122 SCIENCE AND CULTURE 



ime of the Renascence to compare with the men of an- 

 tiquity ; there was no art to compete with their sculpture ; 

 there was no physical science but that which Greece had 

 created. Above all, there was no other example of perfect 

 intellectual freedom of the unhesitating acceptance of 

 reason as the sole guide to truth and the supreme arbiter 

 of conduct. 



The new learning necessarily soon exerted a profound 

 influence upon education. The language of the monks 

 and schoolmen seemed little better than gibberish to 

 scholars fresh from Virgil and Cicero, and the study of 

 Latin was placed upon a new foundation. Moreover, 

 Latin itself ceased to afford the sole key to knowledge. 

 The student who sought the highest thought of antiquity, 

 found only a second-hand reflection of it in Roman lit- 

 erature, and turned his face to the full light of the Greeks. 

 And after a battle, not altogether dissimilar to that which 

 is at present being fought over the teaching of physical 

 science, the study of Greek was recognised as an essential 

 element of all higher education. 



Then the Humanists, as they were called, won the 

 day; and the great reform which they effected was of 

 incalculable service to mankind. (But the Nemesis 5 of all 

 reformers is finality; and the reformers of education, like 

 those of religion, fell into the profound, however com- 

 mon, error of mistaking the beginning for the end of the 

 work of reformation] 



The representatives of the Humanists, in the nine- 

 teenth century, take their stand upon classical educa- 

 tion as the sole avenue to culture, as firmly as if we were 

 still in the age of Renascence. Yet, surely, the present 

 intellectual relations of the modern and the ancient 

 worlds are profoundly different from those which obtained 

 three centuries ago. Leaving aside the existence of a 

 5 The Greek divinity who dealt out retributive justice. 



