fabrics made by the industrious mechanics of Manchester not only clothe our own population, but are worn by the Chinese mandarin, the Indian prince, and the poor African slave. There is not a corner of the globe into which the industry of this place does not penetrate, through the aid of mercantile enterprise, and the cheapness resulting from the division of labour. All this is not only useful, but this development of mechanical skill and manufacturing industry goes a great way to promote human civilisation. It adds greatly to the wealth and comfort of the country, and the decencies of life. But we must not imagine that manufacturing industry is everything. The great truth I wish to impress on your minds is that however great money, manufacture and trade may be, mind is greater still. This must be obvious from the reflection that the whole of this industry has arisen from the effort of mind. We can hardly have any conception what an amount of mental power has been expended upon these mechanical contrivances which have made Manchester so great. I remember in the year of the Exhibition meeting Professor Sylvester, who was for many years Professor of Mathematics in London University, and afterwards in America, and who had travelled over half the world. He said, "There is no place in the world that I have visited which so much impresses me with the power of the human mind as Manchester." It seemed as if the abstract studies which he had pursued here started into life, and became, as it were, practical, living powers in the world. All this has sprung from mind as its source, and it all tends to the elevation of mind as its end. It would be a poor thing indeed if all this industry had no ultimate influence upon the culture of the human mind. Whatever produces a higher state of civilisation, and enhances the wellbeing of mankind, in a material point of view, is merely subsidiary to another and greater end, namely, making mankind wiser and better.

In treating of self culture, its meaning and materials, I have begun at the lowest element, as it were, in human culture-man's industrial life. There is a certain amount of mental life involved even in industrial life. Mankind, probably, in the earliest ages of its history, had no industrial life. When men lived without industry, that is by hunting, or by plunder, or gathering the natural fruits of the earth, human culture must have been in a very low state. The first step in human culture was when men turned from a mere roving, desultory life to that of regular, systematic and organised industry. This culture is increased when industry becomes of a more skilled kind. Men who are devoted to what is called skilled labour are more intelligent than those who are devoted to unskilled labour; and in proportion as the skill becomes greater, and has to do with mechanism in its higher and more delicate forms, in that proportion it has a greater cultivating and educating influence upon the mind.

The first intention of Mechanics' Institutions was to teach labourers the theories and principles of the arts upon which they were daily employed. This idea of Dr. Birkbeck's was a good, a great idea, because it was the first principle of human culture.

The next step upwards, after industrial life, is that which brings us to Social life. As industrious beings we do our work to earn a living; but as social beings we take a wider survey of human things, regarding ourselves as members of a great community, having a peculiar language and peculiar laws and institutions. We belong, by virtue of our social life, to the community which speaks the English language, and the very fact of using that language intelligently and grammatically shows a certain amount of culture and civilisation of which, as Englishmen, we have reason to be proud. As a Roman citizen felt proud of his country, so may an Englishman, and for the same reason-because England is in the van of nations.

Moreover this social life indicates that we live under certain laws, which have been framed to a large extent according to the principles of human right. Though not absolutely perfect, English law represents the rights and freedom of individuals as completely, both in theory and practice, as the code of any country on the face of the earth. With regard to our institutions it is the same; they are not extreme in their nature; they have grown up under the influence of the common sense of the nation at large. We do not possess a constitution which has any very great degree of symmetry about it, but you know that carpentery is not half as good as growth. A mere symmetrical constitution, thought out in any man's brain, however perfect in theory, is not half so good as an imperfect one which has grown from the feelings and habits of the people. I hold that our social life is a great element in our country's greatness, and that every man ought to take an interest in that social life, endeavour to understand something of its history, laws and institutions, and take a personal interest in its development, feeling that he is a unit in that great process of carrying the civilisation of England to a far higher degree of perfection than anything which has been attained.

But that is not all. I come now to a third element in culture, and that is Intellectual life. Here we belong to the still larger community of mind, of reason. What I mean by intellectual culture is this-realising the fact and acting upon it, that we possess mental powers and faculties, the great aim and purport of which is knowledge, independent of anything else which tends to knowledge as its end and satisfaction, without caring about its utility in a material point of view. This is a feature of life that is not developed as it ought to be in all men; it is often repressed by cares, and checked by adverse circumstances. The fact that such an intellectual life does exist is plain. We only have to look at those in whom the intellectual

life is developed to an extraordinary degree of activity, in order to see how important a part it may play in a man's existence. Do you think, for instance, that when Kepler was labouring year after year to discover the laws of the planetary motions, that it ever entered into his brain to calculate how much money each one of these laws of the planetary system would bring him? Do you think that Newton, when he was dividing a ray of light into its prismatic colours, or that Adams or Leverrier, when searching for the new planets which have been discovered lately, thought of the material advantage they would get ?

Men who are devoted earnestly to intellectual pursuits, lose all care for the utilitarian principle, in the ardour with which they pursue knowledge for its own sake. They feel that success is its own reward; and no other reward would be valued if intellectual success were wanting. We all more or less possess these same intellectual elements of human life, and there is no reason why they should not be developed in us as in others.

There are many spheres in which the intellectual life may be cultivated with enthusiasm, independently of material considerations. Take, for instance, the study of natural history. I remember reading, that Linnæus, the great Swedish botanist, on first coming to this country, and seeing from the coach the heath covered with the blooming furze, which he knew well, but had never seen before, was so enraptured that he induced the coachman to allow him to alight, when he fell on his knees to embrace the golden blossoms with enthusiastic admiration and delight. This simple incident shows that such studies create their own reward. It is the same with researches into history or antiquity. None of these branches of investigation possess the utilitarian element; they are the natural product of the intellectual life, and when we achieve success, when we gain any footstep, as it were, in the process of ascending the mountain of knowledge, we

feel that the very fact that we have got there-that we breathe a purer air and have a wider prospect—is its own reward.

The fourth branch is Esthetic life-a convenient word for expressing a large number of mental facts and phenomena. By Esthetic life I mean anything, everything connected with Taste-the sense and perception of the beautiful. The word comes from a Greek verb that means to feel: unlike intellectual life, esthetic life depends upon feeling, emotion, the sentiment of the beautiful. There are many avenues through which the beautiful reveals itself to the human mind; for instance, there is the beautiful in Art, in painting, in sculpture, where in the highest form the artist seeks to realise in external form and colour those visions of beauty which exist in his imagination. The sense of the beautiful may be cultivated by nature as well as by art also by music, for music is one of the fine arts; and especially by poetry, which is the first and most natural expression of man's esthetic life, being that form in which it always first pours itself forth in the infancy of nations. This early poetry of nations, inasmuch as it is the most simple, is generally speaking the most beautiful, because the most immediate, reflex of the esthetic life of man. The charm of this esthetic life is seen in the enthusiasm which it produces. Why, the enthusiasm of the poet is proverbial. He devotes himself to his art with a singleness of purpose which to men in ordinary life appears wonderful. The enthusiasm of the painter and the sculptor is no less remarkable. Go to any part of the world where these arts are most cultivated-especially to Rome, where there is a great concentration of artistic power, and you find that the artist's life presents a certain phenomenon of it its own; the man seems rapt up in this esthetic feeling, by which he attempts to convey to others the conceptions of his own soul. It is not for all of us-nay it is for very few of us, in this every-day world-to be artists in the