VII SCIENCE AND AUT AND EDUCATION 181 



thing professes to be literary education that is 

 not a literary education at all. It was not 

 literature at all that was taught, but science in a 

 very bad form. It is quite obvious that grammar 

 is science and not literature. The analysis of a 

 text by the help of the rules of grammar is just as 

 much a scientific operation as the analysis of a 

 chemical compound by the help of the rules of 

 chemical analysis. There is nothing that appeals 

 to the aesthetic faculty in that operation ; and I 

 ask multitudes of men of my own age, who went 

 through this process, whether they ever had a 

 conception of art or literature until they obtained 

 it for themselves after leaving school ? Then you 

 may say, " If that is so, if the education was 

 scientific, why cannot you be satisfied with it ? " I 

 say, because although it is a scientific training, it 

 is of the most inadequate and inappropriate kind. 

 If there is any good at all in scientific education 

 it is that men should be trained, as I said before, 

 to know things for themselves at first hand, and 

 that they should understand every step of the 

 reason of that which they do. 



I desire to speak with the utmost respect of 

 that science philology of which grammar is a 

 part and parcel ; yet everybody knows that 

 grammar, as it is usually learned at school, affords 

 no scientific training. It is taught just as you 

 would teach the rules of chess or draughts. On 

 the other hand, if I am to understand by a literary 



