motives savours a little of self-indulgence, and sentimentality, and other objectionable qualities.  There is a great stir in the region of physical science at this moment, and it is likely, as any one may see, to take a chief and foremost place in the field of intellectual activity.  After the severity with which science was for so many ages treated by literature, we cannot wonder that science now retaliates, now mightily exalts herself, and thrusts literature down into the lower place.  I only have to say on the relative claims of science and literature what Dr Arnold said:—­“If one might wish for impossibilities, I might then wish that my children might be well versed in physical science, but in due subordination to the fulness and freshness of their knowledge on moral subjects.  This, however, I believe cannot be; wherefore, rather than have it the principal thing in my son’s mind, I would gladly have him think that the sun went round the earth, and that the stars were so many spangles set in the bright blue firmament” (Stanley’s Life of Arnold, ii. 31).  It is satisfactory that one may know something of these matters, and yet not believe that the sun goes round the earth.  But if there is to be exclusion, I, for one, am not prepared to accept the rather enormous pretensions that are nowadays sometimes made for physical science as the be-all and end-all of education.

Next to this we know that there is a great stir on behalf of technical and commercial education.  The special needs of our time and country compel us to pay a particular attention to this subject.  Here knowledge is business, and we shall never hold our industrial pre-eminence, with all that hangs upon that pre-eminence, unless we push on technical and commercial education with all our might.  But there is a third kind of knowledge, and that too, in its own way, is business.  There is the cultivation of the sympathies and imagination, the quickening of the moral sensibilities, and the enlargement of the moral vision.  The great need in modern culture, which is scientific in method, rationalistic in spirit, and utilitarian in purpose, is to find some effective agency for cherishing within us the ideal.  That is the business and function of literature.  Literature alone will not make a good citizen; it will not make a good man.  History affords too many proofs that scholarship and learning by no means purge men of acrimony, of vanity, of arrogance, of a murderous tenacity about trifles.  Mere scholarship and learning and the knowledge of books do not by any means arrest and dissolve all the travelling acids of the human system.  Nor would I pretend for a moment that literature can be any substitute for life and action.  Burke said, “What is the education of the generality of the world?  Reading a parcel of books?  No!  Restraint and discipline, examples of virtue and of justice, these are what form the education of the world.”  That is profoundly true; it is life that is the great educator.  But the parcel of books, if they are well chosen, reconcile us to this discipline; they interpret this virtue and justice; they awaken within us the diviner mind, and rouse us to a consciousness of what is best in others and ourselves.