SCIENCE AS A BRANCH OF EDUCATION
Science-Teaching Fifty Years Ago--Huxley's Insistence on
Reform--Science Primers--Physiography--Elementary
Physiology--_The Crayfish_--Manuals of Anatomy--Modern
Microscopical Methods--Practical Work in Biological
Teaching--Invention of the Type System--Science in Medical
Education--Science and Culture.
Less than half a century ago, there was practically no generally
diffused knowledge of even the elements of science and practically no
provision for teaching it. Medical students, in the course of their
professional education, received some small instruction in botany,
chemistry, and physiology; in the greater universities of England and
the Continent there were not in all a dozen professorships of science
apart from special branches of medicine; in the Scottish universities
there were one or two dreamy chairs of "Natural and Civil History,"
the occupiers of which were supposed to dispense instruction in half a
dozen sciences. There was no scientific teaching at the public
schools; there were practically no books available for beginners in
science, and even the idea of guides to laboratory work had not been
invented. Huxley, addressing in 1854 a particularly select audience in
St. Martin's Hall, London, spoke to them of the
"utter ignorance as to the simplest laws of their own animal
life, which prevails among even the most highly educated persons
in this country." "I am addressing," he said, "I imagine, an
audience of cultivated persons; and yet I dare venture to assert
that, with the exception of those of my hearers who may chance to
have received a medical education, there is not one who could
tell me what is the meaning and use of an act which he performs a
score of times every minute, and whose suspension would involve
his immediate death:--I mean the act of breathing--or who could
state in precise terms why it is that a confined atmosphere is
injurious to health."
The power to express the precise meaning of even a common
physiological act is probably not yet possessed by all educated
people: but no one can doubt that there is now a very generally
diffused knowledge of and interest in the ordinary processes of living
bodies. It is almost impossible for any of us to escape some amount of
scientific education at school, at college, from lectures, or from
books. Certainly those of us who have a natural inclination towards
knowledge of that kind can hardly fail to have the opportunity of
acquiring it. Every library abounds in elementary and advanced
scientific books; every university and many schools have their
lectures and laboratories for science, and there is scientific
teaching involved in every educational curriculum. To attempt a
complete account of how this radical change in the attitude of the
world to science has come about would be to attempt to write the
history of European civilisation in the last half-century. A thousand
causes have been contributory; but among these causes two have been of
extraordinary importance--an idea and a man. The idea is the
conception of organic evolution, and the man was Huxley. The idea of
evolution clothed the dead bones of anatomy with a fair and living
flesh, and the new body left the dusty corners of museums to pervade
the world, arousing the attention and interest of all. A large part of
the prodigious mental activities of Huxley was devoted to compelling
the world to take an interest in biological science. Had his life-work
been no more than this side of it, it would have been of commanding
importance. A mere enumeration of the modes in which he assisted in
arousing attention to science among all classes would fill many pages.
Almost before he was settled in London, in the lecture from which we
quoted at the beginning of this chapter he urged the "educational
value of the natural history sciences." In 1869 in a speech in
Liverpool; in 1870 at University College, London; in 1874 as his
Rectorial address in the University of Aberdeen; in 1876 at the
opening ceremonial of the Johns Hopkins University at Baltimore; in
the same year at South Kensington; in 1877 in a separate essay; in
1881 in an address to the International Medical Congress: at these
different times and addressing different and important audiences he
continued to urge the absolute necessity of a knowledge of nature. A
well-known and eloquent passage from an address on "a liberal
education" delivered to working men in 1868 contains the gist of his
reiterated argument:
"Suppose it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of
every one of us would, one day or other, depend on his winning or
losing a game of chess, don't you think that we should all
consider it to be a primary duty to learn at least the names and
the moves of the pieces; to have a notion of a gambit, and a keen
eye for all the means of giving and getting out of check? Do you
not think that we should look with a disapprobation amounting to
scorn upon the father who allowed his son, or the state which
allowed its members, to grow up without knowing a pawn from a
knight?
