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Rh to the interpretation of the ancients. That there is a science of man, though yet imperfect, and a science of mind rapidly growing, and a science of society roughly established, it is impossible to deny, and they determine for us the method of future investigation. And it is not by the study of ancient languages that these sciences have been created, nor is it by their ardent devotees that they are being now pursued and developed. As it is mainly by the men who have given the classics the go-by that all science has been cultivated, so it is to-day by men who are ignorant or not at all proficient in those old studies that the higher sciences pertaining to humanity are most vigorously and successfully pursued. And as it is not to the classicists but to the scientists that the world must look for further light on the nature, activities, and relations of man, so it is not to the dead languages but to the modern sciences that young men are to be commended to gain the best understanding of humanity, both in the present and the past.

Professor Sumner's article, "Our Colleges before the Country," is written from the thoroughly modern point of view. It is a breezy discussion of college tactics, and quite unprofessorial in the freedom of its criticisms of college functionaries' habits, ideas, and studies. Appreciating the merits of classical study, and acknowledging his own indebtedness to it. Professor Sumner is alive to its short-comings, the exaggerated claims that are made for it, and the bad results that flow from its prescriptive position in modern collegiate education. We quote some passages from this admirable article, some of which it will be seen are not without bearing upon the preceding discussion:

Now, however, the advocates of the old classical culture, ignoring or ignorant of all the change which has come over human knowledge and philosophy within fifty years, come forward to affirm that that culture still is the best possible training for our young men and the proper basis for the work of our colleges. How do they know it? How can anybody say that one thing or another is just what is needed for education? Can we not break down this false and stupid notion that it is the duty of a university, not to teach whatever any one wants to know, but to prescribe to everybody what he ought to want to know? Some years ago, at a school-meeting in one of our cities, a gentleman made an argument against the classics. A distinguished clergyman asked him across the room whether he had ever studied the classics. He replied that he had not. "I thought not," replied the clergyman, as he sat down. He was thought to have won a great victory, but he had not. His opponent should have asked him whether he had ever studied anything else. Where is the man who has studied beyond the range of the classical culture who retains his reverence for that culture as superior to all other for the basis of education? No doubt a man of classical training often looks back with pleasure and gratitude to his own education and feels that it has been of value to him; but when he draws an inference, either that no other course of discipline would have been worth more to himself, or that no other discipline can be generally more useful as a basis of education, he forms a judgment on a comparison one branch of which is to him unknown.

When, however, all this is admitted in regard to the uses of a classical training, what does it prove in regard to the claims of the classics to be made the basis of all higher education, or the toll which every one must pay before he can be admitted to the guild of the learned? Nothing at all. I have known splendid Greek scholars who could not construct a clear and intelligible argument of six sentences. They always became entangled in subtilties of phrase and super-refinement of words. I have known other great Greek scholars who wrote an English which was so dull that scarcely any one could read it. On the other hand, there are men whose names are household words wherever the English language is spoken, because they can say what they mean in clear, direct, and limpid English, although they have never had any classical culture at all. I have known whole classes to graduate at our colleges who had never read a line of Aristotle, and who had not a single correct notion about the life and polity of the Greeks. Men graduate now all the time who know nothing of Greek history and polity but the fragments which they pick out of the notes on the authors which they read. It is grotesque to talk about the