LIBERAL EDUCATION. 9 



that unlocked the stores of a whole new world of ethical thought, in 

 the shape of the philosophy, the history, and the poetry contained in 

 Greek and Roman literature. How assiduously those literatures were 

 studied, how they leavened the whole thought of Europe, and mightily 

 contributed to disperse the intellectual darkness and break the bonds 

 of the spiritual despotism of the mediaeval Church, we all know. Clas- 

 sical philosophy, history, poety, and art, nourished the European mind, 

 and were almost the sole foundation of its culture, through all the 

 period during which the Latin and Teutonic races of Western Europe 

 were slowly elaborating languages and literatures of their own. They 

 were thus of necessity the main instrument of culture of the schools 

 during the period when, save the obsolete scholastic philosophy, no 

 other instrument was forthcoming ; and I do not think it possible to 

 overrate the debt which Western Europe owes to them. But grad- 

 ually their educating influence has been absorbed, and in great meas- 

 ure exhausted, while partially, but by no means wholly, out of the 

 nutriment they furnished have sprung the national languages and 

 literatures which, as more and not less powerful educating instru- 

 mentalities, are to supersede them. It is to ignore the vast progress 

 of the human mind since the days of Erasmus to try any longer to 

 make classical learning stand in the same relation to the modern stu- 

 dent that it stood in to Erasmus : and Erasmus, if he were alive to- 

 day, would be the first to abandon the dead pedantries of the past for 

 the fountains of new thought he would see flowing all round him. 



When I say, then, that I think the languages and literatures of 

 Greece and Rome are soon to be abandoned, as the sole or main in- 

 struments of that side of liberal culture which I have preferred to call 

 ethical rather than literary, it is not that I do not fully recognize their 

 value and beauty, or the vast service they have done in emancipating 

 and training the mind of Western Europe : it is not that I do not 

 recognize their value as among the specialties of liberal culture now. 

 It is only as the sole or chief instruments of literary school training 

 that I believe them to be superseded. So far from believing that they 

 will be abandoned, I believe they will be more diligently and success- 

 fully studied in the future, when they will be left as a specialty in the 

 hands of that small number of students who, at any time, in this mod- 

 ern world of ours, will of their own free choice x pursue them. As a 



1 The advocates of the classical theory sometimes point triumphantly to the number of 

 students who, in colleges where the elective system prevails, freely, as they say, elect the 

 classics ; but it should be remembered that at present their whole previous school training 

 has been by compulsion classical. Of science they are absolutely ignorant ; and it is not 

 strange that they should prefer to go on in studies whose elementary difficulties they have 

 partially overcome, rather than engage in a belated encounter with new difficulties, of a sort 

 for which their minds have been by their very previous training unfitted. The present 

 system at some of our colleges of giving an election between science and literature, after 

 admission, and no similar election in regard to preparatory studies, seems to me to be the 

 very reductio ad absurdum of the grindstone-theory. 



