Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/131

Rh of science, as we now know it, is far too difficult and too grand to have been accomplished in the early or middle stages of human development. It now represents profounder study, more intense intellectual exertion, and a higher discipline of the mental faculties than was possible until mankind had had a long and painful experience in the difficult task of explaining the mysteries of Nature. By the necessities of the law of unfolding, therefore, the higher exploits of modern thought are not to be limited and measured by ancient standards. The ideal of literary culture belongs to an older and, consequently, to a lower stage of progress, and it can not continue to hold in this age the unrivaled ascendency which has been accorded to it in the past. Science represents an independent movement of the human mind, and creates standards of its own. It can not be judged, and is not to be ranked, by those who have been cultivated in a totally different order of ideas. To the linguists, as such, and to the cultivators of literature, as such, the understanding of the course of Nature is nothing. They could go on forever with their elegant arts in utter ignorance of it, and without missing it. The study of Nature, in a methodical way, was a new mental dispensation. The quest of truth by the methods that yield the truth, and because of the value of truth, was a new ideal, and the preparation for it a new education. Under the old ideal of culture truth was, in fact, disavowed as a supreme intellectual aim. The philosophers loved to seek it, but proclaimed that they did not care to find it; and there are still an emptiness, a hollowness, and a conventionality in the ideal of literary and scholastic culture, which betray its mediæval origin. With the coming of science as a method of thought, there came a profounder seriousness in the purposes of study, which could never have been originated in the purely literary sphere.

With the coming of science, the thinker was forced to take a new relation to the world in which he lived, He became a devotee of truth in a sense not before known, and subjected himself to a moral as well as to an intellectual discipline, of which little could be understood in the earlier stages of mental cultivation.

The literary ideal of culture is still practically supreme. It is historic, it is fortified by institutions, it reigns in education, it is a social passport, it is suited for display, and makes a minimum requisition of intellectual effort. For these reasons it is popular, and we need not wonder at the arrogance and exclusiveness of its pretensions. But it belongs to the past, is losing its hold upon the present; and, while it may never be superseded, it is yet bound to be subordinated in future to that ideal of mental culture which is the highest intellectual attainment of the latest time, and which is to be perfected through the light of that scientific knowledge into which the human mind has emerged in this wonderful period. The triumphs of intellect in the conquest of Nature and the acquisition of great ideas in the understanding of the universe are not to be without powerful influence in determining the cultivation of the educated classes. The emancipation from narrow and groveling traditions may take place slowly, but the change is going on, and must go on, by the law of progress, until the newer and nobler knowledges become the highest instruments of mental cultivation.

the eminent naturalist, who is well known as an earnest member of the Roman Catholic Church, discusses in a recent number of the "Nineteenth Century" the question as to the degree of liberty which modern Catholics may claim in the treatment of scientific subjects. His