56 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



land, though they lay, at arm's-length, overhead. Cardinals were 

 more familiar with Virgil than with Isaiah ; and popes labored, with 

 great success, to repaganize Rome. 



The second influence was the slow, but sure, growth of the physi- 

 cal sciences. It was discovered that some results of speculative 

 thouo"ht, of immense practical and theoretical importance, can be 

 verified by observation ; and are always true, however severely they 

 may be tested. Here, at any rate, Avas knowledge, to the certainty 

 of which no authority could add, or take away, one jot or tittle, and 

 to which the tradition of a thousand years was as insignificant as 

 the hearsay of yesterday. To the scholastic system, the study of 

 classical literature might be inconvenient and distracting, but it was 

 possible to hope that it could be kept within bounds. Physical sci- 

 ence, on the other hand, was an irreconcilable enemy, to be excluded 

 at all hazards. The College of Cardinals has not distinguished itself 

 in physics or physiology ; and no jDope has, as yet, set up public labo- 

 ratories in the Vatican. 



People do not always formulate the beliefs on which they act. 

 The instinct of fear and dislike is quicker than the reasoning process ; 

 and I suspect that, taken in conjunction with some other causes, such 

 instinctive aversion is at the bottom of the long exclusion of any 

 serious discipline in the physical sciences from the general curriculum 

 of universities ; while, on the other hand, classical literature has been 

 gradually made the backbone of the arts course. 



I am ashamed to repeat here what I have said elsewhere, in season 

 and out of season, respecting the value of science as knowledge and 

 discipline. But the other day I met with some passages in the address 

 to another Scottish university, of a great thinker, recently lost to us, 

 which express so fully, and yet so tersely, the truth in this matter, 

 that I am fain to quote them : 



" To question all things — never to turn away from any difliculty ; 

 to accept no doctrine either from ourselves or from other people with- 

 out a rigid scrutiny by negative criticism ; letting no fallacy, or inco- 

 herence, or confusion of thought step by unperceived ; above all, to 

 insist upon having the meaning of a word clearly understood before 

 using it, and the meaning of a proposition before assenting to it — 

 these are the lessons we learn " from workers in science. " With all 

 this vigorous management of the negative element, they inspire no 

 skepticism about the reality of truth or indiflerence to its pursuit. 

 The noblest enthusiasm, both for the search after truth and for apply- 

 ing it to its highest uses, pervades those writers. ... In cultivating, 

 therefore," science as an essential ingredient in education, " we are all 

 the while laying an admirable foundation for ethical and philosophical 

 culture." ' 



^ Inaugural address delivered to the University of St. Andrews, February 1, ISeV, by 

 J. S. Mill, Rector of the University (pp. 32, 33). 



