842 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



%tiitov r s gaMs. 



SCIENCE AND CULTURE. 



"\ \7"E do not know from whom the 

 VV philosopher Locke quotes the 

 saying, " Non vitce sed scholce dis- 

 cimus" but he translates it well, 

 "We learn not to live, but to dis- 

 pute." The adage has reference to 

 the old systems of education which 

 had for their aim neither the dis- 

 covery of truth nor the perfecting of 

 the human faculties in any broad 

 sense, but the fitting of the individ- 

 ual to take his place in a world of 

 conventional ideas and discuss con- 

 ventional topics upon conventional 

 lines. In other words, the prepara- 

 tion was for school, not for life, the 

 whole subsequent career of the indi- 

 vidual being regarded simply as a 

 prolongation of the intellectual in- 

 fluences and discipline of the school. 

 That system, which was ecclesiasti- 

 cal in its origin, has now, save for 

 strictly ecclesiastical purposes, passed 

 away. We consider life as the end 

 of school and not school as the end 

 of life. 



It may be questioned, however, 

 whether we have as yet thoroughly 

 adapted our educational methods to 

 this change of standpoint. Do we as 

 yet take a sufficiently broad view of 

 life ? If we conceive life narrowly as 

 essentially a business struggle, and 

 adapt our procedure to that concep- 

 tion, the results will show very lit- 

 tle relation to the larger and truer 

 conception according to which life 

 means development of faculty, ac- 

 tivity of function, and a harmonious 

 adjustment of relations between man 

 and man. If, again, we make too 

 much of knowledge that has only a 

 conventional value, having little or 

 no bearing on the understanding of 

 things or the accomplishment of 



useful work, we are so far falling 

 into the old error of ''learning for 

 school." The address by Sir Archi- 

 bald Geikie, which we published last 

 month, gives a useful caution against 

 undervaluing ''the older learning." 

 The older learning can certainly be 

 made an effective instrument for the 

 cultivation of taste, of sympathy, and 

 of intellectual accuracy along certain 

 lraes. It tends further, we believe, 

 to promote a certain intellectual self- 

 l'espect, which is a valuable quality. 

 In the study of language and litera- 

 ture the human mind surveys, as it 

 were, its own peculiar possessions, 

 and thus acquires a sense of propri- 

 etorship which a study of the exter- 

 nal world can hardly give. Still, it 

 is well to cultivate a consciousness of 

 the essentially limited and arbitrary 

 nature of such knowledge. It is im- 

 portant, we may admit, to have a 

 good text of such an author as 

 Chaucer; but the minutiae into which 

 critics of his text enter can not be 

 said to possess any broad human in- 

 terest. Whether he wrote this word 

 or that word, adopted this spelling 

 or that, can not be a question on 

 which much depends ; and could one 

 know the exact truth on a thousand 

 such points, he would not really be 

 much the wiser. Among Chaucer 

 scholars he could speak with a good 

 deal of confidence ; but the knowl- 

 edge of these details would not really 

 help to round out any useful system 

 of knowledge, nor could any single 

 fact possess the illuminating' power 

 which sometimes belongs to some 

 single and, at first sight, unimpor- 

 tant fact in the realm of natural 

 knowledge. 



This is not said with any inten- 

 tion of disparaging the culture that 



