Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 4.djvu/18

8 , we may know it; and I may add that it is because in our common schools we are completely outgrowing it, that day by day we see in them so much new life.

So much in regard to the debt which a liberal education is destined soon to owe to the progress of psychology, giving prevalence to truer views in regard to its rudimentary processes. Let me pass to the second influence, which is acting powerfully to modify all our previous conceptions of the subject; I mean the progress of modern linguistic science. I take this next in order because, contrary to the current of thought prevailing at the present moment, I believe the old doctrine will still be found to hold true, even after physical science shall have at last found its true place in the new education, that the study of that wonderful world of matter, which is the stage on which man plays his earthly part, wonderful as it is, is yet inferior in dignity and importance to the study of the being and doing of the actor who plays his part thereon. Scientific studies, though for the time being in the ascendant, yet, even when all their rights shall be accorded to them, will, in a well-balanced system, take their place a little below ethical studies. This, I say, as not believing in the current materialistic philosophy in any of its forms, but as being an immaterialist, as I must phrase it, since we have been robbed by unworthy and degrading associations of the word spiritualist. But, without raising any question of precedence between branches of study which are both essential to any true conception of a complete education, let me proceed to point out that the progress of linguistic science and of modern literature has totally transformed the educational character and position of the ethical studies of which they are the instrument and the embodiment. When the Revival of Learning gave birth to the present classical system of literary, or, as I have termed it, ethical liberal study, it did so by putting into the hands of scholars not merely two grammars as instruments of youthful mental discipline, as the advocates of the grindstone-system would fain have us believe, but two languages