M 
 
 
 I Im
 
 r HE I IBRARY 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CAL [FORNIA
 
 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE
 
 COLLEGE 
 AND THE FUTURE 
 
 ESSAYS FOR THE UNDERGRADUATE ON PROBLEMS 
 OF CHARACTER AND INTELLECT 
 
 EDITED BY 
 
 RICHARD RICE, JR. 
 
 /'/ 
 
 ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN INDIANA UNIVERSITY 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 NEW YORK CHICAGO BOSTON
 
 LB21H 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
 
 TO 
 
 MY NEPHEW, RICHARD RICE, 30 
 
 IN THE HOPE THAT, WHEN HE ENTERS COLLEGE A 
 GENERATION HENCE, HE WILL FIND THERE A TRUER 
 EXPRESSION OF THOSE IDEALS WHICH THE AUTHORS 
 OF THE FOLLOWING ESSAYS HAVE SEEN FROM AFAR
 
 THE PLAN OF THE BOOK 
 
 " There is no enlargement, unless there be a compari- 
 son of ideas one with another, as they come before the mind, 
 and a systematizing of them. We feel our minds to be 
 growing and expanding then, when we not only learn, but 
 refer what we learn to what we know already " 
 
 CARDINAL NEWMAN. 
 
 The object of this volume is to present a set of essays 
 which form a close sequence of ideas, a little philosophy, 
 about the present interests and the future problems of the 
 undergraduate. It is hoped that he may find in them a 
 series of facts and opinions that will be naturally produc- 
 tive of further opinions and investigation on his part. 
 The chief intention of the book is to be gathered from the 
 order of the essays, which enables the writer of themes to 
 proceed from one discussion to another logically resulting 
 discussion, accumulating thought instead of "writing him- 
 self out" in rather scattered and casual efforts. Owing 
 to the variety of the materials, which illustrate many kinds 
 of writing, he has an unusual chance to gain true impres- 
 sions of manner and method, because he can here see what 
 different styles do for the drift of the same general argu- 
 ment. The essays make chapters of a book that may be 
 read from cover to cover as a unit. 
 
 A brief commentary will serve here better than else- 
 where to describe some of its practical uses as a text for 
 courses in writing. 
 
 vii
 
 viii THE PLAN OF THE BOOK 
 
 I and II. The two preliminary articles, which consti- 
 tute Part I, deal with the general question of learning to 
 write, and may, it is hoped, clear up certain perplexities 
 which sometimes long encumber the student. What is 
 style? What is technique? What is originality? What 
 are some of the practical methods for organizing detail, for 
 raising expectation, for guiding the reader, and for main- 
 taining an effective tone? The discussion of these points 
 looks forward specifically to the subject-matter of the essays 
 which follow. 
 
 Ill and IV. Articles III and IV, of Part II, contain 
 descriptions of Oxford University, from which the student 
 is expected to form his opinion of an institution widely 
 different, in all probability, from his own. To write a par- 
 allel account of life at his own college, to compare the 
 two places in detail as regards athletics or scholarship, to 
 give his chief reason for preferring one place to the other, 
 are, for example, exercises that will naturally suggest them- 
 selves to him. They are exercises that will test the logic of 
 many of his prejudices and prove to him the difficulty and 
 the profit of forming opinions fairly from an array of facts. 
 He may supplement these facts by such reading as is sug- 
 gested in the little bibliography at the end of the volume. 
 Here at the start he is asked to think justly and vividly 
 about a set of ideas and customs which are new to him, and 
 which make a sharp criticism of the ideas and customs he 
 has always accepted. This teaches him to see the essential 
 character of the place he lives in and prepares him to 
 understand and to criticise the point of view of many of 
 the succeeding articles, especially of the next three, which 
 deal with the general objects and advantages of liberal 
 education. If, after reading them, or at some later period, 
 he is asked to discuss again the relative merits of Oxford
 
 THE PLAN OF THE BOOK ix 
 
 and his own university, there will at once be apparent a 
 new and more vivid picturing of what both Oxford and his 
 own college really are. 
 
 V, VI, and VII. For meanwhile many questions have 
 come up. What do we really go to college for what 
 combination of social and intellectual training? Which 
 of these two objects best includes the other ? What is the 
 difference between character and intellect? After reading 
 President Wilson's essays, should one regard the qualities 
 of character discussed by Professor William James as 
 "by-products" of education? What is for most men the 
 valuable " by-product" of the college course? How closely 
 is it related to the training of intellect? These are pretty 
 heavy questions, and they should be approached through 
 illustration and personal experience. In this way there 
 may be avoided a certain monotony and ineffectiveness 
 which comes, in undergraduate writing, from a tendency to 
 generalization and mere assumption. Properly answered, 
 these questions teach one how to bring experience and evi- 
 dence of all kinds to bear in such a way as to give both 
 solidity and relief to abstract argument. 
 
 VIII and IX. In the midst of this general discussion of 
 the purposes and ideals of college life, it seems well to in- 
 troduce a test case, about which nearly every student will 
 have his own definite opinion. What is the importance 
 and influence of sport in college life? Is the example of 
 phenomenal athletic skill more inspiring to college stu- 
 dents than the example of wide-spread athletic habits? 
 Will not emphasis of the second produce the first, and em- 
 phasis of the first diminish the second ? Articles VIII and 
 IX put before us information and opinions which are sure 
 to call out a good deal of prejudice and a good deal of 
 pointed explanation. It is probable that, relative to the
 
 three preceding essays, the writer has already committed 
 himself in a general way on the issues here, and he must 
 now attempt to be both outwardly consistent with what he 
 has already said about the objects of college life, and true 
 to his own convictions for many students a stimulating 
 process of thought. 1 
 
 X. The essays on the function of athletics in college 
 life, which are attempts to define and to make vivid the 
 moral relation of a single important college interest to many 
 others, lead to a general study of what may be called the 
 balance of interests, or the sense of proportion, in college 
 life. Professor Gayley finds that this sense is growing de- 
 fective. Democratic ideals have rather upset the aristoc- 
 racy of learning. We have been able neither to keep the 
 old standards nor to make a proper readjustment to changed 
 conditions, as we have been called on to educate a whole 
 nation instead of a chosen few. In place of ideals we have 
 thought it necessary to substitute idols. "Idols of Edu- 
 cation," from which Article X is taken, is at once the most 
 stimulating and amusing of books on the trouble with the 
 modern college. It is a sane, witty corrective of those 
 incongruities and confusions in the thought of college men 
 trustees, faculty, and students who mistake the flashy 
 and the specious for the solid and the thorough, or who 
 actually prefer the advertisement to the real thing. Is 
 Professor Gayley's satire justified by what the student 
 has seen of college life? What are college "activities"? 
 How does the modern curriculum compete with them for 
 
 'The purpose of all these essays and exercises in their specific order is 
 to furnish a training, that shall be natural rather than arbitrary, in con- 
 structive, consequential thinking; and the critical emphasis should be 
 laid on the logic, the importance, the pointedness of what is said. The 
 effort to think logically and pointedly is a positive cure for incorrect and 
 slouchy diction.
 
 THE PLAN OF THE BOOK xi 
 
 the student's attention? What appears to be the value of 
 the ambition of the "typical college man"? What is 
 college spirit ? What is the difference between an idol and 
 a by-product of a college education? What ideals are per- 
 haps idols in disguise? What is there to say in defense 
 of some of the idols? Can an idol be improved into an 
 ideal ? The manner of Professor Gayley's satire, humorous 
 and trenchant, is a training in urbanity, in deftness of 
 touch qualities the most difficult to attain, but here thor- 
 oughly appreciable. 
 
 XI. As a concise and more arbitrary statement of the 
 student's purpose among those conditions which Professor 
 Gayley has made humorously clear comes President Hyde's 
 advice to freshmen. President Hyde is speaking to the 
 entering class in a hard-headed, compact New England 
 college. Professor Gayley had in mind the infinitely more 
 expansive and complex State university of the West. Yet 
 are not the problems of both institutions at bottom much 
 the same? Are they not the central problems described 
 in President Wilson's two essays ? What are the differences 
 in college life and the resulting differences in the student's 
 purpose described in the essays of these three men? Is 
 there really a difference in the outlook on life of a student 
 at a small college and a student at a large university? 
 President Hyde's address describes the temptations and 
 the discipline of college life, and what the student's clear 
 purpose should be, not so much from the ultimate social 
 point of view as from the immediate point of view of a 
 member of a strictly regulated institution whose standards 
 of excellence are a precious inheritance. It makes it clear 
 that the ideals of a liberal education are only to be seen 
 through the efforts which a strenuous discipline demands. 
 Power depends on a practical training in obedience. Char-
 
 xii THE PLAN OF THE BOOK 
 
 acter and wisdom come only from devotion to some im- 
 mediate and practical demand. This address sums up 
 much that has preceded. It leads toward what is to come. 
 XII. The relation of the practical to the ideal, of the 
 arbitrary to the experimental, which is one of the parts of 
 life most important to understand vividly, is the central 
 topic of the next essay, by Cardinal Newman, on "Knowl- 
 edge Viewed in Relation to Learning." It is placed here 
 because it is in all this discussion the one topic that must 
 now be fundamentally treated. When the student comes 
 to college and begins to pick his way among its complex- 
 ities, he is constantly trying to decide what is practical, 
 what is, as he says, worth while. The abstruseness of cer- 
 tain studies, their remoteness from any immediate utility, 
 lead him often to conclude that he is wasting his time on 
 them. He wants to see results. He wants before his eye 
 what Professor Gayley calls the Idol of Quick Returns. 
 He wants useful knowledge. Learning alone does not 
 satisfy him. There is Latin, still too largely a grammar, 
 not a literature. There is geometry, an interesting puzzle, 
 but not an applied science. There are German and French 
 which he may never "use," as he says. And history why 
 should they spend so much time over Frederick Barbarossa 
 and never get to William II? And there is English com- 
 position, useful, but perfunctory. Of what are all these 
 mere beginnings the beginning? If it is the beginning of 
 knowledge, it is a pretty roundabout way of getting down 
 to any facts of life which he expects to be called on to use. 
 But in reality all this is not so much the beginning of 
 knowledge as it is the beginning of wisdom. That is Car- 
 dinal Newman's point. Large stores of special knowledge 
 are to be gained in some technical school where the fresh- 
 man had better go if he must immediately learn something
 
 THE PLAN OF THE BOOK xiii 
 
 that will bring in quick results in money. But if he can 
 afford the time to train his mind in a way that may after- 
 ward make all his knowledge concordant and more largely 
 effective just as team-play is more effective than indi- 
 vidual action the liberal-arts course is the place for him. 
 Here he may become in a fine sense obedient to, and hence 
 in control of, all the details of his knowledge. And later he 
 will be emancipated, rather than somewhat enslaved, by 
 his particular profession. To understand this relationship 
 of knowledge and wisdom, as Newman here allows one to 
 understand it, is a fundamental experience for the college 
 man. 
 
 XIII. With more personal illustration the next essay, 
 on "The College Curriculum," brings these principles to 
 matters immediately confronting every student. There 
 are three kinds of thinking practical, imaginative, and 
 moral necessary either to solve satisfactorily the common- 
 est difficulty of life or to contemplate wisely the eternal and 
 unsolvable questions. It is not advisable to train the mind 
 from the beginning too much in one kind of thought. In 
 the college curriculum these modes of thought are called 
 science, poetry, and philosophy; and every course in col- 
 lege emphasizes one mode or a certain combination of 
 them. How, in this connection, may the three modes be 
 defined and illustrated? What is meant by narrow- 
 mindedness, and how is the usual course in liberal arts a 
 cure for it ? How does liberal education help one to know 
 and follow his bent, and to do what he really wishes to do ? 
 
 XIV and XV. Let us now take the specific instance of 
 a subject which we must learn to think of in the various 
 modes of thought, from all sides, that is, if we would have 
 any fair view of it at all. The student, plunged into an 
 unwonted freedom and variety of opinion in college, is apt
 
 xiv THE PLAN OF THE BOOK 
 
 to have as an early experience there a certain confusion, 
 or loss, as he calls it, of his religion. This is almost in- 
 variably not because he is weak in faith, but because he 
 does not understand that, in keen minds, religious thought, 
 like all other kinds of thought about life which are worth 
 while, changes, is evolutionary and progressive. In re- 
 gard to religion, as in regard to other ways of thinking, a 
 man's opinions must grow. To hold an opinion is to 
 understand its tendency to change, and thus to allow its 
 full development in one's life. To be held by an opinion 
 is to be blind to its evolutionary qualities. Ideas change 
 and grow through the ages in the minds of great men 
 and are useful to successive generations. Ideas come to a 
 standstill in the minds of small men, where they persist as 
 obstacles and stumbling-blocks. In great minds changes 
 of opinion and of belief do not upset the principles of 
 faith. In small minds, because there is room for no en- 
 larging principles of faith, any change of opinion appears 
 to be confusing and is usually rejected. What is meant 
 by faith? What is meant by religious opinion? What 
 part does the church play in a personal religion? What 
 adjustment must there be between the faith of our fathers 
 and our own creeds? How is the principle of growth the 
 principle of strength? These are questions partly answered 
 by the essays of Professor Colestock and Doctor Peabody. 
 A further question should be asked, in the light of the pre- 
 ceding articles how does the study of science, poetry, and 
 philosophy help to establish in the mind of a reasoning 
 student a strong, reasonable, enlarging religious belief? 
 
 XVI. President Meiklejohn's Inaugural Address makes 
 at this point an analysis of the general problems so far dis- 
 cussed. What is college like as a phase of life? What is 
 training of intellect for? This discourse defines the broad-
 
 THE PLAN OF THE BOOK xv 
 
 ening point of view, for it describes college training as 
 leading to an eminence from which to look out over our 
 complex world. What is the wider function of college 
 training and leisure? Is it to help men re-form ideals in 
 thoughtful quiet before entering the strenuous life of busi- 
 ness and the professions ? Is it to help men cultivate their 
 natural resources and their capabilities for the superior 
 enjoyment of life? How does college teach one the art of 
 learning to play? In this connection what is meant by 
 thought for its own sake? How, then, does liberal educa- 
 tion differ from professional education? Which general 
 type may render a man more independently useful ? Which 
 most helps a man on in the world? How may technical 
 education, if not preceded or accompanied by liberal 
 studies, tend to make a man the slave of his vocation? 
 These are questions which modern college students are 
 constantly asking themselves, which they try to answer 
 from the experience and counsel of their elders, and also 
 by looking forward into life independently and afresh. 
 
 XVII, XVIII, XIX, and XX. It is thus natural to pre- 
 sent next two views of practical idealism. These two theories 
 of life, especially if taken in connection with the lives of 
 the men who utter them, make an interesting and consist- 
 ent contrast. But they are not altogether opposite in 
 tendency. They both emphasize the importance of getting 
 all the action and enjoyment out of life possible or a 
 little more than circumstances at first sight seem to war- 
 rant and they are both prophecies of youth and of the 
 spirit of our age in its two dominant phases strenuous 
 labor and ardent dreaming. They both represent the 
 reaction from what Stevenson calls "cowardly and pru- 
 dential proverbs." They emphasize the importance of 
 progress at all costs instead of safety at all costs. In this
 
 xvi THE PLAN OF THE BOOK 
 
 connection the two essays of Stevenson furnish an excel- 
 lent view of the typical relations between fathers and 
 sons. From another point of view, however, the doc- 
 trines of Colonel Theodore Roosevelt and Robert Louis 
 Stevenson make a distinct contrast. One represents 
 strenuous, pragmatic, commercial America; the other the 
 criticism which an artistic idealism makes of all tempo- 
 rary effort in a material age. It is a contrast especially 
 illuminating in this era of the great European war, when 
 the principles of our vaunted Christian civilization are 
 undergoing the criticism of brute nature, and when we 
 Americans, congratulating ourselves on our democracy, 
 our representative government, and our present geographic 
 independence, are beginning somewhat anxiously to fore- 
 cast the future. For there already looms ahead the ques- 
 tion of whether any nation, which, in this practical and 
 commercial era, believes strongly in its practical and com- 
 mercial ambitions, must not soon arm itself to the teeth for 
 their maintenance. It is the question of whether, in the 
 evolution of this planet, commercialism will not mean just 
 that, so long as it is backed by the national will. There is 
 national militant Christianity for a curious parallel. But 
 is this sort of national will the real will of the people? 
 Is it not merely a governmental will? That during the 
 leisure and idealism of college days the good and evil of 
 such matters should be seriously contemplated is of the 
 utmost importance. And here, the article on "Thinking 
 for Yourself" makes an interesting comment by denning 
 the practical relation of thought and action, the two gen- 
 eral attributes of the all-round man. It is a comment on 
 the theories of life set forth in Colonel Roosevelt's ad- 
 dress and in Stevenson's two essays. It might be valuably 
 applied to the lives of the two writers.
 
 THE PLAN OF THE BOOK xvii 
 
 XXI. "The Discovery of the Future," by Mr. Wells, 
 is the statement of a scientist and a novelist who has 
 described the incongruities, the muddle, of our modern 
 commercial prosperity. Realizing the muddle, the modern 
 world is all for organization. ''Organize and we shall be 
 saved " is the watchword of all commercial undertakings; 
 and anything, if thoroughly organized, satisfies the modern 
 moral sense. Do we not all, for example, wherever our 
 neutral hearts may be in the present conflict, take a great 
 satisfaction in the supreme organization of the German 
 people for it is the nation that is organized, not just the 
 army? The virtue of organization we call morale. By 
 the morale of a people, we say, their state of civilization 
 may be judged. And more rarely do we ask the question, 
 in the light of what ultimate moral principle is this morale 
 perfected? Now we ask the question rarely only because 
 we are in the habit of believing ourselves to be blind to 
 the future. If we understood some way of discovering 
 the future, would not that question certainly be the cri- 
 terion of value in regard to any enterprise? Would not 
 organization of business, that is, be for ultimate moral 
 ends and less for immediate or, let us say, national ends? 
 This philosophy cannot be too much emphasized. We have 
 neglected it for a blind materialism, for a stupid fatalism, 
 which are much the same thing. Eat, drink, and be merry, 
 for to-morrow we die, is the business man's motto. And 
 this is because his to-morrow is never far enough in the 
 future. He has left idealistic thinking to men whom he 
 speaks of condescendingly as mere dreamers. He is not 
 sufficiently aware that in collective dreaming lies the greatest 
 safeguard of civilization. By what present indications, in 
 what modes of thought, the discovery of the future is being 
 attempted, is the subject of Mr. Wells's discourse.
 
 xviii THE PLAN OF THE BOOK 
 
 XXII. The rare kind of thinking or social forecasting 
 which Mr. Wells predicts must soon hold sway, if we are 
 to progress beyond the limits of our present national form 
 of civilization, is concretely described in the fantasy that 
 now follows, entitled "The Great Analysis." The little 
 book from which it is taken is perhaps the best definition 
 in recent years of that constructive imagination which 
 long ago produced the philosophy of Aristotle. It de- 
 scribes the kind of imaginative wisdom that from now on, 
 even in the face of further war, must begin to guide the 
 human will to think of a peaceful world-order. Among 
 the various types of free creative imagination in our era, 
 far-reaching non-partisan statesmanship is the rare type 
 which must ultimately predominate and direct. It is 
 presupposed by the enormous progress of certain other 
 great types of imagination, like the commercial, the me- 
 chanical, or the medical, which surely cannot be ends 
 simply to themselves. It is presupposed by the very com- 
 plexity of the world-order which they create and then fail 
 to safeguard. It is the all-inclusive type to which every 
 other is contributory. When the non-partisan statesmen, 
 historians, sociologists, of the future begin in earnest to 
 make the Great Analysis, the relation of all types and their 
 importance will be more clearly seen; but already we un- 
 derstand how commercial and mechanical and medical 
 imagination each make progress in the other more rapid 
 and more important, how they combine for mutual benefit 
 and for the benefit of humanity. 
 
 It is the problem of a world-order which we have so far 
 failed to see with any comprehensive view. Imagination 
 is not yet in this respect freely constructive. The experi- 
 ments of government are so slow, and it dares make so 
 few of them. The present forms of government are but
 
 THE PLAN OF THE BOOK xix 
 
 two, the autocratic and the representative, and neither 
 one appears to be successful in combining different races 
 under its rule. The Great Analysis has for its political 
 aim, as Professor Gilbert Murray says in the preface, "to 
 find out by organized knowledge what is good for society 
 as a whole, not to snatch by strategy what is good for a 
 particular group." 
 
 Non-partisan statesmanship is the greatest need of our 
 country; for, in the light of the present conflagration, it 
 can be seen to be the greatest need of the world. But 
 have we had, as a matter of fact, much statesmanship of 
 any kind, except in emergency? Have we had, as a gov- 
 ernment, steady, constructive statesmanship? We are an 
 intelligent people most advantageously situated, and we 
 have been able to get on without a great deal of states- 
 manship. But have we not reached a stage when our 
 problems obviously require the finest intelligence of the 
 country to save us from constant distress? Why is it, 
 then, that in spite of all that our last three Presidents have 
 done and are doing to make political service popular with 
 the finer men of America, it does not usually attract the 
 most cultivated and brilliant of them? Is this a serious 
 indictment of our politics or of our intellectual men? Do 
 they perceive their obvious duty? Do they think about 
 it deeply and in large terms? Are Americans deeply pa- 
 triotic? Trained theoretically in college for just such 
 impersonal problems as federal government faces, do they 
 not seem to prefer almost any form of money-getting in 
 business, when once successful there, to this most intel- 
 lectual and humane of callings, this most active and excit- 
 ing of enterprises? 
 
 XXIII. An appeal to college men on this subject con- 
 cludes our discussion. It is called "The Unity of Human
 
 xx THE PLAN OF THE BOOK 
 
 Nature." Our discussion has led from the conditions and 
 purposes immediately about us in college to the conditions 
 of the vast world of which, if we are preparing for it, we 
 should have some comprehension at the start. "The 
 trouble with the world is its vastness." "If one could 
 stand on the edge of the moon and look down through a 
 couple of thousand years on human politics, it would be 
 apparent that everything that happened on the earth was 
 directly dependent on everything else that happened 
 there." These sentences, one of which stands at the be- 
 ginning of "The Great Analysis" and the other at the 
 beginning of Mr. Chapman's address to the students of 
 Hobart College on "The Unity of Human Nature," make 
 practically the same assertion. If the problem is vast and 
 complex and in need of vast and complex minds for its 
 simplification, the hope that such minds are in the making 
 lies in this interdependency of all things. In the very 
 cause of what seems at times the hopeless confusion of the 
 world lies the means of its constant betterment, through 
 education. The fact of the unity of human nature implies 
 for all thinking men a consciousness of their social obliga- 
 tions, and is the ultimate reason for self-improvement 
 and for believing in the doctrine of individualism. "The 
 Czar of Russia cannot get rid of your influence, nor you 
 of his. Every ukase he signs makes allowance for you, 
 and, on the other hand, the whole philosophy of your 
 life is tinged by him. You believe that the abuses under 
 the Russian Government are inscrutably different from and 
 worse than our own; whereas both sets of atrocities are 
 identical in principle, and are more alike in fact, in taste 
 and smell and substance, than your prejudice is willing to 
 admit. The existence of Russia narrows America's phi- 
 losophy, and misconduct by a European power may be
 
 THE PLAN OF THE BOOK xxi 
 
 seen reflected in the moral tone of your clergyman on the 
 following day." 
 
 It is the unity of human nature that makes the train- 
 ing of an individual American college student such a vastly 
 important thing; for only by extreme clearness of individ- 
 ual thought do we attain the requisite for the great citizen- 
 ship. What is the world for, with its vast and tantalizing 
 problem? What is life for, with its seemingly inscrutable 
 incongruities? What is college for? The answer to all 
 these questions turns out to be very nearly the same, and 
 its full meaning is a faith in the efficacy of the well-rounded 
 mind. 
 
 To know so much about life through experience, and 
 through science, art, and philosophy, which are experience 
 typified, that one is convinced of the need for bearing a 
 noble part in the world, is the purpose of going to college. 
 And the true purpose of the college itself as part of the 
 state is to increase that great society of men and women 
 who are dedicated to the principle of idem sentire de re- 
 publicd of thinking together about public affairs not in 
 the sense of all thinking alike, but in the sense of all wish- 
 ing to act with that broad and generous intelligence which 
 has been inculcated by the same training and which is 
 fostered by memories and ideals held in common. 
 
 [NOTE: At the end of this series of essays a number of questions, on which 
 the student has been writing, will present themselves in a new light, and 
 they may perhaps be worth rediscussing. His mind is equipped for more 
 urbane and farther-sighted arguments, for weightier explanations, for more 
 pointed records of his own experience. In the light of President Hyde's 
 brief characterization of Oxford (Chapter XI), and of Cardinal Newman's 
 description of what sort of outlook on life a university ought to cultivate 
 (Chapter XII, Section V), and of Stevenson's " Apology for Idlers" (Chapter 
 XVIII), the reader will very likely perceive the real differences between 
 Oxford and American methods, where at first he only caught at rather 
 trivial and superficial aspects. Or he may find, after reading "The Great 
 Analysis," that he has a new opinion about Colonel Roosevelt's arguments
 
 xxii ACKNOWLEDGMENT 
 
 against peace, and about the question whether empire is a valid ideal for 
 the United States. When he has finished Mr. Chapman's essay he may 
 well perceive a new significance in William James's saying, that the end 
 of college education is ability to know a good man when you see him. 
 Such reference of one set of ideas to another is the truest way of deepening 
 thought and of producing that enlargement of which Cardinal Newman 
 speaks in the quotation placed at the beginning of this book. In this con- 
 nection it may also be well to note Edmund Burke's advice about reading: 
 " Reading, and much reading, is good. But the power of diversifying the 
 matter infinitely in your own mind, and of applying it to every occasion 
 that arises, is far better; so don't suppress the vivida vis."] 
 
 ACKNOWLEDGMENT 
 
 The editor wishes to express his sincere appreciation of 
 the generosity of authors and publishers whose permis- 
 sion to reprint articles and parts of books has made it 
 possible to carry out the purpose of this volume. To 
 Professor Byron Rees, of Williams College, and to Pro- 
 fessor W. D. Howe and Mr. F. C. Senour, of Indiana 
 University, the editor is indebted for valuable suggestions, 
 and to Mr. Horace O'Connor and Doctor Robert With- 
 ington for much help in technical difficulties.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE PLAN OF THE BOOK vii 
 
 PART I 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. LEARNING TO WRITE. RICHARD RICE, JR. i 
 
 II. THE QUESTION OF STYLE. ARNOLD BEN- 
 NETT 45 
 
 PART II 
 
 III. LIFE AT OXFORD. JOHN CORBIN ... 54 
 
 IV. TOM BROWN'S LETTER FROM ST. AM- 
 
 BROSE'S COLLEGE. THOMAS HUGHES . 72 
 
 V. THE SOCIAL VALUE OF THE COLLEGE-BRED. 
 
 WILLIAM JAMES 78 
 
 VI. WHAT is A COLLEGE FOR? WOODROW 
 
 WILSON 88 
 
 VII. THE TRAINING OF INTELLECT. WOODROW 
 
 WILSON 107 
 
 VEIL UNIVERSITY ATHLETICS. SIMON NEWCOMB 115 
 
 IX. PANEM ET CIRCENSES. RICHARD RICE, JR. 131 
 
 X. IDOLS. CHARLES MILLS GAYLEY . . . 143 
 
 XI. AN ADDRESS TO FRESHMEN. WILLIAM DE 
 
 WITT HYDE 160 
 
 xxiii
 
 xxiv CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 XII. KNOWLEDGE VIEWED IN RELATION TO 
 
 LEARNING. JOHN HENRY NEWMAN . . 168 
 
 XIII. THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM. RICHARD 
 
 RICE, JR 196 
 
 XIV. LOSING ONE'S RELIGION: A STUDENT EX- 
 
 PERIENCE. HENRY THOMAS COLESTOCK 212 
 
 XV. THE RELIGION OF A COLLEGE STUDENT. 
 
 FRANCIS G. PEABODY 216 
 
 XVI. INAUGURAL ADDRESS. ALEXANDER MEI- 
 
 KLEJOHN 233 
 
 XVII. THE STRENUOUS LIFE. THEODORE ROOSE- 
 VELT 257 
 
 XVIII. AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS. ROBERT Louis 
 
 STEVENSON 272 
 
 XIX. CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH. ROBERT Louis 
 
 STEVENSON 284 
 
 XX. THINKING FOR YOURSELF. THE LONDON 
 
 "TIMES" 299 
 
 XXI. THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE. H. G. 
 
 WELLS 302 
 
 XXII. THE GREAT ANALYSIS. ANONYMOUS . .332 
 
 XXIII. THE UNITY OF HUMAN NATURE. JOHN JAY 
 
 CHAPMAN 359 
 
 APPENDIX. FOR REFERENCE 371
 
 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE
 
 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 PART I 
 
 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 RICHARD RICE, JR. 
 
