September 28, 1906.] 



SCIENCE. 



391 



dents' minds by preparatory courses inim- 

 ical to scientific interest. 



Scientific courses have not become pop- 

 ular as the old requirements in the lan- 

 guages have been decreased. It is rather 

 the other courses such as the Ph.B. that 

 have profited by the greater freedom of 

 election. With considerable freedom of 

 election in the preparatory schools the sci- 

 entific courses are not sought out there by 

 the children at a period when the concrete 

 subject-matter of science properly present- 

 ed should be immensely more attractive 

 than the languages and many more abstract 

 objects of study. The science courses in 

 the high school are not at the present time 

 popular, nor is the money spent upon them, 

 either in equipment or in teaching force, 

 comparable with their educational impor- 

 tance. 



The result of this is that the majority of 

 our students leave our colleges and univer- 

 sities, without being able to grasp the most 

 important achievements in modern thought, 

 without being able to take the point of view 

 of those thinkers who are reconstructing 

 our views of the physical universe and its 

 constituent parts, and without being able 

 to interpret what they see and hear and 

 feel by means of the profoundest and most 

 magnificent generalizations which the world 

 has ever known. 



I wish to present two reasons for this 

 condition which seem to me more funda- 

 mental than those usually presented, and 

 to discuss in connection with them the pos- 

 sibility of removing them or at least to 

 invite discussion on the subject. 



It is natural to compare the sciences so- 

 called with the humanities. And yet in 

 one respect the distinction between them 

 has much decreased of late years and prom- 

 ises to continue to decrease. The method 

 of study of the languages, history, litera- 

 ture and the so-called social sciences has 

 become to a large degree that of the nat- 



ural sciences. There is certainly no fun- 

 damental distinction between the researches 

 of the historian, the philologist, the social 

 statistician and those of the biologist, the 

 geologist or even the physicist and chemist, 

 in point of method. Each is approaching 

 problems which must be solved, and to be 

 solved must be presented in the form of 

 carefully gathered data. For their solu- 

 tion hypotheses must be constructed and 

 tested by means of experiment or observa- 

 tion. "With the complexity of the phe- 

 nomena, of course, the application of the 

 scientific methods will vary. The processes 

 of observation, for example, will vary enor- 

 mously in the study of a historical problem 

 in the ancient world, and in the study of 

 the problem of variation where the material 

 is immediately at hand. The methods of 

 historical criticism — lower and higher — are 

 nothing but methods of observations under 

 conditions which are peculiarly difficult of 

 access. 



While it is true that in literature and 

 other arts we do not go back of the esthetic 

 reaction in the judgment of beauty, or the 

 study of this reaction in others as presented 

 in literary criticism ; outside this field of 

 appreciation and criticism, the methods of 

 study in the field of the humanities is just 

 as scientific as the subject matter with 

 which it deals allows. 



This means for one thing that we no 

 longer regard the acquirement of informa- 

 tion as the legitimate object or method of 

 education. The ideal of modern education 

 is the solution of problems, the research 

 method. And this research method is no 

 less dominant in the humanities than it is 

 in the natural sciences so far as the subject 

 matter permits. 



The ground for the difference in attract- 

 ive power of the natural sciences and the 

 humanities can not be laid up, therefore, 

 to a difference in method. And if it could 

 the prospect would be discouraging indeed 



