The conception of education has within recent times undergone a curious development. Some of us can still remember the time when the word “education” meant as a matter of course the rudiments of intellectual education only, and when such education was regarded as a panacea for many evils; this kind of education has, in consequence, we may take it, been virtually secured to every child in all civilized countries. To this kind of education, however, it is no longer possible to attribute any satisfying sort of virtue. It may produce a very inferior order of clerk; but _education_--the reasonable development of the individual--it cannot deserve to be called; it merely puts a certain rude intellectual instrument into the hands of a still thoroughly uneducated person. Education, as we understand it now, must be founded on the harmonious exercise of body, senses, and emotions, as well as intellect; the whole environment is the agent of education. That is why we are now extending the meaning of the word indefinitely. Fresh air, good food, manual training, the cultivation of the art instincts, physical exercise and abundant recreation, wholesome home relationships--these are a few of the things which we now recognize as essential parts of the rational education of every boy and girl, and which we are seeking to obtain for all. Nor is education in this sense incompatible with intellectual development; on the contrary, it is the only sound foundation for such development. There is here no need for fear. We seem, indeed, to be rapidly approaching a period in which the excessive intension of knowledge, its confinement to a few persons, will give way to a marked extension of knowledge. Such a process is in the lines of our democratic advance. It is for the advantage of the men of science who have paid for the seclusion of extreme specialism by incapacity to understand popular movements and popular needs; it is to the advantage of all that there should be no impassable gulf between those who know and those who are ignorant. It is well to sacrifice much, if we may thereby help to diffuse the best things that are known and thought in the world, and make the scientific attitude, even more than scientific results, a common possession.