 7. The Nature of Literary Art and Its Technique 
 
 Why is learning to write so difficult? The simplest and 
 also the deepest reason is because all writing is done in the 
 shadow of infinite possibilities those of the writer's un- 
 known powers for thought and those of the fine art of 
 literature. But if this is the reason why learning to write 
 is difficult, it is also the reason why it is inspiring. Literary 
 art is not inaccessible. It is not the achievement of profes- 
 sionals alone. It is part of the same energy which any man 
 displays when he writes a good letter or converses well of 
 an evening. It is a thing more and more understood as one 
 observes life, profits by experience, and learns to know him- 
 self. It is the art with which we all inevitably grow more 
 and more intimate all our lives. It may be called the 
 technique of life. 
 
 Learning to write is difficult for the same reason that it 
 is difficult for a boy to think like a man. It can be done. 
 Little by little it is done. But to do it outright is rare. 
 All this means that learning to write is but part of learn- 
 ing to grow up. For writing is thinking.
 
 2 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 Undoubtedly there is something ironical in the fact that 
 at the very time when the world shines in the most glowing 
 colors to our eyes and calls most interestingly to our imag- 
 inations, we should find ourselves incapable of giving any 
 correspondingly vivid and poignant account of it. It is 
 curious to note that one can hardly find a prose record of 
 the feelings and opinions of youth made on the hour, with 
 whatever degree of technical skill, which does not lack, 
 paradoxically, the vital energy that inspired it, which does 
 not shortly appear both to youth and to time thin and 
 unsatisfying. 
 
 But this aspect of the old truth that what youthful 
 genius lacks is an art, the combining of a wisdom and a 
 technique which requires time to effect, forms a hopeful 
 consideration for the student who is still continually baffled 
 by the difficulties of "mere self-expression." The fact that 
 the art of writing is acquired only after much practise means 
 also that it can be acquired to a great extent by every one 
 who practises. The fact that without an ever-maturing 
 power of thought technical facility has no lasting products 
 means also that such experience and wisdom as may come 
 to any man are at the basis of literary power. The in- 
 spiring conditions which determine how we should go about 
 learning to write are, then, the possibility of definite im- 
 provement through acquiring technical knowledge and the 
 impossibility of power without maturing one's energy as a 
 thinker. 
 
 A great many counsellors have told us that the only way 
 to learn to write is to write. This advice emphasizes the 
 fact that literary art has a fairly definite body of technique 
 which must be mastered by practise before skill and facility 
 can be hoped for. Another set of counsellors has said that 
 the way to learn to write is to read, to see life, to enlarge
 
 LEARNING TO WRITE 3 
 
 general knowledge and experience as much as possible. 
 This advice often seems to a beginner less definite and 
 satisfactory than the first, because it emphasizes the fact 
 that the art of composition is the art of thinking and of 
 growing up; and the beginner always hopes that by the time 
 he is perfect in the A B C's he will somehow have a supply 
 of thoughts. But the truth is that whichever advice he 
 inclines to pay chief attention to will show the beginner, 
 before very long, the necessity and value of also following 
 the other; for the two conditions for literary prowess here 
 laid down are so interdependent that they are really one 
 comprehensive condition. 
 
 In the practise of any art, thinking and acquired technical 
 skill must constantly support each other, ideas at once 
 fashioning their technique, and technique helping in the 
 formation of ideas. In their final effects these two elements 
 may scarcely be separated. It is hence unwise to separate 
 them to begin with in the process of learning to write. 
 
 Obviously, it is convenient to have a body of special 
 advice about writing all together in one book of grammar 
 and rhetoric. But this should not give to grammar and 
 rhetoric a particle of the false dignity of isolation; for, 
 in any comprehensive view, the technique of correct 
 English, which one may apparently study by itself in a 
 hand-book, is really nothing but a practical method of 
 thinking. Without thinking you say: "I see a black ob- 
 ject under the smoke which grows larger as it approaches." 
 Technique bids you think more clearly. You must think: 
 "Under the smoke I see a black object which grows 
 larger as it approaches." Without thinking you say: "Be 
 sure that your sentences end with words that deserve the 
 distinction you give them." Technique bids you apply the 
 very principle you have wished to express, and think as
 
 4 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 follows : ' ' End with words that deserve distinction. ' ' If you 
 say, "In the process of civilization I expect that man will 
 find woman to be the last thing he can improve," it is a 
 trifle ambiguous and certainly a rather weak statement. 
 Sir Austin Feverel, whatever the truth of the sentiment, 
 at least knew sharply what he thought: "I expect that 
 Woman will be the last thing civilized by Man." What you 
 say and what you think are really the same thing, since 
 any slight change in speech represents a slight change in 
 thought. Thus what you say (or write) is simply the shape 
 of what you think, and the study of technique is the study 
 of representative convenient and effective shapes for 
 thought from which the principles of correctness and of 
 structure are to be deduced. 
 
 Now the reason why learning to write is so difficult, even 
 when the principles of correctness and structure are well 
 in mind, is because the immature will does not easily effect 
 a junction between powers of thinking and the knowledge, 
 facility, and taste which have been acquired by technical 
 study. "I know what I mean, but I can't say it," is one 
 way of describing our common perplexity, which nearly 
 always should be: "I could say it, if I could only think it." 
 But however you look at the matter, what is here described 
 is a lack of co-ordination between the various faculties of 
 the mind. In youth, what the mind chiefly lacks is a multi- 
 plicity of contacts. Liberal education, or the art of growing 
 up, may be said to be the process of bringing the various 
 faculties of the mind closer and closer together, of sup- 
 plying contacts; and maturity in any person is expressed 
 in terms of the energy generated by the extent of these 
 contacts. Maturity means that the various faculties are 
 thoroughly contributive to each other, and that they are 
 thus one comprehensive faculty, the art of thinking. My
 
 LEARNING TO WRITE 5 
 
 friend, Professor Aydelotte, in a chapter called "Writing 
 and Thinking," at the end of his book, College English, has 
 expressed this matter as follows: "To write clearly one 
 must think clearly, to write nobly one must think nobly, 
 to have a great style one must think great thoughts. All 
 of which means that one must be clear-sighted and noble 
 and great, for as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. The 
 problem of improving a man's writing is usually the problem 
 of improving his character." 
 
 This thoroughly logical statement places the problem of 
 learning to write on a high plane, and if it is once realized 
 that it must be so placed to see it clearly, there need be no 
 confusion simply from terminology as to what is meant by 
 style, matter, technique, and thought. If writing were 
 mainly a technique, it might be mastered rapidly and com- 
 pletely as one masters the management of a typewriter. 
 Because it is an art, one grows in it only as fast as one grows 
 up. What at first appeared to be a definite set of conven- 
 tions and a definite body of knowledge in the rule book, 
 to be utilized freely as soon as mastered, is soon perceived 
 to possess no value of its own, and to depend for vitality 
 entirely on the power to think. Literacy grows with the 
 demands of experience; we become articulate as we develop 
 wants. And at length something more than articulation 
 and literacy is required of us. We must compete in clear- 
 ness and force and copiousness with the rest of mankind, 
 and for that we must train ourselves in something more 
 vital than mere conventionalities. "Mechanical correct- 
 ness," says Professor Aydelotte, "is not a merit in writing; 
 it is only a necessity. It does not in the least imply that 
 the writing is good. The absence of it means, on the other 
 hand, that the student's work, no matter how brilliant in 
 other respects, will receive no consideration in practical
 
 6 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 life until the mechanical faults are mended. Correctness 
 of this sort is like wearing a necktie, a condition of 
 entrance into good society, but not an admission ticket." 
 We are never done with conventionalities, with attention 
 to the structure of paragraphs, proper guides to the drift 
 of thought, summaries at crucial spots, brightened endings 
 that cast a light back over the whole; but what we notice, 
 if we are growing up, is that these things begin to grow out 
 of the necessities of our thought, and that we cannot finally 
 conceive of technique as something external to our purposes 
 in writing. 
 
 In the study of any art it is important to keep this in 
 mind. The painter, the sculptor, or the musician may seem 
 to give himself up for a time more thoroughly than the 
 writer to technical study, to the thorough understanding 
 of the mode of thought before using it for original, personal 
 expression. But what the painter is studying is thought 
 not just ways of mixing and laying on color. All technique 
 is the technique of thought; it has no existence for its own 
 sake. To forget this is to be either a pedant or a dilettante. 
 
 The relation of practise in technique to artistic execution 
 is, however, very generally misunderstood. It is a common 
 remark, which we have all accepted, that the musician 
 who has once mastered his technique can then forget about 
 it and just create or interpret. It is in this way that 
 we like to think of great pianists, especially if we are our- 
 selves still rather hampered in playing scales or such a 
 carefully fingered exercise as childhood's old friend, "The 
 Spinning- Wheel." After hearing Paderewski, we are very 
 apt to say that he does not have to think about fingering 
 at all. We like to say this, and to believe it inadvertently, 
 though we know that a great musician is always playing 
 his scales and that the last thing he wishes to do is to reach
 
 LEARNING TO WRITE 7 
 
 a state of automatism where he might be unconscious of 
 technical control. For his sincerest purpose is to make the 
 technique of his art more and more a part of himself, and 
 to think in its terms with such facility that every change 
 of thought will find its exact expression. Doctor Fite, from 
 whose book on Individualism the above illustration is partly 
 borrowed, points out that being thus facile is the opposite 
 of being highly automatic, and that automatism is the very 
 negation of art. "Art," says Doctor Fite, "aims above all 
 things to be free." 1 Freedom is secured through complete 
 conscious control, or through practised obedience to law, 
 which is exactly the same thing. Only by obeying the 
 technical laws of your automobile do you control it. Only 
 by practising obedience does the musician have his will 
 with his instrument; and when his attention is, as we say, 
 wholly on interpretation, it is because he can be aware, 
 without confusion, of every aspect of his performance. 
 He grows oblivious to nothing. He relies more than ever 
 on all the qualities that make up his final effect. The crea- 
 tion of art demands this kind of expanded consciousness, 
 and the appreciation of art is to a great extent a compre- 
 hension of this faculty. 
 
 In the foregoing considerations of the nature of art, it is 
 not intended to place before one who is learning to write an 
 ideal that can never be practically comprehended without 
 the gift of genius, but rather to help him realize, as much 
 as possible to begin with, and more and more as maturity 
 sets in, the unity of mental processes in any effective and 
 practical writing. For it is very necessary to understand 
 this general principle, whether apropos of a business letter 
 or of a sonata. Otherwise we shall hardly make out from 
 day to day what the lifelong process of liberal education 
 
 1 Warner Fite, Individualism, p. 94.
 
 8 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 is for. Otherwise we may constantly fail to appreciate 
 greatness in our fellow men, and by our own fogginess be- 
 dim, if ever so little, the creative ardor of our generation. 
 At the end of this volume is an essay, an address to a gradu- 
 ating college class, on "The Unity of Human Nature." 
 Corresponding to the influence of one man's mind on his 
 neighbor's which makes for social unity, there is in every 
 man's mind a natural force for uniting his own mental 
 processes in what may be called their artistic unity. To- 
 ward this as an end, learning to write is the fundamental 
 and the supreme training, not because we expect to be- 
 come creative artists, but because writing is perhaps the 
 only art in which we shall practise enough to cultivate a 
 sense of the universal principles. 
 
 II, Originality and Thoroughness 
 
 Every man who intends to be a thinker and who escapes 
 being a thinker in these latter days ? will understand much 
 that is fundamental in the problem of literary art; for the 
 textures of great writings, though they are as various as 
 the range of personalities, have something in common in 
 their warp and woof, and this every man understands some- 
 what, since he himself cultivates so far as he can a share of 
 originality, and since every bit of thoughtful, practical 
 writing he attempts contains principles that relate it to 
 the efforts of genius. The practical man uses these words, 
 genius, originality, art, with increasing respect and famil- 
 iarity as his knowledge of his own processes of thought 
 expands. Indeed, every one, however humble his own gifts, 
 has an ideal duty, the duty of fitting himself to appreciate 
 art, genius, originality, wherever he meets it. 
 
 We often deem it the part of modesty to disclaim this
 
 LEARNING TO WRITE 9 
 
 duty; but it is really not modesty that prompts us here so 
 much as laziness or self-satisfaction. The man who says, 
 "I know nothing about art," seldom feels humbleness or 
 even shame in the acknowledgment, as he usually shows 
 by adding with infinite assurance, "but I know what I 
 like." Now, it is knowing about art that makes a man 
 humble. It is some familiarity with genius and some 
 realization of how genius thinks that makes a man reverent 
 and robs him of his complacency. It is by a keen ap- 
 preciation of originality that every man shares in the 
 progress of the world. 
 
 From this point of view the effort of learning to write 
 has a great importance, whether we succeed very well or 
 not. For even the kind of writing which, as college students, 
 we already seem to do with a certain finality, and the kind 
 of writing that any man, though he have no intention of 
 being a deep thinker, must yet do with skill and force or 
 fail in his profession, even such rather small achievements 
 are bound to give us some knowledge of the greater art 
 which we would not otherwise have. In college it is not 
 the fact that composition is the substratum and the funda- 
 mental technique of all intellectual work that gives it its 
 final importance there, but the fact that the effort of learn- 
 ing to write may lead us most directly and personally into 
 the presence of great minds and make us compare our- 
 selves with greatness. Education, whatever skill in method 
 it may teach us, is not liberal education unless it does that. 
 From this point of view for the purpose, that is, of ex- 
 panding intellect, of cultivating originality or what I shall 
 presently define as thoroughness it is important for one 
 who is learning to write at college to see, more vividly than 
 he usually does see, into what presences and toward what 
 kind of enjoyments and appreciations the traditional col-
 
 io COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 lege exercises and his own trusting efforts are leading. It 
 is not good for him to be satisfied with the old, lazy saying 
 that "it all trains the mind." Even the freshman in his 
 green cap, as one supposed to know his place and take life 
 as it comes, should wish to be more truly conscious of his 
 work than that sort of talk implies. I mean that he should 
 be more keenly alive to the fact that even the report he 
 writes on an issue in history enables him to see, if he but 
 look, the enlargement of mind in the great historian who 
 has endeavored to encompass and compress a hundred 
 details of the issue; or that the plan which his professor 
 makes him draw of the Roman Forum, brings him into 
 relation with the vastness of an empire; that his mechanical 
 and imitative skill in handling the algebra of calculus can 
 grow directly into the imagination of the engineer he may 
 some day be when calculus is the bridge over a river or 
 the range of a fortress beyond a hilltop; that the stanza 
 he may have composed as a mere exercise gives him a new 
 inkling of what kind of energy brought Spenser's poem to 
 its completion; that the story he has invented about storm 
 and shipwreck, if he has at all realized the elements he is 
 dealing with, puts him more keenly hi touch with humanity 
 and nature; and that all of these matters lead straight out 
 into the complex world which is shortly to require of him 
 whatever expansion of mind and power of analysis he is 
 capable of. 
 
 To the man interested in writing, such relationships are 
 the chief source of inspiration. They both idealize his tasks 
 and make them more obviously practical. For one cannot, 
 with a sweep of the arm and a fine phrase about culture, 
 proceed very far or very sincerely with the studies of a 
 modern university. The freshman in his green cap under- 
 stands more than that of the matter, more than the vague
 
 LEARNING TO WRITE n 
 
 principle that every little court in the hall of knowledge 
 has its further door. He wishes already to see himself 
 approaching, if not actually in the presence of, greatness. 
 From the start he must compare his mind and his acts 
 with those of greatness and have some basis for the com- 
 parison. Only thus, if he is to be a thinker and a writer, 
 can he best cultivate his originality through seeing the 
 further possibilities, the wide importance, of what he is 
 doing. And only thus is he apt to realize the necessity for 
 thoroughness. 
 
 Originality in thought about any subject nearly always 
 means a comprehensive thoroughness. Or, if you put it the 
 other way round, a comprehensive thoroughness leads to 
 originality. 
 
 Let me take, first, an illustration that applies directly to 
 such practical writing as every undergraduate is asked to 
 do. You have read, let us say, about the execution of 
 Mary Queen of Scots, and you are to write a report on the 
 significance of that historical fact. Now the drift of the 
 report, if it is only a mechanical effort, may be something 
 as follows: "Mary was very beautiful and also rather in- 
 discreet. When she was driven from Scotland she fled to 
 England. She was a Catholic, which stirred up trouble. 
 Philip, France, and the Pope had a good deal to do with this. 
 Elizabeth may have had nothing against Mary personally, 
 but she yielded to her counsellors and permitted Mary's 
 execution. This brought on the vengeance of Philip, France, 
 and the Pope. The result was the Armada." This report 
 may be two pages long, or twenty, and anybody might 
 have written it. What is the matter with it ? How can 
 one be original on such a hackneyed topic? 
 
 In the first place, I think you have probably read, in 
 preparation, one of those books nearest to your elbow,
 
 12 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 which is itself simply a report, concise or flimsy, as the case 
 may be, but which, in any event, carefully avoids doing 
 anything for the subject that would surely make you think 
 about it. If, on the other hand, you should read a great 
 account, such as Froude has written a great account, 
 because it is vivid, complex, simple, comprehensive, all 
 at once you will take the first step toward writing an 
 "original" report on the subject. For Froude is thor- 
 ough, in spite of a few inaccuracies, and is sure to give you, 
 even in a rather hurried reading, some notion of the infinite 
 ramifications of this one fact, the execution of Mary Stuart. 
 It will then perhaps occur to you rather sharply how in- 
 teresting is the old truth that everything that happens 
 on earth is connected with everything else that happens 
 there, and that this one fact is a wonderful illustration of it. 
 In order to see the matter originally, this is a fundamental 
 idea to keep in mind. After reading such an account as 
 Froude's, ask yourself what were the causes of Mary's 
 execution, and you will be led at once into most complex 
 and seemingly endless chains of influence. These chains 
 of events are, however, just because of their complexity, 
 reasonable and comprehensible; they always lead you back 
 to central connections. Now you probably observe that 
 certain links in each chain of cause and effect are forged 
 more definitely than the rest, or that they seem to join 
 together several chains. What sort of force is it that forges 
 most of these links? That is obviously the important 
 matter. If you can determine that, you will have a point 
 of view about the whole subject. So you begin to compare 
 the links for similarities: Mary's early relations with the 
 French court; her marriage with Darnley; Rizzio; her 
 treachery; Bothwell; her conflict with John Knox; her 
 conflict with her brother; Elizabeth's jealousy; Eliza-
 
 LEARNING TO WRITE 13 
 
 beth's failure to marry the Duke of Alencon; the excom- 
 munication of Elizabeth; the Northern Rising; the mas- 
 sacre of St. Bartholomew; popular enthusiasm for Francis 
 Drake; the Babington plot. You examine them all, and 
 as you find more and more traces of the same forces at 
 work, you begin to see how you will answer any phase of 
 the question. A force that forges a great many of these 
 links in the chain of circumstance that surrounds Mary 
 appears to be her own wayward, rather "indiscreet" dis- 
 position. Another force forges links out of the conflict 
 between Rome and John Knox, and joins them to those 
 formed in the conflict between Rome and Elizabeth. Again 
 appears the mischievous force of Elizabeth's own froward- 
 ness. Mary's fate wears many chains, and, as you perceive 
 in reading Froude, there is something ominous in the way 
 these chains are slowly welded together. Any aspect of 
 her fate inevitably suggests the others. 
 
 When you have reached this comprehensive point of 
 view, you may safely take up any phase of the subject 
 without a constant tendency to produce a mere imitation 
 of the facts. It is in seeing a thing thoroughly, or from many 
 angles, that you choose a point of view of your own and 
 begin to see originally. You decide, let us say, to show how 
 far John Knox and the growth of Calvinism may be said 
 to have brought about Mary's tragic end. This will per- 
 haps involve, first, a description of the contrast between 
 Mary's character, which was formed in the French court 
 before she came to Scotland, and the austerity of Scotch 
 opinion. Then might follow a discussion of John Knox 
 as the originator and representative of this opinion, his 
 conception of his duty, and his attitude toward Romanism. 
 Next, the shock felt by the nation at Mary's unscrupulous 
 behavior, and the effects of this in driving her into England
 
 14 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 and in dissuading Elizabeth from any attempt to restore 
 her to the throne and from any other step that would offend 
 the Scotch in the crisis which was threatening abroad. 
 
 From this special point of view, you thus look at nearly 
 all the phases of the subject. You introduce nothing not 
 well known; but your arrangement of details expresses 
 your own opinion, and you are seeing the thing for yourself 
 not just through somebody else's eyes. Seeing a thing 
 thus thoroughly implies an expansion of mind, without 
 which one hardly writes well on any subject. For it is 
 expansion that clear thinking demands as much as con- 
 centration. This is the same principle that we noted in 
 regard to the musician and his technique. There, Doctor 
 Fite pointed out that "art aims above all things to be free," 
 and that freedom comes from a mastery of detail. In 
 regard to writing he puts the case as follows: "Every one 
 who attempts to put his thoughts into writing has his days 
 when words are mere words and nothing more. We speak 
 at such times of the difficulty of concentration. But it is 
 equally a difficulty of expansion. You cannot get your 
 thoughts together because you cannot cover your field of 
 thought. Like the traveller in a fog, your vision is limited 
 to the region just about you, and you find it difficult to 
 make out whence your argument has come and whither 
 you intend it to go. And when you afterwards review what 
 you have written you find there a string of formal literary 
 phrases expressing not so much what you meant as what 
 was the correct thing to say. Contrast this with the rarer 
 occasions when you are truly and certainly yourself. Then, 
 in a mental atmosphere of serene clearness, the whole field 
 of your argument lies extended before you in perfect dis- 
 tinctness of outline. And then, just because of your ex- 
 panded field of vision, you know at each moment just where
 
 LEARNING TO WRITE 15 
 
 you are, just what you mean; and every phrase that you 
 utter, instead of being merely the proper thing to say, is 
 now remoulded, re-born, so to speak, out of the depths of 
 your private self, and, like your hand or your face, so in- 
 dividuated that it could belong to no one else." 1 
 
 Indeed, you date your understanding of any problem 
 from the moment when you stop leaning on somebody else's 
 explanation of it. Even in so literal a matter as geometry, 
 you can scarcely be said to understand it till you have 
 acquired a certain independence of thought, and, having 
 mastered the principal theorems, can proceed to solve 
 "originals." Your originality here both depends on your 
 comprehension of those previous explanations, and is set 
 free by that comprehension. Thoroughness is the bottom 
 of originality. Being original consists not so much in being 
 different from other people as in going beyond them; it 
 consists not so much in alighting on some unthought-of 
 point as in working up to it. To originality the past is 
 indispensable. A mastery of tradition is its source and 
 spring. Walt Whitman depends distantly on Shakespeare 
 and Wordsworth; Marconi immediately on Edison and 
 Tesla. The thought of man progresses, slowly or by leaps 
 and bounds; but it does not create itself. 
 
 Such definitions, while viewing originality from its hope- 
 ful side, do not, however, put it within the reach of every 
 persistent and serious-minded person. Thoroughness is 
 not just laboriousness, and comprehensive thoroughness 
 presupposes a superior type of energy. I once heard a 
 newspaper reporter explaining the difference between re- 
 porting and writing. "Suppose you are told," said he, "to 
 furnish a column about the opening of the new Boston sub- 
 way. If you are just a reporter, you will take a lot of pains 
 1 Warner Fite, Individualism, p. 96.
 
 16 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 to find out how long the subway is, how long it has taken 
 to build it, how it is built, how much it has cost, how much 
 traffic it is likely to divert, and all the other obvious how's 
 regarding it. You will arrange all your information syste- 
 matically, and as interestingly as you can without spoiling 
 the system. Those who read your article will not have, 
 at first, a question to ask. They will simply say: 'Well, 
 the new subway is a mile long; it has cost the city a pretty 
 penny; but it is finished.' If you are a writer, you will 
 at once recognize that you have here an inspiring and 
 difficult task, not a mechanical task. In the same space 
 of a column, you have, somehow or other, to answer all 
 the obvious questions in the case, and, in addition, to make 
 the reader see more personally what the subway is like and 
 what the problem of building it has meant, its significance 
 to himself and to the city, how it is going to affect a dozen 
 civic problems, how it is going to change the area, let us 
 say, of some distant residence section, and the price of 
 land ten miles out of town. You have, that is, to use your 
 trained imagination and answer a great many hypothetical 
 and ultimate questions, and think all the time with more 
 comprehensive thoroughness than the reporter. When the 
 reporter got through with his impersonal and mechanical ac- 
 count, the subway was still, so to speak, anybody's subway; 
 it was described as anybody might have described it. When 
 the writer gets through with his interpretative account, the 
 subway has become an expression of the writer's opinion, 
 and it is, in certain aspects, the writer's subway." Now 
 this is not saying that to be a writer you must be a genius; 
 it merely expresses, to a newspaper man, the basic difference 
 between reporting and writing. It perhaps expresses also 
 what is essential in serious originality. 
 It is perfectly clear to us, if we have studied the writings
 
 LEARNING TO WRITE 17 
 
 of men of originality, that practically every subject of 
 thought has two aspects: its obvious aspect, or as it might 
 appear to anybody, and its aspect as it appears to some 
 thinking individual. Our simplest phrases illustrate this. 
 The dark night, says anybody. The huge and thoughtful 
 night, says some individual. The bright moon, says any- 
 body. The immense and silent moon, says some individual, 
 who, in these cases, was a poet. You have, probably, like 
 anybody else, made a voyage in a great steamship. The 
 compact complexity of the vessel interested you, as it 
 naturally would interest anybody. But after you have 
 read Kipling's story of The Ship that Found Herself, is there 
 not a far more vivid aspect of the matter and far more 
 meaning? Do you now see the ship as anybody might see 
 it, or quite differently? And the truth is that after the 
 individual has spoken there is a third aspect of every 
 subject the unforgettable aspect that everybody knows 
 who has looked through the individual's eyes. For grad- 
 ually the world is made over by art and becomes a new 
 original possession for those who have eyes to see with the 
 artists. 1 
 
 This is what the writers and the musicians and the 
 painters are doing for us, and what we are all striving to 
 do somewhat for ourselves. Though we may disclaim any 
 attempt to be original, the attempt is spontaneous whenever 
 we try to make any subject clear to another person. "How 
 shall I know Jones in the crowd at the railway station?" 
 you are asked; and your reply is an attempt on your part 
 to be an artist. "The way to learn to write," said Flaubert 
 to his pupil De Maupassant, "is to stand on a street corner 
 watching the cab-horses file past; pick out one cab-horse, 
 and describe him in a single phrase so that he will be dif- 
 
 1 See Browning's Fra Lippo Lippi, lines 300-306.
 
 i8 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 ferent from all the other cab-horses in Paris." Think of 
 the unrelaxing scrutiny, the complete thoroughness, which 
 this stupendous advice, if it could be carried out, would 
 mean. Yet that, on a reasonable scale, is the way to learn 
 to write, as can be illustrated from almost any page of 
 good fiction. In De Maupassant's story of The String how 
 carefully he watches the old peasant's every gesture; in 
 The Coward how intently he follows the successive moods 
 of fear. 
 
 In art nothing that is superficial is successful; being 
 artistically true depends to a high degree on thoroughness. 
 If you will try to write up one of your own vivid experiences 
 with the sole idea of making the reader see and feel as you 
 did, you will discover at once that a few truthful statements 
 do not necessarily convey the impression you intend. 
 A truthful statement is one thing; an impression like yours 
 is another. It is a truthful statement to say: "It was a 
 hot day, and a great many people were assembled at the 
 county fair." But you hardly expect the reader, on the 
 strength of that, to find himself with you at the fair-grounds. 
 To be artistically true requires much sharp observation, 
 much experience, much practise. 
 
