CLASSICS V. SCIENCE AGAIN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXIV, Issue 7923, 15 April 1887, Page 6

CLASSICS V. SCIENCE AGAIN.

IN REPLY TO DR. POSNETT. [by COiONUS.] Ix had almost passed from my xt collection that in these columns I ha discussed the relative merits of th ancient classics and the modern science as element in the education of th rising generation ; and it had temporaril; escaped my memory, that in indignation at the ancient Greeks and Romans forcinj their lingo on our unhappy youngsters I had dubbed them each a race o "savages." But I have been remindec | of both, and more especially the latter in a rather angry shot from Dr. Posnett, the Professor of Classics in the Auckland University College, who has taken th< opportunity of his inaugural address to his students the other day to confound my impudence. Our excellent Professor lias bottled his wrath for a long time, but that 1 may not seem to evade hit attack, I give it herewith in his owe words, as furnished by him to the Press la conclusion, the Professor remarked that h< had recently seen in ft leading Auckland papei some essays (signed " Colonus") on the relative merits of classical and scientific education. It was not his purpose to discuss that question at present. Those who alone were capable ol discussing it —men who possess both classic:*! and scientific knowledge—were beginning to see that not only classical, but all literary studies were capable of scientific treatment, and that the supposed conflict was no rani conflict at all. But the essays to which the Professor referred displayed an equal ignorance of both science anc classics, accompanied by an inaccurato know ledge of the English language. It was s disgrace to Auckland that its leading journal should publish a rigmarole roundly abusing as " savages" the nations to which modern Europe owes the greater part of her legal, her political, and her philosophic ideas. To the Greeks we owe the foundations of our geometry and logic. To the Greeks we owe more than the foundations of our ethics and political science. To the Greeks we owe the grandest models ot oratory and poetry the world has ever read ; the noblest works of architecture and sculpture the world has ever seen. Without the Greeks we should never have known a language more rational, more scientific, more melodious, than any our modern world can boast. It was from the Greeks, not from the Hebrews, that Christianity borrowed its most profound doctrines—the doctrines of the immortality of the soul and the unity of human conscience. To the Romans Englishmen owe nearly half of tho language they speak. To the Romans France and Germany and Italy owe the great body of their legal knowledge. But why enumerate our debts to these poor Greeks und Romans We can only realise our indebtedness after much study. " Colonus" can save us the trouble of such research. He has made the unique discovery that the men of Athens and Rome were "savages"; and the far more significant fact that a leading Auckland paper sees fit to publish that discovery is enough to make us doubt whether we are living in a civilised land. To begin ; I take no exception to the Professor's charge in aught, save the passage wherein he exposes my ignorance at once of classics, of science, and of the English language ; and I cannot but feel humiliated when I learn that he has found me out, and says that I " displayed in equal ignorance of both science and :lassics, accompanied by an inaccurate knowledge of the English language." rhis is, of course, my misfortune, and :an hardly be charged as my fault; but ioea not the learned Professor show an mwisdom in dialectics in thus minimi sing the equipment of an opponent? Because now, should he silence me in irgument, he will lose half the credit, secause of my unfitness for controversy, md my ignorance of the subjects of iebate ; and, worse still, my incapacity in ;he use of the English tongue. My method, on the contrary, is wholly iifferent; for I magnify the learning md ability of my opponent; I regard him is a very Triton among the minnows; learned in all the literature of Greece and Rome; perfect to the nail in all the sciences, and absolute master of the English tongue ; so that should it come to pass that I, with my little pebble from the creek and ray little sling, slay this Goliath of learning, it will be, that like the maids of Judah, the people of Auckland ivill go dancing round and sing, 14 Colonus hath slain his tens of thousands. " THE SAVAGES. Our excellent Professor, in referring to ivhat he calls my essays, has been, pleased ;o select his ground for attack. He does lot touch the major question of the value Df my allegation, as to the absolute svorthlessness of the ancient classics in the education of our rising generation, but he is pleased to fasten on a very minor, and mere side issue, the savagery A Greece and Rome. Of course, this is i mere herring drawn across the scent, md I shall invite