Yet it is a very plain and elementary truth, that the life, the
fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, and more or less
of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing
something of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and
complicated than chess. It is a game which has been played for
untold ages, every man and woman of us being one of the two
players in a game of his or her own. The chess-board is the
world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of
the game are what we call the laws of nature. The player on the
other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always
fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he
never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for
ignorance. To the man who plays well, the highest stakes are
paid, with that sort of overflowing generosity with which the
strong shows delight in strength, and one who plays ill is
checkmated--without haste, but without remorse."
Huxley wished that this scientific education should begin at an early
period of every child's training. In 1869 he wrote:
"Let every child be instructed in those general views of the
phænomena of nature for which we have no exact English name. The
nearest approximation to a name for what I mean which we possess
is physical geography; the Germans have a better, 'Erdkunde'
(earth knowledge or geology in its etymological sense), that is
to say, a general knowledge of the earth, and what is on it and
in it and about it. If anyone who has experience of the ways of
young children will call to mind their questions, he will find
that so far as they can be put in any scientific category, they
will come under this head of 'Erdkunde.' The child asks, 'What is
the moon, and why does it shine?' 'What is this water, and where
does it run?' 'What is the wind?' 'What makes these waves in the
sea?' 'Where does this animal live, and what is the use of that
plant?' And if not snubbed and stunted by being told not to ask
foolish questions, there is no limit to the intellectual craving
of a young child; nor any bounds to the slow but solid accretion
of knowledge and development of the thinking faculty in this way.
To all such questions, answers which are necessarily incomplete,
though true as far as they go, may be given by any teacher whose
ideas represent real knowledge and not mere book learning: and a
panoramic view of nature, accompanied by a strong infusion of the
scientific habit of mind, may thus be placed within the reach of
every child of nine or ten."
In 1880 Huxley, in association with Professor Roscoe, the chemist, and
Professor Balfour Stewart, the physicist, took a great practical step
toward securing the widest possible extension of elementary knowledge
in science. They became general editors, for the English publishing
house of Macmillan, of a series of "Science Primers." These were
written in simple language, suitable for those with no preliminary
knowledge of science, but were the work of the chief authorities in
the leading branches of science. They were published at what was then
the phenomenally cheap price of a shilling, and they sold in almost
incredible numbers. Huxley himself wrote the introductory volume to
this great series of tracts, taking for his subject the simplest and
most natural phenomena of the world and the simplest chains of cause
and effect that can be observed around us. The keynote of the little
book was that knowledge of nature could be gained only by observation
and experiment, and that for these the ordinary things in the world
around us provided ample material. A few years later he wrote a more
advanced volume on the same subject. He had now found an English name
for the German _Erdkunde_, and his book on _Physiography_ was simply
an account of the leading things and forces of nature. A traveller
set down in a foreign land will at once get into difficulties unless
he has provided himself with a guide to the geography, the manners and
customs, and the regulations of the country in which he finds himself.
Huxley's aim was to provide a similar guide to nature; an outline of
elementary knowledge of the world into which we all come as strangers.
He wrote of force and energy, of the forms of water, of heat and cold,
of the atmosphere, of winds and tides and weather, and of the main
features of the lives of plants and animals. There was nothing new in
what he wrote; he simply took from the chief sciences their leading
principles and elementary facts, and set them forth in plain and
simple language so that all could read and understand. The novelty was
that an attempt should be made to bring these facts within the reach
of all. The idea proved extremely infectious; in Europe and America,
in many languages and by many authors, Huxley's main lines were
followed, with the result that a new branch of education, and almost
of science, was created.
