Omega of a sound education.  The calm judgment of that great humanist, Professor Jebb, led him to the conclusion that the claims of the humanities have been at times defended by pleas which were exaggerated and paradoxical—­using this latter term in the sense of arguments which contain an element of truth, but of truth which has been distorted—­and that in an age remarkable beyond all previous ages for scientific research and discoveries, that nation must necessarily lag behind which, in the well-known words uttered by Gibbon at a time when science was still in swaddling-clothes, fears that the “finer feelings” are destroyed if the mind becomes “hardened by the habit of rigid demonstration.”  All this has now been changed.  Professor Huxley did not live in vain.  His mantle fell on the shoulders of many other doughty champions who shared his views.  Science no longer slinks modestly in educational bypaths, but occupies the high road, and, to say the least, marches abreast of her humanistic sister.  Yet the scientists are not yet content.  Their souls are athirst for further victories.  A high authority on education, himself a classical scholar,[90] has recently told us that, although the English boy “as he emerges from the crucible of the public school laboratory” may be a fairly good agent for dealing with the “lower or more submissive races in the wilds of Africa or in the plains of India,” elsewhere—­notably in Canada—­he is “a conspicuous failure”; that one of the principal reasons why he is a failure is that “the influence of the humanists still reigns over us”; and that “the future destiny of the Empire is wrapt up in the immediate reform of England’s educational system.”  In the course of that reform, which it is proposed should be of a very drastic character, some half-hearted efforts may conceivably be made to effect the salvage of whatever will remain of the humanistic wreck, but the real motto of the reformers will almost certainly be Utilitarianism, writ large.  The humanists, therefore, are placed on their defence.  It may be that the walls of their entrenchment, which have already been a good deal battered, will fall down altogether, and that the garrison will be asked to submit to a capitulation which will be almost unconditional.

In the midst of the din of battle which may already be heard, and which will probably ere long become louder, it seems very desirable that the voices of those who are neither profound scholars nor accomplished scientists nor educational experts should be heard.  These—­and there are many such—­ask, What is the end which we should seek to attain?  Can science alone be trusted to prevent education becoming, in the words of that sturdy old pagan, Thomas Love Peacock, a “means for giving a fixed direction to stupidity”?  The answer they, or many of them, give to these questions is that the main end of education is to teach people to think, and that they are not prepared to play false to their own intellects to such an extent as to believe that the