THE RIVALRY OF THE HIGHER SENSES. 767 



a large extent in our older colleges and in European universities. 

 Among the subjects thus contracted by the pressure of the mate- 

 rial arts and sciences may be mentioned mathematics, studied as 

 an end, not as a means ; logic, the science of thought ; ethics, the 

 science of conduct ; classical literature ; music, the most cultivat- 

 ing of the fine arts ; and, to some extent, history and politics. 

 Language is much studied, but more for utility than for culture. 

 Hence Greek and Latin give way to the modern languages. But 

 even language does not check our eye-mindedness. Here, if any- 

 where, one would suppose that the ear and tongue would be 

 trained. Curiously enough, it is again the eye and hand. Greek 

 and Latin are usually studied by sight. We learn to read them 

 and possibly to write them, but not to understand or speak them. 

 This is to some extent true also of modern languages. The French 

 and German learned in our schools and colleges are the written 

 rather than the spoken languages. Strange though it is, since lan- 

 guage is the rightful inheritance of the ear and tongue, and is the 

 very groundwork of our social life, that our young people should 

 be found studying it silently in their several places, thumbing 

 their pens and their printed dictionaries, yet the explanation is 

 not far to seek. We are a reading rather than a speaking people, 

 and the written language is of more use to us than the spoken. 

 We care more to be able to consult French and German books 

 than to converse with French and German people. To be sure, 

 there is at present a wide-spread movement among language- 

 teachers to correct this evil ; but, as a fact, language is studied in 

 the same old way, and few students seem to understand that a 

 language is not known unless it is known to the ear and tongue. 



If now we seek the causes of our prevailing and increasing eye- 

 mindedness, we shall find them chiefly in the invention and rapid 

 extension of printing, engraving, and photography. These are the 

 arts that have drawn so heavily upon our visual resources and 

 made it so easy to dispense with the ear and the memory. The 

 yearly increasing time given to reading and writing, compared 

 with the time given to listening and speaking, is apparent to every- 

 body. The present generation is a book-and-newspaper-reading 

 generation. We get our politics from the daily paper, our art from 

 the magazine, our science from the text-book, our amusement from 

 the novel, our gossip from the biography, our facts from the cy- 

 clopaedia. We speak of the man of education as the " well-read " 

 man. He reads, of course, extensively in some special subject con- 

 nected with his work or profession. As a foundation for this, how- 

 ever, he has read some standard works in mathematics, or philoso- 

 phy, or physical science, or history, or philology. Of the classical 

 writers he has, of course, read a few, such for instance as Shake- 

 speare, Milton, Goethe, Schiller, Byron, Wordsworth, Burns, Ten- 



