Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/425

Rh which seems to be the very type of unchangeable method, he shows to have undergone nothing less than a revolution, so that that form of it, which Dr. Whewell defended as "a permanent study," has disappeared, and been replaced by another mathematics of a totally different sort. The modern analytical mathematics, "the only mathematics now in common use in the United States," is thus characterized by the Master of Trinity in contrast with the earlier geometry. He says: "We must hold also that the geometrical forms of mathematics must be especially preserved and maintained as essentially requisite for this office (the study by which the reason of man is to be educated); that analytical mathematics can in no way answer this purpose, and, if the attempt be made so to employ it, will not only be worthless, but highly prejudicial to men's minds."

In regard to another unalterable element of the disciplinary curriculum, President Eliot remarks: "It is obvious that the spirit and method in which Latin has been, for the most part, studied during the present century, are very different from the spirit and method in which it was studied in the preceding centuries. During this century it has been taught as a dead language (except, perhaps, in parts of Italy and Hungary), whereas it used to be taught as a living language, the common speech of all scholars, both lay and clerical. Those advocates of classical learning who maintain that a dead language must have more disciplinary virtue than a living one would hardly have been satisfied with the prevailing modes of teaching and learning Latin in any century before our own." Even Greek, so lauded as "an instrument for the perpetual training of the mind of the later generations," has not always been a constituent of the accepted scheme of liberal education. "It took two hundred years for the Greek language and literature gradually to displace, in great part, the scholastic metaphysics, which, with scholastic theology, had been for generations regarded as the main staple of liberal education; and this displacement was accomplished only after the same sort of tedious struggle by which the new knowledges of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are now winning their way to academic recognition. The revived classical literature was vigorously and sincerely opposed as frivolous, heterodox, and useless for discipline; just as natural history, chemistry, physics, and modern literatures are now opposed. The conservatives of that day used precisely the same arguments which the conservatives of to-day bring forward, only they were used against classical literature then, while now they are used in its support."

The sticklers for traditional immutability being thus disarmed, by showing that "new learning has repeatedly forced its way in times past to full academic standing, in spite of the opposition of the conservative, and of the keener resistance of established teachers and learned bodies, whose standing is always supposed to be threatened by the rise of new sciences," President Eliot proceeds to point out the imperative necessity of still further important changes that shall bring university and college studies into completer harmony with the present state of knowledge and the demands of modern life. The ground taken is thus broadly stated: "To the list of studies which the sixteenth century called liberal, I would therefore add as studies of equal rank, English, French, German, history, political economy, and natural science, not one of which can be said to have existed in mature form when the definition of liberal education, which is still in force, was laid down. The claims of these studies are taken up separately; it is shown how widely and grossly they are neglected, and their right to coequal recognition