When we read the works of Homer, or Virgil, or Plato, or turn to the later productions of Dante, of Shakespeare, of Milton, and the host of writers and poets who have done so much to instruct and amuse us, and to make our lives good and agreeable, we are apt to look with some disappointment upon present times. And when we turn to the field of art and compare Greek statues and Gothic or Renaissance architecture with our modern efforts, we must feel bound to admit our inferiority to our ancestors. And this leads us perhaps to question whether our age is the equal of those which have gone before, or whether the human intellect is not on the decline.

This feeling, however, proceeds from a failure to remember that each age of the world has its peculiar points of strength, as well as of weakness. During one period that self-denying patriotism and zeal for the common good will be developing, which is necessary for the formation of society. During another, the study of the principles of morality and religion will be in the ascendant. During another the arts will take the lead; during another, poetry, tragedy, and lyric poetry and prose will be cultivated; during another, music will take its turn, and out of rude peasant songs will evolve the harmony of the opera.

To our age is reserved the glory of being easily the foremost in scientific discovery. Future ages may despise our literature, surpass us in poetry, complain that in philosophy we have done nothing, and even deride and forget our music; but they will only be able to look back with admiration on the band of scientific thinkers who in the seventeenth century reduced to a system the laws that govern the motions of worlds no less than those of atoms, and who in the eighteenth and nineteenth founded the sciences of chemistry, electricity, sound, heat, light, and who gave to mankind the steam-engine, the telegraph, railways, the methods of making huge structures of iron, the dynamo, the telephone, and the thousand applications of science to the service of man.

And future students of history who shall be familiar with the conditions of our life will, I think, be also struck with surprise at our estimate of our own peculiar capabilities and faculties. They will note with astonishment that a gentleman of the nineteenth century, an age mighty in science, and by no means pre-eminent in art, literature and philosophy, should have considered it disgraceful to be ignorant of the accent with which a Greek or a Roman thought fit to pronounce a word, should have been ashamed to be unable to construe a Latin aphorism, and yet should have considered it no shame at all not to know how a telephone was made and why it worked. They will smile when they observe that our highest university degrees, our most lucrative rewards, were given for the study of dead languages or archÆological investigations, and that science, our glory and that for which we have shown real ability, should only have occupied a secondary place in our education.

They will smile when they learn that we considered that a knowledge of public affairs could only be acquired by a grounding in Greek particles, or that it could ever have been thought that men could not command an army without a study of the tactics employed at the battle of Marathon.

But the battle between classical and scientific education is not in reality so much a dispute regarding subjects to be taught, as between methods of teaching. It is possible to teach classics so that they become a mental training of the highest value. It is possible to teach science so that it becomes a mere enslaving routine.

The one great requirement for the education of the future is firmly to grasp the fact that a study of words is not a study of things, and that a man cannot become a carpenter merely by learning the names of his tools.

It was the mistake of the teachers of the Middle Ages to believe that the first step in knowledge was to get a correct set of concepts of all things, and then to deduce or bring out all knowledge from them. Admirable plan if you can get your concepts! But unfortunately concepts do not exist ready made—they must be grown; and as your knowledge increases, so do your concepts change. A concept of a thing is not a mere definition, it is a complete history of it. And you must build up your edifice of scientific knowledge from the earth, brick by brick and stone by stone. There is no magic process by which it can with a word be conjured into existence like a palace in the Arabian Nights.

For nothing is more fatal than a juggle with words such as force, weight, attraction, mass, time, space, capacity, or gravity. Words are like purses, they contain only as much money as you put into them. You may jingle your bag of pennies till they sound like sovereigns, but when you come to pay your bills the difference is soon discovered.

This fatal practice of learning words without trying to obtain a clear comprehension of their meaning, causes many teachers to use mathematical formulÆ not as mere steps in a logical chain, but like magical chaldrons into which they put the premises as the witches put herbs and babies’ thumbs into their pots, and expect the answers to rise like apparitions by some occult process that they cannot explain. This tendency is encouraged by foolish parents who like to see their infant prodigies appear to understand things too hard for themselves, and look on at their children’s lessons in mathematics like rustics gaping at a fair. They forget that for the practical purposes of life one thing well understood is worth a whole book-full of muddled ill-digested formulÆ. Unfortunately it is possible to cram boys up and run them through the examination sieves with the appearance of knowledge without its reality. If it were cricket or golf that were being tested how soon would the fraud be discovered. No humbug would be permitted in those interesting and absorbing subjects. And really, when one reflects how easy it is to present the appearance of book knowledge without the reality, one can hardly blame those who select men for service in India and Egypt a good deal for their proficiency in sports and games. Better a good cricketer than a silly pedant stuffed full of learning that “lies like marl upon a barren soil encumbering what is not in its power to fertilize.”

Another kindred error is to expect too much of science. For with all our efforts to obtain a further knowledge of the mysteries of nature, we are only like travellers in a forest. The deeper we penetrate it, the darker becomes the shade. For science is “but an exchange of ignorance for that which is another kind of ignorance”A and all our analysis of incomprehensible things leads us only to things more incomprehensible still.

It is, therefore, by the firm resolution never to juggle with words or ideas, or to try and persuade ourselves or others that we understand what we do not understand, that any scientific advance can be made.