and handicraft is fantastic, that he had no conception of a great
industrial community such as that of the United States, and that such a
community must and will shape its education to suit its own needs. If
the usual education handed down to it from the past does not suit it, it
will certainly before long drop this and try another. The usual
education in the past has been mainly literary. The question is whether
the studies which were long supposed to be the best for all of us are
practically the best now; whether others are not better. The tyranny of
the past, many think, weighs on us injuriously in the predominance given
to letters in education. The question is raised whether, to meet the
needs of our modern life, the predominance ought not now to pass from
letters to science; and naturally the question is nowhere raised with
more energy than here in the United States. The design of abasing what
is called "mere literary instruction and education," and of exalting
what is called "sound, extensive, and practical scientific knowledge,"
is, in this intensely modern world of the United States, even more
perhaps than in Europe, a very popular design, and makes great and rapid
progress.

I am going to ask whether the present movement for ousting letters from
their old predominance in education, and for transferring the
predominance in education to the natural sciences; whether this brisk
and flourishing movement ought to prevail, and whether it is likely that
in the end it really will prevail. An objection may be raised which I
will anticipate. 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. A man of letters, it will perhaps be said, is not competent
to discuss the comparative merits of letters and natural science as
means of education. To this objection I reply, first of all, that his