Scientific Culture, and Other Essays: Second Edition; with AdditionsCooke, Josiah P., Jr. (Josiah Parsons)
Science
Scientific Culture, and Other Essays: Second Edition; with Additions
Cooke, Josiah P., Jr. (Josiah Parsons)
Science
There are, of course, two distinct elements in a liberal education: the
one the acquisition of useful knowledge, the other a training or
culture of the intellectual faculties. The first should be made as broad
as possible, the second, in the present state of knowledge, must
unfortunately be greatly restricted. While in the passage referred to I
have claimed that, in a system of education based upon science,
languages should be studied simply as tools, Mr. Matthew Arnold, in a
lecture which he has recently repeatedly delivered in this country, and
whose constant refrain was the phrases I have already quoted, has
claimed that, although scholars must use the results of science as so
much literary material, they need have nothing to do with its methods.
In my view, both positions are essentially sound. It has been said that
the Greek departments in our colleges could do without the scientific
students much better than scientific scholars could do without Greek,
and this remark admits of an evident rejoinder. Certainly in this age no
professional man can afford to be ignorant of the results of science,
and he will constantly be led into error if he does not know something
of its methods. It is perfectly well known that very few of the
investigators, who have coined the scientific terms derived from the
Greek, so often referred to, could read a page of Herodotus or Homer in
the original; and it is equally true that Mr. Matthew Arnold, and his
compeer, Lord Tennyson, who have shown such large knowledge of the
results of science, could not interpret the complex relations in which
the simplest phenomena of Nature are presented to the observer. The
greater number of the students of Nature can only know the beauties of
Greek literature as they are feebly presented in translations, and so
the greater number of literary students can only know of the wonders of
Nature as they are inadequately described in popular works on science.
If it requires years of study to enable a student to master the meaning
of a Greek sentence, can we expect that in less time a student shall be
able to unravel the intricacies of natural phenomena? It has been said
that no Greek scholarship is possible for a student who begins the study
of that language in college. Is it supposed that scientific scholarship
is any more possible under such conditions?
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