DEMOCRATIC CULTURE 279 



been taken from the laboratory and pure science to 

 make a country doctor. Nor can democracy rest sat- 

 isfied with any substitute for culture which would 

 disregard what is great in literature, in art, and in 

 philosophy, or which would ignore history, and the 

 languages and civilizations of the past, as if culture 

 had its beginning yesterday. 



In this chapter we have considered democracy and 

 democratic culture from the standpoint of three 

 writers on education, a Greek aristocrat, a German 

 advocate of the domination of the classes over the 

 masses, and an Oxford professor, all by training and 

 temperament more or less hostile critics. A more 

 direct procedure might have been employed to es- 

 tablish the claim of science to afford a basis of intel- 

 lectual and social homogeneity. A brilliant literary 

 man of the present day considers that places in the 

 first ranks of literature are reserved for the doctri- 

 nally heterodox. None of the great writers of Europe, 

 he asserts, have been the adherents of the traditional 

 faith. (He makes an exception in favor of Racine : 

 but this is a needless concession, for Racine owed 

 his early education to the Port Royalists, became 

 alienated from them and wrote under the inspiration 

 of the idea of the moral sufficiency of worldly honor ; 

 then, after an experience that shook his faith in his 

 own code, he returned to the early religious influ- 

 ences in his life and composed his Esther and Atha- 

 lie.) But, unlike literature, the study of science is 

 not exclusive. In the front ranks of science stand the 

 devout Roman Catholic Pasteur, the Anglican Dar- 

 win, the Unitarian Priestley, the Calvinist Faraday, 

 the Quakers Dalton, Young, and Lister, Huxley the 



