LITERATURE AXD SCIENCE. 



power with theirs, be felt and acknowledged, and their place in educa- 

 tion be secured. 



Let us, all of us, avoid as much as possible any invidious compari- 

 son between the merits of humane letters, as means of education, and 

 the merits of the natural sciences. But when some President of a 



tion for Mechanical Science insists on making the comparison, and 

 tells us that " he who in his training has substituted literature and his- 

 tory for natural science has chosen the less useful alternative,*' let us 

 sav to him that the student of humane letters onlv will at least know 

 also the great general conceptions brought in by modern physical sci- 

 ence ; for science, as Professor Huxley hjh, forces them upon us alL 

 But the student of the natural sciences only will, by our very hypothe- 

 . know nothing of humane letters ; not to mention that in setting 

 himself to be perpetually accumulating natural knowledge, he sets 

 himself to do what only specialists have the gift for doing genially. 

 And so he will be unsatisfied, or at any rate incomplete, and even more 

 incomplete, than the student of humane letters. 



I ooce mentioned in a school-report how a young man in a training 

 college, having to paraphrase the passage in " Macbeth " beginning, 



Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased 



turned this line into, " Can you not wait upon the lunatic ? " And I 

 remarked what a curious state of things it would be if every pupil of 

 our primary schools knew that, when a taper burns, the wax is con- 

 verted into carbonic acid and water, and thought at the same time 

 that a good paraphrase for 



. inst thou not minister to a mir 



was. u Can you not wait upon the lunatic ? " If one is driven to 

 choose, I think I would rather have a young person ignorant about the 

 converted wax, but aware that " Can you not wait upon the lunatic : " 

 is bad, than a young person whose education had left things the other 

 wav. 



Or to go higher than the pupils of our primary schools. I have in 

 my mind's eye a member of Parliament who g s to travel in America, 

 who relates his travels, and who shows a reallv masterlv knowledge of 

 the geology of the country and of its mining capabilities, but who ends 

 by gravely suggesting that the United St should borrow a prince 



from our roval familv and should make him their kine, and should 

 create a House of Lords of great landed proprietors after the pattern 

 of ours ; and then America, he thinks, would have her future happ 

 secured. Surely, in this case, the President of the Section for Me- 

 chanical Science would himself hardlv sav that our member of Parlia- 

 ment, by concentrating himself upon geology and mining and so on, 

 and not attending: to literature and historv. had "chosen the more u~ 

 ful alternative 



If, then, there ^e to be separation and option between humane let- 



