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Matthew Arnold and Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Fred A. Dudley
Fred A. Dudley*
Affiliation:
Morehead State Teachers College
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Extract

The central axiom of Mathew Arnold's cultural arithmetic is well known; less familiar is this curiously precise elaboration:

And, as the discipline of conduct is three-fourths of life, for our aesthetic and intellectual disciplines, real as these are, there is but one-fourth of life left; and if we let art and science divide this one-fourth fairly between them, they will have just one-eighth of life each.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 57 , Issue 1 , March 1942 , pp. 275 - 294
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1942

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References

A Works of Arnold frequently cited, and the editions used, are designated by the following abbreviations:

CUS

Civilization in the United States (Boston, 1888).

CA

Culture and Anarchy (New York, 1913).

DA

Discourses in America (London and New York, 1889).

EC1

Essays in Criticism, First Series (London, 1875).

EC2

Essays in Criticism, Second Series (London and New York, 1891).

EC3

Essays in Criticism, Third Series, ed. E. J. O'Brien (Boston, 1910).

FG

Friendship's Garland (London and New York, 1903).

GB

God and the Bible (New York, 1895).

HSG

Higher Schools and Universities in Germany, 2nd ed. (London, 1874).

LD

Literature and Dogma (London and New York, 1892).

Letters

Letters of Matthew Arnold 1848–1888, ed. G. W. E. Russell (New York and London, 1895), 2 vols.

Letters

to Clough Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. H. F. Lowry (London and New York, 1932).

ME

Mixed Essays, Irish Essays, and Others (New York, 1883).

CL

On the Study of Celtic Literature, and On Translating Homer (New York, 1883).

PEF

The Popular Education of France (London, 1861).

RES

Reports on Elementary Schools 1852–1882, ed. Sir Francis Sandford (London and New York, 1889).

SPP

St. Paul and Protestantism, and Last Essays on Church and Religion (New York, 1897).

SUC

Schools and Universities on the Continent (London, 1868).

Note 1 in page 275 LD, p. 190.—Cf. ibid., pp. 320, 348.

Note 2 in page 275 This hardly squares with Mr. Lionel Trilling's description of “Literature and Science” (Matthew Arnold, New York, 1939) as embodying that portion of Arnold's literary criticism which “is the affirmation of the French Revolution” (p. 371). The passage is not the clearest in that excellent book; it is not fully apparent why “Byron is the hero of ‘Literature and Science‘” (p. 373), nor why excerpts from the essay on Byron are chosen to elucidate the radicalism of “Literature and Science.” But Mr. Trilling is speaking of the social radicalism involved in developing a less aristocratic view of literature, whereas we are here concerned with the cultural conservatism involved in conceiving the excellence of literature largely in terms of Greek. For contradictory comments by Arnold on the French Revolution, see SUC, p. 115,and EC3, p. 171.

Note 3 in page 276 Jessie Mebane, Matthew Arnold's Relation to the Scientific Movement, Chicago M.A. thesis (unpublished), 1927, p. 4. The argument is that Arnold sought to mediate between science and the “amenities”; that his effort was always first “to see the thing as it really was,” next to formulate “a constructive hypothesis of underlying causes” (p. 54), and then to suggest measures rationally adjusted to the facts; and that in so doing he was applying scientific method to the non-scientific ends of cultural advance.

Note 4 in page 276 “... a German scientific book of any sort,—on philosophy, history, art, religion, etc....” SUC, p. 279.—“ ... Science, in the widest sense of the word, meaning a true knowledge of things as the basis of our operations.” Letters, i, 285.—Cf. “The Bishop and the Philosopher,” Macmillan's Magazine, vii (1863), 243; also SPP, p. 36.

Note 5 in page 276 Sir Joshua Fitch, Thomas and Matthew Arnold (New York, 1899), pp. 15, 35, 49–50, 62–63, 152.

Note 6 in page 276 SUC, p. 231; FG, p. 14.

