ver this scientific
"criticism of life" presents itself to us with different credentials
from any other. It appeals not to authority, nor to what anybody may
have thought or said, but to nature. It admits that all our
interpretations of natural fact are more or less imperfect and
symbolic, and bids the learner seek for truth not among words but among
things. It warns us that the assertion which outstrips evidence is not
only a blunder but a crime.

The purely classical education advocated by the representatives of the
humanists in our day gives no inkling of all this. A man may be a
better scholar than Erasmus, and know no more of the chief causes of
the present intellectual fermentation than Erasmus did. Scholarly and
pious persons, worthy of all respect, favor us with allocutions upon
the sadness of the antagonism of science to their mediaeval way of
thinking, which betray an ignorance of the first principles of
scientific investigation, an incapacity for understanding what a man of
science means by veracity, and an unconsciousness of the weight of
established scientific truths, which is almost comical.

There is no great force in the _tu quoque_ argument, or else the
advocates of scientific education might fairly enough retort upon the
modern humanists that they may be learned specialists, but that they
possess no such sound foundation for a criticism of life as deserves
the name of culture. And, indeed, if we were disposed to be cruel, we
might urge that the humanists have brought this reproach upon
themselves, not because they are too full of the spirit of the ancient
Greek, but because they lack it.

The period of the Renaissance is commonly called that of the "Revival
of Letters," as if the influences then brought to bear upon the mind of
Western Europe had been wholly exhausted in the field of literature. I
think it is very commonly forgotten that the revival of science,
effected by the same agency, although less conspicuous, was not less
momentous.

In fact, the few and scattered students of nature of that day picked up
the clew to her secrets exactly as it fell from the hands of the Greeks
a thousand years before. The foundations of mathematics were so well
laid by them that our children learn their geometry from a book written
for the schools of Alexandria two thousand years ago. Modern astronomy
is the natural continuation and development of the work of Hipparchus
and of Ptolemy; modern physics