you are fifty millions and more. I suppose that, as in England, as in
France, as everywhere, so likewise here, the majority of people doubt
very much whether the majority is unsound; or, rather, they have no
doubt at all about the matter, they are sure that it is not unsound. But
let us consent to-night to remain to the end in the ideas of the sages
and prophets whom we have been following all along; and let us suppose
that in the present actual stage of the world, as in all the stages
through which the world has passed hitherto, the majority is and must be
in general unsound everywhere,—even in the United States, even here in
New York itself. Where is the failure? I have already, in the past,
speculated in the abstract about you, perhaps, too much. But I suppose
that in a democratic community like this, with its newness, its
magnitude, its strength, its life of business, its sheer freedom and
equality, the danger is in the absence of the discipline of respect; in
hardness and materialism, exaggeration and boastfulness; in a false
smartness, a false audacity, a want of soul and delicacy. ‘Whatsoever
things are _elevated_,’—whatsoever things are nobly serious, have true
elevation,[2]—that perhaps, in our catalogue of maxims which are to
possess the mind, is the maxim which points to where the failure of the
unsound majority, in a great democracy like yours, will probably lie. At
any rate let us for the moment agree to suppose so. And the philosophers
and the prophets, whom I at any rate am disposed to believe, and who say
that moral causes govern the standing and the falling of States, will
tell us that the failure to mind whatsoever things are elevated must
impair with an inexorable fatality the life of a nation, just as the
failure to mind whatsoever things are just, or whatsoever things are
amiable, or whatsoever things are pure, will impair it; and that if the
failure to mind whatsoever things are elevated should be real in your
American democracy, and should grow into a disease, and take firm hold
on you, then the life of even these great United States must inevitably
suffer and be impaired more and more, until it perish.
Then from this hard doctrine we will betake ourselves to the more
comfortable doctrine of _the remnant_. ‘The remnant shall return;’ shall
‘convert and be healed’ itself first, and shall then recover the unsound
majority. And you are fifty millions and growing apace. What a remnant
yours may be, surely! A remnant of how great numbers, how mighty
strength, how irresistible efficacy! Yet we must not go too fast,
either, nor make too sure of our efficacious remnant. Mere multitude
will not give us a saving remnant with certainty. The Assyrian Empire
had multitude, the Roman Empire had multitude; yet neither the one nor
the other could produce a sufficing remnant any more than Athens or
Judah could produce it, and both Assyria and Rome perished like Athens
and Judah.
But you are something more than a people of fifty millions. You are
fifty millions mainly sprung, as we in England are mainly sprung, from
that German stock which has faults indeed,—faults which have diminished
the extent of its influence, diminished its power of attraction and the
interest of its history, and which seems moreover just now, from all I
can see and hear, to be passing through a not very happy moment,
morally, in Germany proper. Yet of the German stock it is, I think,
true, as my father said more than fifty years ago, that it has been a
stock ‘of the most moral races of men that the world has yet seen, with
the soundest laws, the least violent passions, the fairest domestic and
civil virtues.’ You come, therefore, of about the best parentage which a
modern nation can have. Then you have had, as we in England have also
had, but more entirely than we and more exclusively, the Puritan
discipline. Certainly I am not blind to the faults of that discipline.
Certainly I do not wish it to remain in possession of the field for
ever, or too long. But as a stage and a discipline, and as means for
enabling that poor inattentive and immoral creature, man, to love and
appropriate and make part of his being divine ideas, on which he could
not otherwise have laid or kept hold, the discipline of Puritanism has
been invaluable; and the more I read history, the more I see of mankind,
the more I recognise its value. Well, then, you are not merely a
multitude of fifty millions; you are fifty millions sprung from this
excellent Germanic stock, having passed through this excellent Puritan
discipline, and set in this enviable and unbounded country. Even
supposing, therefore, that by the necessity of things your majority must
in the present stage of the world probably be unsound, what a remnant, I
say,—what an incomparable, all-transforming remnant,—you may fairly
hope with your numbers, if things go happily, to have!
LITERATURE AND SCIENCE.
