Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/721

Rh on the interpretation of phenomena in lower terms than are suited to their special character. "Materialism" in this sense stands in the way of scientific progress, for, while the Newtonian maxim, "Hypotheses non fingendæ sunt præter necessitatem" (hypotheses are not to be framed beyond our actual need for them), is a very valuable one, the whole life of science is bound up in the liberty to frame hypotheses according to our needs.

We are perhaps now in a position to understand why materialism, in one phase at least, has excited so much suspicion and aversion. The conservative and the progressive instincts of mankind are at once against it. Men do not wish to be argued out of their perceptions of beauty, or out of their admiration for the higher human sentiments and virtues. But they would be argued out of everything of the kind, if they once consented to the principle that the true expression for any given phenomenon is the lowest that it admits of. "Tell love it is but lust!" says Sir Walter Raleigh, or whoever was the author of that pessimistic poem, "The Lie," which has sometimes passed under Raleigh's name. Such is the inspiring message which the materialism we are now considering sometimes feels called upon to deliver to the world. Sexual attraction is the physical basis of love; ergo, all love must be mere physical appetite. But the world knows that upon that basis great and glorious things have been built, and that love in its higher forms bears about as close a resemblance to lust as the perfect flower does to the soil from which it springs, or the seed in which it once lay imprisoned. The reasonable request of decent people is that things be left as God or Nature has arranged them; that what has been raised, by no act of man's, into beauty and honor, should hold its status unassailed by the destructive hands of sophistical levelers. Teach us the truth, they say; show us the unity of Nature; show us the analogies of type and function that proclaim and illustrate that unity; but do not seek to promote a morbid confluence of all the elements of thought by trying to make us think in the same terms of the most diverse facts. It is in its character of the universal denier that materialism encounters such hostility. It does not want to recognize the accomplished facts of Nature in any region higher than the lowest. But the facts survive, and will survive, all attempts to deny their existence. Man has come, and man is an intellectual and moral being. This is the great, irreversible fact which gives the lie to all pessimistic theories, and which renders nugatory all attempts to see nothing in the universe but matter and motion.

able quarterly, the "Bibliotheca Sacra," contains an article in its January issue which, considering the scholarly traditions of this old and high-toned periodical, is significant of wholesome progress. It is a defense of the claims of modern languages as against the ancient in the curriculums of college-study. The paper is entitled "A Plea for a Liberal Education," and is by James King Newton, Professor of the German and French Languages and Literature at Oberlin. For the benefit of such of our readers as may be interested in this important question, we present some of the considerations urged by this independent writer.

The ground taken by Professor Newton is substantially that which we have maintained throughout in "The Popular Science Monthly." Of course, he will be at once ranked, as we have been, among the enemies of the classics—a proceeding entirely without justification. He simply but firmly contends for the educational rights of German and French, as against the arrogant and extravagant pretensions put forward by