212 HERMANN VON HELMHOLTZ 



year of his friend du Bois-Reymond's doctorate, that a great 

 gulf still divides the philosophical and historical interests in our 

 nation (as in all civilized Europe) from those of natural science 

 and mathematics ; the two worlds hardly understand each 

 other's aims in thought and work, and this is a serious 

 hindrance to salutary co-operation, and to the concordant de- 

 velopment of mankind. It is for this reason that Helmholtz 

 advocates the increase of popular scientific lectures in the 

 best sense, as a means of harmonizing the different scientific 

 views, since it is not so much information about the results 

 of these discoveries that is demanded by the more intelligent 

 and cultured of the laity, but rather ' some idea of the mental 

 activities of the scientific investigator, of the particular character 

 of his scientific methods, his aims, and the new solutions which 

 his work offers for the great mysteries of human existence '. 



Helmholtz only alludes in passing to the question of in- 

 struction, which afterwards became of such burning impor- 

 tance ; he gives the preference to classics over modern 

 languages in the education of the young, on account of its fine 

 aesthetic and logical training, and in discussing the question 

 whether mathematics, as ' the representative of self-conscious 

 logical activity ', should not be made more important in school 

 studies, he expresses himself in favour of this, since the 

 individual will presently have to graduate in sterner schools 

 of thought than that of the grammarian. 



Helmholtz tried to define the characteristic difference between 

 the physical and the mental sciences more particularly, by 

 saying that the physical sciences for the most part reduce 

 their inductions to definite and universal laws and theorems, 

 while the mental sciences are chiefly concerned with inferences 

 from the psychological sense of touch. In the preface to his 

 translation of Tyndall's Fragments of Science he describes in 

 clear and beautiful language the importance of the classics in 

 the development of a moral and aesthetic sense, and in the 

 evolution of an intuitive knowledge of human sensations, ideas, 

 and conditions of civilization : but he denies that the exclusively 

 literary method of education is the most important function 

 in the methodical training of that faculty ' by which we subject 

 the unorganized material, governed as it would seem more by 

 chance than by reason, which we encounter in real life, to the 



