“The Voice of Science in Nineteenth-Century Literature” is a volume of selections put together for use in the third term of a course in English and History offered to the second-year students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The plan of the year’s work provides for a study of the record made in English literature by the great movements of thought that distinguished the nineteenth century. First John Stuart Mill’s essays on “Liberty” and “Representative Government” furnish an interpretation of the political currents of thought in the first half of the century. Carlyle’s “Past and Present,” which is read in the second third of the year, is an analysis of economic and social problems in the same period; in the third term the profound effect of science on the thought of the age receives illustration in the writings here brought together.

Broadly stated, the central theme of the book is man’s place in the universe, considered in the light of the new knowledge and speculation as to his origin and destiny which the study of science in the nineteenth century has invoked. Some of the selections are more closely related to this theme than are others. Between some of the selections the connection or contrast is obvious (“Rabbi Ben Ezra” and “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”); in others it is less immediately evident. In some cases the background is the group of ideas roughly classed under the word evolution; in others it is some characteristic phase of religious feeling or ethical or theological thought. The contrast in outlook between the American writers, Emerson and Whitman, and their English contemporaries is one of which particularly valuable use may be made. The discovery of these interrelations is what gives zest to the reading for both parties in the classroom; for neither teacher nor students should the work take the form of checking off selections on a minutely correlated syllabus. The course should be pursued on the assumption that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts: the total impression, the height gained at the end, the inspiration of the view there disclosed—these are the goals to be sought for. And the discerning teacher will not be surprised that the pupil presses him so closely up the ascent.

In reading pursued on this plan what should be emphasized on the side of history is not the marshaling of fact, of things done, but the war of thought in one field or another. Without being embroiled in the controversy for this or that belief, the student examines the battleground to learn how the battle was fought. He discovers what befell truths, half-truths, and falsehoods, and under what circumstances of glory or shame. He sees the period with the unity that genius always gives to a subject; at the same time he learns how to make the correction that a piece of contemporary interpretation inevitably requires. On the side of literature, the student’s approach is no less special and with its appropriate reward. He sees the man of genius primarily in the setting of his age. The personal adventures and idiosyncracies that often form so large and so unedifying a portion of the treatment afforded in the traditional “historical survey course” here fill a modest space in the background; the attention is concentrated on what this leader did for the men of his own day. These writers lived intensely in the life of their own generation; conscious of a clearer perception of the truth and possessing a voice that men could hear, they sought to lead their companions out of the wilderness. It is the man of genius speaking with authority to those of his own time who is here presented. In such a setting his voice has still its ancient power.