The Pleasures of Life Part 11

"Science," said the Royal Commission of 1861, "quickens and cultivates directly the faculty of observation, which in very many persons lies almost dormant through life, the power of accurate and rapid generalization, and the mental habit of method and arrangement; it accustoms young persons to trace the sequence of cause and effect; it familiarizes them with a kind of reasoning which interests them, and which they can promptly comprehend; and it is perhaps the best corrective for that indolence which is the vice of half-awakened minds, and which shrinks from any exertion that is not, like an effort of memory, merely mechanical."

Again, when we contemplate the grandeur of science, if we transport ourselves in imagination back into primeval times, or away into the immensity of s.p.a.ce, our little troubles and sorrows seem to shrink into insignificance. "Ah, beautiful creations!" says Helps, speaking of the stars, "it is not in guiding us over the seas of our little planet, but out of the dark waters of our own perturbed minds, that we may make to ourselves the most of your significance." They teach, he tells us elsewhere, "something significant to all of us; and each man has a whole hemisphere of them, if he will but look up, to counsel and befriend him."

There is a pa.s.sage in an address given many years ago by Professor Huxley to the South London Working Men's College which struck me very much at the time, and which puts this in language more forcible than any which I could use.

"Suppose," he said, "it were perfectly certain that the life and fortune of every one of us would, one day or other, depend upon his winning or losing a game of chess. Don't you think that we should all consider it to be a primary duty to learn at least the names and the moves of the pieces?

Do you not think that we should look with a disapprobation amounting to scorn upon the father who allowed his son, or the State which allowed its members, to grow up without knowing a p.a.w.n from a knight? Yet it is a very plain and elementary truth that the life, the fortune, and the happiness of every one of us, and more or less of those who are connected with us, do depend upon our knowing something of the rules of a game infinitely more difficult and complicated than chess. It is a game which has been played for untold ages, every man and woman of us being one of the two players in a game of his or her own. The chessboard is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the Universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know to our cost that he never overlooks a mistake or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance. To the man who plays well the highest stakes are paid, with that sort of overflowing generosity which with the strong shows delight in strength. And one who plays ill is checkmated--without haste, but without remorse."

I have elsewhere endeavored to show the purifying and enn.o.bling influence of science upon religion; how it has a.s.sisted, if indeed it may not claim the main share, in sweeping away the dark superst.i.tions, the degrading belief in sorcery and witchcraft, and the cruel, however well-intentioned, intolerance which embittered the Christian world almost from the very days of the Apostles themselves. In this she has surely performed no mean service to religion itself. As Canon Fremantle has well and justly said, men of science, and not the clergy only, are ministers of religion.

Again, the national necessity for scientific education is imperative. We are apt to forget how much we owe to science, because so many of its wonderful gifts have become familiar parts of our everyday life, that their very value makes us forget their origin. At the recent celebration of the s.e.xcentenary of Peterhouse College, near the close of a long dinner, Sir Frederick Bramwell was called on, some time after midnight, to return thanks for Applied Science. He excused himself from making a long speech on the ground that, though the subject was almost inexhaustible, the only ill.u.s.tration which struck him as appropriate under the circ.u.mstances was "the application of the domestic lucifer to the bedroom candle." One cannot but feel how unfortunate was the saying of the poet that

"The light-outspeeding telegraph Bears nothing on its beam."

The report of the Royal Commission on Technical Instruction, which has recently been issued, teems with ill.u.s.trations of the advantages afforded by technical instruction. At the same time, technical training ought not to begin too soon, for, as Bain truly observes, "in a right view of scientific education the first principles and leading examples, with select details, of all the great sciences, are the proper basis of the complete and exhaustive study of any single science." Indeed, in the words of Sir John Herschel, "it can hardly be pressed forcibly enough on the attention of the student of Nature, that there is scarcely any natural phenomenon which can be fully and completely explained in all its circ.u.mstances, without a union of several, perhaps of all, the sciences."

