Let us, therefore, all of us, avoid indeed as much as possible any invidious comparison between the merits of humane letters, as means of education, and the merits of the natural sciences.  But when some President of a Section for Mechanical Science insists on making the comparison, and tells us that “he who in his training has substituted literature and history for natural science has chosen the less useful alternative,” let us make answer to him that the student of humane letters only, will, at least, know also the great general conceptions brought in by modern physical science:  for science, as Professor Huxley says, forces them upon us all.  But the student of the natural sciences only, will, by our very hypothesis, know nothing of humane letters; not to mention that in setting himself to be perpetually accumulating natural knowledge, he sets himself to do what only specialists have in general the gift for doing genially.  And so he will probably be unsatisfied, or at any rate incomplete, and even more incomplete than the student of humane letters only.

I once mentioned in a school-report, how a young man in one of our English training colleges having to paraphrase the passage in Macbeth beginning,

  “Can’st thou not minister to a mind diseased?"[133]

turned this line into, “Can you not wait upon the lunatic?” And I remarked what a curious state of things it would be, if every pupil of our national schools knew, let us say, that the moon is two thousand one hundred and sixty miles in diameter, and thought at the same time that a good paraphrase for

  “Can’st thou not minister to a mind diseased?”

was, “Can you not wait upon the lunatic?” If one is driven to choose, I think I would rather have a young person ignorant about the moon’s diameter, but aware that “Can you not wait upon the lunatic?” is bad, than a young person whose education had been such as to manage things the other way.

Or to go higher than the pupils of our national schools.  I have in my mind’s eye a member of our British Parliament who comes to travel here in America, who afterwards relates his travels, and who shows a really masterly knowledge of the geology of this great country and of its mining capabilities, but who ends by gravely suggesting that the United States should borrow a prince from our Royal Family, and should make him their king, and should create a House of Lords of great landed proprietors after the pattern of ours; and then America, he thinks, would have her future happily and perfectly secured.  Surely, in this case, the President of the Section for Mechanical Science would himself hardly say that our member of Parliament, by concentrating himself upon geology and mineralogy, and so on, and not attending to literature and history, had “chosen the more useful alternative.”

If then there is to be separation and option between humane letters on the one hand, and the natural sciences on the other, the great majority of mankind, all who have not exceptional and overpowering aptitudes for the study of nature, would do well, I cannot but think, to choose to be educated in humane letters rather than in the natural sciences.  Letters will call out their being at more points, will make them live more.