knowing an ancient language one lays in a stock
of thought and observation and becomes familiar
with the principal literary compositions which the
human mind has produced. Moreover, one receives
the most valuable discipline of the intellect. The
structure of these languages, at once so regular and
so complex, leads to this result. The grammar of
the Greek language illustrates this method and
effect. Grammar is logic, analysis, synthesis and
relationship. It demands discriminations, precise
and accurate. It obliges thinking.
The ancient classics, moreover, are the accumu-
lated treasures of wisdom. The experiences of
human nature and conduct are in them gathered
together. These results in speech and history, in
dialogue, essay, poetry and philosophy are the
stores of the best ancient civilization. The end of
education is here set forth. The truths of meta-
physics are here explained. The methods of the
search for truth are here interpreted, illustrated,
and applied.
The form, too, as well as the content of these
158 EDUCATION
examples of ancient thought, approaches the high-
est perfection. The literature of Greece is the
noblest. It has no rival. The ancients were neither
hurried nor self-conscious as are the moderns.
Their style represents good sense, without trickery
or deceit. They use words with meanings, with
clearness and fitness. They were not discursive,
but intrinsic and essential. They chose right words
for right thought and put them in the right places.
They have neither too much nor too little. Their
literature finds a type in their sculptures. They
are not prolix. They are condensed and brief be-
cause they took pains. The acquaintance of the
moderns with these ancient masterpieces would
make the moderns more masterful.
But the argument for the study of the sciences
is hardly less weighty. The sciences give informa-
tion. They tell us of the world in which we live,
and they tell us of ourselves. Truth, the search for
which is the most important employment of man,
is made known by observation and reasoning.
Methods for research and for the discovery of
truth have been carried to their highest point of
usefulness in the sciences. If ancient literature is
an illustration of the art of expression, the modern
sciences are the finished illustration of the art of
ACCORDING TO JOHN STUART MILL 159
thinking. Mathematics stands for reasoning, phy-
sical science for observation. Models, rules and
principles for weighing evidence, which is the es-
sence of thinking, are most effectively proved in
the sciences. The mathematical sciences, pure and
complete, help one to understand and to express
the premises of reasoning and also to keep in mind
the proper process arising from these premises.
The physical sciences, which are not mathematical,
like chemistry, teach methods of rounding-out
truth by observation and experiment. Reasoning
by induction and reasoning by deduction are like-
wise taught by these studies. In his examination
of Hamilton, Mill speaks particularly of mathe-
matics as habituating the student to precision. It
demands observation, and exactness in observation.
It teaches the value of quantities. It also expresses
the necessity of progressive reasoning. It requires
sure footing before and as each step is taken.
Neither is physiology nor psychology to be
omitted. The knowledge of one's body, of one's
mind, is evidently of much value. To understand
one's self is a natural wish. It also is a means
of preventing disaster and disease of all sorts, and
of promoting health. The moral conditions of life
have close relations with the physiological and the
160 EDUCATION
psychological facts. Man's own nature in both
higher and lower relations is most deserving of
study. Moreover, metaphysical controversies are
among the powerful forces for giving intellectual
discipline. Metaphysical reading and thinking are
profitable for all students.
The author of the classical political economy ad-
vises, furthermore, the study of this subject as a
guidance for life and for the interpretation of
laws, institutions and affairs human. The study
of ethics, of politics, of history, moreover, aids in
the humanizing of the student, equipping him for
his duty as a student and as a future citizen. Juris-
prudence and international law, likewise, represent
those principles which underlie the conduct of in-
dividuals and of nations, and embody those methods
by which individuals and nations may and should
live together and do prosper.
But education, whatever its content, fails to be-
come a proper disciplinary force, unless it be put
into practise. Truth is to lead to duty. Intellect
is to train conscience, and conscience to direct and
incite the will.
