=Real functions of education for race-culture.=--Nevertheless education has a true function for race-culture in addition to the obvious fact of its necessity in order to realise the inherent potentialities of the individual. One of its functions is to provide a level of public opinion and public taste such that the finer specimens of each generation shall receive their due reward and shall not be crushed out of existence or perverted. There is a passage in Goethe which suggests the true function of education, and makes us suspect that, so far as many kinds of genius and talent are concerned, our immediate business is perhaps less to endeavour to produce them by breeding--if that be possible--than to make the most of them when they are vouchsafed us. Says Goethe:-- “We admire the Tragedies of the ancient Greeks; but to take a correct view of the case, we ought to admire the period and the nation in which their production was possible rather than the individual authors; for though these pieces differ in some points from each other, and though one of these poets appears somewhat greater and more finished than the other, still, taking all things together, only one decided character runs through the whole. “This is the character of grandeur, fitness, soundness, human perfection, elevated wisdom, sublime thought, pure, strong intuition, and whatever other qualities one might enumerate. But when we find all these qualities, not only in the dramatic works which have come down to us, but also in lyrical and epic works--in the philosophers, orators, and historians, and in an equally high degree in the works of plastic art that have come down to us--we must feel convinced that such qualities did not merely belong to individuals, but were the current property of the nation and the whole period.”