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 subjects
of our thoughts--all feelings and propositions (leaving aside our
sensations as the mere materials and occasions of thinking and feeling),
all our mental furniture--may be classified under one of two heads--as
either within the province of the intellect, something that can be put
into propositions and affirmed or denied; or as within the province
of feeling, or that which, before the name was defiled, was called
the aesthetic side of our nature, and which can neither be proved nor
disproved, but only felt and known.
According to the classification which I have put before you, then, the
subjects of all knowledge are divisible into the two groups, matters
of science and matters of art; for all things with which the reasoning
faculty alone is occupied, come under the province of science; and in
the broadest sense, and not in the narrow and technical sense in which
we are now accustomed to use the word art, all things feelable, all
things which stir our emotions, come under the term of art, in the sense
of the subject-matter of the aesthetic faculty.
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