Besides intellectual and moral education, esthet-
ics is not to suffer neglect. In England, two causes
have contributed to the elimination of the science
ACCORDING TO JOHN STUART MILL 161
of the beautiful from the educational process,
money-making and puritanism. But poetry, paint-
ing, sculpture and the other fine arts, are never to
be interpreted as qualities. They embody the truth
of that early saying of Goethe, that "the beautiful
is greater than the good, for it includes the good."
The beautiful is the good made practical. The
examples of the beautiful give quickening, appre-
ciation and self -culture. They stir feeling, enlarge
thought, and ennoble life unto the highest.
Yet these severer studies do not alone constitute
the elements of the educational process. Of the
value of poetry in this program Mill writes with
deep sympathy. In particular does he write of the
great ministry of Wordsworth to both his mind and
heart:
In the first place, these poems addressed themselves power-
fully to one of the strongest of my pleasurable susceptibili-
ties, the love of rural objects and natural scenery; to which
I had been indebted not only for much of the pleasure of my
life, but quite recently for relief from one of my longest re-
lapses into depression. In this power of rural beauty over
me, there was a foundation laid for taking pleasure in Words-
worth 's poetry ; the more so, as his scenery lies mostly among
mountains, which, owing to my early Pyrenean excursion,
were my ideal of natural beauty. But Wordsworth would
never have had any great effect on me, if he had merely
162 EDUCATION
placed before me beautiful pictures of natural scenery. Scoti
does this still better than Wordsworth, and a very second-
rate landscape does it more effectually than any poet. What
made Wordsworth's poems a medicine for my state of mind,
was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states
of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the ex-
citement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of
the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to
draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imagi-
native pleasure, which could be shared in by all human be-
ings; which had no connexion with struggle or imperfection,
but would be made richer by every improvement in the
physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed
to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness,
when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed.
And I felt myself at once better and happier as I came under
their influence. 21
But the education of the intellect and of the
imagination does not complete the whole of educa-
tion, for man is more than intellectual. Man has
feelings and a heart. He is a social being, and, as
a social being, faculties other than intellectual have
their place. Man is also a doer and an executive.
He is a moral being and a religious soul. He has
a will. He, also, is endowed with the capacity for
seeing the beautiful and sublime. He is an esthetic
being. Education is comprehensive of the whole
* Autobiography, p. 147.
ACCORDING TO JOHN STUART MILL 163
nature of the individual and of all the relations
which the individual embodies.
The intellect, moreover, is not cultured by itself
alone, either as a condition or as a force. It re-
ceives enrichment from the feelings. As Mill says
in the Autobiography:
I had now learnt by experience that the passive susceptibili-
ties needed to be cultivated as well as the active capacities,
and required to be nourished and enriched as well as guided.
I did not, for an instant, lose sight of, or undervalue, that
part of the truth which I had seen before; I never turned
recreant to intellectual culture, or ceased to consider the
power and practice of analysis as an essential condition both
of individual and of social improvement. But I thought that
it had consequences which required to be corrected, by join-
ing other kinds of cultivation with it. The maintenance
of a due balance among the faculties, now seemed to me of
primary importance. The cultivation of the feelings be-
came one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophi-
cal creed. And my thoughts and inclinations turned in an
increasing degree towards whatever seemed capable of being
instrumental to that object.
I now began to find meaning in the things which I had
read or heard about the importance of poetry and art as
instruments of human culture. But it was some time longer
before I began to know this by personal experience. The
only one of the imaginative arts in which I had from child-
hood taken great pleasure, was music; the best effect of
which (and in this it surpasses perhaps every other art)
consists in exciting enthusiasm; in winding up to a high
164 EDUCATION
pitch those feelings of an elevated kind which are already
in the character, but to which this excitement gives a glow and
a fervour, which, though transitory at its utmost height, is
precious for sustaining them at other times. 22
It is furthermore to be remembered that the
intellect and every part of one's being are cul-
tivated by human association. In education the
social relations of man have not received sufficient
emphasis. The value of great men, men of great
manners and noble qualities, in this general cul-
tivation, is of the highest consequence.
