Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/649

 Arnold observed that the power of intellect and knowledge is not the only one that goes to the building up of human life; there is also the power of conduct and the power of beauty. Literature, he said, serves to bring knowledge into relation with our sense for conduct and our sense for beauty. The greater and more fruitful is the progress of science, the greater is the need for humane letters, to establish and maintain a harmony between the new knowledge and those profound, unchanging instincts of our nature.

It is not surprising that, in the last third of the nineteenth century, Arnold's fascinating advocacy of literature, as the paramount agency of culture, should have incurred some criticism from the standpoint of science and of philosophy. The general drift of this criticism was that the claim which he made for literature, though just in many respects, was carried too far; and also that his conception of intellectual culture was inadequate. As a representative of such criticism, I would take the eminent philosopher whose own definition of culture has already been cited, Henry Sidgwick: for no one, I think, could put more incisively the particular point with which we are here concerned. "Matthew Arnold's method of seeking truth," says Sidgwick, "is a survival from a pre-scientific age. He is a man of letters pure and simple; and often seems quite serenely unconscious of the intellectual limitations of his type." The critic proceeds to enumerate some things which, as he affirms, are "quite alien to