THE HARMONY OF VIRTUE

128 The Harmony of Virtueeducation of the active mental faculties while the passive andretaining faculty, which we call the memory, should occupy arecognised and well-defined but subordinate place and we mustdirect our school and university examinations to the testing ofthese active faculties and not of the memory. For this is an objectwhich cannot be affected by the mere change or rearrangementof the curriculum. It is true that certain subjects are moreapt to develop certain faculties than others; the power of accuratereasoning is powerfully assisted by Geometry, Logic andPolitical Economy; one of the most important results of languagesis to refine and train the power of expression and nothing moreenlarges the power of comparison and differentiation than anintelligent study of history. But no particular subject except languageis essential, still less exclusively appropriate to any givenfaculty. There are types of intellect, for instance, which are constitutionallyincapable of dealing with geometrical problems oreven with the formal machinery of Logic, and are yet profound,brilliant and correct reasoners in other intellectual spheres. Thereis in fact hardly any subject, the sciences of calculation excepted,which in the hands of a capable teacher does not give roomfor the development of all the general faculties of the mind. Thefirst thing needed therefore is the entire and unsparing rejectionof the present methods of teaching in favour of those which arenow being universally adopted in the more advanced countriesof Europe.But even in this narrower sphere of knowledge acquisitionto which our system has confined itself, it has been guilty ofother blunders quite as serious. Apart from pure mathematics,which stands on a footing of its own, knowledge may be dividedinto two great heads, the knowledge of things and the knowledgeof men, that is to say, of human thought, human actions,human nature and human creations as recorded, preserved orpictured in literature, history, philosophy and art. The latter iscovered in the term humanities or humane letters and the ideaof a liberal education was formerly confined to these, though itwas subsequently widened to include mathematics and has againbeen widened in modern times to include a modicum of science.The humanities, mathematics and science are therefore the three