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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



a narrow, utilitarian culture, but his 

 main point is that it breaks down in 

 presence of the higher human interests 

 in which we are all mainly concerned. 

 He declares of its expositors : 



"It is assumed, in nearly all that many 

 of them say about education, that it is with 

 Nature only that man has to struggle in the 

 pursuit of happiness ; and that, if he can only 

 discover what to eat, drink, and avoid, how 

 mines may best be worked, and crops raised, 

 and distance traversed, and storms foreseen, 

 and the state of the market transmitted, he 

 will have solved the problem of living. . . . 

 It now begins to be discovered, however, 

 that, no matter how successful we may be in 

 wresting her secrets from Nature, or how 

 familiar we make ourselves with her pro- 

 cesses, or however conscientiously we may 

 adapt our lives to her requirements, the best 

 scientific education, after all, only half fits 

 us for the battle of life, and for the simple 

 reason that the battle has to be fought not 

 only with hard, inexorable physical sur- 

 roundings, but with very troublesome and 

 mysterious social surroundings. In other 

 words, in making a career, we have to deal 

 with our brother man as well as with earth 

 and air and water. Let .us mine never so 

 successfully, we have to settle with the 

 crowd at the mouth of the shaft before we 

 can carry home our earnings. Let us manu- 

 facture never so deftly, we have to establish 

 a rule of distribution before our science or 

 our dexterity does us any good. Let us 

 build railroads as we may, we have to come 

 to an agreement as to who shall work them, 

 and what he shall receive, before they profit 

 us. Heat, and light, and electricity, and 

 steam, are great monarchs, but they cannot 

 raise us out of grovelling barbarism, unless 

 we can come to some understanding with 

 our neighbors as to the ends and modes of 

 living. The study of man, therefore, is 

 really the most important of all studies, and 

 must always continue to be so. Nothing 

 can take its place in any curriculum. People 

 must learn how to live in society before they 

 can get any lasting benefit from science, and 

 before they can have and retain any thing 

 worth the name of art ; and this they cannot 

 do without observing human nature as it is, 

 and without making themselves acquainted 

 with the past experience of the race. Now, 

 the past experience of the race is found in 

 literature, and Languages, and laws, and 

 monuments, or, in other words, in things of 

 which our physicists are apt to make light." 



We entirely agree with the writer 

 as to the supreme importance of the 

 study of man and his relations, but 

 we totally dissent from his method of 

 studying them. "What we want to 

 know concerning man and society is 

 the laws of their constitution and ac- 

 tion, and this it is the proper business 

 of science to ascertain. It is not the 

 office of literature to elucidate natural 

 laws. We have had the literary method 

 in its full power for thousands of years, 

 without dispelling the illusions and 

 obscurities which have shrouded the 

 nature of man and human society. 

 Literature was both incompetent in 

 method and destitute of all the neces- 

 sary data. Before man and society 

 could be understood, it was necessary 

 first to have correct notions of the 

 workings and order of Nature. Light 

 could only be thrown upon the higher 

 phenomena, as the lower were first ex- 

 plained. To the preliminary work, lit- 

 erature and the literary method con- 

 tributed absolutely nothing. We owe 

 entirely to modern science that whole 

 series of preliminary revelations con- 

 cerning the method and operations of 

 Nature, by which it becomes possible 

 to interpret the individual and social 

 phenomena of man. And to science 

 we owe not only the solution of the 

 preliminary problems, upon which the 

 higher depend, but we are also in- 

 debted to it for that long and severe 

 discipline, in the quest of truth that 

 apprenticeship of centuries in the mas- 

 tery of mental methods which are 

 necessary to engage with the most 

 difficult of all investigations, the un- 

 ravelling of the complexities of hu- 

 man nature and the social state. Is 

 all this preparation to go for nothing ? 

 Are we to be told that science is inca- 

 pable of carrying on its own work, and 

 that the agency which was incompetent 

 to begin it is still able to complete it ? 

 Undoubtedly " the past experience of 

 the race is found in literature, and 

 languages, and laws, and monuments," 



