The objective man, at the same time, may find even in the vehement pages of Nietzsche warnings and criticisms which the friends of democracy should not disregard. Extreme, almost insane, as his doctrine undoubtedly is, it may have value as a corrective influence, an antidote for other extreme views. It serves to remind us that democracy may be misled by feelings in themselves noble, and may, by grasping what seems good, miss what is best. For example, there are in the United States about three hundred thousand persons, defective or subnormal mentally; there is a smaller number of persons exceptionally gifted mentally. It is a poor form of social service that would exhaust the resources of science and philanthropy to care for the former without making any special provision for the latter. Genius is too great an asset to be wasted or misapplied. All culture would have suffered if Newton had been held, in his early life, to exacting administrative work; or if Darwin had devoted his years to alleviating the conditions of the miners of Peru whose misery touched him so profoundly; or if Pasteur had been taken from the laboratory and pure science to make a country doctor. Nor can democracy rest satisfied with any substitute for culture which would disregard what is great in literature, in art, and in philosophy, or which would ignore history, and the languages and civilizations of the past, as if culture had its beginning yesterday.
In this chapter we have considered democracy and democratic culture from the standpoint of three writers on education, a Greek aristocrat, a German advocate of the domination of the classes over the masses, and an Oxford professor, all by training and temperament more or less hostile critics. A more direct procedure might have been employed to establish the claim of science to afford a basis of intellectual and social homogeneity. A brilliant literary man of the present day considers that places in the first ranks of literature are reserved for the doctrinally heterodox. None of the great writers of Europe, he asserts, have been the adherents of the traditional faith. (He makes an exception in favor of Racine: but this is a needless concession, for Racine owed his early education to the Port Royalists, became alienated from them and wrote under the inspiration of the idea of the moral sufficiency of worldly honor; then, after an experience that shook his faith in his own code, he returned to the early religious influences in his life and composed his _Esther_ and _Athalie_.) But, unlike literature, the study of science is not exclusive. In the front ranks of science stand the devout Roman Catholic Pasteur, the Anglican Darwin, the Unitarian Priestley, the Calvinist Faraday, the Quakers Dalton, Young, and Lister, Huxley the Agnostic, and Aristotle the pagan biologist. Science has no Test Acts.