The themes of classical education are less important than those of science. For culture an exclusively scientific education is at least as effectual as an exclusively literary education. New knowledge has so much increased in modern times as to sway daily life. The scientific method is now recognized as the one mode of discerning or discovering truth. What in the past men said about things is vastly less to the point than what can be learned now at first hand. The Greeks looked to Nature, let us also look to Nature and not merely repeat what the Greeks reported. Modern languages, especially English, as means of culture. Science cannot be applied unless its principles are understood. The mastery of these principles is culture. Art and letters, no less than science, are needed for a well-rounded mind. 171 MIND THE PART PLAYED BY INFANCY IN THE EVOLUTION OF MAN JOHN FISKE [John Fiske attained distinction in three distinct fields of letters: as a historian, as a scientific interpreter of religion, as an expositor of the philosophy of evolution. In this last department of his work his original contribution was the theory here set forth, taken from a chapter in "A Century of Science and Other Essays," copyright by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston and New York, 1900. Mr. Fiske died in 1901, in his sixtieth year.] When Darwin's "Origin of Species" was first published, when it gave us that wonderful explanation of the origin of forms of life from allied forms through the operation of natural selection, it must have been like a mental illumination to every person who comprehended it. But after all it left a great many questions unexplained, as was natural. It accounted for the phenomena of organic development in general with wonderful success, but it must have left a great many minds with the feeling: If man has been produced in this way, if the mere operation of natural selection has produced the human race, wherein is the human race anyway essentially different from lower races? Is not man really dethroned, taken down from that exceptional position in which we have been accustomed to place him, and might it not be possible, in the course of the future, for other beings to come upon the earth as far superior to man as man is superior to the fossilized dragons of Jurassic antiquity?