LIBERAL EDUCATION. 19 



and masters,' in learning what he has now forgotten, and to recall 

 which he would not now take the trouble to raise his little finger." ■ 

 I was the docile and diligent receiver of such training as, in my youth, 

 a " classical school " and our oldest New-England college had to give, 

 and surely it is from no vanity that I say that I was also a recipient 

 of their honors ; and it is from the melancholy feeling that my formal 

 education was so barren and empty when looked at from the stand- 

 point of real life, and real thought, and real mental training, that I am 

 so earnest an advocate of changes that I believe will give to future 

 generations the reality instead of the pretense of an education. 



I come now to the study of Physical Science, as from this time for- 

 ward destined to play a wholly new part in our system of liberal edu- 

 cation. Nowhere, save in that astonishing document, the Syllabus of 

 his holiness Pope Pius IX., can any education-philosophy be found 

 so benighted as not to recognize its value and importance. Yet I am 

 far from believing that its true place, as a factor in the new education, 

 has yet been determined. While, on the one hand, among the old 

 high-and-dry advocates of the grindstone-system, certain merits and a 

 subordinate place are beginning to be grudgingly allowed it, we are 

 in danger, on the other hand, in this new country of ours, whose vast 

 material resources are waiting for development through its instrumen- 

 tality, rather of overrating than underrating its purely educational 

 function. It is not as an economical instrument for the development 

 of material wealth that I have here to deal with it, though that is a 

 very important aspect, but considered as a factor in a system of edu- 

 cation, and, as such, I claim for it no monopoly, but only a place as 

 the indispensable complement to those ethical and linguistic studies 

 which have heretofore monopolized the title of a liberal education, 

 and which, from the absence of science from that form of education, 

 have been reduced to their present effete and impotent condition. It 

 is to the incorporation into it of the study of science that we are to 

 look as the source of new life-blood. 



You will not expect me to attempt to deal here with the great sub- 

 ject which forever occupies the minds of speculative thinkers, and 

 never more than at the present moment — the true relations of the world 

 of matter and the world of mind. That is too large a subject to be 

 dealt with, though upon right views regarding it will greatly depend 

 the correctness even of our educational theories. I will only say, that 

 though I am as far as possible from being an adherent of any form of 

 materialism, yet I believe that physical science is destined to be the 

 great instrument of these modern days to give new forms to our phi- 

 losophy and our theology — to give new forms to the same everlasting 

 problems, but not to give us new philosophy or new theology. It 

 will but cast old truths in new moulds, while it explodes old super- 



1 Mountstuart, E. Grant Duff, Inaugural Address as Hector of the University of Aber- 

 deen, p. 22. 



