20 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



stitions by adding new truths to the old ones. Our conservatives may- 

 spare their anxieties. Not a truth the world gains is ever lost again ; 

 but they who, blindly believing they have all truth, oppose the new 

 form which science is giving to all knowledge, will soon find them- 

 selves side by side with those old Dunsemen who could not believe in 

 the last revival of learning. 1 



Now, if the study of physical science is to play a vastly more im- 

 portant part than it has hitherto done in all future schemes of liberal 

 education, the first and most obvious consideration is that room must 

 be found for it. Bearing in mind, as we must constantly do, that the 

 word education stands for a strictly limited quantity, a limited amount 

 of time, a definite amount of mental effort, if that time and mental 

 effort have been wholly absorbed in one set of studies, it is very ob- 

 vious that these must undergo modification and curtailment in order 

 to make room for another set. And yet no error is at present more 

 common or more disastrous than the attempt to introduce the new, 

 without any disturbance of the older studies. Either the older curricu- 

 lum did not absorb, as it professed to do, the whole of the student's 

 mental energies, and was not therefore a complete education, or its 

 requisitions must be diminished to make room for another set of solid, 

 important, and disciplinary studies ; or else it must be maintained 

 that the new studies are not solid, important, and disciplinary, but 

 only fitted to be the amusement of idle hours, and the lighter tasks 

 with which gaps and intervals may be filled between the more solid, 

 older ones. That this latter is really the view of the more thorough- 

 going adherents of the classical system is pretty obvious. Thus the 

 Rev. S. Hawtrey, one of the masters of Eton, says, in a recently- 

 printed lecture : " It is for the masses that I fear, when I hear the cry 

 that boys should be freed from the severer labor of studying language 

 if it is distasteful, and therefore it is said unprofitable, and should 

 learn, instead, something about the wonders which science has achieved 

 m the present century." a It is very obvious that a writer who speaks 



1 " There is no reason for thinking that philosophy, which is only a just and perfect 

 judgment on the bearings and relations of knowledge, should not be as generally attain- 

 able as a wise judgment in practical matters is. And should our universities, ceasing to 

 be schools of grammar and mathematics, resume their proper functions, it will be found 

 that a far larger proportion of minds than we now suspect are capable of arriving at this 

 stage of progress. For, be it again repeated, it it not a knowledge, but a discipline that 

 is required ; not science, but the scientific habit ; not erudition, but scholarship. And 

 those who have not leisure to amass stores of knowledge to master in detail the facts of 

 science, may yet acquire the power of scientific insight, if opportunity is afforded them. 

 It is the want of this discernment and the absence of the proper cultivation of it which 

 produce that deluge of crude speculation and vague mysticism which pervades the 

 philosophical and religious literature of the day, and which is sometimes wrongly as- 

 cribed to the importation of philosophy itself and its recent unreasonable intrusion on 

 our practical good sense. The business of the highest education is not to check, but to 

 regulate this movement ; not to prohibit speculation, but to supply the discipline which 

 alone can safely wield it."— (Pattison, in " Oxford Essays for 1855," p. 258.) 



8 "A Narrative-Essay on a Liberal Education," p. 29. 



