558 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



deavoring to set forth. " The fear of 

 the Lord," says an admirable proverb, 

 " is the beginning of wisdom " ; and the 

 first lesson in culture is the correction 

 of that error to which, as Bacon has 

 pointed out, all untutored minds are 

 prone, of supposing in nature a greater 

 simplicity than really exists. 



Now, the contribution which science 

 brings to culture is this : 



1. It imparts actual Itnowledge of 

 the conditio^ and constitution of the 

 external world. 



2. It trains the observing and rea- 

 soning faculties. 



3. It imparts a knowledge of its 

 own methods, and by so doing gives 

 the mind a new consciousness of its 

 powers ; for the methods of science are 

 simply the labor-saving methods of the 

 mind itself. 



We see, therefore, its relation to 

 culture. That wholeness of the mind 

 of which we have spoken is manifestly 

 incompatible with gross ignorance and 

 error in regard to the source whence all 

 sense-impressions flow. It is not cult- 

 ure to be floundering amid hopelessly 

 erroneous hypotheses, nor to see things 

 only with the untrained eye of sense in- 

 stead of with the inward eye of instruct- 

 ed reason. Culture — intellectual whole- 

 ness — requires that we should see the 

 world as those see it who have studied 

 its phenomena and laws ; not that we 

 should know all that each specialist 

 knows — a manifest impossibility — but 

 that we should in a general way know 

 what report has been brought from 

 each great field of inquiry. So in the 

 days of Columbus* culture did not re- 

 quire that each man should visit the 

 new continent for himself ; but culture 

 did require that each should know that 

 a new continent had been discovered, 

 and what its general features were, so 

 far as it had been explored. The man 

 of culture to-day should be able to 

 speak of the world as it is now known 

 to be, not as it was supposed to be fifty, 

 or a hundred, or two hundred years ago. 



Secondly, science trains the observ- 

 ing and reasoning faculties. The habit 

 of direct observation of Nature is one of 

 the most important that any human be- 

 ing can acquire. By bringing the ob- 

 server into direct contact with Nature, 

 it gives a healthy concreteness to his 

 conceptions. He who misses this train- 

 ing in early life will not be likely to 

 make good the deficiency in later years. 

 Many men, who have naturally good 

 reasoning powers, find themselves con- 

 demned to more or less of iqtellectual 

 sterility, simply because what we may 

 call the fact-grasping faculty has never 

 been developed in them. If they had 

 materials to work with, they could do 

 good work ; but they have not the ma- 

 terials, and do not seem to know how 

 to gather them. They live in a too at- 

 tenuated air: like the ancestral ghosts 

 whom Myrtle Hazard saw in her dream, 

 they call for "breath! breath!" — the 

 breath that no living soul need lack 

 who will but go to Nature for a sup- 

 ply. It may be said, indeed, that a 

 logical faculty without a strong sense 

 for the concrete is a source of danger 

 to its possessor, leading him afar on 

 the seas of speculation, with no guide 

 but a few charts and his own dead-reck- 

 oning. He who can observe Nature, on 

 the other hand, is like the mariner who 

 can "take the sun," and know his ex- 

 act position from day to day. Many of 

 the intellectual evils of the present time 

 spring from the too wide-spread use 

 of intellectual faculties untrained by 

 the study of Nature, and therefore un- 

 checked by any due sense of the com- 

 plexities which the problems of life 

 present. Science teaches caution; it 

 teaches the paramount importance of 

 verification, and creates not only a dis- 

 trust of, but a certain lack of interest in, 

 conclusions that have not been reached 

 by proper methods, and which do not 

 admit of verification. Scientific men, 

 in general, it will be observed, are not 

 revolutionary in their opinions ; they 

 work on patiently, and hate nothing so 



