Ii8 Selections from Huxley 



being that he satisfies the artistic instinct of the youngest 

 and harmonizes with the ripest and richest experience of 

 the oldest. 



I have said this much to draw your attention to what, 



5 in my mind, lies at the root of all this matter, and at the 

 understanding of one another by the men of science on the 

 one hand, and the men of literature, and history, and art, 

 on the other. It is not a question whether one order of 

 study or another should predominate. It is a question of 



10 what topics of education you shall select which will com- 

 bine all the needful elements in such due proportion as to 

 give the greatest amount of food, support, and encourage- 

 ment to those faculties which enable us to appreciate truth, 

 and to profit by those sources of innocent happiness which 



15 are open to us, and at the same time, to avoid that which is 

 bad, and coarse, and ugly, and keep clear of the multitude 

 of pitfalls and dangers which beset those who break 

 through the natural or moral laws. 



I address myself, in this spirit, to the consideration of 



20 the question of the value of purely literary education. Is 

 it good and sufficient, or is it insufficient and bad ? Well, 

 here I venture to say that there are literary educations and 

 literary educations. If I am to understand by that term 

 the education that was current in the great majority of 



25 middle-class schools, and upper schools too, in this country 

 when I was a boy, and which consisted absolutely and 

 almost entirely in keeping boys for eight or ten years at 

 learning the rules of Latin and Greek grammar, constru- 

 ing certain Latin and Greek authors, and possibly making 



30 verses which, had they been English verses, would have 

 been condemned as abominable doggerel if that is what 

 you mean by literary education, then I say it is scandal- 

 ously insufficient and almost worthless. My reason for 

 saying so is not from the point of view of science at all, 