Note 7 in page 276 “But the worst of the English is that on foreign politics they search so very much more for what they like and wish to be true than for what is true. In Paris there is certainly a larger body of people than in London who treat foreign politics as a science, as a matter to know upon before feeling upon.” Letters, i, 118–119. Cf. SUC, pp. 231, 264, 276, 277, 280, 288. Cf. EC3, p. 153.

Note 8 in page 276 SPP, p. 56; “A Liverpool Address,” Nineteenth Century, xii (1882), 716; ME, p. 418.

Note 9 in page 276 ME, pp. 283, 360, 381, 462; G. W. E. Russell, Matthew Arnold (London and New York, 1904), p. 56 (cf. Helen C. White, “Matthew Arnold and Goethe,” PMLA, xxxvi (1921), esp. pp. 438–439); GB, pp. 154, 292; CUS, pp. 27, 129. “Disestablishment in Wales,” National Review, xi (1888), 7.

Note 10 in page 277 CA, p. 124. Such differences are of course less emphasized by more recent ethnological theory; the point here made is simply that Arnold was using the word science in a restricted sense. Cf. SPP, p. 37; cf. HSG, pp. xxxviii-xxxix.

Note 11 in page 277 CL, p. 84.

Note 12 in page 277 Though the last quotation might seem broad enough, the context justifies the insertion of the word physical. The theory of derivation is illuminating: “Out of the steady humdrum habit of the creeping Saxon ... has come ... Philistinism, that plant of essentially Germanic growth ...; but what a soul of goodness there is in Philistinism itself! ... This steady-going habit leads at last ... up to science, up to the comprehension and interpretation of the world.” CL, pp. 83–84.

Note 13 in page 277 “And there are the sciences, in which I think the passion for truth, not special curiosities about birds and beasts, makes the great professor.” Letters to Clough, p. 66.

Note 14 in page 277 DA, p. 111.

Note 15 in page 277 DA p. 81. cf. SUC, pp. 37, 85, 220, 259–260, 289.

Note 16 in page 277 Matthew Arnold's Notebooks, with a preface by the Hon. Mrs. Wodehouse (New York, 1902).

Note 17 in page 277 Five such manuals may be identified from references in the Letters: i, 387; ii, 37–39, 44. Botanical references are fairly frequent in his family letters from about 1866 to 1870 (ii, 387; ii, 44, 72–73, 109, 113, 117, 145, 200, 402), and numerous in his poetry; his friend Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff (Letters, ii, 187–188, 396–397) praised their accuracy in an article which was little more than a series of quotations: “The Plant Allusions in the Poems of Matthew Arnold,” Nature Notes, i (1890), 81–84, 104–107. In Arnold's prose written for publication, however, I have noted no such reference. See Tinker and Lowry, The Poetry of Matthew Arnold: A Commentary (London, New York, Toronto, 1940), p. 218.

Note 18 in page 278 Leiters, ii, 195.

Note 19 in page 278 Ibid., i, 146 (oölite).

Note 20 in page 278 Ibid., i, 10 (the angle subtended by Saturn).

Note 21 in page 278 GB, p. 76.

Note 22 in page 278 DA, pp. 96–97, 109; cf. RES, pp. 199–200.

Note 23 in page 278 SPP, pp. 271, 278.

Note 24 in page 278 Letters, ii, 87.

Note 25 in page 278 Ibid., ii, 228.

Note 26 in page 278 Especially when unleavened by the best that has been thought and said. See his outburst about Margaret Fuller and “America, where everybody knows that the world is an oblate spheroid and nobody knows any thing worth knowing ...” (Letters to Clough, p. 132); see also the praise accorded by Bottles, the Philistine, to the principal of the Lycurgus House Academy (FG, pp. 50–51). See also SPP, pp. 239–240.

Note 27 in page 278 Arnold and Darwin were honored with Oxford's D. C. L. on the same day in June, 1870; see Letters, ii, 35, 39.