The most important secrets of Nature are often hidden away in unexpected places. Many valuable substances have been discovered in the refuse of manufactories; and it was a happy thought of Glauber to examine what everybody else threw away. There is perhaps no nation the future happiness and prosperity of which depend more on science than our own. Our population is over 35,000,000, and is rapidly increasing. Even at present it is far larger than our acreage can support. Few people whose business does not lie in the study of statistics realize that we have to pay foreign countries no less than 140,000,000 a year for food. This, of course, we purchase mainly by manufactured articles. We hear now a great deal about depression of trade, and foreign, especially American, compet.i.tion, which, let me observe, will be much keener a few years hence, when the United States have paid off their debt, and consequently reduced taxation.

But let us look forward a hundred years--no long time in the history of a nation. Our coal supplies will then be greatly diminished. The population of Great Britain doubles at the present rate of increase in about fifty years, so that we should, if the present rate continues, require to import over 400,000,000 a year in food. How, then, is this to be paid for? We have before us, as usual, three courses. The natural rate of increase may be stopped, which means suffering and outrage; or the population may increase, only to vegetate in misery and dest.i.tution; or, lastly, by the development of scientific training and appliances, they may probably be maintained in happiness and comfort. We have, in fact, to make our choice between science and suffering. It is only by wisely utilizing the gifts of science that we have any hope of maintaining our population in plenty and comfort. Science, however, will do this for us if we will only let her.

She may be no Fairy G.o.dmother indeed, but she will richly endow those who love her.

That discoveries, innumerable, marvellous, and fruitful, await the successful explorers of Nature no one can doubt. What would one not give for a Science primer of the next century? for, to paraphrase a well-known saying, even the boy at the plough will then know more of science than the wisest of our philosophers do now. Boyle ent.i.tled one of his essays "Of Man's great Ignorance of the Uses of Natural Things; or that there is no one thing in Nature whereof the uses to human life are yet thoroughly understood"--a saying which is still as true now as when it was written.

And, lest I should be supposed to be taking too sanguine a view, let me give the authority of Sir John Herschel, who says: "Since it cannot but be that innumerable and most important uses remain to be discovered among the materials and objects already known to us, as well as among those which the progress of science must hereafter disclose, we may hence conceive a well-grounded expectation, not only of constant increase in the physical resources of mankind, and the consequent improvement of their condition, but of continual accession to our power of penetrating into the arcana of Nature and becoming acquainted with her highest laws."

Nor is it merely in a material point of view that science would thus benefit the nation. She will raise and strengthen the national, as surely as the individual, character. The great gift which Minerva offered to Paris is now freely tendered to all, for we may apply to the nation, as well as to the individual, Tennyson's n.o.ble lines:--

"Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control: These three alone lead life to sovereign power, Yet not for power (power of herself Would come uncalled for), but to live by law; Acting the law we live by without fear."

"In the vain and foolish exultation of the heart," said John Quincy Adams, at the close of his final lecture on resigning his chair at Boston, "which the brighter prospects of life will sometimes excite, the pensive portress of Science shall call you to the sober pleasures of her holy cell. In the mortification of disappointment, her soothing voice shall whisper serenity and peace. In social converse with the mighty dead of ancient days, you will never smart under the galling sense of dependence upon the mighty living of the present age. And in your struggles with the world, should a crisis ever occur, when even friendship may deem it prudent to desert you, when priest and Levite shall come and look on you and pa.s.s by on the other side, seek refuge, my unfailing friends, and be a.s.sured you shall find it, in the friendship of Laelius and Scipio, in the patriotism of Cicero, Demosthenes, and Burke, as well as in the precepts and example of Him whose law is love, and who taught us to remember injuries only to forgive them."

Let me in conclusion quote the glowing description of our debt to science given by Archdeacon Farrar in his address at Liverpool College--testimony, moreover, all the more valuable, considering the source from which it comes.

