Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/719

Rh is the greatest, the most productive tool for developing the minds of the young known to man."

But if, now, we ask how these sovereign advantages are to be secured, or in what does this incomparable virtue of Greek for educational purposes consist, the reply is, that through the mastery of this language the student's mind is brought into close relation with the minds of the greatest men, Plato and Aristotle, Virgil and Æschylus, Thucydides and Demosthenes, Homer and, "above all Saint Paul"—especially in the Epistle to the Romans.

Professor Price's argument here consists merely of fresh and vivid eulogies of the old Greek masters, and declarations that they are wonderfully fitted to quicken and elevate the minds of students. He maintains that they are excellent instruments of discipline, and this probably but few dispute. His proposition is that Greek and Latin are "pre-eminently the first" among the instrumentalities of mental development; but he neither proves nor attempts to prove it. The idea of "pre-eminence" is relative; it implies superiority to something else; and the argument, to be good for anything, must state the claims and prove the inferiority of that something which is assumed to be inferior. The acquisition of Greek gives a discipline in the study of languages, and that may be the best of all languages for the purpose. The mastery of Greek literature gives a literary training, and it may be the best of all literatures for the purpose. But that is not at all the question. The question is as to the "pre-eminence" of language and literary discipline over any other kind of discipline. The real issue, the issue that has arisen in modern times, is between language and literature on the one hand and science-studies on the other, as instruments of mental development. This essential issue Professor Price does not take up. He does not even recognize the existence of such a thing as a mental discipline gained by the study of science. He refers indeed to science, in the usual classical spirit, as giving useful knowledge to "the lower classes," who have to work for a living. "In the lower classes of life, useful knowledge, knowledge that fits the learner to carry on some special business from which a livelihood is to be obtained, is the object most desired.... A little boy may easily be made to understand how a plant grows, how it picks up some substances from the sun and air, or under or from the ground, how it decomposes these substances and extracts from them the parts which they can apply to their own growth." Are we to infer from this slovenly sentence, equally false to the facts of science and the rules of grammar, that an accomplished Oxford classicist holds himself under no obligation to write decent English when coupling the study of science with vulgar laboring people?

Not withstanding Professor Price ignores it, yet Greek and Latin are on trial before the world under indictment for the fatal deficiency of their educational discipline! They are arraigned as in this respect fundamentally defective because they leave in total neglect some of the most essential powers of the mind. What valid claim has a system of mental cultivation, in this age, which gives no more heed to the important faculty of observation in the youthful mind than if it had no existence; which neglects the study of Nature, and makes no provision for cultivated mental intercourse with the most immediate objects of human experience; which fails to use the great living problems of human interest with which intelligent beings are vitally concerned, as means for the systematic discipline of the reason and the judgment in preparation for the responsible work of life? Here are the opportunities and the urgent needs, and here the