truth has ever new lights for the inquirer, and that the humble efforts of pigmies like himself may by combination lead to the scaling of heights which even giants could not take by storin. Do not, then, neglect the scientific attitude in your studies. Whatever it be that you are engaged uponwhether chemistry or physics, or biology or geology, whether mathematics or classics, or some modern language or literature-make it your effort, if possible, to be a discoverer, on however small a scale, or at any rate to exercise independent thought. I have accentuated the importance of the scientific attitude in the development of mind. But a further and important question remains. Is the scientific attitude the only and allsufficient attitude? Let us consider more closely what the method of science involves. The object of science is essentially to arrange phenomena in the most simple way-to introduce order into our conceptions of things. To effect this, each science adopts a single point of view, and is compelled to deal with single aspects of thingsemploys, in fact, division of labour. For to treat all aspects at once would be to introduce cross divisions into science, and so make it unscientific. Thus mathematics, for instance, deals with things from the point of view of number and space; physics treats them as exhibiting energy; chemistry as compounded or uncompounded; biology as living; psychology as thinking and feeling; sociology as living in societies or states. Comte sketched out a pyramid of the sciences, in which they were arranged in a sort of hierarchy of complexity; at the base the most general and simple, at the apex the most special and complex. But, whether more or less complex, each science deals with its one aspect of things, and that only. No single science can exhaust even the smallest concrete thing. A piece of chalk represents for the physicist a certain group of forces; for the chemist certain elements combined in certain proportions; for the geologist a certain stage in the history of the earth's crust. To the political economist man is wealth-producing, for political economy deals mainly with human nature as concerned in wealth. Each science, then, consciously limits its view, in order that it may give a more complete account of one phase of thingsdirects its energies into one channel in order to give force to the stream. In other words, science is abstract. But man is not content always to confine his view to aspects of things; he needs also to regard them as wholes. It is true that the several sciences to a certain extent supplement one another. The man who is acquainted with physics, chemistry, geology, and other sciences, has an insight into several aspects of the same lump of chalk. But still the unity, the wholeness, may be missed. For, though the whole is made up of its parts, it cannot be conceived by addition of isolated conceptions of parts. This has been expressed with fine sarcasm by Goethe's Mephistopheles: "Wer will was Lebendig's erkennen und beschreiben, Sucht erst den Geist herauszutreiben, How, then, are we to grasp the "spirit that binds things together?" The answer is, by another than the scientific method-by the method of poetry. Science analyses and arranges according to special aspects; poetry bodies forth conceptions of wholes, rejecting all definition by limitation, sacrificing detail for breadth. The poet's aim is to build up again in his own soul the unity of things, which science is always breaking down; to find in the universe an object which can satisfy the claims of his emotional as well as his intellectual nature. 1 "The man who seeks to know and describe a living thing first drives the spirit out of it: he then holds the parts in his hand; but alas! the spirit that bound them together has departed." Thus, if in one sense it is true that poetry always lags a little behind. science, turning the laborious results of one generation into the fairy tales of the next, in another sense poetry anticipates science; the vision of the poet dimly traces out the lines along which the science of the future will march. Shall I seem to be trying to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, if I say that some of the highest generalisations of science appear to me to be in large degree of the nature of poetry-anticipations of nature, conceived and believed long before anything like adequate evidence was forthcoming? I would name the doctrines of the conservation of energy and the evolution of life. The latter may be read, in a somewhat archaic form, in the philo. sophic poem of Lucretius, written nearly two thousand years ago; and I can well believe that it was present to Darwin as a poetic idea before he conceived of the exact method of its demonstration. No doubt poetry must renounce the severity and caution of which science is so justly proud. For the objects at which the poet "throws out" his conception are too great to be compassed by definition, and his ideas will often be pronounced faulty by the future researcher. But he is content in his own sphere of work-that of a maker or creator-knowing that his results, too, are unapproachable by the scientific man. No amount of psychology would create a Hamlet. And, if the results of poetry are different from those of science, so is the form into which the poet throws his ideas. He does not aim at an iron rigidity of logical proof, but rather at a lightness of touch which hints rather than demonstrates, veils while it unveils. The ideal of science is exhaustive demonstration; that of poetry imaginative creation. The poet does not attempt to give new knowledge; rather he takes the reader into partnership, and tries, by the power of sympathy, to awaken his slumber ing conceptions. And the products of literature can be apprehended only imaginatively. If we seek for demonstration, we find emptiness. I know of a young man, trained in mathematics and Latin grammar, who patiently-almost pathetically-read and re-read his Sartor Resartus in the hope of finding a syllogism or some semblance of a proposition of Euclid in it, and who did not understand it. Like the mathematical reader of Paradise Lost, he could not make out that it proved anything. Perhaps it would