Part 31

The "utility" of physical science is, in a measure, only a collateral product of that flight of the intellect which produced science. No one, however, should underrate the utility of science who has shared in the realisation by modern industrial art of the Oriental world of fables, much less one upon whom those treasures have been poured, as it were, from the fourth dimension, without his aid or understanding.

Nor may we believe that science is useful only to the practical man. Its influence permeates all our affairs, our whole life; everywhere its ideas are decisive. How differently does the jurist, the legislator, or the political economist think, who knows, for example, that a square mile of the most fertile soil can support with the solar heat annually consumed only a definite number of human beings, which no art or science can increase. Many economical theories, which open new air-paths of progress, air-paths in the literal sense of the word, would be made impossible by such knowledge.

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The eulogists of classical education love to emphasise the cultivation of taste which comes from employment with the ancient models. I candidly confess that there is something absolutely revolting in this to me. To form the taste, then, our youths must sacrifice ten years of their life! Luxury takes precedence over necessity. Have the future generations, in the face of the difficult problems, the great social questions, which they must meet, and that with strengthened mind and heart, no more important duties to fulfil than these?

But let us assume that this end were desirable. Can taste be formed by rules and precepts? Do not ideals of beauty change? Is it not a stupendous absurdity to force one's self artificially to admire things which, with all their historical interest, with all their beauty in individual points, are for the most part foreign to the rest of our thoughts and feelings, provided we have such of our own. A nation that is truly such, has its own taste and will not go to others for it. And every individual perfect man has his own taste.

And what, after all, does this cultivation of taste consist in? In the acquisition of the personal literary style of a few select authors! What should we think of a people that would force its youth a thousand years from now, by years of practice, to master the tortuous or bombastic style of some successful lawyer or politician of to-day? Should we not justly accuse them of a woful lack of taste?

The evil effects of this imagined cultivation of the taste find expression often enough. The young savant who regards the composition of a scientific essay as a rhetorical exercise instead of a simple and unadorned presentation of the facts and the truth, still sits unconsciously on the school-bench, and still unwittingly represents the point of view of the Romans, by whom the elaboration of speeches was regarded as a serious scientific (!) employment.

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Far be it from me to underrate the value of the development of the instinct of speech and of the increased comprehension of our own language which comes from philological studies. By the study of a foreign language, especially of one which differs widely from ours, the signs and forms of words are first clearly distinguished from the thoughts which they express. Words of the closest possible correspondence in different languages never coincide absolutely with the ideas they stand for, but place in relief slightly different aspects of the same thing, and by the study of language the attention is directed to these shades of difference. But it would be far from admissible to contend that the study of Latin and Greek is the most fruitful and natural, let alone the only, means of attaining this end. Any one who will give himself the pleasure of a few hours' companionship with a Chinese grammar; who will seek to make clear to himself the mode of speech and thought of a people who never advanced as far as the analysis of articulate sounds, but stopped at the analysis of syllables, to whom our alphabetical characters, therefore, are an inexplicable puzzle, and who express all their rich and profound thoughts by means of a few syllables with variable emphasis and position,--such a person, perhaps, will acquire new, and extremely elucidative ideas upon the relation of language and thought. But should our children, therefore, study Chinese? Certainly not. No more, then, should they be burdened with Latin, at least in the measure they are.

It is a beautiful achievement to reproduce a Latin thought in a modern language with the maximum fidelity of meaning and expression--for the translator. Moreover, we shall be very grateful to the translator for his performance. But to demand this feat of every educated man, without consideration of the sacrifice of time and labor which it entails, is unreasonable. And for this very reason, as classical teachers admit, that ideal is never perfectly attained, except in rare cases with scholars possessed of special talents and great industry. Without slurring, therefore, the high importance of the study of the ancient languages as a profession, we may yet feel sure that the instinct for speech which is part of every liberal education can, and must, be acquired in a different way. Should we, indeed, be forever lost if the Greeks had not lived before us?

The fact is, we must carry our demands further than the representatives of classical philology. We must ask of every educated man a fair scientific conception of the nature and value of language, of the formation of language, of the alteration of the meaning of roots, of the degeneration of fixed forms of speech to grammatical forms, in brief, of all the main results of modern comparative philology. We should judge that this were attainable by a careful study of our mother tongue and of the languages next allied to it, and subsequently of the more ancient tongues from which the former are derived. If any one object that this is too difficult and entails too much labor, I should advise such a person to place side by side an English, a Dutch, a Danish, a Swedish, and a German Bible, and to compare a few lines of them; he will be amazed at the multitude of suggestions that offer themselves. In fact, I believe that a really progressive, fruitful, rational, and instructive study of languages can be conducted only on this plan. Many of my audience will remember, perhaps, the bright and encouraging effect, like that of a ray of sunlight on a gloomy day, which the meagre and furtive remarks on comparative philology in Curtius's Greek grammar wrought in that barren and lifeless desert of verbal quibbles.

