III

[7]Professor Wheeler inProceedings of Amer. Phil. Soc., vol.LVII, no. 4, 1918.

What does the community at large, so careful of your comforts, expect from you? Surely the honey-dew and the milk of paradise secreted from your classical exudatoria, which we lap up greedily in recensions, monographs, commentaries, histories, translations, and brochures. Among academic larvæ you have for centuries absorbed the almost undivided interest of the nest, and not without reason, for the very life of the workers depends on the hormones you secrete. Though small in number, your group has an enormous kinetic value, like our endocrine organs. For man's body, too, is a humming hive of working cells, each with its specific function, all under central control of the brain and heart, and all dependent on materials called hormones(secreted by small, even insignificant-looking structures) which lubricate the wheels of life. For example, remove the thyroid gland just below the Adam's apple, and you deprive man of the lubricants which enable his thought-engines to work—it is as if you cut off the oil-supply of a motor—and gradually the stored acquisitions of his mind cease to be available, and within a year he sinks into dementia. The normal processes of the skin cease, the hair falls, the features bloat, and the paragon of animals is transformed into a shapeless caricature of humanity. These essential lubricators, of which a number are now known, are called hormones—you will recognize from its derivation how appropriate is the term.

Now, the men of your guild secrete materials which do for society at large what the thyroid gland does for the individual. The Humanities are the hormones. Ourfriend Mr. P. S. Allen read before this Association a most suggestive paper on the historical evolution of the word "Humanism." I like to think of the pleasant-flavoured word as embracing all the knowledge of the ancient classical world—what man knew of nature as well as what he knew of himself. Let us see what this university means by theLiteræ Humaniores. The "Greats" papers for the past decade make interesting study. With singular uniformity there is diversity enough to bear high tribute to the ingenuity of the examiners. But, comparing the subjects in 1918 with those in the first printed papers of the school in 1831, one is surprised to find them the same—practically no change in the eighty-seven years! Compare them, again, with the subjects given in John Napleton's "Considerations" in 1773—no change! and with the help of Rashdall we may trace the story of the studies in arts, only to find that asfar back as 1267, with different names sometimes, they have been through all the centuries essentially the same—Greek and Latin authors, logic, rhetoric, grammar, and the philosophies, natural, moral, and metaphysical—practically the seven liberal arts for which, as you may see by the names over the doors, Bodley's building provided accommodation. Why this invariableness in an ever-turning world? One of the marvels, so commonplace that it has ceased to be marvellous, is the deep rooting of our civilization in the soil of Greece and Rome—much of our dogmatic religion, practically all the philosophies, the models of our literature, the ideals of our democratic freedom, the fine and the technical arts, the fundamentals of science, and the basis of our law. The Humanities bring the student into contact with the master minds who gave us these things—with the dead who never die, with those immortallives "not of now nor of yesterday, but which always were."

As true to-day as in the fifth centuryB.C.the name of Hellas stands no longer for the name of a race, but as the name of knowledge; or, as more tersely put by Maine, "Except the blind forces of Nature, nothing moves [intellectually, he means] in this world that is not Greek in origin." Man's anabasis from the old priest-ridden civilizations of the East began when "the light of reason lighted up all things," with which saying Anaxagoras expressed our modern outlook on life.

The Humanities have been a subject of criticism in two directions. Their overwhelming prominence, it is claimed, prevents the development of learning in other and more useful directions; and the method of teaching is said to be antiquated and out of touch with the present needs. They control the academic life of Oxford. An analysisof the Register for 1919 shows that of the 257 men comprising the Heads and Fellows of the twenty-three colleges (including St. Edmund's Hall), only fifty-one are scientific, including the mathematicians.

It is not very polite, perhaps, to suggest that as transmitters and interpreters they should not bulk quite so large in a modern university. 'Twas all very well

"... in days when wits were fresh and clearAnd life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames—"

in those happy days when it was felt that all knowledge had been garnered by those divine men of old time, that there was nothing left but to enjoy the good things harvested by such universal providers as Isidore, Rabanus Maurus, and Vincent of Beauvais, and those stronger dishes served by such artists as Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas Aquinas—delicious blends of such skill that only the palate of an Apiciuscould separate Greek, Patristic, and Arabian savours.

