benefits of humanism to be reconciled with the learned and intellectual demand for specialization? It would not be my desire, even if the occasion permitted, to attempt a detailed criticism of any particular answer to that question which has taken shape and is now operative in this country. But one is tempted to ask whether the advance of knowledge and the subdivision of the field have really made it impossible to obtain, in the education of University students, something nearer to that more comprehensive survey of classical antiquity at which the earlier humanists aimed. It may be a dream, but it is an interesting subject of speculation. Evidently we have to reckon, at the outset, with a prepossession which the growth of high specializing has strengthened; namely, that the only intellectually valuable knowledge of a subject is such as is possessed by the specialist, the expert, in that subject; and that the acquisition of knowledge which is not, in that sense, thorough can be of little or no worth, either as a discipline or as a result.
Now, the most general recommendation of all classical study is the supreme and varied excellence of the classical literatures; these illustrate, and are illustrated by, all the activities of classical thought and life. A conceivable ideal of humanistic study under modern conditions—whether it be practicable or not, I do not venture to pronounce, though I am not convinced that it is impracticable—would be one which took those literatures as the basis throughout,
