602 REPORT—1905. 
sense for conduct and our sense for beauty. The greater and more fruitful the 
progress of science, the greater is the need for humane letters to establish and 
maintain a harmony between the new knowledge and those profound, unchanging 
instincts of our nature. 
It is not surprising that, in the last third of the nineteenth century, Arnold’s 
fascinating advocacy of literature, as the paramount agency of culture, should 
have incurred some criticism from the standpoint of science and of philosophy. 
The general drift of this criticism was that the claim which he made for literature, 
though just in many respects, was carried too far; and also that his conception of 
intellectual culture was inadequate. As a representative of such criticism, I 
would take the eminent philosopher whose own definition of culture has already 
been cited, Henry Sidgwick: for no one, I think, could put more incisively the 
particular point with which we are here concerned. ‘Matthew Arnold’s method 
of seeking truth,’ says Sidgwick, ‘is a survival from a pre-scientific age. He 
is a man of letters pure and simple; and often seems quite serenely unconscious of 
the intellectual limitations of his type.’ The critic proceeds to enumerate some 
things which, as he affirms, are ‘ quite alien to the habitual thought of a mere man 
of letters.’ They are such as these: ‘How the crude matter of common experi- 
ence is reduced to the order and system which constitutes it an object of scientific 
knowledge ; how the precisest possible conceptions are applied in the exact appre- 
hension and analysis of facts, and how by facts thus established and analysed the 
conceptions in their turn are gradually rectified; how the laws of Nature are 
ascertained by the combined processes of induction and deduction, provisional 
assumption and careful verification; how a general hypothesis is used to guide 
inquiry, and, after due comparison with ascertained particulars, becomes an 
accepted theory ; and how a theory, receiving further confirmation, takes its place 
finally as an organic part of a vast, living, ever-growing system of knowledge.’ 
Sidgwick’s conclusion is as follows: ‘Intellectual culture, at the end of the nine- 
teenth century, must include as its most essential element a scientific habit of 
mind ; and a scientific habit of mind can only be acquired by the methodical study 
of some part at least of what the human race has come scientifically to know.’ 
There is nothing in that statement to which exception need be taken by the 
firmest believer in the value of literary education. The more serious and methodical 
studies of literature demand, in some measure, a scientific habit of mind, in the 
largest sense of that expression; such a habit is necessary; for instance, in the 
study of history, in the scientific study of language, and in the ‘higher criticism.’ 
Nor, again, does anyone question that the studies of the natural sciences are 
instruments of intellectual culture of the highest order. The powers of observation 
and of reasoning are thereby disciplined in manifold ways; and the scientific habit 
of mind so formed is in itself an education. To define and describe the modes in 
which that discipline operates on the mind is a task for the man of science; it 
could not, of course, be attempted by anyone whose own training has been wholly 
literary. But there is one fact which may be noted by any intelligent observer. 
Many of our most eminent teachers of science, and more especially of science 
in its technical applications, insist on a demand which, in the province of science, 
is analogous to a demand made in the province of literary study by those who wish 
such study to be a true instrument of culture. As the latter desire that literature 
should be a means of educating the student’s intelligence and sympathies, so the 
teachers of science, whether pure or applied, insist on the necessity of cultivating 
the scientific imagination, of developing a power of initiative in the learner, and 
of drawing out his inventive faculties. They urge that, in the interests of the 
technical industries themselves, the great need is for a training which shall be 
more than technical—which shall be thoroughly scientific. Wherever scientific 
and technical education attains its highest forms in institutions of University rank, 
the aim is not merely to form skilled craftsmen, but to produce men who can con- 
tribute to the advance of their respective sciences and arts, men who can originate 
and invent. There is a vast world-competition in scientific progress, on which 
industrial and commercial progress must ultimately depend ; and it is of national 
importance for every country that it should haye men who are not merely 