Practical people talk with a smile of Plato and of his absolute ideas;
and it is impossible to deny that Plato’s ideas do often seem
unpractical and impracticable, and especially when one views them in
connexion with the life of a great work-a-day world like the United
States. The necessary staple of the life of such a world Plato regards
with disdain; handicraft and trade and the working professions he
regards with disdain; but what becomes of the life of an industrial
modern community if you take handicraft and trade and the working
professions out of it? The base mechanic arts and handicrafts, says
Plato, bring about a natural weakness in the principle of excellence in
a man, so that he cannot govern the ignoble growths in him, but nurses
them, and cannot understand fostering any other. Those who exercise such
arts and trades, as they have their bodies, he says, marred by their
vulgar businesses, so they have their souls, too, bowed and broken by
them. And if one of these uncomely people has a mind to seek
self-culture and philosophy, Plato compares him to a bald little tinker,
who has scraped together money, and has got his release from service,
and has had a bath, and bought a new coat, and is rigged out like a
bridegroom about to marry the daughter of his master who has fallen into
poor and helpless estate.
Nor do the working professions fare any better than trade at the hands
of Plato. He draws for us an inimitable picture of the working lawyer,
and of his life of bondage; he shows how this bondage from his youth up
has stunted and warped him, and made him small and crooked of soul,
encompassing him with difficulties which he is not man enough to rely on
justice and truth as means to encounter, but has recourse, for help out
of them, to falsehood and wrong. And so, says Plato, this poor creature
is bent and broken, and grows up from boy to man without a particle of
soundness in him, although exceedingly smart and clever in his own
esteem.
One cannot refuse to admire the artist who draws these pictures. But we
say to ourselves that his ideas show the influence of a primitive and
obsolete order of things, when the warrior caste and the priestly caste
were alone in honour, and the humble work of the world was done by
slaves. We have now changed all that; the modern majority consists in
work, as Emerson declares; and in work, we may add, principally of such
plain and dusty kind as the work of cultivators of the ground,
handicraftsmen, men of trade and business, men of the working
professions. Above all is this true in a great industrious community
such as that of the United States.
Now education, many people go on to say, is still mainly governed by the
ideas of men like Plato, who lived when the warrior caste and the
priestly or philosophical class were alone in honour, and the really
useful part of the community were slaves. It is an education fitted for
persons of leisure in such a community. This education passed from
Greece and Rome to the feudal communities of Europe, where also the
warrior caste and the priestly caste were alone held in honour, and
where the really useful and working part of the community, though not
nominally slaves as in the pagan world, were practically not much better
off than slaves, and not more seriously regarded. And how absurd it is,
people end by saying, to inflict this education upon an industrious
modern community, where very few indeed are persons of leisure, and the
mass to be considered has not leisure, but is bound, for its own great
good, and for the great good of the world at large, to plain labour and
to industrial pursuits, and the education in question tends necessarily
to make men dissatisfied with these pursuits and unfitted for them!
That is what is said. So far I must defend Plato, as to plead that his
view of education and studies is in the general, as it seems to me,
sound enough, and fitted for all sorts and conditions of men, whatever
their pursuits may be. ‘An intelligent man,’ says Plato, ‘will prize
those studies which result in his soul getting soberness, righteousness,
and wisdom, and will less value the others.’ I cannot consider _that_ a
bad description of the aim of education, and of the motives which should
govern us in the choice of studies, whether we are preparing ourselves
for a hereditary seat in the English House of Lords or for the pork
trade in Chicago.
Still I admit that Plato’s world was not ours, that his scorn of trade
and handicraft is fantastic, that he had no conception of a great
industrial community such as that of the United States, and that such a
community must and will shape its education to suit its own needs. If
the usual education handed down to it from the past does not suit it, it
will certainly before long drop this and try another. The usual
education in the past has been mainly literary. The question is whether
the studies which were long supposed to be the best for all of us are
practically the best now; whether others are not better. The tyranny of
the past, many think, weighs on us injuriously in the predominance given
to letters in education. The question is raised whether, to meet the
needs of our modern life, the predominance ought not now to pass from
letters to science; and naturally the question is nowhere raised with
more energy than here in the United States. The design of abasing what
is called ‘mere literary instruction and education,’ and of exalting
what is called ‘sound, extensive, and practical scientific knowledge,’
is, in this intensely modern world of the United States, even more
perhaps than in Europe, a very popular design, and makes great and rapid
progress.
