SCIENCE AND ART AND EDUCATION 169 



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 w^iich 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 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 application to the interpretation of texts, but 

 as an exemplification of and commentary upon the princi- 

 ples of art; if you look upon the literature of a people as a 

 chapter in the development of the human mind, if you work 

 out this in a broad spirit, and with such collateral references 

 to morals and politics, and physical geography, and the 

 like as are needful to make you comprehend what the 



