this that the community must contain a sufficient number of trained men of science to meet its needs. But it is not a just conclusion that every citizen must be a trained scientist. The community would equally collapse if it had no farmers, no shipwrights, no teachers-the list may be extended indefinitely; but it is not a just conclusion from this that we must all study agriculture, naval architecture and pedagogics. Because specialists are necessary in all branches of life, it does not follow that we must all specialise in every form of specialisation. Why is physical science to be given an exceptionally favoured position?

The reply made is, because physical science covers the greater part of life. But does it? Take this present war and ask how much of it physical science explains. What does it tell about the causes of the war? Nothing; you must look for them in the past history of Germany since Frederick the Great, in German thinkers, Nietzsche, Treitschke, and a host of others, in political and moral philosophies, in theories of empire, and nationality, in Russia, Austria, the Balkan States, in the wealth of the Turkish empire and the nature of its government and inhabitants, in the character of the various peoples fighting-an

enquiry which takes us infinitely far before we find the forces which have moulded national spirit and temper, and made Germans, Frenchmen, Russians, Britons so strangely different. Physical science covers only the tiniest plot of all this ground; all it could tell us about the war is something about coveted mineral deposits, something (very little) about industrial complications, and practically everything about the material means by which the war is being fought. This knowledge is, no doubt, indispensable, but it covers neither the whole, nor even the greater part of the war, any. more than it covers the whole or the greater part of life.

The great gap in science is that it tells us hardly anything about man. This sounds paradoxical; yet consider. Suppose that we have studied physics, chemistry, physiology, zoology and the rest, how much do we thereby know of man? Perhaps we have mastered the history of his tissues, his nervous system, his bones and sinews; perhaps we understand his structure and constitution, the laws which regulate his production, `growth and decay. Still, we know nothing of him as he moves in actual life. The man who is our friend, enemy, kinsmän, partner, colleague, with

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whom we live and do business, who governs or is governed by us, has never once come within our view.

That is why it is impossible to 'base our education on physical science.' It omits a branch of knowledge which everyone needs. It is possible for the ordinary man to dispense with a knowledge of physical science; he can go to specialists who will do his business for him better than he can do it for himself. Considering that the world reposes on physical science, it is wonderful how well most of us can get along without any knowledge of it, provided our occupation does not demand actual scientific knowledge. (The layman, in spite of his ignorance of physiology, enjoys no worse health than a doctor.) But no one can dispense with a knowledge of man. Everyone needs it, and is using it each minute he is in relation with human beings, whether he is speaking to them, or reading what they have written, or engaged in work which at any point touches them. We need this knowledge as private individuals: and still more, we need it as citizens and voters; the political conditions of England make it absolutely indispensable for us. Our need of science may be great, but our need of political

and moral wisdom is greater, and we are far more likely to shipwreck from the former than from the latter. We may require more chemists, and need to appreciate and employ them more than we do, but the storms that loom above us and threaten to break in most disastrous ruin are political; they are the dangers of a self-willed, impetuous and ignorant democracy (and by democracy we do not only mean the labouring classes). This democracy is called to vote on problems of government at home and abroad, to decide between the policies presented to it, to discern whether truth resides in the glib tongues of its leaders and the facile pens of its daily papers. Without some knowledge of itself, and its neighbours in the world, of the ideals that sway or have swayed its own and other countries, of the judgments that history records on the experiments, crimes and blunders of past ages, the steps of humanity will be more blind and blundering than ever. Metallurgical or chemical analysis needs highly trained skill and knowledge; but the analysis of political and moral problems is at least as complicated and' urgent, and it is work which çannot be handed over entirely to experts; if we do not all take some share in it, we are all, as voters, called to pronounce a decision upon it. If

a voter knows nothing of trinitrotoluene, England will not be much the worse for his ignorance; but she is in a bad case, if her citizens, however primed with physical science, cannot appreciate and judge the political issues at stake. The attitude of some sections of our population at the beginning of this war should have convinced the most sceptical that the ignorance of a democracy is a real danger. Now this knowledge cannot be acquired merely by living in the world. It is in books. Physical science cannot give it; for it is the knowledge of man recorded in history, and, more vaguely, in literature.

What, more precisely, do we get from the studies on which our higher education is at present based, the studies which some critics wish to replace by more 'paying subjects,' and which Sir E. Schäfer wishes to replace by physical science? There is no good English word to describe them; but for convenience' sake we will call them the humanities,✔✔ a term coined at the Renaissance. How do we

justify their prominence in education?

First, as science reveals to us the physical constitution of ourselves and of the world round us,