Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/661

 : "Intellectual culture, at the end of the nineteenth century, must include as its most essential element a scientific habit of mind; and a scientific habit of mind can only be acquired by the methodical study of some part at least of what the human race has come scientifically to know."

There is nothing in that statement to which exception need be taken by the firmest believer in the value of literary education. The more serious and methodical studies of literature demand, in some measure, a scientific habit of mind, in the largest sense of that expression; such a habit is necessary, for instance, in the study of history, in the scientific study of language and in the 'higher criticism.' Nor, again, does any one question that the studies of the natural sciences are instruments of intellectual culture of the highest order. The powers of observation and of reasoning are thereby disciplined in manifold ways; and the scientific habit of mind so formed is in itself an education. To define and describe the modes in which that discipline operates on the mind is a task for the man of science; it could not, of course, be attempted by any one whose own training has been wholly literary. But there is one fact which may be noted by any intelligent observer. Many of our most eminent teachers of science, and more especially of science in its technical applications, insist on a demand which, in the provinces of science, is analogous to a demand made in the province of literary study by those who wish such study to be a true instrument of culture. As the latter desire that literature should be a means of educating the student's intelligence and sympathies, so that teachers of science, whether pure or applied, insist on the necessity of cultivating the scientific imagination, of developing a power of initiative in the learner, and of drawing out his inventive faculties. They urge that, in the interests of the technical industries themselves, the great need is for a training which shall be more than technical—which shall be thoroughly scientific. Wherever scientific and technical education attains its highest forms in institutions of university rank, the aim is not merely to form skilled craftsmen, but to produce men who can contribute to the advance of their respective sciences and arts, men who can originate and invent. There is a vast world-competition in scientific progress, on which industrial and commercial progress must ultimately depend; and it is of national importance for every country that it should have men who are not merely expert in things already known, but who can take their places in the forefront of the onward march.

But meanwhile the claims of literary culture, as part of the general higher education, must not be neglected or undervalued. It may be that, in the prescientific age, those claims were occasionally stated in a somewhat exaggerated or one-sided manner. But it remains as true as ever that literary studies form an indispensable element of a really