training already exists in full working order, in the first place, in
the classes of the Science and Art Department, which are, for the most
part, held in the evening, so as to be accessible to all who choose to
avail themselves of them after working hours. The great advantage of
these classes is that they bring the means of instruction to the doors
of the factories and workshops; that they are no artificial creations,
but by their very existence prove the desire of the people for them;
and finally, that they admit of indefinite development in proportion
as they are wanted. I have often expressed the opinion, and I repeat
it here, that, during the eighteen years they have been in existence,
these classes have done incalculable good; and I can say, of my own
knowledge, that the Department spares no pains and trouble in trying to
increase their usefulness and ensure the soundness of their work.
No one knows better than my friend Colonel Donnelly, to whose clear
views and great administrative abilities so much of the successful
working of the science classes is due, that there is much to be done
before the system can be said to be thoroughly satisfactory. The
instruction given needs to be made more systematic and especially more
practical; the teachers are of very unequal excellence, and not a few
stand much in need of instruction themselves, not only in the subjects
which they teach, but in the objects for which they teach. I daresay
you have heard of that proceeding, reprobated by all true sportsmen,
which is called “shooting for the pot.” Well, there is such a thing
as “teaching for the pot”—teaching, that is, not that your scholar
may know, but that he may count for payment among those who pass the
examination; and there are some teachers, happily not many, who have
yet to learn that the examiners of the Department regard them as
poachers of the worst description.
Without presuming in any way to speak in the name of the Department, I
think I may say, as a matter which has come under my own observation,
that it is doing its best to meet all these difficulties. It
systematically promotes practical instruction in the classes; it
affords facilities to teachers who desire to learn their business
thoroughly; and it is always ready to aid in the suppression of
pot-teaching.
All this is, as you may imagine, highly satisfactory to me. I see that
spread of scientific education, about which I have so often permitted
myself to worry the public, become, for all practical purposes, an
accomplished fact. Grateful as I am for all that is now being done,
in the same direction, in our higher schools and universities, I have
ceased to have any anxiety about the wealthier classes. Scientific
knowledge is spreading by what the alchemists called a “distillatio per
ascensum;” and nothing now can prevent it from continuing to distil
upwards and permeate English society, until, in the remote future,
there shall be no member of the legislature who does not know as much
of science as an elementary school-boy; and even the heads of houses
in our venerable seats of learning shall acknowledge that natural
science is not merely a sort of University back-door through which
inferior men may get at their degrees. Perhaps this apocalyptic vision
is a little wild; and I feel I ought to ask pardon for an outbreak of
enthusiasm, which, I assure you, is not my commonest failing. I have
said that the Government is already doing a great deal in aid of that
kind of technical education for handicraftsmen which, to my mind, is
alone worth seeking. Perhaps it is doing as much as it ought to do,
even in this direction. Certainly there is another kind of help of the
most important character, for which we may look elsewhere than to the
Government. The great mass of mankind have neither the liking, nor the
aptitude, for either literary, or scientific, or artistic pursuits;
nor, indeed, for excellence of any sort. Their ambition is to go
through life with moderate exertion and a fair share of ease, doing
common things in a common way. And a great blessing and comfort it is
that the majority of men are of this mind; for the majority of things
to be done are common things, and are quite well enough done when
commonly done. The great end of life is not knowledge but action. What
men need is, as much knowledge as they can assimilate and organise into
a basis for action; give them more and it may become injurious. One
knows people who are as heavy and stupid from undigested learning as
others are from over-fulness of meat and drink. But a small percentage
of the population is born with that most excellent quality, a desire
for excellence, or with special aptitudes of some sort or another; Mr.
Galton tells us that not more than one in four thousand may be expected
to attain distinction, and not more than one in a million some share
of that intensity of instinctive aptitude, that burning thirst for
excellence, which is called genius.
Now, the most important object of all educational schemes is to
catch these exceptional people, and turn them to account for the
good of society. No man can say where they will crop up; like their
opposites, the fools and knaves, they appear sometimes in the palace,
and sometimes in the hovel; but the great thing to be aimed at, I was
almost going to say the most important end of all social arrangements,
is to keep these glorious sports of Nature from being either corrupted
by luxury or starved by poverty, and to put them into the position in
which they can do the work for which they are specially fitted.