 Let us take this instance of a county fair. Let us sup- 
 pose that the centre of interest is a running race, and that 
 we wish to give the reader some notion of how it appeared 
 in the midst of the great crowd. Since the whole thing is 
 just the sort of occasion that we never feel more keenly 
 than in youth, why should we not be able to give a true 
 and vivid account of it? Yet something like the following 
 is what we are usually capable of: 
 
 It was a piping hot August afternoon, and a great many people had 
 assembled at the fair-grounds. There were farmers from all over the 
 county, with their wives and children, dressed out in every imag-
 
 LEARNING TO WRITE 19 
 
 inable fashion, all wandering about at random, looking at the 
 various shows or drinking red lemonade in a shed out of the sun. 
 But the centre of interest was the running track where the great 
 race "for the championship of the world" was shortly to be held. 
 
 And so we might go on for several pages, gathering mere 
 general impressions, not untruthful, but perfectly flat, 
 opening our eyes to stare, but not to see sharply. In con- 
 trast, here is the same scene visualized: 
 
 There was, in the first place, a piping hot August afternoon, the 
 kind that they have out in the corn belt, when not a drop of rain 
 has fallen for a couple of months and the leaves are drying up on 
 the trees and the grass is yellow and crackly under foot, and the 
 dust follows after the farmers' wagons like smoke. Then, inside 
 a high board fence, was the fair-ground, with big wooden halls here 
 and there, oak-trees with locusts singing away in the branches, and 
 packed full of people and prize cattle and pumpkins and lunch-boxes 
 and chewing candy and noise. There were farmers in their store- 
 clothes just in from thrashing and farmers' girls in white dresses 
 with pink and baby-blue ribbons, and in between, children with 
 sticky popcorn and red balloons and squawkers. There was a 
 "natural amphitheatre" with benches running along the side hill, 
 where the hushed crowd gaped at the spellbinder waving his arms 
 beside the ice-water pitcher. There were prize-pig pens and sheep 
 pens, the art hall with its pictures of peaches tumbling out of 
 baskets and watermelons just opened with the knife lying beside 
 them, and the tents where Diavolo ate grass and blew fire out of 
 his mouth and the beautiful young lady stood out on a platform 
 by the ticket-box, in faded pink tights, with a big wet snake wound 
 around her throat and her spangles blinking in the sunshine. There 
 were sample windmills and cane-ringing games, and wherever there 
 was room a man shaking popcorn or pulling candy over a hook, 
 or a damp little shed smelling of vanilla, where people were eating 
 ice cream and drinking red lemonade. You get all that and lots 
 more going at once, with the barkers yelling and the sledge-ham- 
 mers thumping on the strength-testing machines and the merry- 
 go-round organs squealing away, with the sun blazing at ninety- 
 four in the shade and everywhere the smell of hot people and clothes 
 and stale perfume, of lemonade and popcorn and peanuts and dust 
 and trampled grass you take all that, draw a third-of-a-mile circle 
 through the thick of it, push the crowd back a bit, and you have
 
 20 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 the Vandalia track that day as the engine bell in the judges' stand 
 tolled out the warning signal and the old marshal on his white 
 circus horse rode down the track sidewise, bellowing out the "mile 
 foot-race fer the champeenship of the world!" 1 
 
 Take a good look at this little picture. Is there an ele- 
 ment in it that you could not have thought of by yourself ? 
 You do not believe that your own impressions were less 
 vivid, for you felt the heat, the crowd, the dust, in just that 
 way. From your point of view, that is what makes the 
 whole so true. It corresponds perfectly to your experience. 
 You did not phrase your impressions at the time, but is 
 not the language simple enough just the phrases, taken 
 one by one, you might perfectly well have used ? What is 
 it, then, which is, perhaps, beyond your reach? It is to 
 give a clear, multicolored impression of the whole appear- 
 ance, taking into account all the facts you remember, the 
 air, the crowd, the noise, the dust, the excitement, the look 
 and sensation of it all, not vaguely, but specifically, by 
 some sort of orderly selection of parts, by some sort of 
 focussing process that suggests whatever it blots out, so 
 that the whole, the reality, is always retained. This kind 
 of record, as you say, requires more originality than you 
 possess. But now please notice that it presents much the 
 same problem as describing the significance of Queen Mary's 
 death, after a reading of Froude's complexly detailed narra- 
 tive. Doubtless it is only a man with a good deal of art 
 who can accomplish either of these things well; but, on 
 the whole, it is as difficult to do one as the other. 
 
 You may call this ability what you like trained ob- 
 servation, craftsmanship, imagination; but for purposes 
 of getting it into a real relationship with your own capabili- 
 ties and with your character, it is well to call it thorough- 
 1 Arthur Ruhl, "Left Behind," Scribner's Magazine, vol. 38, p. 300.
 
 LEARNING TO WRITE 21 
 
 ness. If you lack thoroughness, you may still hope to gain 
 some of it and some of those qualities that it either includes 
 or creates. 
 
 ///. The Practical Methods 
 
 After considering even thus briefly what literary art is 
 and what are some of its demands on us, we are in a better 
 position to take advantage of any definite, practical advice 
 as to methods of working at our literary tasks. But no 
 practical advice such as, for example, Benjamin Franklin 
 or Robert Louis Stevenson has given us about how to sit 
 down to work, or such counsel in regard to technicalities 
 of structure as the books of rhetoric are full of, is so im- 
 portant and so fundamental as a vivid conception of the 
 kind of energy which the ideals of literary art represent. 
 
 By practical methods I mean here the combination of 
 personal habits of work with external principles of literary 
 structure. Good habits of work come from the effort to 
 make them correspond to principles of structure. Unity 
 is a principle of structure; concentration is a habit of work. 
 Ease is a principle of structure; listening to the tone of 
 what one says and imitating or continuing its finest strains 
 is a habit of work. But concentration and listening to 
 tone are effected by different people in different ways, and 
 the habits resulting are individual. Therefore practical 
 methods of composition are often highly idiosyncratic. 
 Those which I shall ultimately emphasize have, however, 
 a fairly wide utility. 
 
 Authors themselves, both the great and the less, have 
 furnished us with an almost infinite variety of informa- 
 tion as to how they "do it," ranging from the sort of pen
 
 22 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 they use to the diet and even .the brand of tobacco which 
 most conduce to inspiration. I recall reading somewhere 
 that the libretto of Don Giovanni was written at midnight 
 in a haze of latakia, and that the novels of Marion Craw- 
 ford were clearly indited on a certain definite size of paper 
 with a Falcon pen. Doubtless there is something to be 
 learned from a study of writers' proclivities : for when you 
 discover that every hour of the day and night has been 
 named by some successful author as the one and only 
 season for labor; and that certain mysterious persons, like 
 Lord Byron, wrote only at the remaining unknown seasons; 
 also that every conceivable speed is earnestly to be striven 
 for, from Walter Pater's two pages a day to Anthony 
 Trollope's regular two hundred and fifty words every fifteen 
 minutes by the clock, or Colonel Ingraham's forty thou- 
 sand words in twenty-four hours, for some novel of the im- 
 mortal Buffalo Bill Series; you wisely conclude that you 
 should study your own case in these matters, and discover 
 what seasons are for you the most fluent or the most in- 
 tense, and how much work you can, as a rule, do effectively 
 at a stretch. It is also interesting to know that such a 
 veteran as Doctor Johnson, found it easier to write while 
 he was stroking a cat; that Herbert Spencer, who suffered 
 from a nervous affection and wrote in brief half-hour in- 
 tervals, wore a white canton-flannel suit to maintain an 
 equilibrium of heat throughout his body, and thick ear- 
 tabs to keep out noise; that Zola worked in the day- 
 time, with blinds closed and gas lighted; and that vast 
 numbers of authors have written chiefly before breakfast 
 as their writings most obviously show. Somebody has 
 defined literature as the record of the best moments of the 
 best minds. A psychologist (with a sense of humor), 
 investigating this matter of authors' habits, could determine
 
 LEARNING TO WRITE 23 
 
 for us what are the best moments and under what circum- 
 stances they are most likely to occur. But until that is 
 done we shall have to blunder on in our own ways. 
 
 There are, nevertheless, a number of small matters of 
 sufficiently general application to be mentioned here. It 
 is most important to learn to write a fastidiously clear 
 script in lines far enough apart to allow an inserted line in 
 revision, to get used to a standard size page, regular margins, 
 and, in general, to perfect early such mechanical aspects 
 of the task as every man finds serviceable. It is an ex- 
 cellent practise, in most cases, to revise each paragraph 
 as it is finished, and the whole composition afterward, and 
 to make a great moral effort to complete the first draft in 
 these two natural processes of revision after which there 
 should be made a final draft, allowing a certain time, if 
 possible, to intervene. 1 
 
 A very reasonable proclivity of a well-known American 
 novelist is to write the first draft of his stories in college 
 blue books, using the opposite blank page for his revisions 
 and insertions. I know of no purely mechanical suggestion 
 so apt to increase order and unity, and to save time, as 
 this. Another writer has told me that he finds it fatal to 
 the ultimately desired sequence of his work to write on 
 large sheets of paper. He writes passages on half-sheets, 
 and from time to time rearranges them and pastes them 
 together. In this way he can see more exactly the real 
 sequences and connections, and he is not so apt to invent 
 a transition or a casual relationship between two thoughts 
 which have occurred to him in succession, but which have 
 no other natural connection. He often finds, that is, that 
 
 1 The student who finishes an essay or report at midnight and turns it in 
 to his instructor the next morning is usually forcing the instructor to do 
 fifty per cent of the revising which the student, a day later, could have done 
 equally well for himself.
 
 24 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 the lucidus ordo of his production is not the chronological 
 order of his thoughts, however logical that order may have 
 seemed at the time. 
 
 Now the lucid order, the right arrangement of parts, 
 is obviously the chief end of structure, and these personal, 
 practical devices or habits are developed by the demands 
 of that end. 
 
 The fundamental methods are organizing detail and guid- 
 ing the reader, and keeping or modulating the tone. They are 
 all methods which serve the end of clearness, though that 
 word, as we shall see, can be variously interpreted. But 
 among all methods that might be suggested, if the student 
 who is learning to write understands thoroughly one or two, 
 he has, so to speak, introduced a yeast into his ideas and 
 purposes which will leaven the whole. Let us consider 
 first an illustrative method of organizing detail. 
 
 II 
 
 Let us suppose that in thinking over the fate of Mary 
 Queen of Scots, to take a subject already referred to and 
 somewhat familiar, you have been struck with the idea 
 that Mary's world of royalty and statecraft was so small 
 and so closely organized that everything any one did in it 
 seemed to affect sooner or later everybody else who be- 
 longed to it. In this closely organized world everything 
 counted in a peculiar way. Mary herself was too important 
 to take a single step which, if it happened to be a foolish 
 one, did not rapidly bring her into trouble. In the larger, 
 more loosely organized world of commonalty, our mistakes 
 are oftener to be mended, because our influence does not 
 radiate so rapidly or so widely. But in Mary's world, the 
 King of Spain could have no opinion that did not ultimately
 
 LEARNING TO WRITE 25 
 
 affect her ambitions, and Drake could not gain a victory 
 in South America that did not make her position in her 
 English prison a little less secure. 
 
 Supposing that such considerations had decided you to 
 write a theme on the subject they suggest The Unity of 
 Men and their Acts. Let us also suppose that you have 
 other illustrations of what we mean by this kind of unity, 
 this interdependence, and that you have thought out some- 
 what the general truth involved that, if all the acts and 
 opinions of men ultimately influence each other, each of 
 us has a tremendous burden of responsibility to think and 
 act wisely, and to be effective citizens of our own part of 
 the world. This may have struck you as a very significant 
 idea. The question is how to introduce and arrange it so 
 that it will affect the reader as poignantly, so that all it 
 implies will dawn on him brightly and create a vista for 
 his imagination. 
 
 Obviously then, the first step is to discover a really in- 
 teresting point from which to begin, for you must gain an 
 advantage over the possible (the highly probable) indif- 
 ference of the reader at the very start. You must say some- 
 thing to throw a light ahead, to rouse his curiosity, his 
 expectation, in regard to the general look of the subject. 
 Indeed, to discover a really significant point of departure 
 is to settle for the writer several difficult problems. Such 
 a beginning usually suggests a fairly definite course and 
 fixes the limits of your subject. If you have definitely 
 raised the reader's expectation, you should more easily 
 know when you have satisfied it. There is something def- 
 inite for you to live up to, and something definite to keep 
 you in bounds. A good beginning will do more psycholog- 
 ically for the unity and coherence, and hence for the end 
 of a theme, than any other one factor.
 
 26 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 You will very likely find a satisfactory beginning by 
 jotting down on separate slips of paper all the points and 
 illustrations you can readily think of which you wish to 
 embody in the essay, and then sorting them as you would 
 a hand of cards till they fall into their most reasonable and 
 most pleasing arrangement. From this arrangement, you 
 can, if you wish, write out a formal outline; but I think 
 it is usually better to let these cards or slips constitute 
 your outline at least until you are well on your course. 
 They are easily shifted, and this kind of outline can be 
 more quickly altered and revised than if it is formally 
 drawn up. Also you may get a better idea of what doesn't 
 belong in it, and this is a matter of first-rate importance. 
 
 Suppose that the topics on these separate slips read as 
 follows: 
 
 (i) Statement of the principle of the unity of men and their acts. 
 (2) Illustration: the history of Mary Stuart. (3) The world is 
 very small, especially in the upper classes of society, and therefore 
 smallest in the ruling class. (4) Does not intermarriage among 
 royalty complicate the relations of nations in a way to make them 
 more precarious than they naturally are? (5) Nations live peace- 
 ably side by side; rulers do not. (6) The principle of unity is seen 
 most easily in the small group of crowned heads, but it is a univer- 
 sal principle. (7) You influence your neighbor, your neighbor in- 
 fluences some one else. Is it not like throwing a stone into a pond 
 and starting the ripples ? (8) Ultimately it may be said that your 
 opinion influences the Czar of Russia. (9) Illustration: You help 
 to call the attention of Mr. Thomas Mott Osborne to the conditions 
 of our prisons. He spends a week in Auburn Jail. He writes a book 
 about it. He is appointed warden of Sing Sing, and inaugurates 
 certain reforms. Russian travellers visit Sing Sing; Russians read 
 his book or the reports of journals. Ultimately, there are better 
 prisons in Siberia. (10) We can never do anything simply for our- 
 selves; whatever we do for ourselves is also for others, (n) We 
 have a grave responsibility. We are part of collective opinion. To 
 be as intelligent a part of collective opinion as we can is our greatest 
 duty, an international duty. (12) In becoming liberally educated 
 we are performing a widely significant r61e. (13) Liberal collective
 
 LEARNING TO WRITE 27 
 
 opinion must rule the world, not family opinion, not royalty, not 
 governmental opinion. (14) Application of these ideas to the 
 great war. 
 
 Suppose that this represents the arrangement of your 
 notes for this essay on the unity of men and their acts. 
 It is not by any means the only arrangement, or the best, 
 but it represents a definite drift of thought. It will do to 
 start with, and a brightened beginning will do much toward 
 making its outline sharper. Suppose that the following 
 ways of beginning occur to you: (i) To tell how you were 
 reading about the life and death of Queen Mary, and how 
 you had concluded, from the way in which so many rather 
 remotely connected events all finally seemed to join toward 
 one end, that there is a more generally applicable principle 
 of the unity of human nature than we are normally con- 
 scious of. This might make an excellent introduction, 
 intimate and personal, in which you take the reader by the 
 hand and start him fairly on his course: 
 
 The other day, when I was reading about the political and religious 
 complications leading to the execution of Mary Stuart, etc. 
 
 It would be that sort of easy beginning. (2) But on ex- 
 perimenting a few minutes with this beginning, it may oc- 
 cur to you that, after all, it will not prove very significant 
 unless you analyze and illustrate the fate of Mary Stuart 
 at length, and that a long discourse on Elizabethan history, 
 all for the sake of showing that what most of us believe in 
 theory is sometimes concretely true, is not a very far- 
 reaching, not exactly a running start. You are out of 
 breath before you have really begun, and you have to begin 
 again. So you decide to put the general truth first and 
 at once illustrate briefly by a reference to this historic 
 example:
 
 28 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 All human actions are interdependent. Everything influences, 
 directly or indirectly, everything else. This can be seen from the 
 study of history. Let us take a single instance, etc. 
 
 It would be that sort of succinct beginning. (3) If, how- 
 ever, you have a keen sense of what beginnings ought to do 
 for subjects, if you recall your own pleasure in opening a 
 magazine and starting to read, as it were from an eminence, 
 you will realize as you proceed that this second beginning 
 of yours is not very prophetic. It does not really raise 
 expectation so well as the other because it proceeds to fix 
 the attention too quickly on an exact instance before the 
 mind has had time to guess at the many implications of 
 the general thesis. You realize that if you are going on to 
 speak of what this thesis means in regard to current affairs 
 and our individual social duty; if, for instance, you intend 
 to apply it for specific illustration to the great European 
 war and to show that we all share in the causes of that war, 
 which, from a universal point of view, is due to a lack of 
 educated opinion, to a lack of power in any great number 
 of men to think widely on international subjects, and hence 
 that it may be said to be partly due to American indifference 
 to the diplomatic systems of Europe; if you are going to 
 end with something like that, you must realize also that 
 you should begin by stating your thesis with comprehensive 
 imagination: 
 
 If one could stand on the edge of the moon and look down through 
 a couple of thousand years on human politics, it would be apparent 
 that everything that happened on the earth was directly dependent 
 on everything else that happened there. Whether the Italian 
 peasant shall eat salt with his bread, depends on Bismarck. Whether 
 the prison system of Russia shall be improved, depends on the 
 ministry of Great Britain. If Lord Beaconsfield is in power, there 
 is no leisure in Russia for domestic reform. In like manner, the 
 good things that happen are each the product of all extant con-
 
 LEARNING TO WRITE 29 
 
 ditions. Constitutional government in England qualifies the whole 
 of western Europe; our slaves were not set free without the as- 
 sistance of every liberal mind in Europe; and the thoughts which 
 we think in our closet affect the fate of the Boer in South Africa. 
 
 Such a beginning is more nearly adequate to the subject. 
 On second thought you will perceive that it is by no means 
 too fanciful. Turn to the last essay in this volume, and, 
 after reading three or four pages, ask yourself if this in- 
 troduction is not still enlarging your imagination to the 
 measure of the subject. 
 
 A glance at several essays with which you are already 
 familiar will show you the effect that the beginning has on 
 the treatment and extent of the subject. One may raise 
 expectation, as Carlyle does in his essay on Scott, by asking 
 a central question that secures light from each detail as 
 he proceeds, Was Scott a great man ? a question requiring 
 obviously some definition of greatness in ambition and in 
 achievement, and leading naturally to an analysis of Scott's 
 life, which shows in what ways Scott was or failed to be 
 great. Brand Whitlock begins his little biography of 
 Lincoln by saying that Lincoln's story, rightly told, is the 
 epic of America. Hutton begins his famous criticism of 
 Shelley and his poetry with nine or ten pages of seemingly 
 random illustration and comment, which lead you to believe 
 with him that the dominant quality in Shelley's acts and 
 in his thinking is caprice; the meaning of all that follows 
 in the essay is modified and illuminated by this primary 
 admission. A good beginning is an impetus that lasts. 
 
 Obviously you will not always be able to think of far- 
 reaching beginnings for your subjects. But if you under- 
 stand the principle involved, you will do better with them 
 than otherwise, and especially will you be apt to go back, 
 after reaching a certain point in the theme, and give the
 
 3 o COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 beginning a more significant turn a turn that more truly 
 prophesies the point you have reached and the line you are 
 proceeding on. (And this point, by the way, where you 
 feel the need of starting over again, is usually the psycholog- 
 ical moment for working up more completely the out- 
 line of the whole theme.) 
 
 Often, it is true, there is the greatest difficulty in start- 
 ing at all, even when there is no vagueness about the main 
 issue. You can see the end clearly, like the gentleman who 
 knew that he wished to propose marriage but could never 
 think how to begin such a terrible conversation. He was 
 advised to begin with the end. And in writing it is an 
 excellent method to begin close to the end, for then you 
 may encircle your subject and return to the same point, 
 which 'will usually give the subject a recognizable shape, 
 or at least a certain mechanical unity that, on second 
 thought, can be turned into real unity. It is the least 
 random of all methods which can be objectively described. 
 Three points, if the first and last are close together, indi- 
 cate at once the exact circumference of a circle. If the first 
 point is not close to the last it is more difficult to visualize 
 the area. 
 
 So much for the influence of the beginning on the trend 
 and end of an essay. To raise expectation, to lift the eye 
 toward the end, to equip the reader with a word, a phrase, 
 or an image that shall be a light on the way, and to mark 
 the extent of the theme these are the chief functions of a 
 good beginning. 
 
 in 
 
 As you proceed to develop the trend of the discussion, 
 which has been largely defined by beginning well and by 
 making an improved outline, you still feel the need of
 
 LEARNING TO WRITE 31 
 
 some kind of test to tell you if its substance has a real, 
 inherent unity, and not just a mechanical or verbal unity. 
 Do the central thoughts cohere, or just the peripheries of 
 their expression? 
 
 It is probably well to trust at first to your natural logic, 
 to the sequences which a certain rapidity and fluency of 
 composition often create. Then, when a definite division 
 of the work has been thus completed, if you will write 
 opposite each paragraph a sentence, or underline in each 
 paragraph a sentence which expresses the chief purpose of 
 the paragraph, and read those sentences together, you will 
 have the best criticism of your work that can be devised. 
 Do these summary sentences, when thus read, form of 
 themselves a logical, pointed paragraph ? Are they in their 
 best order, and do they fit together easily? If they can 
 be changed about to advantage, the chances are that the 
 paragraphs they represent should change places. Or, if 
 they can be changed about without especially embarrassing 
 their sense, the chances are that there is a corresponding 
 lack of emphasis or lack of proper subordination in the 
 parts they represent. Also, these summary sentences, if 
 not already in the paragraphs and in some significant posi- 
 tion there, should nearly always be so incorporated. They 
 should be most carefully and pointedly worded. They are 
 the bones, the ribs, of the whole matter, the things that 
 count most in giving it shape. Again, if they do not fit 
 together as they are, but need to be supplemented by other 
 connecting sentences to make their sequence plain, see to 
 it that these connecting sentences are also incorporated 
 and, when necessary, new paragraphs written to correspond. 
 If you cannot devise connecting sentences for them at all, 
 then they are superfluous, and the parts they stand for 
 should be cut out. A large part of poor writing and super-
 
 32 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 ficial thinking is due to a lack of these features by which 
 we recognize more sharply the character and influence of 
 thoughts as we write. And, just so, their presence is a 
 large part of the enduring impression of great writings. 
 
 Such a method, which, after some practise becomes a 
 thoroughly conscious habit embodying itself in the proc- 
 esses of thought and not requiring an external application, 
 includes, obviously, many minor points in organizing detail. 
 One of these I wish especially to describe the principle 
 of emphasis. 
 
 IV 
 
 In a Gothic arch every stone has its place. Remove 
 any stone, the arch falls. But while every stone is a neces- 
 sity, we think of some of them as being more important 
 than the others, especially the bases and the keystone. If 
 a stone cross surmounts the keystone, we think of the key- 
 stone as supporting it, though it may be there to give weight 
 to the keystone. We say, in turn, that the arch supports 
 the keystone, that the flying buttresses support the arch, 
 that the pinnacles on the buttresses add their weight to 
 resist the thrust of the arch. Remove the pinnacles and the 
 stone cross is less secure. 
 
 Everything in this structure is necessary and important 
 because it is subordinate to some other part. It is indis- 
 pensable only because of this relationship. The cross and 
 the pinnacles look like ornaments or like expressions of 
 the purpose of the substructure; in reality they play their 
 own indispensable parts. 
 
 This principle of subordination is the principle of em- 
 phasis. In writing, if you would sharpen the outline of 
 your idea (an exposition, an argument, a story), subordinate
 
 LEARNING TO WRITE 33 
 
 many parts to the few you wish to emphasize, make the 
 few thoroughly dependent on the many. Apply this Gothic 
 test. See that you do not place as co-ordinate parts that 
 depend directly or indirectly on each other, that have, in 
 some measure, a cause-and-effect relationship. You may 
 wish to emphasize the cause or the effect, as the case may 
 be, but you will bring out the significance of neither if they 
 are not represented in their proper relationship. 
 
 If, for example, in your discussion of the interdependence 
 of human actions, you wish to emphasize point eleven, about 
 our international duty to be liberally educated and to help 
 in the good government of our little locality, make points 
 thirteen and fourteen lead up to it by saying that, if liberal 
 opinion ruled the world, the great war might not have come, 
 and it is, therefore, our chief public duty to be liberally 
 and democratically educated. Suppose you wish to em- 
 phasize your statement of the general principle of the unity 
 of human nature, make the story of Mary Stuart simply 
 an illustration of it. Suppose you wish to emphasize that 
 story, then say that it is from such a story as that of Mary 
 Stuart that we learn most about the nature of the principle. 
 
 True emphasis is a principle inherent in structure. Being 
 arbitrarily emphatic, talking loud, reiterating, beating your 
 breast, swearing by all the gods that what you are saying 
 is important, are the resources not of eloquence but of 
 flatulence. The ornaments of speech should play their part 
 like the ornaments in the Gothic design, and their sig- 
 nificance should result largely from their place, their ar- 
 rangement, in the design. I once heard a distinguished 
 speaker say that every lasting impression he had made was 
 due more to his having simply managed to put the horse 
 before the cart than to any particular attraction in the rig 
 itself.
 
 34 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 In describing methods for organizing detail we have not 
 spoken entirely from the writer's point of view, but from 
 the reader's as well. All good methods of writing are, of 
 course, methods of guiding the reader. We try to write 
 so that the reader will see his way clearly and not grope 
 about, so that he will be impressed and not confused, and 
 so that we shall not have to explain at length over and over 
 what we mean and whither we are going. At street corners 
 are sign-posts not in themselves obtrusive, but part of the 
 scheme of the town. We think of them as belonging to the 
 streets, like the lamps to which they are often attached. 
 So in a well-organized piece of writing there are, as part of 
 the plan, a good many incidental guides. 
 
 That these guides may not appear as superficial formal- 
 ities for the benefit of some not-overintelligent reader, it 
 is most desirable that they should be part of the general 
 attitude and manner of the writer himself. The older 
 novelists and essayists, with a charming courtesy toward 
 their guest, the gentle reader, were in the habit of taking 
 him aside informally and explaining how matters really 
 stood. Modern methods are perhaps more subtle, but too 
 often they are not employed at all. Impersonality is the 
 growing characteristic of style. The reader is, in a certain 
 sense, always the writer's guest, and most of the rules for 
 receiving and entertaining a guest, and especially for not 
 boring him, may be followed with benefit by the literary 
 host. Having our house fit to be seen, we take a certain 
 pride in showing a guest about till he has learned his way 
 our way, that is. We make allowance for his ignorance of 
 what to us is the commonplace of habit; we keep him posted 
 on our plans and arrangements; we occupy ourselves with
 
 LEARNING TO WRITE 35 
 
 him to a considerable extent, and certainly never quite 
 forget that he is with us. At the same time we are careful 
 not to bore him. These things are in the intention of any 
 socially inclined writer. He accomplishes them naturally. 
 They are part of his style, his literary manners. He is 
 always thus doubly thoughtful, of his subject and of his 
 reader; and the more complex his subject, the more pains 
 he must take; for the reader and the subject are always 
 close together in his mind, two aspects of the same problem. 
 In this matter of guiding the reader, there is perhaps one 
 rule of more frequent application than any other in writing: 
 Proceed from the general to the particular. In other words, 
 when you have made a statement hasten to illustrate it. 
 Be specific. "The Germans are going to win; they have 
 kept the war almost entirely on foreign soil." "Byron is a 
 great poet; read the last stanza of the fifteenth canto of 
 'Don Juan.' ' So far as you are concerned, the first state- 
 ments may mean something. So far as the reader is con- 
 cerned, it is only the second statements that count. Most 
 writing is simply the process of illustrating our opinion; 
 and I venture to suggest that the greatest faults in writ- 
 ing, which correspond exactly to the greatest weaknesses 
 in thinking, could be described by saying that a gen- 
 eralization has no eyes. Dulness, vagueness, incoherence, 
 bluster, repetition, gabble, pomposity, inanity, twaddle, 
 these are qualities that belong to authors who are deaf to 
 the reader's cry, "Give me an illustration!" It should 
 also be said, however, that the reader who cannot follow 
 closely connected abstract reasoning misses the deepest 
 truths, which, as Shelley once said, are "imageless"; and 
 no set of illustrations unaccompanied by the criticism of 
 comprehensive, enlarging, or qualifying statements are apt 
 to give a fair view of the subject.
 
