without making any show of argument, deductive or inductive, as though you could not avoid being convinced and agreeing with me, I will frankly state my own opinions and some of the reasons which, in my own reflections, support them.
A truly liberal education includes, I think, as essential to it, the prolonged and scholastic pursuit of three subjects, or groups of subjects. These three are, language and literature, mathematics and natural science, and the soul of man, including the products of his reflective thinking. Any education which is markedly defective on any one of these three sides comes, so far, short of being liberal,—of being, that is to say, the kind of culture which sets the mind most truly free, and which is worthy of the cultivated gentleman in the nobler meaning of that latter word.
It is difficult indeed to separate the scientific study of literature from the study of history, or to separate the proper pursuit of philosophy from the study of both literature and history. But in a qualified, though meaningful, way we may declare that the supreme expression of human mental life is in literature,—of man's life, that is, of thought and feeling. To get the supreme expression of man in action, in the exercise of those activities which we somewhat loosely call practical, we must turn to the study of history. But literature is, of course, a certain form of human
