Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/498

494 spiritual change—a change, so great, indeed, that it is well-nigh impossible for us thoroughly to sympathize with our grandfathers? Do they realize that science has thrust us into a new world and that our new surroundings have made us new men? Unless they appreciate this they can not be in real communion with the life of this age. They must live more or less apart, and move away from the great current that is sweeping the world along. Like Bernard Shaw, they must find that they were born in the seventeenth century and that they have not yet outlived it.

I might express this last test of efficiency otherwise by saying that you must look to the cultural element in the teaching of science—but I am afraid of the word "culture." It has been so terribly abused. Some speak as if the test of culture were the knowledge of Latin, or of Greek, or of French literature, or of Italian painting, or of what not. As a matter of fact it is none of these things, for I take it that the root of culture in any worthy sense of that word is the possession of an ideal that is broad enough to form the basis of a sane criticism of life. I hope that I need not turn aside to demonstrate the competency of science to present such an ideal. I willingly admit that some such ideal may be reached by various paths, through the study of literature, or of art, or of science. I should be the last to suggest that these are rival or mutually exclusive pursuits or that any one can justly claim a monopoly of culture. To know the best that has been said in literature and to use this as a touchstone in the criticism of the life of to-day, or to reach through art the ideal of perfection in form and color and make this broad enough to embrace life as a whole—each opens a promising avenue to culture. But how can a criticism of life be broadly enough based to-day unless the main results of scientific investigation lie at its roots and the method and the spirit of science be in the atmosphere that surrounds it? It can not, I think, be broad enough, unless we greatly exaggerate the part that science has played and is playing in the modern world. And I do not think that we exaggerate it, for practically all must recognize that there are few important problems of life to-day that science does not touch and touch most closely. This being the case, can a school be declared efficient that fails to give its students a vision and a grasp of the scientific ideal—an ideal that will guide them in the solution of all the complex problems that face individuals and face the state?