30 PROFESSORS AND PRACTICAL MEN 



true practice of stagnation. I do not bid you cease to lay 

 mains, to erect gasholders, or to make gas-fires, till we, in the 

 august seclusion of our learned halls, have worked out the 

 whole true science of heating and illumination. 



But while conceding all this, we have to remember that it is 

 man's prerogative, and it should be his delight, to possess, to 

 use, and to extend the faculty of reason ; to increase his power 

 over the forces of Nature, and to constrain them to his service 

 by a deliberate, a carefully organized, and an unceasing culti- 

 vation of the human mind. 



The true barbarian is the man who is content to do, and 

 does not want to know. And yet how many men are there 

 not, whom no one could call barbarians, who look upon our 

 organized system of education with a degree of distrust that 

 increases in intensity as their survey passes upwards from 

 the elementary school to the university? This, in my 

 judgement, is a most serious question of the day. 



I have long held the opinion that education in England 

 is afflicted, from top to bottom, with an utterly exagge- 

 rated fear of what is called { useful knowledge '. In that fear 

 much of a vital kind has been left undone, and much 

 has been given in the name of education which helps 

 its possessor neither to truer wisdom, better work, nobler 

 conduct, nor to greater happiness. The world cries out for 

 educational bread, and it receives only too often an academic 

 stone. 



I do not know that I am behind other men in the delight 

 I feel in abstract studies; and I can honestly say it is but 

 rarely I envy another man his larger share of loaves and fishes. 

 But knowledge gathered for what is sometimes called its own 

 sake, and treasured for its own sake, seems to me in great 

 danger of unwholesomeness, and a learned man who is merely 

 a man of erudition, as likely to prove a mischief as he is 

 certain to be a bore. 



