here was no lack of ability; but there
was no inducement to any intellectual activity for its own sake; and
there were abundant temptations for any man of energy to diverge to the
career which offered more intelligible rewards.

The universities in fact supplied the demand which was actually
operative. They provided the average clergyman with a degree; they
expected the son of the country-gentleman or successful lawyer to
acquire the traditional culture of his class, and to spend three or four
years pleasantly, or even, if he chose, industriously. But there was no
such thing as a learned society, interested in the cultivation of
knowledge for its own sake, and applauding the devotion of life to its
extension or discussion. The men of the time who contributed to the
progress of science owed little or nothing to the universities, and were
rather volunteers from without, impelled by their own idiosyncrasies.
Among the scientific leaders, for example, Joseph Black (1728-1799) was
a Scottish professor; Priestley (1733-1804) a dissenting minister;
Cavendish (1731-1810) an aristocratic recluse, who, though he studied at
Cambridge, never graduated; Watt (1736-1819) a practical mechanician;
and Dalton (1766-1844) a Quaker schoolmaster. John Hunter (1728-1793)
was one of the energetic Scots who forced their way to fame without help
from English universities. The cultivation of the natural sciences was
only beginning to take root; and the soil, which it found congenial, was
not that of the great learned institutions, which held to their old
traditional studies.

I may, then, sum up the result in a few words. The church had once
claimed to be an entirely independent body, possessing a supernatural
authority, with an organisation sanctioned by supernatural powers, and
entitled to lay down the doctrines which gave the final theory of life.
Theology was the queen of the sciences and theologians the interpreters
of the first principles of all knowledge and conduct. The church of
England, on the other hand, at our period had entirely ceased to be
independent: it was bound hand and foot by acts of parliament: there was
no ecclesiastical organ capable of speaking in its name, altering its
laws or defining its tenets: it was an aggregate of offices the
appointment to which was in the hands either of the political ministers
or of the lay members of the ruling class. It was in reality simply a
part of the ruling class told off to perform di