and to the absence of compulsory science in theirs, the comparison is unduly favourable. We are told that science is materialistic and concerned with the bread-and-butter side of life, whereas the humanistic studies elevate human character and inspire human ideals. Our criticism of these studies is that the elevation of human ideals and inspiration of human character has not progressed to keep pace with the growth of physical power put into the hands of men by science. They are ideals that cannot co-exist with science without wrecking the world. As for the bread-and-butter libel, our trouble is that scientific knowledge and capacity in this country has been valued so cheaply, whereas the road to prosperity and honour has lain along the well-beaten and timehonoured road. The smallest acquaintance with the history of scientific progress would disclose what is a commonplace to scientific men, that all the grandest discoveries which have been subsequently exploited for utilitarian ends and have brought in untold millions of wealth to the commerce and industries of the country, have been made uniformly by men, without reward and without even the thought or expectation of reward, labouring solely for pure love of Truth. We are warned with unconscious humour of the danger "of the divorce of science and the scientific spirit from literature and art, from morality and religion, and generally from the human element of education." But the scientific man is not especially deaf to the appeal which literature, music, painting and sculpture, the ethics of human conduct, morality and religion make to mankind in general, though he may be more conscious of their limitations than others. It is the ordinary man and his instructors, the statesman, the headmaster, the poet, divine and artist who, too often, through defects in their early education, are both blind and deaf to the spirit of STEREOTYPED HUMANISM 71 science. Their present attention has been directed to its existence by the fear of annihilation, and their interest is mainly in its profanation to the purpose of destruction. They inhabit a world a thousand times more wealthy than their predecessors did, but they do not understand why. They can wage war on a thousand times more lavish and destructive a scale, but it is not to them that the world can look for recuperation. Science, which has enlarged the heritage of man beyond reckoning, and which promises to enlarge it beyond the dreams of phantasy, is a sealed book to the majority, more than any other branch of human activity and endeavour at the present time. The opponents of science are already arguing for the retention of everything that is time-honoured and classical in our curricula alongside with what is essentially modern and of present-day significance. It is not so much that the subjects they represent have no present-day application as that, as they represent them, in complete isolation from the main development of scientific thought, their influence has become pernicious and a barrier to a properlybalanced co-ordination between the old and the new. Every argument they use against scientific specialisation untempered by humanistic influences applies with much greater aptness to their stereotyped humanism, uninstructed by knowledge of the external world, and incapable of adapting itself to a world of men which has changed in essential respects more in the past century than in the whole previous period of recorded history. If they are incapable of growth and development to keep pace with the growth of science, if enthralled with the contemplation of the world as it was they cannot envisage the world as it is, science would be the last to deny them a sanctuary in the ancient homes of learning, but science does deny them the right or the power to mould the destinies of the present or of the future. But a sanctuary in which to keep alive the memory of the glories of departed times is in fact the thing they dread most. They claim nothing less than that their decadent humanism shall continue to be in the future, as it has been in the past, the sole avenue to positions of lucre, honour, opportunity and influence in vast fields of State service-a claim that is preposterous, and from which the present holocaust became possible. No man can serve two masters, and, if he is a man not specially endowed with moral courage or special enthusiasm and talents, he will be but human if he elects to serve that master with most power in the State to start him on a prosperous career. Science has hitherto had little or no power to do that. The Civil Service is but one specially notorious instance, but it must suffice. Eminent scientific men have recently decided to insist, as a practical step towards the accomplishment of what they have been advocating for seventy years, that capital importance be assigned to the natural sciences in the competitive examinations for the Home and Indian Civil Service. Hitherto these examinations have been regulated by the desire not to secure the best men, most suitably trained for their work, but rather to secure men from particularly favoured universities, especially from Oxford. Science is not of any capital importance, and a man professing a group of the natural sciences as his central subject could only be successful by a miracle. If you wish to laugh, you should read the imaginary interview between a candidate and the Civil Service Commissioners in Science Progress for July 1916. Ridicule is the only weapon against such folly. THE CIVIL SERVICE 133 73 Unfortunately, however, the times are too serious for ridicule. At the first prick of the lance of a scientific enemy, the indispensability of science to the nation, if it is to continue to exist, became for the first time universally recognised. Were she all that her worst and most ignorant detractors have alleged, wooed she must be in earnest now, if only for the defence of her superior sisters. Before that realisation, every sort of objection that cant has hitherto invented to bar the way must now go down. We shall be a stronger people in future in the competitions of peace, as well as in the actual struggle of war, in consequence, but this will be but a small gain indeed compared with what we shall become if science teaches the nation to recognise Truth apart from traditional belief. To those to whom science is associated only with the carnage of the battlefield or with the hubbub of the market-place such an aspiration will be unintelligible. Nevertheless, to-day, in the orgy of lying which has accompanied the war, scientific truth is the only aspect of truth that has not been cheapened and made nauseating, and which stands so far above all personal prejudice and passion as to be unshaken. Until a similar veracity of thought and action becomes universal, there can, in the words of Huxley, be no alleviation of the sufferings of mankind. The cult of science is becoming daily, almost hourly, more difficult to gainsay, but, in the curricula of the ancient universities, a culture that reached its zenith before the birth of Christ still struggles to retain its complete ascendency in human affairs and over the human mind. It has been said of mathematical analysis that it is merely a mill. Nothing can be got out in the answer, which, wittingly or unwittingly, was not introduced in the enunciation. But the same is generally true even of the humanistic and scientific philosophies. The mind is merely the mill, and what comes out depends only on what you put in. This does not detract from the value of the process, assuming, of course, as in mathematical analysis, that the mind is capable of reasoning correctly, and does not introduce errors of its own. In every sphere the solution of a problem is a vastly important step forward from its enunciation, though errors usually arise from the latter rather than from the former. The humanistic philosophy feeds its mill with man and it gets out man. Man is the raw material, the reasoning machine, and the sole judge of the product, whether it is true or false, noble or base. Thinking that he was appealing beyond himself to a higher external power, and often indeed claiming direct inspiration therefrom, he created deities in the image of himself, and endowed them with various aspects of his own nature. There was no break in the vicious circle of thought, no real appeal beyond his own instincts and intuitions, until men of science, in their study of the laws of external nature, became acquainted with a very different and totally impersonal aspect of Truth, and a very different ruler of the universe than that which hitherto had appealed to the uninstructed and self-centred imagination of man. Now, in so far as the realm of external nature interacts with, and in the most fundamental sense possible, absolutely controls humanity, the mistake of neglecting it is serious. Conclusions which may have appealed irresistibly to the jury of the human intellect for thousands of years may be false, and may indeed raise the question whether man in fact is not essentially insane. That would certainly be the verdict at the present moment, if any outside rational being surveyed the world, seeing nothing but the |