Part 9 (1/2)

In order to teach successfully the _results_ of science to college students, I have no desire that they should have any preliminary preparation. It has been my duty for more than thirty years to present the elements of chemistry to the youngest cla.s.s in one of our colleges, and I have never had any reason to complain of their want of interest in the subject. Indeed, I regard it as a great privilege to be the first to point out to enthusiastic young men the wonderful vistas which modern science has opened to our view. So far as their temporary interest is concerned, I should greatly prefer that they had never studied the subject before coming to college. But even enthusiastic interest in popular lectures is not scientific culture. A few men in every cla.s.s always have been, and will continue to be, so far interested as to make the cultivation of science the business of their lives. But such men always labor under the disadvantages resulting from a want of early training, and these obstacles repel a large number whose natural tastes and abilities would otherwise have fitted them for a scientific calling.

The change from one system of culture to another, at the age of eighteen, has all the disadvantages of changing a profession late in life. Nevertheless, the college will always continue to educate a number of men of science in this way. Most of these men become teachers, and no one questions that their previous linguistic training makes them all the more forcible expositors of scientific truth. It is not for such persons that I desire any change. I am, however, most anxious that the university should do its part in educating that important cla.s.s of men who are to direct the industries and develop the material resources of our country. Such men can be led to appreciate, and will give time to acquire, an elegant use of language, but they will not devote four or five years of their lives to purely linguistic training, and, if we do not open our doors to them, they will be forced to content themselves with such education as high-schools, or, at best, technical schools, can offer. But, while they will thus lose the broader knowledge and larger scope which a university education affords, the university will also lose their sympathy and powerful support. Such students are now wholly repelled from the university, and, under a more liberal policy, they would form an important and clear addition to our numbers, and--as I have said in another place--without diminis.h.i.+ng by a single man the number of those who come to college through the cla.s.sical schools.

But there is another cla.s.s of young men with whom a system of education based on the study of Nature would, as I am convinced, be more successful than the prevailing system of linguistic culture: I refer to those who now come to college, some of them through the influence of family tradition, some of them through the expectation of social advantage, and a still larger number on account of the attractions of college-life. Many of these are men who, with poor verbal memories, or want of apt.i.tude for recognizing abstract relations, can never become cla.s.sical scholars with any exertion that they can be expected to make, but who can often be educated with success through their perceptive faculties. These men are the dunces of the cla.s.sical department, they add nothing to its strength, and in every cla.s.sical school are a hindrance to the better students; but some of them may become able and useful men, if their interest can be aroused in objective realities. Of our present students, it is only this cla.s.s that the proposed changes would really affect. Those who have tastes and apt.i.tudes for linguistic studies would continue to come through the old channels, and of such only can cla.s.sical scholars be made.

I know very well it is said that, although the cla.s.sical department would be glad to be rid of this undesirable element, yet the change could not be made without endangering the continuance of the study of Greek in many of our cla.s.sical schools. But can the university be justified in continuing a requisition which is recognized to be opposed to the best interests of an important cla.s.s of its patrons? And certainly it is not necessary to protect the study of Greek in this country by any such questionable means. I have a great deal more faith myself in the value of cla.s.sical scholars.h.i.+p than many of my cla.s.sical colleagues appear to possess. Never has one word of disparagement been heard from me. I honor true cla.s.sical scholars.h.i.+p as much as I despise the counterfeit. To maintain that the cla.s.s of cla.s.sical dunces, to whom I have referred, appreciate the beauties of cla.s.sical literature or derive any real advantage from the study is, in my opinion, to maintain a manifest absurdity. Fully as much do the convicts in a tread-mill enjoy the beauties of the legal code under which they are compelled to work; and if, as Chief-Justice Coleridge has recently maintained, in his speech at New Haven, cla.s.sical scholars.h.i.+p is the best preparation for the highest distinctions in church and state, certainly its continuance does not depend on the minimum requisition in Greek of this university.[O] The ”new culture,” although a much ”younger industry,”