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The principal result obtained by the present method of studying the ancient languages is that which comes from the student's employment with their complicated grammars. It consists in the sharpening of the attention and in the exercise of the judgment by the practice of subsuming special cases under general rules, and of distinguishing between different cases. Obviously, the same result can be reached by many other methods; for example, by difficult games of cards. Every science, the mathematics and the physical sciences included, accomplish as much, if not more, in this disciplining of the judgment. In addition, the matter treated by those sciences has a much higher intrinsic interest for young people, and so engages spontaneously their attention; while on the other hand they are elucidative and useful in other directions in which grammar can accomplish nothing.

Who cares, so far as the matter of it is concerned, whether we say hominum or hominorum in the genitive plural, interesting as the fact may be for the philologist? And who would dispute that the intellectual need of causal insight is awakened not by grammar but by the natural sciences?

It is not our intention, therefore, to gainsay in the least the good influence which the study of Latin and Greek grammar also exercises on the sharpening of the judgment. In so far as the study of words as such must greatly promote lucidity and accuracy of expression, in so far as Latin and Greek are not yet wholly indispensable to many branches of knowledge, we willingly concede to them a place in our schools, but would demand that the disproportionate amount of time allotted to them, wrongly withdrawn from other useful studies, should be considerably curtailed. That in the end Latin and Greek will not be employed as the universal means of education, we are fully convinced. They will be relegated to the closet of the scholar or professional philologist, and gradually make way for the modern languages and the modern science of language.

Long ago Locke reduced to their proper limits the exaggerated notions which obtained of the close connexion of thought and speech, of logic and grammar, and recent investigators have established on still surer foundations his views. How little a complicated grammar is necessary for expressing delicate shades of thought is demonstrated by the Italians and French, who, although they have almost totally discarded the grammatical redundancies of the Romans, are yet not surpassed by the latter in accuracy of thought, and whose poetical, but especially whose scientific literature, as no one will dispute, can bear favorable comparison with the Roman.

Reviewing again the arguments advanced in favor of the study of the ancient languages, we are obliged to say that in the main and as applied to the present, they are wholly devoid of force. In so far as the aims which this study theoretically pursues are still worthy of attainment, they appear to us as altogether too narrow, and are surpassed in this only by the means employed. As almost the sole, indisputable result of this study we must count the increase of the student's skill and precision in expression. One inclined to be uncharitable might say that our gymnasiums and classical academies turn out men who can speak and write, but, unfortunately, have little to write or speak about. Of that broad, liberal view, of that famed universal culture, which the classical curriculum is supposed to yield, serious words need not be lost. This culture might, perhaps, more properly be termed the contracted or lopsided culture.

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While considering the study of languages we threw a few side glances at mathematics and the natural sciences. Let us now inquire whether these, as branches of study, cannot accomplish much that is to be attained in no other way. I shall meet with no contradiction when I say that without at least an elementary mathematical and scientific education a man remains a total stranger in the world in which he lives, a stranger in the civilisation of the time that bears him. Whatever he meets in nature, or in the industrial world, either does not appeal to him at all, from his having neither eye nor ear for it, or it speaks to him in a totally unintelligible language.

A real understanding of the world and its civilisation, however, is not the only result of the study of mathematics and the physical sciences. Much more essential for the preparatory school is the formal cultivation which comes from these studies, the strengthening of the reason and the judgment, the exercise of the imagination. Mathematics, physics, chemistry, and the so-called descriptive sciences are so much alike in this respect, that, apart from a few points, we need not separate them in our discussion.

Logical sequence and continuity of ideas, so necessary for fruitful thought, are par excellence the results of mathematics; the ability to follow facts with thoughts, that is, to observe or collect experiences, is chiefly developed by the natural sciences. Whether we notice that the sides and the angles of a triangle are connected in a definite way, that an equilateral triangle possesses certain definite properties of symmetry, or whether we notice the deflexion of a magnetic needle by an electric current, the dissolution of zinc in diluted sulphuric acid, whether we remark that the wings of a butterfly are slightly colored on the under, and the fore-wings of the moth on the upper, surface: indiscriminately here we proceed from observations, from individual acts of immediate intuitive knowledge. The field of observation is more restricted and lies closer at hand in mathematics; it is more varied and broader but more difficult to compass in the natural sciences. The essential thing, however, is for the student to learn to make observations in all these fields. The philosophical question whether our acts of knowledge in mathematics are of a special kind is here of no importance for us. It is true, of course, that the observation can be practised by languages also. But no one, surely, will deny, that the concrete, living pictures presented in the fields just mentioned possess different and more powerful attractions for the mind of the youth than the abstract and hazy figures which language offers, and on which the attention is certainly not so spontaneously bestowed, nor with such good results.

