Let us, I say, be agreed about the meaning of the terms we are using.  I talk of knowing the best which has been thought and uttered in the world; Professor Huxley says this means knowing literature.  Literature is a large word; it may mean everything written with letters or printed in a book.  Euclid’s Elements and Newton’s Principia are thus literature.  All knowledge that reaches us through books is literature.  But by literature Professor Huxley means belles lettres.  He means to make me say, that knowing the best which has been thought and said by the modern nations is knowing their belles lettres and no more.  And this is no sufficient equipment, he argues, for a criticism of modern life.  But as I do not mean, by knowing ancient Rome, knowing merely more or less of Latin belles lettres, and taking no account of Rome’s military, and political, and legal, and administrative work in the world; and as, by knowing ancient Greece, I understand knowing her as the giver of Greek art, and the guide to a free and right use of reason and to scientific method, and the founder of our mathematics and physics and astronomy and biology,—­I understand knowing her as all this, and not merely knowing certain Greek poems, and histories, and treatises, and speeches,—­so as to the knowledge of modern nations also.  By knowing modern nations, I mean not merely knowing their belles lettres, but knowing also what has been done by such men as Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin.  “Our ancestors learned,” says Professor Huxley, “that the earth is the centre of the visible universe, and that man is the cynosure of things terrestrial; and more especially was it inculcated that the course of nature had no fixed order, but that it could be, and constantly was, altered.”  But for us now, continues Professor Huxley, “the notions of the beginning and the end of the world entertained by our forefathers are no longer credible.  It is very certain that the earth is not the chief body in the material universe, and that the world is not subordinated to man’s use.  It is even more certain that nature is the expression of a definite order, with which nothing interferes.”  “And yet,” he cries, “the purely classical education advocated by the representatives of the humanists in our day gives no inkling of all this!”

In due place and time I will just touch upon that vexed question of classical education; but at present the question is as to what is meant by knowing the best which modern nations have thought and said.  It is not knowing their belles lettres merely which is meant.  To know Italian belles lettres, is not to know Italy, and to know English belles lettres is not to know England.  Into knowing Italy and England there comes a great deal more, Galileo and Newton amongst it.  The reproach of being a superficial humanism, a tincture of belles lettres, may attach rightly enough to some other disciplines; but to the particular discipline recommended when I proposed knowing the best that has been thought and said in the world, it does not apply.  In that best I certainly include what in modern times has been thought and said by the great observers and knowers of nature.