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 a narrow, utilitarian culture, but his main point is that it breaks down in presence of the higher human interests in which we are all mainly concerned. He declares of its expositors:

We entirely agree with the writer as to the supreme importance of the study of man and his relations, but we totally dissent from his method of studying them. What we want to know concerning man and society is the laws of their constitution and action, and this it is the proper business of science to ascertain. It is not the office of literature to elucidate natural laws. We have had the literary method in its full power for thousands of years, without dispelling the illusions and obscurities which have shrouded the nature of man and human society. Literature was both incompetent in method and destitute of all the necessary data. Before man and society could be understood, it was necessary first to have correct notions of the workings and order of Nature. Light could only be thrown upon the higher phenomena, as the lower were first explained. To the preliminary work, literature and the literary method contributed absolutely nothing. We owe entirely to modern science that whole series of preliminary revelations concerning the method and operations of Nature, by which it becomes possible to interpret the individual and social phenomena of man. And to science we owe not only the solution of the preliminary problems, upon which the higher depend, but we are also indebted to it for that long and severe discipline, in the quest of truth—that apprenticeship of centuries in the mastery of mental methods—which are necessary to engage with the most difficult of all investigations, the unravellingunraveling [sic] of the complexities of human nature and the social state. Is all this preparation to go for nothing? Are we to be told that science is incapable of carrying on its own work, and that the agency which was incompetent to begin it is still able to complete it? Undoubtedly "the past experience of the race is found in literature, and languages, and laws, and monuments,"