Note 28 in page 278 See Russell, op. cit., p. 168. Arnold refers once to Huxley, somewhat inexactly, as “that great physicist” (SPP, p. xxxvi).

Note 29 in page 278 1868, 1869; see Letters, i, 451; ii, 3.

Note 30 in page 278 1874; ibid., ii, 139–140. In 1870 Arnold had declined an invitation to join a Royal Society expedition to Etna; ibid., ii, 41.

Note 31 in page 278 EC1, pp. 90, 118n.

Note 32 in page 278 Dr. John Hicks of Miami University has kindly verified this impression for me.

Note 33 in page 278 In his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry, Arnold spoke of Lucretius as socially and therefore poetically inadequate; see EC3, pp. 73, 75. Arnold's tragedy Lucretius was never finished, and the fragment preserved as epigraph to Thyrsis tells us little. But for the close connection between the unpublished tragedy and Empedocles, see Tinker and Lowry, op. cit., pp. 292–297, 340–347.

Note 34 in page 279 “Nothing, indeed, could be more surely fatal to scholasticism ... than the growth of positive and experimental science ...” SUC, pp. 111–112.

Note 35 in page 279 See below, p. 282.

Note 36 in page 279 EC1, p. 62; EC2, p. 128; PEE, p. xlix; Letters, i, 30.

Note 37 in page 279 “It is as if Newton had introduced into his exposition of the law of gravitation an incidental remark, perhaps erroneous, about light or colours; and we were then to make this remark the head and front of Newton's law.” SPP, p. 84. This wording is hardly what would be natural for one who knew that Newton had made famous researches, partly erroneous, into the nature of light. It is probable, anyway, that Arnold could no more have read Newton's language than I can; he confessed, “the mathematics were ever foolishness to me.” Letters to Clough, p. 110.

Note 38 in page 279 EC1, p. 186.

Note 39 in page 279 ME, pp. 233–234; GB, p. 134.

Note 40 in page 279 See J. Arthur Thomson, Introduction to Science (New York, 1911), p. 120; H. Bavink, The Natural Sciences, trans. H. S. Hatfield (New York, 1932); pp. 221, 596–597, 640; W. C. Dampier-Whetham, History of Science and its Relations with Philosophy and Religion (Cambridge, 1929), pp. 293, 314–315; Erik Nordenskiöld, History of Biology, trans. L. B. Eyre (New York, 1935), pp. 279–285 (an excellent brief estimate). For more exhaustive discussion see G. S. Brett, “Goethe's Place in the History of Science,” Univ. of Toronto Quar., i (1932), 297–299, and George Wagner, “Goethe as a Scientist,” Univ. of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, No. 34 (1932), pp. 63–83.

Note 41 in page 279 See below, p. 285. John W. Judd, The Coming of Evolution (Cambridge, 1911, pp. 3–4) reports hearing Arnold say in 1871: “I cannot understand why you scientific people make such a fuss about Darwin. Why it's all in Lucretius.” When Judd remarked that Darwin had proved what Lucretius only guessed, Arnold rejoined that this power of intuition proved Lucretius the greater. Citing this passage, Henshaw Ward declares that “science regards Matthew Arnold as an arch-Philistine.” (Charles Darwin, Indianapolis, 1927, p. 23.)

Note 42 in page 279 Op. cit., p. 359.

Note 43 in page 280 Ibid., p. 318.

Note 44 in page 280 “... the highest reach of science is, one may say, an inventive power, a faculty of divination, akin to the highest power exercised in poetry; therefore, a nation whose spirit is characterised by energy may well be eminent in science;—and we have Newton.” EC1, p. 58.

Note 45 in page 280 “Science makes her progress, not merely by close reasoning and deduction, but also, and much more, by the close scrutiny and correction of the present commonly received data.” GB, p. xxiv.

Note 46 in page 280 DA, p. 97.

Note 47 in page 280 CA, p. 131.

