6. I say you do not all know this; and yet, whether you know it or not,--whether you desire it or not,--to some extent the everlasting fitness of the matter makes the facts conform to it. For we have at present, observe, schools of three kinds, in operation over the whole of England. We have--I name it first, though, I am sorry to say, it is last in influence--the body consisting of the Royal Academy, with the Institute of Architects, and the schools at Kensington, and their branches; teaching various styles of fine or mechanical art. We have, in the second place, the Royal Society, as a central body; and, as its satellites, separate companies of men devoted to each several science: investigating, classing, and describing facts with unwearied industry. And lastly and chiefly, we have the great Universities, with all their subordinate public schools, distinctively occupied in regulating,--as I think you will at once admit,--not the language merely, nor even the language principally, but the modes of philosophical and imaginative thought in which we desire that youth should be disciplined, and age informed and majestic. The methods of language, and its range; the possibilities of its beauty, and the necessities for its precision, are all dependent upon the range and dignity of the unspoken conceptions which it is the function of these great schools of literature to awaken, and to guide. 7. The range and dignity of _conceptions_! Let us pause a minute or two at these words, and be sure we accept them. First, what _is_ a conception? What is this separate object of our work, as scholars, distinguished from artists, and from men of science? We shall discover this better by taking a simple instance of the three agencies.