 36 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 The examination of a number of serious writings, such as 
 follow in this book, even the examination of the first few 
 paragraphs of each, will convince you that the normal 
 method of thinking about any subject is that of alternating 
 general and specific considerations. Nor do I know any 
 exercise so beneficial to the writer as to plan rigidly a few 
 themes which consist entirely of a set of illustrations fol- 
 lowing an expressed opinion, and in which each paragraph 
 is a set of more specific statements after one rather general 
 statement. To hold to this idea rigidly and see just what 
 it does for coherence and point is often a revelation in 
 regard to literary method. 
 
 Besides looking for a series of lamps along the way, the 
 reader is also hoping to arrive on a series of eminences from 
 which he can get a view. He wishes to look back, to look 
 ahead, and to realize where he is. For merely coming out 
 somewhere at the end does not satisfy him. The writer 
 must therefore provide a number of vantage points where 
 he tells what he is going to do, and others where he tells 
 what he has done, and still others where he tells what he 
 has not done and has no intention of doing. All these 
 points he must reach at the psychological moments: when 
 the reader is growing expectant, never before; and when 
 he is trying to recall, never after he has totally forgotten. 
 Moreover, the writer must not linger at these points be- 
 yond the psychological moment when the reader under- 
 stands. A word or a phrase will often suffice to sum up a 
 long matter; a new turn to a phrase is often all the reader 
 needs to point him ahead. We remember single words 
 and phrases far better than long sentences, and are guided 
 by them more easily. Indeed, the importance of the single 
 word is so great that, like the maker of maxims, Joseph 
 Joubert, the man interested in guiding his reader is con-
 
 LEARNING TO WRITE 37 
 
 tinually taken up with the effort to reduce his pages to a 
 paragraph, his paragraph to a sentence, his sentence to 
 a word. 
 
 The art of describing one's own purpose brightly enough 
 to shed some real light on it, that is one of the rare things 
 in literary art. It is the secret of Lincoln's power, of which 
 his Gettysburg address is not the only example. It is 
 a large part of Stevenson's charm how certain phrases 
 keep ringing in the ear as one flies after him from fancy to 
 fancy, guided by the echo ! It is the essential brilliance of 
 Carlyle, whose guiding words flash like swords across his 
 page. It is in the nature of every man who is a force in 
 letters, from the poet with his refrain to the statesman 
 with his shibboleth. And when one has caught the ring of 
 these words one knows something more of a matter than 
 is evident from the logic of its structure. 
 
 VI 
 
 Clearness, the Ittcidus ordo, is the fundamental thing in 
 art, but not its consummation though so to regard it is a 
 present popular superstition. "Whatever you do, be clear," 
 the successful writers and practical teachers of this practical 
 success-loving generation are always telling us. The advice 
 usually stops there; for practical people like to think that 
 the world is all made up of real objective facts and ideas, 
 and that the writer should try to see them as impersonally 
 as possible in order to see them clearly. Consequently, 
 if the word style is mentioned at all, it is only to say that 
 the best style is that of which we are least aware "just 
 as the best-dressed man is he whose clothes are not notice- 
 able, and the best manners are those which occasion no 
 remark one way or the other." But the analogy is not
 
 38 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 true to nature; for the best style is no more that of which 
 we are least aware than the best-dressed man is he who 
 wears no clothes at all, or the best manners are those of 
 complete silence and self-effacement. But if we have been 
 misled by mere words, it is in theory rather than in practise. 
 There is surely no lack of vivid and picturesque style now- 
 adays. Nor do we really mean, in emphasizing our practical 
 maxim, "Whatever you do, be clear," instead of the older 
 maxim of fine manners and taste, "Quoi que wus ecriviez, 
 evitez la bassesse," that the personal characteristics of a 
 man's writing are unworthy of attention. For undoubtedly 
 there is more excellently mannered writing at present than 
 in the day of "manners," and more appreciation both of the 
 essentials and of the fine shades of literary art. If we have 
 been misled in theory, it is by a set of people who under- 
 stand nothing which they cannot teach, and who have not 
 yet discovered an exact pedagogical method for "teaching 
 style." If we are not cultivating our own personalities 
 enough in writing, it may be because we read too rarely in 
 the thoroughly written books the books in which the 
 writer has lived as he wrote and because we read too much 
 in the newspapers } where a certain impersonality has to be 
 consciously cultivated in order to secure, in reports from 
 a hundred different pens, some unity of tone. For it is a 
 curious paradox that seeing life through the deep eyes of a 
 dominating personality is to discover our own point of view, 
 while seeing life impersonally in the passing, helter-skelter 
 show of successive journals is to see it always at second 
 hand. The vivid reality of things is in the minds and im- 
 aginations of men, not in the things themselves. 
 
 So, when we say that lucidity is our ideal, we do not 
 mean mere plainness. We mean also vividness and pic- 
 turesqueness; and though one general quality does not
 
 LEARNING TO WRITE 39 
 
 comprehend all the excellencies of writing, it is helpful to 
 those learning to write to think of many qualities con- 
 tributing to a final clear end rather than of many qualities 
 being cultivated for their own sakes. As a matter of fact, 
 tone, manner, sustained "rhetoric," finely flowing sequence, 
 are qualities not often existing or even possible for their 
 own sakes or for the sake of any intention quite different 
 from the intention to be clear. They are qualities which 
 add at once to the clarity of our impressions. If Mr. 
 Dooley writes one of his humoresques on grand opera, the 
 manner of the whole thing, the fantastic exaggerations of 
 his mental dialect, are for the purpose of making us see 
 some of the characteristics of grand opera more clearly. 
 Nor can we see them at all from his point of view unless 
 
 we laugh. If addresses to us a stirring and lofty 
 
 appeal, the eloquence is for the purpose of making us feel 
 and reason more emphatically. But the man who does not 
 catch the tone, the manner, of these things is neither stirred 
 in the one case nor entertained in the other, and conse- 
 quently misses the point of their meaning. Tone is, there- 
 fore, part of any meaning, intellectual or emotional, and 
 those people who do not care for manner but want only 
 the " practical gist of the thing" miss the very point they 
 are after. They beg the question; they do not care for 
 the meaning. I remember saying once to a Spaniard that 
 few Americans seem to care for the humor of Don Quixote 
 until, perhaps, the vast moral of the satire begins to dawn 
 on them. "That," he replied, "is simply because you 
 cannot perceive in English the delicious tone in which each 
 little bit is written." Now, it is in that tone, of course, 
 that the real satirical meaning lies. Until every intention 
 of the writer is perceived, one cannot understand a work 
 wholly. In a translation there is sure to be something
 
 40 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 lacking from the author's intention in his choice of words 
 to convey his meaning; and therefore, no matter how exact 
 the translation may be, the meaning is not quite the same 
 as in the original. It is rather hopeless to translate poetry, 
 or any writings where the meaning is so largely conveyed 
 by the tone, by the sequences of sound, by the connotations 
 of words that are vividly local. What meaning there is in 
 the translation may be perfectly clear, but it is not a fully 
 toned clearness, and we say we do not get "the spirit of 
 the original." 
 
 The element which we have in mind here is obviously 
 not just lucidity. It is another part of a writer's meaning 
 that appears to be best described by the word tone, because 
 this term includes the idea of choices in words, the sounds 
 of phrases and sentences, and the psychological impression 
 on us. We call this impression smoothness, choppiness, 
 bluntness, floridity, grace, richness, thinness, as the case 
 may be. Obviously, in all writings there is some kind of 
 tone, though in many it is so flat and so slightly accented 
 as to be unindividual, or so crudely developed and un- 
 harmonious that we receive only irksome impressions. But 
 when the tone is well modulated, whether it be prominent 
 or restrained, so long as it suits the rest of the meaning we 
 have a definite satisfaction in feeling it. Temperamentally 
 we may prefer one kind of tone and meaning to another. 
 We may prefer Macaulay's history to Carlyle's; the essays 
 of H. G. Wells to those of Bernard Shaw; Newman, as 
 a preacher, to Matthew Arnold; Tennyson, as a dramatist, 
 to Browning. The appreciation of literary art, however, 
 comes from a sense of what is suitable between tone and 
 clearness in any meaning. Well-toned clearness is the 
 object of any writer's best effort. 
 
 Ultimately you will perceive that this is what you are
 
 LEARNING TO WRITE 41 
 
 always trying for to make the thing ring true, to cast out 
 or make whole the dead places and to harmonize all the 
 variations. For a certain poet's intention, such a line as 
 
 "The weirdly wistful wailing of the melancholy flute" 
 
 suits perfectly. Supposing it had first been written, "the 
 sad and wistful wailing," is not the tone of "wistful wailing" 
 marked enough to have immediately suggested "weirdly" 
 as the word to complete the sensuous meaning? "Veni, 
 vidi, vici!" "I came, I saw, I conquered!" How much 
 less of the original meaning would be preserved if we said, 
 "I arrived, I saw, I was victorious!" and how little or 
 nothing in, "I got there, I looked around, and I came out 
 ahead." If you have written the last, which is all in the 
 same (ragged) tone, there is no chance for improvement 
 except by erasing the whole thing and beginning over. 
 But if you have written the second, you will be guided by 
 the tone of "I saw, I was victorious," to give it more 
 uniformity by saying, "I saw, I conquered"; and you will 
 hardly fail to realize that "I came " chimes in better than, 
 "I arrived," in bluntness and brevity, for the whole effect. 1 
 You improve upon yourself. You imitate your own 
 better moments, and thus you enlarge your glimpses of 
 your true meaning. You work up on either side of what 
 strikes you as your true level of well-toned clearness, till all 
 is in a graded relationship with that level. To know how 
 to work skilfully and rapidly in this kind of revision is the 
 final thing in learning to write. It requires taste; it re- 
 quires ability to listen to your own style critically; and it 
 
 1 A good exercise toward an understanding of tone is to paraphrase a page 
 of one of Stevenson's Essays in this volume, retaining in the paraphrase every 
 now and then a sentence from the original. The tone of the original may be 
 then, perhaps, more sharply discovered.
 
 42 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 requires power to make every now and then a phrase or a 
 paragraph worthy of being looked up to. If it were not 
 for this last and fundamental necessity of thorough and 
 original thought, the whole might be described as the way 
 in which we may all become great writers. It is the method, 
 so far as there is one, that all great writers have used ; and 
 that it is the natural method must be obvious from your 
 own experience. 
 
 It is already your method. But perhaps you have not 
 made the most of it. Perhaps you revise here and there, 
 in much the same way that one usually begins to work at 
 a picture-puzzle after the pieces are dumped on the table, 
 putting together scatteringly any two pieces that fit. There 
 is, however, little similarity between the mechanical fitness 
 in a picture-puzzle and the idea of general suitability that 
 one keeps in mind while revising a composition. Don't use 
 picture-puzzle methods; there are no better and worse 
 pieces in a picture-puzzle. But perhaps you do not clearly 
 distinguish, in writing, your better tones and phrases from 
 the mediocre. It is a very poor critic who cannot show 
 them to you. Yet, better than any critic or teacher, who 
 can, after all, be little more than a wide-awake audience for 
 you, greeting with alternate applause and hisses your efforts, 
 is some long, enthusiastic reading in an author who has a 
 strong smack of language about him, like Carlyle, or Kip- 
 ling, or Joseph Conrad, or Browning. You must discover 
 your own book, just as you have ultimately to discover 
 yourself; and "your own book," if it happens to be a true 
 and great one, will be a sort of mirror to you and will hasten 
 your understanding of many things. You will begin to hear 
 your own words more distinctly and to recognize what is 
 typical of your best moments of thought. For reading ac- 
 customs you to minds definitely engaged in these processes,
 
 LEARNING TO WRITE 43 
 
 and in the intimacy of "your own book" you will at last 
 understand them critically and thoroughly. 
 
 This is not the old doctrine of imitating the other man, 
 nor yet the fallacy of trying to be original all by yourself. 
 It is the doctrine of understanding the other man, and then 
 of imitating, not him, but yourself. It is the doctrine of 
 inheriting the past, not of dying with it. It is a description, 
 I believe, of the way in which every great artist has in- 
 dividually learned his art. Sooner or later he has thought 
 and expressed something thoroughly, finely, compactly; 
 and listening to the tone of it, how well it suits its meaning, 
 he has caught the trick of style from himself. So, it is not 
 a trick, after all; it is simply himself at last coming out. 
 
 This is a fundamental idea; it is in every part of life. 
 You learn to swim three strokes, and you are at once guess- 
 ing about your possibilities for a mile. The picture in 
 your father's house which you have looked at for years 
 makes you suddenly aware of its real beauty it is also 
 something in yourself that you are conscious of. For the 
 first time you play an old piece in the exercise book with 
 an expression that is your own, and you are at the entrance 
 of the whole realm of music. What is it you have heard in 
 that piece somebody else's notes ? Return to your favorite 
 book, a book like Middlemarch, after three years. It is 
 all new, you say. What is new? Your own experiences 
 and your latest thoughts, reflected in that mirror. Art 
 is ever fresh, so long as you do not grow stale. It takes 
 the measure of your increasing maturity and of your hopes. 
 It cleanses your nature by showing you what you must 
 outgrow, by developing the beautiful and enjoyable part 
 of you, and by flashing before you vividly those things 
 that you do not yet understand but may not remain in- 
 different to.
 
 44 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 Once having recognized the truth of this, a general truth 
 which applies to much in one's character besides the power 
 to write, the man of character finds that it sets before him 
 the sternest of ideals the necessity of striving to enlarge 
 and, at the same time, encompass his true possibilities, of 
 not settling back into his adequate mediocrities. For the 
 discovery of power, while it is an inspiration, does not insure 
 success. Mediocrity is strong in all of us. It usually con- 
 quers. And because it often buries us so comfortably, we 
 come to regard it as success instead of the other thing which 
 is rarely comfortable at all which is only romantic and 
 moral, an unending effort. 
 
 It is in this light that the far-reaching comment with 
 which we began, in the saying that the problem of improv- 
 ing a man's writing is usually the problem of improving his 
 character, places the whole matter on a high plane. Most 
 men have, at one time or another, glimpses of their possible 
 powers; they see the truth they long to believe in, they 
 hear the words they fain would utter. But only one man 
 in a thousand has the patience, persistence, the energy for 
 thoroughness, and the romantic egoism that enable him 
 to enlarge that finest area in his nature, and to protect it 
 inch by inch against the encroachments of his mediocrity 
 and his self-satisfaction. Self-satisfaction is the story of 
 most of us; self-realization only of the few. Nowhere is 
 this more commonly to be seen than in writing. Yet we 
 have all been given our little bit of magic, the open sesame 
 both to our own minds and to the secrets of art.
 
 II 
 
 THE QUESTION OF STYLE l 
 
 ARNOLD BENNETT 
 
 In discussing the value of particular books, I have heard 
 people say people who were timid about expressing their 
 views of literature in the presence of literary men: "It 
 may be bad from a literary point of view, but there are 
 very good things in it." Or: "I dare say the style is very 
 bad, but really the book is very interesting and suggestive." 
 Or: "I'm not an expert, and so I never bother my head 
 about good style. All I ask for is good matter. And when 
 I have got it, critics may say what they like about the book." 
 And many other similar remarks, all showing that in the 
 minds of the speakers there existed a notion that style is 
 something supplementary to, and distinguishable from, 
 matter; a sort of notion that a writer who wanted to be 
 classical had first to find and arrange his matter, and then 
 dress it up elegantly in a costume of style, in order to please 
 beings called literary critics. 
 
 This is a misapprehension. Style cannot be distinguished 
 from matter. When a writer conceives an idea he conceives 
 it in a form of words. That form of words constitutes his 
 style, and it is absolutely governed by the idea. The idea 
 can only exist in words, and it can only exist in one form of 
 words. You cannot say exactly the same thing in two dif- 
 
 1 Chapter VI of Literary Taste, How to Form It. Reprinted through the 
 courtesy of Arnold Bennett and of George H. Doran Company. 
 
 45
 
 46 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 ferent ways. Slightly alter the expression, and you slightly 
 alter the idea. Surely it is obvious that the expression 
 cannot be altered without altering the thing expressed! 
 A writer, having conceived and expressed an idea, may, 
 and probably will, "polish it up." But what does he polish 
 up? To say that he polishes up his style is merely to say 
 that he is polishing up his idea, that he has discovered faults 
 or imperfections in his idea, and is perfecting it. An idea 
 exists in proportion as it is expressed; it exists when it is 
 expressed, and not before. It expresses itself. A clear idea 
 is expressed clearly, and a vague idea vaguely. You need 
 but take your own case and your own speech. For just 
 as science is the development of common sense, so is litera- 
 ture the development of common daily speech. The dif- 
 ference between science and common sense is simply one 
 of degree; similarly with speech and literature. Well, 
 when you "know what you think," you succeed in saying 
 what you think, in making yourself understood. When 
 you "don't know what to think," your expressive tongue 
 halts. And note how in daily life the characteristics of 
 your style follow your mood; how tender it is when you 
 are tender, how violent when you are violent. You have 
 said to yourself in moments of emotion: "If only I could 
 write ," etc. You were wrong. You ought to have said: 
 "If only I could think on this high plane." When you 
 have thought clearly you have never had any difficulty 
 in saying what you thought, though you may occasionally 
 have had some difficulty in keeping it to yourself. And 
 when you cannot express yourself, depend upon it that 
 you have nothing precise to express, and that what incom- 
 modes you is not the vain desire to express, but the vain 
 desire to think more clearly. All this just to illustrate how 
 style and matter are coexistent, and inseparable, and alike.
 
 THE QUESTION OF STYLE 47 
 
 You cannot have good matter with bad style. Examine 
 the point more closely. A man wishes to convey a fine idea 
 to you. He employs a form of words. That form of words 
 is his style. Having read, you say: "Yes, this idea is fine." 
 The writer has therefore achieved his end. But in what 
 imaginable circumstances can you say: "Yes, this idea is 
 fine, but the style is not fine"? The sole medium of com- 
 munication between you and the author has been the form 
 of words. The fine idea has reached you. How? In the 
 words, by the words. Hence the fineness must be in the 
 words. You may say, superiorly: "He has expressed him- 
 self clumsily, but I can see what he means." By what 
 light ? By something in the words, in the style. That some- 
 thing is fine. Moreover, if the style is clumsy, are you 
 sure that you can see what he means? You cannot be 
 quite sure. And, at any rate, you cannot see distinctly. 
 The "matter" is what actually reaches you, and it must 
 necessarily be affected by the style. 
 
 Still further to comprehend what style is, let me ask you 
 to think of a writer's style exactly as you would think of 
 the gestures and manners of an acquaintance. You know 
 the man whose demeanor is "always calm," but whose 
 passions are strong. How do you know that his passions 
 are strong? Because he "gives them away" by some small, 
 but important, part of his demeanor, such as the twitching 
 of a lip or the whitening of the knuckles caused by clenching 
 the hand. In other words, his demeanor, fundamentally, 
 is not calm. You know the man who is always "smoothly 
 polite and agreeable," but who affects you unpleasantly. 
 Why does he affect you unpleasantly ? Because he is tedious 
 and therefore disagreeable, and because his politeness is 
 not real politeness. You know the man who is awkward, 
 shy, clumsy, but who, nevertheless, impresses you with a
 
 48 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 sense of dignity and force. Why? Because mingled with 
 that awkwardness and so forth is dignity. You know the 
 blunt, rough fellow whom you instinctively guess to be 
 affectionate because there is "something in his tone" or 
 " something in his eyes." In every instance the demeanor, 
 while perhaps seeming to be contrary to the character, is 
 really in accord with it. The demeanor never contradicts 
 the character. It is one part of the character that contra- 
 dicts another part of the character. For, after all, the blunt 
 man is blunt, and the awkward man is awkward, and these 
 characteristics are defects. The demeanor merely expresses 
 them. The two men would be better if, while conserving 
 their good qualities, they had the superficial attributes of 
 smoothness and agreeableness possessed by the gentleman 
 who is unpleasant to you. And as regards this latter, it is 
 not his superficial attributes which are unpleasant to you, 
 but his other qualities. In the end the character is shown 
 in the demeanor; and the demeanor is a consequence of 
 the character and resembles the character. So with style 
 and matter. You may argue that the blunt, rough man's 
 demeanor is unfair to his tenderness. I do not think so. 
 For his churlishness is really very trying and painful, even 
 to the man's wife, though a moment's tenderness will make 
 her and you forget it. The man really is churlish, and much 
 more often than he is tender. His demeanor is merely just 
 to his character. So, when a writer annoys you for ten 
 pages and then enchants you for ten lines, you must not 
 explode against his style. You must not say that his style 
 won't let his matter "come out." You must remember the 
 churlish, tender man. The more you reflect, the more 
 clearly you will see that faults and excellences of style are 
 faults and excellences of matter itself. 
 
 One of the most striking illustrations of this neglected
 
 THE QUESTION OF STYLE 49 
 
 truth is Thomas Carlyle. How often has it been said that 
 Carlyle's matter is marred by the harshness and the ec- 
 centricities of his style ? But Carlyle's matter is harsh and 
 eccentric to precisely the same degree as his style is harsh 
 and eccentric. Carlyle was harsh and eccentric. His be- 
 havior was frequently ridiculous, if it were not abominable. 
 His judgments were often extremely bizarre. When you 
 read one of Carlyle's fierce diatribes, you say to yourself: 
 "This is splendid. The man's enthusiasm for justice and 
 truth is glorious." But you also say: "He is a little un- 
 just and a little untruthful. He goes too far. He lashes 
 too hard." These things are not the style; they are the 
 matter. And when, as in his greatest moments, he is emo- 
 tional and restrained at once, you say: "This is the real 
 Carlyle." Kindly notice how perfect the style has become ! 
 No harshnesses or eccentricities now ! And if that partic- 
 ular matter is the "real" Carlyle, then that particular style 
 is Carlyle's "real" style. But when you say "real" you 
 would more properly say "best." "This is the best Carlyle." 
 If Carlyle had always been at his best he would have counted 
 among the supreme geniuses of the world. But he was a 
 mixture. His style is the expression of the mixture. The 
 faults are only in the style because they are in the matter. 
 You will find that, in classical literature, the style always 
 follows the mood of the matter. Thus, Charles Lamb's 
 essay on Dream Children begins quite simply, in a calm, 
 narrative manner, enlivened by a certain quippishness 
 concerning the children. The style is grave when great- 
 grandmother Field is the subject, and when the author 
 passes to a rather elaborate impression of the picturesque 
 old mansion it becomes, as it were, consciously beautiful. 
 This beauty is intensified in the description of the still 
 more beautiful garden. But the real dividing point of the
 
 5 o COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 essay occurs when Lamb approaches his elder brother. 
 He unmistakably marks the point with the phrase: "Then, 
 in somewhat a more heightened tone, I told how," etc. Hence- 
 forward the style increases in fervor and in solemnity until 
 the culmination of the essay is reached: "And while I 
 stood gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter to 
 my view, receding and still receding till nothing at last but 
 two mournful features were seen in the uttermost distance, 
 which, without speech, strangely impressed upon me the 
 effects of speech. . . ." Throughout, the style is governed 
 by the matter. "Well," you say, "of course it is. It 
 couldn't be otherwise. If it were otherwise it would be 
 ridiculous. A man who made love as though he were 
 preaching a sermon, or a man who preached a sermon as 
 though he were teasing schoolboys, or a man who described 
 a death as though he were describing a practical joke, must 
 necessarily be either an ass or a lunatic." Just so. You 
 have put it in a nutshell. You have disposed of the problem 
 of style so far as it can be disposed of. 
 
 But what do those people mean who say: "I read such 
 and such an author for the beauty of his style alone"? 
 Personally, I do not clearly know what they mean (and 
 I have never been able to get them to explain), unless they 
 mean that they read for the beauty of sound alone. When 
 you read a book there are only three things of which 
 you may be conscious: (i) The significance of the words, 
 which is inseparably bound up with the thought. (2) The 
 look of the printed words on the page I do not suppose 
 that anybody reads any author for the visual beauty of the 
 words on the page. (3) The sound of the words, either 
 actually uttered or imagined by the brain to be uttered. 
 Now it is indubitable that words differ in beauty of sound. 
 To my mind one of the most beautiful words in the English
 
 THE QUESTION OF STYLE 51 
 
 language is "pavement." Enunciate it, study its sound, 
 and see what you think. It is also indubitable that certain 
 combinations of words have a more beautiful sound than 
 certain other combinations. Thus Tennyson held that the 
 most beautiful line he ever wrote was: 
 
 "The mellow ousel fluting in the elm." 
 
 Perhaps, as sound, it was. Assuredly it makes a beautiful 
 succession of sounds and recalls the bird sounds which it 
 is intended to describe. But does it live in the memory as 
 one of the rare, great Tennysonian lines ? It does not. It 
 has charm, but the charm is merely curious or pretty. A 
 whole poem composed of lines with no better recommen- 
 dation than that line has would remain merely curious or 
 pretty. It would not permanently interest. It would be 
 as insipid as a pretty woman who had nothing behind her 
 prettiness. It would not live. One may remark in this 
 connection how the merely verbal felicities of Tennyson 
 have lost our esteem. Who will now proclaim the Idylls of 
 the King as a masterpiece ? Of the thousands of lines writ- 
 ten by him which please the ear, only those survive of which 
 the matter is charged with emotion. No ! As regards the 
 man who professes to read an author "for his style alone," 
 I am inclined to think either that he will soon get sick of 
 that author or that he is deceiving himself and means the 
 author's general temperament not the author's verbal 
 style, but a peculiar quality which runs through all the 
 matter written by the author. Just as one may like a man 
 for something which is always coming out of him, which 
 one cannot define, and which is of the very essence of the 
 man. 
 
 In judging the style of an author, you must employ the 
 same canons as you use in judging men. If you do this
 
 52 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 you will not be tempted to attach importance to trifles that 
 are negligible. There can be no lasting friendship without 
 respect. If an author's style is such that you cannot respect 
 it, then you may be sure that, despite any present pleasure 
 which you may obtain from that author, there is something 
 wrong with his matter, and that the pleasure will soon cloy. 
 You must examine your sentiments towards an author. If, 
 when you have read an author, you are pleased without 
 being conscious of aught but his mellifluousness, just con- 
 ceive what your feelings would be after spending a month's 
 holiday with a merely mellifluous man. If an author's 
 style has pleased you but done nothing except make you 
 giggle, then reflect upon the ultimate tediousness of the 
 man who can do nothing but jest. On the other hand, if 
 you are impressed by what an author has said to you, but 
 are aware of verbal clumsinesses in his work, you need 
 worry about his "bad style" exactly as much and exactly 
 as little as you would worry about the manners of a kind- 
 hearted, keen-brained friend who was dangerous to carpets 
 with a tea-cup in his hand. The friend's antics in a draw- 
 ing-room are somewhat regrettable, but you would not say 
 of him that his manners were bad. Again, if an author's 
 style dazzles you instantly and blinds you to everything 
 except its brilliant self, ask your soul before you begin to 
 admire his matter what would be your final opinion of a 
 man who at the first meeting fired his personality into you 
 like a broadside. Reflect that, as a rule, the people whom 
 you have come to esteem communicated themselves to you 
 gradually, that they did not begin the entertainment with 
 fireworks. In short, look at literature as you would look 
 at life, and you cannot fail to perceive that, essentially, 
 the style is the man. Decidedly you will never assert that 
 you care nothing for style, that your enjoyment of an
 
 THE QUESTION OF STYLE 53 
 
 author's matter is unaffected by his style. And you will 
 never assert, either, that style alone suffices for you. 
 