not be going too far to say that, in the interests of science itself, we ought to cultivate the capacity for a non-scientific attitude. For the first attitude in approaching an object, whether natural or literary, should be a receptive one. The widening of one's experience, letting things tell their own tale, even the attitude of mere passive enjoyment, will often carry the beginner further in understanding than a relentless search for law. Nature, then, is not exhausted by the most complete inquiry into her laws taken separately. It still remains to conceive her as a whole-to apprehend her by the imagination; and some of her secrets reveal themselves less to the microscope than to the poetic eye. "This most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire"-how many a digger and delver in the cause of science has presented to them a mind petrified by absorption in a fixed idea, and insensible to their magic? "We live by admiration" is one of the favourite texts of Wordsworth. The scientist seeks not to live, but to reduce things to his categories of thought. Like Mr. Browning's Paracelsus: "He still must hoard and keep and class all truths With one ulterior purpose: he must know." To him nature is indeed never a mere "pestilential congregation of vapours." For there is the beauty of her law ever unfolding itself before his eyes; "the heavens" it has been said, "declare to him the glory of Kepler and Newton." But this is not all their glory. He must have something of the poetic mind if he would feel the awe and rapture with which Kant gazed upon the starry heavens, and Linnæus upon the gorse in blossom; if he would see nature as she paints herself upon the canvas of Turner; if he would love her as Wordsworth loved her. Otherwise the soul of nature escapes his ken; we may say of Nature what Schiller says of truth generally: "Dich zu fangen, ziehen sie aus mit Netzen und Stangen, Aber mit Geistestritt schreitest du mitten hindurch."1 have ransacked the Iliad and the Odyssey to discover the development of a mood or a particle, while remaining wall-eyed to the beauty of these poems; one may be an authority on the Homeric question without having known Homer. I would not call such a man a pedant; but I would say that he has confined himself to one aspect of the poet and missed his poetry. A fair country lies around him, waiting for illumination from the dawn of poetic imagination. He gropes in it, guided only by the uncertain beams of his grammatical candle. For to enter into the conceptions of the poet, one must be something of a poet oneself; one needs, at any rate, some literary experience. A sense of humour is one thing; an inquiry into the humorous-the rationale of humour -is quite another. 1 "To catch thee they take the field with nets and poles; but thou, like a spirit, passest through the midst of them." I think a protest is needed at the present day against an exclusive devotion to the scientific șide of literature, and especially of classical literature. The laws and history of the classical languages are the main objects of work in our classical schools and universities; grammar tends to replace literature, prosody is substituted for poetry, and little room is left for the play of contemplative imagination. This perhaps cannot be otherwise so long as we live under the whips and scorpions of an exigent examination system; for the scientific side of literature presents obvious advantages, in the examination room, both to examiners and examined. Literary culture, like astronomy, does not pay. So our students learn to translate and compose, but not to read or appreciate; and the literary artists are approached through the medium of what the scientific scholars have said about them. It is commonly believed abroad that the English man of business, or country squire, refreshes his soul during the long winter evenings by reading his Virgil or Horace. This is, I am told, an exaggeration, and likely to be less true since it has ceased to be the fashion for members of Parliament to quote Horace in the House-or at any rate to quote him correctly. However, in the treatment of the classics as literature, we might perhaps do well to remember the best traditions of English scholarship, and emulate the wider and more liberal reading of the age of Bentley. Again in history we have the same two elements-the scientific and the purely literary. I have no wish to depreciate the great achievements of scientific history-a science which has resulted in discoveries as instructive as those of paleontology or geology. It is an admirable thing to weigh evidence, and to correct hasty judgments by fuller research; but history, written in this spirit only, loses its power of inspiration, of kindling the imagination at the thought of great deeds and great men, and of carrying the reader on the wings of sympathy into a remote past. And this-its dramatic or poetic function-is surely one at least of the functions of history. Here then you have my conception of the prime essentials of culture in the two attitudes of mind-the scientific and the poetic. Intellectual manhood is not reached till concentration, exact inquiry, begins; but the mind grows poor without the poetical spirit. There is one truth of science, and another of poetry, and both are indispensable. But it is not many subjects that are needed for culture; rather it is a manysidedness of mind by which to conceive things both scientifically and imaginatively. To maintain this twofold attitude is, I know, not easy. Men inspired with the ardour of pursuit, and conscious of the limitless field of research right ahead, may say with Luther, "God help me, I can no other; " and he would be a bold man who ventured to cast a stone at them. "The ink of science," says a Mohammedan proverb, "is more precious than the blood of martyrs." But the victories of science too have been achieved not without sweat and blood. Let us not fail to remember the cost to the intellectual martyrs themselves. They have nobly served humanity; but they have sacrificed their own development. The Nemesis is inevitable; we cannot, for our own sakes, afford to be less than cultured. Nay, we cannot afford to be less than cultured for