SCIENCE AND CULTURE. 165 



stincts he might safely reckon upon earning the reputation, and proba- 

 bly upon suffering the fate of a sorcerer. 



Had the "Western world been left to itself in Chinese isolation, 

 there is no saying how long this state of things might have endured. 

 But, happily, it was not left to itself. Even earlier than the thirteenth 

 century, the development of Moorish civilization in Spain and the great 

 movement of the Crusades had introduced the leaven which, from that 

 day to this, has never ceased to work. At first through the interme- 

 diation of Arabic translations, afterward by the study of the origi- 

 nals, the western nations of Europe became acquainted with the writ- 

 ings of the ancient jjhilosophers and poets, and in time with the whole 

 of the vast literature of antiquity. 



Whatever there was of high intellectual aspiration or dominant 

 capacity in Italy, France, Germany, and England, spent itself for 

 centuries in taking possession of the rich inheritance left by the dead 

 civilizations of Greece and Rome. Marvelously aided by the inven- 

 tion of printing, classical learning spread and flourished. Those who 

 possessed it prided themselves on having attained the highest culture 

 then within the reach of mankind. 



And justly. For, saving Dante on his solitary pinnacle, there was 

 no figure in modern literature, at the time of the Renascence, to com- 

 pare with the men of antiquity ; there was no art to compete with 

 their sculpture ; there was no physical science but that which Greece 

 had created. Above all, there was no other example of perfect intel- 

 lectual freedom of the unhesitating acceptance of reason as the sole 

 guide to truth and arbiter of conduct. 



The new learning necessarily soon exerted a profound influence 

 upon education. The language of the monks and schoolmen seemed 

 little better than gibberish to scholars fresh from Virgil and Cicero, 

 and the study of Latin was placed upon a new foundation. Moreover, 

 Latin itself ceased to afford the sole key to knowledge. The student 

 who sought the highest thought of antiquity found only a second- 

 hand reflection of it in Roman literature, and turned his face to the 

 full light of the Greeks. And after a battle, not altogether dissimilar 

 to that which is at present being fought over the teaching of physical 

 science, the study of Greek was recognized as an essential element of 

 all higher education. 



Thus the Humanists, as they were called, won the day ; and the 

 great reform which they effected was of incalculable service to man- 

 kind. But the Nemesis of all reformers is finality ; and the reformers 

 of education, like those of religion, fell into the profound but common 

 error of mistaking the beginning for the end of the work of reforma- 

 tion. The representatives of the Humanists, in the nineteenth cen- 

 tury, take their stand upon classical education as the sole avenue to 

 culture, as firmly as if we were still in the age of Renascence. Yet 

 surely the present intellectual relations of the modern and the ancient 