 If you are undecided upon a question of style, whether 
 leaning to the favorable or to the unfavorable, the most 
 prudent course is to forget that literary style exists; for, 
 indeed, as style is understood by most people who have not 
 analyzed their impressions under the influence of literature, 
 there is no such thing as literary style. You cannot divide 
 literature into two elements and say: This is matter and 
 that style. Further, the significance and the worth of liter- 
 ature are to be comprehended and assessed in the same way 
 as the significance and the worth of any other phenomenon: 
 by the exercise of common sense. Common sense will tell 
 you that nobody, not even a genius, can be simultaneously 
 vulgar and distinguished, or beautiful and ugly, or precise 
 and vague, or tender and harsh. And common sense will 
 therefore tell you that to try to set up vital contradictions 
 between matter and style is absurd. When there is a super- 
 ficial contradiction, one of the two mutually contradicting 
 qualities is of far less importance than the other. If you 
 refer literature to the standards of life, common sense will 
 at once decide which quality should count heaviest in your 
 esteem. You will be in no danger of weighing a mere 
 maladroitness of manner against a fine trait of character, 
 or of letting a graceful deportment blind you to a funda- 
 mental vacuity. When in doubt, ignore style, and think 
 of the matter as you would think of an individual.
 
 PART II 
 
 III 
 LIFE AT OXFORD 1 
 
 JOHN CORBIN 
 
 I 
 
 One of the familiar sights at Oxford is the American 
 traveller who stops over on his way from Liverpool to 
 London, and, wandering up among the walls of the twenty 
 colleges from the Great Western Station, asks the first 
 undergraduate he meets which building is the university. 
 When an Oxford man is first asked this, he is pretty sure 
 to answer that there isn't any university; but as the answer 
 is taken as a rudeness, he soon finds it more agreeable to 
 direct inquirers to one of the three or four single buildings, 
 scattered hither and yon among the ubiquitous colleges, 
 in which the few functions of the university are performed. 
 
 To the undergraduate the university is an abstract in- 
 stitution that at most examines him two or three times, 
 "ploughs" him, or graduates him. He becomes a member 
 of it by being admitted into one of the colleges. To be sure, 
 he matriculates also as a student of the university; but the 
 ceremony is important mainly as a survival from the historic 
 past, and is memorable to him perhaps because it takes 
 
 'This article, taken partly from An American at Oxford and partly from 
 an essay in Harper's Weekly, is here reprinted in this special form through 
 the courtesy of John Corbin, The Houghton Mifflin Company, and Messrs. 
 Harper and Brothers. 
 
 54
 
 LIFE AT OXFORD 55 
 
 place beneath the beautiful mediaeval roof of the Divinity 
 School; perhaps because he receives from the vice-chancel- 
 lor a copy of the university statutes, written in mediaeval 
 Latin, which it is to be his chief delight to break. Except 
 when he is in for "schools," as the examinations are called, 
 the university fades beyond his horizon. If he says he is 
 "reading" at Oxford, he has the city in mind. He is more 
 likely to describe himself as "up at" Magdalen, Balliol, 
 or elsewhere. This English idea that a university is a mere 
 multiplication of colleges is so firmly fixed that the very 
 word is denned as "a collection of institutions of learning at 
 a common centre." In the daily life of the undergraduate, 
 in his religious observances, and in regulating his studies, 
 the college is supreme. 
 
 To an American the English college is not at first sight 
 a wholly pleasing object. It has walls that one would take 
 to be insurmountable if they were not crowned with shards 
 of bottles mortared into the coping; and it has gates that 
 seem capable of resisting a siege until one notices that they 
 are reinforced by a cheval defrise, or a row of bent spikes 
 like those that keep the bears in their dens at the Zoo. 
 Like so many English institutions, its outward and visible 
 signs belong to the manners of forgotten ages, even while 
 it is charged with a vigorous and very modern life. A 
 closer view of it, I hope, will show that in spite of the barna- 
 cles of the past that cling to it and in some measure, too, 
 because of them it is the expression of a very high ideal 
 of undergraduate convenience and freedom. 
 
 The virtue of the college lies in the fact that it gives every 
 man a suitable home, and provides that he come under the 
 best influences of the university with the least possible 
 effort and delay. When a freshman arrives at the college 
 the mediaeval gate is unbarred by a very modern porter,
 
 56 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 who lifts boxes and bags from the hansom in the most 
 obliging manner; and he is presently shown to his cloisteral 
 chambers by a friendly and urbane butler or steward. To 
 accommodate the newcomers in the more populous colleges 
 a measure is resorted to that shocks all American ideas 
 of academic propriety. Enough seniors fourth and third 
 year men are turned out of college to make room for the 
 freshmen. The assumption is that these upper classmen 
 have had every opportunity to profit by the life of the 
 college and are prepared to flock by themselves in the 
 town. Little communities of four or five fellows who have 
 proved congenial live together in "diggings" that is, 
 in some townsman's house hard by the college gate. This 
 arrangement makes possible closer and more intimate re- 
 lationship among them than would otherwise be likely; 
 and, by insuring them against the distractions of life in 
 the college, it gives them a solid year for study before the 
 final examination. It cannot be said that they leave col- 
 lege without regret, but I never heard a word of complaint, 
 and it is tacitly admitted that, on the whole, they profit by 
 the arrangement. 
 
 When the freshman has been shown to his room he falls 
 to the care of the "scout" a dignitary in the employ of 
 the college who stands in somewhat less than the place of 
 a parent and more than that of a servant to some half a 
 dozen fellows whose rooms are adjacent. The more sub- 
 stantial furnishings in the rooms are usually permanent, 
 belonging to the college; each successive occupant is 
 charged for interest on the investment and for depreciation 
 by wear. Thus the furniture is far more comfortable than 
 in an American college and costs the occupant less. Bed 
 and table linen, cutlery, and a few of the more personal 
 furnishings the student brings himself. If one neglects to
 
 LIFE AT OXFORD 57 
 
 bring them, however, as, I confess, I did, through ignorance, 
 mine host, the scout, clandestinely levies on the man above 
 for sheets, on the man below for knives and forks, and on 
 the man across the way for table-linen. And there is no 
 call for either shame on the one part or resentment on the 
 other, for is not the scout the representative of the hospi- 
 tality of the college? "When you have time, sir," the 
 scout says kindly, "you will order your own linen and 
 cutlery." How high a state of civilization such an arrange- 
 ment implies can be appreciated only by those who have 
 turned up friendless in an American university. 
 
 As soon as the freshman is settled in his rooms, and some- 
 times even before, his tutor meets him and arranges for a 
 formal presentation to the dean and master. All three are 
 apt to show their interest in a freshman by advising him as 
 to trying for the athletic teams, joining the college clubs 
 and societies, and, in a word, as to all the concerns of under- 
 graduate life except his studies these come later. If a 
 man has any particular gift, athletic or otherwise, the tutor 
 introduces him to the upper classman he should know or, 
 when this is not feasible, gives a word to the upper class- 
 men, who take the matter into their own hands. If a fellow 
 has no especial gift, the tutor is quite as sure to say the 
 proper word to the fellows who have most talent for draw- 
 ing out newcomers. 
 
 In the first weeks of a freshman's residence he finds sun- 
 dry pasteboards tucked beneath his door the upper class- 
 man's call is seldom more than the formal dropping of a 
 card. The freshman is expected to return these calls at 
 once and is debarred by a happy custom from leaving his 
 card in return. He goes again and again until he finds his 
 upper classman. By direct introduction from the tutor or 
 by this formality of calling, the freshman soon meets half
 
 58 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 a dozen upper classmen, generally second-year men, and 
 in due time he receives little notes like this: 
 
 DEAR SMITH, Come to my rooms to breakfast, if you 
 can, with Mr. Brown and me on Wednesday at 8.30. 
 
 Yours sincerely, 
 
 A. ROBINSON. 
 
 At table, the freshman finds other freshmen, whose in- 
 terests are presumably similar to his own. 
 
 No one supposes for a moment that all this is done out 
 of simple human kindness. The freshman breakfast is a 
 conventional institution for gathering together the unlicked 
 cubs, so that the influences of the college can take hold of 
 them. The reputation of the college in general demands 
 that it keep up a name for hospitality, and in particular 
 the clubs and athletic teams find it of advantage to get the 
 run of all available new material. As a result of this ma- 
 chinery for initiating newcomers, a man usually ceases to be 
 a freshman after a single term two months of residence, 
 and it is always assumed that he does. 
 
 If one's idiosyncrasies do not yield to the kindlier treat- 
 ment he is liable to be "ragged," or, as we should say, hazed. 
 The more I learned of Oxford motives, the less anxious I 
 was to censure the system of ragging. In an article I wrote, 
 after only a few months' stay, I spoke of it as boyish and 
 undignified, and most Americans, I feel sure, would hold 
 up the hand of public horror. Yet I am not now inclined 
 to be thankful that we are not as they. Ragging is doubtless 
 a survival of the excellently efficient system of discipline 
 in the public schools where the older boys have charge of 
 the manners and morals of the younger, if indeed it is not, 
 like public-school discipline, an inheritance from the Mid-
 
 LIFE AT OXFORD 59 
 
 die Ages. In the schools, to be sure, the sixth form take 
 their duties with great sobriety of conscience, which is 
 scarcely the case in the college; but the difference of spirit 
 in the colleges is perhaps justifiable. 
 
 I have not come to this trust in the college system with- 
 out experience. I have also sounded the undergraduates 
 as to whether they would find use for a greater liberty. 
 I found that the fellows were not only content with their 
 lot, but would resent any loosening of the restrictions. To 
 give them the liberty of London at night, or even of Ox- 
 ford, they argued, would tend to break up the college as a 
 social organization and to weaken it athletically, for at 
 Oxford they understand what we sometimes do not that 
 a successful cultivation of sports goes hand in hand with 
 universal good comradeship and mutual loyalty. 
 
 The only question remaining was of the actual moral 
 results of the semicloisteral life. As for drinking, in spite 
 of the fact that wine is sold to the students at any and all 
 times by the college, and in any and all quantities, there 
 seemed to be less excessive indulgence than, for instance, at 
 Harvard or at Yale. And the fact that what there was 
 took place for the most part within the college walls was 
 certainly most fortunate. When fellows are turned loose 
 for their jubilations amid the florid vices of a great city, 
 as is often the case with us, the consequences to their 
 general morality are sometimes the most hideous. The 
 lives of the men in English colleges are clean, incredibly 
 clean. The few men to whom immorality seems inevitable 
 and such are to be found in all communities have re- 
 course to London. But as their expeditions take place in 
 daylight and cold blood, and are, except at a great risk, 
 cut short when the last evening train leaves Paddington 
 shortly after dinner, it is not possible to carry them off
 
 60 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 with that dazzling air of the man of the world that in 
 America lures so many silly freshmen into dissipations 
 for which they have no natural inclination. 
 
 It will be seen that the English college affords those 
 peculiar advantages of community life eating, sleeping, 
 work, and play that with us are confined to fraternities 
 and clubs, and where these are in their very nature exclusive 
 the college is consciously and effectively inclusive. The 
 very fact of being at Oxford insures one a well-ordered life 
 and ample opportunity for making friends. Society life, 
 as we know it, is obviously superfluous. The social organ- 
 izations in a college are, for the most part, for the promotion 
 of recognized undergraduate activities athletics, debat- 
 ing, etc. and are open to all who are qualified for mem- 
 bership. Each college, to be sure, is likely to have its wine 
 club, membership in which is a purely social distinction; 
 and in the university, as a whole, there are, as in American 
 universities, many exclusive organizations most pleasant 
 and useful to belong to. But their evil effects are annulled 
 by the fact that the life in the colleges is so admirably 
 adapted to supplying all normal social wants. The col- 
 lege is a man's home, while the university is, like the city 
 he lives in, full of interests and activities which it is pleasant 
 but not necessary to form a part of. And here is the point 
 of chief moment. By the very conditions of residence in 
 colleges the members of the exclusive societies come into 
 daily contact, each with the life of the college he belongs 
 to, and the esprit de corps of the college is so strong that 
 they seldom or never cease to be loyal to its interests. No 
 matter how distinguished a 'varsity oarsman may be, he 
 has the keenest interest in the boating reputation of his 
 college, as the annual bumping races testify. And socially 
 it is the same. The news of the university at large is first
 
 LIFE AT OXFORD 61 
 
 reported and discussed over afternoon tea at the great 
 university society, Vincent's; by dinner time it has been 
 brought into the dining-halls of all the great colleges. In 
 an incredibly short time all undergraduate news and the 
 judgments upon it of the men best qualified to judge ramify 
 the college, and men who seldom stir beyond the college 
 walls are brought closely in touch with the innermost spirit 
 of the university life. Here again the compact communi- 
 ties within those college walls so terrible to Americans 
 make possible a freedom of interplay of all social forces 
 unknown at Harvard or Yale. The real Union of Oxford, 
 social, athletic, and intellectual, exists quite apart from 
 the so-called Oxford Union; it results from the nice ad- 
 justment between the residential life of the colleges and 
 the social life of the university. Thus Oxford and Cam- 
 bridge combine the intellectual advantages of a large uni- 
 versity with the social advantages possible in a small 
 college. 
 
 II 
 
 When a freshman is once established in college, his life 
 falls into a pleasantly varied routine. The day is ushered 
 in by the scout, who bustles into the bedroom, throws aside 
 the curtain, pours out the bath, and shouts, "Half past 
 seven, sir," in a tone that makes it impossible to forget 
 that chapel or if one chooses, roll-call comes at eight. 
 Unless one keeps his six chapels or " rollers" a week, he 
 is promptly "hauled" before the dean, who perhaps "gates" 
 him. To be gated is to be forbidden to pass the college gate 
 after dark, and fined a shilling for each night of confine- 
 ment. To an American all this brings recollections of the 
 paternal roof, where tardiness at breakfast meant, perhaps, 
 the loss of dessert and bedtime an hour earlier. I remember
 
 62 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 once, when out of training, deliberately cutting chapel to 
 see with what mien the good dean performed his nursery 
 duties. His calm was unruffled, his dignity unsullied. I 
 soon came to find that the rules about rising were bowed 
 to and indeed respected by all concerned, even while they 
 were broken. They are distinctly more lax than those the 
 fellows have been accustomed to in the public schools, and 
 they are conceded to be for the best welfare of the college. 
 
 Breakfast comes soon after chapel, or roll-call. If a man 
 has "kept a dirty roller," that is, has reported in pajamas, 
 ulster, and boots, and has turned in again, the scout puts 
 the breakfast before the fire on a trestle built of shovel, 
 poker, and tongs, where it remains edible until noon. If 
 a man has a breakfast party on, the scout makes sure that 
 he is stirring in season, and, hurrying through the other 
 rooms on the staircase, is presently on hand for as long as 
 he may be wanted. The usual Oxford breakfast is a single 
 course, which not infrequently consists of some one of the 
 excellent English pork products with an egg or kidneys. 
 There may be two courses, in which case the first is of 
 the no less excellent fresh fish. There are no vegetables. 
 The breakfast is ended with toast and jam or marmalade. 
 When one has fellows in to breakfast and the Oxford 
 custom of rooming alone instead of chumming makes such 
 hospitality frequent his usual meal is increased by a course, 
 say, of chicken. In any case it leads to a morning cigarette, 
 for tobacco aids digestion and helps fill the hour or so after 
 meals which an Englishman gives to relaxation. 
 
 At ten o'clock the breakfast may be interrupted for a 
 moment by the exit of some one bent on attending a lecture, 
 though one apologizes for such an act as if it were scarcely 
 good form. An appointment with one's tutor is a more 
 legitimate excuse for leaving; but even this is always an
 
 LIFE AT OXFORD 63 
 
 occasion for an apology, in behalf of the tutor, of course, 
 for one is certainly not himself responsible. If a quorum 
 is left, they manage to sit comfortably by the fire, smoking 
 and chatting in spite of lectures and tutors, until by mutual 
 consent they scatter to glance at the Times and the 
 Sportsman in the common-room, or even to get in a bit 
 of reading. 
 
 Luncheon often consists of bread and cheese and jam 
 from the buttery, with perhaps a half -pint of bitter beer; 
 but it may, like the breakfast, come from the college kitchen. 
 In any case it is very light, for almost immediately after 
 it everybody scatters to field and track and river for the 
 exercise that the English climate makes necessary and the 
 sport that the English temperament demands. 
 
 By four o'clock every one is back in college tubbed and 
 dressed for tea, which a man serves himself in his rooms to 
 as many fellows as he has been able to gather in on field 
 or river. If he is eager to hear of the games he has not been 
 able to witness, he goes to the junior common-room or to 
 his club, where he is sure to find a dozen or so of kindred 
 spirits representing every sport of importance. In this way 
 he hears the minutest details of the games of the day from 
 the players themselves; and before nightfall such is the 
 influence of tea those bits of gossip which in America are 
 known chiefly among members of a team have ramified 
 the college. Thus the function of the "bleachers" on an 
 American field is performed with a vengeance by the easy 
 chairs before a common-room fire; and a man had better 
 be kicked off the team by an American captain than have 
 his shortcomings served up with common-room tea. 
 
 The two hours between tea and dinner may be, and 
 usually are, spent in reading. 
 
 At seven o'clock the college bell rings, and in two min-
 
 64 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 utes the fellows have thrown on their gowns and are seated 
 at table, where the scouts are in readiness to serve them. 
 As a rule a man may sit wherever he chooses; this is one 
 of the admirable arrangements for breaking up such cliques 
 as inevitably form in a college. But in point of fact a man 
 usually ends by sitting in some certain quarter of the hall, 
 where from day to day he finds much the same set of fel- 
 lows. Thus all the advantages of friendly intercourse are 
 attained without any real exclusiveness. This may seem 
 a small point; but an hour a day becomes an item in four 
 years, especially if it is the hour when men are most dis- 
 posed to be companionable. 
 
 The English college hall is a miniature of Memorial Hall 
 at Harvard, of which it is the prototype. It has the same 
 sombrely beautiful roof, the same richness of stained glass. 
 It has also the same memorable and impressive canvases, 
 though the worthies they portray are likely to be the princes 
 and prelates of Holbein instead of the soldiers, merchants, 
 and divines of Copley and Gilbert Stuart. The tables are 
 of antique oak, with the shadow of centuries in its grain, 
 and the college plate bears the names and date of the Res- 
 toration. To an American the mugs he drinks his beer 
 from seem old enough, but the Englishman finds them ag- 
 gressively new. They are not, however, without endearing 
 associations, for the mugs that preceded them were last 
 used to drink a health to King Charles, and were then 
 stamped into coin to buy food and drink for his soldiers. 
 The one or two colleges that, for Puritan principles or 
 thrift, or both, refused to give up their old plate are not 
 overproud of showing it. 
 
 Across the end of the hall is a platform for high table, 
 at which the dons assemble as soon as the undergraduates 
 are well seated. On Sunday night they come out in full
 
 LIFE AT OXFORD 65 
 
 force, and from the time the first one enters until the last 
 is seated, the undergraduates rattle and bang the tables, 
 until it seems as if the glass must splinter. When, as often 
 happens, a distinguished graduate comes up the speaker 
 of the Commons to Balliol, or the prime minister to Christ 
 Church the enthusiasm has usually to be stopped by a 
 gesture from the master or the dean. 
 
 The dons at high table, like the British peers, mingle 
 judicial with legislative functions. All disputes about 
 sconces are referred to them, and their decrees are absolute. 
 A sconce is a penalty for a breach of good manners at table, 
 and is an institution that can be traced far back into the 
 Middle Ages. The offenses that are sconcible may be sum- 
 marized as punning, swearing, talking shop, and coming to 
 hall after high table is in session. Take, for instance, the 
 case of a certain oarsman who found the dinner forms rather 
 too rigid after his first day on sliding seats. By way of com- 
 forting himself, he remarked that the Lord giveth and the 
 Lord taketh away. Who is to decide whether he is guilty 
 of profanity? The master, of course, and his assembled 
 court of dons. The remark and the attendant circum- 
 stances are written on the back of an order-slip by the 
 senior scholar present, and a scout is despatched with it. 
 Imagine, then, the master presenting this question to the 
 dons : Is it profanity to refer by means of a quotation from 
 Scripture to the cuticle one loses in a college boat? Sup- 
 pose the dons decree that it is. The culprit has the alter- 
 native of paying a shilling to the college library or ordering 
 a tun of bitter beer. If he decides for beer, a second alter- 
 native confronts him: he may drink it down in one un- 
 interrupted draft, or he may kiss the cup and send it circling 
 the table. If he tries to floor the sconce and fails, he has 
 to order more beer for the table; but if he succeeds, the
 
 66 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 man who sconced him has to pay the shot and order a 
 second tun for the table. 
 
 In the evening, when the season permits, the fellows sit 
 out-of-doors after dinner, smoking and playing bowls. 
 There is no place in which the spring comes more sweetly 
 than in an Oxford garden. The high walls are at once a 
 trap for the first warm rays of the sun and a barrier against 
 the winds of March. The daffodils and crocuses spring up 
 with joy as the gardener bids; and the apple and cherry 
 trees coddle against the warm north walls, spreading out 
 their early buds gratefully to the mild English sun. For 
 long, quiet hours after dinner they flaunt their beauty to 
 the fellows smoking and breathe their sweetness to the 
 fellows playing bowls. "No man," exclaims the American 
 visitor, " could live four years in these gardens of delight 
 and not be made gentler and nobler ! " Perhaps ! though 
 not altogether in the way the visitor imagines. When the 
 flush of summer is on, the loiterers loll on the lawn full 
 length; and as they watch the insects crawl among the 
 grass they make bets on them, just as the gravest and most 
 reverend seniors have been known to do in America. 
 
 In the windows overlooking the quadrangle are boxes of 
 brilliant flowers, above which the smoke of a pipe comes 
 curling out. At Harvard some fellows have geraniums in 
 their windows, but only the very rich; and when they began 
 the custom an ancient graduate wrote one of those communi- 
 cations to the Crimson, saying that if men put unmanly 
 boxes of flowers in the window, how can they expect to beat 
 Yale? Flower-boxes, no sand. At Oxford they manage 
 things so that anybody may have flower-boxes; and their 
 associations are by no means unmanly. This is the way 
 they do it. In the early summer a gardener's wagon from 
 the country draws up by the college gate, and the driver
 
 LIFE AT OXFORD 67 
 
 cries: "Flowers ! Flowers for a pair of old bags, sir." Bags 
 is of course the fitting term for English trousers which 
 don't fit; and I should like to inform that ancient graduate 
 that the window-boxes of Oxford suggest the very badge of 
 manhood. 
 
 As long as the English twilight lingers, the men will sit 
 and talk and sing to the mandolin; and I have heard of 
 fellows sitting and talking all night, not turning in until the 
 porter appeared to take their names at roll-call. On the 
 eve of May-day it is quite the custom to sit out, for at dawn 
 one may go to see the pretty ceremony of heralding the 
 May on Magdalen Tower. The Magdalen choir-boys 
 the sweetest songsters in all Oxford mount to the top of 
 that most beautiful of Gothic towers, and, standing among 
 the pinnacles pinnacles afire with the spirituality of the 
 Middle Ages, that warms all the senses with purity and 
 beauty those boys, I say, on that tower and among those 
 pinnacles, open their mouths and sing a Latin song to greet 
 the May. Meantime, the fellows who have come out to 
 listen in the street below make catcalls and blow fish-horns. 
 The song above is the survival of a Romish, perhaps a 
 Druidical, custom; the racket below is the survival of a 
 Puritan protest. That is Oxford in symbol ! Its dignity 
 and mellowness are not so much a matter of flowering gar- 
 dens and crumbling walls as of the traditions of the cen- 
 turies in which the whole life of the place has deep sources; 
 and the noblest of its institutions are fringed with survivals 
 that run riot in the grotesque. 
 
 If a man intends to spend the evening out of college, he 
 has to make a dash before nine o'clock; for love or for 
 money the porter may not let an inmate out after nine. 
 One man I knew was able to escape by guile. He had a 
 brother in Trinity whom he very much resembled, and
 
 68 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 whenever he wanted to go out, he would tilt his mortar- 
 board forward, wrap his gown high about his neck, as it 
 is usually worn of an evening, and bidding the porter a 
 polite good night, say: "Charge me to my brother, Han- 
 cock, if you please." The charge is the inconsiderable sum 
 of one penny, and is the penalty of having a late guest. 
 Having profited by my experience with the similar charge 
 for keeping my name on the college books, I never asked 
 its why and wherefore. Both are no doubt survivals of 
 some mediaeval custom, the authority of which no college 
 employee or don, for the matter of that would question. 
 Such matters interest the Oxford man quite as little as the 
 question how he comes by a tonsil or a vermiform appendix. 
 They are there, and he makes the best of them. 
 
 If a fellow leaves college for an evening, it is for a fore- 
 gathering at some other college, or to go to the theatre. 
 As a rule he wears a cloth cap. A "billycock" or "bowler," 
 as the pot hat is called, is as thoroughly frowned on now in 
 English colleges as it was with us a dozen years ago. As 
 for the mortarboard and gown, undergraduate opinion 
 rather requires that they be left behind. This is largely, 
 no doubt, because they are required by law to be worn. 
 So far as the undergraduates are concerned, every operative 
 statute of the university, with the exception of those re- 
 lating to matriculation and graduation, refers to conduct 
 in the streets after nightfall, and almost without exception 
 they are honored in the breach. This is out of disregard 
 for the vice-chancellor of the university, who is familiarly 
 called the vice, because he serves as a warning to others 
 for the practise of virtue. The vice makes his power felt 
 in characteristically dark and tortuous ways. His factors 
 are two proctors, college dons in daytime, but skulkers 
 after nightfall, each of whom has his bulldogs, that is,
 
 LIFE AT OXFORD 69 
 
 scouts employed literally to spy upon the students. If these 
 catch you without cap or gown, they cause you to be proc- 
 torized or "progged," as it is called, which involves a mat- 
 ter of five shillings or so. As a rule there is little danger of 
 progging, but my first term fell in evil days. For some 
 reason or other the chest of the university showed a deficit 
 of sundry pounds, shillings, and pence; and as it had long 
 ceased to need or receive regular bequests the finance of 
 the institution being in the hands of the colleges a crisis 
 was at hand. A more serious problem had doubtless never 
 arisen since the great question was solved of keeping under- 
 graduates' names on the books. The expedient of the vice- 
 chancellor was to summon the proctors, and bid them 
 charge their bulldogs to prog all freshmen caught at night 
 without cap and gown. The deficit in the university chest 
 was made up at five shillings a head. 
 
 One of the vice-chancellor's rules is that no under- 
 graduate shall enter an Oxford "pub." Now the only 
 restaurant in town, Queen's, is run in conjunction with a 
 pub, and was once the favorite resort of all who were bent 
 on breaking the monotony of an English Sunday. The vice- 
 chancellor resolved to destroy this den of Sabbath-breaking, 
 and the undergraduates resolved no less firmly to defend 
 their stronghold. The result was a hand-to-hand fight with 
 the bulldogs, which ended so triumphantly for the under- 
 graduates that a dozen or more of them were sent down. 
 In the articles of the peace that followed, it was stipulated, 
 I was told, that so long as the restaurant was closed Sunday 
 afternoons and nights, it should never suffer from the visit 
 of proctor or bulldog. As a result, Queen's is a great scene 
 of undergraduate foregatherings. The dinners are good 
 enough and reasonably cheap; and as most excellent cham- 
 pagne is to be had at twelve shillings the bottle, the diners
 
 70 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 are not unlikely to get back to college a trifle buffy, in the 
 Oxford phrase. 
 
 By an interesting survival of mediaeval custom, the vice- 
 chancellor has supreme power over the morals of the town, 
 and any citizen who transgresses his laws is visited with 
 summary punishment. For a tradesman or publican to 
 assist in breaking university rules means outlawry and ruin, 
 and for certain offenses a citizen may be punished by im- 
 prisonment. Over the Oxford theatre the vice-chancellor's 
 power is absolute. In my time he was much more solici- 
 tous that the undergraduate be kept from knowledge of the 
 omnipresent woman with a past than that dramatic art 
 should flourish, and forbade the town more than one 
 excellent play of the modern school of comedy that had 
 been seen and discussed in London by the younger sisters 
 of the undergraduates. The woman with a present is 
 virtually absent. 
 
