20 SCIENCE AND CULTURE. 



feet intellectual freedom of the unhesitating acceptance 

 of reason as the sole guide to truth and the supreme 

 arbiter of conduct. 



The new learning necessarily soon exerted a profound 

 influence upon education. The language of the monks 

 and schoolmen seemed little better than gibberish to 

 scholars fresh from Yirgil and Cicero, and the study of 

 Latin was placed upon a new foundation. Moreover, 

 Latin itself ceased to afford the sole key to knowledge. 

 The student who sought the highest thought of anti- 

 quity, found only a second-hand reflection of it in Ro- 

 man literature, and turned his face to the full light of 

 the Greeks. And after a battle, not altogether dissimilar 

 to that which is at present being fought over the teach- 

 ing of physical science, the study of Greek was recog- 

 nised as an essential element of all higher education. 



Thus the Humanists, as they were called, won the 

 day ; and the great reform which they effected was of 

 incalculable service to mankind. But the Nemesis of al^| 

 reformers is finality ; and the reformers of education, 4 

 like those of religion, fell into the profound, however 

 common, error of mistaking the beginning for thernd 



the" work ol reformation. 



The representatives ol the Humanists, in the nine- 

 teenth century, take their stand upon classical education 

 as the sole avenue to culture, as firmly as if we were still 

 in the age of Renascence. Yet, surely, the present intel- 

 lectual relations of the modern and the ancient worlds 

 are profoundly different from those which obtained three 





