece the progress of science 

 was arrested by its slave system ; points out the necessity 

 of abounding wealth to give leisure for thought and cul- 

 ture, and the importance of those social conditions which 

 bring into intimate intercourse all classes of thinkers and 

 workers, upon the mutual co-operation of which the ad- 

 vance of science and of society depends. He says : " Free- 

 dom, that is the absence of ail restrictions which can pre- 

 vent men from using to their advantage the powers which God 

 has given them, is the mightiest of all the conditions of 

 progress in civilization and culture"; and he adds that "it 

 can hardly be doubted that among the peoples of the North 

 American Free States, all the conditions exist for their de- 

 velopment to the highest point of culture and civilization 

 attainable by man." 



These are weighty considerations for the educators of 

 this country. Institutions are but expressions of ideas and 

 habits ; and the European policy, governmental and eccle- 

 siastical, is grounded upon a culture suited to its neces- 

 sities, and which has grown up with it in the course of 

 ages. Both idolize the past ; both worship precedent and 

 authority, and both dread independent inquiry into first 

 principles: one recoils from Freedom, as the other from 

 Science. Freedom and Science, on the other hand, have 



