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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXIV. No. 878 



trary, to be nothing but a vast pantomime 

 illustrating the spiritual world as religious 

 dogma created it. It was not ignorance of the 

 natural world alone that filled the early hesti- 

 aries with statements that the ass brayed seven 

 times a day to illustrate the seven deadly sins, 

 or did something else three times to illustrate 

 the trinity, and others of a like nature; such 

 statements were disproved by the daily experi- 

 ence of almost everybody, and their wide cir- 

 culation and general acceptance can only be 

 explained by the fact that the popular intellect 

 was so engrossed with the contemplation of 

 emotional phenomena as to be unconscious of 

 nearly everything else. 



To-day the pendulum has swung to the 

 other extreme, and the human mind conceives 

 everything, not in terms of spiritual experi- 

 ence, but according to the analogy of material 

 phenomena; in fact, it is not too much to say 

 that the modern intellect is as devoid of any 

 intelligent insight into human nature as the 

 early Christian mind was of knowledge of 

 natural history. This of course tends to pre- 

 vent any profound understanding of litera- 

 ture, for literature is concerned primarily with 

 human nature and only secondarily with na- 

 ture in its ordinary significance. " Mankind," 

 says Goethe, "is ever changing; man remains 

 ever the same " ; and it is the business of lit- 

 erature to exhibit this eternal nature of man 

 through the incessant variations of its external 

 environment. In modern times, however, the 

 progress of civilization has vastly increased 

 the physical forces under man's control, and so 

 obscured those fundamental moral powers with 

 the exercise of which literature is concerned, 

 while it has rendered his artificial environ- 

 ment more complex and more varied, so that 

 its reproduction has become a more interest- 

 ing and a more important task, and has come 

 to be regarded as the chief concern of litera- 

 ture, although in reality it is only one of its 

 less important functions. 



The materialistic intellectual preconceptions 

 of modern times and the artificial character 

 of modern civilization have also affected the 

 teaching and interpretation of literature in a 

 way calculated to give an erroneous impres- 



sion of its real nature. The pedantry of to- 

 day shows a slavish worship of the literal fact, 

 and, at the same time, an artificiality that is 

 surprising. The human interest is more com- 

 pletely eliminated from literature — whose in- 

 terest, we have seen, is supremely human — 

 than it ever has been before. A mass of mis- 

 cellaneous information relating to literary his- 

 tory rather than to literature,' mingled with 

 much unsubstantial theorizing and some frag- 

 mentary reading is what the colleges present 

 to the student as literary instruction. The 

 classics are no longer taught as the thought of 

 other civilizations; they have become almost 

 exclusively the memorizing of details of acci- 

 dence and syntax, supplemented at more ad- 

 vanced stages by equally bald and inert in- 

 formation about literary forms or historical 

 relationships. Under these circumstances it 

 is not to be wondered at that the average 

 youth, and every youth who has an acute mind 

 or the courage of his convictions, finds no at- 

 traction in the study of the classics. The facts 

 such a study will reveal to him may be com- 

 plicated and diflicult to learn, but so are facts 

 in connection with chemical changes or phys- 

 ical laws; and these latter have, besides their 

 greater direct vocational value, the added ad- 

 vantage of being current and significant to- 

 day and possessed of a greater degree of certi- 

 tude and demonstrability. 



Such is the appeal of literature to the under- 

 graduate, the graduate is no better off. Phi- 

 lology is a significant and interesting study 

 that bears an important relation to the under- 

 standing of language, which is the vehicle of 

 literature ; but philology is not literature, even 

 though it be a much more secure field for 

 those whose minds are baffled by the illusive 

 nature of that subject. Philology, however, 

 even when it sets itself to tabulating the num- 

 ber of times a certain conjunction or adverb 

 occurs in some author or text, has far more to 

 justify it than the other form of literary schol- 

 arship that is most industrious to-day. By this 

 latter the student is encouraged to expend his 

 energies on questions as indeterminate and fu- 



^ See Babbitt, ' ' Literature and the American 

 College. ' ' 



