So far as school education is concerned, I want to go no further just now; and I believe that such instruction would make an excellent introduction to that preparatory scientific training which, as I have indicated, is so essential for the successful pursuit of our most important professions.  But this modicum of instruction must be so given as to ensure real knowledge and practical discipline.  If scientific education is to be dealt with as mere bookwork, it will be better not to attempt it, but to stick to the Latin Grammar, which makes no pretence to be anything but bookwork.

If the great benefits of scientific training are sought, it is essential that such training should be real:  that is to say, that the mind of the scholar should be brought into direct relation with fact, that he should not merely be told a thing, but made to see by the use of his own intellect and ability that the thing is so and no otherwise.  The great peculiarity of scientific training, that in virtue of which it cannot be replaced by any other discipline whatsoever, is this bringing of the mind directly into contact with fact, and practising the intellect in the completest form of induction; that is to say, in drawing conclusions from particular facts made known by immediate observation of Nature.

The other studies which enter into ordinary education do not discipline the mind in this way.  Mathematical training is almost purely deductive.  The mathematician starts with a few simple propositions, the proof of which is so obvious that they are called self-evident, and the rest of his work consists of subtle deductions from them.  The teaching of languages, at any rate as ordinarily practised, is of the same general nature,—­authority and tradition furnish the data, and the mental operations of the scholar are deductive.

Again:  if history be the subject of study, the facts are still taken upon the evidence of tradition and authority.  You cannot make a boy see the battle of Thermopylae for himself, or know, of his own knowledge, that Cromwell once ruled England.  There is no getting into direct contact with natural fact by this road; there is no dispensing with authority, but rather a resting upon it.

In all these respects, science differs from other educational discipline, and prepares the scholar for common life.  What have we to do in every-day life?  Most of the business which demands our attention is matter of fact, which needs, in the first place, to be accurately observed or apprehended; in the second, to be interpreted by inductive and deductive reasonings, which are altogether similar in their nature to those employed in science.  In the one case, as in the other, whatever is taken for granted is so taken at one’s own peril; fact and reason are the ultimate arbiters, and patience and honesty are the great helpers out of difficulty.