does not ask for any such artificial protection. It only asks for an opportunity to show what it can accomplish, and this opportunity it has never yet had. Even if the largest liberty were granted, those who seek to promote a genuine education, based on natural science, would labor under the greatest disadvantages. Not only is the apparatus required for the new culture far more expensive than that of an ordinary cla.s.sical school, but also more personal attention must be given to each scholar, and the ordinary labor-saving methods of the cla.s.s-room are wholly inapplicable. In the face of such obstacles as these conditions present, the new culture can advance only very gradually; and, amid the rivalry of the old system, it can only succeed by maintaining a very high degree of efficiency. The new way will certainly not offer any easier mode of admission to college than the old; and when it is remembered that the cla.s.sical system has the control of all the endowed secondary schools, the prestige of past success, and the support of the most powerful social influence, it is difficult to understand on what the opposition to the free development of the ”new education” is based. Are not gentlemen, who have been talking of a revolution in education, taking counsel of their fears rather than of their better judgment; and are they not forgetting that the teachers of natural science have the same interest in upholding the principles of sound education as have their cla.s.sical colleagues? Certainly there can be no question that, in the future as in the past, they will ever seek to maintain the integrity of all the great departments of the university unimpaired. It has happened before this that the judgment, even of intelligent men, has been warped by their cla.s.s relations or supposed interests; but as, in this country, the learned cla.s.s has no control of government patronage, we may at least hope that the discussion of the Greek question will never a.s.sume with us the great bitterness that a similar controversy has aroused in Germany.

[O] This article was written and read to the Faculty of Harvard College shortly after Lord Coleridge's visit to the United States, in the autumn of 1883.

There has been a great deal said in this discussion about the ”humanities,” and it has been a.s.sumed that, while the a.n.a.lysis of the Greek verb is ”humanizing,” the a.n.a.lysis of the phenomena of Nature is ”materializing.” I can discover nothing humanizing in the one or the other, except through the spirit with which they are studied, and I know by experience that the spirit with which the study of the Latin and Greek grammars is often enforced is most demoralizing. Those who have been born with a facility for language may laugh at this statement; but a boy who has been held up to ridicule for the want of a good verbal memory, denied him by his Creator, long remembers the depressing effect produced, if not the malignity aroused, by the cruelty. Many are the men, now eminent in literature as well as science, who have experienced the tyranny of a cla.s.sical school, so graphically described in the Autobiography of Anthony Trollope; and many are the boys who might have been highly educated if their perceptive faculties had been cultivated, whose career as scholars has been cut short by the same tyranny.

Again, a great deal has been said about specialization at an early age, as if the study of Nature were specializing while the study of Latin metres and Greek accents was liberalizing. But how could specialization be more strikingly ill.u.s.trated than by a system which limits a boy's attention between the ages of twelve and twenty to linguistic studies to the almost entire exclusion of a knowledge of that universe in which his life is to be pa.s.sed, and which so limits his intellectual training that his powers of observation are left undeveloped, his judgments in respect to material relations unformed, and even his natural conceptions of truth distorted? Now, although a special culture which has such mischievous results as these may be necessary in order to command that power over language which marks the highest literary excellence, and although a university should foster this culture by all legitimate means, yet to enforce it upon every boy who aspires to be a scholar, whatever may be his natural talents, is as cruel as the Chinese practice of cramping the feet of women in order to conform to a traditional ideal of beauty. Indeed, an instructor in natural science has very much the same difficulty in training cla.s.sical scholars to observe that a dancing-master would have in teaching a cla.s.s of Chinese girls to waltz.

Again, it has been said that while the opportunities for scientific culture in college are ample, no one will oppose such a modification of the requisitions for admission as the conditions of this culture demand, provided only we label the product of such culture with a descriptive name. Call the product of your scientific culture Bachelors of Science, we have been told, and you may arrange the requisites of admission to your own courses as you choose. I am forced to say that this argument, however specious, is neither ingenuous nor charitable. If you will label the product of a purely linguistic culture with an equally descriptive name; if, following the French usage, you will call such graduates Bachelors of Letters, we shall not object to the term Bachelors of Science; or, without making so great an innovation, I, for one, should have no objection to a distinction between Bachelors of Arts in Letters and Bachelors of Arts in Science. But it is perfectly well understood that in this community the degree of Bachelor of Arts is for most men the one essential condition of admission to the n.o.ble fraternity of scholars, to what has been called the ”Guild of the Learned.” To refuse this degree to a certain cla.s.s of our graduates is to exclude them from such a.s.sociations and from the privileges which they afford; and this is just what is intended. Hence I say that the argument is not ingenuous, and it is not charitable because it implies that a cla.s.s of men who profess to love the truth as their lives are seeking to appear under false colors. To cite examples from my own profession only, I have always maintained that such men as Davy, Dalton, and Faraday were as truly learned, as highly cultivated, and as capable of expressing their thoughts in appropriate language, as the most eminent of their literary compeers, and I shall continue to maintain this proposition before our American community, and I have no question that sooner or later my claim will be allowed, and the doors of the ”Guild of the Learned” will be opened to all scholars who have acquired by cultivation the same power which these great men held in such a pre-eminent degree by gift of Nature.

