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!’