I am going to ask whether the present movement for ousting letters from
their old predominance in education, and for transferring the
predominance in education to the natural sciences, whether this brisk
and flourishing movement ought to prevail, and whether it is likely that
in the end it really will prevail. An objection may be raised which I
will anticipate. My own studies have been almost wholly in letters, and
my visits to the field of the natural sciences have been very slight and
inadequate, although those sciences have always strongly moved my
curiosity. A man of letters, it will perhaps be said, is not competent
to discuss the comparative merits of letters and natural science as
means of education. To this objection I reply, first of all, that his
incompetence, if he attempts the discussion but is really incompetent
for it, will be abundantly visible; nobody will be taken in; he will
have plenty of sharp observers and critics to save mankind from that
danger. But the line I am going to follow is, as you will soon discover,
so extremely simple, that perhaps it may be followed without failure
even by one who for a more ambitious line of discussion would be quite
incompetent.
Some of you may possibly remember a phrase of mine which has been the
object of a good deal of comment; an observation to the effect that in
our culture, the aim being _to know ourselves and the world_, we have,
as the means to this end, _to know the best which has been thought and
said in the world_. A man of science, who is also an excellent writer
and the very prince of debaters, Professor Huxley, in a discourse at the
opening of Sir Josiah Mason’s college at Birmingham, laying hold of this
phrase, expanded it by quoting some more words of mine, which are these:
‘The civilised world is to be regarded as now being, for intellectual
and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action
and working to a common result; and whose members have for their proper
outfit a knowledge of Greek, Roman, and Eastern antiquity, and of one
another. Special local and temporary advantages being put out of
account, that modern nation will in the intellectual and spiritual
sphere make most progress, which most thoroughly carries out this
programme.’
Now on my phrase, thus enlarged, Professor Huxley remarks that when I
speak of the above-mentioned knowledge as enabling us to know ourselves
and the world, I assert _literature_ to contain the materials which
suffice for thus making us know ourselves and the world. But it is not
by any means clear, says he, that after having learnt all which ancient
and modern literatures have to tell us, we have laid a sufficiently
broad and deep foundation for that criticism of life, that knowledge of
ourselves and the world, which constitutes culture. On the contrary,
Professor Huxley declares that he finds himself ‘wholly unable to admit
that either nations or individuals will really advance, if their outfit
draws nothing from the stores of physical science. An army without
weapons of precision, and with no particular base of operations, might
more hopefully enter upon a campaign on the Rhine, than a man, devoid of
a knowledge of what physical science has done in the last century, upon
a criticism of life.’
This shows how needful it is for those who are to discuss any matter
together, to have a common understanding as to the sense of the terms
they employ,—how needful, and how difficult. What Professor Huxley
says, implies just the reproach which is so often brought against the
study of _belles lettres_, as they are called: that the study is an
elegant one, but slight and ineffectual; a smattering of Greek and Latin
and other ornamental things, of little use for any one whose object is
to get at truth, and to be a practical man. So, too, M. Renan talks of
the ‘superficial humanism’ of a school-course which treats us as if we
were all going to be poets, writers, preachers, orators, and he opposes
this humanism to positive science, or the critical search after truth.
And there is always a tendency in those who are remonstrating against
the predominance of letters in education, to understand by letters
_belles lettres_, and by _belles lettres_ a superficial humanism, the
opposite of science or true knowledge.
But when we talk of knowing Greek and Roman antiquity, for instance,
which is the knowledge people have called the humanities, I for my part
mean a knowledge which is something more than a superficial humanism,
mainly decorative. ‘I call all teaching _scientific_,’ says Wolf, the
critic of Homer, ‘which is systematically laid out and followed up to
its original sources. For example: a knowledge of classical antiquity is
scientific when the remains of classical antiquity are correctly studied
in the original languages.’ There can be no doubt that Wolf is perfectly
right; that all learning is scientific which is systematically laid out
and followed up to its original sources, and that a genuine humanism is
scientific.
