Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/539

Rh way, but this wrong way is so easy and alluring, that you will most certainly stray into it unless you strive earnestly to keep out of it. Hence I am most anxious to point out to you the right way, and do what I can to keep you in it; and you will find that our courses and methods have been devised with this object.

When advocating in our mother University of Cambridge, in Old England, the claims of scientific culture, I was pushed with an argument which had very great weight with the eminent English scholars present, and which you will be surprised to learn was regarded as fatal to the success of the science triposes then under debate. The argument was, that the experimental sciences could not be made the subjects of competitive examinations. Some may smile at such an objection; but, as viewed from the English stand-point, there was really a great deal in it, and the argument brought out the radical difference between scientific and classical culture. The old method of culture may be said to have culminated in the competitive examinations of the English universities. We have no such examinations here. Success depends not simply on knowing your subject thoroughly, but on having it at your fingers' ends, and those fingers so agile that they can accomplish not only a prodigious amount of work in a short time, but can do this work with absolute accuracy. For the only approach we make to an experience of this kind, we must look to our athletic contests. It may of course be doubted whether the ability, once in a man's life, to perform such mental feats, is worth what it costs. Still it implies a very high degree of mental culture, and it is perfectly certain that the experimental sciences give no field for that sort of mental prize-fights. It is easy to prepare written examinations which will show whether the students have been faithful to their work, but they cannot be adapted to such competitions as I have described without abandoning the true object of science culture. The ability of the scientific student can only be shown by long-continued work at the laboratory-table, and by his success in investigating the problems which Nature presents.

We have here struck the true key-note of the scientific method. The great object of all our study should be to study Nature, and all our methods should be directed to this one object. This aim alone will ennoble our scholarship as students, and will give dignity to our scientific calling as men of science. It is this high aim, moreover, which vindicates the worth of the mode of culture we have chosen. What is it that ennobles literary culture but the great minds which, through this culture, have honored the nations to which they belong? The culture we have chosen is capable of even greater things; not because science is nobler than art, for both are equally noble;—it is the thought, the conception, which ennobles, and I care not whether it be attained through one kind of exercise of the mental faculties or another;—but we are capable of grander and nobler thoughts than Plato,