Lastly, I am persuaded that in a large body politic like this it is unwise, and in the long run futile, to attempt to protect any special form of culture at the expense of another. If one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; and what is for the interest of the whole is in the long run always for the interest of every part. I would welcome every form of culture which has vindicated its efficiency and its value, and in so doing I feel that I should best promote the interests of the special department which I have in charge.

XI.

SCIENTIFIC CULTURE; ITS SPIRIT, ITS AIM, AND ITS METHODS.[P]

I a.s.sume that most of those whom I address are teachers, and that you have been drawn here by a desire to be instructed in the best methods of teaching physical science. It has therefore seemed to me that I might render a real service, in this introductory address, by giving the results of my own experience and reflection on this subject; and my thoughts have been recently especially directed to this topic by the discussion in regard to the requisites for admission, which during the past year have actively engaged the attention of the faculty of this college.

[P] An address delivered at the opening of the Summer School of Chemistry at Harvard College, July 7, 1884.

At the very outset of this discussion we must be careful to make a clear distinction between instruction and education--between the acquisition of knowledge and the cultivation of the faculties of the mind. Our knowledge should be as broad as possible, but, in the short s.p.a.ce of human life, it is not, as a rule, practicable to cultivate, for effective usefulness, the intellectual powers in more than one direction.

Let me ill.u.s.trate what I mean from that department of knowledge which is at once the most fundamental and the most essential. I refer to the study of language. No person can be regarded as thoroughly educated who has not the power of speaking and writing his mother-tongue accurately, elegantly, and forcibly; and scholars of the present day must also command, to a considerable extent, both the French and the German languages. These three languages, at least, are the necessary tools of the American scholar, whatever may be the special field of his scholars.h.i.+p, and his end is gained if he has acquired thorough command of these tools. But if he goes further, and studies the philology of these languages, their structure, their derivation, their literature, the study may occupy a lifetime, and be made the basis of severe intellectual training. More frequently, and as most scholars think more effectually, such linguistic training is obtained by the study of the ancient languages, especially the Latin and the Greek, and no one questions the value and efficiency of this form of mental discipline.

But obviously such a preparation is not necessary for the use of the modern languages as tools, or in order to acquire a knowledge of ancient history, of the modes of ancient life, or the results of ancient thought. In recent discussions a great deal has been said about the value of cla.s.sical learning, and it has been argued that no man could be regarded as thoroughly educated who had never heard of Homer or Virgil, of Marathon or Cannae, of the Acropolis of Athens or the Forum of Rome.

Certainly not. But all this knowledge can be acquired without spending six years in learning to read the Latin and Greek authors in the original, or in writing Latin hexameters or Greek iambics. The discipline acquired by this long study is undoubtedly of the highest value, but its value depends upon the intellectual training which is the essential result, and not upon the knowledge of ancient life and thought, which is merely an incident.

Now, this same distinction, which I have endeavored to ill.u.s.trate on familiar ground, must not be forgotten in considering the relations of physical science to education. Physical science may also be studied from two wholly different points of view: First, to acquire a knowledge of facts and principles, which are among the most important factors of modern life; secondly, as a means of developing and training some of the most important intellectual faculties of the mind--for example, the powers of observation, of conception, and of inductive reasoning.

The experimental sciences must often be studied chiefly from the first point of view. If no man can be regarded as thoroughly educated who is ignorant of the outlines of Roman and Greek history: one who knows nothing of the principles of the steam-engine, or of the electric telegraph, is certainly equally deficient. I do not question that in our high-schools the physical sciences must be taught, for the most part, as funds of useful knowledge, and in regard to such teaching I have only a few remarks to make. a.s.suming that information is the end to be attained, the best method of securing the desired result is to present the facts in such a way as will interest the scholar, and thus secure the retention of these facts by his memory. I think it a very serious mistake to attempt to teach such subjects by _memoriter_ recitations from a text-book, however well prepared. This method at once makes the subject a task; and, if in addition the preparation for an examination is the great end in view, it is wonderful how small is the residuum after the work is done. Such subjects can always be made intensely interesting if presented by lectures, with the requisite ill.u.s.trations, and I do not believe that the cramming process required to pa.s.s an examination adds much to the knowledge previously gained. Many teachers, finding that the parrot-like learning of a text-book is unprofitable, attempt to make the exercise more valuable by means of problems--usually simple arithmetical problems--depending upon principles of physics or chemistry. And there can be no doubt that such problems do serve to enforce the principles they ill.u.s.trate; but I am afraid they also more frequently, by disgusting the student, stand in the way of the acquisition of the desired knowledge.

