22 SCIENCE AND CULTUEE. 



may have thought or said, but to nature. It admits that 

 all our interpretations of natural fact are more or less 

 imperfect and symbolic, and bids the learner seek for 

 truth not among words but among things. It warns us 

 that the assertion which outstrips evidence is not only 

 a blunder but a crime. / 



The purely classical education advocated by the rep- 

 resentatives of the Humanists in our day, gives no ink- 

 ling of all this. A man may be a better scholar than 

 Erasmus, and know no more of the chief causes of the 

 present intellectual fermentation than Erasmus did. 

 Scholarly and pious persons, worthy of all respect, fa- 

 vour us with allocutions upon the sadness of the antag- 

 onism of science to their mediaeval way of thinking, 

 which betray an ignorance of the first principles of sci- 

 entific investigation, an incapacity for understanding 

 what a man of science means by veracity, and an un- 

 consciousness of the weight of established scientific 

 truths, which is almost comical. 



There is no great force in the tu quoque argument, 

 or else the advocates of scientific education might fairly 

 enough retort upon the modern Humanists that they 

 may be learned specialists, but that they possess no such 

 sound foundation for a criticism of life as deserves the 

 name of culture. And, indeed, if we were disposed to 

 be cruel, we might urge that the Humanists have 

 brought this reproach upon themselves, not because they 

 are too full of the spirit of the ancient Greek, but 

 because they lack it. 