"In this great commercial city," he said, "where you are surrounded by the triumphs of science and of mechanism--you, whose river is ploughed by the great steamships whose white wake has been called the fittest avenue to the palace front of a mercantile people--you know well that in the achievements of science there is not only beauty and wonder, but also beneficence and power. It is not only that she has revealed to us infinite s.p.a.ce crowded with unnumbered worlds; infinite time peopled by unnumbered existences; infinite organisms. .h.i.therto invisible but full of delicate and iridescent loveliness; but also that she has been, as a great Archangel of Mercy, devoting herself to the service of man. She has labored, her votaries have labored, not to increase the power of despots or to add to the magnificence of courts, but to extend human happiness, to economize human effort, to extinguish human pain. Where of old, men toiled, half blinded and half naked, in the mouth of the glowing furnace to mix the white-hot iron, she now subst.i.tutes the mechanical action of the viewless air. She has enlisted the sunbeam in her service to limn for us, with absolute fidelity, the faces of the friends we love. She has shown the poor miner how he may work in safety, even amid the explosive fire-damp of the mine. She hits, by her anaesthetics, enabled the sufferer to be hushed and unconscious while the delicate hand of some skilled operator cuts a fragment from the nervous circle of the unquivering eye. She points not to pyramids built during weary centuries by the sweat of miserable nations, but to the lighthouse and the steamship, to the railroad and the telegraph. She has restored eyes to the blind and hearing to the deaf. She has lengthened life, she has minimized danger, she has controlled madness, she has trampled on disease. And on all these grounds, I think that none of our sons should grow up wholly ignorant of studies which at once train the reason and fire the imagination, which fashion as well as forge, which can feed as well as fill the mind."

[1] Byron.

[2] Emerson.

[3] H. Smith.

CHAPTER X.

EDUCATION.

"No pleasure is comparable to the standing upon the vantage ground of truth."--BACON.

"Divine Philosophy!

Not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose, But musical as is Apollo's lute, And a perpetual feast of nectar'd sweets Where no crude surfeit reigns."--MILTON.

It may seem rather surprising to include education among the pleasures of life; for in too many cases it is made odious to the young, and is supposed to cease with school; while, on the contrary, if it is to be really successful it must be suitable, and therefore interesting, to children, and must last through life. The very process of acquiring knowledge is a privilege and a blessing. It used to be said that there was no royal road to learning; it would be more true to say that the avenues leading to it are all royal.

"It is not," says Jeremy Taylor, "the eye that sees the beauties of heaven, nor the ear that hears the sweetness of music, or the glad tidings of a prosperous accident; but the soul that perceives all the relishes of sensual and intellectual perceptions: and the more n.o.ble and excellent the soul is, the greater and more savory are its perceptions. And if a child behold the rich ermine, or the diamonds of a starry night, or the order of the world, or hears the discourses of an apostle; because he makes no reflex act on himself and sees not what he sees, he can have but the pleasure of a fool or the deliciousness of a mule."

Herein lies the importance of education. I say education rather than instruction, because it is far more important to cultivate the mind than to store the memory. Studies are a means and not an end. "To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules is the humor of a scholar: they perfect nature, and are perfected by experience.... Crafty men contemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them." [1]

Moreover, though, as Mill says, "in the comparatively early state of human development in which we now live, a person cannot indeed feel that entireness of sympathy with all others which would make any real discordance in the general direction of their conduct in life impossible,"

yet education might surely do more to root in us the feeling of unity with our fellow-creatures. At any rate, if we do not study in this spirit, all our learning will but leave us as weak and sad as Faust.

"I've now, alas! Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence too, And to my cost Theology, With ardent labor studied through, And here I stand, with all my lore Poor fool, no wiser than before." [2]

Our studies should be neither "a couch on which to rest; nor a cloister in which to promenade alone; nor a tower from which to look down on others; nor a fortress whence we may resist them; nor a workshop for gain and merchandise; but a rich armory and treasury for the glory of the creator and the enn.o.blement of life." [3]

For in the n.o.ble words of Epictetus, "you will do the greatest service to the state if you shall raise, not the roofs of the houses, but the souls of the citizens: for it is better that great souls should dwell in small houses rather than for mean slaves to lurk in great houses."

It is then of great importance to consider whether our present system of education is the one best calculated to fulfil these great objects. Does it really give that love of learning which is better than learning itself?

Does all the study of the cla.s.sics to which our sons devote so many years give any just appreciation of them; or do they not on leaving college too often feel with Byron--

"Then farewell, Horace; whom I hated so!"

Too much concentration on any one subject is a great mistake, especially in early life. Nature herself indicates the true system, if we would but listen to her. Our instincts are good guides, though not infallible, and children will profit little by lessons which do not interest them. In cheerfulness, says Pliny, is the success of our studies--"studia hilaritate proveniunt"--and we may with advantage take a lesson from Theognis, who, in his Ode on the Marriage of Cadmus and Harmonia, makes the Muses sing:

"What is good and fair, Shall ever be our care; Thus the burden of it rang, That shall never be our care, Which is neither good nor fair.

