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phenomena which demand our attention, and many of 
which will brook no neglect. We learn what heat is, not 
by the instruction of mother or nurse, but by the memor- 
able experience of scalded tongue or burnt finger. The 
idea of distance grows upon us as our infant hands 
struggle in vain to grasp the picture on the farther wall, 
or to reach the moon. The notion of weight dawns upon 
our minds as the toy falls from our loosened grasp to the 
floor. In these and other ways Nature herself is our 
teacher ; and we learn rapidly enough when not to do so 
involves us in continual physical suffering. 
In our journey through life thousands of objects impress 
themselves on our mere outward eyes, yet are never really 
observed by us. Nay, they may actually in some degree 
reach the inner eye, and yet from want of traininz, or 
ignorance, or carelessness, we may never see these things 
as they essentially are, or as they would be seen by one 
whose observing faculty had been duly cultivated. 
Some years ago I had an amusing illustration of this 
familiar fact in the case of a cottager in Ayrshire who 
stopped me on the high-road near his own door, late one 
autumn evening, to show me a will-o’-the-wisp. Never 
having had the good fortune to encounter one of these 
legendary sprites, I was naturally curious to see and hear 
about this example. I was told that it appeared in damp 
breezy weather in autumn and spring, usually in the 
evening, and never anywhere else than over the rubbish 
heaps of a deserted coal-mine. The light seemed, indeed, 
to my rather sceptical eyes strangely like the flicker of 
cottage windows seen behind some waving trees ; but my 
informant assured me that he had watched the thing for 
fully thirty years, and could not be mistaken. Leaving 
him at his cottage, I made straight across a succession of 
fields and fences, and soon reached, in the fading twilight, 
the mound at the old coal-mine. There, however, I sought 
in vain for will-o’-the-wisp ; but about a quarter of a mile 
farther on, on the other side of a strip of wood, now visible, 
now concealed, as the leaves happened to be stirred by 
the wind, were the flickering lights of a row of cottages. 
My friend had noted the lights, had even correctly enough 
connected their flickering with breezy weather; but his 
observations had gone no further, and so for thirty years he 
was content with an hallucination which he could at any 
time have dispelled in five minutes. 
Many men never get very much further in their ques- 
tioning and experiment of the external world than that 
degree of child-like experience which enables them to keep 
themselves from bodily harm or to obtain the means of 
bodily enjoyment. If this habit of observation be not already 
born and active in them the usual discipline of modern 
education does little to engender or quicken it. They are 
left to learn the use of their eyes as they best may, or to 
pass through life without ever learning to use them at all. 
There is still no special training in the cultivation of the 
observing faculty—a training not to be taken or left at the 
expense of parent or scholar,-but which shall be an 
essential and imperative part of education. 
Nevertheless, though this great faculty is left to such 
scanty collateral iafluences as it may receive from the 
already-authorised lines of instruction, it is as certainly 
capable of cultivation and improvement as any other part 
of our mental organism—nay, upon its proper cultivation 
much of our welfare and of our highest pleasure depends. 
Surely it is not too much to demand that a faculty to 
which the present epoch of human history owes in especial 
measure its characteristics, shall be recognised as one of 
the parts of our nature to be sedulously cared for in the 
instruction of youth ? 
Among the reforms of the future one will assuredly be 
the supplying of this defect in our present system of edu- 
cation. And in no way can this be so advantageously 
done as by the practical teaching of some branch of 
natural science, We may not increase the army of 
scientific discoverers, and there is no need that we should ; 
NATURE 
[Yan. 9, 1873 
but we shall at all events equip each man and woman — 
with better armour for the battle of life, adding vastly at 
the samme time to their capacity for some of the purest 
pleasures which are obtainable in this world. 
2. Whatever tends to stimulate the imaginative faculty, 
taking us out of the routine of daily life, and enabling us 
to realise times and conditions different from those in 
which we live, helps to raise us in the dignity of thinking 
beings. This faculty is well cultivated by some parts of 
the traditional system of education. Literature, notably 
history and poetry, afford endless materials for this pur- 
pose. These materials deal largely with questions having 
amore or less distinctly human interest. Nevertheless, 
though man is himself the proper study of mankind, his 
conceptions cannot fail to be enlarged when he is brought 
face to face with a whole world of phenomena lying out- 
side of himself and his experience. Such enlargement it 
is one of the tasks of science to ensure. 
You will find it sometimes gravely asserted to be “a 
deviation from the correct use of language and a con- 
founding of things essentially distinct to say that a man of 
science stands in need of imagination as well as powers of 
reason.” I hope that before long you will perceive the 
fallacy of such an assertion and recognise the necessity of 
imagination not in the man of science only, but in every 
one who would adequately master the aims and results of 
scientific thought. Imagination, that is, the power of 
shaping in our minds a distinct picture of what from many 
observations of facts we determine to be the plan of 
nature, either now or in the past, lies at the very bottom of 
all thorough scientific research. Without imagination to 
gather them all up into a luminous conception, the scat- 
tered observations of countless independent workers would 
lose half their meaning, and indeed would often never 
be made at all, for in many cases they are themselves the 
suggestion of imagination. To deny to Science the use of 
this faculty would be to clip her wings, to forbid her to 
soar into the highest heavens, and to condemn her to a 
mere ant-like industry upon this nether earth. 
In adding to the present curriculum of a liberal educa- 
tion some training in scientific habits of mind and work, 
we should in no wise deaden or hamper the free use of 
the imaginative faculty. On the contrary, we should 
furnish it with the complement of that anthropomorphic 
or subjective method of viewing things which mere literary 
training is apt to produce We should enable it to take a 
freer, wider grasp of creation and of man’s place therein. 
[The speaker here illustrated his argument by an 
example drawn from the geology of the neighbourhood of 
Edinburgh, } 
Now this is but an ordinary and simple example of the 
kind of mental processes through which geology requires 
us to pass. There seems little worthy of note on a group 
of moss-grown lichened stones on a bare hill-side; yet 
the observing faculty, once put on the alert, readily detects 
the singularity of these boulders, sets about its task of 
gathering all the information to be gleaned regarding 
them and of preparing a body of evidence to be weighed 
and decided upon by the judgment. And then arises the 
imaginative faculty with its power of reproducing the past. 
Under its sway woodland and cornfield seem to melt 
away before us, the hills are once more sealed in ice, 
and fleets of boulder-laden bergs come drifting over 
what are now the fertile plains of the Lothians. 
While, therefore, in the work which lies before you here 
it will be your endeavour to add to your knowledge, do 
not lose an opportunity of cultivating at the same time 
these two faculties. So long as your knowledge is merely 
from books, so long as you are content with a kind of 
mere cramming, such an opportunity will be little likely 
to occur. It is when you turn your knowledge to account 
and seek for illustration or expansion of it by direct per- 
sonal appeal to Nature that your powers of observation 
and imagination will have free play. 
