RELATIONS OF CLASSICAL LITERATURE TO OTHER 

 BRANCHES OF LEARNING 



BY PAUL SHOREY 



[Paul Shorey, Professor of Greek, University of Chicago, since 1892. b. Davenport. 

 Iowa, August 3, 1857. Graduate, Harvard University, 1878; Ph. D. Munich. 

 1884; LL. D. Iowa College, 1905. Professor of Greek, Bryn Mawr College, 1885- 

 92. Author of De Platonis Idearum Doctrina; The Idea of Good in Plato's Republic: 

 The Odes and Epodes of Horace; The Unity of Plato's Thought.] 



THE mutual interdependence of the constituted sciences, mathe- 

 matics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, if it does not admit of uncon- 

 troverted exposition, at least provokes arguments as definite as 

 those of Spencer criticising Comte's classification of the sciences, or 

 Professor Karl Pearson correcting the theories of both Spencer and 

 Comte. But the globus intcllectualis which this Congress has under- 

 taken to survey includes other disciplines that are mainly, if not 

 merely, collections of facts, as histories, or, at the most, systematic 

 methods of envisaging facts, as psychology, ethics, sociology. And in 

 respect of these, candor requires the acknowledgment that the topic 

 of " Relations " is merely the theme of a discursive essay whose quality 

 will vary with the talent or information of the writer, but which 

 remains a literary exercise rather than the authoritative report of 

 an expert. It is well that the historian of 'England or America should 

 have the broad outlook of a Freeman or a Fiske. But he can do 

 estimable work with no other equipment than the education of a 

 gentleman, industry, and a facile pen. And similarly, though almost 

 any fact or method of history or physical science may prove useful 

 to the psychologist and the sociologist, hardly any could be singled 

 out as indispensable in present practice. Inquiry into the relations 

 of such subjects is chiefly occupied with the proof that they, scien- 

 tifically speaking, exist. But. as Renan observes, the first geologists 

 did not concern themselves with a priori demonstration of the exist- 

 ence of geology they geologized. Xow it may be true in tin- 

 abstract that man writes books as the bee secretes honey or the silk- 

 worm spins its cocoon, and that literature as a mental, supra-organic. 

 or social product will some time be brought under the province of 

 psychological or sociological, not to say biological, law. But at pre- 

 sent the study of literature is history, or, at the most, critical and 

 scholarly method, and its relation to other pursuits is to be found on 

 the one hand in the unity of modern historical and critical method 

 to whatever subject applied, and on the other in the material whirl) 

 it provides for the student of psychology, ethics, sociology, ethnology, 

 and comparative religion. 



