§ 36. Nor did he do much for the science of education. His scheme is vitiated, as Mark Pattison says, by “the information fallacy.” In the literary instruction there is no thought of training the faculties of all or the special faculties of the individual. “It requires much observation of young minds to discover that the rapid inculcation of unassimilable information stupefies the faculties instead of training them,” says Pattison; and Milton absorbed by his own thoughts and the thoughts of the ancients did not observe the minds of the young, and knew little of the powers of any mind but his own. For information the youths are not required to observe for themselves but are to be taught “a general compact of physicks.” “Also in course might be read to them out of some not tedious writer the Institution of Physick; that they may know the tempers, the humours, the seasons, and how to manage a crudity.” § 37. Even the study of the classics is advocated by Milton on false grounds. If, like the Port-Royalists, he had recommended the study of the classical authors for the sake of pure Latin and Greek or as models of literary style, the means would have been suited to the end; but it was very different when he directed boys to study Virgil and Columella in order to learn about bees and farming. In after-life they would find these authorities a little out of date; and if they ever attempted to improve tillage, “to recover the bad soil and to remedy the waste that is made of good, which was one of Hercules’s praises,” they would have found a knowledge of the methods of Hercules about as useful as of the methods of the Romans. § 38. Milton was then a reformer “for his own hand;” and notwithstanding his moral and intellectual elevation and his superb power of rhetoric, he seems to me a less useful writer on education than the humble Puritans whom he probably would not deign to read. In his haughty self-reliance, he, like Carlyle with whom Seeley has well compared him (_Lectures and Addresses: Milton_), addressed his contemporaries _de haut en bas_, and though ready to teach could learn only among the old renowned authors with whom he associated himself and we associate him. § 39. Judged from our present standpoint the Tractate is found with many weaknesses to be strong in this, that it co-ordinates physical, moral, mental and æsthetic training. § 40. But nothing of Milton’s can be judged by our ordinary canons. He soars far above them and raises us with him “to mysterious altitudes above the earth” (_supra_, p. 153, _note_). Whatever we little people may say about the suggestions of the Tractate, Milton will remain one of the great educators of mankind.[108] XIII. LOCKE. (1632-1704).