conscious of his soul than of his body or his mind. Hence, his education is primarily spiritual and unworldly. He loves solitude and silence, meditates much upon the vanity of life, the certainty of death, and the unreality of all earthly hopes. His thoughts are in eternity with God, and the great world-drama of human life seems to him like a phantasmagoria. He studies, but learning is made subordinate to spiritual progress; he labors, but not that he may enrich himself, but that he may teach the idle to work, and that he may have wherewith to help the poor. His education is interfered with or made impossible when the monastic state is lifted out of humility and poverty by the gratitude and love of the people or the munificence of princes, or when he abandons the seclusion of his cloister to mingle in worldly affairs.

Education is the effort to create the ideal man, whether absolutely or relatively to special vocations, and hence the theory will conform to the received notions concerning this ideal. When the first requisite of a perfect man is thought to be a strong and athletic body, gymnastic exercise will take precedence of intellectual training; when the chief good is held to be an enlightened mind, mental activity will be stimulated, even though the body should suffer. Again, each vocation will have its special education. The training of the soldier will be different from that of the lawyer; the physician will not be educated like the priest. A fashionable mother, who thinks woman's vocation is to please and to be pleased, will send her daughter to a school of manners, where she will be taught the graces and accomplishments of artificial and frivolous society. The unlikeness of the different special educations arises from the dissimilar ideals of the various vocations. Knowledge, whether got in a military academy or a commercial college, is equally good, but knowledge is not education. Habits of thought and of life are more than knowledge, and the habits which are necessarily acquired during the process of education may render knowledge useless or hurtful. Every educated man knows much that may be to his advantage in any position, but in getting this knowledge he has probably formed habits which, in avocations different from the one for which he has been trained, will be of greater injury than his learning of help. And hence our American axiom, that "knowledge is power," is fallacious. The soldier has doubtless learned many things which the tradesman ought to know, but he has also conceived a notion of life, of honor, of the value of courage, as compared with other qualities, which, were he forced to become a merchant, would prove to be obstacles to his success.

"An Oxford education," says Mr. Froude, "fits a man extremely well for the trade of gentleman. I do not know for what other trade it does fit him as at present constituted. More than one man

who has taken high honors there, who has learnt faithfully all that the university undertakes to teach him, has been seen in these late years breaking stones upon a road in Australia." A better stonebreaker he would doubtless be had he never studied at Oxford. An illustration of the truth upon which I am here insisting is furnished by American society. A scientific education gives to the farmer knowledge which he can put to practical use in a thousand ways. Chemistry, zoology, botany, physiology, mineralogy, and physics generally, may in his hands be converted into money. Shall we not, then, give to every farmer a scientific education? No; for the habits of thought and sentiment which such education creates would render farm life distasteful to him, and in fact, we find in our own country that even a little education tends to drive the young men from tillage of the land to the shop life of towns and cities, or, worse still, into the learned professions, and our agricultural colleges train young men for everything except the end for which they were organized.

It can hardly be necessary to insist further upon the essential relation which exists between the theory of human destiny and the theory of human education. The question, what education shall I give my child? can be answered only by asking another question, what do you desire your child to be and to do? The accepted end of man determines the aim of the educator and prescribes his system. Now there are two radically different ways of viewing human life, and but two. We may consider it as complete in this world, or as preparatory to a higher state of existence, and corresponding to these opposite views we have the secular and the religious theories of education. If there is no future life, a system of education based upon the recognition of such life must be false and hurtful. The human mind in matters of this kind refuses to accept arguments drawn from expediency. To held that there is no God and no immortal human soul, and yet to educate men to believe in God and in the soul from a notion that such teaching has a social value, is an outrage. Rather let the race perish than be kept alive by an infinite lie and worldwide imposture. On the other hand, to hold that God is and that the soul is immortal, and yet to refuse to make the system of education conformable to this belief, is an outrage; and here again the human mind refuses to accept arguments drawn from expedience. Whether or not this kind of education will best serve the cause of what is called civilization and progress, is of small moment. If God is, He is first, He is all in all; if the soul is, it is more than civilization and progress.

These two opposite views of human life are in fatal antagonism, and there can be no thought of compromise; they give form and character to the two hostile armies in the eternal warfare between

spirit and matter, the temporal and the eternal, the Christ and the world. That the view, whose horizon is bounded by man's present life is widely accepted, there can be no doubt. It has its philosophy, its ethics, its political economy, its sociology, its pedagogy, and hopes to have its religion. It is not a happy or joyful belief, yet it is full of confidence and eager courage, a confidence and a courage born not of an accidental or a casual insight into the nature of things, but of a range of thought which embraces the universe, which weighs the atom and the sun, which meditates devoutly upon the life of the animalcule and seeks to trace it in uninterrupted ascent to man, which studies with a courage that never despairs the most hidden nerve-force, hoping against hope that it will yet detect it breaking into thought and soul life. It has not the mocking and frivolous temper of Voltaire, nor the satanic mood of Byron. So wide has its thought grown, that fanaticism is almost impossible. As Schiller grieved over the dead gods of Greece, this new philosophy is filled with the quiet sorrow of fatalism in contemplating the old faith. There is a kind of exultation as the light breaks in upon the hidden mysteries of nature, but in every cry of triumph there is an undertone of sadness, almost of despair, as from a half-conscious feeling that the end of all is death and darkness and nothingness, so that what began as the most self-satisfied optimism, now fatally turns to pessimism, which is the protest of the unbelieving soul against sensualism and atheism.

