Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/563

 which have an importance for others besides the specialist to whose branch they belong; sometimes they compel the literary scholar to reconsider some of the views which a long tradition had sanctioned. For instance, quite lately an archæological architect has affirmed, as the result of a close inspection, that the Dionysiac Theatre at Athens had no permanent stage before at least the second half of the 4th century B.C., and that in the days of the great dramatists the actors stood on the same level with the chorus. As you are aware, I have not exhausted the list of those special studies connected with classical scholarship which have had their birth, or found their maturity within the last half-century; for instance, we might add Comparative Mythology and Comparative Syntax; but this imperfect outline is enough for our present purpose.

The spirit represented by these new special studies is the spirit of science; that is to say, in each department the aim is to ascertain the facts as correctly as possible, and, when the range of facts has become large enough to warrant generalisation, to deduce general rules or principles, with a view to making the further study of the subject a methodical and, as far as possible, an exact study. In everyone of the special branches to which I have referred there are now certain propositions which are accepted as axiomatic; if a man's work conforms to these, it is allowed as scientific—he is advancing on the true path; if it does not, his work may be clever, interesting, even brilliant, but it is not scientific. A single