The body of man and the processes of life, in the earlier part of the
century, were almost as unknown to most people as were the structure of
the earth and the great processes of nature. What was known of human
anatomy and physiology was contained in ponderous treatises, written in
difficult and technical language suitable only for students of medicine
and doctors. It was thought to be not only unnecessary but slightly
coarse for those not in the profession to know anything of the viscera
of digestion, circulation, and so forth. Huxley laid low this great
superstition by his _Elementary Lessons in Physiology_, a little volume
first published in 1866, which ran through many editions. In it he wrote
primarily for teachers and learners in boys' and girls' schools, and
selected from the great bulk of knowledge and opinion called human
physiology only the important and well-established truths. So successful
was he in his selection that, notwithstanding the immense increase in
knowledge since he wrote, the book still remains an adequate and useful
elementary treatise, and by this time must have given their main
knowledge of the human body to hundreds and thousands of readers who
otherwise would have remained ignorant.
The books of which we have been writing were addressed to the general
public, but, in addition, Huxley wrote several, of which three are
specially important, for those students who devote themselves
specially to anatomy. _The Crayfish_, his famous volume in the
International Scientific Series, has been called by Professor Howes,
the assistant and successor of Huxley at the Royal College of Science,
"probably the best biological treatise ever written." Many naturalists
have written elaborate monographs on single animals: Lyonet worked for
years on the willow caterpillar, Strauss Durckheim devoted an even
minuter attention to the common cockchafer, and the great Bojanus
investigated almost every fibre in the structure of the tortoise. The
volumes produced by these anatomists were valuable and memorable, and
occupy an honoured place in the library of science, but Huxley's aim
was wider and greater. He showed how careful study of one of the
commonest and most insignificant of animals leads, step by step, from
every-day knowledge to the widest generalisations and the most
difficult problems of zoölogy. He made study of a single creature an
introduction to a whole science, and taught students to regard any
form of life not merely as a highly complicated and deeply interesting
anatomical study, but as a creature that is only one out of an
innumerable host of living things, every fibre in its body, every
rhythm in its functions proclaiming the degree and nature of its
relationship to other animals. R. Louis Stevenson, writing of his
native town, tried to give "a vision of Edinburgh, not as you see her,
in the midst of a little neighbourhood, but as a boss upon the round
world, with all Europe and the deep sea for her surroundings. For
every place is a centre to the earth, whence highways radiate, or
ships set sail for foreign ports; the limit of a parish is not more
imaginary than the frontier of an empire." It is this wider sweep,
this attempt to see and to teach not merely the facts about things but
the relations of these facts to the similar facts in other things,
that makes the difference between the new knowledge and the old. The
questions to be asked and answered are not merely, What are the
structures in this animal? but, How and why do they come to be what
they are? Huxley was a ruthless enemy of the books and teachers which
or who made the mere acquisition of details of knowledge their chief
object.
"I remember," he wrote, "in my youth there were detestable books
which ought to have been burned by the hands of the common
hangman, for they contained questions and answers to be learned
by heart, of this sort, 'What is a horse? The horse is termed
_Equus caballus_; belongs to the class Mammalia; order,
Pachydermata; family, Solidungula.' Was any human being the wiser
for learning that magic formula? Was he not more foolish inasmuch
as he was deluded into taking words for knowledge?"
Huxley himself admitted his difficulty in remembering apparently
meaningless facts, and occasionally aided his memory by inventing for
them a humorous significance. Professor Howes relates a story of this
kind. While examining the papers of candidates for some examination,
Huxley came across one in which the mitral or bicuspid valve of the
heart was erroneously described as being placed in the right cavity.
"Poor little beggar," said Huxley; "I never could get them myself
until I reflected that a bishop could never be in the right." This
insistence on the uselessness of formal knowledge applied only to
those who were being taught or who were learning from books or
lectures. Of the value and discipline of knowledge of facts gained at
first hand from objects themselves either in original investigation or
with the aid of books, Huxley had the highest possible opinion. By
such a method of work alone he believed it possible to distinguish
what we believe on authority from what we have convinced ourselves to
be true, and, as we shall see later, he regarded it as the most
important duty of a man to have acquired the habit of classifying the
mass of ideas in his brain into those which he knew and those which he
thought to be true from having read or heard or imagined them.