 Time was when no Oxford play was quite successful un- 
 less the undergraduates assisted at its first night, though 
 in a way very different from that which the term denotes 
 in France. The assistance was of the kind so generously 
 rendered hi New York and Boston on the evening of an 
 athletic contest. Even to-day, just for tradition's sake, 
 the undergraduates sometimes make a row. A lot of B. 
 N. C. men, as the clanny sons of Brazenose College call 
 themselves, may insist that an opera stop while the troupe 
 listen to one of their own excellent vocal performances; 
 and I once saw a great sprinter, not unknown to Yale men, 
 rise from his seat, face the audience, and, pointing with 
 his thumb over his shoulder at the soubrette, announce 
 impressively: "Do you know, I rather like that girl!" 
 The show is usually over just before eleven, and then occurs 
 an amusing, if unseemly, scramble to get back to college
 
 LIFE AT OXFORD 71 
 
 before the hour strikes. A man who stays out after ten 
 is fined threepence; after eleven the fine is sixpence. When 
 all is said, why shouldn't one sprint for threepence? 
 
 If you stay out of college after midnight, the dean makes 
 a star-chamber offense of it, fines you a "quid" or two, 
 and like as not sends you down. This sounds a trifle worse 
 than it is; for if you must be away, your absence can usually 
 be arranged for. If you find yourself in the streets after 
 twelve, you may rap on some friend's bedroom window and 
 tell him of your plight through the iron grating. He will 
 then spend the first half of the night in your bed and wash 
 his hands in your bowl. With such evidence as this to 
 support him, the scout is not apt, if sufficiently retained, 
 to report a suspected absence. I have even known fellows 
 to make their arrangements in advance and spend the 
 night hi town; but the ruse has its dangers, and the penalty 
 is to be sent down for good and all. 
 
 It is owing to such regulations as these that life in the 
 English college has the name of being cloisteral. Just how 
 cloisteral it is in spirit no one can know who has not taken 
 part in a rag in the quad; and this is impossible to an out- 
 sider, for at midnight all visitors are required to leave, under 
 a heavy penalty to their host.
 
 IV 
 
 TOM BROWN'S LETTER FROM ST. AMBROSE'S 
 COLLEGE * 
 
 THOMAS HUGHES 
 
 "Sx. AMBROSE, OXFORD, 
 
 "FEBRUARY, 184 . 
 "My DEAR GEORDIE: 
 
 "According to promise, I write to tell you how I get on 
 up here, and what sort of a place Oxford is. Of course, 
 I don't know much about it yet, having been only up some 
 two weeks; but you shall have my first impressions. 
 
 "Well, first and foremost, it's an awfully idle place; at 
 any rate, for us freshmen. Fancy now. I am in twelve 
 lectures a week of an hour each Greek Testament, first 
 book of Herodotus, second ^Eneid, and first book of Euclid ! 
 There's a treat ! Two hours a day; all over by twelve, or 
 one at latest; and no extra work at all, in the shape of 
 copies of verses, themes, or other exercises. 
 
 "I think sometimes I'm back in the lower fifth; for we 
 don't get through more than we used to do there; and if 
 you were to hear the men construe, it would make your hair 
 stand on end. Where on earth can they have come from? 
 unless they blunder on purpose, as I often think. Of course, 
 I never look at a lecture before I go in, I know it all nearly 
 by heart, so it would be sheer waste of time. I hope I shall 
 take to reading something or other by myself; but you 
 
 1 From Tom Brown at Oxford a letter written soon after matriculation 
 at Oxford to a friend in the sixth form at Rugby School. 
 
 72
 
 TOM BROWN'S LETTER 73 
 
 know I never was much of a hand at sapping, and, for the 
 present, the light work suits me well enough, for there's 
 plenty to see and learn about in this place. 
 
 "We keep very gentlemanly hours. Chapel every morn- 
 ing at eight, and evening at seven. You must attend once 
 a day, and twice on Sundays at least, that's the rule of 
 our college and be in gates by twelve o'clock at night. 
 Besides which, if you're a decently steady fellow, you ought 
 to dine in hall perhaps four days a week. Hall is at five 
 o'clock. And now you have the sum total. All the rest 
 of your time you may just do what you like with. 
 
 "So much for our work and hours. Now for the place. 
 Well, it's a grand old place, certainly; and I dare say, if a 
 fellow goes straight in it, and gets creditably through his 
 three years, he may end by loving it as much as we do the 
 old schoolhouse and quadrangle at Rugby. Our college 
 is a fair specimen: a venerable old front of crumbling stone 
 fronting the street, into which two or three other colleges 
 look also. Over the gateway is a large room, where the 
 college examinations go on, when there are any; and, as 
 you enter, you pass the porter's lodge, where resides our 
 janitor, a bustling little man, with a pot-belly, whose busi- 
 ness it is to put down the time at which the men come in 
 at night, and to keep all discommonsed tradesmen, stray 
 dogs, and bad characters generally, out of the college. 
 
 "The large quadrangle into which you come first, is 
 bigger than ours at Rugby, and a much more solemn and 
 sleepy sort of a place, with its gables and old mullioned 
 windows. One side is occupied by the hall and chapel; 
 the principal's house takes up half another side; and the 
 rest is divided into staircases, on each of which are six or 
 eight sets of rooms, inhabited by us undergraduates, with 
 here and there a tutor or fellow dropped down amongst
 
 74 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 us (in the first-floor rooms, of course), not exactly to keep 
 order, but to act as a sort of ballast. This quadrangle is 
 the show part of the college, and is generally respectable 
 and quiet, which is a good deal more than can be said for 
 the inner quadrangle, which you get at through a passage 
 leading out of the other. The rooms ain't half so large or 
 good in the inner quad; and here's where all we freshmen 
 live, besides a lot of the older undergraduates who don't 
 care to change their rooms. Only one tutor has rooms here; 
 and I should think, if he's a reading man, it won't be long 
 before he clears out; for all sorts of high jinks go on on the 
 grass plot, and the row on the staircases is often as bad, 
 and not half so respectable, as it used to be in the middle 
 passage in the last week of the half-year. 
 
 "My rooms are what they call garrets, right up in the 
 roof, with a commanding view of college tiles and chimney- 
 pots, and of houses at the back. No end of cats, both col- 
 lege Toms and strangers, haunt the neighborhood, and I 
 am rapidly learning cat- talking from them; but I'm not 
 going to stand it I don't want to know cat-talk. The 
 college Toms are protected by the statutes, I believe; but 
 I'm going to buy an air-gun for the benefit of the strangers. 
 My rooms are pleasant enough, at the top of the kitchen 
 staircase, and separated from all mankind by a great, iron- 
 clamped, outer door, my oak, which I sport when I go out 
 or want to be quiet; sitting-room eighteen by twelve, bed- 
 room twelve by eight, and a little cupboard for the scout. 
 
 "Ah, Geordie, the scout is an institution! Fancy me 
 waited upon and valeted by a stout party in black, of quiet, 
 gentlemanly manners, like the benevolent father in a 
 comedy. He takes the deepest interest in all my posses- 
 sions and proceedings, and is evidently used to good society, 
 to judge by the amount of crockery and glass, wines,
 
 TOM BROWN'S LETTER 75 
 
 liquors, and grocery, which he thinks indispensable for my 
 due establishment. He has also been good enough to re- 
 commend to me many tradesmen who are ready to supply 
 these articles in any quantities; each of whom has been here 
 already a dozen times, cap in hand, and vowing that it 
 is quite immaterial when I pay which is very kind of 
 them; but, with the highest respect for friend Perkins 
 (my scout) and his obliging friends, I shall make some in- 
 quiries before 'letting in' with any of them. He waits on 
 me in hall, where we go in full fig of cap and gown at five, 
 and get very good dinners, and cheap enough. It is rather 
 a fine old room, with a good, arched, black-oak ceiling and 
 high panelling, hung round with pictures of old swells, 
 bishops and lords chiefly, who have endowed the college 
 in some way, or at least have fed here in times gone by, 
 and for whom, 'caeterisque benefactoribus nostris,' we 
 daily give thanks in a long Latin grace, which one of the 
 undergraduates (I think it must be) goes and rattles out 
 at the end of the high table, and then comes down again 
 from the dais to his own place. No one feeds at the high 
 table except the dons and the gentlemen commoners, who 
 are undergraduates in velvet caps and silk gowns. Why 
 they wear these instead of cloth and serge I haven't yet 
 made out I believe it is because they pay double fees; but 
 they seem uncommonly wretched up at the high table, and 
 I should think would sooner pay double to come to the other 
 end of the hall. 
 
 "The chapel is a quaint little place, about the size of the 
 chancel of Lutterworth Church. It just holds us all com- 
 fortably. The attendance is regular enough, but I don't 
 think the men care about it a bit in general. Several I 
 can see bring in Euclids, and other lecture books, and the 
 service is gone through at a great pace. I couldn't think
 
 76 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 at first why some of the men seemed so uncomfortable and 
 stiff about the legs at the morning service, but I find that 
 they are the hunting set, and come in with pea-coats over 
 their pinks, and trousers over their leather breeches and 
 top-boots; which accounts for it. There are a few others 
 who seem very devout, and bow a good deal, and turn 
 toward the altar at different parts of the service. These 
 are of the Oxford High-church school, I believe; but I shall 
 soon find out more about them. On the whole, I feel less 
 at home at present, I am sorry to say, in the chapel, than 
 anywhere else. 
 
 "I was very nearly forgetting a great institution of the 
 college, which is the buttery-hatch, just opposite the hall 
 door. Here abides the fat old butler (all the servants at 
 St. Ambrose's are portly), and serves out limited bread, 
 butter, and cheese, and unlimited beer brewed by himself, 
 for an hour in the morning, at noon, and again at supper 
 time. Your scout always fetches you a pint or so on each 
 occasion, in case you should want it, and if you don't, it 
 falls to him; but I can't say that my fellow gets much, for 
 I am naturally a thirsty soul, and cannot often resist the 
 malt myself, coming up, as it does, fresh and cool, in one 
 of the silver tankards, of which we seem to have an endless 
 supply. 
 
 "I spent a day or two in the first week, before I got shaken 
 down into my place here, in going round and seeing the other 
 colleges, and finding out what great men had been at each 
 (one got a taste for that sort of work from the doctor, and 
 I'd nothing else to do). Well, I never was more interested: 
 fancy ferreting out Wycliffe, the Black Prince, our friend 
 Sir Walter Raleigh, Pym, Hampden, Laud, Ireton, Butler, 
 and Addison, in one afternoon. I walked about two inches 
 taller in my trencher cap after it. Perhaps I may be going
 
 TOM BROWN'S LETTER 77 
 
 to make dear friends with some fellow who will change the 
 history of England. Why shouldn't I? There must have 
 been freshmen once who were chums of Wycliffe of Queens, 
 or Raleigh of Oriel. I mooned up and down the High-street, 
 staring at all the young faces in caps, and wondering which 
 of them would turn out great generals, or statesmen, or 
 poets. Some of them will, of course, for there must be a 
 dozen at least, I should think, in every generation of under- 
 graduates, who will have a good deal to say to the ruling 
 and guiding of the British nation before they die. 
 
 "But, after all, the river is the feature of Oxford, to my 
 mind; a glorious stream, not five minutes' walk from the 
 colleges, broad enough in most places for three boats to 
 row abreast. I expect I shall take to boating furiously: 
 I have been down the river three or four times already with 
 some other freshmen, and it is glorious exercise; that I can 
 see, though we bungle and cut crabs desperately at present. 
 
 "Here's a long yarn I'm spinning for you; and I dare 
 say after all you'll say it tells you nothing, and you'd rather 
 have twenty lines about the men, and what they're think- 
 ing about, and the meaning and inner life of the place, and 
 all that. Patience, patience ! I don't know anything about 
 it myself yet, and have only had time to look at the shell, 
 which is a very handsome and stately affair; you shall have 
 the kernel, if I ever get at it, in due time. 
 
 "And now write me a long letter directly, and tell me 
 about the doctor, and who are in the sixth, and how the 
 house goes on, and what sort of an eleven there'll be, and 
 what you are all doing and thinking about. Come up here 
 and try for a scholarship; I'll take you in and show you the 
 lions. Remember me to all old friends. Ever yours 
 affectionately, T. B."
 
 THE SOCIAL VALUE OF THE COLLEGE-BRED 1 
 
 WILLIAM JAMES 
 
 Of what use is a college training? We who have had it 
 seldom hear the question raised we might be a little non- 
 plussed to answer it offhand. A certain amount of medita- 
 tion has brought me to this as the pithiest reply which I 
 myself can give: The best claim that a college education 
 can possibly make on your respect, the best thing it can 
 aspire to accomplish for you, is this: that it should help 
 you to know a good man when you see him. This is as true 
 of women's as of men's colleges; but that it is neither a 
 joke nor a one-sided abstraction I shall now endeavor to 
 show. 
 
 What talk do we commonly hear about the contrast 
 between college education and the education which busi- 
 ness or technical or professional schools confer? The col- 
 lege education is called higher because it is supposed to 
 be so general and so disinterested. At the "schools" you 
 get a relatively narrow practical skill, you are told, whereas 
 the "colleges" give you the more liberal culture, the broader 
 outlook, the historical perspective, the philosophic atmos- 
 phere, or something which phrases of that sort try to ex- 
 press. You are made into an efficient instrument for doing 
 a definite thing, you hear, at the schools; but, apart from 
 
 1 An address before The Association of American Alumnae, at Radcliffe 
 College, November 7, 1907. Reprinted through the courtesy of McClure's 
 Magazine. 
 
 78
 
 SOCIAL VALUE OF THE COLLEGE-BRED 79 
 
 that, you may remain a crude and smoky kind of petroleum, 
 incapable of spreading light. The universities and colleges, 
 on the other hand, although they may leave you less ef- 
 ficient for this or that practical task, suffuse your whole 
 mentality with something more important than skill. They 
 redeem you, make you well-bred; they make "good com- 
 pany" of you mentally. If they find you with a naturally 
 boorish or caddish mind, they cannot leave you so, as a 
 technical school may leave you. This, at least, is pretended ; 
 this is what we hear among college-trained people when 
 they compare their education with every other sort. Now, 
 exactly how much does this signify? 
 
 It is certain, to begin with, that the narrowest trade or 
 professional training does something more for a man than 
 to make a skilful, practical tool of him it makes him also 
 a judge of other men's skill. Whether his trade be pleading 
 at the bar or surgery or plastering or plumbing, it develops 
 a critical sense in him for that sort of occupation. He under- 
 stands the difference between second-rate and first-rate 
 work in his whole branch of industry; he gets to know a 
 good job in his own line as soon as he sees it; and getting 
 to know this in his own line, he gets a faint sense of what 
 good work may mean anyhow, that may, if circumstances 
 favor, spread into his judgments elsewhere. Sound work, 
 clean work, finished work: feeble work, slack work, sham 
 work these words express an identical contrast in many 
 different departments of activity. In so far forth, then, 
 even the humblest manual trade may beget in one a cer- 
 tain small degree of power to judge of good work generally. 
 
 Now, what is supposed to be the line of us who have the 
 higher college training? Is there any broader line since 
 our education claims primarily not to be "narrow" in 
 which we also are made good judges between what is first-
 
 8o COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 rate and what is second-rate only? What is especially 
 taught in the colleges has long been known by the name 
 of the "humanities," and these are often identified with 
 Greek and Latin. But it is only as literatures, not as 
 languages, that Greek and Latin have any general humanity 
 value; so that in a broad sense the humanities mean litera- 
 ture primarily, and in a still broader sense the study of 
 masterpieces in almost any field of human endeavor. 
 Literature keeps the primacy; for it not only consists of 
 masterpieces, but is largely about masterpieces, being little 
 more than an appreciative chronicle of human master- 
 strokes, so far as it takes the form of criticism and history. 
 You can give humanistic value to almost anything by teach- 
 ing it historically. Geology, economics, mechanics are 
 humanities when taught with reference to the successive 
 achievements of the geniuses to which these sciences owe 
 their being. Not taught thus, literature remains grammar, 
 art a catalogue, history a list of dates, and natural science 
 a sheet of formulas and weights and measures. 
 
 The sifting of human creations ! nothing less than this 
 is what we ought to mean by the humanities. Essentially 
 this means biography; what our colleges should teach is, 
 therefore, biographical history, that not of politics merely, 
 but of anything and everything so far as human efforts 
 and conquests are factors that have played their part. 
 Studying in this way, we learn what types of activity have 
 stood the test of time; we acquire standards of the excellent 
 and durable. All our arts and sciences and institutions are 
 but so many quests of perfection on the part of men; and 
 when we see how diverse the types of excellence may be, 
 how various the tests, how flexible the adaptations, we gain 
 a richer sense of what the terms "better" and "worse" 
 may signify in general. Our critical sensibilities grow both
 
 SOCIAL VALUE OF THE COLLEGE-BRED 81 
 
 more acute and less fanatical. We sympathize with men's 
 mistakes even in the act of penetrating them; we feel the 
 pathos of lost causes and misguided epochs even while we 
 applaud what overcame them. 
 
 Such words are vague and such ideas are inadequate, 
 but their meaning is unmistakable. What the colleges 
 teaching humanities by examples which may be special, 
 but which must be typical and pregnant should at least 
 try to give us, is a general sense of what, under various 
 disguises, superiority has always signified and may still 
 signify. The feeling for a good human job anywhere, the 
 admiration of the really admirable, the disesteem of what 
 is cheap and trashy and impermanent this is what we call 
 the critical sense, the sense for ideal values. It is the better 
 part of what men know as wisdom. Some of us are wise 
 in this way naturally and by genius; some of us never 
 become so. But to have spent one's youth at college, in 
 contact with the choice and rare and precious, and yet still 
 to be a blind prig or vulgarian, unable to scent out human 
 excellence or to divine it amid its accidents, to know it 
 only when ticketed and labelled and forced on us by others, 
 this indeed should be accounted the very calamity and 
 shipwreck of a higher education. 
 
 The sense for human superiority ought, then, to be con- 
 sidered our line, as boring subways is the engineer's line 
 and the surgeon's is appendicitis. Our colleges ought to 
 have lit up in us a lasting relish for the better kind of man, 
 a loss of appetite for mediocrities, and a disgust for cheap 
 jacks. We ought to smell, as it were, the difference of 
 quality in men and their proposals when we enter the world 
 of affairs about us. Expertness in this might well atone for 
 some of our awkwardness at accounts, for some of our ig- 
 norance of dynamos. The best claim we can make for the
 
 82 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 higher education, the best single phrase in which we can 
 tell what it ought to do for us, is, then, exactly what I said : 
 it should enable us to know a good man when we see him. 
 
 That the phrase is anything but an empty epigram fol- 
 lows from the fact that if you ask in what line it is most 
 important that a democracy like ours should have its sons 
 and daughters skilful, you see that it is this line more than 
 any other. "The people in their wisdom" this is the kind 
 of wisdom most needed by the people. Democracy is on 
 its trial, and no one knows how it will stand the ordeal. 
 Abounding about us are pessimistic prophets. Fickleness 
 and violence used to be, but are no longer, the vices which 
 they charge to democracy. What its critics now affirm is 
 that its preferences are inveterately for the inferior. So 
 it was in the beginning, they say, and so it will be world 
 without end. Vulgarity enthroned and institutionalized, 
 elbowing everything superior from the highway, this, they 
 tell us, is our irremediable destiny; and the picture papers 
 of the European Continent are already drawing Uncle Sam 
 with the hog instead of the eagle for his heraldic emblem. 
 The privileged aristocracies of the foretime, with all their 
 iniquities, did at least preserve some taste for higher human 
 quality and honor certain forms of refinement by their 
 enduring traditions. But when democracy is sovereign, 
 its doubters say, nobility will form a sort of invisible church, 
 and sincerity and refinement, stripped of honor, precedence, 
 and favor, will have to vegetate on sufferance in private 
 corners. They will have no general influence. They will 
 be harmless eccentricities. 
 
 Now, who can be absolutely certain that this may not 
 be the career of democracy ? Nothing future is quite secure; 
 states enough have inwardly rotted; and democracy as a 
 whole may undergo self-poisoning. But, on the other hand,
 
 SOCIAL VALUE OF THE COLLEGE-BRED 83 
 
 democracy is a kind of religion, and we are bound not to 
 admit its failure. Faiths and Utopias are the noblest exercise 
 of human reason, and no one with a spark of reason in him 
 will sit down fatalistically before the croaker's picture. 
 The best of us are filled with the contrary vision of a democ- 
 racy stumbling through every error till its institutions glow 
 with justice and its customs shine with beauty. Our better 
 men shall show the way and we shall follow them; so we 
 are brought round again to the mission of the higher educa- 
 tion in helping us to know the better kind of man whenever 
 we see him. 
 
 The notion that a people can run itself and its affairs 
 anonymously is now well known to be the silliest of absurdi- 
 ties. Mankind does nothing save through initiatives on the 
 part of inventors, great or small, and imitation by the rest 
 of us these are the sole factors active in human progress. 
 Individuals of genius show the way, and set the patterns, 
 which common people then adopt and follow. The rivalry 
 of the patterns is the history of the world. Our democratic 
 problem thus is statable in ultrasimple terms: Who are 
 the kind of men from whom our majorities shall take their 
 cue? Whom shall they treat as rightful leaders? We and 
 our leaders are the x and the y of the equation here; all 
 other historic circumstances, be they economical, political, 
 or intellectual, are only the background of occasion on which 
 the living drama works itself out between us. 
 
 In this very simple way does the value of our educated 
 class define itself: we more than others should be able to 
 divine the worthier and better leaders. The terms here are 
 monstrously simplified, of course, but such a bird's-eye 
 view lets us immediately take our bearings. In our democ- 
 racy, where everything else is so shifting, we alumni and 
 alumnae of the colleges are the only permanent presence
 
 84 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 that corresponds to the aristocracy in older countries. We 
 have continuous traditions, as they have; our motto, too, 
 is noblesse oblige; and, unlike them, we stand for ideal 
 interests solely, for we have no corporate selfishness and 
 wield no powers of corruption. We ought to have our own 
 class consciousness. "Les intellectuels ! " What prouder 
 club name could there be than this one, used ironically by 
 the party of "red blood," the party of every stupid prejudice 
 and passion, during the anti-Dreyfus craze, to satirize the 
 men in France who still retained some critical sense and 
 judgment? Critical sense, it has to be confessed, is not an 
 exciting term, hardly a banner to carry in processions. 
 Affections for old habit, currents of self-interest, and gales 
 of passion are the forces that keep the human ship moving; 
 and the pressure of the judicious pilot's hand upon the tiller 
 is a relatively insignificant energy. But the affections, 
 passions, and interests are shifting, successive, and dis- 
 traught; they blow in alternation while the pilot's hand 
 is steadfast. He knows the compass, and, with all the lee- 
 ways he is obliged to tack toward, he always makes some 
 headway. A small force, if it never lets up, will accumulate 
 effects more considerable than those of much greater forces 
 if these work inconsistently. The ceaseless whisper of the 
 more permanent ideals, the steady tug of truth and justice, 
 give them but time, must warp the world in their direction. 
 This bird's-eye view of the general steering function of 
 the college-bred amid the driftings of democracy ought to 
 help us to a wider vision of what our colleges themselves 
 should aim at. If we are to be the yeast-cake for democ- 
 racy's dough, if we are to make it rise with culture's prefer- 
 ences, we must see to it that culture spreads broad sails. 
 We must shake the old double reefs out of the canvas into 
 the wind and sunshine, and let in every modern subject,
 
 SOCIAL VALUE OF THE COLLEGE-BRED 85 
 
 sure that any subject will prove humanistic, if its setting 
 be kept only wide enough. 
 
 Stevenson says somewhere to his reader: "You think 
 you are just making this bargain, but you are really laying 
 down a link in the policy of mankind." Well, your tech- 
 nical school should enable you to make your bargain splen- 
 didly; but your college should show you just the place of 
 that kind of bargain a pretty poor place, possibly in the 
 whole policy of mankind. That is the kind of liberal out- 
 look, of perspective, of atmosphere, which should surround 
 every subject as a college deals with it. 
 
 We of the colleges must eradicate a curious notion which 
 numbers of good people have about such ancient seats of 
 learning as Harvard. To many ignorant outsiders, that 
 name suggests little more than a kind of sterilized conceit 
 and incapacity for being pleased. In Edith Wyatt's ex- 
 quisite book of Chicago sketches called Every One His Own 
 Way there is a couple who stand for culture in the sense 
 of exclusiveness, Richard Elliot and his feminine counter- 
 part feeble caricatures of mankind, unable to know any 
 good thing when they see it, incapable of enjoyment unless 
 a printed label gives them leave. Possibly this type of 
 culture may exist near Cambridge and Boston, there may 
 be specimens there, for priggishness is just like painters' 
 colic or any other trade disease. But every good college 
 makes its students immune against this malady, of which 
 the microbe haunts the neighborhood-printed pages. It 
 does so by its general tone being too hearty for the microbe's 
 life. Real culture lives by sympathies and admirations, 
 not by dislikes and disdains under all misleading wrap- 
 pings it pounces unerringly upon the human core. If a 
 college, through the inferior human influences that have 
 grown regnant there, fails to catch the robuster tone, its
 
 86 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 failure is colossal, for its social function stops: democracy 
 gives it a wide berth, turns toward it a deaf ear. 
 
 "Tone," to be sure, is a terribly vague word to use, but 
 there is no other, and this whole meditation is over ques- 
 tions of tone. By their tone are all things human either 
 lost or saved. If democracy is to be saved it must catch 
 the higher, healthier tone. If we are to impress it with 
 our preferences, we ourselves must use the proper tone, 
 which we, in turn, must have caught from our own teachers. 
 It all reverts in the end to the action of innumerable imita- 
 tive individuals upon each other and to the question of 
 whose tone has the highest spreading power. As a class, 
 we college graduates should look to it that ours has spread- 
 ing power. It ought to have the highest spreading power. 
 
 In our essential function of indicating the better men, 
 we now have formidable competitors outside. McClure's 
 Magazine, the American Magazine, Cottier's Weekly, and, 
 in its fashion, the World's Work, constitute together a real 
 popular university along this very line. It would be a pity 
 if any future historian were to have to write words like 
 these: "By the middle of the twentieth century the higher 
 institutions of learning had lost all influence over public 
 opinion in the United States. But the mission of raising 
 the tone of democracy, which they had proved themselves 
 so lamentably unfitted to exert, was assumed with rare 
 enthusiasm and prosecuted with extraordinary skill and 
 success by a new educational power; and for the clarifica- 
 tion of their human sympathies and elevation of their human 
 preferences, the people at large acquired the habit of re- 
 sorting exclusively to the guidance of certain private lit- 
 erary adventures, commonly designated in the market by 
 the affectionate name of ten-cent magazines." 
 
 Must not we of the colleges see to it that no historian
 
 SOCIAL VALUE OF THE COLLEGE-BRED 87 
 
 shall ever say anything like this? Vague as the phrase of 
 knowing a good man when you see him may be, diffuse and 
 indefinite as one must leave its application, is there any 
 other formula that describes so well the result at which 
 our institutions ought to aim? If they do that, they do 
 the best thing conceivable. If they fail to do it, they fail 
 in very deed. It surely is a fine synthetic formula. If 
 our faculties and graduates could once collectively come 
 to realize it as the great underlying purpose toward which 
 they have always been more or less obscurely groping, a 
 great clearness would be shed over many of their problems; 
 and, as for their influence in the midst of our social system, 
 it would embark upon a new career of strength.
 
 VI 
 
 WHAT IS A COLLEGE FOR? 1 
 
 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 It may seem singular that at this time of day and in this 
 confident century it should be necessary to ask : What is a 
 \college for? But it has become necessary. I take it for 
 granted that there are few real doubts concerning the ques- 
 tion in the minds of those who look at the college from the 
 inside and have made themselves responsible for the realiza- 
 tion of its serious purposes; but, there are many divergent 
 -, opinions held concerning it by those who, standing on the 
 outside, have pondered the uses of the college in the life of 
 the country; and their many varieties of opinion may very 
 well have created a confusion of counsel in the public mind. 
 
