is naive metaphysics; and
the physiology of plants and animals, geology, inorganic chemistry,
force their devotees to view nature from an altogether different
standpoint. What is lost by this new point of view is not only a
poetical phantasmagoria, but the instinctive, true, and unique point
of view, instead of which we have shrewd and clever calculations, and,
so to speak, overreachings of nature. Thus to the truly cultured man
is vouchsafed the inestimable benefit of being able to remain
faithful, without a break, to the contemplative instincts of his
childhood, and so to attain to a calmness, unity, consistency, and
harmony which can never be even thought of by a man who is compelled
to fight in the struggle for existence.

"You must not think, however, that I wish to withhold all praise from
our primary and secondary schools: I honour the seminaries where boys
learn arithmetic and master modern languages, and study geography and
the marvellous discoveries made in natural science. I am quite
prepared to say further that those youths who pass through the better
class of secondary schools are well entitled to make the claims put
forward by the fully-fledged public school boy; and the time is
certainly not far distant when such pupils will be everywhere freely
admitted to the universities and positions under the government, which
has hitherto been the case only with scholars from the public
schools--of our present public schools, be it noted![7] I cannot,
however, refrain from adding the melancholy reflection: if it be true
that secondary and public schools are, on the whole, working so
heartily in common towards the same ends, and differ from each other
only in such a slight degree, that they may take equal rank before the
tribunal of the State, then we completely lack another kind of
educational institutions: those for the development of culture! To say
the least, the secondary schools cannot be reproached with this; for
they have up to the present propitiously and honourably followed up
tendencies of a lower order, but one nevertheless highly necessary. In
the public schools, however, there is very much less honesty and very
much less ability too; for in them we find an instinctive feeling of
shame, the unconscious perception of the fact that the whole
institution has been ignominiously degraded, and that the sonorous
words of wise and apathetic teachers are contradictory to the dreary,
barbaric, and sterile reality