When I speak of knowing Greek and Roman antiquity, therefore, as a help
to knowing ourselves and the world, I mean more than a knowledge of so
much vocabulary, so much grammar, so many portions of authors in the
Greek and Latin languages. I mean knowing the Greeks and Romans, and
their life and genius, and what they were and did in the world; what we
get from them, and what is its value. That, at least, is the ideal; and
when we talk of endeavouring to know Greek and Roman antiquity, as a
help to knowing ourselves and the world, we mean endeavouring so to know
them as to satisfy this ideal, however much we may still fall short of
it.
The same also as to knowing our own and other modern nations, with the
like aim of getting to understand ourselves and the world. To know the
best that has been thought and said by the modern nations, is to know,
says Professor Huxley, ‘only what modern _literatures_ have to tell us;
it is the criticism of life contained in modern literature.’ And yet
‘the distinctive character of our times,’ he urges, ‘lies in the vast
and constantly increasing part which is played by natural knowledge.’
And how, therefore, can a man, devoid of knowledge of what physical
science has done in the last century, enter hopefully upon a criticism
of modern life?
Let us, I say, be agreed about the meaning of the terms we are using. I
talk of knowing the best which has been thought and uttered in the
world; Professor Huxley says this means knowing _literature_. Literature
is a large word; it may mean everything written with letters or printed
in a book. Euclid’s _Elements_ and Newton’s _Principia_ are thus
literature. All knowledge that reaches us through books is literature.
But by literature Professor Huxley means _belles lettres_. He means to
make me say, that knowing the best which has been thought and said by
the modern nations is knowing their _belles lettres_ and no more. And
this is no sufficient equipment, he argues, for a criticism of modern
life. But as I do not mean, by knowing ancient Rome, knowing merely more
or less of Latin _belles lettres_, and taking no account of Rome’s
military, and political, and legal, and administrative work in the
world; and as, by knowing ancient Greece, I understand knowing her as
the giver of Greek art, and the guide to a free and right use of reason
and to scientific method, and the founder of our mathematics and physics
and astronomy and biology,—I understand knowing her as all this, and
not merely knowing certain Greek poems, and histories, and treatises,
and speeches,—so as to the knowledge of modern nations also. By knowing
modern nations, I mean not merely knowing their _belles lettres_, but
knowing also what has been done by such men as Copernicus, Galileo,
Newton, Darwin. ‘Our ancestors learned,’ says Professor Huxley, ‘that
the earth is the centre of the visible universe, and that man is the
cynosure of things terrestrial; and more especially was it inculcated
that the course of nature had no fixed order, but that it could be, and
constantly was, altered.’ But for us now, continues Professor Huxley,
‘the notions of the beginning and the end of the world entertained by
our forefathers are no longer credible. It is very certain that the
earth is not the chief body in the material universe, and that the world
is not subordinated to man’s use. It is even more certain that nature is
the expression of a definite order, with which nothing interferes.’ ‘And
yet,’ he cries, ‘the purely classical education advocated by the
representatives of the humanists in our day gives no inkling of all
this!’
In due place and time I will just touch upon that vexed question of
classical education; but at present the question is as to what is meant
by knowing the best which modern nations have thought and said. It is
not knowing their _belles lettres_ merely which is meant. To know
Italian _belles lettres_ is not to know Italy, and to know English
_belles lettres_ is not to know England. Into knowing Italy and England
there comes a great deal more, Galileo and Newton, amongst it. The
reproach of being a superficial humanism, a tincture of _belles
lettres_, may attach rightly enough to some other disciplines; but to
the particular discipline recommended when I proposed knowing the best
that has been thought and said in the world, it does not apply. In that
best I certainly include what in modern times has been thought and said
by the great observers and knowers of nature.
