THE MEANING OF SCIENCE TO MANKIND 7 



shall discover this procedure only by long and painstaking 

 study. Merely to have changed time-honored standards is 

 no guarantee that the new ones are final. If analysis of 

 educational experience shows that the only road to an under- 

 standing of the ancient humanism lies through the original 

 languages, and if it appears, as a further result of scientific 

 analysis, that herein lies the greatest reservoir of humanistic 

 thought, study of these languages will continue to be widely 

 required. If, as in the case with our ethical ideals, the 

 average man in a busy world can secure the essence of this 

 humanism by means of translations and interpretations, the 

 classical languages will be primarily for the classical scholar, 

 and not for those who merely aspire to a liberal education. 

 The acid of the scientific method is being applied in educa- 

 tion. In time it will destroy the baser metal, not alone in the 

 teaching of the classics but in the teaching of science as well. 

 In education, as in other fields, the day of passive acceptance 

 of what is because it has been seems gone never to return. 

 Here, as elsewhere, an appeal to the facts results in the undo- 

 ing of traditional authority and establishes the authority of 

 science. The changing classical requirements in modern 

 education illustrate our point, although such changes are 

 insignificant when compared with the possible revolution in 

 education as a whole. 



Recent changes in religious belief may be cited as a further 

 example of the influence of scientific thought. By insensible 

 degrees, theology has been losing its hold upon the western 

 mind. The early Christian cosmogony has long been dis- 

 carded by the educated laity, and is not taken seriously by 

 many of the clergy. What the Copernican Theory did to the 

 Heaven and Hell of an earlier period, the Higher Criticism, 

 which consists of the method of science applied to the study 

 of the Old and New Testaments, is doing in our own day to 

 belief in a revealed religion. Facts! Facts! Facts that can- 

 not be denied have everywhere rendered ancient beliefs un- 

 tenable. Wonderfully interesting legends and fables the 



