i2 4 SCIENCE AND CULTURE 



The purely classical education advocated by the rep- 

 resentatives of the Humanists in our day, gives no ink- 

 ling of all this. A man may be a better scholar than 

 Erasmus, 6 and know no more of the chief causes of the 

 present intellectual fermentation than Erasmus did. 

 Scholarly and pious persons, worthy of all respect, favour 

 us with allocutions upon the sadness of the antagonism 

 of science to their mediaeval way of thinking, which be- 

 tray an ignorance of the first principles of scientific 

 investigation, an incapacity for understanding what a 

 man of science means by veracity, and an unconsciousness 

 of the weight of established scientific truths, which is 

 almost comical. 



There is no great force in the tu quoquc 7 argument, 

 or else the advocates of scientific education might fairly 

 enough retort upon the modern Humanists that they 

 may be learned specialists, but that they possess no 

 such sound foundation for a criticism of life as deserves 

 the name of culture. And, indeed, if we were disposed to 

 be cruel, we might urge that the Humanists have brought 

 this reproach upon themselves, not because they are too 

 full of the spirit of the ancient Greek, but because they 

 lack it. 



The period of the Renascence is commonly called that 

 of the "Revival of Letters," as if the influences then 

 brought to bear upon the mind of Western Europe had 

 been wholly exhausted in the field of literature. I think 

 it is very commonly forgotten that the revival of science, 

 effected by the same agency, although less conspicuous, 

 was not less momentous. 



In fact, the few and scattered students of nature of 



6 Desiderius Erasmus (1467-1536), a Dutch scholar, was prob- 

 ably the most important of the Renascence scholars. The Collo- 

 quia, 1509, a series of dialogues on social, religious, and educa- 

 tional subjects, was his greatest work. 



7 "Thou too." 



