More than this, however, is demanded by the reformers.  It is proposed to make the training in natural science the main part of education, for the great majority of mankind at any rate.  And here, I confess, I part company with the friends of physical science, with whom up to this point I have been agreeing.  In differing from them, however, I wish to proceed with the utmost caution and diffidence.  The smallness of my own acquaintance with the disciplines of natural science is ever before my mind, and I am fearful of doing these disciplines an injustice.  The ability and pugnacity of the partisans of natural science make them formidable persons to contradict.  The tone of tentative inquiry, which befits a being of dim faculties and bounded knowledge, is the tone I would wish to take and not to depart from.  At present it seems to me, that those who are for giving to natural knowledge, as they call it, the chief place in the education of the majority of mankind, leave one important thing out of their account:  the constitution of human nature.  But I put this forward on the strength of some facts not at all recondite, very far from it; facts capable of being stated in the simplest possible fashion, and to which, if I so state them, the man of science will, I am sure, be willing to allow their due weight.

Deny the facts altogether, I think, he hardly can.  He can hardly deny, that when we set ourselves to enumerate the powers which go to the building up of human life, and say that they are the power of conduct, the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty, and the power of social life and manners,—­he can hardly deny that this scheme, though drawn in rough and plain lines enough, and not pretending to scientific exactness, does yet give a fairly true representation of the matter.  Human nature is built up by these powers; we have the need for them all.  When we have rightly met and adjusted the claims of them all, we shall then be in a fair way for getting soberness, and righteousness with wisdom.  This is evident enough, and the friends of physical science would admit it.

But perhaps they may not have sufficiently observed another thing:  namely, that the several powers just mentioned are not isolated, but there is, in the generality of mankind, a perpetual tendency to relate them one to another in divers ways.  With one such way of relating them I am particularly concerned now.  Following our instinct for intellect and knowledge, we acquire pieces of knowledge; and presently in the generality of men, there arises the desire to relate these pieces of knowledge to our sense for conduct, to our sense for beauty,—­and there is weariness and dissatisfaction if the desire is balked.  Now in this desire lies, I think, the strength of that hold which letters have upon us.