Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/791

Rh of material forms and physical phenomena as a mode of liberal culture, but it has been assumed throughout that—to use the now familiar form of words—"no sense for conduct" and "no sense for beauty" can be acquired except through that special type of linguistic training that has so long limited elementary education. Those who demand a place for science-culture certainly have not shown the same contemptuous spirit; and I venture to suggest that, if classical students were as familiar with the methods of natural science as are the students of Nature with philological and archæological study, they would be more charitable to those who differ with them on this subject.

There are, of course, two distinct elements in a liberal education: the one the acquisition of useful knowledge, the other a training or culture of the intellectual faculties. The first should be made as broad as possible, the second in the present state of knowledge must unfortunately be greatly restricted. While in the passage referred to I have claimed that, in a system of education based upon science, languages should be studied simply as tools, Mr. Matthew Arnold, in a lecture which he has recently repeatedly delivered in this country, and whose text was the phrases I have already quoted, has claimed that, although scholars must use the results of science as so much literary material, they need have nothing to do with its methods. In my view, both positions are essentially sound. It has been said that the Greek departments in our colleges could do without the scientific students much better than scientific scholars could do without Greek, and this remark admits of an evident rejoinder. Certainly in this age no professional man can afford to be ignorant of the results of science, and he will constantly be led into error if he does not know something of its methods. It is perfectly well known that very few of the investigators, who have coined the scientific terms derived from the Greek, so often referred to, could read a page of Herodotus or Homer in the original; and it is equally true that Mr. Matthew Arnold, and his compeer, Lord Tennyson, who have shown such large knowledge of the results of science, could not interpret the complex relations in which the simplest phenomena of Nature are presented to the observer. The greater number of the students of Nature can only know the beauties of Greek literature as they are feebly presented in translations, and so the greater number of literary students can only know of the wonders of Nature as they are inadequately described in popular works on science. If it requires years of study to enable a student to master the meaning of a Greek sentence, can we expect that in less time a student shall be able to unravel the intricacies of natural phenomena? It has been said that no Greek scholarship is possible for a student who begins the study of that language in college. Is it supposed that scientific scholarship is any more possible under such conditions?

In order to teach successfully the results of science to college students, I have no desire that they should have any preliminary