VIE CHOW ON THE TEACHING OF SCIENCE. 



75 



with dread and suspicion on the teachers of it. I 

 am not attaching importance to the personalities 

 of orthodox polemic, which, having "no case," 

 is compelled to "abuse the plaintiff's attorney." 

 This symptom is of weight only as a symptom, 

 and as such is understood by the intelligent pub- 

 lic. But there are men, high iu literature, in 

 statesmanship, and in art, whose good opinion, 

 founded on knowledge, every man of sense must 

 count desirable, who yet withhold that good opin- 

 ion from the scientific teacher and the work that 

 he is doing. Notwithstanding this fact, I have 

 no fear that the attitude of mind of these men 

 will be intensified, or will become more general ; 

 because it seems to me to be clearly traceable to 

 two circumstances, both of which are disappear- 

 ing. I mean that there are faults on both sides, 

 and that both faults are being mended. 



The first fault is on the side of the scientific 

 student ; and yet it is not altogether his fault, 

 because it gomes of the great change which is 

 passing over our educational system. We have 

 all been learning science — that is, organized com- 

 mon-sense — at school for some centuries, and did 

 not know what it was. But, of recent times, our 

 science has received enormous additions, partly 

 new sense, partly fresh organized ; and these have 

 now to be taught. The first generation of teachers 

 of the new science could naturally not learn it in 

 places where the old science, which we called a 

 liberal education, was to be learned. Some of 

 them learned both, with much labor, and search- 

 ing, and picking up out of stray corners ; but some 

 went without a liberal education altogether. And 

 perhaps a few of these, when they found what a de- 

 mand there was for them, and how important they 

 were, may have fallen into a mistake, and taken 

 their half or quarter culture for a whole culture. 

 Now, when a man not only mistakes his half or 

 quarter culture for a whole culture, but thinks 

 that the culture which he does not possess is silly 

 and worthless, then people who have received 

 a liberal education are apt to think him a bore. 

 And it would be a hard matter to prove them 

 altogether in the wrong. 



But this race, which bores a few and educates 

 the many, is patiently and surely exterminating 

 itself. As the new science makes itself at home 

 in the schoolhouse of the old, as it is more taught 

 and in a more civilized manner, the mind of the stu- 

 dent balances itself, and recovers its sense of pro- 

 portion. Exact observation goes naturally enough 

 with justice and simplicity of statement ; the 

 great inductions of human life and feeling lighting 

 up by resemblance and contrast the great induc- 



tions of physics. Dynamics and Prose Composi- 

 tion have met together ; Literature and Biology 

 have kissed each other. Perhaps not yet, but the 

 good time is coming. And in that time every 

 scientific teacher will have received such a many- 

 sided culture, and will be no longer a bore to any- 

 body. Above all, he will have studied that His- 

 tory of Culture itself, which is the great unifier 

 and justifier and purifier of all our teaching. 



The other fault is on the side of those who 

 dislike the new science ; it is the fault of being 

 profoundly ignorant of it. No public schoolboy 

 thinks a man uncanny because he knows a great 

 deal of Greek ; no member of Parliament imagines 

 that a careful study of ancient history, or even a 

 revolutionary view about the " Iliad," might be- 

 come a dangerous ally of socialism. It is because 

 he has learned a little Greek himself, and knows 

 what it is like. But if a man has morphology at 

 his fingers' ends, or is profound about organic 

 radicles, that is a man to beware of. There is no 

 knowing what theories he does not secretly foster. 

 Or else he is a mere impostor, and gets a great 

 reputation for pottering away at some silly trifles, 

 being really no better than an official in the Her- 

 alds' Office: so hinted some irreverent young 

 scapegrace in the prologue to the Westminster 

 Play. Now, it is clear that a statesman who thinks 

 a decimal coinage means the keeping of shilling 

 and pence accounts in terms of decimal fractions, 

 or a musician who really sees no difference be- 

 tween Graham Bell's telephone and Wheatstone's 

 telephonic concert, may well be expected to mis- 

 judge exact students, and their studies, and their 

 aims. But in the good time coming, when "there 

 shall be no member of Parliament who does not 

 know as much of science as a scholar in one of 

 our elementary schools," when also benevolent 

 old ladies may be expected to know one end of a 

 Guinea-pig from the other, all this will be changed. 

 The man of science will be no more uncanny than 

 the Greek scholar is now. And we may be quite 

 sure that the average Englishman is not going to 

 see a man bullied for merely knowing a little more 

 of what he himself learned a little of at school. 

 When he has learned a little science himself, and 

 knows what it is like, he will have, it is true, a 

 less superstitious reverence for the authority of 

 the investigator; but then also he will regard him 

 as a citizen, having as good a right to be trusted 

 and respected, and to say his say upon matters 

 of common interest, as anybody else. 



Such distrust or dislike of science, then, as is 

 to be found among us, is due to circumstances 

 which are rapidly disappearing, to misunderstand- 



