bearings one
on another, and an internal sympathy, and admit, or rather demand,
comparison and adjustment. They complete, correct, balance each other.
This consideration, if well-founded, must be taken into account, not only
as regards the attainment of truth, which is their common end, but as
regards the influence which they exercise upon those whose education
consists in the study of them. I have said already, that to give undue
prominence to one is to be unjust to another; to neglect or supersede
these is to divert those from their proper object. It is to unsettle the
boundary lines between science and science, to disturb their action, to
destroy the harmony which binds them together. Such a proceeding will have
a corresponding effect when introduced into a place of education. There is
no science but tells a different tale, when viewed as a portion of a
whole, from what it is likely to suggest when taken by itself, without the
safeguard, as I may call it, of others.

Let me make use of an illustration. In the combination of colours, very
different effects are produced by a difference in their selection and
juxta-position; red, green, and white, change their shades, according to
the contrast to which they are submitted. And, in like manner, the drift
and meaning of a branch of knowledge varies with the company in which it
is introduced to the student. If his reading is confined simply to one
subject, however such division of labour may favour the advancement of a
particular pursuit, a point into which I do not here enter, certainly it
has a tendency to contract his mind. If it is incorporated with others, it
depends on those others as to the kind of influence which it exerts upon
him. Thus the Classics, which in England are the means of refining the
taste, have in France subserved the spread of revolutionary and deistical
doctrines. In Metaphysics, again, Butler's Analogy of Religion, which has
had so much to do with the conversion to the Catholic faith of members of
the University of Oxford, appeared to Pitt and others, who had received a
different training, to operate only in the direction of infidelity. And so
again, Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, as I think he tells us in the narrative
of his life, felt the science of Mathematics to indispose the mind to
religious belief, while others see in its investigations the best
parallel, and thereby defence, of the Christian Mysteries. In like manner,
I suppose, Arcesilas woul