elementary instruction which I have referred to embraces all the kinds
of real knowledge and mental activity possible to man. The university
can add no new departments of knowledge, can offer no new fields of
mental activity; but what it can do is to intensify and specialise the
instruction in each department. Thus literature and philology,
represented in the elementary school by English alone, in the
university will extend over the ancient and modern languages. History,
which, like charity, best begins at home, but, like charity, should not
end there, will ramify into anthropology, archaeology, political
history, and geography, with the history of the growth of the human
mind and of its products in the shape of philosophy, science, and art.
And the university will present to the student libraries, museums of
antiquities, collections of coins, and the like, which will efficiently
subserve these studies. Instruction in the elements of social economy,
a most essential, but hitherto sadly-neglected part of elementary
education, will develop in the university into political economy,
sociology, and law. Physical science will have its great divisions of
physical geography, with geology and astronomy; physics; chemistry and
biology; represented not merely by professors and their lectures, but
by laboratories, in which the students, under guidance of
demonstrators, will work out facts for themselves and come into that
direct contact with reality which constitutes the fundamental
distinction of scientific education. Mathematics will soar into its
highest regions; while the high peaks of philosophy may be scaled by
those whose aptitude for abstract thought has been awakened by
elementary logic. Finally, schools of pictorial and plastic art, of
architecture, and of music, will offer a thorough discipline in the
principles and practice of art to those in whom lies nascent the rare
faculty of aesthetic representation, or the still rarer powers of
creative genius.