LIBERAL EDUCATION. 25 



aims. If to try by knowledge to make this world a better place to 

 live in, and to teach men how to make the highest and best use of it 

 be utilitarianism, then I make bold to say that any knowledge that 

 cannot make good its claim to such usefulness is worse than utilita- 

 rian, for it is useless knowledge. The charge that is meant to be 

 brought is this, that none but the advocates of classical learning have 

 or can have the higher ends of life in view in planning schemes of edu- 

 cation ; that all other systems look solely to the stomach or the pocket. 

 I do not know whether such charges are not too hackneyed to waste 

 words on ; certainly I can conceive of no lower form of utilitarian abuse 

 of education than the pursuit of fellowships by the cramming of Greek 

 and mathematics for the competitive examinations of an English 

 university. On the other hand, the truly liberal learning of England 

 is to be found more than anywhere else at this moment with that noble 

 band of students of science who are virtually excluded from all such 

 preferments. 1 It is not a difference in studies that constitutes them 

 liberal or illiberal ; it is a difference in the spirit in which all studies 

 may be pursued. The study of chemistry and the study of Greek 

 particles may be equally base or equally noble, according as they are 

 pursued worthily or unworthily, with a selfish eye to the loaves and 

 fishes, or with an aim at the higher rewards of true culture, and the 

 higher advancement of man's estate. But I think we may well leave 

 aside this stupid charge of utilitarianism. It comes nowadays only 

 from those benighted pedants who are wholly ignorant of the true 

 spirit of modern science. 



I have left myself no room, even if I were competent, to speak of 

 the last ingredient in any just scheme of modern liberal education — the 

 study of art, aesthetic culture. I fear there will be abundance of time 

 to develop that side of the question in this country before it is in any 



and comfort. The higher training of our youth must not be that of a polytechnic school. 

 We want such institutions, no doubt, for we need observers and surveyors, engineers and 

 artillerymen to do the work, which can best be performed by such intelligent automatons." 

 — (" Classical Scholarship and Classical Learning," p. 90.) 



1 " I believe there can be no doubt that the foreigner, who should wish to become ac- 

 quainted with the scientific or the literary activity of modern England, would simply lose 

 his time and his pains if he visited our universities with that object. . . . England can 

 show now, as she has been able to show in every generation since civilization spread over 

 the West, individual men who hold their own against the world, and keep alive the old 

 tradition of her intellectual eminence. But in the majority of cases these men are what 

 they are in virtue of their native intellectual force, and of a strength of character which 

 will not recognize impediments. They are not trained in the courts of the temple of 

 science, but storm the walls of that edifice in all sorts of irregular ways, and with much 

 loss of time and power, in order to obtain their legitimate positions. Our universities not 

 only do not encourage such men, do not offer them positions in which it should be their 

 highest duty to do thoroughly that which they are most capable of doing ; but, as far as 

 possible, university training shuts out of the minds of those among them who are sub- 

 jected to it the prospect that there is any thing in the world for which they are specially 

 fitted."— (Huxley, "Lay Sermons," p. 55.) 



