He wanted society to work unfailingly at raising moral and intellectual standards, popularizing science, putting ideas into circulation, developing the minds of young people; and he was afraid that the inadequacy of the methods currently employed, the woeful narrowness of literary outlook confined as it was to two or three so-called classic centuries, the tyrannical dogmatism of the official pedants, scholastic prejudices and learning by rote, would end up turning our schools into artificial oysterbeds.
