224 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 



thing is impossible. It is impossible because ' a humane or liberal 

 education ' includes subjects which a fifteen-year-old is not sufficiently 

 adult to grasp. 



I have been urging the truism that if we wish to teach a subject, we must 

 teach it at an age when the mind can digest it. Otherwise we shall be like 

 mothers who feed their babies on beans and bacon. But there is another 

 principle, if not more important, even more commonly ignored. The 

 fruitfulness of education, at least in some subjects, depends on experience 

 of life. That is true of the majority of the subjects which are most 

 important to us as men and citizens — literature, philosophy, history and 

 politics. We may study them in books and enjoy them ; we shall not 

 appreciate their full significance till we have seen enough of life to have 

 met the things which historians, philosophers and poets are talking about. 

 That is where the so-called humanistic subjects differ profoundly from 

 science and mathematics. Physical science and mathematics need no 

 experience of life to be understood. Their laws are independent of time 

 and place, of human nature, 



Based on the crystalline sea 

 Of thought and its eternity. 



For their comprehension a mind sufficiently clear and powerful to grasp 

 them is required ; knowledge of life and of the world is unnecessary. 

 Hence the child mathematical genius ; hence Mozart writing a concerto and 

 playing in the Hall of Salzburg University at the age of 5. It is doubtless 

 rare to find the mind sufficiently adult at an early age for such achieve- 

 ments. But, given precocious mental development, the grasp of these 

 abstract relations, whether of number or harmony, presents no difficulties. 

 But such infant prodigies are not found in historical or literary studies. 

 It is necessary to know life itself, to have seen something of human 

 nature, before either achievement or understanding in these fields is 

 possible. 



That is the meaning of a famous passage where Newman, with character- 

 istic fineness of perception and beauty of language, points out that full 

 appreciation of literature depends on knowledge of life. ' Let us consider, 

 too, how differently young and old are affected by the words of some classic 

 author, such as Homer or Horace. Passages, which to a boy are but 

 rhetorical commonplaces, neither better nor worse than a hundred others 

 which any clever writer might supply, which he gets by heart and thinks 

 very fine, and imitates, as he thinks, successfully, in his own flowing 

 versification, at length come home to him, when long years have passed, 

 and he has had experience of life, and pierce him, as if he had never before 

 known them, with their sad earnestness and vivid exactness. Then he 

 comes to understand how it is that lines, the birth of some chance morning 

 or evening at an Ionian festival, or among the Sabine hills, have lasted 

 generation after generation, for thousands of years, with a power over the 

 mind, and a charm, which the current literature of his own day, with all 

 its obvious advantages, is utterly unable to rival.' 



' When he has had experience of life.' Read Horace and Homer by 