It is not the dominance, but the unequal dominance that is a cause of just complaint. As to methods of teaching—by their fruits ye shall know them. The product of "Greats" needs no description in this place. Many deny the art to find the mind's construction in the face, but surely not the possibility of diagnosing at a glance a "first in Greats"! Only in him is seen that altogether superior expression, that self-consciousness of having reached life's goal, of having, in that pickled sentence of Dean Gaisford's Christmas sermon, done something "that not only elevates above the common herd, but leads not unfrequently to positions of considerable emolument." "Many are the wand-bearers, few are the mystics," and a system should not be judged by the exceptions. As a discipline of the mind for the few, the system should not betouched, and we should be ready to sacrifice a holocaust of undergraduates every year to produce in each generation a scholar of the type of, say, Ingram Bywater. 'Tis Nature's method—does it not cost some thousands of eggs and fry to produce one salmon?

But the average man, not of scholar timber, may bring one railing accusation against his school and college. Apart from mental discipline, the value of the ancient languages is to give a key to their literatures. Yet we make boys and young men spend ten or more years on the study of Greek and Latin, at the end of which time the beauties of the languages are still hidden because of the pernicious method in which they are taught. It passes my understanding how the more excellent way of Montaigne, of Milton, and of Locke should have been neglected until recently. Make the language an instrument to play with and to playwith thoroughly, and recognize that except for the few in "Mods." and "Greats" it is superfluous to know how the instrument is constructed, or to dissect the neuro-muscular mechanism by which it is played. It is satisfactory to read that the Greek Curriculum Committee thinks "it is possible in a comparatively short time to acquire a really valuable knowledge of Greek, and to learn to read with accuracy and fair fluency some of the most important works in Greek literature." I am sure of it, if the teacher will go to school to Montaigne and feed fat against that old scoundrel Protagoras a well-earned grudge for inventing grammar—paceMr. Livingstone, every chapter in whose two books appeal to me, except those on grammar, against which I have a medullary prejudice. I speak, of course, as a fool among the wise, and I am not pleading for the "Greats" men, but for the average man, whom to infect with the spiritof the Humanities is the greatest single gift in education. To you of the elect this is purecamouflage—the amateur talking to the experts; but there is another side upon which I feel something may be said by one whose best friends have been the old Humanists, and whose breviary is Plutarch, or rather Plutarch gallicized by Montaigne. Paraphrasing Mark Twain's comment upon Christian Science, the so-called Humanists have not enough Science, and Science sadly lacks the Humanities. This unhappy divorce, which should never have taken place, has been officially recognized in the two reports edited by Sir Frederic Kenyon,[8]which have stirred the pool, and cannot but be helpful. To have got constructive, anabolic action from representatives of interests so diverse is most encouraging. While all agree that neither in the public schoolsnor in the older universities are the conditions at present in keeping with the urgent scientific needs of the nation, the specific is not to be sought in endowments alone, but in the leaven which may work a much-needed change in both branches of knowledge.

[8]Education, Scientific and Humane(1917), andEducation, Secondary and University(1919).

The School ofLiteræ Humanioresexcites wonder in the extent and variety of the knowledge demanded, and there is everywhere evidence of the value placed upon the ancient models; but this wonder pales before the gasping astonishment at what is not there. Now and again a hint, a reference, a recognition, but the moving forces which have made the modern world are simply ignored. Yet they are all Hellenic, all part and parcel of the Humanities in the true sense, and all of prime importance in modern education. Twin berries on one stem, grievous damage has been done to both in regarding the Humanities and Science in any other light than complemental. Perhaps the anomalous position of science in our philosophical school is due to the necessary filtration, indeed the preservation,of our classical knowledge, through ecclesiastical channels. Of this the persistence of the Augustinian questions until late in the eighteenth century is an interesting indication. The moulder of Western Christianity had not much use for science, and the Greek spirit was stifled in the atmosphere of the Middle Ages. "Content to be deceived, to live in a twilight of fiction, under clouds of false witnesses, inventing according to convenience, and glad to welcome the forger and the cheat"—such, as Lord Acton somewhere says, were the Middle Ages. Strange, is it not? that one man alone, Roger Bacon, mastered his environment and had a modern outlook.[9]

[9]How modern Bacon's outlook was may be judged from the following sentence: "Experimental science has three great prerogatives over all other sciences—it verifies conclusions by direct experiment, it discovers truths which they could never reach, and it investigates the secrets of nature and opens to us a knowledge of the past and of the future."

