[This lecture greatly postdates all of the other materials in this edition: it was written when Faraday was 62, but demands inclusion here because it illustrates his lifelong concern with the themes of self-education, mental discipline and the duty of the individual to improve himself to the utmost possible extent. It represents, in fact, his fullest public statement on these themes, and was so important to him that he included it in his 1859 collection of Experimental Researches in Chemistry and Physics, where it sits somewhat oddly among the scientific papers. Faraday insisted that the lecture belonged in that volume because it was ‘so immediately connected’ in ‘nature and origin with my own experimental life, considered either as cause or consequence,’ and in the context of this edition it provides a satisfying bookend to this selection of Faraday's educational writings.

Some of the ways in which Faraday frames his subject in this lecture are similar to his writings on self-education from the 1810s: most importantly, perhaps, his entire shelving of the religious aspect of self-education. Here he explains, more explicitly than in his earlier lectures, that no human mind, no matter how finely disciplined, can break through to the divine, so that there is no possibility that ‘man by reasoning could find out God.’ As Geoffrey Cantor points out, this represented a major difference between Faraday's understanding of the power of science and that of the natural theologians who had dominated the public ideology of British science in the first half of the nineteenth century. However, despite this explicit separation of religious from mundane, Faraday's language on this occasion is frequently at least quasi-religious, and indeed he describes the lecture as an ‘open declaration, almost a confession.’ Faraday had been accustomed to preaching to the Sandemanian congregation in London since his appointment as an elder in 1840: this experience may have affected the way in which he allowed a degree of religious feeling into his secular rhetoric. The language of confession is especially apparent as he presents himself as merely one self-improver among many, equally liable to failures of judgment as others: ‘I have learned to know that I fall infinitely short of that efficacious exercise of the judgment which may be attained.’

Reading this lecture in conjunction with Faraday's writings of the 1810s on similar themes, striking differences emerge.