Autobiography contains many examples of dogmatic fatuity, but none more striking than this implicit rejection of the study of history, as unworthy of an intelligent man.

Our danger in education to-day comes, not from men of science as a whole, but from her less liberal devotees, and from that part of the public, which (in a thoroughly unscientific

about education without studying it.

spirit) talks While While supteaching of

porting any attempt to improve the science where it is deficient, and to bring more science where it is needed in national life, we shall remember that an education based on physical science would not only leave the mind unflexible, unsympathetic, unimaginative, undeveloped, but would ignore what is more important than the Cosmos itself. Our motto was written 2500 years ago on the walls of the temple of Apollo at Delphi, Tv σeavтóv, 'Know thyself.'

CHAPTER III

THE CASE FOR THE CLASSICS: GREEK

To know himself a man must know the capabilities and performances of the human spirit; and the value of the humanities, of Altertumswissenschaft, the science. of antiquity, is, that it affords for this purpose an unsurpassed source of light and stimulus. Whoever seeks help for knowing himself from knowing the capabilities and performances of the human spirit, will nowhere find a more fruitful object of study than in the achievements of Greece in literature and the arts. MATTHEW ARNOLD.

GREECE and her foundations are

Built below the tide of war,

Based on the crystalline sea
Of thought and its eternity.

SHELLEY.

In our last chapter we saw that an education based on physical science, whether regarded as a training of the mind or as an introduction to life, would leave serious gaps, which only the humanities can fill; and though people sometimes write and speak as if this were not so, no one who has thought

about education would deny it. We now pass to a much more difficult and disputed point-Why should the classics have a place in our education? Why should they be taught to any except a few specialists, who happen to be interested in them? Why should they hold their present position in our public schools? Why should they not be entirely replaced by our own and other modern languages, literatures and history? With these questions we shall be occupied for the rest of the book.

Some people would explain our classical system as a survival, an anachronism. In the Middle Ages, from which our education dates, "Latin was made the groundwork of education; not for the beauty of its classical literature, not because the study of a dead language was the best mental gymnastic. but because it was the language of educated men throughout Western Europe, employed for public business, literature, philoessential to the sophy and science, above all . . . unity of the Western Church."1 Greek on the other hand took place at its side as offering the fifteenth century, not only finer prose and poetry, but also better text-books in philosophy and science 1 Essays on a Liberal Education, p. 7.

than any contemporary literature. The needs, it is argued, which brought Greek and Latin into our curriculum have disappeared or are met in other ways; but the classics still but the classics still occupy their places by vis inertiae and the favour of a supine nation that has never troubled to dislodge them.

This is on the whole a true account of the origin of our classical education; though it cannot explain why W. von Humboldt, founding in 1810 A.D. the education which was to regenerate Germany, made Greek a compulsory subject in secondary education, or why the modern world still retains Plato and Aristotle and the masters of Greek literature, though it no longer approaches science through Greek researches or medicine through Hippocrates and Galen. But it assumes too easily that the classics are superseded or rivalled, and that is just what has to be proved. Those who think to discredit Latin and Greek by references to the needs which brought them into education, are making the familiar confusion between origin and validity. A habit or institution may originate in a certain need, and yet be valuable for other reasons when that particular need has passed away. The stars were originally observed because people hoped to read in them human destinies; yet no

one would discard astronomy because it has developed out of a superstition. The characteristic forms of Greek architecture which still meet us in our streets, were devised to meet the difficulties of building in wood; yet no one would suggest that they should have been abandoned, when the progress of architecture made them no longer strictly necessary. The classics may have taken their place in education because they were once the only keys to knowledge; but it does not follow that they should be condemned because they are no longer required for this particular purpose. Still, it is a paradox that the twentieth century should study literatures 2000 years old; it is a paradox that does not stand by itself, for the Bible is as old as Latin and Greek, and yet we study it; but its defenders are bound to justify it, and shew reason when they maintain, "No man having drunk old wine desireth new; for he saith, The old is better." What are our reasons?

It is not true that we only study Latin because men spoke it in the Middle Ages, and Greek because there was a time when the fullest knowledge of various sciences was contained in Greek books. But it is true that the history of Greece