the learned Professor co meet me on the major question, as will lppear in the sequel; nor yet shall I svade the minor one, and I again declare 5f both Greeks and Romans, that they ivere mere savages. Ignorant as I amteste Dr. Posnett— sf the ancient classics, I shall- feel safest irst in resting on some of his own learned statements, as to one of those estimable people at the epoch which he has himself :hosen for illustrating the social life of Greece —a period which, of course, he nu3t regard as the most honourable in iterature, for its having given birth to the [Had and Odyssey. Writing, he tells us, ;vas at that period unknown ; the central igure in their government is that of a :hief; under him are lesser chiefs ,* he s not a kiug, for of centralised governnent the Greeks knew nothing. He is he head of a very small community ; he eads his" people in war; he offers up )üblic sacrifices for them ; he unites cingly and priestly powers; he is the great iispenser of law, but his law is not always ustice, asHesiod tells us ; his power is lot checked by any bodies ; the Homeric Council is merely an instrument for advising the chief ; the Homeric Assembly s merely an instrument for promulgating lis commands; no regular voting takes dace ; no formal resolution is adopted, 'n one line of the Iliad it is said '' that he rule of the many is no good thing." [*hey have no broad social sympathies.' n such a society, ruled by custom and he decision of its chiefs, family and clan elationships are almost the sole claim to :indly treatment. In the Odyssey we ind the free labourer treated as the very ype of human misery : the woman of iesiod is a working animal, classed with he slave, the ox, and the ass. These are all quotations, in exact words, com the description—in the earlier lortion of the same address—by Dr. 'osnett, of Greek life in the heroic, lomeric age, and if they had been written of social life among the Maoris re should, while seeing a resemblance in ome things, repudiate them as maligning he character of " Maori life, and should ccept them rather as descriptive of some >£ the lower class of savages encountered ly Livingstone, or Stanley, in Central Africa. I accept this as Dr. Posnett's own lescription of Grecian life at one period ?hich he has selected, and as illustrating he social life of a time that gave birth to he noblest work in that classical literaure which he regards as having such an nfluence for culture and refinement over he minds of our youth. In the Homeric ge, at all events, it is clear that the Jreeks were a very low order of savages ndeed. 3 HE LATER SAVAGES. Descending four or five hundred years re certainly find them improved—some f them—by the educational influences irought to bear on them from without, ait a race of savages still ; and supposing granted all that Dr. Posnett claims— /Inch I certainly do notas to our inebtedness, that learned Professor knows roll that everything of excellence, whether i literature, philosophy, or art, emanated :om a small number, that bore about the ame proportion to the whole people as lie Professors of the University do to the is hundred thousand people of New

Zealand, and that we might as just] take Dr. Posnett as typical of humanit on the Papakura gumfields, as Plato c Aristotle of the pirates and robbers, th ignorance and squalor of ancient Greece i- This of necessity arises from the ver cl absence of printing and the paucity < e books, and from the utter impossibility c s learning of any kind passing outside th narrow circle of those among whom min sharpening mind gave cultivation of P kind. If we never had other indicatio. i of the social conditions of the masses c I the people of Greece, we would from thi fact of itself be warranted in concludini f that as respects the people, theirs mua have been a state of savage life. But their mythology is quite sufficien > to satisfy us on that point. Some on says an honest God is the noblest worl of man," and if their deities were th , reflex of the ideals of excellence existiu; in the minds of the Grecian people, thei the people were low indeed. There i not a vice of duplicity, of intrigue of violence, of inhumanity, of savagery, o bestiality, but was deified among them , and though it . may be admitted tha [ immorality may be consistent with civili sation and culture, the accumulation o vices so degrading, as embodied in thei: I conceptions of the highest order of beings , is utterly inconsistent with the peoph having other than the habits and lives o . a very degradod class of savages. Has Dr. Posnett ever been to Naples 1 Has he seen there tho disentombec \ relics of social life collected in the State ; Museum, from Pompeii—the silent tell tale of the fashionable cultured life o! Rome and Italy ? Has he entered thai ' chamber with the startling legend overhead that tells that none but men shoulc i go in I Has he seen the statuary thai i long ago decorated the inner chambers ol ' luxury and fashion ? I