UNIVERSITY EDUCATION AND NATIONAL LIFE. 655 



lows : " Intellectual culture, at the end of the nineteenth century, must 

 include as its most essential element a scientific habit of mind; and a 

 scientific habit of mind can only be acquired by the methodical study 

 of some part at least of what the human race has come scientifically to 

 know." 



There is nothing in that statement to which exception need be taken 

 by the firmest believer in the value of literary education. The more 

 serious and methodical studies of literature demand, in some measure, 

 a scientific habit of mind, in the largest sense of that expression; such 

 a habit is necessary, for instance, in the study of history, in the scien- 

 tific study of language and in the ' higher criticism.' Nor, again, 

 does any one question that the studies of the natural sciences are instru- 

 ments of intellectual culture of the highest order. The powers of 

 observation and of reasoning are thereby disciplined in manifold ways ; 

 and the scientific habit of mind so formed is in itself an education. 

 To define and describe the modes in which that discipline operates on 

 the mind is a task for the man of science; it could not, of course, be 

 attempted by any one whose own training has been wholly literary. 

 But there is one fact which may be noted by any intelligent observer. 

 Many of our most eminent teachers of science, and more especially of 

 science in its technical applications, insist on a demand which, in the 

 provinces of science, is analogous to a demand made in the province of 

 literary study by those who wish such study to be a true instrument of 

 culture. As the latter desire that literature should be a means of edu- 

 cating the student's intelligence and sympathies, so that teachers of 

 science, whether pure or applied, insist on the necessity of cultivating 

 the scientific imagination, of developing a power of initiative in the 

 learner, and of drawing out his inventive faculties. They urge that, 

 in the interests of the technical industries themselves, the great need 

 is for a training which shall be more than technical — which shall be 

 thoroughly scientific. Wherever scientific and technical education 

 attains its highest forms in institutions of university rank, the aim is 

 not merely to form skilled craftsmen, but to produce men who can con- 

 tribute to the advance of their respective sciences and arts, men who 

 can originate and invent. There is a vast world-competition in scien- 

 tific progress, on which industrial and commercial progress must ulti- 

 mately depend; and it is of national importance for every country that 

 it should have men who are not merely expert in things already known, 

 but who can take their places in the forefront of the onward march. 



But meanwhile the claims of literary culture, as part of the general 

 higher education, must not be neglected or undervalued. It may be 

 that, in tbe prescientific age, those claims were occasionally stated in a 

 somewhat exaggerated or one-sided manner. But it remains as true as 

 ever that literary studies form an indispensable element of a really 



