The situation is very similar in dealing with scientific men,--at least
with that large class of them who have little learning and no religion,
and who are thus obliged to use the formulae of modern science as their
only vehicle of thought. These men regard humanity as something which
started up in Darwin’s time. They do not listen when the humanities
are mentioned; and if they did they would not understand. When Darwin
confessed that poetry had no meaning for him, and that nothing
significant was left to him in the whole artistic life of the past,
he did not know how many of his brethren his words were destined to
describe.
We can forgive the business man for the loss of his birthright: he
knows no better. But we have it against a scientist if he undervalues
education. Surely, the Latin classics are as valuable a deposit as the
crustacean fossils, or the implements of the Stone Age. When science
shall have assumed her true relation to the field of human culture we
shall all be happier. To-day science knows that the silkworm must be
fed on the leaves of the mulberry tree, but does not know that the
soul of man must be fed on the Bible and the Greek classics. Science
knows that a queen bee can be produced by care and feeding, but does
not as yet know that every man who has had a little Greek and Latin
in his youth belongs to a different species from the ignorant man. No
matter how little it may have been, it reclassifies him. There is more
kinship between that man and a great scholar than there is between the
same man and some one who has had no classics at all: he breathes from
a different part of his anatomy. Drop the classics from education? Ask
rather, Why not drop education? For the classics are education. We
cannot draw a line and say, ‘Here we start.’ The facts are the other
way. We started long ago, and our very life depends upon keeping alive
all that we have thought and felt during our history. If the continuity
is taken from us, we shall relapse.
When we discover that these two tremendous interests--business and
commercial science have arisen in the modern world and are muffling
the voice of man, we tremble for the future. If these giants shall
continue their subjugation of the gods, the whole race, we fear, may
relapse into dumbness. By good fortune, however, there are other
powers at work. The race is emotionally too rich and too much attached
to the past to allow its faculties to be lost through disuse. New
and spontaneous crops will soon be growing upon the mould of our own
stubbly, thistle-bearing epoch.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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