The mind; its capabilities and cultivation : being the substance of a lecture delivered in the reading room of the Calver and Stony Middleton Mutual Improvement Society / by James Wills.

  • Wills, James (junior, of Sheffield)
Date:
1859
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The mind; its capabilities and cultivation : being the substance of a lecture delivered in the reading room of the Calver and Stony Middleton Mutual Improvement Society / by James Wills. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    taste and capacity. Amongst painters you find some whose province is landscape, others the human figure, others drapery, &c. Amongst another class you find some who excel in modelling, sculpture, and the like. In well-conducted Mechanics' Institutions, facilities are afforded to all classes and degrees of mind. There the working man has opportunities presented to him for learning all the immediately useful branches of know- ledge. Innumerable are the blessings which have already accrued from such institutions. Thousands have been raised by them from the chambers of obscurity, and have become qualified to occupy most important positions in a literary, scientific, and artistic point of view. May the noble list be swelled by hundreds from the several institutions in the Peak of Derbyshire ; and may many Furnesses and Sewards arise as the literary and scientific representatives of struggling but conquer- ing genius! It is very lamentable that, notwithstanding all the comforts, conveniences, and embellishments of life which, in the all-wise arrangements of our heavenly Benefactor, are furnished by the working classes, any of the so-called aristocracy, and especially any of the middle-class population of the country, should be op- posed to the education of the masses. Let the people be shut up in ignorance, and then bigotry, despotism, and religious intolerance will re-appear with all their hor- rifying virulence. Let the people be educated on right