4 8o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



SCIENCE, EDUCATION, AND AEISTOCKACY. 1 



THERE could be no doubt that, in the age in which it was their lot 

 to live, the tendency of education ran toward science and abstract 

 science, and every man who was interested in the fortunes of his gen- 

 eration would naturally ask himself the question what the effect of 

 such scientific teaching was likely to be, what it would be still more 

 likely to produce, if it rose to absolute predominance, and whether 

 it would raise or lower, soften or harden, those upon whom it was 

 brought to bear. As he said before, no reasonable man could doubt 

 that the tendency of the age was to make scientific teaching the pre- 

 dominant study. The greatest of philosophical writers would admit 

 that was so. That which followed the main teaching of former times 

 — the great arts of sculpture, painting, writing, oratory, and the like — 

 all comparatively sank before the abstract science of the present day. 

 Compare for one moment the range of teaching in the middle ages 

 with the present circles of learning. In the tenth century Pope 

 Gebert was said to embrace within himself all the knowledge of the 

 time; but let any one contrast his attainments, great as they were, 

 with the correlation of arts now practised, and the enlarged field over 

 which modern science ranged. There was undoubtedly a vast differ- 

 ence between the two states of things. When they looked at the 

 present state of scientific education they might fairly distinguish three 

 different classes of persons to whom it might be applied. First, there 

 were those like the late Mr. Brassey, great captains of labor, who led 

 men not only over Europe, but over every quarter of the globe, and 

 changed the whole face of the earth by their vast engineering power 

 and skill. Secondly, there were those among them at the present day 

 who saw only through the eyes of material philosophy, who accepted 

 that material philosophy and scientific teaching as their surest and 

 safest standard and guide, who reduced most things to it and judged 

 most things by it, but whose minds were nevertheless open to other 

 considerations, and who did not feel that it was the sole and exclusive 

 standard of their lives. To both those classes what he was about to 

 say did not apply. There was, however, a third class who were 

 tempted to reduce every thing to the one standard of science — who 

 knew no other law and applied no other rule, not only to science 

 itself, but to all the other conditions of life and action. To such a 

 class, though he alluded to no one in particular, his observations would, 

 he thought, apply. When science was pushed to that extreme its 

 professors would not be the best rulers for mankind, and he, for one, 

 should regret to see the affairs of men regulated solely by such a 



1 Extract from an address of Lord Carnarvon before the London Birkbeck Institu- 

 tion, with comments thereupon by " J. H. L.," of the London Examiner. 