 They are, of course, entirely entitled to their independent 
 opinions and have a right to expect that full consideration 
 will be given what they say by those who are in fact re- 
 sponsible. The college is for the use of the nation, not for 
 / the satisfaction of those who administer it or for the carry- 
 ing out of their private views. They may speak as experts 
 and with a very intimate knowledge, but they also speak 
 as servants of the country and must be challenged to give 
 reasons for the convictions they entertain. Controversy, 
 it may be, is not profitable in such matters, because it is 
 so easy, in the face of opposition, to become a partisan of 
 
 1 Reprinted through the courtesy of President Woodrow Wilson from 
 Scribner's Magazine. 
 
 88
 
 WHAT IS A COLLEGE FOR? 89 
 
 one's own views and exaggerate them in seeking to vin- 
 dicate and establish them; but an explicit profession of 
 faith cannot fail to clear the air, and to assist the thinking 
 both of those who are responsible and of those who only 
 look on and seek to make serviceable comment. 
 
 Why, then, should a man send his son to college when 
 school is finished ; or why should he advise any youngster in 
 whom he is interested to go to college ? What does he expect 
 and desire him to get there? The question might be car- 
 ried back and asked with regard to the higher schools also 
 to which lads resort for preparation for college. What are 
 they meant to get there? But it will suffice to centre the 
 question on the college. What should a lad go to college 
 for for work, for the realization of a definite aim, for dis- 
 cipline and a severe training of his faculties, or for relaxa- 
 tion, for the release and exercise of his social powers, for 
 the broadening effects of life in a sort of miniature world 
 in which study is only one among many interests ? That is 
 not the only alternative suggested by recent discussions. 
 They also suggest a sharp alternative with regard to the 
 character of the study the college student should under- 
 take. Should he seek at college a general discipline of his 
 faculties, a general awakening to the issues and interests 
 of the modern world, or should he, rather, seek specially 
 and definitely to prepare himself for the work he expects 
 to do after he leaves college, for his support and advance- 
 ment in the world ? The two alternatives are very different. 
 The one asks whether the lad does not get as good a prepa- 
 ration for modern life by being manager of a football team 
 with a complicated programme of intercollegiate games and 
 trips away from home as by becoming proficient in mathe- 
 matics or in history and mastering the abstract tasks of 
 the mind; the other asks whether he is not better prepared
 
 9 o COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 by being given the special skill and training of a particular 
 calling or profession, an immediate drill in the work he is 
 to do after he graduates, than by being made a master of 
 his own mind in the more general fields of knowledge to 
 which his subsequent calling will be related, in all proba- 
 bility, only as every undertaking is related to the general 
 thought and experience of the world. 
 /^"Learning" is not involved. No one has ever dreamed 
 of imparting learning to undergraduates. It cannot be 
 done in four years. To become a man of learning is the 
 enterprise of a lifetime. The issue does not rise to that 
 high ground. The question is merely this: Do we wish 
 college to be, first of all and chiefly, a place of mental disci- 
 pline or only a school of general experience; and, if we wish 
 it to be a place of mental discipline, of what sort do we 
 wish the discipline to be a general awakening and release 
 of the faculties or a preliminary initiation into the drill of 
 a particular vocation? 
 
 These are questions which go to the root of the matter. 
 They admit of no simple and confident answer. Their 
 roots spring out of life and all its varied sources. To reply 
 to them, therefore, involves an examination of modern 
 life and an assessment of the part an educated man ought 
 to play in it an analysis which no man may attempt with 
 perfect self-confidence. The life of our day is a very com- 
 plex thing which no man can pretend to comprehend in its 
 entirety. 
 
 But some things are obvious enough concerning it. There 
 is an uncommon challenge to effort in the modern world, 
 and all the achievements to which it challenges are un- 
 commonly difficult. Individuals are yoked together in 
 modern enterprise by a harness which is both new and 
 inelastic. The man who understands only some single
 
 WHAT IS A COLLEGE FOR? 91 
 
 process, some single piece of work which he has been set 
 to do, will never do anything else, and is apt to be deprived 
 at almost any moment of the opportunity to do even that, 
 because processes change, industry undergoes instant revo- 
 lutions. New inventions, fresh discoveries, alterations in 
 the markets of the world throw accustomed methods and 
 the men who are accustomed to them out of date and use 
 without pause or pity. The man of special skill may be 
 changed into an unskilled laborer overnight. Moreover, 
 it is a day in which no enterprise stands alone or indepen- 
 dent, but is related to every other and feels changes in all 
 parts of the globe. The men with mere skill, with mere 
 technical knowledge, will be mere servants perpetually, 
 and may at any time become useless servants, their skill 
 gone out of use and fashion. The particular thing they do 
 may become unnecessary or may be so changed that they 
 cannot comprehend or adjust themselves to the change. 
 
 These, then, are the things the modern world must have 
 in its trained men, and I do not know where else it is to get 
 them if not from its educated men and the occasional self- 
 developed genius of an exceptional man here and there. 
 It needs, at the top, not a few, but many men with the 
 power to organize and guide. The college is meant to 
 stimulate in a considerable number of men what would 
 be stimulated in only a few if we were to depend entirely 
 upon nature and circumstance. Below the ranks of gen- 
 eralship and guidance, the modern world needs for the exe- 
 cution of its varied and difficult business a very much 
 larger number of men with great capacity and readiness 
 for the rapid and concentrated exertion of a whole series 
 of faculties: planning faculties as well as technical skill, the 
 ability to handle men as well as to handle tools and correct 
 processes, faculties of adjustment and adaptation as well
 
 92 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 as of precise execution men of resource as well as knowl- 
 edge. These are the athletes, the athletes of faculty, of 
 which our generation most stands in need. All through its 
 ranks, besides, it needs masterful men who can acquire a 
 working knowledge of many things readily, quickly, in- 
 telligently, and with exactness things they had not fore- 
 seen or prepared themselves for beforehand, and for which 
 they could not have prepared themselves beforehand. 
 Quick apprehension, quick comprehension, quick action 
 are what modern life puts a premium upon a readiness to 
 turn this way or that and not lose force or momentum. 
 
 To me, then, the question seems to be: Shall the lad who 
 goes to college go there for the purpose of getting ready to 
 be a servant merely, a servant who will be nobody and 
 who may become useless, or shall he go there for the pur- 
 pose of getting ready to be a master adventurer in the field 
 of modern opportunity? 
 
 We must expect hewers of wood and drawers of water 
 to come out of the colleges in their due proportion, of 
 course, but I take it for granted that even the least gifted 
 of them did not go to college with the ambition to be nothing 
 more. And yet one has hardly made the statement before 
 he begins to doubt whether he can safely take anything 
 for granted. Part of the very question we are discussing 
 is the ambition with which young men now go to college. 
 It is a day when a college course has become fashionable 
 but not for the purpose of learning, not for the purpose 
 of obtaining a definite preparation for anything no such 
 purpose could become fashionable. The clientage of our 
 colleges has greatly changed since the time when most of 
 the young men who resorted to them did so with a view 
 to entering one or other of the learned professions. Young 
 men who expect to go into business of one kind or another
 
 WHAT IS A COLLEGE FOR? 93 
 
 now outnumber among our undergraduates those who 
 expect to make some sort of learning the basis of their work 
 throughout life; and I dare say that they generally go to 
 college without having made any very definite analysis 
 of their aim and purpose in going. Their parents seem to 
 have made as little. 
 
 The enormous increase of wealth in the country in recent 
 years, too, has had its effect upon the colleges not in the 
 way that might have been expected not, as yet, by chang- 
 ing the standard of life to any very noticeable extent or 
 introducing luxury and extravagance and vicious indul- 
 gence. College undergraduates have usually the fresh- 
 ness of youth about them, out of which there springs a 
 wholesome simplicity, and it is not easy to spoil them or 
 to destroy their natural democracy. They make a life of 
 their own and insist upon the maintenance of its standards. 
 But the increase of wealth has brought into the colleges, 
 in rapidly augmenting numbers, the sons of very rich 
 men, and lads who expect to inherit wealth are not as 
 easily stimulated to effort, are not as apt to form definite 
 and serious purposes, as those who know that they must 
 whet their wits for the struggle of life. 
 
 There was a time when the mere possession of wealth 
 conferred distinction; and when wealth confers distinction 
 it is apt to breed a sort of consciousness of opportunity 
 and responsibility in those who possess it and incline them 
 to seek serious achievement. But that time is long past 
 in America. Wealth is common. And, by the same token, 
 the position of the lad who is to inherit it is a peculiarly 
 disadvantageous one, if the standard of success is to rise 
 above mediocrity. Wealth removes the necessity for effort, 
 and yet effort is necessary for the attainment of distinction, 
 and very great effort at that, in the modern world, as I
 
 94 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 have already pointed out. It would look as if the ordinary 
 lad with expectations were foredoomed to obscurity; for 
 the ordinary lad will not exert himself unless he must. 
 
 We live in an age in which no achievement is to be 
 cheaply had. All the cheap achievements, open to ama- 
 teurs, are exhausted and have become commonplace. 
 Adventure, for example, is no longer extraordinary: which 
 is another way of saying that it is commonplace. Any 
 amateur may seek and find adventure; but it has been 
 sought and had in all its kinds. Restless men, idle men, 
 chivalrous men, men drawn on by mere curiosity and men 
 drawn on by love of the knowledge that lies outside books 
 and laboratories, have crossed the whole face of the habita- 
 ble globe in search of it, ferreting it out in corners even, fol- 
 lowing its by-paths and beating its coverts, and it is nowhere 
 any longer a novelty or distinction to have discovered and 
 enjoyed it. The whole round of pleasure, moreover, has 
 been exhausted time out of mind, and most of it discredited 
 as not pleasure after all, but just an expensive counterfeit; 
 so that many rich people have been driven to devote them- 
 selves to expense regardless of pleasure. No new pleasure, 
 I am credibly informed, has been invented within the 
 memory of man. For every genuine thrill and satisfaction, 
 therefore, we are apparently, in this sophisticated world, 
 shut in to work, to modifying and quickening the life of 
 the age. If college be one of the highways to life and 
 achievement, it must be one of the highways to work. 
 
 The man who comes out of college into the modern world 
 must, therefore, have got out of it, if he has not wasted 
 four vitally significant years of his life, a quickening and a 
 training which will make him in some degree a master 
 among men. If he has got less, college was not worth his 
 while. To have made it worth his while he must have got
 
 WHAT IS A COLLEGE FOR? 95 
 
 such a preparation and development of his faculties as will 
 give him movement as well as mere mechanical efficiency 
 in affairs complex, difficult, and subject to change. The 
 word efficiency has in our day the power to think at the 
 centre of it, the power of independent movement and ini- 
 tiative. It is not merely the suitability to be a good tool, 
 it is the power to wield tools, and among the tools are men 
 and circumstances and changing processes of industry, 
 changing phases of life itself. There should be technical 
 schools a great many and the technical schools of America 
 should be among the best in the world. The men they 
 train are indispensable. The modern world needs more 
 tools than managers, more workmen than master work- 
 men. But even the technical schools must have some 
 thought of mastery and adaptability in their processes; 
 and the colleges, which are not technical schools, should 
 think of that chiefly. We must distinguish what the col- 
 lege is for, without disparaging any other school, of any 
 other kind. It is for the training of the men who are to 
 rise above the ranks. 
 
 That is what a college is for. What it does, what it 
 requires of its undergraduates and of its teachers, should 
 be adjusted to that conception. The very statement of 
 the object, which must be plain to all who make any dis- 
 tinction at all between a college and a technical school, 
 makes it evident that the college must subject its men to 
 a general intellectual training which will be narrowed to 
 no one point of view, to no one vocation or calling. It 
 must release and quicken as many faculties of the mind as 
 possible and not only release and quicken them but disci- 
 pline and strengthen them also by putting them to the 
 test of systematic labor. Work, definite, exacting, long 
 continued, but not narrow or petty or merely rule of thumb,
 
 96 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 must be its law of life for those who would pass its gates 
 and go out with its authentication. 
 
 By a general training I do not mean vague spaces of 
 study, miscellaneous fields of reading, a varied smattering 
 of a score of subjects and the thorough digestion of none. 
 The field of modern knowledge is extremely wide and 
 varied. After a certain number of really fundamental 
 subjects have been studied in the schools, the college under- 
 graduate must be offered a choice of the route he will 
 travel in carrying his studies further. He cannot be shown 
 the whole body of knowledge within a single curriculum. 
 There is no longer any single highway of learning. The 
 roads that traverse its vast and crowded spaces are not 
 even parallel, and four years is too short a time in which 
 to search them all out. But there is a general programme 
 still possible by which the college student can be made 
 acquainted with the field of modern learning by sample, 
 by which he can be subjected to the several kinds of mental 
 discipline in philosophy, in some one of the great sciences, 
 in some one of the great languages which carry the thought 
 of the world, in history and in politics, which is its frame- 
 work which will give him valid naturalization as a citizen 
 of the world of thought, the world of educated men and 
 no smatterer merely, able barely to spell its constitution 
 out, but a man who has really comprehended and made 
 use of its chief intellectual processes and is ready to lay his 
 mind alongside its tasks with some confidence that he can 
 master them and can understand why and how they are 
 to be performed. This is the general training which should 
 be characteristic of the college, and the men who undergo 
 it ought to be made to undergo it with deep seriousness 
 and diligent labor; not as soft amateurs with whom learn- 
 ing and its thorough tasks are side interests merely, but
 
 WHAT IS A COLLEGE FOR? 97 
 
 as those who approach life with the intention of becoming 
 professionals in its fields of achievement. 
 
 Just now, where this is attempted, it seems to fail of 
 success. College men, it is said, and often said with truth, 
 come out undisciplined, untrained, unfitted for what they 
 are about to undertake. It is argued therefore, that what 
 they should have been given was special vocational in- 
 struction; that if they had had that they would have been 
 interested in their work while they were undergraduates, 
 would have taken it more seriously, and would have come 
 out of college ready to be used, as they now cannot be. 
 No doubt that is to be preferred to a scattered and aim- 
 less choice of studies, and no doubt what the colleges offer 
 is miscellaneous and aimless enough in many cases; but, 
 at best, these are very hopeful assumptions on the part 
 of those who would convert our colleges into vocational 
 schools. They are generally put forward by persons who 
 do not know how college life and work are now organized 
 and conducted. I do not wonder that they know little of 
 what has happened. The whole thing is of very recent 
 development, at any rate in its elaborate complexity. It 
 is a growth, as we now see it, of the last ten or twelve years; 
 and even recent graduates of our colleges would rub their 
 eyes incredulously to see it if they were to stand again on 
 the inside and look at it intimately. 
 
 What has happened is, in general terms, this: that the 
 work of the college, the work of its classrooms and labora- 
 tories, has become the merely formal and compulsory side 
 of its life, and that a score of other things, lumped under 
 the term "undergraduate activities," have become the 
 vital, spontaneous, absorbing realities for nine out of every 
 ten men who go to college. These activities embrace social, 
 athletic, dramatic, musical, literary, religious, and profes-
 
 98 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 sional organizations of every kind, besides many organized 
 for mere amusement and some, of great use and dignity, 
 which seek to exercise a general oversight and sensible 
 direction of college ways and customs. Those which con- 
 sume the most time, are, of course, the athletic, dramatic, 
 and musical clubs, whose practises, rehearsals, games, and 
 performances fill the term time and the brief vacations 
 alike. But it is the social organizations into which the 
 thought, the energy, the initiative, the enthusiasm of the 
 largest number of men go, and go in lavish measure. 
 
 The chief of these social organizations are residential 
 families fraternities, clubs, groups of housemates of one 
 kind or another in which, naturally enough, all the under- 
 graduate interests, all the undergraduate activities of the 
 college have their vital centre. The natural history of 
 their origin and development is very interesting. They 
 grew up very normally. They were necessary because of 
 what the college did not do. 
 
 Every college in America, at any rate every college out- 
 side a city, has tried to provide living-rooms for its under- 
 graduates, dormitories in which they can live and sleep 
 and do their work outside the classroom and the labora- 
 tory. Very few colleges whose numbers have grown rap- 
 idly have been able to supply dormitories enough for all 
 their students, and some have deliberately abandoned the 
 attempt, but in many of them a very considerable propor- 
 tion of the undergraduates live on the campus, in college 
 buildings. It is a very wholesome thing that they should 
 live thus under the direct influence of the daily life of such 
 a place and, at least in legal theory, under the authority 
 of the university of which the college forms a principal 
 part. But the connection between the dormitory life and 
 the real life of the university, its intellectual tasks and disci-
 
 WHAT IS A COLLEGE FOR? 99 
 
 plines, its outlook upon the greater world of thought and 
 action which lies beyond, far beyond, the boundaries of 
 campus and classroom, is very meagre and shadowy indeed. 
 It is hardly more than atmospheric, and the atmosphere 
 is very attenuated, perceptible only by the most sensitive. 
 
 Formerly, in more primitive, and I must say less desirable, 
 days than these in which we have learned the full vigor of 
 freedom, college tutors and proctors lived in the dormitories 
 and exercised a precarious authority. The men were looked 
 after in their rooms and made to keep hours and observe 
 rules. But those days are happily gone by. The system 
 failed of its object. The lads were mischievous and recalci- 
 trant; those placed in authority over them generally young 
 and unwise; and the rules were odious to those whom they 
 were meant to restrain. There was the atmosphere of the 
 boarding-school about the buildings, and of a boarding- 
 school whose pupils had outgrown it. Life in college dormi- 
 tories is much pleasanter now and much more orderly, 
 because it is free and governed only by college opinion, 
 which is a real, not a nominal, master. The men come and 
 go as they please and have little consciousness of any con- 
 nection with authority or with the governing influences 
 of the university in their rooms, except that the university 
 is their landlord and makes rules such as a landlord may 
 make. 
 
 Formerly, in more primitive and less pleasant days, the 
 college provided a refectory or "commons" where all under- 
 graduates had their meals, a noisy family. It was part of 
 the boarding-school life; and the average undergraduate 
 had outgrown it as consciously as he had outgrown the 
 futile discipline of the dormitory. Now nothing of the 
 kind is attempted. Here and there, in connection with 
 some large college which has found that the boarding-
 
 ioo COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 houses and restaurants of the town have been furnishing 
 poor food at outrageous prices to those of its undergrad- 
 uates who could not otherwise provide for themselves, 
 will be found a great "commons," at which hundreds of 
 men take their meals, amid the hurly-burly of numbers, 
 without elegance or much comfort, but nevertheless at a 
 well-spread table where the food is good and the prices 
 moderate. The undergraduate may use it or not as he 
 pleases. It is merely a great co-operative boarding-place, 
 bearing not even a family resemblance to the antique 
 "commons." It is one of the conveniences of the place. 
 It has been provided by the university authorities, but 
 it might have been provided in some other way and have 
 been quite independent of them; and it is usually under 
 undergraduate management. 
 
 Those who do not like the associations or the fare of 
 such a place provide for themselves elsewhere, in clubs 
 or otherwise generally in fraternity houses. At most 
 colleges there is no such common boarding-place, and all 
 must shift for themselves. It is this necessity in the one 
 case and desire in the other that has created the chief com- 
 plexity now observable in college life and which has been 
 chiefly instrumental in bringing about that dissociation 
 of undergraduate life from the deeper and more permanent 
 influences of the university which has of recent years become 
 so marked and so significant. 
 
 Fraternity chapters were once and that not so very 
 long ago merely groups of undergraduates who had bound 
 themselves together by the vows of various secret socie- 
 ties which had spread their branches among the colleges. 
 They had their fraternity rooms, their places of meeting; 
 they were distinguished by well-known badges and formed 
 little coteries distinguishable enough from the general body
 
 WHAT IS A COLLEGE FOR? 101 
 
 of undergraduates, as they wished to be; but in all ordinary 
 matters they shared the common life of the place. The 
 daily experiences of the college life they shared with their 
 fellows of all kinds and all connections in an easy democ- 
 racy; their contacts were the common contacts of the 
 classroom and the laboratory not only, but also of the 
 boarding-house table and of all the usual undergraduate 
 resorts. Members of the same fraternity were naturally 
 enough inclined to associate chiefly with one another, and 
 were often, much too often, inclined, in matters of college 
 " politics," to act as a unit and in their own interest; but 
 they did not live separately. They did not hold aloof or 
 constitute themselves separate families, living apart in 
 their own houses, in privacy. Now all that is changed. 
 Every fraternity has its own house, equipped as a com- 
 plete home. The fraternity houses will often be the most 
 interesting and the most beautiful buildings a visitor will 
 be shown when he visits the college. In them members 
 take all their meals, in them they spend their leisure hours 
 and often do their reading for each house has its library 
 and in them many of the members, as many as can be 
 accommodated, have their sleeping-rooms and live, because 
 the college has not dormitories enough to lodge them or 
 because they prefer lodging outside the dormitories. In 
 colleges where there are no fraternities, clubs of one sort 
 or another take their places, build homes of their own, 
 enjoy a similar privacy and separateness, and constitute 
 the centre of all that is most comfortable and interesting 
 and attractive in undergraduate life. 
 
 I am pointing out this interesting and very important 
 development, not for the purpose of criticising it, but 
 merely to explain its natural history and the far-reaching 
 results it has brought about. The college having deter-
 
 102 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 mined, wisely enough, some generation or two ago, not to 
 be any longer a boarding-school, has resolved itself into a 
 mere teaching machine, with the necessary lecture-rooms 
 and laboratories attached and sometimes a few dormitories, 
 which it regards as desirable but not indispensable, and 
 has resigned into the hands of the undergraduates them- 
 selves the whole management of their life outside the class- 
 room; and not only its management but also the setting 
 up of all its machinery of every kind as much as they 
 please and the constitution of its whole environment, so 
 that teachers and pupils are not members of one university 
 body but constitute two bodies sharply distinguished and 
 the undergraduate body the more highly organized and 
 independent of the two. They parley with one another, 
 but they do not live with one another, and it is much 
 easier for the influence of the highly organized and very 
 self-conscious undergraduate body to penetrate the faculty 
 than it is for the influence of the faculty to permeate the 
 undergraduates. 
 
 It was inevitable it should turn out so in the circum- 
 stances. I do not wonder that the consequences were not 
 foreseen and that the whole development has crept upon 
 us almost unawares. But the consequences have been very 
 important and very far-reaching. It is easy now to see 
 that if you leave undergraduates entirely to themselves, 
 to organize their own lives while in college as they please 
 and organize it in some way they must if thus cast adrift 
 that life, and not the deeper interests of the university, 
 will presently dominate their thoughts, their imaginations, 
 their favorite purposes. And not only that. The work of 
 administering this complex life, with all its organizations 
 and independent interests, successfully absorbs the energies, 
 the initiative, the planning and orginating powers of the
 
 WHAT IS A COLLEGE FOR? 103 
 
 best men among the undergraduates. It is no small task. 
 It would tax and absorb older men; and only the finer, 
 more spirited, more attractive, more original and effective 
 men are fitted for it or equal to it, where leadership goes 
 by gifts of personality as well as by ability. The very men 
 the teacher most desires to get hold of and to enlist in some 
 enterprise of the mind, the very men it would most reward 
 him to instruct and whose training would count for most 
 in leadership outside of college, in the country at large, 
 and for the promotion of every interest the nation has, 
 the natural leaders and doers, are drawn off and monopo- 
 lized by these necessary and engaging undergraduate under- 
 takings. The born leaders and managers and originators 
 are drafted off to "run the college" (it is in fact noth- 
 ing less), and the classroom, the laboratory, the studious 
 conference with instructors get only the residuum of their 
 attention, only what can be spared of their energy are 
 secondary matters where they ought to come first. It is 
 the organization that is at fault, not the persons who enter 
 into it and are moulded by it. It cannot turn out other- 
 wise in the circumstances. The side-shows are so numerous, 
 so diverting so important, if you will that they have 
 swallowed up the circus, and those who perform in the 
 main tent must often whistle for their audiences, discouraged 
 and humiliated. 
 
 Such is college life nowadays, and such its relation to 
 college work and the all-important intellectual interests 
 which the colleges are endowed and maintained to foster. 
 I need not stop to argue that the main purposes of educa- 
 tion cannot be successfully realized under such conditions. 
 I need not stop to urge that the college was not, and can 
 never be, intended for the uses it is now being put to. A 
 young man can learn to become the manager of a football
 
 io 4 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 team or of a residential club, the leader of an orchestra or 
 a glee-club, the star of amateur theatricals, an oarsman or 
 a chess-player without putting himself to the trouble, or his 
 parents to the expense, of four years at a college. These 
 are innocent enough things for him to do and to learn, 
 though hardly very important in the long run; they may, 
 for all I know, make for efficiency in some of the simpler 
 kinds of business ; and no wise man who knows college lads 
 would propose to shut them off from them or wish to dis- 
 courage their interest in them. All work and no play makes 
 Jack not only a dull boy but may make him a vicious boy 
 as well. Amusement, athletic games, the zest of contest 
 and competition, the challenge there is in most college 
 activities to the instinct of initiative and the gifts of leader- 
 ship and achievement all these are wholesome means of 
 stimulation, which keep young men from going stale and 
 turning to things that demoralize. But they should not 
 assume the front of the stage, where more serious and last- 
 ing interests are to be served. Men cannot be prepared 
 by them for modern life. 
 
 The college is meant for a severer, more definite disci- 
 pline than this: a discipline which will fit men for the con- 
 tests and achievements of an age whose every task is con- 
 ditioned upon some intelligent and effective use of the mind, 
 upon some substantial knowledge, some special insight, 
 some trained capacity, some penetration which comes from 
 study, not from natural readiness or mere practical ex- 
 perience. 
 
 The side-shows need not be abolished. They need not 
 be cast out or even discredited. But they must be sub- 
 ordinated. They must be put in their natural place as 
 diversions, and ousted from their present dignity and pre- 
 eminence as occupations.
 
 WHAT IS A COLLEGE FOR? 105 
 
 And this can be done without making of the college again 
 a boarding-school. The characteristic of the boarding- 
 school is that its pupils are in all things in tutelage, are 
 under masters at every turn of their life, must do as they 
 are bidden, not in the performance of their set tasks only, 
 but also in all their comings and goings. It is this char- 
 acteristic that made it impossible and undesirable to con- 
 tinue the life of the boarding-school into the college, where 
 it is necessary that the pupil should begin to show his man- 
 hood and make his own career. No one who knows what 
 wholesome and regulated freedom can do for young men 
 ought ever to wish to hale them back to the days of childish 
 discipline and restraint of which the college of our grand- 
 fathers was typical. But a new discipline is desirable, is 
 absolutely necessary, if the college is to be recalled to its 
 proper purpose, its bounden duty. It cannot perform its 
 duty as it is now organized. 
 
 The fundamental thing to be accomplished in the new 
 organization is, that, instead of being the heterogeneous 
 congeries of petty organizations it now is, instead of being 
 allowed to go to pieces in a score of fractions free to cast 
 off from the whole as they please, it should be drawn to- 
 gether again into a single university family of which the 
 teachers shall be as natural and as intimate members as 
 the undergraduates. The "life" of the college should not 
 be separated from its chief purposes and most essential 
 objects, should not be contrasted with its duties and in 
 rivalry with them. The two should be but two sides of 
 one and the same thing; the association of men, young and 
 old, for serious mental endeavor and also, in the intervals 
 of work, for every wholesome sport and diversion. Under- 
 graduate life should not be in rivalry and contrast with 
 undergraduate duties: undergraduates should not be merely
 
 106 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 in attendance upon the college, but parts of it on every 
 side of its life, very conscious and active parts. They 
 should consciously live its whole life not under masters, 
 as in school, and yet associated in some intimate daily 
 fashion with their masters in learning: so that learning 
 may not seem one thing and life another. The organiza- 
 tions whose objects lie outside study should be but parts 
 of the whole, not set against it, but included within it. 
 
