It is with some diffidence that I have elected to address you to-day on the subject of culture and science. I am aware that I shall have to speak about matters on which I am imperfectly instructed in the presence of masters of the craft; and even to tread ground on which the eminent man who opened this college five years ago-Professor Huxley has unfurled the flag of Occupation. But after all, science and culture are subjects of perennial interest, upon which a good deal may be said. And there is perhaps a certain fitness in reverting, at the close of our first college lustrum, and on a day when the memory of our generous founder and of our late venerable president, Dr. Heslop, is fresh, to the topics in which they were so deeply interested.

In

But I must, at the outset, guard myself against misapprehension. comparing culture and science, I have no intention of contrasting the faculties of arts and science in this or any other college. I must claim the original right of a speaker to define the terms he uses in his own way. By science I do not mean merely the science of nature; by culture I do not mean merely literary culture. Nor is it the object of this address to define the position and relations of classics and physical science in the school curriculum. I am about to speak to students of a "miniature University" about university studies. And my object is to indicate the relations of science-in the widest sense-and letters to culture. Let us first ask, "What is science?"

1 An Address delivered at the Distribution

of Prizes in the Mason College, Birmingham (October 1st, 1885), by E. A. Sonnenschein, M.A., Professor of Classics, and Chairman of the Academic Board.

By science I understand organised knowledge, working by method, based on evidence, and issuing in the discovery of law. By culture I mean the complete spiritual development of the individual. The object of science is exact knowledge; the object of culture is a complete human being.

Nor can I admit that this view is arbitrary. Underlying much confusion of thought and polemical perversity, I find some such distinction as I have indicated present to the consciousness of educated men and

women.

In contending, then, that the distinction between science and culture is not coincident with the distinction between the study of the external universe on the one hand and the study of letters on the other, let me first try to show that science does not exclude letters-that letters admit of a scientific treatment just as much as the phenomena of light or the circulation of the blood.

Having given an extended sense to the word science, I will indicate the part that it plays in culture; and finally I will maintain that, though an essential factor in culture, it is not the only factor. I will try to show that science embraces one aspect of letters, but is itself only one element in a wider conception of culture.

I do not wish to base my argument on authority; but it is the fashion nowadays to appeal on important questions to Germany, and I will remind you that the word Wissenschaft is by no means so restricted in its use as our corresponding English word "science" sometimes is. Wissenschaft

- scientific knowledge embraces philology, philosophy, theology, laws, no less than mathematics and the branches included under the name

Naturwissenschaft, chemistry, physics, biology, and so on. This is not a mere question of terminology; under distinctions of words there generally lie distinctions of things, and by this use of their word Wissenschaft the Germans-the most active body of explorers in the world-declare that they regard all these subjects as admitting of scientific treatment; and they make it the chief business of their Universities to treat them in this way. The word arts I cannot It carries There are are not fine.

But why

but regard as unfortunate. very little meaning in it. fine arts, and arts which There are even black arts. philology, for instance, should be called an art, and medicine a science, does not appear, except to the historic consciousness.

My illustrations shall be derived chiefly from the subject in which I am personally most interested-the study of classical philology. Classics is a wide field, and includes two main divisions interpretation, and textual criticism. It embraces in its scope several departments, such as ancient history, archæology, mythology, epigraphy, palæography. The latter is the study of manuscripts, and aims at determining the method of deciphering them, and the law of error in them. The object of the whole of classical philology is to restore a picture of human life in the Greek and Roman world. The object of textual criticism is the restoration of texts, the discovery of what the classical writers really said. This it effects by exposing the traces of detrition in them, the havoc which time and error have wrought, and by finding the true way of repairing their devastations. George Eliot speaks with light banter of inventing a few Greek emendations, as if emendation were mere guesswork, to be thrown off in a careless hour for the amusement of the world of scholars and the advertisement of one's own ingenuity. But to emend scientifically is no light task. The scholar must employ

method and proof if his work is to claim serious attention. To discover that a passage is corrupt, he must have found that this word, or this construction, or this rhythm, is a barbarism, or at any rate is never so used by his author; that this sentiment or allusion is an anachronism; he must, in fact, discover or rectify the law of the word, the law of the sentence, the law of the metre. Here there is plenty of room for independent observation. These laws are not to be found ready-made in grammars; an emendation really new must be based on nothing less than a new examination of the facts. The proof of corruption of the text lies in the application of the resulting laws to a particular passage. To emend is to form an hypothesis as to the original constitution of the passage-an hypothesis which must pass through the ordeal of verification by all the known laws-paleographical, linguistic, historic, and other.

The

Let us not be dominated by the phrase "inductive science." Each science has its own peculiar methods, in which induction and deduction, observation and experiment, play parts more or less prominent. methods of physics are not identically the methods of the so-called natural sciences. Mathematics is not usually reckoned as an inductive science at all. But the methods and results of one and all may be equally scientific -may be alike calculated to carry an authoritative power of conviction.

No doubt the processes of textual criticism have been often conducted in such a way as to lead to results which were tentative, or even purely fanciful. But other sciences too have passed through an empirical stage. As practised nowadays, especially in the philological seminaries of Germany, textual criticism may claim to rank as a science; its methods are wellestablished, its results definite κτήματα ἐς ἀεὶ, wrung from the wilderness of medieval barbarism by the devoted efforts of armies of scholars. If a scholar of the sixteenth

century could come to life, he would be astonished at the magnitude of the results which have been achieved. He would find many a familiar interpolation exscinded, many a sorry gap filled up by probable or certain conjectures, many a line-nay, even a whole author-restored to metrical form. It is scarcely too much to say that the face of classical literature has undergone, and is undergoing, a process of renovation.