Such were the words your lips immortal sang."

There are some who seem to think that our educational system is as good as possible, and that the only remaining points of importance are the number of schools and scholars, the question of fees, the relation of voluntary and board schools, etc. "No doubt," says Mr. Symonds, in his _Sketches in Italy and Greece_, "there are many who think that when we not only advocate education but discuss the best system we are simply beating the air; that our population is as happy and cultivated as can be, and that no substantial advance is really possible. Mr. Galton, however, has expressed the opinion, and most of those who have written on the social condition of Athens seem to agree with him, that the population of Athens, taken as a whole, was as superior to us as we are to Australian savages."

That there is, indeed, some truth in this, probably no student of Greek history will deny. Why, then, should this be so? I cannot but think that our system of education is partly responsible.

Manual and science teaching need not in any way interfere with instruction in other subjects. Though so much has been said about the importance of science and the value of technical instruction, or of hand-training, as I should prefer to call it, it is unfortunately true that in our system of education, from the highest schools downward, both of them are sadly neglected, and the study of language reigns supreme.

This is no new complaint. Ascham, in _The Schoolmaster_, long ago lamented it; Milton, in his letter to Mr. Samuel Hartlib, complained "that our children are forced to stick unreasonably in these grammatick flats and shallows;" and observes that, "though a linguist should pride himself to have all the tongues Babel cleft the world into, yet, if he have not studied the solid things in them as well as the words and lexicons, he were nothing so much to be esteemed a learned man as any yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his mother dialect only;" and Locke said that "schools fit us for the university rather than for the world."

Commission after commission, committee after committee, have reiterated the same complaint. How then do we stand now?

I see it indeed constantly stated that, even if the improvement is not so rapid as could be desired, still we are making considerable progress. But is this so? I fear not. I fear that our present system does not really train the mind, or cultivate the power of observation, or even give the amount of information which we may reasonably expect from the time devoted to it.

Sir M. E. Grant-Duff has expressed the opinion that a boy or girl of fourteen might reasonably be expected to "read aloud clearly and agreeably, to write a large distinct round hand, and to know the ordinary rules of arithmetic, especially compound addition--a by no means universal accomplishment; to speak and write French with ease and correctness, and have some slight acquaintance with French literature; to translate _ad aperturam libri_ from an ordinary French or German book; to have a thoroughly good elementary knowledge of geography, under which are comprehended some notions of astronomy--enough to excite his curiosity; a knowledge of the very broadest facts of geology and history--enough to make him understand, in a clear but perfectly general way, how the larger features of the world he lives in, physical and political, came to be like what they are; to have been trained from earliest infancy to use his powers of observation on plants, or animals, or rocks, or other natural objects; and to have gathered a general acquaintance with what is most supremely good in that portion of the more important English cla.s.sics which is suitable to his time of life; to have some rudimentary acquaintance with drawing and music."

To effect this, no doubt, "industry must be our oracle, and reason our Apollo," as Sir T. Browne says; but surely it is no unreasonable estimate; yet how far do we fall short of it? General culture is often deprecated because it is said that smatterings are useless. But there is all the difference in the world between having a smattering of, or being well grounded in, a subject. It is the latter which we advocate--to try to know, as Lord Brougham well said, "everything of something, and something of everything."

"It can hardly," says Sir John Herschel, "be pressed forcibly enough on the attention of the student of nature, that there is scarcely any natural phenomenon which can be fully and completely explained, in all its circ.u.mstances, without a union of several, perhaps of all, the sciences."

The present system in most of our public schools and colleges sacrifices everything else to cla.s.sics and arithmetic. They are most important subjects, but ought not to exclude science and modern languages. Moreover, after all, our sons leave college unable to speak either Latin or Greek, and too often absolutely without any interest in cla.s.sical history or literature. But the boy who has been educated without any training in science has grave reason to complain of "knowledge to one entrance quite shut out."

By concentrating the attention, indeed, so much on one or two subjects, we defeat our own object, and produce a feeling of distaste where we wish to create an interest.