ng the abyss of the remote past, have brought within our ken
some stages of the evolution of the earth. And in the shifting "without
haste, but without rest"[75] of the land and sea, as in the endless
variation of the forms assumed by living beings, we have observed
nothing but the natural product of the forces originally possessed by
the substance of the universe.

THE PRINCIPAL SUBJECTS OF EDUCATION [76]

I know quite well that launching myself into this discussion [77] is a
very dangerous operation; that it is a very large subject, and one
which is difficult to deal with, however much I may trespass upon
your patience in the time allotted to me. But the discussion is so
fundamental, it is so completely impossible to make up one's mind on
these matters until one has settled the question, that I will even
venture to make the experiment. A great lawyer-statesman and philosopher
of a former age--I mean Francis Bacon [78]--said that truth came out
of error much more rapidly than it came out of confusion. There is a
wonderful truth in that saying. Next to being right in this world, the
best of all things is to be clearly and definitely wrong, because you
will come out somewhere. If you go buzzing about between right and
wrong, vibrating and fluctuating, you come out nowhere; but if you are
absolutely and thoroughly and persistently wrong, you must, some of
these days, have the extreme good fortune of knocking your head against
a fact, and that sets you all straight again. So I will not trouble
myself as to whether I may be right or wrong in what I am about to say,
but at any rate I hope to be clear and definite; and then you will be
able to judge for yourselves whether, in following out the train of
thought I have to introduce, you knock your heads against facts or not.

I take it that the whole object of education is, in the first place,
to train the faculties of the young in such a manner as to give their
possessors the best chance of being happy [79] and useful in their
generation; and, in the second place, to furnish them with the most
important portions of that immense capitalised experience of the human
race which we call knowledge of various kinds. I am using the term
knowledge in its widest possible sense; and the question is, what
subjects to select by training and discipline, in which the object I
have just defined may be best attained.

I must call your attention further to this fact, that all the sub