The view still widely prevails that although all "higher, ideal culture," all extension of our view of the world, is acquired by philological and in a lesser degree by historical studies, still the mathematics and natural sciences should not be neglected on account of their usefulness. This is an opinion to which I must refuse my assent. It were strange if man could learn more, could draw more intellectual nourishment, from the shards of a few old broken jugs, from inscribed stones, or yellow parchments, than from all the rest of nature. True, man is man's first concern, but he is not his sole concern.
In ceasing to regard man as the centre of the world; in discovering that the earth is a top whirled about the sun, which speeds off with it into infinite space; in finding that in the fixed stars the same elements exist as on earth; in meeting everywhere the same processes of which the life of man is merely a vanishingly small part—in such things, too, is a widening of our view of the world, and edification, and poetry. There are here perhaps grander and more significant facts than the bellowing of the wounded Ares, or the charming island of Calypso, or the ocean-stream engirdling the earth. He only should speak of the relative value of these two domains of thought, of their poetry, who knows both.
The "utility" of physical science is, in a measure, only a collateral product of that flight of the intellect which produced science. No one, however, should underrate the utility of science who has shared in the realisation by modern industrial art of the Oriental world of fables, much less one upon whom those treasures have been poured, as it were, from the fourth dimension, without his aid or understanding.
Nor may we believe that science is useful only to the practical man. Its influence permeates all our affairs, our whole life; everywhere its ideas are decisive. How differently does the jurist, the legislator, or the political economist think, who knows, for example, that a square mile of the most fertile soil can support with the solar heat annually consumed only a definite number of human beings, which no art or science can increase. Many economical theories, which open new air-paths of progress, air-paths in the literal sense of the word, would be made impossible by such knowledge.
The eulogists of classical education love to emphasise the cultivation of taste which comes from employment with the ancient models. I candidly confess that there is something absolutely revolting in this to me. To form the taste, then, our youths must sacrifice ten years of their life! Luxury takes precedence over necessity. Have the future generations, in the face of the difficult problems, the great social questions, which they must meet, and that with strengthened mind and heart, no more important duties to fulfil than these?
But let us assume that this end were desirable. Can taste be formed by rules and precepts? Do not ideals of beauty change? Is it not a stupendous absurdity to force one's self artificially to admire things which, with all their historical interest, with all their beauty in individual points, are for the most part foreign to the rest of our thoughts and feelings, provided we have such of our own. A nation that is truly such, has its own taste and will not go to others for it. And every individual perfect man has his own taste.[121]
And what, after all, does this cultivation of taste consist in? In the acquisition of the personal literary style of a few select authors! What should we think of a people that would force its youth a thousand years from now, by years of practice, to master the tortuous or bombastic style of some successful lawyer or politician of to-day? Should we not justly accuse them of a woful lack of taste?