UNIVERSITIES: ACTUAL AND IDEAL. 51 



People do not always formulate the beliefs on which 

 they act. The instinct of fear and dislike is quicker 

 than the reasoning' process ; and I suspect that, taken 

 in conjunction with some other causes, such instinctive 

 aversion is at the bottom of the long exclusion of any 

 serious discipline in the physical sciences from the gen- 

 eral curriculum of Universities; while, on the other 

 hand, classical literature has been gradually made the 

 backbone of the Arts course. 



I am ashamed to repeat here what I have said else- 

 where, in season and out of season, respecting the value 

 of Science as knowledge and discipline. But the other 

 day I met with some passages in the Address to another 

 Scottish University, of a great thinker, recently lost to 

 us, which express so fully, and yet so tersely, the truth 

 in this matter, that I am fain to quote them : 



" To question all things ; never to turn away from 

 any difficulty ; to accept no doctrine either from ourselves 

 or from other people without a rigid scrutiny by negative 

 criticism ; letting no fallacy, or incoherence, or confusion 

 of thought step by unperceived ; above all, to insist upon 

 having the meaning of a word clearly understood before 

 using it, and the meaning of a proposition before assent- 

 ing to it ; these are the lessons we learn " from workers 

 in Science. "With all this vigorous management of 

 the negative element, they inspire no scepticism about 

 the reality of truth or indifference to its pursuit. The 

 noblest enthusiasm, both for the search after truth and 

 for applying it to its highest uses, pervades those writ- 



