In learning anything there are two points to be considered; 1st, the advantage we shall find from knowing that subject or having that skill, and 2nd, the effect which the study of that subject or practising for that skill will have on the mind or the body. These two points are in themselves distinct, though it is open to anyone to maintain that they need not be considered separately. Nature has provided that the bodies of most animals should get the exercise best for them in procuring food. So Mr. Herbert Spencer has come to the conclusion that it would be contrary to “the economy of nature” if one set of occupations were needed as gymnastics and another for utility. In other words he considers that it is in learning the most useful things we get the best training. The utilitarian view of instruction is that we should teach things useful in themselves and either neglect the result on the mind and body of the learner or assume Mr. Spencer’s law of “the economy of nature.” Again, when the subjects are settled the utilitarian thinks how the knowledge or skill may be most speedily acquired, and not how this method or that method of acquisition will affect the faculties. § 21. This being utilitarianism in education the question is how far was Locke the utilitarian he is generally considered? If we take by itself what he says under the head of “Learning” in the _Thoughts concerning Education_ no doubt we should pronounce him a utilitarian. He considers each subject of instruction and pronounces for or against it according as it seems likely or unlikely to be useful to a gentleman. And in the methods he suggests he simply points out the quickest route, as if the knowledge were the only thing to be thought of. Hence his utilitarian reputation. But two very important considerations have been lost sight of. 1st. Learning is with him “the last and least part” in education. 2nd. Intellectual education was not for childhood but for the age when we can teach ourselves. “When a man has got an entrance into any of the sciences,” says he, “it will be time then to depend on himself and rely upon his own understanding and exercise his own faculties, which is the only way to improvement and mastery.” (L. to Peterborough, quoted in Camb. edition of _Thoughts_, p. 229.) “So,” he says, “the business of education is not, as I think, to make the young perfect in any one of the sciences but so to open and dispose their minds as may best make them capable of any when they shall apply themselves to it.” The studies he proposes in the _Conduct of the Understanding_ (which is his treatise on intellectual education) have for their object “an increase of the powers and activity of the mind, not an enlargement of its possessions” (_C. of U._ § 19, _ad f._). Thus strange to say the supposed leader of the Utilitarians has actually propounded in so many words the doctrine of their opponents.