religious or political; to see why he has rejected this and espoused that, why this failed and that was successful, what are liberty and religion, family affection and personal greed, and in a word, to study Man. As he reviews them, and compares them with the present, he can see, as far as a man can see, what ideas have come down to his own day, and what new elements are combining with them, can forecast in some degree the future, and by virtue of his knowledge guide the streaming forces, and shape the molten mass, serve his country and use to the best advantage his own powers.1

If anyone thinks this pedantic, and believes that the knowledge of man is only got from life, let him read Anna Karenina or The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, and say if he learns nothing from them about marriage, education and human nature in general; and let him remember the opinion of a man who knew the world and was not a pedant. Lord Chesterfield wrote to his son: the knowledge of the world and that of books "assist one another reciprocally; and no man will have either perfectly, who has not both. The knowledge of the world is only to be acquired in the world, and not in a

1 I have quoted this passage from an article of my own in the first number of the Oxford and Cambridge Review.

closet. Books alone will never teach it you; but they will suggest many things to your observation, which might otherwise escape you; and your own observations upon mankind, when compared with those which you will find in books, will help you to fix the true point." That is perfectly true. The world is far more intelligible to us if we have studied history and literature. We understand Hamlet or Brutus, when we meet them in the flesh, far more readily if we have already met them in Shakespeare. Their actions have a meaning for us because we have the clue to their character. We are like visitors to a foreign town who have already studied its map; the lie of the land, the plan of the whole is already familiar for us, and we pick up our bearings quickly, instead of wandering vaguely about the streets.

Consider what a literary education in theory is, and in fact might easily become. The student of literature moves familiarly in an infinitely vast and varied assembly. Even if he confines himself narrowly to the classics, he meets there all sorts and conditions of men-neurotics as different as Lucretius and Propertius, conservatives as different as Pindar and Aristophanes; he meets the man of letters as politician in Isocrates and Cicero, and the

politician as man of letters in Caesar; he learns to know worldly commonsense incarnate in Horace, reason incarnate in Socrates; he sees the pessimists of an over-civilised society-Juvenal, the disappointed bourgeois, Tacitus, the soured aristocrat, Marcus Aurelius, the disillusioned saint; he notes how differently Plato, the imaginative idealist, and Aristotle, the clear-sighted analyst, prescribe for their distempered age. These are only a few of the types whom he learns to know as intimate friends, whose dispositions become familiar to him, into whose moods and personality he can in a moment throw himself. And I have said nothing of the characters they have painted in their books.

The value of history is even more obvious. The nation might have been saved something by a little knowledge of German history; and a study of the Napoleonic wars might have preserved us, if not from certain strategical mistakes, yet from our worst fits of despondency about ourselves and our rulers: while one great danger, as we set about social reform, is that the democracy knows very little history. Yet even so, we have learnt immensely from history, and our whole political attitude, consciously or unconsciously, is coloured

by our knowledge of it.

One point in which we differ most profoundly from the Greeks and Romans, in other ways so like us, is that we have more history behind us, and have learnt more from it. It is history that has taught us the lesson of political toleration; it is history that gave a constitution to South Africa, and is giving a parliament to Ireland.

If history needs no apology, philosophy needs a good deal. Its name is against it; and we forget that when we think, argue or act, it stands behind us, the unseen framework of all our practice, which becomes visible as soon as we ask how or why. Bishop Berkeley's grave and measured saying is its best justification: "Whatever the world thinks, he who hath not much meditated upon God, the human mind, and the Summum Bonum, may possibly make a thriving earthworm, but will certainly make a sorry patriot and a sorry statesman.” 2

It is as the study of man that the humanities. claim their predominant place in education, and in this age of material things, while we honour science

1A boy must be very badly taught if he studies the Civil War without modifying some of his views; to understand Cromwell, Strafford and Ļaud is a political education.

Siris, § 350.

and pay her dues, we shall do well sometimes to remind ourselves that man is more important than nature, and man's spiritual, more important than his physical, constitution. Philosophically it may be disputable, practically it is admitted, that the world exists for him; and those who deny it with their lips assert it by their actions and their attitude to life. "Quand l'univers l'écraserait, l'homme serait encore plus noble que ce qui le tue." "Social progress means a checking of the cosmic process at every step and the substitution for it of . . . the ethical process."1 Pascal and Huxley are here agreed. We cannot in our education give the chief place to the junior partner.

Then a further point. One of the chief objects of education is to train flexibility of mind, to make a man quick to comprehend other points of view than his own. Obviously, no power is more necessary in dealing with men. To be able to discard for the moment his own opinions, and see the world through the eyes of other classes, races or types, is as indispensable to the merchant as to the statesman; for men are hardly to be controlled or influenced unless they are understood. And yet 1Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (Eversley edition), p. 81.