I might extend my illustrations almost infinitely. There is comparative philology, one of the most brilliant examples of what can be effected by scientific research in the field of language. It has opened up to us glimpses into a past far more remote than the beginnings of history; it has given us a far from colourless picture of early Aryan civilisation, and a still fuller account of the periods when the western Aryans separated from their eastern kinsfolk. I might quote the marvellous discoveries in the history of Assyria and Egypt, the deciphering of the cuneiform character and the hieroglyphics. There is comparative mythology, which has brought to light the various deposits of nature worship, hero worship, and primitive custom embedded in the soil of language, like the remains of extinct animals in the crust of the earth. All these sciences are sisters german of anthropology and archæology. To sketch the early condition of man many different kinds of evidence must be pressed into the service; and the study of language is not the least of them.

By a similar argument I might establish the claims of history, of sociology, of political economy to the name of sciences. All the great products of human thought and human life may form the subject-matter of science, if examined on scientific principles.

Let us, then, cease to oppose one subject to another as scientific and non-scientific. The distinction is not in subjects, but in methods of treating them. Let us hold fast to the position

that science is a particular method of treating subjects, leading to results of a particular kind.

I am not going to discuss the question of the school curriculum. But even at the risk of seeming to adopt the platform that there is " nothing like leather," I will say one word upon the educational value of these studies. If scientific in themselves, they may be so taught as to furnish a scientific discipline. The highest ideal of teaching is that which follows the path of discovery, leading the pupil along lines which an original discoverer pursued, or might have pursued. And I do not know that there is any better field for educating the logical powers than the scientific treatment of language and the products of literature. Am I confronted with the statement that these studies depend on authority? Not, I reply, if they are taught and studied rationally. Whose authority? Not the authority of the classics themselves. The days are past when men set the classics of Greece and Rome on an icy pinnacle of excellence by themselves, unapproachable by the literary masters of other countries. All serious students of the classics know, or ought to know, that not all the writers of Greece and Rome are equally worthy of admiration and imitation. Nor would any classical teacher, I imagine, claim special consideration for any opinions expressed by these writers. Is it the authority of the grammar that is referred to? I reply that a grammar is not the arbitrary creation of schoolmasters, but the record of law discovered by the patient observation of ages, and liable to revision by any independent inquirer into the phenomena of language. No, the doctrine of the infallibility of the Eton grammar, like the doctrine of the plenary inspiration of manuscripts, has had its day. I believe that so far from fostering a blind adherence to authority, there is no discipline more helpful in liberating the mind from the thraldom of words. Hear cne, who cannot himself be

charged with any prejudice in favour of authority-the late John Stuart Mill:"To question all things, never to turn away from any difficulty, to accept no doctrine either from ourselves or from other people without a rigid scrutiny by negative criticism; letting no fallacy or incoherence or confusion of thought step by unperceived; above all, to insist upon having the meaning of a word clearly understood before using it, and the meaning of a proposition before assenting to it-these are the lessons we learn from ancient dialecticians." And again, "In cultivating the ancient languages. we are all the while laying an admirable foundation for ethical and philosophical culture."

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And this is not the expression of an isolated opinion. The unanimous and maturely-considered verdict of the University of Berlin, contained in the memorial addressed in the year 1880 to the Prussian Minister of Education on the question of the admission of Realschüler-pupils of modern schools -to the University, constitutes, perhaps, the most important modern testimony to the value of a classical education. This memorial was signed by all the members of the philosophical faculty, including such names Hoffmann, the chemist; Helmholtz, the physicist; Peters, the naturalist; Zeller, the philosopher; as well as Mommsen, the classical philologist; Zupitza, the English philologist; Curtius, the historian. I am aware that the whole of Germany is not unanimous upon the educational questions raised in the Berlin memorial; but they are nevertheless worthy of our most earnest attention. The interesting point of the memorial is the emphasis with which it insists on the value of classical philology in cultivating what it calls "the ideality of the scientific sense, the interest in science not dependent upon, nor limited by, practical aims, but ministering to the liberal education of the mind as such, the many-sided and broad exercise of the thinking faculty." By science is

of course here meant not merely the science of nature. But the science of nature is included. Germany has built temples and palaces for the study of nature, as Professor Hoffmann says. But she cultivates philology side by side with nature more assiduously than ever; and here we have some of her leading physicists and naturalists joining hands with the philologists. and coming forward to tell the world that they consider classics not in the light of a foe, but rather as a discipline of peculiar value as a preparation for other scientific pursuits. And the German Universities are schools of universal learning. Here are a few statistics. In the year 1880 the German Universities numbered in all eighteen hundred and nine teachers, including extraordinary professors and Privat-Docenten. Of these, nine hundred and thirty belonged to the philosophical faculty, which includes what we should call the faculties of science and arts. Now, how are these nine hundred and thirty teachers distributed? About one-third of them represent mathematics and the sciences of nature; the other two-thirds are engaged upon classical philology, ori ental philology, modern philology (the latter two branches are increasing in numbers from year to year), archæology, history, political science, and philosophy. The numbers at Leipsic