Education; Priestley, Joseph, 1733-1804; Science -- Study and teaching
If we turn to literature, the same thing is true, and you find works of
literature which may be said to be pure art. A little song of
Shakespeare or of Goethe is pure art; it is exquisitely beautiful,
although its intellectual content may be nothing. A series of pictures
is made to pass before your mind by the meaning of words, and the
effect is a melody of ideas. Nevertheless, the great mass of the
literature we esteem is valued, not merely because of having artistic
form, but because of its intellectual content; and the value is the
higher the more precise, distinct, and true is that intellectual
content. And, if you will let me for a moment speak of the very highest
forms of literature, do we not regard them as highest simply because
the more we know the truer they seem, and the more competent we are to
appreciate beauty the more beautiful they are? No man ever understands
Shakespeare until he is old, though the youngest may admire him, the
reason being that he satisfies the artistic instinct of the youngest
and harmonises with the ripest and richest experience of the oldest.
I have said this much to draw your attention to what, to my mind, lies
at the root of all this matter, and at the understanding of one another
by the men of science on the one hand, and the men of literature, and
history, and art, on the other. It is not a question whether one order
of study or another should predominate. It is a question of what topics
of education you shall select which will combine all the needful
elements in such due proportion as to give the greatest amount of food,
support, and encouragement to those faculties which enable us to
appreciate truth, and to profit by those sources of innocent happiness
which are open to us, and, at the same time, to avoid that which is
bad, and coarse, and ugly, and keep clear of the multitude of pitfalls
and dangers which beset those who break through the natural or moral
laws.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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