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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXI. No. 787 



tunities, students have not flocked to the 

 study of science in the nvimbers predicted, 

 nor has science modified the spirit and 

 purport of all education in a degree com- 

 mensurate with the claims made for it. 

 The causes for this result are many and 

 complex. I make no pretense of doing 

 more than singling out what seems to me 

 one influential cause, the remedy for which 

 most lies with scientific men themselves. 

 I mean that science has been taught too 

 much as an accumulation of ready-made 

 material with which students are to be 

 made familiar, not enough as a method of 

 thinking, an attitude of mind, after the 

 pattern of which mental habits are to be 

 transformed. 



Among the adherents of a literary educa- 

 tion who have contended against the claims 

 of science, Matthew Arnold has, I think, 

 been most discreetly reasonable. He freely 

 admitted the need of men knowing some- 

 thing, knowing a good deal, about the nat- 

 ural conditions of their own lives. Since, 

 so to say, men have to breathe air, it is 

 advisable that they should know something 

 of the constitution of air and of the mech- 

 anism of the lungs. Moreover, since the 

 sciences have been developed by human 

 beings, an important part of humanistic 

 culture, of knowing the best that men have 

 said and thought, consists in becoming ac- 

 quainted with the contributions of the 

 great historic leaders of science. 



These concessions made, Matthew Arnold 

 insisted that the important thing, the indis- 

 pensable thing in education, is to become 

 acquainted with human life itself, its art, 

 its literature, its politics, the fluctuations 

 of its career. Such knowledge, he con- 

 tended, touches more closely our offices 

 and responsibilities as human beings, since 

 these, after all, are to human beings and 

 not to physical things. Such knowledge, 

 moreover, lays hold of the emotions and 



the imagination and modifies character, 

 while knowledge about things remains an 

 inert possession of speculative intelligence. 



Those who believe, nevertheless, that the 

 sciences have a part to play in education 

 equal— at the least — to that of literature 

 and language, have perhaps something to 

 learn from this contention. If we regard 

 science and literary culture as just so much 

 subject-matter, is not Mr. Arnold's conten- 

 tion essentially just? Conceived from this 

 standpoint, knowledge of human affairs 

 couched in personal terms seems more im- 

 portant and more intimately appealing 

 than knowledge of physical things con- 

 veyed in impersonal terms. One might 

 well object to Arnold that he ignored the 

 place of natural forces and conditions in 

 human life and thereby created an impos- 

 sible dualism. But it would not be easy to 

 deny that knowledge of Thermopylse knits 

 itself more readily into the body of emo- 

 tional images that stir men to action than 

 does the formula for the acceleration of a 

 flying arrow; or that Bums's poem on the 

 daisy enters more urgently and compel- 

 lingly into the moving vision of life than 

 does information regarding the morphol- 

 ogy of the daisy. 



The infinitely extensive character of nat- 

 ural facts and the universal character of 

 the laws formulated about them is some- 

 times claimed to give science an advantage 

 over literature. But viewed from the 

 standpoint of education, this presumed 

 superiority turns out a defect; that is to 

 say, so long as we confine ourselves to the 

 point of view of subject-matter. Just be- 

 cause the facts of nature are multitudinous, 

 inexhaustible, they begin nowhere and end 

 nowhere in particular, and hence are not, 

 just as facts, the best material for the edu- 

 cation of those whose lives are centered in 

 quite local situations and whose careers are 

 irretrievably partial and specific. If we 