have; and making every allowance for the consistency of vice and culture, I declare, from ocular evidence, that tho people must have been lower than savage : they were brutes. OUR INDEBTED . sut, coming back to Greece. Dr, Posnett, in his endeavour to show the enlightenment of tho Greeks, says, "To the Greeks we owe the foundations of our geometry and logic." If the doctor were not a Professor I would tell him that he does not know what he is talking about. Does Dr. Posnett seriously mean to say that we owe the origin of geometry to the Greeks ? Is ho not aware—or, if he is, what purpose does he mean to compass by attempting to conceal, that geometry was known and practised in Egypt a thousand years before it was ever cultivated in Greece—that the earliest authority that speaks on the subject, Herodotus, traces its origin to the reign of Sesostris ; and how will Dr. Posnett explain the geometrical proportions of the pyramids, which were built at least a few years before, as he knows ? Dr. Posnett, I am sorry to say, appears to be one that makes rash statements, apparently on the faith that nobody will question them, because he is a Professor ; and that nobody would have the audacity to tell him that ho either does not know or is intentionally misleading on a question relating to ancient Greece. But when Dr. Posnett says that we are indebted to Greece for the foundations of geometry, he has himself apparently been misled by the common idea that Euclid was the "father of mathematics," whereas Euclid collected even his theorems from Egypt, and the science itself had been imported from Egypt three or four hundred years before. As for the foundations of logic being found in Greece, perhaps it is so ; the laws of thought were formulated there ; though probably thought existed elsewhere, and followed the same processes, before Aristotle gave them names. May be not. Dr. Posnett knows. Dr. Posnett claims that to Greece we are indebted for the greater part of our legal, political, and philosophic ideas, not one of which in so far as they were thought out in Greece was autochthonous, but came as an exotic, from over .seas, like geometry, and not one of which in virtue of its Grecian connection has the smallest practical effect on the course of either law, politics, or philosophy at the present hour, any more than a mummy has on the study of practical anatomy ; and the same may be said of ethics and political science, which latter Dr. Posnett appears to place in a different category from "political ideas." " To the Greeks," says Dr. Posnett, " we owe the grandest models of oratory and poetry the world has ever read which simply means that to the eye morbid with long poring over ancient characters, the areola thrown around the heads of Homer and Demosthenes, gives them the aspect of demi-gods ; and these two, looming out of the haze of antiquity, assume prodigious proportions—like the Spectre of the Brocken, which is nothing but the enlarged and distorted image of the spectator, the mirage manifold magnified by the fogs that hang around those lofty heights. Dr. Posnett says, to the Greeks "we owe the noblest works of architecture and sculpture the world has ever seen." That may be admitted. In architecture they derived what Dr. Posnett calls "its foundations "-as is now clearly proved by modern discoveries—from Assyria mainly, and from Egypt also ; and it was developed in the temples of thoir gods ; while, owing to the anthropomorphism of their ideas in relation to their gods, even a greater stimulus was given by their religion to sculpture. We are accustomed to speak of sculpture as one of the fiue arts, but in its greatest luxuriance it was really, as Dr. Posnett knows, the growth of a low and degraded mental state, which is incapable of forming ideal conceptions of the Deity, and which consequently demands that the object of adoration be presented in a visible and material form. The Greeks excelled in statuary, but I refuse to see in that, their most distinguishing and attractive feature, anything sufficient to neutralise tho thousand and one evidences of the low and savage state in which the great mass of the population lived their sordid and degraded lives. THEIR LANGUAGE. Again Dr. Posnett says, " Without the Greeks we should never have known a language more rational, more scientific, more melodious, than any our modern world can boast." I do not know what a " rational " l&uguage is, so I give that up; but there is nothing scientific at all in the Greek language, except in so far • as any artificial arbitrary thing may accidentally assume pseudo-scientific forms. The first old savage just expressed himself as best he could, and the next old savage altered and fixed the endings and the beginnings to suit himself, and so it necessarily, as anything would, fell into a kind of regularity or uniformity about the tails of the words without any rhyme or reason about it, being entirely arbitrary or whimsical. Indeed, Homer's