The great fact of the time is, the advance from mere art upward to science, from the blossom to the fruit.  Practical wants, ’the greatest good for the greatest number,’ the fullest development of free labor, the increase of capital, the diminution of suffering, the harmony of interests between capital and labor—­all of these are the children of Science and Facts.  During the feudal age, nearly all the resources of genius—­all the capital of the day—­was devoted to mere Art, for the sake of setting off social position and ‘idealisms.’  As with the nobility and royalty of England at the present day, society enormously overpaid what is, or was, really the police—­whose mission it was to keep it in order.  But from Friar Bacon to Lord Bacon, a movement was silently progressing, which the present century has just begun to realize.  This movement was that of the development of all human ability and natural resources, guided by science.  It was a tendency toward the practical, the positive, which is destined in time to bring forth its own new art and literature, is breaking away from the trammels of the old literary or imaginative sway.

At the present day, up to the present hour, Education—­especially the higher education, destined to fit men for leading positions—­is still under the old literary regime.  We laugh when we read of the two first years of medical study at the school of Salerno being devoted to dry logic, yet the four years’ course at nearly all our modern Universities, or, in fact, the course of almost any ‘high-school,’ is as little adapted to the real wants of the practical leading men of this age as a study of the Schoolmen would be.  The ‘literature’ of the past still rules the practical wants of the present.  It is not that the study of the thought of the past is not noble, nay, essential, to the highly cultivated man; but it should be pursued on a large, scientific scale.  The study of Greek and Latin, as languages, is not so disciplining nor so valuable as that of the science of language, as taught by Max Mueller; and if these languages must be learned, (and we do not deny that they should,) they can better be studied in their relations to all languages than simply by themselves.  And as if to make bad worse, the genial and strictly scientific use of literal translations, advocated by Milton and Locke, and generally employed at the Revival of Letters, and during the days when Europe boasted its greatest classic scholars, is prohibited.  ‘A college education’ suggests the employment of the best years of life in studies of little practical use in themselves, and seldom revived, save for pleasure, after graduation.  And even where such studies are exceptionally practical; nay, where science and a free choice of languages and literature are left to the somewhat advanced student, we still find the shadow of the past—­of the old, formal, and rapidly growing obsolete literature—­overawing the more enlightened effort.  Deny it as we may,