s,
such an enlargement and development, such a comprehensiveness, is
necessarily a matter of training. And again, such a training is a matter
of rule; it is not mere application, however exemplary, which introduces
the mind to truth, nor the reading many books, nor the getting up many
subjects, nor the witnessing many experiments, nor the attending many
lectures. All this is short of enough; a man may have done it all, yet be
lingering in the vestibule of knowledge:--he may not realize what his mouth
utters; he may not see with his mental eye what confronts him; he may have
no grasp of things as they are; or at least he may have no power at all of
advancing one step forward of himself, in consequence of what he has
already acquired, no power of discriminating between truth and falsehood,
of sifting out the grains of truth from the mass, of arranging things
according to their real value, and, if I may use the phrase, of building
up ideas. Such a power is the result of a scientific formation of mind; it
is an acquired faculty of judgment, of clear-sightedness, of sagacity, of
wisdom, of philosophical reach of mind, and of intellectual
self-possession and repose,--qualities which do not come of mere
acquirement. The bodily eye, the organ for apprehending material objects,
is provided by nature; the eye of the mind, of which the object is truth,
is the work of discipline and habit.

This process of training, by which the intellect, instead of being formed
or sacrificed to some particular or accidental purpose, some specific
trade or profession, or study or science, is disciplined for its own sake,
for the perception of its own proper object, and for its own highest
culture, is called Liberal Education; and though there is no one in whom
it is carried as far as is conceivable, or whose intellect would be a
pattern of what intellects should be made, yet there is scarcely any one
but may gain an idea of what real training is, and at least look towards
it, and make its true scope and result, not something else, his standard
of excellence; and numbers there are who may submit themselves to it, and
secure it to themselves in good measure. And to set forth the right
standard, and to train according to it, and to help forward all students
towards it according to their various capacities, this I conceive to be
the business of a University.

2.

Now this is what some great men are very slow to allow; they insist that
Educati