Great men, and great actions, are seldom wasted; they
send forth a thousand unseen influences, more effective than
those which are seen; and though nine out of every ten
things done, with a good purpose, by those who are in ad-
vance of their age, produce no material effect, the tenth
thing produces effects twenty times as great as any one
would have dreamed of predicting from it. Even the men
who for want of sufficiently favorable circumstances left no
impress at all upon their own age, have often been of the
greatest value to posterity. Who could appear to have lived
more entirely in vain than some of the early heretics? They
were burned or massacred, their writings extirpated, their
memory anathematized, and their very names and existence
left for seven or eight centuries in the obscurity of musty
manuscripts their history to be gathered, perhaps, only from
the sentences by which they were condemned. Yet the mem-
ory of these men men who resisted certain pretensions or
*Ibid., p. 143.
ACCORDING TO JOHN STUART MILL 165
certain dogmas of the Church in the very age in which the
unanimous assent of Christendom was afterward claimed as
having been given to them, and asserted as the ground of
their authority broke the chain of tradition, established a
series of precedents for resistance, inspired later Reformers
with the courage, and armed them with the weapons, which
they needed when mankind were better prepared to follow
their impulse. 28
In this relationship, too, of social education, Mr.
Mill believes in the value of the fellowship of
equals. This value is reinforced by his own ex-
perience. He says :
It was in the winter of 1822-3 that I formed the plan of a
little society, to be composed of young men agreeing in funda-
mental principles acknowledging Utility as their standard
in ethics and politics, and a certain number of the principal
corollaries drawn from it in the philosophy I had accepted
and meeting once a fortnight to read essays and discuss ques-
tions conformably to the premises thus agreed on. 24
But association with one's superiors or with
one's equals is not the only method of gaining
cultivation. Cultivation is also to be gained from
executive work. The will and its expression react
upon the intellectual faculties. If efficiency springs
from these faculties, it tends in turn those same
faculties to develop and to expand.
*"A System of Logic," p. 650.
"Autobiography, p. 79.
166 EDUCATION
In the Autobiography it is said:
I am disposed to agree with what has been surmised by
others, that the opportunity which my official position gave
me of learning by personal observation the necessary condi-
tions of the practical conduct of public affairs, has been of
considerable value to me as a theoretical reformer of the
opinions and institutions of my time. Not, indeed, that
public business transacted on paper, to take effect on the
other side of the globe, was of itself calculated to give much
practical knowledge of life. But the occupation accustomed
me to see and hear the difficulties of every course, and the
means of obviating them, stated and discussed deliberately
with a view to execution; it gave me opportunities of per-
ceiving when public measures, and other political facts, did
not produce the effects which had been expected of them,
and from what causes; above all, it was valuable to me by
making me, in this portion of my activity, merely one wheel
in a machine, the whole of which had to work together. As
a speculative writer, I should have had no one to consult
but myself, and should have encountered in my speculations
none of the obstacles which would have started up whenever
they came to be applied to practice. But as a Secretary con-
ducting political correspondence, I could not issue an order
or express an opinion, without satisfying various persons very
unlike myself, that the thing was fit to be done. I was thus
in a good position for finding out by practice the mode of
putting a thought which gives it easiest admittance into minds
not prepared for it by habit; while I because practically
conversant with the difficulties of moving bodies of men, the
necessities of compromise, the art of sacrificing the
non-essential to preserve the essential. I learnt how to ob-
ACCORDING TO JOHN STUART MILL 167
tain the best I could, when I could not obtain everything;
instead of being indignant or dispirited because I could not
have entirely my own way, to be pleased and encouraged when
I could have the smallest part of it; and when even that
could not be, to bear with complete equanimity the being
overruled altogether. I have found, through life, these acqui-
sitions to be of the greatest possible importance for per-
sonal happiness, and they are also a very necessary condi-
tion for enabling any one, either as theorist or as practical
man, to effect the greatest amount of good compatible with
his opportunities. 85
In one of the great essays it is also said :
It is by action that the faculties are called forth, more than
by words; more, at least, than by words unaccompanied by
action. We want schools in which the children of the poor
should learn to use, not only their hands, but their minds
for the guidance of their hands; in which they should be
trained to the actual adaptation of means to ends; should
become familiar with the accomplishment of the same ob-
ject by various processes, and be made to apprehend with
their intellects in what consists the difference between the
right way of performing industrial operations and the wrong.
