442 APPENDIX, 13

faculty, and has nothing to do with parts of speech any more than the moral part has. A man may feel and know things without expressing either the feeling or knowledge; and the talking is a muscular mode of communicating the workings of the intellect or heart:-muscular, whether it be by tongue or by sign, or by carving or writing, or by expression of feature; so that to divide a man into muscular and talking parts, is to divide him into body in general, and tongue in particular, the endless confusion resulting from which arrangement is only less marvellous in itself, than the resolution with which Mr. Fergusson has worked through it, and in spite of it, up to some very interesting and suggestive truths; although starting with a division of humanity which does not in the least raise it above the brute, for a rattlesnake has his muscular, æsthetic, and talking part as much as man, only he talks with his tail, and says, “I am angry with you, and should like to bite you,” more laconically and effectively than any phonetic biped could, were he so minded. And, in fact, the real difference between the brute and man is not so much that the one has fewer means of expression than the other, as that it has fewer thoughts to express, and that we do not understand its expressions. Animals can talk to one another intelligibly enough when they have anything to say, and their captains have words of command just as clear as ours, and better obeyed. We have indeed, in watching the efforts of an intelligent animal to talk to a human being, a melancholy sense of its dumbness; but the fault is still in its intelligence, more than in its tongue. It has not wit enough to systematise its cries or signs, and form them into language.

But there is no end to the fallacies and confusions of Mr. Fergusson’s arrangement. It is a perfect entanglement of gun-cotton, and explodes into vacuity wherever one holds a light to it. I shall leave him to do so with the rest of it for himself, and should perhaps have left it to his own handling altogether, but for the intemperateness of the spirit with which he has spoken on a subject perhaps of all others demanding gentleness and caution.¹ No man could more earnestly have desired the changes lately introduced into the system of the University of Oxford than I did myself: no man can be more deeply sensible than I of grievous failures in the practical working even of the present system: but I believe that these failures may be almost without exception traced to one source, the want of evangelical, and the excess of rubrical, religion among the tutors; together with such rustinesses and stiffnesses as necessarily attend the continual operation of any intellectual

¹ [In some introductory remarks (p. 14) Fergusson inveighs against the backward-ness of the universities to provide adequate education in science and art:-“Can we hope to rouse the Ephesian sleepers of our universities from their slumber of ages, and convince them that the sixteenth century has passed away, and that we are really living in the nineteenth? Will they ever be taught to believe that what was a respectable education in the days of Wykeham, or Waynflete, or Wolsey, is only a very contemptible one after the invention of the printing-press and steam-engine? etc., etc.” Fergusson’s cry for reform was soon to be taken up both within and without the University of Oxford. In 1849 Stanley and Jowett (the leaders of the reform party) secured the passing of the New Examination Statute providing an intermediate examination, and widening the curriculum. In the following year lord John Russell issued the University Commission, of which Stanley was secretary, and which resulted in larger measures of reforms: see Evelyn Abbott’s Life and Letters of Jowett, vol. i. ch. vi., and Morley’s Life of Gladstone, vol. i. pp. 496 seq.]

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