subject and its value, and if possible, allure some of you to the
study of it.

I have said that lectures do not supply mental training; that only
personal study can do that. The next question is, What study? And
that is a question which I do not answer in a hurry, when I say, The
study of natural history. It is not, certainly, a study which a
young man entering on the business of self-education would be likely
to take up. To him, naturally, man is the most important subject.
His first wish is to know the human world; to know what men are,
what they have thought, what they have done. And therefore, you
find that poetry, history, politics, and philosophy are the matters
which most attract the self-guided student. I do not blame him, but
he seems to me to be beginning at the middle, rather than at the
beginning. I fell into the same fault myself more than once, when I
was younger, and meddled in matters too high for me, instead of
refraining my soul, and keeping it low; so I can sympathise with
others who do so. But I can assure them that they will find such
lofty studies do them good only in proportion as they have first
learnt the art of learning. Unless they have learnt to face facts
manfully, to discriminate between them skilfully, to draw
conclusions from them rigidly; unless they have learnt in all things
to look, not for what they would like to be true, but for what is
true, because God has done it, and it cannot be undone--then they
will be in danger of taking up only the books which suit their own
prejudices--and every one has his prejudices--and using them, not to
correct their own notions, but to corroborate and pamper them; to
confirm themselves in their first narrow guesses, instead of
enlarging those guesses into certainty. The son of a Tory turn will
read Tory books, the son of a Radical turn Radical books; and the