old savages—those that Dr, Posnett tells us made the woman " a working animal," and classed her with the slave, the ox, and the as3seem to not have been very clear about how they would talk, and had not put the curl of the tails of their words in order, but railed at one another in a sort of patois, from which one set of the savages took one kind of tailending, and one set took another, and called their patois after themselves ; and some of them, again, managed to get their tailending3 made the fashionable lingo, and so it came. Scientific ! There is no science there, unless what science can be discovered by indefatigable zeal and a vivid imagination ; or about as much science of form and construction as an ingenious .man could discover in the faces and angles of a cartload of road metal. And a more melodious language never was known! thinkei Dr. Posnett. Why for melodiousness it is no more to be compared to Italian, for example, .than— what shall I say ? Let Dr. Posnett read

y aloud a passage of Herodotus or Thucyy didea in his most dulcet tones, and let »r somebody from Florence read a passage e from Tasso or Mazzini, and let somebody i. with a musical ear, bat no knowledge y whatever of either language, listen and if judge; and I would bet my bottom f dollar that it would be to him as the e highland bagpipes to the iEolian harp, or 3 a hurdygurdy to an organ. Of course this a could only be decided as a matter of taste, i and tastes differ. f IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 8 But on the next point raised we are pulled = up with a round turn by the very audacity 11 of the learned Professor's remark. Unfortunately for his logomachy, Dr. Posnett ® is of the rash class that in its statements 3 presumes on the ignorance of its hearers, c How otherwise can we account for this 3 statement: "It was from the Greeks, I not from the Hebrews, that Christianity 1 borrowed its most profound doctrines--3 the doctrines of the immortality of » the soul V' Apart from the evident ' infidel bias in the remark, —and which will > make some parents open their eyes if Dr. k Posnett is to be the teacher of the youth* ' ful aspirants to the position of teachers of E religion among us, —the statement is : untrue as a matter of fact; for just as ' Christianity is entirely evolved from ' Hebraism, and the shadowy teaching of ' types had its full elucidation in Gospel light, so were the dim glimmerings of an ■ after state to Job, to David, to Isaiah, ' and the Prophets, that from which the 1 doctrines of an immortal life were evolved ; by the Founder of the Christian Church : aud His Apostles. But the fields of religious literature are probably not familiar to our Professor, so ' I shall invite him into a field that ought ; not to be unknown to him; though, indeed, as the learned gentleman does not ' appear to be aworo of the indebtedness of 1 Greece to Assyria, it is probable that he does not know that the immortality of ■ the soul was a doctrine familiar to the minds of men before Greece was cradled ; find that consequently Christianity, if it did not derive the doctrine from the ancient faith of the Bible, could have found it where Greece had found it—in Egypt, for example, and in a dozen places beside. For in the worship of Osiris, who lived some three thousand years before Socrates and Plato, and whoso worship had been fully established in all the land of the Nile for over a thousand years before Homer's old savages wore jawing one another in primeval Greek, there was the dogma in the cult of the great Egyptian God that he judged the dead, and, " having weighed their heart in the scales of justice, he sends the wicked to regions of darkness, while the just are sent to dwell with the God of Light." THE ROMAN SAVAGES. But having exhausted his space on the virtues of the Greeks, our Professor gives but scant measure to the Romans. He -says, " To the Romans Englishmen owe nearly half of the language they spoak." As I proceed with the study of Dr." Posnett, I am forced to the conviction more and more that he is either singularly reckless in assertion, or does not exactly under" stand the subjects on which he aflirins. I have been to the trouble of counting a large section of Dr. Posnett's own published statement, and I find that the words of Latin origin contained in it number not one-half, but between a sixth and a seventh of the whole; and, as Dr. Posnett writes in colloquial English, I am warranted in furnishing evidence from his own pen that Englishmen do not owe half of the language they speak, nor onesixth of it, to the Romans. I am not speaking of the language of learning or of the dictionaries, of which it is true there is not merely one-half, but over two-thirds of the words having Roman roots ; I am merely instancing the recklessness of Dr. Posnett's assertion that nearly one-half of what Englishmen speak is of Latin origin ; when as a matter of fact, taking the latter portion of hia own published