Thus, if a lad in an elementary school showed signs of special
capacity, I would try to provide him with the means of continuing his
education after his daily working life had begun; if, in the evening
classes, he developed special capabilities in the direction of science
or of drawing, I would try to secure him an apprenticeship to some
trade in which those powers would have applicability. Or, if he chose
to become a teacher, he should have the chance of so doing. Finally, to
the lad of genius, the one in a million, I would make accessible the
highest and most complete training the country could afford. Whatever
that might cost, depend upon it the investment would be a good one. I
weigh my words when I say that if the nation could purchase a potential
Watt, or Davy, or Faraday, at the cost of a hundred thousand pounds
down, he would be dirt-cheap at the money. It is a mere commonplace
and everyday piece of knowledge, that what these three men did has
produced untold millions of wealth, in the narrowest economical sense
of the word.
Therefore, as the sum and crown of what is to be done for technical
education, I look to the provision of a machinery for winnowing out the
capacities and giving them scope. When I was a member of the London
School Board, I said, in the course of a speech, that our business
was to provide a ladder, reaching from the gutter to the university,
along which every child in the three kingdoms should have the chance of
climbing as far as he was fit to go. This phrase was so much bandied
about at the time, that, to say truth, I am rather tired of it; but I
know of no other which so fully expresses my belief, not only about
education in general, but about technical education in particular.
The essential foundation of all the organisation needed for the
promotion of education among handicraftsmen will, I believe, exist in
this country, when every working lad can feel that society has done
as much as lies in its power to remove all needless and artificial
obstacles from his path; that there is no barrier, except such as
exists in the nature of things, between himself and whatever place in
the social organisation he is fitted to fill; and, more than this,
that, if he has capacity and industry, a hand is held out to help him
along any path which is wisely and honestly chosen.
I have endeavoured to point out to you that a great deal of such an
organisation already exists; and I am glad to be able to add that
there is a good prospect that what is wanting will, before long, be
supplemented.
Those powerful and wealthy societies, the livery companies of the City
of London, remembering that they are the heirs and representatives of
the trade guilds of the Middle Ages, are interesting themselves in the
question. So far back as 1872 the Society of Arts organised a system
of instruction in the technology of arts and manufactures, for persons
actually employed in factories and workshops, who desired to extend and
improve their knowledge of the theory and practice of their particular
avocations;[8] and a considerable subsidy, in aid of the efforts of
the Society, was liberally granted by the Clothworkers’ Company. We
have here the hopeful commencement of a rational organisation for the
promotion of excellence among handicraftsmen. Quite recently, other of
the livery companies have determined upon giving their powerful, and,
indeed, almost boundless, aid to the improvement of the teaching of
handicrafts. They have already gone so far as to appoint a committee
to act for them; and I betray no confidence in adding that, some time
since, the committee sought the advice and assistance of several
persons, myself among the number.
Of course I cannot tell you what may be the result of the deliberations
of the committee; but we may all fairly hope that, before long, steps
which will have a weighty and a lasting influence on the growth and
spread of sound and thorough teaching among the handicraftsmen[9] of
this country will be taken by the livery companies of London.
[This hope has been fully justified by the establishment
of the Cowper Street Schools, and that of the Central
Institution of the City and Guilds of London Institute.
September 1881.]
IV.
ON ELEMENTARY INSTRUCTION IN PHYSIOLOGY.
The chief ground upon which I venture to recommend that the teaching of
elementary physiology should form an essential part of any organised
course of instruction in matters pertaining to domestic economy, is,
that a knowledge of even the elements of this subject supplies those
conceptions of the constitution and mode of action of the living body,
and of the nature of health and disease, which prepare the mind to
receive instruction from sanitary science.
It is, I think, eminently desirable that the hygienist and the
physician should find something in the public mind to which they can
appeal; some little stock of universally acknowledged truths, which may
serve as a foundation for their warnings, and predispose towards an
intelligent obedience to their recommendations.
Listening to ordinary talk about health, disease, and death, one is
often led to entertain a doubt whether the speakers believe that the
course of natural causation runs as smoothly in the human body as
elsewhere. Indications are too often obvious of a strong, though
perhaps an unavowed and half unconscious, under-current of opinion
that the phenomena of life are not only widely different, in their
superficial characters and in their practical importance, from other
natural events, but that they do not follow in that definite order
which characterises the succession of all other occurrences, and the
statement of which we call a law of nature.
Hence, I think, arises the want of heartiness of belief in the value
of knowledge respecting the laws of health and disease, and of the
foresight and care to which knowledge is the essential preliminary,
which is so often noticeable; and a corresponding laxity and
carelessness in practice, the results of which are too frequently
lamentable.
It is said that among the many religious sects of Russia, there is one
which holds that all disease is brought about by the direct and special
interference of the Deity, and which, therefore, looks with repugnance
upon both preventive and curative measures as alike blasphemous
interferences with the will of God. Among ourselves, the “Peculiar
People” are, I believe, the only persons who hold the like doctrine
in its integrity, and carry it out with logical rigour. But many of
us are old enough to recollect that the administration of chloroform
in assuagement of the pangs of childbirth was, at its introduction,
strenuously resisted upon similar grounds.