There is, therefore, really no question between Professor Huxley and me
as to whether knowing the great results of the modern scientific study
of nature is not required as a part of our culture, as well as knowing
the products of literature and art. But to follow the processes by which
those results are reached, ought, say the friends of physical science,
to be made the staple of education for the bulk of mankind. And here
there does arise a question between those whom Professor Huxley calls
with playful sarcasm ‘the Levites of culture,’ and those whom the poor
humanist is sometimes apt to regard as its Nebuchadnezzars.
The great results of the scientific investigation of nature we are
agreed upon knowing, but how much of our study are we bound to give to
the processes by which those results are reached? The results have their
visible bearing on human life. But all the processes, too, all the items
of fact, by which those results are reached and established, are
interesting. All knowledge is interesting to a wise man, and the
knowledge of nature is interesting to all men. It is very interesting to
know, that, from the albuminous white of the egg, the chick in the egg
gets the materials for its flesh, bones, blood, and feathers; while,
from the fatty yolk of the egg, it gets the heat and energy which enable
it at length to break its shell and begin the world. It is less
interesting, perhaps, but still it is interesting, to know that when a
taper burns, the wax is converted into carbonic acid and water.
Moreover, it is quite true that the habit of dealing with facts, which
is given by the study of nature, is, as the friends of physical science
praise it for being, an excellent discipline. The appeal, in the study
of nature, is constantly to observation and experiment; not only is it
said that the thing is so, but we can be made to see that it is so. Not
only does a man tell us that when a taper burns the wax is converted
into carbonic acid and water, as a man may tell us, if he likes, that
Charon is punting his ferry-boat on the river Styx, or that Victor Hugo
is a sublime poet, or Mr. Gladstone the most admirable of statesmen; but
we are made to see that the conversion into carbonic acid and water does
actually happen. This reality of natural knowledge it is, which makes
the friends of physical science contrast it, as a knowledge of things,
with the humanist’s knowledge, which is, say they, a knowledge of words.
And hence Professor Huxley is moved to lay it down that, ‘for the
purpose of attaining real culture, an exclusively scientific education
is at least as effectual as an exclusively literary education.’ And a
certain President of the Section for Mechanical Science in the British
Association is, in Scripture phrase, ‘very bold,’ and declares that if a
man, in his mental training, ‘has substituted literature and history for
natural science, he has chosen the less useful alternative.’ But whether
we go these lengths or not, we must all admit that in natural science
the habit gained of dealing with facts is a most valuable discipline,
and that every one should have some experience of it.
More than this, however, is demanded by the reformers. It is proposed to
make the training in natural science the main part of education, for the
great majority of mankind at any rate. And here, I confess, I part
company with the friends of physical science, with whom up to this point
I have been agreeing. In differing from them, however, I wish to proceed
with the utmost caution and diffidence. The smallness of my own
acquaintance with the disciplines of natural science is ever before my
mind, and I am fearful of doing these disciplines an injustice. The
ability and pugnacity of the partisans of natural science makes them
formidable persons to contradict. The tone of tentative inquiry, which
befits a being of dim faculties and bounded knowledge, is the tone I
would wish to take and not to depart from. At present it seems to me,
that those who are for giving to natural knowledge, as they call it, the
chief place in the education of the majority of mankind, leave one
important thing out of their account: the constitution of human nature.
But I put this forward on the strength of some facts not at all
recondite, very far from it; facts capable of being stated in the
simplest possible fashion, and to which, if I so state them, the man of
science will, I am sure, be willing to allow their due weight.
Deny the facts altogether, I think, he hardly can. He can hardly deny,
that when we set ourselves to enumerate the powers which go to the
building up of human life, and say that they are the power of conduct,
the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty, and the power
of social life and manners,—he can hardly deny that this scheme, though
drawn in rough and plain lines enough, and not pretending to scientific
exactness, does yet give a fairly true representation of the matter.
Human nature is built up by these powers; we have the need for them all.
When we have rightly met and adjusted the claims of them all, we shall
then be in a fair way for getting soberness and righteousness, with
wisdom. This is evident enough, and the friends of physical science
would admit it.