The two other of the three great treatises for anatomical students are
the _Manual of the Anatomy of Vertebrated Animals_, published in 1871,
and the _Manual of the Anatomy of Invertebrated Animals_, published in
1877. Of these two volumes it is sufficient to say that they formed
the chief introduction to the study of animal zoölogy for many years,
and that a large number of the best-known zoölogists of the end of
this century received from them their first instruction in the
science. As text-books they have been superseded lately by larger
volumes in which there is found more space for some of the recent
advances in knowledge, especially comparative embryology, and the more
intricate knowledge of the structure of the soft parts of marine
invertebrates made possible by the newer and more successful methods
of preserving delicate tissues. Just before Huxley ceased his regular
work as a teacher at the Royal College of Science, there arrived a
series of marine embryos, beautifully preserved and prepared for
microscopic work by the zoölogists at the International Zoölogical
Station at Naples. Huxley is reported to have exclaimed at their
beauty, and to have said: "You young men cannot realise your
advantages; you have brought to you for study at your leisure in
London, creatures that I had to lash my microscope to the mast to get
a glimpse of." Huxley's books were written for students with fewer
advantages, and, naturally, laid more stress on the harder skeletal
parts and such structures as could be more easily preserved; but with
this inevitable limitation they still serve as luminous and
comprehensive guides to the subjects of which they treat. There is no
doubt but that if he had been a younger man when the new technical
methods made their appearance, he would have adopted them and their
results in his volumes. One of the first great pieces of work which
utilised methods more like those now used in all laboratories than
those employed during the greater part of Huxley's life as a teacher
was the classical investigation by Van Beneden into the changes in the
egg of Ascaris which accompany the process of fertilisation. When
Huxley read the memoir he exclaimed, "All this by the use of glacial
acetic acid--is it possible!" At once, Professor Howes relates, he
repeated the whole investigation himself, and, when satisfied,
declared that the "history of the histological investigation of the
future would be the history of its methods." Not only have the
chemical substances used in preparing tissues for examination greatly
increased since Huxley's time as an active worker, but a very
important method of investigation has come into general use. In
Huxley's time tissues or animals too large or too opaque to be
examined microscopically as whole structures were either teased by
needles or were cut with a razor by hand into comparatively thick
slices. The process of cutting, however practised the operator, was
tedious and uncertain, and it was almost impossible to cut a piece of
tissue into a series of thin slices without losing or destroying
considerable portions. Microtomes, with various accessory mechanical
appliances, have now been invented, and by means of these not only are
slices of great tenuity made with ease, but there is little difficulty
in cutting the most delicate organism into a ribbon of consecutive
slices. Such new methods have made almost a revolution in the study of
zoölogy, particularly of the lower forms of life and of the embryonic
stages of higher animals, and books written before these methods
became common have naturally been superseded.
Huxley did far more for the teaching of science than the preparation
of books, however useful these were. He was the practical inventor of
the laboratory system of teaching zoölogical science, and all over the
world the methods invented by him have been adopted in university
laboratories and technical schools. He had always declared that since
zoölogy was a physical science, the method of studying it must needs
be analogous to that which is followed in other physical sciences. If
a man wishes to be a chemist, it is necessary not only that he should
read chemical books and attend chemical lectures, but that he should
actually perform the fundamental experiments in the laboratory for
himself, and thus learn exactly what the words which he reads in his
books and hears from his teachers, mean. "If you want a man to be a
tea-merchant, you don't tell him to read books about China or about
tea, but you put him into a tea-merchant's office where he has the
handling, the smelling, and the tasting of tea. Without the sort of
knowledge which can be gained only in this practical way, his exploits
as a tea-merchant will soon come to a bankrupt termination." The great
and obvious difficulty in the practical teaching of biology appeared
to be the immense number of different kinds of animals and plants in
existence. A human life would not suffice for the examination of a
hundredth part of these. Huxley met the difficulty by the "type"
system.
"There are certainly more than 100,000 species of insects, and
yet anyone who knows one insect, if a properly chosen one, will
be able to have a fair conception of the structure of the whole.