The practical point for us here is that in the only school dealing with the philosophyof human thought, the sources of the new science that has made a new world are practically ignored. One gets even an impression of neglect in the schools, or at any rate of scant treatment, of the Ionian philosophers, the very fathers of your fathers. Few "Greats" men, I fear, could tell why Hippocrates is a living force to-day, or why a modern scientific physician would feel more at home with Erasistratus and Herophilus at Alexandria, or with Galen at Pergamos, than at any period in our story up to, say, Harvey. Except as a delineator of character, what does the Oxford scholar know of Theophrastus, the founder of modern botany, and a living force to-day in one of the two departments of biology, and made accessible to English readers—perhaps indeed to Greek readers!—by Sir Arthur Hort?[10]Beggarly recognition or base indifference is meted out to the men whose mindshave fertilized science in every department. The pulse of every student should beat faster as he reads the story of Archimedes, of Hero, of Aristarchus, names not even mentioned in the "Greats" papers in the past decade. Yet the methods of these men exorcised vagaries and superstitions from the human mind and pointed to a clear knowledge of the laws of nature. It is surprising that some wag among the examiners has never relieved the grave monotony of the papers by such peripatetic questions as "How long a gnat lives," "To how many fathoms' depth the sunlight penetrates the sea," and "What an oyster's soul is like"—questions which indicate whence the modern Lucian got his inspiration to chaff so successfully Boyle and the professors of Gresham College.

[10]Loeb Series.

May I dwell upon two instances of shocking neglect? It really is amusing in Oxford to assert neglect of "the measurer of all Artand Science, whose is all that is best in the passing sublunary world," as Richard de Bury calls "the Prince of the Schooles." In Gulliver's voyage to Laputa he paid a visit to the little island of Glubbdubdrib, whose Governor, you remember, had an Endorian command over the spirits, such as Sir Oliver Lodge or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle might envy. When Aristotle and his commentators were summoned, to Gulliver's surprise they were strangers, for the reason that having so horribly misrepresented Aristotle's meaning to posterity, a consciousness of guilt and shame kept them far away from him in the lower world. Such shame, I fear, will make the shades of many classical dons of this university seek shelter with the commentators when they realize their neglect of one of the most fruitful of all the activities of the Master. In biology Aristotle speaks for the first time the language of modern science, and indeed he seems to have been firstand foremost a biologist, and his natural history studies influenced profoundly his sociology, his psychology, and his philosophy in general. The beginner may be sent now to Professor D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's Herbert Spencer Lecture, 1913, and he must be indeed a dull and muddy-mettled rascal whose imagination is not fired by the enthusiastic—yet true—picture of the founder of modern biology, whose language is our language, whose methods and problems are our own, the man who knew a thousand varied forms of life,—of plant, of bird, and animal,—their outward structure, their metamorphosis, their early development; who studied the problems of heredity, of sex, of nutrition, of growth, of adaptation, and of the struggle for existence.[11]And the senior student, if capable of appreciating a biological discovery, I advise to study the account by JohannesMüller[12](himself a pioneer in anatomy) of his rediscovery of Aristotle's remarkable discovery of a special mode of reproduction in one of the species of sharks. For two thousand years the founder of the science of embryology had neither rival nor worthy follower. There is no reference, I believe, to the biological works in theLiteræ Humaniorespapers for the past ten years, yet they form the very foundations of discoveries that have turned our philosophies topsy-turvy.

[11]Summarized from D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson.

[12]Ueber den Glatten Hai des Aristotles.(Berlin, 1842.)

Nothing reveals the unfortunate break in Humanities more clearly than the treatment of the greatest nature-poet in literature, a man who had "gazed on Nature's naked loveliness" unabashed, the man who united, as no one else has ever done, the "functions and temper and achievement of science and poetry" (Herford). The golden work of Lucretius is indeedrecognized, and in Honour Moderations, Books I to III and V are set as one of seven alternatives in section D; and scattered through the "Greats" papers are set translations and snippets here and there; but anything like adequate consideration from the scientific side is to be sought in vain. Unmatched among the ancients or moderns is the vision by Lucretius of continuity in the workings of Nature—not less ofle silence éternel de ces espaces infiniswhich so affrighted Pascal, than of "the long, limitless age of days, the age of all time that has gone by"—

"... longa dieiinfinita ætas anteacti temporis omnis."

