IV AND WHERE TO FIND IT 105 



as compared with the German mind ? The 

 countrymen of Grote and of Mill, of Faraday, of 

 Robert Brown, of Lyell, and of Darwin, to go no 

 further back than the contemporaries of men of 

 middle age, can afford to smile at such a suggestion. 

 England can show now, as she has been able to 

 show in every generation since civilisation spread 

 over the West, individual men who hold their 

 own against the world, and keep alive the old 

 tradition of her intellectual eminence. 



But, in the majority of cases, these men are 

 what they are in virtue of their native intellectual 

 force, and of a strength of character which will 

 not recognise impediments. They are not trained 

 in the courts of the Temple of Science, but storm 

 the walls of that edifice in all sorts of irregular 

 ways, and with much loss of time and power, in 

 order to obtain their legitimate positions. 



Our universities not only do not encourage such 

 men; do not offer them positions, in which it 

 should be their highest duty to do, thoroughly, 

 that which they are most capable of doing ; but, 

 as far as possible, university training shuts out of 

 the minds of those among them, who are subjected 

 to it, the prospect that there is anything in the 

 world for which they are specially fitted. Imagine 

 the success of the attempt to still the intellectual 

 hunger of any of the men I have mentioned, by 

 putting before him, as the object of existence, the 

 successful mimicry of the measure of a Greek 