I do not mean to say he will know that structure thoroughly, or
as well as is desirable that he should know it; but he will have
enough real knowledge to enable him to understand what he reads,
to have genuine images in his mind of these structures which
become so variously modified in all the forms of insects he has
not seen. In fact, there are such things as types of form among
animals and vegetables, and for the purpose of getting a definite
knowledge of what constitutes the leading modifications of animal
and plant life, it is not needful to examine more than a
comparatively small number of animals and plants."
The type system in itself was not absolutely new. Rolleston, the
Linacre professor at Oxford, in his _Forms of Animal Life_ had
devised the method of teaching comparative anatomy by the study of a
graded series of animals. But his method depended on the existence of
a series of dissections and preparations made by a skilled craftsman;
the tradition of teaching by authority instead of by investigation was
maintained, although the authority of books and lectures was aided by
museum specimens in glass bottles, the actual basis of the book being
a series of dissections prepared by Mr. Charles Robertson, Rolleston's
laboratory assistant, for the great International Exhibition of 1861.
The authorities of Huxley's students were to be found in nature
itself. The green scum from the nearest gutter, a handful of weed from
a pond, a bean-plant, some fresh-water mud, a frog, and a pigeon were
the ultimate authorities of his course. His students were taught how
to observe them, and how to draw and record their observations.
However familiar the objects, each student had to verify every fact
afresh for himself. The business of the teacher was explanation of the
methods of verification, insistence on the accomplishment of
verification. It was a training in the immemorial attitude of the
scientific mind, codified by Huxley and made an integral part in
national education.
As a matter of fact it was comparatively late in his life as a teacher
that Huxley had complete opportunity for putting into practice his
scheme for the laboratory teaching of biology. In 1854 there was no
laboratory attached to the Natural History Department of the School of
Mines. Lectures alone were given, and the only opportunity the student
had of any practical acquaintance with the facts was in a short
interview with the professor at the lecture table after the lecture.
This condition continued practically to 1872. But a few years before
that Huxley and his colleagues got up a kind of pronunciamento
deploring the existing state of affairs. In his evidence before the
Royal Commission of 1870 Huxley said: "There is a complete want in the
School of Mines, as it now exists, of any means of teaching several of
the subjects practically. For example, I am set there to teach natural
history without a biological laboratory and without the means of
shewing a single dissection." Against strong internal opposition and
at considerable pecuniary loss Huxley and some of his colleagues
succeeded, in 1872, in getting the School of Mines transferred to
South Kensington, where it became the Royal College of Science. For
the first course of instruction given in the new buildings, Huxley
obtained the aid of Prof. M. Foster, Prof. Rutherford, and Prof. Ray
Lankester. The laboratory course originated by Huxley and shaped by
him with these three distinguished assistants became the model of the
regular courses given subsequently, and, with various slight
modifications, has since been adopted almost universally. Later on,
Huxley described it as follows:
"I lecture to a class of students daily for about four months and
a half, and my class have, of course, their text-books; but the
essential part of the whole teaching, and that which I regard as
really the most important part of it, is a laboratory for
practical work, which is simply a room with all the appliances
needed for ordinary dissection. We have tables properly arranged
in regard to light, microscopes and dissecting instruments, and
we work through the structure of a certain number of plants and
animals. As, for example, among the plants we take the
yeast-plant, a Protococcus, a common mould, a Chara, a fern, and
some flowering plant; among animals we examine such things as an
Amoeba, a Vorticella, and a fresh-water polyp. We dissect a
starfish, an earthworm, a snail, a squid, and a fresh-water
mussel. We examine a lobster and a crayfish, and a black beetle.