Observation having revealed the different properties of a given geometrical or physical object, it is discovered that in many cases these properties depend in some way upon one another. This interdependence of properties (say that of equal sides and equal angles at the base of a triangle, the relation of pressure to motion,) is nowhere so distinctly marked, nowhere is the necessity and permanency of the interdependence so plainly noticeable, as in the fields mentioned. Hence the continuity and logical consequence of the ideas which we acquire in those fields. The relative simplicity and perspicuity of geometrical and physical relations supply here the conditions of natural and easy progress. Relations of equal simplicity are not met with in the fields which the study of language opens up. Many of you, doubtless, have often wondered at the little respect for the notions of cause and effect and their connexion that is sometimes found among professed representatives of the classical studies. The explanation is probably to be sought in the fact that the analogous relation of motive and action familiar to them from their studies, presents nothing like the clear simplicity and determinateness that the relation of cause and effect does.

That perfect mental grasp of all possible cases, that economical order and organic union of the thoughts which comes from it, which has grown for every one who has ever tasted it a permanent need which he seeks to satisfy in every new province, can be developed only by employment with the relative simplicity of mathematical and scientific investigations.

When a set of facts comes into apparent conflict with another set of facts, and a problem is presented, its solution consists ordinarily in a more refined distinction or in a more extended view of the facts, as may be aptly illustrated by Newton's solution of the problem of dispersion. When a new mathematical or scientific fact is demonstrated, or explained, such demonstration also rests simply upon showing the connexion of the new fact with the facts already known; for example, that the radius of a circle can be laid off as chord exactly six times in the circle is explained or proved by dividing the regular hexagon inscribed in the circle into equilateral triangles. That the quantity of heat developed in a second in a wire conveying an electric current is quadrupled on the doubling of the strength of the current, we explain from the doubling of the fall of the potential due to the doubling of the current's intensity, as also from the doubling of the quantity flowing through, in a word, from the quadrupling of the work done. In point of principle, explanation and direct proof do not differ much.

He who solves scientifically a geometrical, physical, or technical problem, easily remarks that his procedure is a methodical mental quest, rendered possible by the economical order of the province--a simplified purposeful quest as contrasted with unmethodical, unscientific guess-work. The geometer, for example, who has to construct a circle touching two given straight lines, casts his eye over the relations of symmetry of the desired construction, and seeks the centre of his circle solely in the line of symmetry of the two straight lines. The person who wants a triangle of which two angles and the sum of the sides are given, grasps in his mind the determinateness of the form of this triangle and restricts his search for it to a certain group of triangles of the same form. Under very different circumstances, therefore, the simplicity, the intellectual perviousness, of the subject-matter of mathematics and natural science is felt, and promotes both the discipline and the self-confidence of the reason.

Unquestionably, much more will be attained by instruction in the mathematics and the natural sciences than now is, when more natural methods are adopted. One point of importance here is that young students should not be spoiled by premature abstraction, but should be made acquainted with their material from living pictures of it before they are made to work with it by purely ratiocinative methods. A good stock of geometrical experience could be obtained, for example, from geometrical drawing and from the practical construction of models. In the place of the unfruitful method of Euclid, which is only fit for special, restricted uses, a broader and more conscious method must be adopted, as Hankel has pointed out. Then, if, on reviewing geometry, and after it presents no substantial difficulties, the more general points of view, the principles of scientific method are placed in relief and brought to consciousness, as Von Nagel, J. K. Becker, Mann, and others have well done, fruitful results will be surely attained. In the same way, the subject-matter of the natural sciences should be made familiar by pictures and experiment before a profounder and reasoned grasp of these subjects is attempted. Here the emphasis of the more general points of view is to be postponed.

Before my present audience it would be superfluous for me to contend further that mathematics and natural science are justified constituents of a sound education,--a claim that even philologists, after some resistance, have conceded. Here I may count upon assent when I say that mathematics and the natural sciences pursued alone as means of instruction yield a richer education in matter and form, a more general education, an education better adapted to the needs and spirit of the time,--than the philological branches pursued alone would yield.

But how shall this idea be realised in the curricula of our intermediate educational institutions? It is unquestionable in my mind that the German Realschulen and Realgymnasien, where the exclusive classical course is for the most part replaced by mathematics, science, and modern languages, give the average man a more timely education than the gymnasium proper, although they are not yet regarded as fit preparatory schools for future theologians and professional philologists. The German gymnasiums are too one-sided. With these the first changes are to be made; of these alone we shall speak here. Possibly a single preparatory school, suitably planned, might serve all purposes.