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It is also impossible to diminish the study of Greek without damaging the study of Latin. At first the Universities would endeavour to preserve intact their classical examinations; and as every candidate would have to offer Greek, the number of candidates in classics would depend on the number of students of Greek. Then there would be fewer candidates than formerly in Latin, because fewer in Greek; there would be fewer prizes in Latin and Greek, because more needed for non-classical subjects; there would be fewer masters wanted from the Universities at schools even in Latin, because the same schoolmaster, who formerly had to teach Greek and Latin, would now have more time to teach Latin without Greek to more boys, so that the whole staff of classical masters would be diminished, and the number of non-classical masters proportionately augmented. Hence there would be fewer men, with fewer motives to read for honours in all classical examinations at the Universities. Thereupon the Universities would be tempted to separate Latin, as a compulsory, from Greek, as an optional subject, in the hope of ensuring more candidates on the whole in classical examinations. If, by this means, they ensured more Latin students than Greek in quantity, the quality of a classical education would at the same time have disappeared. There would arise a kind of semi-scholar, learning Latin at school, graduating in Latin at a University, and ending as a Latin pedagogue. He might sometimes learn Greek afterwards to throw light on Latin; more often Latin grammar would not be compared with Greek, and Latin literature would often be read without Greekthe copy without the original, Virgil without Homer! Finally, Latin would tend to become to the Romance languages what Gothic is to German and AngloSaxon to English, a dead language studied merely for the sake of understanding modern languages. The

same spirit which now undervalues Greek would not for long value Latin on its own account.

Mr. Welldon is playing into the hands of the modernizers of education, who hold that boys should learn what they like; that, if they like Greek, they ought to learn it; if not, they ought not to be compelled, for Greek is not an essential part of a liberal education. But in reality education consists, as Bacon says, in a judicious mixture of subjects to which we are inclined with subjects to which we are disinclined, in such a manner as at once to develop our faculties and to correct our faults. Again, though a few generous minds would spontaneously like to study Greek for its own sake, we must remember that, as Plato says in the 'Laws', we are men legislating for mankind at the present moment, and that, in what your correspondent, An Oxford Tutor', calls the pressure of modern life', most boys would avoid Greek, if Greek were no longer a compulsory subject in the Universities'. But would this really be a gain to education'? Is or is not Greek an essential part of a liberal education? This is a subject too long for the present letter. But I appeal to the combined authority of the most distinguished English philosopher and of the most successful English head-master of our time. John Stuart Mill, in his inaugural address at St. Andrews, has left us abundant proofs that Greek as well as Latin is an essential part of a liberal education, and wise directions for combining ancient and modern studies. Dr. Temple, in his written report to the Public School Commission of 1864, reinforces Mill, and quotes from him an apposite passage, written in the true educational spirit, to prove that classical studies are' precisely the true corrective for the chief defects of modern life'. If,' Mill concludes, as every one must see, the want of affinity of these studies to the modern mind is gradually lowering them in popular

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estimation, this is but a confirmation of the need of them, and renders it more incumbent on those who have the power to do their utmost to aid in preventing their decline.' Oxford, Dec. 29.

LORD KELVIN, SCIENCE, AND GREEK Lord Kelvin was the most famous living physicist. Since 1899 be was in retirement from the chair of Natural Philosophy at Glasgow University. In 1904 he was elected Chancellor of that University. He died in 1907.

FROM The Times, JANUARY 15, 1903.

The controversy which has arisen in your columns out of Lord Kelvin's statement, at the beginning of May, that a 'fortuitous concourse of atoms' may account for the formation of a crystal but not for the existence of living things, suggests many reflections, but none more curious than the fact that some of our most distinguished natural scientists have taken nearly three weeks to decide between them the meaning of a well-known phrase, which might have been decided at once by referring to its Greek origin. On May 7, Sir W. T. Thiselton-Dyer, evidently mistaking the 'fortuitous' for the accidental as opposed to the regular, tried to answer Lord Kelvin by the contention that a 'fortuitous concourse of atoms' might account for an amorphous mass of matter, but not for a crystal any more than for life. On the 19th, Professor Ray Lankester confessed himself unable to comprehend Lord Kelvin's meaning. At last, on the 21st, Sir Oliver Lodge pointed out that what Lord Kelvin meant was that the formation of a crystal proceeds according to the laws of mechanics, while life requires something more, i.e. a vital principle' and a 'creative power'.

Had the disputants only turned to the philosophy of Democritus, the Greek atomist, whose theory of the origin of the world was afterwards characterized

by Cicero in the phrase ' fortuitous concourse', they would have known at once that fortuitous ' meant, not the accidental as opposed to the regular laws of nature, but the spontaneous necessity of nature as opposed to the voluntary designs of Providence. Aristotle characterizes the theory of Democritus by the Greek words for spontaneity and necessity indifferently; and the same opposition of spontaneity not to the necessity of nature but to the designs of Providence pervaded all ancient Atomism through Epicurus to Lucretius. As Munro in his commentary on Lucretius remarks, The Epicurean nature is at one and the same time blind chance and inexorable necessity,' or, as Lucretius puts it, 'Seu casu seu vi, quod sic natura parasset'. The point of ancient Atomism was that nature, by its forces of gravity and impact of atoms, spontaneously or necessarily accounts for the production of the effects usually ascribed to Divine power. Hence Lord Kelvin was obviously justified in applying the phrase 'fortuitous concourse of atoms' to express the view that the mechanical forces of nature account for the formation of a crystal. Hence, too, he was not open to the objections of Sir W. T. Thiselton-Dyer and Professor Ray Lankester.

Nor is this the only point in the present controversy which requires the consideration of Greek philosophy. When Lord Kelvin further said that life requires a vital principle', he was using a phrase which goes back to Aristotle's theory that the soul is the principle of all life, whether in plants or in animals, including our own mental life as a whole; and, unless this Greek origin of the theory is considered, it is apt to be overlooked that the question is not purely biological, but involves the psychological question how far the supposed ' vital principle is to be identified with the thinking soul. When Lord Kelvin proceeded to admit that free

will is a miracle to natural science, he was plunging into a question which begins with Aristotle's view that there is a contingency in things by which the same thing may be or may not be equally, and therefore a power of man to act or not to act at will. When Sir W. T. Thiselton-Dyer, in answer to Lord Kelvin's remarks about the luminiferous ether transmitting undulations, admitted the undulations, but contended that ether is only an intellectual conception' and 'nothing more than a working hypothesis', he was opening up the question of Aristotle's metaphysics, whether there can be an attribute such as motion without a substance moving; he was borrowing the terms 'conception' and 'hypothesis' from Aristotle's logic; and he was attributing to the medium of light, and other motions, words of 'second intention'. When these, and other, natural scientists dispute about 'creative power', they are going back to the main problem of Greek philosophy, as well as of Christian theology-the nature and origin of things. As natural science in our day becomes more and more general, it passes insensibly into a universal philosophy, which is essentially Greek.

But, it will be said, these problems of universal philosophy were only Greek in their origin, and whatever the Greeks had to say has been absorbed in modern science and modern philosophy. This is exactly what has not happened in modern science, as the present dispute shows; else, why did not your correspondents at once agree that what Lord Kelvin meant by fortuitous concourse' is the spontaneous mechanism of nature as distinguished from Divine intervention? Nor would modern philosophy have helped matters, with its refinements on consciousness and the origin of knowledge, and its paradoxes about the identity of things with sensations, force with will, being with thinking. The fact is that modern natural science, as it becomes

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