One point in which we

by our knowledge of it.1 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

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

2 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

1 Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (Eversley edition), p. 81.

no power is rarer. It is almost non-existent among uneducated people. A man who has not risen above the elementary school, is hardly ever able to seize an attitude of mind at all different to his own; he may acquiesce in it because he trusts or respects the character of the person in question, but he does not understand it; he cannot perform the great feat for which our intellectual gymnasia train us, of being in two (or more) people's skins at the same time. And this is not due to the absence of any organ from his body, but simply to the fact that he has never practised the art. Nor is the failing confined to the quite uneducated. We all of us spend half of our time in misunderstanding our neighbour, and in most controversies misunderstanding is the dividing line between the parties concerned. Now the power of sympathetic insight is trained by a literary education. A man learns above all from the study of literature and history to put himself in the place of other men, races and times, to identify himself with them, to see what they mean and how they felt. And so, by continual practice, he becomes quick at seizing the views of other people than himself, seeing what is in their mind, and accommodating himself to it.

Here physical science gives no help. In literature the mind must continually be moving from one place to another; in twenty-five pages the reader must successively become Polonius, Hamlet, Horatio, Laertes, Gertrude-to mention no other characters of the play. In fact, he must do, what the merchant does who wishes to sell goods in half a dozen different markets, or the statesman who has to consider the interests and temper of half a dozen different classes and nationalities. But science keeps on one plane; she is not puzzled by the subtle and profound variations of outlook which separate a Russian from an Englishman, a Herefordshire farmer from a Tyneside artisan. Minerals and nerves, alkalis and engines have no point of view, no outlook on life, into which it is necessary to enter; understanding them is very different from understanding Shakespeare or Euripides. You deal with them and all the while remain your own insulated self. Science does not train sympathy, because nothing in its subject-matter has feelings with which we can sympathise.

So far the work of the humanities in education is obvious; but its further task, though often for

gotten, is perhaps the most important of all. Jowett was thinking of it when he said to Matthew Arnold, then professor of poetry at Oxford, "Teach us not to criticise, but to enjoy." Hitherto we have seen how the humanities teach us to criticise; now we are concerned with their second lesson.

Imaginative literature in prose or poetry helps us in our turn to see the world with imagination, The poet in a golden clime was born,

With golden stars above.

But the ordinary man is not born in a golden clime, and though his happiness, and in the best sense, his success, depends on his reaching it, little in his surroundings helps him to do so. He was probably born among smoke and red

brick; there is

not much beauty in the streets around him; the literature which in the ordinary course he is most certain to see, is the daily press; and here too, he will get little help. On his paper's first page, he will see (typical of the whole) the three most wonderful events of life, presented by a bare enumeration of dates, names and places, and as he turns the sheets, life unrolls itself before him in a list of Stock Exchange prices, law court reports and so on. None of this suggests the golden