Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/134

126 Science may take nature, and the classics will appropriate man, as the respective objects of study. Dr. Fisher says:

Dr. Fisher then proceeds to work out this view, by referring to mathematics, which is a leading element in all liberal education, and showing its fundamental relation in the sphere of the sciences of nature; and he then makes the surprising affirmation that what mathematics is in the study of nature that also is classics in the study of man. He says, "Analogous to the relations of mathematics to the sciences of nature is the relation of the Græco-Roman history and civilization to our modern society." And, after referring to the historic position of the Greeks, the Romans, and the Hebrews, and their providential relation to modern affairs, he says, "As God has made nature mathematically, so he has governed the life and development of mankind as here indicated." The succeeding steps of the argument are obvious. To understand man and modern things we must study the ancients, and "how shall this knowledge of antiquity be obtained? It can be obtained after a fashion at second hand. But for a 'liberal' education, for that direct and penetrating view of ancient society which alone satisfies the ideal of such a culture, the languages of Greece and Rome must be learned. In the study of them the youth is put into immediate intercourse with the mind of the ancients. The veil is lifted."

Now, the first objection to this view is that, as a matter of fact, the veil is not lifted, and the minds of college youth are not "put into immediate intercourse with the mind of the ancients." It is notorious that, after five or ten years of study, "the average pupil can not read the Greek and Latin authors with any facility. Unable to read them, he lays them aside forever. Not unfrequently he sells the books which he has laboriously conned." Dr. Fisher, in referring to this objection, admits that it "can not be confuted by a sneer." It has so much truth that he recognizes it as "a deserved rebuke to methods of teaching which have come into vogue, and which loudly call for reform." This is a tacit confession that the study of Greek and Latin, which Dr. Fisher holds to be the key to a great department of knowledge concerning man and human society, is a total failure with the great mass of college students.

But the whole argument is futile. Man is not to be separated from nature as an object of study. He is a part of nature, and can only be understood as nature is understood, and by exactly the same mental procedures. Mathematics is a fundamental condition of the sciences of nature, and they can not be cultivated or understood without it. To say that the classical languages hold any such relation to the study of man is preposterous. We have man and all his activities and institutions before us, to be directly explored by observation, analysis, comparison, and all the perfected intellectual processes by which truth is established and knowledge extended. To be sure, we have not the ancients before us, but to understand them we had better study living men and existing society rather than to waste time on dead languages which, in nine cases out of ten, are never sufficiently learned to be of the slightest use for the purpose here contemplated. When living men are first studied and understood, translations will quite suffice to apply that knowledge