Let us trace the theoretical development of this earth-creed, and then study its historical manifestation, in so far as it bears upon the question of education and man's destiny. I shall not go further back than Kant, who is the father of the critical philosophy, and who gave the impulse to the intellectual movement, which, outside the Church, is bearing the modern mind farther and farther away from metaphysics. It was he who first inspired a profound distrust of whatever is beyond the sphere of experience; and who relegated to the region of the unknown the reality which underlies the phenomenon. The result of his thinkings is this: The phenomenon alone can be known; the nomnenon is not cognoscible.

The human reason is involved in radical contradictions whenever it attempts to dogmatize concerning God, the soul, and the universe; and hence arise, by a necessary process, the paralogisms of theology, the gratuitous hypotheses of psychology and the antinomies of cosmology. Here we have the essential principles of the Positivism of Compte, and of the Cosmism of Herbert Spencer-absolute condemnation of metaphysics, skepticism concerning the operations of our highest faculties, and the elimination of all reality which is not perceived by the senses.

The influence of Hegel, which has been so profoundly felt by

the modern world, is in the same direction. The identity of being and not being; the personality of God, an absurdity unworthy of the attention of serious thinkers; the efficient and final cause of the world immanent in the world; nothing is, but everything is becoming; truth and reality consequently nothing absolute, but fugitive forms of what neither is, nor is not-a kind of intellectual star-dust, which is not nothing nor anything. These are some of the characteristic doctrines of Hegelian pantheism, and whatever else may be thought of them, they unmistakably confine the life of man to this world, which is its own efficient and final cause. The universe is an eternal flow, in which truth and beauty and goodness, are but the changeful waves that float upon the great world-current of matter. Each fact, each individual, is a point of momentary rest in the midst of universal mobility.

In this system religion has but an accidental value, and the interest which it inspires is chiefly historical and psychological. The forms in which man has clothed his dreams of the divine are curious as an archæological study or as a branch of ethnology. The vulgar and passionate polemics of Protestantism and rationalism are obsolete. Nothing is false or in bad taste, but dogmatism. Christianity is man's highest effort to give form and body to the infinite, and when criticism shall have finally done away with all its dogmas, it will be left to the inspirations of the heart, to be transformed indefinitely to suit the requirements of progress and civilization. There is no God, but there are divine things,— culture, liberty and love. This is the religion of sentiment, so familiar to us Americans, so frequent upon the lips of eloquent preachers, for whom it were charitable to pray, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." This is the soil in which the religion of humanity flourishes: the worship of man taking the place of the worship of God. In the beginning there is no God, there is nothing, only a becoming; in the end, there is man. He is the highest, let us serve him. And since the individual is but a bubble that bursts and remerges in the general air, a snowdrop, remelting into the element from which it was assumed and congealed into separateness, let him dwindle and let the race be more and more. Let the weak perish, let the fittest survive, let all things belong to the strong. This is the eternal law of our sacred mother, Nature, who alone is supreme. An ideal humanity, truly, is only an abstraction; it does not exist, it will never exist; it is but a phantom. The individual is contemptible. The race is found only in the individual. All this is undeniable. But what will you have? Our hypothesis excludes God, and this phantom of humanity is all that remains to persuade us that to eat and to drink is not the only wisdom. In this system too, the

religion of pantheistic mysticism, the faith of Mr. Carlyle and of Mr. Emerson, finds its justification. Pantheism is obscure and nebular, and mysticism loves the uncertain light of a symbolical and oracular phraseology, and when the two are combined, it is not easy to seize the real thought. The thought, however, is pantheistic, the mood is mystic. The central idea, upon which the thousand changes of poetic and prophetic rhapsody are rung, and from which also proceed objurgation, scorn, anger, indignation, withering contempt, whether in the jolting, interrupted, epigrammatic style of Mr. Emerson, or in the tumultuous, turgid, apodictic manner of Mr. Carlyle, is Hegelian Pantheism. For both the efficient and final cause of the world is immanent in the world, and the transcendentalism is modal and accidental. To both, systems and creeds are hateful, and to be "a swallower of formulas" is the highest glory. As there is no absolute truth, there is no permanent symbol. To be spontaneous, original, and strong, is the only merit. The world's great men know no other law than the fatality of their genius. To be weak is, as Milton says, the true misery.

"Thus," says Mr. Carlyle, "like some wild-flaming, wild-thundering train of Heaven's artillery, does this mysterious MANKIND thunder and flame in long-drawn, quick-succeeding grandeur through the unknown deep. Thus like a God-created, fire-breathing spirit-host, we emerge from the inane, haste stormfully across the astonished earth, then plunge again into the inane." A rushing forth from nothing back into nothing-this is all. The educator's business is to prepare man to make this stormful haste across the astonished earth in a becoming manner.

Pedagogy cannot aspire to fit him for an existence in the inane. For this life must man be educated; of another, if other there be, neither knowledge nor faith can give us true account. The hero of Mr. Carlyle's profoundest and most eloquent work, walks wearisomely through this world, having lost all tidings of another and higher. Fixed, starless, tartarean darkness envelops his soul. "The everlasting NO had said: 'Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the universe is mine."" The hero made answer: "I am not thine, but free, and forever hate thee." This wild protest against despair leads him to the Centre of Indifference, from which in grim mockery he hurls his objurgations: "God," he says, "must needs laugh outright, could such a thing be, to see his wondrous manikins here below." He is in the wilderness; it is the wide world in an atheistic century.

Lying here in this Centre of Indifference he awakes to a new heaven and a new earth. From a high table-land he gazes upon the world and contemplates its myriadfold and ever-changing forms