Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/29

 begin with, that the interest of his own department is unflagging and inexhaustible: every day adds a new development of the old elements, he feels that he is living in his subject, it is living all around him. And this being so, he is conscious that he is working with a different set of mental powers from those which he works with on the old world; 1 speak under correction, for I do not pretend to look at the subject as a question of psychology, simply for the moment as one of education. It is in a manner analogous to a training for association with men in the world; the student must look for Truth, and work for Justice, but he must work for such truth and justice as is attainable. He must not, as in Ancient History, amuse himself with principles however valuable or however generally applicable, because he has to deal with rights: his inquiry is more into laws than into principles, more into facts than into laws. He must act as a judge not as a philosopher, all the better judge for being somewhat of a philosopher, but never in the philosopher forgetting that he is a judge. And as in practical matters we, ordinary men that is, are seldom called upon to act as judges except in questions where their own sympathies or interests are concerned; the faculty to be trained is the judgment, the practical judgment at work among matters in which its possessor is deeply interested, not from the desire of Truth only, but from his own involution in the matters of which he is to judge.

I think that there are few lessons more necessary for men to learn, not merely who are going to take to public life, but who are going to live and move as men among their fellows, than these:—that there are few questions on which as much may not be said on one side as on the other: that there are none at all on which all the good are on one side, all the bad on the other, or all the wise on one and all the fools on the other; that the amount of dead weight in human affairs, call it stupidity or what you will, is pretty equally divided between the advocates of order and the advocates of change, giving to the one party much of its stability and to the other much of its momentum: that intolerance is no prerogative of heterodoxy, nor tolerance the inseparable accompaniment of