75 o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ters on the one hand and the natural sciences on the other, the great 

 majority of mankind, all who have not exceptional and overpowering 

 aptitudes for the study of nature, would do well, I can not but think, 

 to choose to be educated in humane letters rather than in the natural 

 sciences. Letters will call out their being at more points, wiU make 

 them live more. 



And indeed, to say the truth, I can not really think that humane 

 letters are in danger of being thrust out from their leading place in 

 education, in spite of the array of authorities against them at this mo- 

 ment. So long as human nature is what it is, their attractions will 

 remain irresistible. They will be studied more rationally, but they 

 will not lose their place. What will happen will rather be that there 

 will be crowded into education other matters besides, far too many ; 

 there will be, perhaps, a period of unsettlement and confusion and false 

 tendency ; but letters will not in the end lose their leading place. If 

 they lose it for a time, they will get it back again. We shall be 

 brought back to them by our wants and aspirations. And a poor 

 humanist may possess his soul in patience, neither strive nor cry, admit 

 the energy and brilliancy of the partisans of physical science, and their 

 present favor with the public, to be far greater than his own, and still 

 have a happy faith that the nature of things works silently on behalf 

 of the studies which he loves, and that, while we shall all have to ac- 

 quaint ourselves with the great results reached by modern science, and 

 to give ourselves as much training in its disciplines as we can conven- 

 iently carry, yet the majority of men will always require humane let- 

 ters, and so much the more as they have the more and the greater 

 results of science to relate to the need in man for conduct, and to the 

 need in him for beauty. 



And so we have turned in favor of the humanities the "No icisdom, 

 nor understandi?ig, nor counsel, against the Eternal!" which seemed 

 against them when we started. The " hairy quadruped furnished with 

 a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits," carried hidden 

 in his nature, apparently, something destined to develop into a neces- 

 sity for humane letters. The time warns me to stop ; but most prob- 

 ably, if we went on, we might arrive at the further conclusion that 

 our ancestor carried in his nature, also, a necessity for Greek. The 

 attackers of- the established course of study think that against Greek, 

 at any rate, they have irresistible arguments. Literature may perhaps 

 be needed in education, they say ; but why on earth should it be 

 Greek literature? Why not French or German? nay, "has not an 

 Englishman models in his own literature of every kind of excellence ?" 

 As before, it is not on any weak pleadings of my own that I rely for 

 convincing the gainsayer ; it is on the constitution of human nature 

 itself and on the instinct of self-preservation in humanity. The in- 

 stinct for beauty is set in human nature, as surely as the instinct for 



