REMARKS ON THE INFLUENCE OF SCIENCE. 83 



ture because of supposed witchcraft. In India it is still believed in 

 some parts that small-pox is a demon, and efforts are made to pro- 

 pitiate it, so that, if unnecessary torture and small-pox are evils, we 

 are better for the light which the scientific man has thrown on these 

 subjects. Still, it must be admitted that in particular ways the de- 

 velopment of science has produced new evils as well as new benefits, 

 and for that matter no sort of progress is made without collateral evils. 

 But the question then remained as to the remedy, and in his opinion 

 that remedy could be very shortly described as more science and 

 not less. There is no sort of conflict between a scientific and a 

 literary education. Everybody ought to have some literary knowl- 

 edge, and everybody ought to be taught the first principles of science ; 

 even a smattering of chemistry might be useful in a literary pursuit. 

 He himself had found what little smattering of science he had ac- 

 quired at Cambridge and elsewhere of the greatest use in every other 

 kind of study. The habits of thought and feeling acquired by the 

 study even of mathematics, which he took to be the most uninterest- 

 ing science there is to most individuals, are very useful when one 

 comes to need accurate thinking anywhere, even in matters purely 

 literary. 



" It had been urged that science prevents a man from taking the 

 same sort of pleasure in nature as he would do without it. Words- 

 worth was very fond of saying this, and of denouncing generally the 

 scientific position. But the reason of that was, that Wordsworth 

 knew nothing about science. The result was, that there is no other 

 instance of so great a poet leaving off writing great poems so early 

 in his career. All his finest poems were written in his early life ; and 

 the reason is, that he went mooning about the mountains by himself, 

 and did not get any new thoughts. In contrast to him Goethe stands 

 out as a man great in both science and poetry, and is a typical example 

 of the way in which they react on one another. Whenever it was sug- 

 gested that science is opposed to a love of nature, the speaker always 

 thought of the greatest man of science of modern times, Mr. Darwin, 

 whose books are, apart from their scientific value, quite delightful in 

 their literary style. No one, for instance, could read his * Voyage in 

 the Beagle ' without seeing that Darwin's love of science was only a 

 part of his love of nature. There is, indeed, no conflict between the 

 two, and a man can not strengthen the one side of his nature without 

 at the same time contributing to strengthen the other. Indeed, the 

 reason why so many of our living poets are inferior to those who wrote 

 at the beginning of this century, or to those of an earlier generation 

 still, is just that they have not had the pluck to look science in the 

 face, but have only taken a passing and sideway glance at it. 



" An important point in the argument namely, the relation of sci- 

 L ence to morality was suggested by the remarks that had been made 

 on the subject of vivisection. The vivisection question, in the first 





