Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 54.djvu/867

 comes of literary study. It is a culture that tends to brighten human intercourse and to sweeten a man's own thoughts. It is a culture eminently favorable to flexibility of mind and quick insight into human character. So far it is a culture "for life"; but too often it tends to become a culture "for school"—that is to say, when things are learned simply to meet conventional demands and conform to the fashion of the time.

A true and sufficient culture can never, as we conceive, be founded on literature and language alone. No mind can be truly liberalized without imbibing and assimilating the fundamental principles of science. There is darkness in the mind that believes that anything can come out of nothing and which has never obtained a glimpse of the exactness with which Nature solves her equations. In the region of mechanics alone there are a thousand beautiful and varied illustrations of the unfailing constancy of natural laws. It is a liberal education to trace the operation of one law under numberless disguises, and thus arrive at an ineradicable conviction that the same law must be reckoned with always and everywhere. The persistence of force, the laws of the composition and resolution of forces, the laws of falling bodies and projectiles, the conservation of energy, the laws of heat, to mention only a few heads of elementary scientific study, are capable, if properly unfolded and illustrated, of producing in any mind open to large thoughts a sense of harmony and a trust in the underlying reason of things, which are constitutive elements of the very highest culture. Only, care must be taken to approach these studies in a right spirit. There is a way of regarding the laws of Nature which tends to vulgarize rather than refine the mind. If we approach Nature merely as something to be exploited, we get no culture from the study of it; but if we approach it as the great men of old did, and feel that in learning its laws we are grasping the thoughts which went to the building of the universe, and, by so doing, are affirming our own high calling as intelligent beings, then every moment given to the study of Nature means intellectual, moral, and spiritual gain. When we look into literature there is much to charm, much to delight and satisfy; and doubtless, in relation to what any one man can accomplish, the field is infinite; but still we know we are looking into the limited. On the other hand, when we are face to face with Nature, we know we are looking into the infinite, and that, however many veils we may take away, there is still "veil after veil behind."

It is needless to say that there are thousands of minds in the world possessed of good native power, but laboring under serious disability for the want of that culture which science alone can bestow. Some of these are sick with morbid longings for unattainable knowledge, and openly or secretly rebellious at the limitations of a Nature whose powers they have never even begun to explore.' To such persons anything like an adequate insight into the harmony amid diversity of Nature's laws would come with all the force of a revelation, and would, we may well believe, clear their minds of the feverish fancies which have made them so restless and dissatisfied; but, alas! it is rarely that such enlightenment comes to those who have not in youth imbibed a portion of the scientific spirit. In this class are to be found the victims of spiritualism, of the Keeley motor, and even of that grotesque satire, the success of