And it is in a Latin poet that we find up-to-date views of the origin of the world and of the origin of man. The description of the wild discordant storm of atoms (Book V) which led to the birth of the world might be transferred verbatim to the accounts ofPoincaré or of Arrhenius of the growth of new celestial bodies in the Milky Way. What an insight into primitive man and the beginnings of civilization! He might have been a contemporary and friend, and doubtless was a tutor, of Tylor. Book II, a manual of atomic physics with its marvellous conception of

"... the flaring atom streamsAnd torrents of her myriad universe,"

can only be read appreciatively by pupils of Roentgen or of J. J. Thomson. The ring theory of magnetism advanced in Book VI has been reproduced of late by Parsons, whose magnetons rotating as rings at high speed have the form and effect with which this disciple of Democritus clothes his magnetic physics.

And may I here enter a protest? Of love-philtres that produce insanity we may read the truth in a chapter of that most pleasant manual of erotology, the "Anatomy ofMelancholy." Of insanity of any type that leaves a mind capable in lucid intervals of writing such verses as"De Rerum Natura"we know nothing. The sole value of the myth is its causal association with the poem of Tennyson. Only exsuccous dons who have never known the wiles and ways of the younger Aphrodite would take the intensity of the feeling in Book IV as witness to anything but an accident which may happen to the wisest of the wise, when enthralled by Vivien or some dark lady of the Sonnets!

In the School ofLiteræ Humanioresthe studies are based on classical literature and on history, "but a large number of students approach philosophical study from other sides. Students of such subjects as mathematics, natural science, history, psychology, anthropology, or political economy become naturally interested in philosophy, and their needs are at present very imperfectly provided for in this university." ThisI quote from a Report to the Board of the Faculty of Arts made just before the war on a proposed new Honour School, the subject of which should be the principles of philosophy considered in their relation to the sciences. That joint action of this kind should have been taken by the Boards of Arts and of Science indicates a widespread conviction that no man is cultivated up to the standard of his generation who has not an appreciation of how the greatest achievements of the human mind have been reached; and the practical question is how to introduce such studies into the course of liberal education, how to give the science school the leaven of an old philosophy, how to leaven the old philosophical school with the thoughts of science.[13]

[13]Since I wrote this lecture, Professor J. A. Stewart has sent me his just-published essay onOxford after the War and a Liberal Education, in which he urges with all the weight of his learning and experience that the foundations of liberal education in Oxford should be "No Humane Letters without Natural Science and no Natural Science without Humane Letters."

It is important to recognize that there is nothing mysterious in the method of science, or apart from the ordinary routine of life. Science has been defined as the habit or faculty of observation. By such the child grows in knowledge, and in its daily exercise an adult lives and moves. Only a quantitative difference makes observation scientific—accuracy; in that way alone do we discover things as they really are. This is the essence of Plato's definition of science as "the discovery of things as they really are," whether in the heavens above, in the earth beneath, or in the observer himself. As a mental operation, the scientific method is equally applicable to deciphering a bit of Beneventan script, to the analysis of the evidence of the Commission on Coal-Mines, a study of the mechanism of the nose-dive, or of the colour-scheme in tiger-beetles. To observation and reasoned thought, the Greek added experiment, but never fullyused it in biology, an instrument which has made science productive, and to which the modern world owes its civilization. Our every-day existence depends on the practical application of discoveries in pure science by men who had no other motives than a search for knowledge of Nature's laws, a disinterestedness which Burnet claims to be the distinctive gift of Hellas to humanity. With the discovery of induced currents Faraday had no thought of the dynamo. Crookes's tubes were a plaything until Roentgen turned them into practical use with the X-rays. Perkin had no thought of transforming chemical industry when he discovered aniline dyes. Priestley would have cursed the observation that an electrical charge produced nitrous acid had he foreseen that it would enable Germany to prolong the war, but he would have blessed the thought that it may make us independent of all outside sources for fertilizers.