others' sakes. Culture as well as science has its altruistic side. Society is the gainer by every complete unit that is added to it, and enriched by every ideal human creature. I do not mean to say that he who commands both attitudes of mind possesses all knowledge. Man's mind I have compared to a house with many windows: some of them, let us say, look out upon the trees and flowers of the garden; others are turned towards the street, crowded with human life; its skylights look upon the heavens. Doubtless it were a grand thing to have knowledge of all the great objects of human contemplation; but we must recognise the limitations of our nature, and renounce the impossible. On the other hand, we may console ourselves with the reflection that one subject deeply studied involves examination of others. No man can thoroughly probe a difficult question of law without coming upon problems of morals, politics, and religion; no one can carry his researches into language far without solving on the way many a question of logic and even metaphysics. In this way one science leads over to another; and the specialist is not so incomplete as he is sometimes supposed to be. His knowledge stretches itself out in many directions, like the branches of a tree, which spring from a single trunk and are centred in it. Still no man can be a master of all sciences. But there is one kind of knowledge of which we must all take accountall must be students in the school of life and manners. Some practical experience of men and affairs is essential to character and social refinement. "Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille ; Sich ein Charakter in dem Strom der Welt."1 For those who have not yet stepped forth into the arena of public life, there is the microcosm of school or college in which they may learn many of the lessons which the great world teaches. This social life is a hardly less important feature of college than the lecture room. And I hope that while in the latter you will imbibe something more than you can get from books, catching the contagion of the lecture room and laboratory-the vis viva of nascent thought-you will, by contact with one another in the common rooms and Union, gain that education of which Oxford and Cambridge are so justly proud-the experience of the world, which makes a man. 1 "Genius develops in retirement ; character in the stream of life."-GOETHE. a Let me cast a brief glance upon the general aim and purport of what I have said. The prime essentials of culture are science and poetry; and they may be cultivated without spreading ourselves impartially over the whole field of knowledge, without ascetically denying our special bent. One branch of either of the great departments, nature and literature, may give us scope for both energies of soul; but the student of nature cannot be independent of the aid of poetry, unless, indeed, he is a poet himself. Further, in resigning claims to universal knowledge, we may remember that to command one department is to command many potentially, and even involves inquiry into, and partial grasp of, subjects lying outside it. Finally, life is long enough to admit of our making practical experience of our fellow men, without which we ourselves are scarcely human. I am I do not know whether my conception of the distinction between science and poetry will be accepted. aware that some philosophers—even Plato-give a very different account of poetry, reducing it to mere imitation and subjective fancy. The position of co-ordinator which I have given to poetry is assigned by Plato to dialectic, that is, philosophy, which he calls the "coping stone of the sciences." But I think you will agree with me that there is a difference between poetry and science, and that both are essential elements of culture. And perhaps what Plato means by "philosophy" is not, after all, so very different from what I mean by poetry -from the highest kind of poetry. Philosophy might be called poetry in undress. The late Mark Pattison spoke of philosophy as a disposition, a method of conceiving things-not a series of demonstrable propositions. In this sense means the power of escaping from one's own limitations, and of rising to higher conceptions; the capacity of reverence for the wider universe of which one's positive knowledge touches merely the fringe; the saving knowledge by which man corrects the tendencies to intellectual arrogance: and this is what I mean by poetry. Plato prophesied, half seriously, that the State would never cease from ill till philosophers became kings, or kings philosophers. For the academic workers of the future I do not demand royal prerogatives. But if the University is worthy of its calling the people will look to it for intellectual light and leading. England is waking up to the paramount importance of education; to this question the new Democracy is sure to turn with increasing earnestness. Is it too much to hope that the University will hold its position at the helm of the educational system? From the University the nation will expect guidance in developing the education. of the people; and if it is not to be false to its trust, it must take up the problem of education in a serious, in a scientific spirit. Teaching may be called a science or an art; but the enlightened know that it admits of definite principles and of progress; and progress, even in details, involves far-reaching consequences to millions. In the science of education England is far behind the foremost nations of Europe-perhaps behind America. This deficiency is nothing less than a "national calamity." To faulty and antiquated methods of teaching we may safely attribute much of that illsuccess in the race of life of which we have recently heard such just complaints. The future of England hangs not only on the recognition of physical science, but far more upon the creation of a high ideal of teaching, and the total abolition of that senseless ingurgitation of compendious statements, which has usurped its place in the national consciousness. I am drawing near the conclusion of my task. I fear I have already taxed your patience too far. One word in conclusion. A genial bishop was in the habit of inquiring from his candidates for |