I am not sure that the feeling, of which the doctrine to which I have
referred is the full expression, does not lie at the bottom of the
minds of a great many people who yet would vigorously object to give
a verbal assent to the doctrine itself. However this may be, the main
point is that sufficient knowledge has now been acquired of vital
phenomena, to justify the assertion, that the notion, that there is
anything exceptional about these phenomena, receives not a particle of
support from any known fact. On the contrary, there is a vast and an
increasing mass of evidence that birth and death, health and disease,
are as much parts of the ordinary stream of events as the rising and
setting of the sun, or the changes of the moon; and that the living
body is a mechanism, the proper working of which we term health;
its disturbance, disease; its stoppage, death. The activity of this
mechanism is dependent upon many and complicated conditions, some of
which are hopelessly beyond our control, while others are readily
accessible, and are capable of being indefinitely modified by our own
actions. The business of the hygienist and of the physician is to know
the range of these modifiable conditions, and how to influence them
towards the maintenance of health and the prolongation of life; the
business of the general public is to give an intelligent assent, and
a ready obedience based upon that assent, to the rules laid down for
their guidance by such experts. But an intelligent assent is an assent
based upon knowledge, and the knowledge which is here in question means
an acquaintance with the elements of physiology.
It is not difficult to acquire such knowledge. What is true, to
a certain extent, of all the physical sciences, is eminently
characteristic of physiology—the difficulty of the subject begins
beyond the stage of elementary knowledge, and increases with every
stage of progress. While the most highly trained and the best furnished
intellect may find all its resources insufficient, when it strives to
reach the heights and penetrate into the depths of the problems of
physiology, the elementary and fundamental truths can be made clear to
a child.
No one can have any difficulty in comprehending the mechanism of
circulation or respiration; or the general mode of operation of the
organ of vision; though the unravelling of all the minutiæ of these
processes, may, for the present, baffle the conjoined attacks of
the most accomplished physicists, chemists, and mathematicians. To
know the anatomy of the human body, with even an approximation to
thoroughness, is the work of a life; but as much as is needed for a
sound comprehension of elementary physiological truths, may be learned
in a week.
A knowledge of the elements of physiology is not only easy of
acquirement, but it may be made a real and practical acquaintance
with the facts, as far as it goes. The subject of study is always at
hand, in oneself. The principal constituents of the skeleton, and the
changes of form of contracting muscles, may be felt through one’s
own skin. The beating of one’s heart, and its connection with the
pulse, may be noted; the influence of the valves of one’s own veins
may be shown; the movements of respiration may be observed; while the
wonderful phenomena of sensation afford an endless field for curious
and interesting self-study. The prick of a needle will yield, in a drop
of one’s own blood, material for microscopic observation of phenomena
which lie at the foundation of all biological conceptions; and a cold,
with its concomitant coughing and sneezing, may prove the sweet uses
of adversity by helping one to a clear conception of what is meant by
“reflex action.”
Of course there is a limit to this physiological self-examination.
But there is so close a solidarity between ourselves and our poor
relations of the animal world, that our inaccessible inward parts
may be supplemented by theirs. A comparative anatomist knows that a
sheep’s heart and lungs, or eye, must not be confounded with those of
a man; but, so far as the comprehension of the elementary facts of the
physiology of circulation, of respiration, and of vision goes, the one
furnishes the needful anatomical data as well as the other.
Thus, it is quite possible to give instruction in elementary physiology
in such a manner as, not only to confer knowledge, which, for the
reason I have mentioned, is useful in itself; but to serve the purposes
of a training in accurate observation, and in the methods of reasoning
of physical science. But that is an advantage which I mention only
incidentally, as the present Conference does not deal with education in
the ordinary sense of the word.
It will not be suspected that I wish to make physiologists of all the
world. It would be as reasonable to accuse an advocate of the “three
R’s” of a desire to make an orator, an author, and a mathematician of
everybody. A stumbling reader, a pot-hook writer, and an arithmetician
who has not got beyond the rule of three, is not a person of brilliant
acquirements; but the difference between such a member of society and
one who can neither read, write, nor cipher is almost inexpressible;
and no one now-a-days doubts the value of instruction, even if it goes
no farther.
The saying that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing is, to my
mind, a very dangerous adage. If knowledge is real and genuine, I do
not believe that it is other than a very valuable possession, however
infinitesimal its quantity may be. Indeed, if a little knowledge is
dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?