The extraordinary development of modern science may be her undoing. Specialism, now a necessity, has fragmented the specialities themselves in a way that makes the outlook hazardous. The workers lose all sense of proportion in a maze of minutiæ. Everywhere men are in small coteries intensely absorbed in subjects of deep interest, but of very limited scope. Chemistry, a century ago an appanage of the Chair of Medicine or even of Divinity, has now a dozen departments, each with its laboratory and literature, sometimes its own society. Applying themselves early to research, young men get into backwaters far from the main stream. They quickly lose the sense of proportion, become hypercritical, and the smaller the field, the greater the tendency to megalocephaly. The study for fourteen years of the variations in the colour-scheme of the thirteen hundred species of tiger-beetles scattered over the earth maysterilize a man into a sticker of pins and a paster of labels; on the other hand, he may be a modern biologist whose interest is in the experimental modification of types, and in the mysterious insulation of hereditary characters from the environment. Only in one direction does the modern specialist acknowledge his debt to the dead languages. Men of science pay homage, as do no others, to the god of words whose magic power is nowhere so manifest as in the plastic language of Greece. The only visit many students pay to Parnassus is to get an intelligible label for a fact or form newly discovered. Turn the pages of such a dictionary of chemical terms as Morley and Muir, and you meet in close-set columns countless names unknown a decade ago, and unintelligible to the specialist in another department unless familiar with Greek, and as meaningless as the Arabic jargon in such mediæval collections as the "Synonyma"of Simon Januensis or the "Pandects" of Matheas Sylvaticus. As "Punch" put it the other day in a delightful poetical review of Professor West's volume:[14]

"Botany relies on Latin ever since Linnæus' days;Biologic nomenclature draws on Greek in countless ways;While in Medicine it is obvious you can never take your oathWhat an ailment means exactly if you haven't studied both."

[14]The Value of the Classics.Princeton University Press, 1917.

Let me give a couple of examples.

Within the narrow compass of the primitive cell from which all living beings originate, onomatomania runs riot. The process of mitosis has developed a special literature and language. Dealing not alone with the problems of heredity and of sex, but with the very dynamics of life, the mitotic complex is much more than a simple physiological process, and in the action and interaction of physical forces the cytologist hopes tofind the key to the secret of life itself. And what a Grecian he has become! Listen to this account, which Aristotle would understand much better than most of us.

The karyogranulomes, not the idiogranulomes or microsomenstratum in the protoplasm of the spermatogonia, unite into the idiosphærosome, acrosoma of Lenhossék, a protean phase, as the idiosphærosome differentiates into an idiocryptosome and an idiocalyptosome, both surrounded by the idiosphærotheca, the archoplasmic vesicle; but the idioectosome disappears in the metamorphosis of the spermatid into a sphere, the idiophtharosome. The separation of the calyptosome from the cryptosome antedates the transformation of the idiosphærotheca into the spermiocalyptrotheca.[15]

[15]Of course I have made this up out of a recent number of theAmerican Journal of Anatomy, 24,I.

Or take a more practical if less Cratyleanexample. In our precious cabbage-patches the holometabolous insecta are the hosts of parasitic polyembryonic hymenoptera, upon the prevalence of which rests the psychic and somatic stamina of our fellow countrymen; for the larvæ ofPieris brassicæ, vulgarly cabbage butterfly, are parasitiased by theApantales glomeratus, which in turn has a hyperparasite, theMesochorus pallidus. It is tragic to think that the fate of a plant, the dietetic and pharmaceutical virtues of which have been so extolled by Cato, and upon which two of my Plinean colleagues of uncertain date, Chrysippus and Dieuches, wrote monographs—it fills one with terror to think that a crop so dear to Hodge (et veris cymata!the Brussels sprouts of Columella) should depend on the deposition in the ovum of the Pieris of another polyembryonic egg. The cytoplasm or oöplasm of this forms a trophoamnion and develops into a polygerminal mass, a sphericalmorula, from which in turn develop a hundred or more larvæ, which immediately proceed to eat up everything in and of the body of their host. Only in this way does Nature preserve the Selenas, the Leas, and the Crambes, so dear to Cato and so necessary for the sustenance of our hard-working, brawny-armed Brasserii.

