ON SCIENCE AND ART 149 



that we cannot deal with this question fully until we 

 have made up our minds as to what the principal sub- 

 jects of education ought to be. 



I know quite well that launching myself into this dis- 

 cussion is a very dangerous operation; that it is a very 

 large subject, and one which is difficult to deal with, 

 however much I may trespass upon your patience in the 

 time allotted to me. But the discussion is so funda- 

 mental, it is so completely impossible to make up one's 

 mind on these matters until one has settled the ques- 

 tion, that I will even venture to make the experiment. 

 A great lawyer-statesman and philosopher of a former 

 age I mean Francis Bacon 7 said that truth came out 

 of error much more rapidly than it came out of con- 

 fusion. There is a wonderful truth in that saying. Next 

 to being right in this world, the best of all things is to 

 be clearly and definitely wrong, because you will come 

 out somewhere. If you go buzzing about between right 

 and wrong, vibrating and fluctuating, you come out no- 

 where; but if you are absolutely and thoroughly and 

 persistently wrong, you must, some of these days, have 

 the extreme good fortune of knocking your head against 

 a fact, and that sets you all straight again. So I will 

 not trouble myself as to whether I may be right or wrong 

 in what I am about to say, but at any rate I hope to 

 be clear and definite; and then you will be able to judge 

 for yourselves whether, in following out the train of 

 thought I have to introduce, you knock your heads 

 against facts or not. 



I take it that the whole object of education is, in the 

 first place, to train the faculties of the young in such a 

 manner as to give their possessors the best chance of 

 being happy and useful in their generation; and, in the 

 second place, to furnish them with the most important 

 7 See On Improving Natural Knowledge, p. 19. 



