A MISTAKE IN EDUCATION 223 strongest passion or desire will prevail-happy when that desire is not a vice. Passions weaken, but habits strengthen with age, and it is the great task of youth to set the current of habit, and to form the tastes which are most productive of happiness in life. Here, as in most other things, opposite exaggerations are to be avoided. There is such a thing as looking forward too rigidly and too exclusively to the future-to a future that may never arrive. This is the great fault of the over-educationist, who makes early life a burden and a toil, and also of those who try to impose on youth the tastes and pleasures of the man. Youth has its own pleasures, which will always give it most enjoyment, and a happy youth is in itself an end. It is the time when the power of enjoyment is most keen, and it is often accompanied by such extreme sensitiveness that the sufferings of the child for what seem the most trivial causes, probably at least equal in acuteness, though not in durability, the sufferings of a man. Many a parent standing by the coffin of his child has felt with bitterness how much of the measure of enjoyment that short life might have known has been cut off by an injudicious education. And even if adult life is attained, the evils of an unhappy childhood are seldom wholly compensated. The pleasures of retrospect are among the most real we possess, and it is around our childish days that our fondest associations naturally cluster. An early over-strain of our powers often leaves behind it lasting distortion or weakness, and a sad childhood introduces into the character elements of morbidness and bitterness that will not disappear. The first great rule in judging of pleasures is that so well expressed by Seneca: Sic præsentibus utaris voluptatibus ut futuris non noceas-so to use present pleasures as not to impair future ones. Drunkenness, sensuality, gambling, habitual extravagance and selfindulgence, if they become the pleasures of youth, will almost infallibly lead to the ruin of a life. Pleasures that are in themselves innocent lose their power of pleasing if they become the sole or main object of pursuit. In starting in life we are apt to attach a disproportionate value to tastes, pleasures, and ideals that can only be even approximately satisfied in youth, health, and strength. We have, I think, an example of this in the immense place which athletic games and out-of-door sports have taken in modern English life. They are certainly not things to be condemned. They have the direct effect of giving a large amount of intense and innocent pleasure, and they have indirect effects which are still more important. In as far as they raise the level of physical strength and health, and dispel the morbidness of temperament which is so apt to accompany a sedentary life, and a diseased or inert frame, they contribute powerfully to lasting happiness. They play a considerable part in the formation of friendships which is one of the best fruits of the period between boyhood and mature manhood. Some of them give lessons of courage, perseverance, energy, self-restraint, and cheerful acquiescence in disappointment and defeat that are of no small value in the formation of character, and when they are not associated with gambling, they have often the inestimable advantage of turning young men away from vicious pleasures. At the same time it can hardly be doubted that they hold an exaggerated prominence in the lives of young Englishmen of the present generation. It is not too SUPERIORITY OF INTELLECTUAL TASTES 225 much to say that among large sections of the students at our Universities, and at a time when intellectual ambition ought to be most strong and when the acquisition of knowledge is most important, proficiency in cricket or boating or football is more prized than any intellectual achievement. I have heard a good judge, who had long been associated with English University life, express his opinion that during the last forty or fifty years the relative intellectual position of the upper and middle classes in England has been materially changed owing to the disproportioned place which outdoor amusements have assumed in the lives of the former. It is the impression of very competent judges that a genuine love, reverence and enthusiasm for intellectual things is less common among the young men of the present day than it was in the days of their fathers. The predominance of the critical spirit which chills enthusiasm, and still more the cram system which teaches young men to look on the prizes that are to be won by competitive examinations as the supreme end of knowledge, no doubt largely account for this, but much is also due to the extravagant glorification of athletic games. If we compare the class of pleasures I have described with the taste for reading and kindred intellectual pleasures, the superiority of the latter is very manifest. To most young men, it is true, a game will probably give at least as much pleasure as a book. Nor must we measure the pleasure of reading altogether by the language of the genuine scholar. It is not every one who could say, like Gibbon, that he would not exchange his love of reading for all the wealth of the Indies. Very many would agree with him, but Gibbon was a man with an intense natural love of knowledge and the weak health of ૨ his early life intensified this predominant passion. But while the tastes which require physical strength decline or pass with age, that for reading steadily grows. It is illimitable in the vistas of pleasure it opens; it is one of the most easily satisfied, one of the cheapest, one of the least dependent on age, seasons, and the varying conditions of life. It cheers the invalid through years of weakness and confinement; illuminates the dreary hours of the sleepless night; stores the mind with pleasant thoughts, banishes ennui, fills up the unoccupied interstices and enforced leisures of an active life; makes men for a time at least forget their anxieties and sorrows, and if it is judiciously managed it is one of the most powerful means of training character and disciplining and elevating thought. It is eminently a pleasure which is not only good in itself but enhances many others. By extending the range of our knowledge, by enlarging our powers of sympathy and appreciation, it adds incalculably to the pleasures of society, to the pleasures of travel, to the pleasures of art, to the interest we take in the vast variety of events which form the great world-drama around us. To acquire this taste in early youth is one of the best fruits of education, and it is especially useful when the taste for reading becomes a taste for knowledge and when it is accompanied by some specialisation and concentration, and by some exercise of the powers of observation. 'Many tastes and one hobby' is no bad ideal to be aimed at. The boy who learns to collect and classify fossils, or flowers, or insects, who has acquired a love of chemical experiments, who has begun to form a taste for some particular kind or department of knowledge, has laid the foundation of much happiness in life. VERSATILITY AND CONCENTRATION 227 In the selection of pleasures and the cultivation of tastes much wisdom is shown in choosing in such a way that each should form a complement to the others; that different pleasures should not clash but rather cover different areas and seasons of life; that each should tend to correct faults or deficiencies of character which the others may possibly produce. The young man who starts in life with keen literary tastes and also with a keen love of out-of-door sports, and who possesses the means of gratifying each, has perhaps provided himself with as many elements of happiness as mere amusements can ever furnish. One set of pleasures, however, often kills the capacity for enjoying others, and some which in themselves are absolutely innocent, by blunting the enjoyment of better things, exercise an injurious influence on character. Habitual novel-reading, for example, often destroys the taste for serious literature, and few things tend so much to impair a sound literary perception and to vulgarise the character as the habit of constantly saturating the mind with inferior literature, even when that literature is in no degree immoral. Sometimes an opposite evil may be produced. Excessive fastidiousness greatly limits our enjoyments, and the inestimable gift of extreme concentration is often dearly bought. The wellknown confession of Darwin that his intense addiction to science had destroyed his power of enjoying even the noblest imaginative literature represents a danger to which many men who have achieved much in the higher and severer forms of scientific thought are subject. Such men are usually by their original temperament, and become still more by acquired habit, men of strong, narrow, concentrated natures whose thoughts like a deep and rapid stream confined in a restricted channel flow with |