From over-specialization scientific men are in a more parlous state than are the Humanists from neglect of classical tradition. The salvation of science lies in a recognition of a new philosophy—thescientia scientiarumof which Plato speaks. "Now when all these studies reach the point of intercommunion and connection with one another and come to be considered in their mutual affinities, then, I think, and not till then, will the pursuit of them have a value." Upon this synthetic process I hesitate to dwell; since, like Dr. Johnson's friend, Oliver Edwards, I have never succeeded inmastering philosophy—cheerfulness was always breaking in.

In the proposed Honour School the principles of philosophy are to be dealt with in relation to the sciences, and by the introduction of literary and historical studies, which George Sarton advocates so warmly as the new Humanism,[16]the student will gain a knowledge of the evolution of modern scientific thought. But to limit the history to the modern period—Kepler to the present time is suggested—would be a grave error. The scientific student should go to the sources and in some way be taught the connection of Democritus with Dalton, of Archimedes with Kelvin, of Aristarchus with Newton, of Galen with John Hunter, and of Plato and Aristotle with them all. And the glories of Greek science should be opened in a sympathetic way to "Greats"men. Under new regulations at the public schools, a boy of sixteen or seventeen should have enough science to appreciate the position of Theophrastus in botany, and perhaps himself construct Hero's fountain. Science will take a totally different position in this country when the knowledge of its advances is the possession of all educated men. The time, too, is ripe for the Bodleian to become astudium generale, with ten or more departments, each in charge of a special sub-librarian. When the beautiful rooms, over the portals of which are the mocking blue and gold inscriptions, are once more alive with students, the task of teaching subjects on historical lines will be greatly lightened. What has been done with the Music-Room, and with the Science-Room through the liberality of Dr. and Mrs. Singer, should be done for classics, history, literature, theology, etc., each section in charge of a sub-librarian whowill beDoctor perplexorumalike to professor, don, and undergraduate.

[16]Popular Science Monthly, September, 1918, andScientia,XXIII, 3.

I wish time had permitted me to sketch even briefly the story of the evolution of science in this old seat of learning. A fortunate opportunity enables you to see two phases in its evolution. Through the kind permission of several of the colleges, particularly Christ Church, Merton, St. John's, and Oriel, and with the coöperation of the Curators of the Bodleian and Dr. Cowley, Mr. R. T. Gunther, of Magdalen College, has arranged a loan exhibition of the early scientific instruments and manuscripts. A series of quadrants and astrolabes show how Arabian instruments, themselves retaining much of the older Greek models, have translated Alexandrian science into the Western world. Some were constructed for the latitude of Oxford, and one was associated with our astronomer-poet Chaucer.

For the first time the instruments andworks of the early members of the Merton School of astronomer-physicians have been brought together. They belong to a group of men of the fourteenth century—Reed, Aschenden, Simon Bredon, Merle, Richard of Wallingford, and others—whose labours made Oxford the leading scientific university of the world.

Little remains of the scientific apparatus of the early period of the Royal Society, but through the kindness of the Dean and Governing Body of Christ Church, the entire contents of the cabinet of philosophical apparatus of the Earl of Orrery, who flourished some thirty years after the foundation of the Society, is on exhibit, and the actual astronomical model, the "Orrery," made for him and called after his name.[17]

[17]Among other notable exhibits there are:1. A series of astronomical volvelles in manuscripts and printed books.2. The printed evidence that Leonard Digges of University College was the inventor of the telescope many years before Galileo.3. The mathematical work of Robert Recorde of All Souls' College, in which he suggested the St. Andrew's Cross as the sign of multiplication, and uses symbols +, -, =.4. The earliest known slide-rule in a circular form, recently discovered in St. John's College.5. The early vellum and wooden telescopes of the Orrery Collection.6. An original Marshall microscope.7. Early surveying instruments, including the great quadrate of Schissler.

[17]Among other notable exhibits there are:

1. A series of astronomical volvelles in manuscripts and printed books.

2. The printed evidence that Leonard Digges of University College was the inventor of the telescope many years before Galileo.

3. The mathematical work of Robert Recorde of All Souls' College, in which he suggested the St. Andrew's Cross as the sign of multiplication, and uses symbols +, -, =.