Note 48 in page 280 In Arnold's view, science was “experience purely, nothing more than organized common-sense, in which the content of any scientific law is only the account of the order of our sensations.” Trilling, op. cit., p. 358.

Note 49 in page 280 “‘Knowledge is easy,’ says the wise man, ‘to him that understandeth’; easy, he means, to him who will use his mind simply and rationally, and not to make him think he can know what he cannot, or to maintain, per fas et nefas, a false thesis with which he fancies his interests to be bound up.” ME, p. 64.

Note 50 in page 280 RES, pp. 34–35, 54–55; PEP, p. xxix; SUC, pp. xi, xvi; HSG, pp. xl-xli; GB, p. 154; ME, pp. 83, 266, 283, 364–365.

Note 51 in page 280 GB, p. 209.

Note 52 in page 280 SUC, p. 116.

Note 53 in page 280 EC1, pp. 93–94.

Note 54 in page 281 Preface to Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads.

Note 55 in page 281 E. g.: H. V. Routh, Towards the Twentieth Century (New York and Cambridge, 1937); J. W. Beach, The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry (New York, 1936); G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age (London, 1936); Lionel Stevenson, Darwin Among the Poets (Chicago, 1932).

Note 56 in page 281 For some of the most characteristic of these pronouncements, see Letters to Clough, p. 135; CL, pp. 130–131; EC2, pp. 1–3; DA, pp. 118, 137.

Note 57 in page 281 Due allowance must be made for a youthful romantic melancholy and for Senancour. Mrs. Sells (Matthew Arnold and France, Cambridge, 1935) quotes, passim, enough of Obermann to prove that moods of gloom in Arnold, echoes of the aimlessness of nature and the futility of life, are not necessarily, perhaps not even probably, the results of direct reflection upon scientific theories.

Note 58 in page 281 SPP, separately published 1870, had appeared in the Cornhill Magazine beginning October, 1869.

Note 59 in page 281 In SPP, Part i (42 pp.), they occur at least 45 times; in two important short passages (pp. 6–9 and 36–39), 17 and 19 times respectively.

Note 60 in page 281 Letters, i. 219 (1863); “The Bishop and the Philosopher” and “Dr. Stanley's Lectures on the Jewish Church,” Macmillan's Magazine, vii (1863), 241–256, 327–336.

Note 61 in page 281 LD, p. 55; cf. ibid., p. xiii.

Note 62 in page 282 It is curious that in books avowedly seeking a scientific basis for religious faith Arnold should have thought it wise to apply the word science ironically to just that kind of religious view which he considered most perverse. He labeled the Three Creeds as “the popular science of Christianity,” its “learned science,” and its “learned science with a strong dash of temper.” LD, Ch. ix. §i. The meaning is, of course, pseudo-science. “[O]ur theologians really suffer, not from having too much science, but from having too little.” Ibid., p. 348.

Note 63 in page 282 SPP, p. 87.

Note 64 in page 282 GB, p. 24.

Note 65 in page 282 LD, p. xii.

Note 66 in page 282 GB, Ch. ii, §§ ii–v, pp. 51–89. Metaphysics vigorously attacked as the true “Dismal Science,” ibid., p. 50.

Note 67 in page 282 Ibid., p. 65.

Note 68 in page 282 With the aid of Curtius' Grundzüge der Greichischen Etymologie.

Note 69 in page 282 GB, p. 71.

Note 70 in page 282 Ibid., p. 73.

Note 71 in page 282 By his caustic reiteration of this formula Arnold must have antagonized many potential sympathizers. The two bishops “doing something for the Godhead of the Eternal Son” appear no less than fifteen times in LD: pp. 4, 7, 12, 29, 100, 108, 114, 146, 162, 166, 192, 207, 225, 246, 334. The designation of the doctrine of the Trinity as “the fairy tale of the three Lord Shaftesburys” seems not to have occurred to him until the book was nearly finished; but that, too, he employed at least six times: pp. 278, 281, 283, 298, 315, 336.