article as a sample — which any reader can judge for himself— and omitting names, we find that not one-sixth of the words Dr. Posnett speaks is of Roman origin. Perhaps, however, I owe an apology to Dr. Posnett, for as he certainly does refer to the words that " Englishmen" speak, I may possibly not be warranted in testing the remark by hi 3 own diction, for Dr Posnett being an Irishman, as I understand, and not an Englishman, he may not regard his own language as a fair sample of how " Englishmen speak and as he says that an Englishman's language is enriched by one-half being from tue ancient classic tongue, we are probably warranted in regarding -sixth as the proper proportion of Latin in the language of an Irishman. However, that is beside the question. But assuming that we owe a sixth, or a fourth, or a half of our common tongue to the old Komans, why in the uame° of fairness do we ignore our indebtedness for the other half, or three-fourths, or. live-sixths to our ancient forbears on the other aide of the family lingo, our Saxon and Teutonic progenitors'? They were about equally savages ; and of the whole crowd on both sides of the .house we should be equally ashamed if we met any of them in the streets of Auckland ; and if they tried to rub noses with us or otherwise testified a disposition in their own frank but savage way to claim relationship. , THE CONCLUSION. i But enough of this. How can it be • that an intelligent gentleman like Dr. 1 Posnett, refined and cultured as he is, . | can possibly allow himself to be so blinded , by predilections as not to (eel contempt ( for such an unmitigated horde of savages ? Why, their gladiatorial contests in which < the old Romans with their wahines took 1 part as delighted spectators, showed the I brutal savagery of their nature ; and the ' power of life and death vested in a parent * over his child, and the sale of the debtor ; with his wife and children into slavery, and similar features in their social state, , present them to us in the most savage condition of existence. Why, from Agamemnon to Augustus there was not one of them that had a fine-tooth comb, nor a pair of boots to his feet, nor a decent pair of stockings to his legs ; nor was there one of them that ever blew his nose but with his fingers ; indeed, j I think it is not recorded in the classics s that they ever blew their noses at all, and t they must have left them to that untended < state which is familiar to the eye of any- ] body that has gazed on the expressive countenances of a Maori hapu on a bitter ( winter's day. a Nor in all the history of Greece and 1 Rome was there one of the lot that could 1 indulge in the luxury familiar to every c colonist, that of striking a match on the ' hip of his pants, for ho had no breeches [ and he had no match ; not one of them c had an eyeglass to twirl, not even a ; window in his wall; and, in the ab- f sence of even an Austrian bent-wood lchair, they lay down on their sides to feed ' J like a beast. And then they had not I even a three-pronged iron fork for their 11 victuals, but stuck their fists in the dish 1 or slopped up. their food with their 1 mouths like a hog. And then when they ' bathed, they smeared themselves all over I with oil and went to bed— and only t think of the state of the sheets! But r then, I bethink me, they had no sheets, fc but slept in their clothes, the beasts. 1 c am really ashamed to think that we a should be thought to be indebted for I anything to two such races of rude, un- f breeched, uncombed savages, 1 c A CHALLENGE. g But all this about the savagery of the * people is, as I said, a minor question, and E of no importance at all. The real ques- 1 tion was and is—what in the advantage to 8 our colonial youth in the study of the dead languages of these two ancient t savage peoples? I maintain that it is f, nothing at all; simply and absolutely r < nothing at all ; and only a criminal waste o of time and labour ; aud on this major p question I respectfully call Dr. Poanett to it

a discussion in these columns.- And fo the honour of my ; "lady-love"—th Herald —whose fair fame has bee traduced, in that Dr. Posnett said tha she had disgraced herself in Auckland b admitting and publishing my "rigma role," I hereby publicly challenge thi Professor to mortal combat ; and as send him the challenge, in courtesy leave to him the choice of weapons ; th rapier, the shot- gun, or the flail, just a he pleases ; or, if he likes it better, Gree fire, or even the shillelagh, at his service I submit my thesis, and am prepare to maintain against Dr. Posnett or al comers that "the study of the language of ancient Greece and Rome, is worthies as an element of education for our colonia youth." I challenge Dr. Posnett to die pute it with me. If he will not, 1 shal tell him that he, the Professor c Classical Literature, believes it, or he i afraid to meet me in a duel of dialectics I draw my coat along the ground. Will Dr. Posnett tread on it?