# Popular Science Monthly/Volume 21/May 1882/Editor's Table

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"SCIENCE AND CULTURE."
THE reception accorded to Professor Huxley's new volume, under the above title, by the leading organs of public opinion, is especially significant at the present time. The book is a collection of addresses, lectures, and essays, which have appeared at intervals during the last seven years, on a considerable variety of subjects, educational, biological, and philosophical. They are all of superior merit—the maturest and most finished of Professor Huxley's literary productions, and are all of popular interest; but the critics do not regard them as having equal claims to their attention. It is the first address, from which the volume takes its name—given at the inauguration of Josiah Mason's college to which they chiefly devote themselves, and their discussions are noteworthy, as indicating the great change that is going forward in the public mind with regard to the higher relations of science and education.
It is beyond doubt that the most formidable hindrance to the progress of rational education is the idolatry of an antiquated and effete system of study. on the ground that it is preeminently and exclusively adapted to the promotion of "culture." It is by association of classical studies with a dignified and venerated ideal of "culture" that they have acquired their superstitious ascendency, and have become the greatest drags we have on real educational progress. Human cultivation is, and always must be, the supreme thing, and it is, therefore, difficult to overestimate the injurious influence of a false ideal of its means and objects.
But the difficulty in this case is increased by the fact that the ideal of culture, which must now be rejected as wholly inadequate, was once true. The old and the still prevalent idea of culture is that which is derived from literary pursuits, and it is limited to certain literary forms, as most perfect for the purpose. Professor Huxley says of the great majority of educated Englishmen that, "in their belief, culture is obtainable only by a liberal education; and a liberal education is synonymous, not merely with education and instruction in literature, but in one particular form of literature, namely, that of Greek and Roman antiquity. They hold that the man who has learned Latin and Greek, however little, is educated, while he who is versed in other branches of knowledge, however deeply, is a more or less respectable specialist, not admissible into the cultured caste."
But the human mind is no longer to be cultivated merely by the forms or the arts of expression. That these are important things, and that in past times they may have been the main things, no one denies; but such an ideal of culture is essentially superficial, and breaks down before the serious intellectual demands of the present time. The mind of our age has passed from the consideration of verbal figments to the laws of reality. The correlative of form is substance, and the correlative of literary form is the substance of thought, and modern science has made this the ​fundamental concernment. There has been not only a change here, but a reversal of the order of importance. The question now is, not of the art of expression in itself, but to what is it subservient. We grow increasingly impatient of the rhetorician. The casket may be elegant, but what does it contain? The husks and shells of expression have had sufficient attention—we have now to deal with the living kernel of truth. The old ideal is discredited by the new developments of knowledge, and the new ideal must contain more substantial elements than that which it supersedes. Under the old ideal of culture, a man may still be grossly ignorant of the things most interesting and now most important to know; but an ideal of cultivation begins to be demanded which does not comport with ignorance. Modern knowledge is the highest and most perfected form of knowledge, and it is no longer possible to maintain that it is not also the best knowledge for that cultivation of mind and character which is the proper object of education. This truth is making its way steadily, and although the traditional ideal of culture is strongly fortified in existing institutions, and maintained by old habits and associations, it is undermined on every side, and is certain to give place to more comprehensive and rational views of what constitutes a properly cultivated man.
The leading criticisms of Professor Huxley's book, as we have said, illustrate this position decisively. They not only show that the question is uppermost and urgent with the thinking classes, but that science has already so clearly established its main positions that the old resistance is futile, and that a revised and enlarged conception of culture has become inevitable. Professor Huxley is even reproached by distinguished literary authorities for not fully perceiving the strength of his own case, and how far science has already pushed its educational conquests. It is even maintained that the scientific spirit and method have so far penetrated and revolutionized the classical system as to have given it a new lease of life; so that it will be conserved in future only by virtue of what it has borrowed from the progressive agency which it has hitherto so desperately resisted. The London "Saturday Review" discourses upon the subject as follows:
It may seem a strange thing to say, but Professor Huxley has underrated the strength and the victories of science. They are not confined to the bounds of natural history or physics, or to any or every branch of what we call the natural sciences. The modern spirit of science is too mighty and subtile not to penetrate, into every region of the field of human knowledge. It is transforming and requickening the humanities themselves; and we make bold to say that classical studies, so far from waning before the light of science, are awakening and waxing to a new Renaissance of which not we, but our children and children's children, will see the full splendor. What is it that Sir Josiah Mason's foundation excludes, and in Professor Huxley's judgment rightly, from the benefits and encouragement of his bounty? "Mere literary education and instruction," such mere drilling in language as until a recent date was understood to be the staple of our so-called classical learning. But our universities are now awake to the truth that knowledge of the ancient languages is an instrument, not an end in itself. The end is another kind of knowledge, and knowledge not undeserving to be compared for worth with the knowledge of things and of nature. It is the knowledge of man in the works of his hands and his thought, of the men from whom we inherit our laws, our art, and our civilization; the praise of famous men, and our fathers that begat us. Socrates and Plato, the fathers of philosophy; Pericles, the father of statesmanship; Alexander, the father of conquering civilization; Ulpian and Papinian, the fathers of scientific law; Trajan and the Antonines, of administration and government; Homer, the father of poetry; Phidias and Praxiteles, of sculpture—these last the masters' of all followers in their craft unto this day—and Aristotle, the father of science itself; surely of these men and their work we can not know too much, and even a little knowledge of them would be ill exchanged, for a man who does not mean to be a chemist, for a little knowledge of the atomic weights of elements.
The criticism of the London "Academy" still further illustrates the advance of rational ideas on this subject:
He points out, near the end of the essay, that the higher sciences, those that deal with man and society, can only be constructed by the application of the methods of physical science. As regards the literary side of education, he expresses the opinion that "for those who mean to make science their serious occupation; or who intend to follow the profession of medicine; or who have to enter early upon the business of life; ... classical education is a mistake." It is possible to get sufficient culture out of modern literature—perhaps out of English literature alone.
This last remark is very important in its bearing upon the general issue between classical and scientific studies. It is a concession of what we have constantly maintained, that, if the study of Greek and Latin is to be worth anything at all, it must consume a portion of the time devoted to education that is out of all relation to the value of the acquisitions, compared with others that are necessarily excluded. If that time is not given to them, the acquisitions are so worthless that the effort is wasted; but, if the full time is taken by the classical tongues, there is no room left for any fullness or thoroughness of scientific study. Hence the need, as the "Academy" remarks, of beginning so early with the Greek and Latin that the pupil is unable to form an opinion of the uses and value of his studies. But this period of immature judgment is exactly the proper time for the training of the powers of observation and the acquisition of elementary science. These early years, therefore, belong rightfully, and by the laws of the mental constitution, to science and the rudimentary study of natural things. It is a sufficient outrage in itself to put children at the dead languages, whereby there is certain to be engendered a hatred of study; but it is no less an outrage upon ​the childish nature to neglect those studies which are best suited to this stage of his unfolding faculties.