We go on to a common skate, a codfish, a frog, a tortoise, a
pigeon, and a rabbit, and that takes us about all the time we
have to give. The purpose of this course is not to make skilled
dissectors, but to give every student a clear and definite
conception, by means of sense images, of the characteristic
structure of each of the leading modifications of the animal
kingdom; and that is perfectly possible by going no further than
the length of that list of forms which I have enumerated. If a
man knows the structure of the animals I have mentioned, he has a
clear and exact, however limited apprehension of the essential
features of the organization of all those great divisions of the
animal and vegetable kingdoms to which the forms I have mentioned
severally belong. And it then becomes possible to him to read
with profit; because every time he meets with the name of a
structure, he has a definite image in his mind of what the name
means in the particular creature he is reading about, and
therefore the reading is not mere reading. It is not mere
repetition of words; but every term employed in the description,
we will say of a horse, or of an elephant, will call up the image
of the things he had seen in the rabbit, and he is able to form a
distinct conception of that which he has not seen, as a
modification of that which he has seen."
Huxley himself was originally a medical man; all through his life he
was chiefly interested in the biological sciences which underlie a
scientific practice of medicine, and as teacher and examiner he had
much to do with the shaping of medical education in London. Acting in
various public capacities, as a member of commissions dealing with
medical education, or as a witness before them, in magazine articles
and in public speeches he made many contributions to the problems to
be faced in medical education. Some of these related to the conditions
peculiar to medical training in London. In the greatest city of the
world there was during Huxley's life and there is still nothing
comparable with the great universities of Europe and America, of
Scotland and Ireland. Some dozen hospitals, supported partly by
endowments, partly by charities, attempt each to maintain a complete,
independent medical school. As the requirements of medical education
in staff, laboratories, and general equipment has advanced, these
hospitals have made heroic efforts to advance with them.
Notwithstanding the zeal and public spirit of the staff and managers
of the hospitals, this want of system has naturally resulted in a
multiplication of inefficient institutions and a number of makeshift
arrangements. Huxley repeatedly urged the concentration of all this
diffuse effort into a few centres, but this inevitable reform has not
yet become possible.
A second important consideration, and one that has a much wider
application, relates to the kind of person by whom the scientific
sides of medical teaching should be given. Primitively, all the
instruction to medical students was given by those actually engaged in
the practice of medicine. Huxley was strongly of the opinion that the
teachers of anatomy, physiology, chemistry, and so forth, should be
specialists devoted to these subjects for life, and not merely
surgeons and physicians who engaged in teaching until their practice
grew sufficiently to monopolise their attention.
"I get every year," he said, "the elaborate reports of Henle and
Meissner--volumes of I suppose 400 pages altogether--and they
consist merely of abstracts of the memoirs and works which have
been written on Anatomy and Physiology--only abstracts of them.
How is a man to keep up his acquaintance with all that is doing
in the physiological world--in a world advancing with enormous
strides every day and every hour--if he has to be distracted with
the cares of practice?"
There would always be found men, he declared, who would make the
choice between the wealth which may come by successful practice and a
modest competency, when that modest competency was to be combined with
a scientific career and the means of advancing knowledge. It was to
those who made the latter choice that he would entrust the teaching of
the sciences underlying medicine; partly because from the mere
mechanical reason of time these men would be better able to keep pace
with the most recent advances in knowledge, and partly because their
teaching would be stimulated by their own work in advancing knowledge.
In this great matter the world is rapidly advancing towards the
standard of Huxley; as each new appointment is made it becomes more
and more probable that the man chosen will be a teacher and
investigator rather than a practitioner.
