PRINCIPAL SUBJECTS OF EDUCATION 79 



is not from the point of view of science at all, but from 

 the point of view of literature. I say the 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 chemi- 

 cal compound by the help of the rules of chemical analy- 

 sis. There is nothing that appeals to the aesthetic fac- 

 ulty 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 under- 

 stand 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 train- 

 ing. It is taught just as you would teach the rules of 

 chess or draughts. On the other hand, if I am to under- 

 stand by a literary education the study of the literatures 

 of either ancient or modern nations but especially 

 those of antiquity, and especially that of ancient Greece ; 

 if this literature is studied, not merely from the point of 

 view of philological science, and its practical applica- 

 tion to the inteipretation of texts, but as an exempli- 