Note 72 in page 283 “The Bishop and the Philosopher,” loc. cit. (Revised and republished, in part, as “Spinoza and the Bible,” EC1, pp. 356–399.)

Note 73 in page 283 “The Bishop and the Philosopher,” loc. cit., p. 254.

Note 74 in page 283 GB, p. xxxii.

Note 75 in page 283 To Fontanes, 1876: “Godwin est interessant, mais il n'est pas une source; des courants actuels qui nous portent, aucun ne vient de lui.” Letters, ii, 149.

Note 76 in page 283 Letters, i, 111; EC1, p. 405; ESG, p. xxi; GB, p. 133; “The Nadir of Liberalism,” Nineteenth Century, xix (1886), 653.

Note 77 in page 283 Letters, i, 227–228; LD, pp. 282, 294; GB, pp. xxxvii, 197; CUS, p. 135.

Note 78 in page 283 “... a grotesque old French pedant,” CUS, p. 135; cf. “A Comment on Christmas,” Contemporary Review, xlvii (1885), 467. Comte, Buckle, and Mill referred to as “men of a system,” Rabbis beloved of Jacobinism but too one-sided to represent culture, CA, pp. 35–36.

Note 79 in page 283 See especially GB, Ch. i, ii, and “A Comment on Christmas,” loc. cit.

Note 80 in page 283 SPP, p. 8.

Note 81 in page 283 LD, p. 158.

Note 82 in page 283 Considering the gloom which seems to many readers the dominant tone of Arnold's poetry, and considering that, as Trilling points out (op. cit., p. 375), the “high seriousness” of the “grand style” meant solemnity and sadness, it is noteworthy that in his religious essays Arnold seems not in the least disturbed by the problem of Job, but secure in the ancient Hebrew wisdom, the assertion as self-evident fact that righteous living leads to joy. But cf. the hitherto unpublished lines, “Rude Orator,” in Tinker and Lowry, op. cit., p. 337.

Note 83 in page 284 But cf.: “All tendencies of human nature are in themselves vital and profitable; when they are blamed, they are only to be blamed relatively, not absolutely.” CL, p. 83.

Note 84 in page 284 GB, p. x; cf. pp. xxix-xxx.

Note 85 in page 284 Letters, ii, 41.

Note 86 in page 284 See ibid., i, 289; GB, p. 53.

Note 87 in page 284 “Dr. Stanley's Lectures,” loc. cit., p. 332; cf. p. 336; cf. EC1, p. 28, n.

Note 88 in page 284 GB, p. xiv.

Note 89 in page 284 It is doubtful, too, whether nature includes or excludes the divine, and thus whether God is controlled by natural law or is independent of physical nature, and perhaps a being concerned only with human moral problems. Cf. Trilling, op. cit., pp. 353–359, on the implications of Arnold's two formulae for God.

Note 90 in page 284 This confusion as it appears in the poems is discussed by J. W. Beach in the short chapter on Arnold, op. cit., pp. 397–405. On the varied senses of the word nature see Beach, passim, esp. pp. 17–27. Cf. LD, p. 321: “Ah, what pitfalls are in that word Nature!”

Note 91 in page 284 Last Essays on Church and Religion, Preface. (In SPP). See also SPP, pp. 201, 204, and EC3, p. 227.

Note 92 in page 285 HSG, p. xxiii.

Note 93 in page 285 SPP, pp. xxix-xxx.

Note 94 in page 285 Ibid., pp. 296–297.

Note 95 in page 285 Ibid., p. 248.

Note 96 in page 285 GB, p. 125. Pascal's argument for blind acceptance of the Bible treated as unintelligent, ibid., pp. xvi-xvii.

Note 97 in page 285 Christianity and Naturalism (New Haven, 1926), pp. 156–197.

