examination, the riddling Sphinx which, as Seeley said in a telling
quotation from Sophocles, forces us to attend to what is at our feet,
neglecting all else--all the imponderables in which the true value of
education consists. The tyranny of examinations has an important
influence upon the choice of subjects as well as upon the manner of
teaching them; for some subjects, which are remarkably stimulating to
the mind of the pupil, are neglected, because they are not well
adapted for examinations. Among these, unfortunately, are our own
literature and language.

It is therefore necessary, even in a short essay which professes to
deal only with generalities, to make some suggestions as to the main
subjects which our education should include. As has been indicated
already, I would divide them into main classes--science and humanism.
Every boy should be instructed in both branches up to a certain point.
We must firmly resist those who wish to make education purely
scientific, those who, in Bacon's words, "call upon men to sell their
books and build furnaces, quitting and forsaking Minerva and the Muses
and relying upon Vulcan." We want no young specialists of twelve years
old; and a youth without a tincture of humanism can never become

A man foursquare, withouten flaw ywrought.

Of the teaching of science I am not competent to speak. But as an
instrument of mind-training, and even of liberal education, it seems
to me to have a far higher value than is usually conceded to it by
humanists. To direct the imagination to the infinitely great and the
infinitely small, to vistas of time in which a thousand years are as
one day; to the tremendous forces imprisoned in minute particles of
matter; to the amazing complexity of the mechanism by which the organs