August 24, 1900.] 



SCIENCE. 



289 



loanities, for instance, using this loose term 

 to express the great region of literature and 

 its allies. The humanities have been and 

 must continue to be a noble course of in- 

 tellectual development, without which an 

 education is certainly incomplete. It is 

 the most ancient and best known form of 

 culture, and being ancient and bound up 

 with the intellectual development of man- 

 kind it must necessarily continue to hold 

 high rank. The general effect of the hu- 

 manities in a scheme of education may be 

 summed up in a single word appreciation. 

 They seek so to relate the student to what 

 has been said or done by mankind, that his 

 critical sense may be developed, and that 

 he may recognize what is best in human 

 thought and action. To recognize what is 

 best involves a standard of comparison. In 

 most cases this standard is derived and 

 conventional ; in rare cases it is original 

 and individual ; in no case is it founded in 

 the essential nature of things, in absolute 

 truth, for it is apt to shift. In any case the 

 student injects himself into the subject ; 

 and the amount he gets out of it is meas- 

 ured by the amount of himself he puts into 

 it. It is the artistic, the {esthetic, which 

 predominates, not the absolute. It is all 

 comparative rather than actual. The ability 

 to read between the lines is certainly the 

 injection of self into the subject-matter, 

 and the whole process may be regarded 

 as one of self- injection in order to reach 

 the power of appreciation. My claim is 

 that any education which stops with this 

 result is an incomplete one, and that 

 there is another mental attitude which 

 is a necessary complement before a full- 

 rounded education can be claimed ; and that 

 this complementary mental attitude is de- 

 veloped by a proper study of the sciences. 

 If the study of nature is conducted so as to 

 cultivate merely a sentimental appreciation 

 of natural objects, it does not fall within the 

 category I am considering, and can in no 



way be considered as a study which acts as 

 a complement to the humanities. It is 

 merely more of the same thing. If the 

 proper intellectual result of the humanities 

 is appreciation, whose processes demand self- 

 injeotion, the proper and distinctive intellec- 

 tual result of the sciences is a formula, to 

 obtain which there must be rigid selj-elimi- 

 nation. Any injection of self into a scientific 

 synthesis vitiates the result. The standard 

 is not a variable, an artificial one, developed 

 from the varying tastes of man, but absolute, 

 founded upon eternal truth. 



Two such distinct mental attitudes as self- 

 injection and self-elimination must receive 

 attention in education, which cannot be 

 complete without both. They are not con- 

 tradictory, but complementary, and it takes 

 both to make the ' all-round ' man. The 

 exclusive cultivation of either one must re- 

 sult in a lop-sided development. Persistent 

 self-injection tends to mysticism, a confu- 

 sion of ideals or even vagaries with realities, 

 a prolific cause of all irrational beliefs. 

 Persistent self-elimination narrows the vis- 

 ion to a horizon touched by the senses and 

 clips the wings that would carry us now and 

 then beyond the treadmill of life into a freer 

 air and a wider outlook. 



The one needs the other as a check. In 

 their combination self-injection is held back 

 from dangerous flights by the demand to 

 feel something solid beneath the feet; and 

 self-elimination is compelled to raise its 

 eyes now and then from the ground and 

 sweep the heavens. 



In our analysis, however, we strip off the 

 flesh and lay bare the skeleton, and are apt 

 to lose sight of the fact that the contour is 

 a composite result. Although the skeletons 

 of the humanities and of the sciences may 

 differ from each other in the fundamental 

 way described, I cannot conceive of the re- 

 sulting contour of the one as distinct from 

 combination with the other. The self- 

 eliminating result of science must be asso- 



