126 



SCIEN.CE. 



[N. S. Vol. IV. No. 83. 



those people who have attained to the high- 

 est civilization; whose art, architecture, 

 industries, literature and learning have 

 reached the highest development ; whose 

 works, in short, possess the highest finish 

 as the expression of human thought. 



An important distinction may be made 

 among the subjects belonging in the nar- 

 rower sense to the humanities. Language 

 in its structure may be regarded as the in- 

 voluntary product of human activity, the 

 result of the unconscious struggle of the 

 mind, its reaction against the environment, 

 with the result of a definite attainment not 

 aimed at. The results are not fortuitous, 

 because all activity is under law. Whether 

 the effort is conscious or unconscious, the 

 result anticipated or unexpected, it must is- 

 sue in accordance with the laws controlling 

 human action. On the other hand, art, 

 architecture and poetry are the conscious 

 products of thought. They are the results 

 of struggles after definite and well conceived 

 ends. They are the issue of an inner im- 

 pulsion toward an ideal attainment. They 

 are not so much the finality of collective ef- 

 fort as the offspring of individual genius. 

 The written language, the canvas and colors, 

 the quarried marble and granite, are the 

 materials with which art works and out of 

 which it constructs a poem, a painting, a 

 statue, or a temple. They are compelled by 

 poetic and artistic genius to shadow forth the 

 ideals existing in the mind of the poet and 

 the artist. The pigments and the marble 

 are not art. It is the artistic use of lan- 

 guage, of canvas and of marble that require 

 the skill of the master. Then too the pen 

 of the poet, the brush of the painter, 

 and the chisel of the sculptor touch their 

 highest point when they delineate that 

 which is truest in life and nature, soft- 

 ened with ideality and ennobled by as- 

 piration. 



Now what characteristics has science that 

 ally it to literature and art ? What have 



they in common which entitles science to 

 be treated as one of the humanities ? 



In the first place the materials which 

 science uses are her own. It is this fact 

 which differentiates science from other 

 branches of learning. But given the 

 materials, the operations of the human 

 mind in working on them are kindred in 

 character and similar in result to those of 

 the same order of intellect elsewhere. It 

 is an unworthy conception of science that 

 makes it consist in the collection of facts 

 about the material world or even the higher 

 animal life. These materials, it is true, 

 must be collected, just as the pigments must 

 be ground and the marble and granite 

 must be quarried. But he who stops with 

 the collection of facts is doing the lowest 

 order of work in science. He contributes 

 to the ^nal result, but it requires genius to 

 clear away the rubbish and to construct the 

 temple of science out of the scattered ma- 

 terials. Or better still, the genius in 

 science does not merely hew and shape and 

 color, but he brings together the disjunda 

 membra formed by the hand of the Almighty, 

 and reconstructs a beautiful body fit for the 

 Creator to look upon. The most important 

 element in science is the human element, 

 that which vivifies the dead facts, fuses 

 them with the fire of imagination, beautifies 

 with the fine finish of ideality, and con- 

 structs an articulated system which must 

 conform to the truth. Science is then in a 

 very large sense a product of human 

 thought, the result of human endeavor. 

 A body of correlated scientific truth can 

 hardly be studied apart from the personality 

 of the names inseparably linked with it. It 

 is scarcely less a human interest which 

 draws us to it than that which attaches to 

 language as the instrument of human ex- 

 pression. Indeed the former has the added 

 attraction of distinct personalities. It is 

 the personality of a few masterminds work- 

 ing with creative ability, impressing their 



