The many simply enjoy the material fruit without enjoying the glorious intellectual quest that finds the fruit, do you say? Yes, but the many may enjoy the ennobling effect upon the intellect of those large conclusions to which science leads the scientific man. This, I concede, is to some extent true, but it is not true to any very considerable extent. And to the extent to which it is true, literature is largely the means through which the effect is produced. The great results of science, satisfying, inspiring as they are to those who first come at them, and to those others who really appreciate them as literature, by eminence, presenting them in her own admirable ways, is able to make them appreciated—these great results, I say, of science, tend when taught as lessons in the text-books of the schools, to become mere lifeless commonplaces of knowledge and of thought—mainly barren of force to quicken and fructify the mind. It has been said, and truly said, that the average American school-boy of to-day knows at twelve more true science than the wisest philosopher of Greek or Roman antiquity could ever by possibility have learned. But, as has been replied, and truly replied, it by no means thence follows that such a school-boy is wiser than was Plato or Aristotle. It is not what you know, it is what you are, that chiefly signifies. And what you are, in that which is most central and most important, literature does more, far more, to make you than lies within the utmost reach of science; that is, if you are an average man, if you are one of the majority, and not one of the elect few who follow science as the vocation of a life. This is what I claim for literature, and this my claim for literature I acknowledge myself under obligation to make good by something beyond mere confident assertion of the fact.