654 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



particular moment, assigned to culture was narrower or wider, the instru- 

 ment of culture with which he was chiefly concerned was always liter- 

 ature. Culture requires us, he said, to know ourselves and the world; 

 and, as a means to this end, we must ' know the best that has been 

 thought and said in the world.' By literature, then — as he once said 

 in reply to Huxley — he did not mean merely belles lettres; he included 

 the books which record the great results of science. But he insisted 

 mainly on the best poetry and the highest eloquence. In comparing 

 science and literature as general instruments of education, Arnold ob- 

 served that the power of intellect and knowledge is not the only one 

 that goes to the building up of human life; there is also the power of 

 conduct and the power of beauty. Literature, he said, serves to bring 

 knowledge into relation with our sense for conduct and our sense for 

 beauty. The greater and more fruitful is the progress of science, the 

 greater is the need for humane letters, to establish and maintain a 

 harmony between the new knowledge and those profound, unchanging 

 instincts of our nature. 



It is not surprising that, in the last third of the nineteenth century, 

 Arnold's fascinating advocacy of literature, as the paramount agency 

 of culture, should have incurred some criticism from the standpoint of 

 science and of philosophy. The general drift of this criticism was 

 that the claim which he made for literature, though just in many 

 respects, was carried too far ; and also that his conception of intellectual 

 culture was inadequate. As a representative of such criticism, I would 

 take the eminent philosopher whose own definition of culture has 

 already been cited, Henry Sidgwick: for no one, I think, could put 

 more incisively the particular point with which we are here concerned. 

 " Matthew Arnold's method of seeking truth," says Sidgwick, " is a sur- 

 vival from a prescientific age. He is a man of letters pure and simple; 

 and often seems quite serenely unconscious of the intellectual limita- 

 tions of his type." The critic proceeds to enumerate some things 

 which, as he affirms, are ' quite alien to the habitual thought of a mere 

 man of letters.' They are such as these : " How the crude matter of 

 common experience is reduced to the order and system which consti- 

 tutes it an object of scientific knowledge; how the precisest possible 

 conceptions are applied in the exact apprehension and analysis of facts, 

 and how by facts thus established and analyzed the conceptions in their 

 turn are gradually rectified; how the laws of nature are ascertained 

 by the combined processes of induction and deduction, provisional as- 

 sumption and careful verification; how a general hypothesis is used to 

 guide inquiry, and, after due comparison with ascertained particulars, 

 becomes an accepted theory; and how a theory, receiving further con- 

 firmation, takes its place finally as an organic part of a vast, living, 

 ever-growing system of knowledge." Sidgwick's conclusion is as fol- 