Meanwhile, they would acquire, not only manual dexterity,
but habits of order and regularity, of the utmost use in after-
life, and which have more to do with the formation of char-
acter than many persons are aware of. Such things would
do much more than is usually believed towards converting
these neglected creatures into rational beings, beings ca-
pable of foresight, accessible to reasons and motives ad-
* Ibid., pp. 84-86.
168 EDUCATION
dressed to their understanding, and therefore not governed
by the utterly senseless modes of feeling and action which so
much astonish educated and observing persons when brought
into contact with them.
But when education, in this its narrow sense, has done its
best, and even to enable it to do its best, an education of
another sort is required, such as schools cannot give. What
is taught to a child at school will be of little effect, if the cir-
cumstances which surround the grown man or woman con-
tradict the lesson. We may cultivate his understanding; but
what if he cannot employ it without becoming discontented
with his position, and disaffected to the whole order of things
in which he is cast? Society educates the poor, for good or
for ill, by its conduct to them, even more than by direct
teaching. A sense of this truth is the most valuable feature
in the new philanthropic agitation; and the recognition of it
is important, whatever mistakes may be at first made in
practically applying it. 26
Regarding the necessity, moreover, of moral
education, and, indeed, of religious, Mill is not
silent. He says, at length :
My father's moral convictions, wholly dissevered from re-
ligion, were very much of the character of those of the Greek
philosophers; and were delivered with the force and decision
which characterized all that came from him. Even at the
very early age at which I read with him the Memorabilia of
Xenophon, I imbibed from that work and from his comments
a deep respect for the character of Socrates; who stood in
my mind as a model of ideal excellence: and I well remem-
* " Dissertations and Discussions," Vol. II., p. 282.
ACCORDING TO JOHN STUART MILL 169
her how my father at that time impressed upon me the
lesson of the "Choice of Hercules." At a somewhat later
period the lofty moral standard exhibited in the writings of
Plato operated upon me with great force. My father's moral
inculcations were at all times mainly those of the "Socratici
viri;" justice, temperance (to which he gave a very extended
application), veracity, perseverance, readiness to encounter
pain and especially labour ; regard for the public good ; esti-
mation of persons according to their merits, and of things
according to their intrinsic usefulness; a life of exertion in
contradiction to one of self-indulgent ease and sloth. These
and other moralities he conveyed in brief sentences, uttered
as occasion arose, of grave exhortation, or stern reprobation
and contempt.
But though direct moral teaching does much, indirect does
more; and the effect my father produced on my character,
did not depend solely on what he said or did with that direct
object, but also, and still more, on what manner of man
he was. 27
In a letter, too, written in 1849, to W. J. Fox r
he says :
I would omit the words including moral instruction. What
the sort of people who will have the management of any
such schools mean by moral instruction, is much the same
thing as what they mean by religious instruction, only low-
ered to the world's practice. It means cramming the chil-
dren directly with all the common professions about what is
right and wrong, and about the worth of different objects
in life, and filling them indirectly with the spirit of all the
* Autobiography, pp. 46-47.
170 EDUCATION
notions on such matters which vulgar-minded people are in
the habit of acting on without consciously professing. I
know it is impossible to prevent much of this from being
done but the less of it there is the better, and I would not
set people upon doing more of it than they might otherwise
do, by insisting expressly on moral instruction.
