852 BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES. 



scientific instruction as an engine for training* the mind ; but 

 neither, on the other hand, should I wish to depreciate the vahie of 

 literary culture, my view of the relations of these two gymnastics 

 of the mind being the very simple, obvious, and natural one that 

 they should be harmoniously combined — 



Alterius sic 

 Altera poscit opem res, et conjurat amice. 



I know it may be said that there are difficulties in the way, 

 and especially practical difficulties ; but I have always observed 

 that people who are good at finding out difficulties, and especially 

 practical difficulties, are like people who are good at finding out 

 excuses, — good at finding* out very little else. The various ways of 

 getting over these difficulties are obvious enough, and have been 

 hinted at or fully expressed by several writers of greater or less 

 authority on many occasions. It is, however, of some consequence 

 that I should here say what I believe has not been said before, 

 namely, that a purely and exclusively literary education, imperfect 

 and one-sided as it is, is still a better thing than a system of 

 scientific instruction (to abuse the use of the word for a moment) in 

 w^hich there should be no courses of practical familiarising with 

 natural objects, verification, and experimentation. A purely literary 

 training, say, in dialectics, or what we are pleased to call logic, 

 to take a flagrant and glaring instance first, does confer certain 

 lower advantages upon the person who goes through it without any 

 discipline in the practical investigation of actual problems. By 

 going through such a training attentively, a man with a good 

 memory and a little freedom from over-scrupulousness, can convert 

 his mind into an arsenal of quips, quirks, retorts, and epigrams, out 

 of which he can, at his own pleasure, discharge a mitraille of 

 chopped straw and chaff*-like arguments, against which no man of 

 ordinary fairness of mind can, for the moment, make head. It is 

 true that such sophists gain this dexterity at the cost of losing, in 

 every case, the power of fairly and fully appreciating or investi- 

 gating truth, of losing in many cases the faculty of sustaining and 

 maintaining serious attention to any subject, and of losing in some 

 cases even the power of writing. A well-know^n character in an 

 age happily, though only recently, gone by, who may be taken as 

 a Caesar worthy of such Antonies, used to speak of a pen as his 

 torpedo. Still they have their reward, they succeed now and then 