4. The earliest known slide-rule in a circular form, recently discovered in St. John's College.

5. The early vellum and wooden telescopes of the Orrery Collection.

6. An original Marshall microscope.

7. Early surveying instruments, including the great quadrate of Schissler.

The story of the free cities of Greece shows how a love of the higher and brighter things in life may thrive in a democracy. Whether such love may develop in a civilization based on a philosophy of force is the present problem of the Western world. To-day there are doubts, even thoughts of despair, but neither man nor nation is to be judged by the behaviour in a paroxysm of delirium. Lavoisier perished in the Revolution, and the Archbishop of Paris was butchered at the altar by the Commune, yet France was not wrecked; and Russia may survive the starvation of such scholars as Danielevski and Smirnov, and the massacre of Botkin. To have intelligent freemenof the Greek type with a stake in the State (not mere chattels from whose daily life the shadow of the workhouse never lifts), to have the men and women who could love the light put in surroundings in which the light may reach them, to encourage in all a sense of brotherhood reaching the standard of the Good Samaritan—surely the realization in a democracy of such reasonable ambitions should be compatible with the control by science of the forces of nature for the common good, and a love of all that is best in religion, in art, and in literature.

Amid the smoke and squalor of a modern industrial city, after the bread-and-butter struggle of the day, "the Discobolus has no gospel." Our puritanized culture has been known to call the Antinous vulgar. Copies of these two statues, you may remember, Samuel Butler found stored away in the lumber-room of the Natural History Museum, Montreal, with skins, plants,snakes, and insects, and in their midst, stuffing an owl, sat "the brother-in-law of the haberdasher of Mr. Spurgeon." Against the old man who thus blasphemed beauty, Butler broke into those memorable verses with the refrain "O God! O Montreal!"

Let us not be discouraged. The direction of our vision is everything, and after weltering four years in chaos poor stricken humanity still nurses the unconquerable hope of an ideal state "whose citizens are happy ... absolutely wise, all of them brave, just, and self-controlled ... all at peace and unity and in the enjoyment of legality, equality, liberty, and all other good things." Lucian's winning picture of this "Universal Happiness" might have been sketched by a Round Table pen or some youthful secretary to the League of Nations. That such hope persists is a witness to the power of ideals to captivatethe mind and the reality may be nearer than any of us dare dream. If survived, a terrible infection, such as confluent smallpox, seems to benefit the general health. Perhaps such an attack through which we have passed may benefit the body cosmic. After discussing the various forms of government, Plato concludes that "States are as the men are, they grow out of human characters,"[18]and then, as the dream-republic approached completion, he realized that after all the true State is within, of which each one of us is the founder, and patterned on an ideal the existence of which matters not a whit. Is not the need of this individual reconstruction the Greek message to modern democracy? And with it is blended the note of individual service to the community on which Professor Gilbert Murray has so wisely dwelt.

[18]Republic, BookVIII.

With the hot blasts of hate still on ourcheeks, it may seem a mockery to speak of this as the saving asset in our future; but is it not the very marrow of the teaching in which we have been brought up? At last the gospel of the right to live, and the right to live healthy, happy lives, has sunk deep into the hearts of the people; and before the war, so great was the work of science in preventing untimely death that the day of Isaiah seemed at hand, when a man's life should be "more precious than fine gold, even a man than the golden wedge of Ophir." There is a sentence in the writings of the Father of Medicine upon which all commentators have lingered, "ἢν γὰρ παρῇ φιλανθρωπίη, πάρεστι καὶ φιλοτεχνίη"[19]—the love of humanity associated with the love of his craft!—philanthropia and philotechnia—the joy of working joined in each one to a true love of his brother. Memorable sentence indeed! in which forthe first time was coined the magic word "philanthropy," and conveying the subtle suggestion that perhaps in this combination the longings of humanity may find their solution, and Wisdom—Philosophia—at last be justified of her children.

[19]Œuvres complètes d' Hippocrates.Par E. Littré,IX, 258.

THE END

The Riverside Press

cambridge . massachusetts

u . s . a

Transcriber Notes:Errors in punctuation and inconsistent hyphenation were not corrected unless otherwise noted.Footnotes were moved to after the paragraph they were referenced in.On page 26, the second open parenthesis was replaced with a closed parenthesis.

Errors in punctuation and inconsistent hyphenation were not corrected unless otherwise noted.

Footnotes were moved to after the paragraph they were referenced in.

On page 26, the second open parenthesis was replaced with a closed parenthesis.

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