He laid it down, more than once, that the aim of culture was “to know ourselves and the world,” and that, as the means to this end, we ought “to know the best which has been thought and said in the world.”  He recognized, candidly and fully, the claims of the physical sciences, and their use and value in Education.  For example, in advising about the instruction of a little girl, in whom her teacher wished to arouse “perception,” he said, “You had much better take some science—­(botany is perhaps the best for a girl) and, choosing a good handbook, go through it regularly with her....  The verification of the laws of grammar, in the examples furnished by one’s reading, is certainly a far less fruitful stimulus of one’s powers of observation and comparison, than the verification of the laws of a science like botany in the examples furnished by the world of nature before one’s eyes.”

But in spite of this, and of similar concessions, he deliberately held the opinion that Literature, rather than Science, was the chief agent in culture.  In 1872 he wrote to an enquirer:  “A single line of poetry, working in the mind, may produce more thought and lead to more light, which is what man wants, than the fullest acquaintance (to take your own instance) with the processes of digestion.”  In 1884 he said to his American audience:  “My own studies have been almost wholly in Letters, and my visits to the field of the natural sciences have been very slight and inadequate, although those sciences have always strongly moved my curiosity.”  In a word, he was, and gloried in being, a Humanist.  What Humanism meant for him is curiously illustrated by his comment on some speeches which the late[14] Lord Salisbury delivered at Oxford on his first appearance there as Chancellor of the University.  After praising his skill and courtesy, Arnold says:  “He is a dangerous man, through, and chiefly from, his want of any true sense and experience of literature and its beneficent function.  Religion he knows, and physical science he knows; but the immense work between the two, which is for literature to accomplish, he knows nothing of; and all his speeches at Oxford[15] pointed this way.  On the one hand, he was full of the great future for physical science, and begging his University to make up her mind to it, and to resign much of her literary studies; on the other hand, he was full, almost defiantly full, of counsels and resolves for retaining and upholding the old ecclesiastical and dogmatic form of religion.  From a juxtaposition of this kind, nothing but shocks and collisions can come.”