24 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



And thus one great result of the new form into which modern 

 science is casting all our conceptions of education will be a vastly 

 higher estimate of the educating value of those pursuits in life which 

 are concerned with material things, and a distinct recognition of them 

 as included among the liberal professions. It is interesting to observe 

 how the list of liberal professions enlarges with the advance of civiliza- 

 tion. At first the priest is the divinely-appointed monopolist of all 

 higher knowledge ; by degrees he is joined by the lawyer, as the in- 

 terpreter still of a divinely-established code ; it is much later and only 

 after a certain amount of progress has been made in physical knowl- 

 edge that the importance of his function raises the physician's art to 

 the dignity of a liberal profession ; and that more at first through a 

 superstitious belief in the power of his spells and his magic than from 

 respect to the small reality of his science. Now that science has so 

 far entered into other callings as to make them worthy fields for the 

 exercise of the highest faculties, all those pursuits which have for their 

 aim the improvement of man's earthly condition will take their due 

 rank in the list of liberal professions, and the chemist, the engineer, 

 the architect, and the merchant, will have their appropriate liberal 

 educations as much as this clergyman, the lawyer, or the physician. It 

 may safely be affirmed that that view of earthly life of mediaeval as- 

 cetics which has left its traces so deeply imprinted in much of our sec- 

 tarian theology is fast vanishing like an ugly dream forever. The 

 intellectual and moral aspect of material pursuits is fast gaining, 

 through the significance given to them by modern science, a predomi- 

 nance over their mere material aspect. The worker in material things 

 is more and more, as the days go by, compelled to be an intellectual 

 being even in order to be a worker, and it is because the study of and 

 working in material things now give scope for the energies of great 

 intellects, that they more and more absorb them. Whoever continues 

 to believe in the antithesis between matter and spirit, and insists upon 

 looking on the world of material things as of necessity the world of 

 the devil, must see in this tendency only disaster to all our higher in- 

 terests ; but whoever sees that it is the true function of modern science 

 to spiritualize material things by enabling us to put them to higher 

 uses, will see in science not the great antagonist but the great hope of 

 the religion and the philosophy of the future. 1 



The advocates of the classical theory are never weary of reproach- 

 ing their opponents with opinions which, as they say, degrade the dig- 

 nity of true learning, by making it subservient to mere utilitarian 



1 The spirit of the older education is well represented in the following extract from a 

 work of that learned and arrogant pedant, the late Dr. Donaldson. He says : " If, then, 

 the education of the whole community is so dependent on that of the upper classes, and 

 if these owe their normal influence to the circumstances which enable them to escape the 

 trammels of material interests, it must follow that the liberal education which is the pecul- 

 iar attribute of the highest order ought to consist in the literature which humanizes and 

 generalizes our views, and not in the science which provides for the increase of opulence 



