ges enabled us
to subjugate nature to our needs, and in these days gives the common
labourer comforts which a few centuries ago kings could not purchase, is
scarcely in any degree old to the appointed means of instructing our
youth. The vital knowledge--that by which we have grown as a nation to
what we are, and which underlies our whole existence--is a knowledge
that has got itself taught in nooks and corners, while the ordained
agencies for teaching have been mumbling little else than dead formulas.

Hitherto we have made no preparation whatever for the third great
division of human activities--the care of offspring, on which no word of
instruction is ever given to those who will by and by be parents. Yet
that parents should begin the difficult task of rearing children,
without ever having given a thought to the principles, physical, moral,
or intellectual, which ought to guide them, excites neither surprise at
the actors nor pity for their victims. To tens of thousands that are
killed, and hundreds of thousands that survive with feeble
constitutions, add millions that grow up with constitutions not so
strong as they should be, and you will have some idea of the curse
inflicted on their offspring by parents ignorant of the laws of life.

Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry may truly be called
the efflorescence of civilised life, but the production of a healthy
civilised life must be the first condition. The vice of our educational
system is that it neglects the plant for the sake of the flower. In
anxiety for elegance it forgets substance, preparing not at all for the
discharge of parental functions and for the duties of citizenship, by
imparting a mass of facts most of which are irrelevant, and the rest
without a key. But the accomplishment of all those things which
constitute the efflorescence of civilisation should be wholly
subordinate to that instruction and discipline on which civilisation
rests. As they occupy the leisure part of life, so should they occupy
the leisure part of education.

Yet in this remaining sphere of activity, also, scientific knowledge is
fundamental, and only when genius is married to science can the highest
results be produced; indeed, not only does science underlie the arts,
but science is itself poetic. The current opinion that science and
poetry are opposed is a delusion. On the contrary, science opens up
realms of poetry where to the unscientific all is blank. Think