Note 98 in page 285 Ibid., p. 185; cf. Irving Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership (Boston and New York, 1924), pp. 160–161. To Shafer's objections may be added some slight evidence of a sort of abstract polytheism. Arnold could speak seriously of “the law of intellectual beauty the eternal not ourselves that makes for intellectual beauty” (GB, p. 81), and could parallel the Greek personification of this force as Apollo and the Hebrew personification of righteousness as Jehovah, without seeing that he thus implied a plurality of eternal non-human forces. Some of his illustrative discussions of physical law (ibid., pp. 77–79, 84–85) seemed to imply an eternal not ourselves that makes for gravitation, and to leave the question open whether this was the same power as the depersonalized Jehovah, or another. Cf. the remarks quoted by Trilling (op. cit., p. 359, n) from F. H. Bradley, about “the Eternal not ourselves that makes for cleanliness” or “for longevity.”

Note 99 in page 286 Arnold declares this definition scientific: “for science, God is simply the stream of tendency,” etc. LD, p. 37.

Note 100 in page 286 Although at the close of LD (pp. 348–349) he declares in favor of the other formula as providing for all of life, whereas righteousness (conduct) is only three-fourths.

Note 101 in page 286 Admitting the idea of infinite duration to be unclear, Arnold held that the word eternal meant merely enduring, having a span beyond the life of a man or a race. (GB, p. 79) But if eternity is merely time extended, so is essence merely breathing glorified, or being merely growing etherealized. See above, p. 282.

Note 102 in page 286 E.g., GB, pp. xxxvii, xxxviii, 24, 30, 31, 94, 97.

Note 103 in page 286 See, e.g., SPP, p. 83.

Note 104 in page 286 This question is discussed by Trilling, op. cit., pp. 320–321, 363–365.

Note 105 in page 286 If there is any single master key to the writings of Arnold as Inspector of Schools, it may perhaps be found in his conception of the nature and the proper functions of the State. His theory of “the true and noble science of politics” (ME, p. 403) has recently been summarized by B. E. Lippincott (Victorian Critics of Democracy, Minneapolis, 1938, pp. 93–133), and more adequately if less compactly discussed by Trilling (op. cit.; see index, State; the passages referring especially to education are pp. 178–189; 384–385). On p. 71 it is observed that Dr. Thomas Arnold's coolness toward the teaching of science was due not to religious doubts but to a belief that science was irrelevant to political training. See ibid., p. 372, and Lowry, Letters to Clough, p. 118, n.

Note 106 in page 287 Letters to Clough, p. 66.

Note 107 in page 287 SUC, pp. 281, 286–287.

Note 108 in page 287 RES, p. 210.

Note 109 in page 287 SUC, pp. 51, 88–89, 95, 120, 123, 140; ME, p. 115.

Note 110 in page 287 SUC, pp. 36–37, 88–89.

Note 111 in page 287 RES, pp. 191–192, 204–209; Fitch, op. cit., pp. 178, 187–188. It should be recalled that he was urging the removal from the curriculum, for children under thirteen, of “mathematics, German, mechanics, animal physiology, physical geography, and botany,” while retaining, in addition to Natur-kunde, not only reading, writing, and arithmetic, but grammar, geography, and English history as well.

Note 112 in page 287 HSG, pp. 81, 174–175; Letters i, 365; ii, 49; See Young, op. cit., p. 97. But cf. Arnold's insistence that the teaching of the classics must be revolutionized, philological emphasis yielding to literary: HSG, Ch. ix; Isaiah of Jerusalem ... (London, 1883), Intro., p. 10.

Note 113 in page 287 Specifically better for this purpose than either Latin or English grammar: see Letters, i, 364–366. Elsewhere, however, he said that the “justness of perception” requisite for rightly interpreting facts is not fostered by mere specialized knowledge of the facts themselves. (LD, p. xxi; cf. RES, pp. 177–178.)

