tific investigation of some of the most important
topics to which the human mind can devote itself. There is no purpose
of which I approve more cordially: yet the very statement suggests a
doubt. To speak of science and politics together is almost to suggest
irony. And if politics be taken in the ordinary sense; if we think of
the discussions by which the immediate fate of measures and of
ministries is decided, I should be inclined to think that they belong
to a sphere of thought to which scientific thought is hardly
applicable, and in which I should be personally an unwarrantable
intruder. My friends have sometimes accused me, indeed, of indifference
to politics. I confess that I have never been able to follow the
details of party warfare with the interest which they excite in some
minds: and reasons, needless to indicate, have caused me to stray
further and further away from intercourse with the society in which
such details excite a predominant--I do not mean to insinuate an
excessive--interest. I feel that if I were to suggest any arguments
bearing directly upon home rule or disestablishment, I should at once
come under that damnatory epithet "academical," which so neatly cuts
the ground from under the feet of the political amateur. Moreover, I
recognise a good deal of justice in the implied criticism. An active
politician who wishes to impress his doctrines upon his countrymen,
should have a kind of knowledge to which I can make no pretension. I
share the ordinary feelings of awful reverence with which the human
bookworm looks up to the man of business. He has faculties which in me
are rudimentary, but which I can appreciate by their contrast to my own
feebleness. The "knowledge of the world" ascribed to lawyers, to
politicians, financiers, and such persons, like the "knowledge of the
human heart" so often ascribed to dramatists and novelists, represents,
I take it, a very real kind of knowledge; but it is rather an instinct
than a set of definite principles; a power of somehow estimating the
tendencies and motives of their fellow-creatures in a mass by rule of
thumb, rather than by any distinctly assignable logical process; only
to be gained by long experience and shrewd observation of men and
cities. Such a faculty, as it reaches sound results without employing
explicit definitions and syllogisms and inductive processes, sometimes
inclines its possessors to look down too contemptuously upon the closet
student.