arrivés de ce qu'on appelle la civilisation moderne, la culture des sciences dans leur expression la plus élevée est peut-être plus nécessaire encore à l'état moral d'une nation qu'à sa prospérité materielle.
"Les grandes découvertes, les méditations de la pensée dans les arts, dans les sciences et dans les lettres, en un mot les travaux désintéresses de l'esprit dans tous les genres, les centres d'enseignement propres à les faire connaître, introduisent dans le corps social tout entier l'esprit philosophique ou scientifique, cet esprit de discernement qui soumet tout à une raison sévère, condamne l'ignorance, dissipe les préjugés et les erreurs. Ils élèvent le niveau intellectuel, le sentiment moral; par eux, l'idée divine elle-même se répand et s'exalte. … Si, au moment du péril suprême, la France n'a pas trouvé des hommes supérieurs pour mettre en oeuvre ses ressources et le courage de ses enfants, il faut l'attribuer, j'en ai la conviction, à ce que la France EST désintéressée, depuis un demi-siècle, des grands travaux de la pensée, particuliérement dans les sciences exactes."
Individually, I have no love for academies on the continental model, and still less for the system of decorating men of distinction in science, letters, or art, with orders and titles, or enriching them with sinecures. What men of science want is only a fair day's wages for more than a fair day's work; and most of us, I suspect, would be well content if, for our days and nights of unremitting toil, we could secure the pay which a first-class Treasury clerk earns without any obviously trying strain upon his faculties. The sole order of nobility which, in my judgment, becomes a philosopher, is that rank which he holds in the estimation of his fellow-workers, who are the only competent judges in such matters. Newton and Cuvier lowered themselves when the one accepted an idle knighthood, and the other became a baron of the empire. The great men who went to their graves as Michael Faraday and George Grote seem to me to have understood the dignity of knowledge better when they declined all such meretricious trappings.
But it is one thing for the State to appeal to the vanity and ambition which are to be found in philosophical as in other breasts, and another to offer men who desire to do the hardest of work for the most modest of tangible rewards, the means of making themselves useful to their age and generation. And this is just what the State does when it founds a public library or museum, or provides the means of scientific research by such grants of money as that administered by the Royal Society.
It is one thing, again, for the State to take all the higher education of the nation into its own hands; it is another to stimulate and to aid, while they are yet young and weak, local efforts to the same end. The Midland Institute, Owens College in Manchester, the newly instituted Science College in Newcastle, are all noble products of local energy and munificence. But the good they are doing is not local—the commonwealth, to its uttermost limits, shares in the benefits they confer; and I am at a loss to understand upon what principle of equity the State, which admits the principle of payment on results, refuses to give a fair equivalent for these benefits; or on what principle of justice the State, which admits the obligation of sharing the duty of primary education with a locality, denies the existence of that obligation when the higher education is in question.
To sum up: If the positive advancement of the peace, wealth, and the intellectual and moral development of its members, are objects which the Government, as the representative of the corporate authority of society, may justly strive after, in fulfilment of its end—the good of mankind; then it is clear that the Government may undertake to educate the people. For education promotes peace by teaching men the realities of life and the obligations which are involved in the very existence of society; it promotes intellectual development, not only by training the individual intellect, but by sifting out from the masses of ordinary or inferior capacities, those who are competent to increase the general welfare by occupying higher positions; and, lastly, it promotes morality and refinement, by teaching men to discipline themselves, and by leading them to see that the highest, as it is the only permanent, content is to be attained, not by grovelling in the rank and steaming valleys of sense, but by continual striving towards those high peaks, where, resting in eternal calm, reason discerns the undefined but bright ideal of the highest Good—"a cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night."
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