Note 114 in page 287 Letters, i, 364–366; SUC, p. 150; DA, p. 109. This “awakening” power of science, and its value in cultivating perception, he coupled with the supposed similar values of music (RES, pp. 106, 164, 278–279), an art of which he had but little appreciation (Fitch, op. cit., p. 175; Letters, i, ix, 163; ii, 341, 360, 374, 378; some of these passages conveniently assembled, Lowry, op. cit., p. 25, n.).

Note 115 in page 288 “The fruitful use of natural science itself depends, in a very great degree, on having effected in the whole man, by means of letters, a rise in what the political economists call the standard of life.” RES, p. 200 (1876).

Note 116 in page 288 Whatever Arnold's provocations, his dislike for “Dissidence and Protestantism” appears extreme; he was not altogether free from what G. M. Young calls “the most intense of Victorian emotions, sectarian animosity.” (Op. cit., p. 61.)

Note 117 in page 288 RES, pp. 86–89, 104–105.

Note 118 in page 288 Ibid., pp. 157, 226–227; “A Speech at Westminster,” Macmillan's Magazine, xxix (1874), 366.

Note 119 in page 288 At the secondary or intermediate level, he advocated a system “of two grades, the classical side predominating in the schools of one grade, the modern side in the other.” (ME, p. 130).

Note 120 in page 288 RES, pp. 19–20, 164–165, 208.

Note 121 in page 288 Letters, i, 270.

Note 122 in page 288 ME, pp. 338, 340, 343.

Note 123 in page 288 SUC, pp. 149–150.

Note 124 in page 288 Letters, ii, 368.

Note 125 in page 288 See Trilling, op. cit., p. 184.

Note 126 in page 289 EC3, pp. 137–150; Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th ed., (American reprint, 1886), pp. 170–174.

Note 127 in page 289 The lectures have not been highly regarded from a philological point of view; and no claim that they are linguistically sound is here intended. They are cited for the sake of their comments upon science in general. Although Arnold attributed the comparative failure of the first lecture to its being “a little too scientific” (Letters, i, 371), it should be remembered that he disclaimed any special competence in the field (CL, pp. vii, 65, 68), urging, even while he advanced some dubious theories of his own, that the Celtic field was worthy of more scientific cultivation.

Note 128 in page 289 See CL, pp. 64–65,137. Arnold here employed to unify and harmonize peoples an ethnological theory which has been more commonly used to separate and antagonize them; see Trilling's remarks, op. cit., pp. 232–233. The subsequent discrediting of racism does not retroactively discredit Arnold for adopting it.

Note 129 in page 289 CL, p. 58.

Note 130 in page 289 1865. Arnold's report, dated 1866, had its official publication in 1868 (Schools Inquiry Commission Report, vi, 441–712). SUC (1868) was a separate trade edition of the same. It contained his strongest insistence upon England's unfortunate lack of the scientific spirit (pp. 276–280, 288); upon the intellectual superiority, in this respect, of France, Germany, and Italy (pp. 112, 150; somewhat ambiguous as to Italy; see pp. 113–114, 130–131, and cf. Letters, i, 313); upon the inadequacy of scientific teaching in the English universities (pp. 222, 232, 288).

Note 131 in page 290 The discussion is worth reading at length: SUC, Ch. xxii, xxiii; reprinted with minor changes in HSG, Ch. viii, ix.

Note 132 in page 290 SUC, p. 260; cf. CL, p. xiii: “The wise man, says Spinoza admirably, ‘de humana impotentia non nisi parce loqui curabit, at largiter de humane virtute seu potentia’.” That the study of nature.is actually detrimental to true culture, to “human force, ... freedom and activity,” is an extreme position hardly typical of Arnold; indeed, on the same page with the passage cited, he says that “no part of the circle of knowledge is common or unclean, none is to be cried up at the expense of another.” See Fitch, op. cit., p. 190.

Note 133 in page 290 June 15, 1867.

Note 134 in page 290 CA, p. 10.

