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SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XVI. No. 410. 



alone, to serve us as an education. With 

 it alone we should get no introduction into 

 the modem world either of thought or of 

 affairs. The mind of the modem student 

 must be carried through a wide range of 

 studies in which science shall have a place 

 not less distinguished than that accorded 

 literature, philosophy or politics. 



But we must observe proportion and re- 

 member what it is that we seek. We seek 

 in our general education, not universal 

 knowledge, but the opening up of the mind 

 to a catholic appreciation of the best 

 achievements of men and the best processes 

 of thought since days of thought set in. 

 We seek to apprise young men of what has 

 been settled and made s\v:e of, of the think- 

 ing that has been carried through and 

 made an end of. We seek to set them 

 securely forwai-d at the point at which the 

 mind of the race has definitively arrived, 

 and save them the trouble of attempting 

 the journey over again, so that they may 

 know from the outset what relation their 

 own thought and effort bear to what the 

 world has already done. We speak of the 

 'disciplinary' studies through which a boy 

 is put in his school days and during the 

 period of his introduction into the full 

 privileges of college work, having in our 

 thought the mathematics of arithmetic, ele- 

 mentary algebra, and geometry, the Greek 

 and Latin texts and grammars, the ele- 

 ments of English and of French or Ger- 

 man; but a better, truer name for them 

 were to be desired. They are indeed dis- 

 ciplinary. The mind takes fiber, facility, 

 strength, adaptability, certainty of touch, 

 from handling them, when the teacher 

 knows his art and their power. But they 

 are disciplinary only because of their defin- 

 itiveness and their established method: 

 and they take their determinateness from 

 their age and perfection. It is their age 

 and completeness that render them so ser- 

 viceable and so suitable for the first proc- 



esses of education. By their means the 

 boy is informed of the bodies of knowledge 

 which are not experimental, but settled, 

 definitive, fundamental. This is the stock 

 upon which time out of mind all the 

 thoughtful world has traded. These have 

 been food of the mind for long genera- 

 tions. 



It is in this view of the matter that we 

 get an explanation of the fact that the 

 classical languages of antiquity afford bet- 

 ter discipline and are a more indispensable 

 means of culture than any language of our 

 own day except the language, the intimate 

 language, of our own thought, which is 

 for us universal coin of exchange in the 

 intellectual world, and must have its values 

 determined to a nicety before we pay it out. 

 No modern language is definite, classically 

 made up. Modern tongues, moreover, carry 

 the modern babel of voices. The thoughts 

 they utter fluctuate and change; the 

 phrases they speak alter and are dissolved 

 with every change of current in modern 

 thought or impulse. They have, first or 

 last, had the same saturations of thought 

 that our own language has had ; they carry 

 the same atmosphere; in traversing their 

 pleasant territory, we see only different 

 phases of our own familiar world, the world 

 of our own experience; and, valuable as 

 it is to have this various view of the world 

 we live in and send our minds upon their 

 travels up and down the modem age, it is 

 not fundamental, it is not an indispensable 

 first process of training. It can be post- 

 poned. The classical literatures give us, 

 in tones and with an authentic accent we 

 can nowhere else hear, the thoughts of an 

 age we cannot visit. They contain airs of 

 a time not our own, unlike our own, and 

 yet its foster parent. To these things was 

 the modern thinking world first bred. In 

 them speaks a time naive, pagan, an early 

 morning day when men looked upon the 

 earth while it was fresh, untrodden by 



