This shows how needful it is for those who are to discuss any matter together, to have a common understanding as to the sense of the terms they employ,—­how needful, and how difficult.  What Professor Huxley says, implies just the reproach which is so often brought against the study of belles lettres, as they are called:  that the study is an elegant one, but slight and ineffectual; a smattering of Greek and Latin and other ornamental things, of little use for any one whose object is to get at truth, and to be a practical man.  So, too, M. Renan[124] talks of the “superficial humanism” of a school-course which treats us as if we were all going to be poets, writers, preachers, orators, and he opposes this humanism to positive science, or the critical search after truth.  And there is always a tendency in those who are remonstrating against the predominance of letters in education, to understand by letters belles lettres, and by belles lettres a superficial humanism the opposite of science or true knowledge.

But when we talk of knowing Greek and Roman antiquity, for instance, which is the knowledge people have called the humanities, I for my part mean a knowledge which is something more than a superficial humanism, mainly decorative.  “I call all teaching scientific” says Wolf, the critic of Homer, “which is systematically laid out and followed up to its original sources.  For example:  a knowledge of classical antiquity is scientific when the remains of classical antiquity are correctly studied in the original languages.”  There can be no doubt that Wolf[125] is perfectly right; that all learning is scientific which is systematically laid out and followed up to its original sources, and that a genuine humanism is scientific.

When I speak of knowing Greek and Roman antiquity, therefore, as a help to knowing ourselves and the world, I mean more than a knowledge of so much vocabulary, so much grammar, so many portions of authors in the Greek and Latin languages, I mean knowing the Greeks and Romans, and their life and genius, and what they were and did in the world; what we get from them, and what is its value.  That, at least, is the ideal; and when we talk of endeavoring to know Greek and Roman antiquity, as a help to knowing ourselves and the world, we mean endeavoring so to know them as to satisfy this ideal, however much we may still fall short of it.

The same also as to knowing our own and other modern nations, with the like aim of getting to understand ourselves and the world.  To know the best that has been thought and said by the modern nations, is to know, says Professor Huxley, “only what modern literatures have to tell us; it is the criticism of life contained in modern literature.”  And yet “the distinctive character of our times,” he urges, “lies in the vast and constantly increasing part which is played by natural knowledge.”  And how, therefore, can a man, devoid of knowledge of what physical science has done in the last century, enter hopefully upon a criticism of modern life?