If William Harvey’s life-long labours had revealed to him a tenth
part of that which may be made sound and real knowledge to our boys
and girls, he would not only have been what he was, the greatest
physiologist of his age, but he would have loomed upon the seventeenth
century as a sort of intellectual portent. Our “little knowledge” would
have been to him a great, astounding, unlooked-for vision of scientific
truth.
I really see no harm which can come of giving our children a little
knowledge of physiology. But then, as I have said, the instruction
must be real, based upon observation, eked out by good explanatory
diagrams and models, and conveyed by a teacher whose own knowledge has
been acquired by a study of the facts; and not the mere catechismal
parrot-work which too often usurps the place of elementary teaching.
It is, I hope, unnecessary for me to give a formal contradiction to
the silly fiction, which is assiduously circulated by fanatics who not
only ought to know, but do know, that their assertions are untrue,
that I have advocated the introduction of that experimental discipline
which is absolutely indispensable to the professed physiologist, into
elementary teaching.
But while I should object to any experimentation which can justly be
called painful, for the purpose of elementary instruction; and, while,
as a member of a late Royal Commission, I gladly did my best to prevent
the infliction of needless pain, for any purpose; I think it is my duty
to take this opportunity of expressing my regret at a condition of the
law which permits a boy to troll for pike, or set lines with live frog
bait, for idle amusement; and, at the same time, lays the teacher of
that boy open to the penalty of fine and imprisonment, if he uses the
same animal for the purpose of exhibiting one of the most beautiful
and instructive of physiological spectacles, the circulation in the
web of the foot. No one could undertake to affirm that a frog is not
inconvenienced by being wrapped up in a wet rag, and having his toes
tied out; and it cannot be denied that inconvenience is a sort of pain.
But you must not inflict the least pain on a vertebrated animal for
scientific purposes (though you may do a good deal in that way for gain
or for sport) without due licence of the Secretary of State for the
Home Department, granted under the authority of the Vivisection Act.
So it comes about, that, in this present year of grace 1877, two
persons may be charged with cruelty to animals. One has impaled a frog,
and suffered the creature to writhe about in that condition for hours;
the other has pained the animal no more than one of us would be pained
by tying strings round his fingers, and keeping him in the position
of a hydropathic patient. The first offender says, “I did it because
I find fishing very amusing,” and the magistrate bids him depart in
peace; nay, probably wishes him good sport. The second pleads, “I
wanted to impress a scientific truth, with a distinctness attainable in
no other way, on the minds of my scholars,” and the magistrate fines
him five pounds.
I cannot but think that this is an anomalous and not wholly creditable
state of things.
V.
JOSEPH PRIESTLEY.
If the man to perpetuate whose memory we have this day raised a
statue had been asked on what part of his busy life’s work he set the
highest value, he would undoubtedly have pointed to his voluminous
contributions to theology. In season and out of season, he was the
steadfast champion of that hypothesis respecting the Divine nature
which is termed Unitarianism by its friends and Socinianism by its
foes. Regardless of odds, he was ready to do battle with all comers in
that cause; and if no adversaries entered the lists, he would sally
forth to seek them.
To this, his highest ideal of duty, Joseph Priestley sacrificed the
vulgar prizes of life, which, assuredly, were within easy reach of a
man of his singular energy and varied abilities. For this object, he
put aside, as of secondary importance, those scientific investigations
which he loved so well, and in which he showed himself so competent
to enlarge the boundaries of natural knowledge and to win fame. In
this cause, he not only cheerfully suffered obloquy from the bigoted
and the unthinking, and came within sight of martyrdom; but bore with
that which is much harder to be borne than all these, the unfeigned
astonishment and hardly disguised contempt of a brilliant society,
composed of men whose sympathy and esteem must have been most dear to
him, and to whom it was simply incomprehensible that a philosopher
should seriously occupy himself with any form of Christianity.
It appears to me that the man who, setting before himself such an ideal
of life, acted up to it consistently, is worthy of the deepest respect,
whatever opinion may be entertained as to the real value of the tenets
which he so zealously propagated and defended.
But I am sure that I speak not only for myself, but for all this
assemblage, when I say that our purpose to-day is to do honour, not
to Priestley, the Unitarian divine, but to Priestley, the fearless
defender of rational freedom in thought and in action: to Priestley,
the philosophic thinker; to that Priestley who held a foremost place
among “the swift runners who hand over the lamp of life,”[10] and
transmit from one generation to another the fire kindled, in the
childhood of the world, at the Promethean altar of Science.
The main incidents of Priestley’s life are so well known that I need
dwell upon them at no great length.