In another general question of the politics of medical education
Huxley took a strong line, and the tendency of change is toward his
view. One of the first results of the awakening of medical education
in the middle of this century was a tendency to throw an almost
intolerable burden of new subjects upon the medical student. In the
revolt from the old apprenticeship system, in which the student, from
the very first, gave his chief attention to practice, and was left
almost to himself to pick up a scanty knowledge of the principles and
theories underlying his profession, the pendulum swung too far the
other way, and there was almost no branch of the biological and
physical sciences in which he was not expected to go through a severe
training. On the old system the greater part of his time was spent in
the wards of the hospital; on the new system it was only at an
advanced stage of his career that he entered the wards at all, a
great part of his time and energy being spent in the purely scientific
teaching of the medical college. Huxley, although he had largely aided
in the overthrow of the happy-go-lucky older system, of which Mr. Bob
Sawyer was no exaggerated type, was equally severe on the reckless
extensions of the new system. "If I were a despot," he said, "I would
cut down the theoretical branches to a very considerable extent." He
would discard comparative anatomy and botany, materia medica, and
chemistry and physics, except as applied to physiology, from the
medical student's course. At first sight, this seems a hard saying,
but it is to be remembered that at that time the normal curriculum of
a medical student lasted only four years, a space of time barely
sufficient for the necessary minimum of purely medical and surgical
work. Huxley's view was that chemistry and physics, botany and
zoölogy, should be part of the general education, not of the special
medical education; he wished students to spend one or two years after
their ordinary career at school in work on these elementary scientific
subjects, and then to begin their medical course free from the burden
of extra-professional subjects. With certain limits due to the
different local conditions in different teaching centres Huxley's
system is being adopted. In most cases the authorities in medical
education are unable to leave the whole responsibility of the
elementary education in science to the schools from which medical
students come, as the conditions under which scientific subjects are
still taught in schools leave much to be desired. The average length
of the medical curriculum has been extended and the elementary
scientific subjects are taken first, sometimes at the medical
colleges, sometimes in the scientific departments of universities.
The interesting general point of view is that Huxley, although himself
a biologist and teacher of biology, took too broad an outlook on the
general policy of education to insist upon his own subject to the
detriment of the precise practical objects of the training of medical
students.
In the days of Huxley's greatest activity, while by the natural force
of events and by his special efforts science was becoming more and
more recognised as a necessary and important branch of general
education, the cry was raised against it that scientific education was
not capable of giving what is called culture. A scientific man was
regarded as a mere scientific specialist, and science was considered
to have no place in, and in fact to be an enemy of, "liberal
education." In 1880, at Birmingham, Huxley attacked this view in a
speech delivered at the opening of the Mason College. Sir Josiah
Mason, the benevolent founder of that great institution, had made it
one of the conditions of the foundation that the College should make
no provision for "mere literary instruction and education." This gave
Huxley a text for raising the whole question of the relation of
science to culture. He declared that he held very strongly by two
convictions.
"The first is, that neither the discipline nor the subject matter
of classical education is of such direct value to the student of
physical science as to justify the expenditure of valuable time
on either; and the second is, that for the purpose of attaining
real culture, an exclusively scientific education is at least as
effectual as an exclusively literary education."
He quoted from Matthew Arnold, then in the zenith of his fame as a
chief apostle of culture, and shewed that there were two propositions
involved in the "literary" view of culture. The first was that a
"criticism of life" was the essence of culture; the second, that
literature contained the materials which sufficed for the construction
of such a criticism. With the first proposition he had no dispute,
taking the view that culture was something quite different from
learning or technical skill. "It implies the possession of an ideal,
and the habit of critically estimating the value of things by
comparison with a theoretic standard. Perfect culture should supply a
complete theory of life, based upon a clear knowledge alike of its
possibilities and its limitations." Against the second proposition he
urged in the first place that it was self-evident that after having
learned all that Greek, Roman, and Eastern antiquity have thought and
said, and all that modern literature has to tell us, it was still
necessary to have a deeper foundation for criticism of life. An
acquaintance with what physical science had done, particularly in
later years, was as necessary to criticism of life as any of the
literary materials. Next, following the biological habit of examining
anything by studying its development, he shewed how the connection
between "culture" and study of classical literature had come into
existence. For many centuries Latin grammar, with logic and rhetoric,
studied through Latin, were the fundamentals of education. A liberal
education was possible only through study of the language in which all
or nearly all the materials for it were written. With the changes
produced by the Renascence there came a battle between Latin and
Greek, and Greek came to be part of a liberal education. Later on,
there came a similar battle between the classical and modern
languages, and now the modern languages have included and absorbed
all the necessary material for knowledge and criticism. Those who
cling to classics as the basis of culture and education are clinging
to old weapons long after these have ceased to be effective, simply
because at one time in history only these weapons were available in
the struggle for knowledge.