Part 3

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 play with 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--_pace_ Mr. 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 spirit of the Humanities is the greatest single gift in education. To you of the elect this is pure _camouflage_--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 schools nor 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), and _Education, Secondary and University_ (1919).

III

The School of _Literæ Humaniores_ excites 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 philosophy of 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 minds have 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 Art and 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 first and 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 Johannes Müller[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 the _Literæ Humaniores_ papers 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 indeed recognized, 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 of _le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis_ which so affrighted Pascal, than of "the long, limitless age of days, the age of all time that has gone by"--

"... longa diei infinita 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 of Poincaré 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 streams And 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 of Melancholy." 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 of _Literæ Humaniores_ the 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." This I 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 on _Oxford 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 fully used 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 may sterilize 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 oath What 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 to find 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 the _American Journal of Anatomy_, 24, I.

Or take a more practical if less Cratylean example. 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 of _Pieris brassicæ_, vulgarly cabbage butterfly, are parasitiased by the _Apantales glomeratus_, which in turn has a hyperparasite, the _Mesochorus 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 spherical morula, 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--the _scientia scientiarum_ of 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 in mastering 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 a _studium 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 who will be _Doctor perplexorum_ alike to professor, don, and undergraduate.

[16] _Popular Science Monthly_, September, 1918, and _Scientia_, 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 and works 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: