ind; but teachers and
professors are not unnaturally perplexed. They see the immeasurable
scope of the new knowledge; they know the labour, often ineffective,
that has been expended in teaching the rudiments of the old
'humanities'. And now a task is propounded to them before which the old
one with all its faults seems definite, manageable and formative of
character. The classical world which has been the staple of our
education for 400 years is a finished thing and we can compass it in
thought. It lives indeed, but unconsciously, in our lives, as we go
about our business. This new world into which our youth has now to
enter, rests also on the past, but it is still more present; it grows
all round us faster than we can keep pace with its earlier stages. How
then can such a thing be used as an instrument of education where above
all something is needed of clear and definite purpose, stimulating in
itself and tending to mental growth and activity in after life? We could
not, even if we would, offer any satisfactory answer here to one of the
most troubled questions of the day. Decades of experiments will be
needed before even a tolerable solution can be reached. But the argument
pursued in this and other essays may suggest a line of approach. This
must lie in a reconciliation between science and history, or rather in
the recognition that science rightly understood is the key to history,
and that the history best worth study is the record of man's collective
thought in face of the infinite complexities, the barriers and byways,
the lights and shadows of life and nature. From the study of man's
approach to knowledge and unity in history each new-coming student may
shape his own. He sees a unity of thought not wholly unattainable, a
foundation laid beneath the storms of time. To a mind thus trained
should come an eagerness to carry on the conquests of the past and to
apply the lessons gained to the amelioration of the present.

This we may hope from the well-disposed. But for all, the contemplation
of a universe where man's mind has worked for ages in unravelling its
secrets and describing its wonders, must bring a sense of reverence as
well as trust. It is no dry category of abstract truths to which we turn
and would have others turn, but a world as bright and splendid as the
rainbow to the savage or the forest to the poet or the heavens to the
lonely watcher on the Babylonian plain. The glories and the depths
remain, deeper