It must not be forgotten, in studying the results of science, that the facts are never fully learned unless the learner is made to understand the evidence on which the facts rest. The child who reads in his physical geography that the world revolves on its axis, learns what to him is a mere form of words, until he connects this astronomical fact with his own observation that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west; and so the scholar who reads that water is composed of oxygen and hydrogen has acquired no real knowledge until he has seen the evidence on which this fundamental conclusion rests. Let, then, the sciences be taught as they have been in schools, as important parts of useful knowledge, but let them so be taught as to engage the interest of the scholar, and to direct his attention to the phenomena of Nature.

All this, however, is not scientific culture, in the sense in which I have constantly used the term, and does not afford any special training for the intellectual faculties. For myself, I do not desire any study of natural history, chemistry, or physics from this point of view as a preparation for college; simply because, with the large apparatus of the university, all these subjects can be presented more effectively, and be made more interesting, than is possible in the schools. What I desire to see accomplished by our schools is a training in physical science, comparable in extent and efficiency with that which they now accomplish in the ancient languages. And this brings me to another topic, namely, scientific culture as a system of mental training.

Before attempting to state in what scientific culture consists, we shall do well, even at the expense of some repet.i.tion, to show that what often pa.s.ses for scientific culture is far different from the system of education which we have so constantly advocated. The acquisition of scientific knowledge, however extensive, does not in itself const.i.tute scientific culture, nor is the power of reproducing such knowledge, at a compet.i.tive examination, any test of real scientific power.

Nevertheless, the examination papers which have been published by the universities of England and of this country show that this is the sole test of scientific scholars.h.i.+p on which most of these universities rely, in awarding their highest honors to students in physical science. The power of so mastering a subject as to be able to reproduce any portion of it with accuracy, completeness, and elegance, at a written examination, is the normal result of literary, not of scientific, culture, and the power is of the same order, whether the subject-matter be philology, literature, art, or science. Indeed, scientific are, as a rule, much less adapted than literary subjects to the cultivation of this power. Moreover, it is also true that scholars, having attained to a very high degree of scholars.h.i.+p, may not possess this power of stating clearly and concisely the knowledge they actually possess. We have all of us known eminent men, possessing in a very high degree the power of investigating Nature, who have been wholly unable to state clearly the knowledge they have themselves discovered. Great harm has been done to the cause of scientific culture by attempting to adapt the well-tried methods of literary scholars.h.i.+p to scientific subjects: for, as I have said in another place, compet.i.tive examinations are no test of real attainment in physical science.

Let me not be understood as disparaging the retentive memory and power of concentration which enable the student to reproduce acquired information with accuracy, rapidity, and elegance. This is a power of the very highest order, and is the result of the cultivation to a high degree of many of the n.o.blest faculties of the mill. And I wish to enforce is, that success in such examinations is no indication of scientific culture, properly so called.

What, then, are the tests of true scientific scholars.h.i.+p? The answer can be made perfectly plain and intelligible. The real test is the power to study and interpret natural phenomena. As in cla.s.sical scholars.h.i.+p the true test of attainment is the power to interpret the delicate shades of meaning expressed by the cla.s.sical authors, so in science the true test is the power to read and interpret Nature; and this last power, like the other, can as a rule only be acquired by careful and systematic training. As some men have a remarkable facility for acquiring languages, so also there are men who seem to be born investigators of Nature; but by most men such powers can only be acquired through a careful training and exercise of the faculties of the mind, on which success depends. No man would be regarded as a cla.s.sical scholar, however broad and extended his knowledge, if that knowledge had been acquired solely by reading English translations of the cla.s.sical authors, however excellent. So, no man can be regarded as a scientific scholar whose knowledge of Nature has been solely derived from books.

In either case the real scholar must have been to the fountain-head and drawn his knowledge from the original sources. In order, then, to discover how scientific culture must be gained, we must consider the conditions on which the successful study and interpretation of Nature depend.

Of the powers of the mind called into exercise in the investigation of Nature, the most obvious and fundamental is the power of observation. By power of observation is not meant simply the ability to see, to hear, to taste, or to smell with delicacy, but the power of so concentrating the attention on what we observe as to form a definite and lasting impression on the mind. There are undoubtedly great differences among men in the acuteness of their sensations, but successful observation depends far less upon the acuteness of the senses than on the faculty of the mind which clearly distinguishes and remembers what is seen and heard. We say of a man that he walks through the world with his eyes shut, meaning that, although the objects around him produce their normal impression on the retina of his eye, he pays no attention to what he sees. The power of the naturalist to distinguish slight differences of form or feature in natural objects is simply the result of a habit, acquired through long experience, of paying attention to what he sees, and the want of this power in students who have been trained solely by literary studies is most marked.