Note 135 in page 291 LD, p. 3. This protest furnished the starting point for “Literature and Science” in its original form, now conveniently available in E. K. Brown's Representative Essays of Matthew Arnold (Toronto, 1936), pp. 186–209.

Note 136 in page 291 “... for this knowledge it is before all things needful that [one] acquaint [one]self with the best which has been thought and said in the world; ... of this best the classics of Greece and Rome form a very chief portion, and the portion most entirely satisfactory. With these conclusions lodged safe in one's mind, one is staunch on the side of the humanities” (ME, p. 411). A year earlier he had spoken of two distinct qualities “in the minds of those who, on the one hand, have the spirit of scientific inquirers, bent on seeing things as they really are, and on the other hand, the spirit of friends of the humane life, lovers of perfection” (ibid., p. 72).

Note 137 in page 291 Still more conciliatory was the tone of his remarks about science in “A Liverpool Address” (loc. cit.), delivered a few months later. It was here, to an audience which included a faculty of medicine, that he spoke of having once contemplated a medical career (Trilling quotes the passage, op. cit., p. 359); it was here that he most specifically connected the word science with his formula, “to see the thing as in itself it really is” (see above, p. 276) —the word science, and another of his favorite words, lucidity: a sort of negative virtue, but one much needed by the English and exemplified by the scientist's ideal.

Note 138 in page 291 Here appeared once more, in close conjunction, the two senses of the word science. “A genuine humanism is scientific” (DA, p. 68) in the sense of Wissenschaft, or thoroughness, order, and objectivity in knowledge of any sort, not in the sense advanced by Huxley of an accurate knowledge of the physical world.

Note 139 in page 291 DA, p. 95.

Note 140 in page 292 Ibid., p. 137—the closing words of “Literature and Science” in the final version.

Note 141 in page 292 See above, notes 26, 62, 132; see “The Twice Revised Code,” Fraser's Magazine, lxv (1862), 361–362; ME, pp. 410, 413, 429; Letters, ii. 96–97.

Note 142 in page 292 Cf. Shafer, op. cit., p. 173, and Beach, op. cit., p. 15.

Note 143 in page 292 There was reason, of course, in his urging that culture was empty without literature, ancient as well as modern; there was something unrealistic, for the nineteenth century, in his feeling that it was empty without a reading knowledge of Greek. For his regret over the displacement at Oxford of classic histories by histories in English, see Letters, ii, 142–143. Reading knowledge aside, he somewhat overvalued even the knowledge of Greek authors and Greek culture; see Trilling (op. cit., p. 156) on “Arnold's failure to see that the subjectivism in romantic poetry had its roots in historical reality, that it could not be dismissed by turning away from it to its seeming opposite, ‘classical’ objectivity.” For certain unfortunate effects of Arnold's fondness for Greek upon the diction of his own verse, see ibid., p. 144; cf. Routh, op. cit., pp. 175–176.

Note 144 in page 293 The judgment of J. T. Adams, that Arnold “paid curiously scant attention” to science (“Sweetness and Light—Sixty Years After,” Atlantic Monthly, cxliv ([1929], 633), seems hardly right in view of Arnold's innumerable if somewhat inconclusive references to it.

Note 145 in page 293 Op. cit., esp. pp. 167–168, 171–174.

Note 146 in page 293 GB, p. 128.

Note 147 in page 293 He gives an oddly naturalistic turn to literary tastes and standards when he attributes “to the instict of self-preservation in humanity” the preservation of the comedies of Aristophanes (EC3, p. 64); the devotion of men to the Bible (GB, p. 9); the survival of Greek as an important element in culture (DA, pp. 107, 131).

Note 148 in page 293 One aspect of “Arnold's claim upon the future” is stated by Professor Lowry as follows: “More than any other of his contemporaries, he comes to us as the symbol of that quality which he himself believed would some day save the world—the quality that arises from the union of reason with imagination” (op. cit., p. 51).

Note 149 in page 294 DA, p. 122.