SCIENCE IN ITS RELATION TO LITERATURE. i 7 i 



which have enabled other countries to achieve victories our system of 

 public schools is sinking into decrepitude and decay for want of a new 

 stimulus. Give it this in the shape of lessons in modern science, in all 

 its freedom and amplitude, and it will be infused with new life. Give 

 it this, and the education of our youth will be something more and 

 something higher than injecting into the mind several new languages, 

 to the sad neglect of the mother tongue, and loading the memory with 

 a useless mass of rules, and definitions, and other abstract forms, which 

 are forgotten as soon as the student enters upon the stage of practical 

 life. 



But to return from what may seem a digression. The influence 

 exerted by the march of modern science upon history and historical 

 composition is even more direct and decided than its influence upon 

 poetry. Dealing with the actions of man either in his individual or 

 collective capacity, even the best historians have been in the habit, 

 until within a few years past, of regarding them as the result either 

 of self-directed will or of special providences. Consequently their 

 pages are filled with the marvels wrought by heroes and conquerors, 

 particularly those who were regarded as the especial favorites of Heaven. 

 No margin has been left in these pages for the operation of general 

 laws, guiding and controlling human conduct. And it is only within 

 a recent period that the theory has been formulated that the progress 

 of society is not to be attributed to the casual disturbances made by 

 powerful individuals, or to the ascription of supernatural means, but 

 wholly to the force of laws working out their results without the in- 

 terference of either divine or human agency. This contribution, or 

 rather new direction to history, constituting by far its most essential 

 feature and element, we owe to science. A few great minds, chief 

 amono- whom may be mentioned Comte in France and Herbert Spen- 

 cer in Great Britain, taking their stand upon the recognized principles 

 and harmonies prevailing in the material universe, have transferred 

 this grand conception of law and order amid apparent discordances 

 into the sphere of human societies. Here, as well as in the material 

 universe, the relations existing between different communities, and be- 

 tween the individual members of each, are relations due to the inter- 

 action of natural forces ; and here, as well as in the material universe, 

 the changes that have been wrought out by these forces are changes 

 analogous to those we see exhibited in the consolidation of the crust 

 of the earth, and in the genesis and growth of the solar and stellar 

 systems changes, that is to say, from a state of homogeneity to greater 

 and greater complexity and apparent elaboration of detail. 



Now, this evident leaning of historians, in common with almost 

 every other class of writers, at the present day, toward the theory of 

 evolution, is so great, and so much is expected of them on account of 

 this theory, that if they were practically to disregard it, in writing 

 history, they would be almost left without readers. I might go further, 



