Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/688

670 affairs of everyday life proceed upon the very reasonable supposition that such knowledge may be taken for granted. But the question arises as to whether experience shall be permitted to end here, and so superficial a knowledge content us. It has been good for man to learn these more common truths. Would it not, then, be well for him to carry the search somewhat further, and to learn facts less commonly observed, as well as to investigate as far as he is able the cause and significance of all phenomena? There is but one answer: it is overwhelmingly affirmative.

It is to this problem that science addresses itself. The value of a study so intimately connected with the conduct of life is attracting an increasing number of students. The old battle between science and the classics in college curriculum does not need to be waged over again. Generations devoted to the pursuit of language have at length evolved a people in whom facility of expression is hereditary. The lack of something to say alone prevents universal authorship. The youth of the present day ask a discipline more inspiring than that offered by grammar and lexicon. It is found that the mind can be both instructed and trained without first killing the natural curiosity and interest of the pupil. It is true that there is a college near Philadelphia where a young woman is not even permitted to take a special course in biology unless she has an intimate knowledge of at least three foreign tongues, but happily such absurdities are rare. As a rule, the colleges and universities of the country have responded generously to the demand for broad scientific culture. In that field the battle has been won. But a little leaven leaveneth the whole. Beginning at the top of our educational system, the tendency toward scientific study is gradually making its way down to the very Kindergarten. It would be still more general, and would be a larger factor in individual life, were that important truth realized which Mr. Herbert Spencer has so often insisted upon, that scientific knowledge is simply a higher development of common knowledge, and means only more accurate and more extended thinking about our environment. And so, in science, we are to become again as little children, and put more questions to our great mother, Nature.

The results of this renewed questioning will not be trivial. They serve a dual purpose. They bring a much enlarged experience, and discover to us the relation between widely different phenomena. By the one service, the confines of our apprehended universe are expanded to such magnitudes that they demand for their occupancy the highest intellectual effort of which man is capable. Through the other, no confusion results from this immensity. It is a world of harmonies and relations. Man feels himself not oppressed, but inspired, by such a contemplation of