If it were possible to provide for giving real moral instruc-
tion it would be worth more than all else that schools can
do. But no programme of moral instruction, which would
be really good, would have a chance of being assented to
or followed by the manager of a general scheme of public
instruction in the present state of people's minds. 28
Mr. Mill holds definite ideas in respect to the
value of religion, whether that religion be Christian
or Buddhistic. In his essay on the Utility of Reli-
gion, he contrasts the power of education with the
power of religion. The contrast relates to one peo-
ple, and to one people only. With a generality
of statement, which he seldom allows himself, he
says:
The power of education is almost boundless: there is not
one natural inclination which it is not strong enough to
coerce, and, if needful, to destroy by disuse. In the greatest
recorded victory which education has ever achieved over
a whole host of natural inclinations in an entire people
the maintenance through centuries of the institutions of
Lycurgus, it was very little, if even at all, indebted to
religion: for the Gods of the Spartans were the same as
""Letters," Vol. I., p. 150.
those of other Greek states; and though, no doubt, every
state of Greece believed that its particular polity had at
its first establishment, some sort of divine sanction (mostly
that of the Delphian oracle), there was seldom any difficulty
in obtaining the same or an equally powerful sanction for a
change. . . . The case of Greece is, I believe, the only one
in which any teaching, other than religious, has had the
unspeakable advantage of forming the basis of education : and
though much may be said against the quality of some part
of the teaching, very little can be said against its effective-
ness. The most memorable example of the power of educa-
tion over conduct, is afforded (as I have just remarked) by
this exceptional case ; constituting a strong presumption that
in other cases, early religious teaching has owed its power
over mankind rather to its being early than to its being
religious. 29
In estimating the worth of education of all types
and content, happiness is to be selected as a stand-
ard. The principle is the old utilitarian one,
largely interpreted, that that education is of the
most worth which gives the greatest happiness to
the greatest number of persons.
In the "Logic" it is said:
I do not mean to assert that the promotion of happiness
should be itself the end of all actions, or even all rules of
action. It is the justification, and ought to be the controller,
of all ends, but it is not itself the sole end. There are many
virtuous actions, and even virtuous modes of action (though
""Three Essays on Religion," pp. 82-83.
172 EDUCATION
the cases are, I think, less frequent than is often supposed),
by which happiness in the particular instance is sacrificed,
more pain being produced than pleasure. But the conduct of
which this can be truly asserted, admits of justification only
because it can be shown that, on the whole, more happiness
will exist in the world, if feelings are cultivated which will
make people, in certain cases, regardless of happiness. I
fully admit that this is true ; that the cultivation of an ideal
nobleness of will and conduct should be to individual human
beings an end, to which the specific pursuit either of their
own happiness or of that of others (except so far as included
in that idea) should, in any case of conflict, give way. But I
hold that the very question, what constitutes this elevation
of character, is itself to be decided by a reference to hap-
piness as the standard. The character itself should be, to
the individual, a paramount end, simply because the exist-
ence of this ideal nobleness of character, or of a near ap-
proach to it, in any abundance, would go farther than all
things else toward making human life happy, both in
the comparatively humble sense of pleasure and freedom from
pain, and in the higher meaning, of rendering life, not what
it now is almost universally, puerile and insignificant, but
such as human beings with highly developed faculties can
care to have. 30
It is furthermore to be remembered that educa-
tion is designed to breed and to train great men.
If the large plateau of general culture needs lifting,
the need is great of the raising of the Himalaya
peaks of thought and of power.
""A System of Logic," p. 658.
ACCORDING TO JOHN STUART MILL 173
In the essay on "Liberty** it is interpreted:
In sober truth, whatever homage may be professed, or even
paid, to real or supposed mental superiority, the general tend-
ency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity
the ascendant power among mankind. In ancient history, in