SCIENCE AND CULTURE 37 



various subjects, because such information, in and for 

 itself, is useful in daily life. Elementary education 

 reading, writing, and arithmetic is almost wholly of 

 this kind. But instruction, necessary as it is, does not 

 per se constitute education in the sense in which I wish 

 to consider it. 



Education, in the sense in which I mean it, may be 

 defined as the formation, by means of instruction, of certain 

 mental habits and a certain outlook on life and the world. 

 It remains to ask ourselves, what mental habits, and 

 what sort of outlook, can be hoped for as the result of 

 instruction ? When we have answered this question we 

 can attempt to decide what science has to contribute to 

 the formation of the habits and outlook which we desire. 



Our whole life is built about a certain number not a 

 very small number of primary instincts and impulses. 

 Only what is in some way connected with these instincts 

 and impulses appears to us desirable or important ; there 

 is no faculty, whether " reason " or " virtue " or what- 

 ever it may be called, that can take our active life and 

 our hopes and fears outside the region controlled by 

 these first movers of all desire. Each of them is like a 

 queen-bee, aided by a hive of workers gathering honey ; 

 but when the queen is gone the workers languish and 

 die, and the cells remain empty of their expected sweet- 

 ness. So with each primary impulse in civilised man : 

 it is surrounded and protected by a busy swarm of 

 attendant derivative desires, which store up in its service 

 whatever honey the surrounding world affords. But if 

 the queen-impulse dies, the death-dealing influence, 

 though retarded a little by habit, spreads slowly through 

 all the subsidiary impulses, and a whole tract of life 

 becomes inexplicably colourless. What was formerly 

 full of zest, and so obviously worth doing that it raised 