 All this can be accomplished by a comparatively simple 
 change of organization which will make master and pupil 
 members of the same free, self-governed family, upon 
 natural terms of intimacy. But how it can be done is not 
 our present interest. That is another story. It is our 
 present purpose merely to be clear what a college is for. 
 That, perhaps, I have now pointed out with sufficient ex- 
 plicitness. I have shown the incompatibility of the present 
 social organization of our colleges with the realization of 
 that purpose only to add emphasis to the statement of 
 what that purpose is. Once get that clearly established 
 in the mind of the country, and the means of realizing it 
 will readily and quickly enough be found. The object of 
 the college is intellectual discipline and moral enlighten- 
 ment, and it is the immediate task of those who administer 
 the colleges of the country to find the means and the organi- 
 zation by which that object can be attained. Education 
 is a process and, like all other processes, has its proper 
 means and machinery. It does not consist in courses of 
 study. It consists of the vital assimilation of knowledge, 
 and the mode of life, for the college as for the individual, 
 is nine parts of the digestion.
 
 VII 
 
 THE TRAINING OF INTELLECT 1 
 WOODROW WILSON 
 
 MR. TOASTMASTER, MR. PRESIDENT, AND GENTLEMEN: 
 I must confess to you that I came here with very serious 
 thoughts this evening, because I have been laboring under 
 the conviction for a long time that the object of a university 
 is to educate, and I have not seen the universities of this 
 country achieving any remarkable or disturbing success 
 in that direction. I have found everywhere the note which 
 I must say I have heard sounded once or twice to-night 
 that apology for the intellectual side of the university. 
 You hear it at all universities. Learning is on the defen- 
 sive, is actually on the defensive, among college men, and 
 they are being asked by way of indulgence to bring that 
 also into the circle of their interests. Is it not time we 
 stopped asking indulgence for learning and proclaimed its 
 sovereignty? Is it not time we reminded the college men 
 of this country that they have no right to any distinctive 
 place in any community, unless they can show it by in- 
 tellectual achievement ? That if a university is a place for 
 distinction at all it must be distinguished by the conquests 
 of the mind? I for my part tell you plainly that that is 
 my motto, that I have entered the field to fight for that 
 thesis, and that for that thesis only do I care to fight. 
 
 1 An address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Yale University 
 in 1908. Reprinted through the courtesy of President Woodrow Wilson 
 from a stenographic report. 
 
 107
 
 io8 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 The toastmaster of the evening said, and said truly, that 
 this is the season when, for me, it was most difficult to 
 break away from regular engagements in which I am in- 
 volved at this time of the year. But when I was invited 
 to the Phi Beta Kappa banquet it had an unusual sound, 
 and I felt that that was the particular kind of invitation 
 which it was my duty and privilege to accept. One of the 
 problems of the American university now is how, among a 
 great many other competing interests, to give places of 
 distinction to men who want places of distinction in the 
 classroom. Why don't we give you men the Y here and 
 the P at Princeton, because, after all, you have done the 
 particular thing which distinguishes Yale ? Not that these 
 other things are not worth doing, but they may be done 
 anywhere. They may be done in athletic clubs where there 
 is no study, but this thing can be done only here. This is 
 the distinctive mark of the place. 
 
 A good many years ago, just two weeks before the mid- 
 year examinations, the faculty of Princeton was foolish 
 enough to permit a very unwise evangelist to come to the 
 place and to upset the town. And while an assisting under- 
 graduate was going from room to room one undergraduate 
 secured his door and put this notice out: "I am a Christian 
 and am studying for examinations." Now I want to say 
 that that is exactly what a Christian undergraduate would 
 be doing at that time of the year. He would not be at- 
 tending religious meetings no matter how beneficial it 
 would be to him. He would be studying for examinations 
 not merely for the purpose of passing them, but from his 
 sense of duty. 
 
 We get a good many men at Princeton from certain 
 secondary schools who say a great deal about their earnest 
 desire to cultivate character among our students, and I
 
 THE TRAINING OF INTELLECT 109 
 
 hear a great deal about character being the object of educa- 
 tion. I take leave to believe that a man who cultivates 
 his character consciously will cultivate nothing except what 
 will make him intolerable to his fellow men. If your 
 object in life is to make a fine fellow of yourself, you will 
 not succeed, and you will not be acceptable to really fine 
 fellows. Character, gentlemen, is a by-product. It comes, 
 whether you will or not, as a consequence of a life devoted 
 to the nearest duty, and the place in which character would 
 be cultivated, if it be a place of study, is a place where study 
 is the object and character the result. 
 
 Not long ago a gentleman approached me in great excite- 
 ment just after the entrance examinations. He said we had 
 made a great mistake in not taking so and so from a certain 
 school which he named. "But," I said, "he did not pass 
 the entrance examinations." And he went over the boy's 
 moral excellencies again. "Pardon me," I said, "you do 
 not understand. He did not pass the entrance examina- 
 tions. Now," I said, "I want you to understand that if 
 the angel Gabriel applied for admission to Princeton Uni- 
 versity and could not pass the entrance examinations, he 
 would not be admitted. He would be wasting his time." 
 It seemed a new idea to him. This boy had come from a 
 school which cultivated character, and he was a nice, 
 lovable fellow with a presentable character. Therefore, 
 he ought to be admitted to any university. I fail to see it 
 from this point of view, for a university is an institution 
 of purpose. We have in some previous years had pity for 
 young gentlemen who were not sufficiently acquainted with 
 the elements of a preparatory course. They have been 
 dropped at the examinations, and I have always felt that 
 we have been guilty of an offense, and have made their 
 parents spend money to no avail and the youngsters spend
 
 no COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 their time to no avail. And so I think that all university 
 men ought to rouse themselves now and understand what 
 is the object of a university. The object of a university 
 is intellect; as a university its only object is intellect. As 
 a body of young men there ought to be other things, there 
 ought to be diversions to release them from the constant 
 strain of effort, there ought to be things that gladden the 
 heart and moments of leisure, but as a university the only 
 object is intellect. 
 
 The reason why I chose the subject that I am permitted 
 to speak upon to-night the function of scholarship was 
 that I wanted to point out the function of scholarship not 
 merely in the university, but in the nation. In a country 
 constituted as ours is, the relation in which education stands 
 is a very important one. Our whole theory has been based 
 upon an enlightened citizenship and therefore the function 
 of scholarship must be for the nation as well as for the uni- 
 versity itself. I mean the function of such scholarship as 
 undergraduates get. That is not a violent amount in any 
 case. You cannot make a scholar of a man except by some 
 largeness of Providence in his make-up, by the time he is 
 twenty-one or twenty-two years of age. There have been 
 gentlemen who have made a reputation by twenty-one or 
 twenty-two, but it is generally in some little province of 
 knowledge, so small that a small effort can conquer it. 
 You do not make scholars by that time, you do not often 
 make scholars by seventy that are worth boasting of. The 
 process of scholarship, so far as the real scholar is concerned, 
 is an unending process, and knowledge is pushed forward 
 only a very little by his best efforts. And it is evident, of 
 course, that the most you can contribute to a man in his 
 undergraduate years is not equipment in the exact knowl- 
 edge which is characteristic of the scholar, but an inspira-
 
 THE TRAINING OF INTELLECT in 
 
 tion of the spirit of scholarship. The most that you can 
 give a youngster is the spirit of the scholar. 
 
 Now, the spirit of the scholar in a country like ours must 
 be a spirit related to the national life. It cannot, therefore, 
 be a spirit of pedantry. I suppose that this is a sufficient 
 working conception of pedantry to say that it is knowledge 
 divorced from life. It is knowledge so closeted, so dese- 
 crated, so stripped of the significances of life itself, that it 
 is a thing apart and not connected with the vital processes 
 in the world about us. 
 
 There is a great place in every nation for the spirit of 
 scholarship, and it seems to me that there never was a time 
 when the spirit of scholarship was more needed in affairs 
 than it is in this country at this time. 
 
 We are thinking just now with our emotions and not with 
 our minds, we are moved by impulse and not by judgment. 
 We are drawing away from things with blind antipathy. 
 The spirit of knowledge is that you must base your con- 
 clusions on adequate grounds. Make sure that you are 
 going to the real sources of knowledge, discovering what 
 the real facts are before you move forward to the next 
 process, which is the process of clear thinking. By clear 
 thinking I do not mean logical thinking. I do not mean 
 that life is based upon any logical system whatever. Life 
 is essentially illogical. The world is governed now by a 
 tumultuous sea of commonalities made up of passions, and 
 we should pray God that the good passions should out- 
 vote the bad passions. But the movement of impulse, of 
 motive, is the stuff of passion, and therefore clear thinking 
 about life is not logical, symmetrical thinking, but it is 
 interpretative thinking, thinking that sees the secret motive 
 of things, thinking that penetrates deepest places where 
 are the pulses of life.
 
 ii2 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 Now scholarship ought to lay these impulses bare just 
 as the physician can lay bare the seat of life in our bodies. 
 That is not scholarship which goes to work upon the mere 
 formal pedantry of logical reasoning, but that is scholar- 
 ship which searches for the heart of a man. The spirit of 
 scholarship gives us catholicity of thinking, the readiness 
 to understand that there will constantly swing into our 
 ken new items not dreamed of in our systems of philosophy, 
 not simply to draw our conclusions from the data that we 
 have had, but that all this is under constant mutation, and 
 that therefore new phases of life will come upon us and a 
 new adjustment of our conclusions will be necessary. Our 
 thinking must be detached and disinterested thinking. 
 
 The particular objection that I have to the undergraduate 
 forming his course of study on his future profession is this 
 that from start to finish, from the time he enters the uni- 
 versity until he finishes his career, his thought will be cen- 
 tred upon particular interests. He will be immersed in 
 the things that touch his profit and loss, and a man is not 
 free to think inside that territory. If his bread and butter 
 is going to be affected, if he is always thinking in the terms 
 of his own profession he is not thinking for the nation. He 
 is thinking for himself, and whether he be conscious of it 
 or not, he can never throw these trammels off. He will 
 only think as a doctor, or a lawyer, or a banker. He will 
 not be free in the world of knowledge and in the circle of 
 interests which make up the great citizenship of the coun- 
 try. It is necessary that the spirit of scholarship should 
 be a detached, disinterested spirit, not immersed in a partic- 
 ular interest. That is the function of scholarship in a coun- 
 try like ours, to supply not heat, but light, to suffuse things 
 with the calm radiance of reason, to see to it that men do 
 not act hastily, but that they act considerately, that they
 
 THE TRAINING OF INTELLECT 113 
 
 obey the truth whether they know it or not. The fault of 
 our age is the fault of hasty action, of premature judgments, 
 of a preference for ill-considered action over no action at 
 all. Men who insist upon standing still and doing a little 
 thinking before they do any acting are called reactionaries. 
 They want actually to react to a state in which they can 
 be allowed to think. They want for a little while to with- 
 draw from the turmoil of party controversy and see where 
 they stand before they commit themselves and their coun- 
 try to action from which it may not be possible to withdraw. 
 
 The whole fault of the modern age is that it applies to 
 everything a false standard of efficiency. Efficiency with 
 us is accomplishment, whether the accomplishment be by 
 just and well-considered means or not; and this standard 
 of achievement it is that is debasing the morals of our age, 
 the intellectual morals of our age. We do not stop to do 
 things thoroughly; we do not stop to know why we do 
 things. We see an error and we hastily correct it by a 
 greater error; and then go on to cry that the age is corrupt. 
 
 And so it is, gentlemen, that I try to join the function 
 of the university with the great function of the national 
 life. The life of this country is going to be revolutionized 
 and purified only when the universities of this country 
 wake up to the fact that their only reason for existing is 
 intellect, that the objects that I have set forth, so far as 
 undergraduate life is concerned, are the only legitimate 
 objects. And every man should crave for his university 
 primacy in these things, primacy in other things also if 
 they may be brought in without enmity to it, but the 
 sacrifice of everything that stands in the way of that. 
 
 For my part, I do not believe that it is athleticism which 
 stands in the way. Athletics have been associated with 
 the achievements of the mind in many a successful civiliza-
 
 ii4 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 tion. There is no difficulty in uniting vigor of body with 
 achievement of mind, but there is a good deal of difficulty 
 in uniting the achievement of the mind with a thousand 
 distracting social influences, which take up all our ambi- 
 tions, which absorb all our thoughts, which lead to all our 
 arrangements of life, and then leave the university authori- 
 ties the residuum of our attention, after we are through 
 with the things that we are interested in. We absolutely 
 changed the whole course of study at Princeton and revolu- 
 tionized the methods of instruction without rousing a ripple 
 on the surface of the alumni. They said those things are 
 intellectual, they were our business. But just as soon as we 
 thought to touch the social part of the university, there 
 was not only a ripple, but the whole body was torn to its 
 depths. We had touched the real things. These lay in 
 triumphal competition with the province of the mind, and 
 men's attention was so absolutely absorbed in these things 
 that it was impossible for us to get their interest enlisted 
 on the real undertakings of the university itself. 
 
 Now that is true of every university that I know any- 
 thing about in this country, and if the faculties in this 
 country want to recapture the ground that they have lost, 
 they must begin pretty soon, and they must go into the 
 battle with their bridges burned behind them so that it 
 will be of no avail to retreat. If I had a voice to which 
 the university men of this country might listen, that is 
 the endeavor to which my ambition would lead me to call.
 
 VIII 
 
 UNIVERSITY ATHLETICS 1 
 
 SIMON NEWCOMB 
 
 "The greatest nation is the one that can send most men 
 to the top of the Matterhorn." This reply to the question 
 which we should deem the greatest nation was probably 
 regarded by the guests who heard it as a euphonious paradox 
 rather than a serious opinion. And yet, if not taken too 
 literally, it suggests a direction in which progress is now 
 tending. With the decay of asceticism, naturally com- 
 mences the growth of the opposite idea, embodied in the 
 familiar phrases, "muscular Christianity" and "the physi- 
 cal basis of life." This idea is supported by modern physio- 
 logical investigation, which brings out in clear relief that 
 physical health and vigor are qualities to be cultivated, 
 not merely from a selfish desire for amusement and to 
 secure freedom from pain, but as a means toward the at- 
 tainment of our highest ethical ends. Experience shows 
 the general rule to be that the physically lazy man is not 
 apt to be mentally active, though the mentally active man 
 may be so absorbed in his work as to have little time or 
 energy to spend in outdoor exercise. The names of the 
 few hundred persons who since Whymper's memorable 
 and disastrous adventure have ascended the Matterhorn 
 would be more than a miscellaneous list of people endowed 
 with bodily vigor and a propensity to climb. They would 
 1 Reprinted through the courtesy of The North American Review. 
 
 "5
 
 u6 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 include a President of the United States, a goodly list of 
 leaders in science and literature, and more than a due pro- 
 portion of men who have made their mark in various fields 
 of effort. The general trend of evidence recently collected 
 by students of hygiene is toward the view that there is 
 something toxic in the air of even the best houses, and 
 that he who would command the best measure of physical 
 health must, so far as he can, live and sleep in the open air. 
 He cannot do this well unless he is in motion during most 
 of his waking hours; and in this we have a completely 
 rational incentive to bodily exercise. 
 
 Having said this by way of preface, let us proceed to our 
 task. We wish to bring about peace and amity between 
 lusty Ajax, who attends all the football games, admires 
 the manly qualities there displayed, and sees in the actors 
 the men who are to do the real work of the world and 
 wise Minerva, who has learned that brain and not muscle 
 does the world's work, and that the best physical health 
 and mental vigor are quite compatible with inability to 
 climb a hill or fight a burglar. We fancy that the goddess 
 is already beginning to ply us with questions, whether we 
 are not confounding causes and effect, whether men do not 
 play football because they are already strong and active, 
 rather than the reverse, whether the qualities they display 
 in the game are really those most required by modern 
 society, and whether Whymper would not have done as 
 good work, and Leslie Stephen become as effective a writer, 
 if neither of them had ever seen a mountain. But, with 
 all the deference due her sex, we shall ask her to postpone 
 her questions and remain a spectator while Ajax has his 
 innings. 
 
 The world, he tells us, has no need of the weakling, who 
 shrinks from personal combat and is disturbed by the
 
 UNIVERSITY ATHLETICS 117 
 
 fear of a little physical pain and discomfort. The man 
 who in the future is to win the admiration and command 
 the respect of his fellow men by his works must possess 
 the robust qualities of the body, as well as the finer quali- 
 ties of the intellect. In no way are such qualities more 
 readily acquired and displayed than in the roughest of the 
 games played by university students in intercollegiate 
 contests. The large majority of men who are to be leaders 
 in this and the next generation will be trained at colleges 
 and in universities. It is essential to their efficiency that 
 they shall not be mere scholars and book-worms, but physi- 
 cally strong and courageous, ready to sacrifice ease and 
 comfort to the exigencies of their work. Therefore, let 
 them engage in manly contests, the rougher the better. 
 
 Now, dear Ajax, I am delighted that you take this ground. 
 I take much the same view as you do, though I might state 
 our case a little differently. We wish the men of our nation 
 to be capable of carrying on great works. The best and 
 most effective work cannot be done unless the doer enjoys 
 good physical health. Human experience, as a whole, 
 shows that life and motion in the open air are among the 
 agents most conducive to vigor. Let us, therefore, culti- 
 vate this life in the nation at large, especially in that frac- 
 tion of it which is to take the lead. Open-air games are 
 an excellent means toward this end, therefore we wish to 
 encourage them. I look for your cordial assent to my state- 
 ment of the problem before us, which is to devise that 
 course of action best adapted to imbue our intellectual 
 young men with a warm love for the green fields, the blue 
 sky, and the varied beauties of nature and such a fondness 
 of physical movement that they shall look forward with 
 pleasure many months in advance to the moment when 
 they can escape from their daily routine to engage in
 
 n8 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 country walking or in mountain climbing. Let us now 
 put our heads together and map out the course of action 
 best adapted to our purpose. To do this we must begin 
 with a survey of the situation, and study the problem which 
 it offers from our point of view. 
 
 A body of several hundred young men enter college. 
 The first step in deciding how to secure them the full 
 measure of the manly qualities we admire will be to classify 
 them as to their present possession of such qualities. We 
 divide them into three groups. At the head will be the 
 vigorous and courageous young men, already possessing 
 in the highest degree the manly qualities we desire to 
 cultivate. Born of strong and healthy parents, they have 
 loved the outdoor air from childhood, and have played 
 on the teams of their respective schools till they have 
 reached the college age. If any of us can claim them as 
 children or grandchildren, we are glad to do so. 
 
 The second and much larger group will comprise a middle 
 class, possessing fair or excellent health and a due amount 
 of every manly quality, but taking no special pleasure in 
 bestowing their car-fares upon the shoemaker, more in- 
 terested in study than in sport and fonder of seeing others 
 lead the strenuous life than of leading it themselves. 
 
 The third will take in the weaklings; the men who shrink 
 from strenuous physical effort, are not strong enough to 
 engage in a rough-and-tumble game, fear they would get 
 hurt if they tried, will not incur even a slight risk of a few 
 bruises without some more serious reason than love of 
 excitement, deem it the part of wisdom to go through life 
 with a minimum of physical pain, and prefer a sphere of 
 activity in which the sacrifice of comfort will be as small 
 as possible. Perhaps many of them watch the games with 
 as much eagerness as any of their fellows and hurrah for
 
 UNIVERSITY ATHLETICS 119 
 
 their teams as loudly as their weak lungs will permit. But 
 this adds little to their physical vigor. 
 
 Having these three groups before us, the problem is so 
 to deal with and train them that, taken as a whole, the best 
 results at which we aim shall be reached. Keeping in our 
 mind's eye the respective needs of the groups, our policy 
 is obvious. The first group already possesses, in as high 
 a degree as society demands, all the manly qualities we 
 wish. It goes without saying that we need not greatly 
 concern ourselves with it. The second admits of improve- 
 ment and may therefore command a share of our atten- 
 tion. But it is the third group which stands most urgently 
 in need of our help and encouragement. One of the strong- 
 est reasons for devoting especial attention to it is that the 
 conditions of modern society are extremely favorable to 
 its increase. What would we do to-day if, like our fore- 
 fathers, we had no street-cars? An evolutionary philos- 
 opher has predicted that at some future epoch the human 
 being will be an animal unable to use his legs except to 
 mount into an automobile or incapable of chewing with 
 his own teeth. We desire to postpone this epoch, if pos- 
 sible, to some future geological age. To do this, we must 
 evidently deal with the group of university students that 
 is in most danger of being the progenitors of such an en- 
 feebled race. In a word, athletic exercises are to be pro- 
 moted with most care and attention in the third group, 
 and with less in the second, while the first may be safely 
 left to take care of itself. The ideal stage of intercollegiate 
 athletics is, then, one in which the teams are made up of 
 the weakest men in college, or at least those who were 
 weakest to begin with but have gained strength from the 
 training which the college has afforded them. 
 
 The contrast of the policy thus suggested with that at
 
 120 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 present pursued is so strong that the proposition may seem 
 as paradoxical as that of measuring national greatness by 
 ability in mountain climbing. No one goes to see a game 
 between men who have not reached the highest grade of 
 vigor, no one even invites them upon a team. Even the 
 second group is left to take care of itself, its members 
 being promoted into the first group if they choose to make 
 the necessary effort. It is to the first that public attention 
 is entirely directed. It alone wins honors and brings out 
 applause. That is to say, we have in actual operation a 
 system which trains those who do not need training, and 
 leaves those who do need it to take care of themselves, 
 without even offering them an incentive to improvement. 
 The worst outcome of the policy is not merely waste of 
 effort through exerting it where it is not needed, but the 
 actual discouragement of effort among those who most 
 need to make it. If the discouragement is not a positive 
 one, it is at least a negative factor in that it fails to offer 
 encouragement to the weak to become strong. 
 
 That a course of action seemingly adapted to the at- 
 tainment of an end should really take us further from it is 
 no new experience in human affairs. The question whether 
 this is true of our present system of intercollegiate athletics 
 is so important as to merit an inquiry how far the conten- 
 tion can be established by independent evidence, especially 
 by the opinions of impartial observers. We have two 
 sources of such opinions, the utterances of officers of our 
 universities who have observed the effect of athletics upon 
 their students and the broader experience of nations. So 
 far as the writer's observation has extended, no college or 
 university authority has claimed, as the result of his own 
 experience, that intercollegiate athletic contests stimulate 
 a personal desire for exercise among that group of students
 
 UNIVERSITY ATHLETICS 121 
 
 who most need it. For the most part, the opinions not only 
 of administrative officers, but even of teachers of athletics, 
 are toward the opposite view. It is conceded, indeed, that 
 almost the entire body of students, even those least dis- 
 posed to go through a course of physical training them- 
 selves, are much interested in the success of their college 
 team. They enjoy a healthful diversion in witnessing the 
 games. A minority say that they enjoy a certain benefit 
 from this stimulus, although the nature of the benefit is 
 not clearly stated. But no one claims to have seen evidence 
 that students in the group most in need of exercise have 
 been led to take it in consequence of the athletic contests 
 of their fellows. So far as experience has gone, the opinions 
 based on the best information tend toward the view that 
 the real wants of the weaker group have been lost from sight 
 in the excitement of preparing for and witnessing contests 
 among the stronger ones. 
 
 We now invite the reader to take a broader view of the 
 general question how far athletic contests between small 
 groups of men stimulate the love of outdoor exercise in a 
 community. The nation which in recent times has been 
 most actively interested in such contests is, no doubt, the 
 English. When physical training was introduced into our 
 own institutions of learning, our schools borrowed their 
 ideas from Rugby and other English sources, and our 
 universities borrowed from Oxford and Cambridge. That 
 athletic contests were the product of a healthy love of out- 
 door life among the English people, and not the cause of 
 that love, must be carefully borne in mind. The result is 
 that to-day the two English-speaking countries are the 
 foremost in athletic contests. On the other hand, the semi- 
 professional university athletic teams, so common in our 
 country and, in a less degree, in England, are, so far as the
 
 122 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 writer is aware, unknown in Germany. It will hardly be 
 maintained that the silly practise of duelling, which has 
 not wholly ceased in some of the German universities, is 
 in any way a substitute for intercollegiate athletic games. 
 In the common schools of the nation, physical training is 
 carefully looked after, but the system is not ours. Those 
 who need the training receive more careful attention and 
 encouragement than those who do not. The whole system 
 is devised and conducted on a rational basis, the end being 
 the physical development of the individual and not the 
 promotion of contests or other games. 
 
 It is of interest to inquire what the results of the systems 
 have been in the case of the nations in question. One re- 
 sult to which we invite attention may be only a straw, but 
 it seems very significant. The fondness of the English 
 for feats of physical endurance in mounting difficult Alpine 
 peaks has led us to regard Switzerland as the especial play- 
 ground of their nation. If this was ever true, it is not true 
 to-day. The fact is that a walker over a snow-covered 
 Alpine pass may now safely use the German language in 
 exchanging greetings with and asking the way of a fellow 
 pedestrian, with confidence that he will not be going astray 
 one time in five. But, when he reaches the luxurious 
 hotels of the valley, he may with equal confidence use the 
 English language in addressing every fellow guest he meets. 
 That the two systems have produced these two distinctly 
 opposite effects is an actual fact of personal observation. 
 That the professional climber of lofty snow-peaks may be 
 found speaking English as often as German, I cannot either 
 affirm or deny. But, if such is the case, it will only strengthen 
 our contention that the semiprofessional physical training 
 to which the English and Americans are addicted benefits 
 the few at the expense of the many who most need it.
 
 UNIVERSITY ATHLETICS 123 
 
 If the conclusion to which a careful examination of the 
 case seems to point is really correct, the ideal athletic 
 contest would be one between teams whose members were 
 chosen from men originally of the weakest class. It may 
 well be asked whether an argument in favor of such a system 
 is not futile. We know that no one but the players them- 
 selves would take any interest in such games. Then why 
 argue the point ? We do not argue it further than to show 
 that intercollegiate contests are worse than useless. If 
 we admit that the policy which supports the system fails 
 of its object because it stimulates effort where no stimulus 
 is necessary, and discourages effort where it is needful, and 
 if, on the other hand, the only reform that will lead to our 
 end is so impracticable as to seem ridiculous, the conclusion 
 is obvious. Physical development on the part of our stu- 
 dents will be best promoted by entirely abandoning inter- 
 collegiate contests and making games of strength a purely 
 local and personal affair. In other words, we must train 
 the body on the same system as we do the mind. 
 
 Having thus arranged, as we hope, a modus vivendi with 
 Ajax by showing how his end can best be attained, let 
 Minerva state her case. The development of intercol- 
 legiate athletics during the past twenty years has been so 
 striking that the thoughtful man will inquire into the in- 
 centive that lies behind it. It may well be that, in the be- 
 ginning, this came from a growing conviction of the benefits 
 of physical training to intellectual workers. But it cannot 
 be claimed that a rational conviction of this truth has been 
 a factor in the present expansion of the system. To begin 
 with the first agent: why does the vigorous and healthy 
 student of Harvard or Yale join the athletic team of his 
 institution and add to the labor of his studies the large 
 outlay of brain and nerve power required by a course of
 
 i2 4 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 physical training? Certainly not because he feels that he 
 needs the exercise, for he can supply this in a much easier 
 way and at much less expense to his daily comfort. With 
 him, the motive is the laudable one of commanding the 
 esteem of his fellows and exciting the admiration of the 
 public. For the most part, the game is not a pleasure to 
 him, but a severe strain, which he willingly undergoes in 
 order to gain his end. He is probably among the ablest 
 students of his class; but, if he devoted himself to purely 
 intellectual improvement, he would have to wait long years 
 before getting into the limelight, while in the athletic team 
 he finds himself there at once. If he is not received at home 
 as was a winner in the Olympian games, he has at least the 
 satisfaction of feeling that his friends and relatives take 
 pride in the qualities he has displayed. 
 
 If interest in the contests were confined to students and 
 their relatives, the actual situation would not have pre- 
 sented itself. Its important feature is the extraordinary 
 public interest which the games now excite, and which may 
 be fairly measured by the sums collected from gate re- 
 ceipts and other sources, the total of which would suffice 
 to pay an important part of the expenses of a university. 
 The income from gate receipts alone has been so great that 
 the problem how to dispose of it could be solved only by 
 incurring enormous outlays for expenses of all sorts. If 
 we had here a measure of public interest in the physical 
 improvement of students, the situation would at least show 
 one bright side. But it may well be questioned whether 
 this is the case, and whether the real incentive at play is 
 not as old as history the love of witnessing a combat. 
 Is it not the same impulse which gave rise to gladiatorial 
 contests in ancient Rome, to the bull-fights of Spain, to 
 the cock-fights of the English, and to the prize-fights of
 
 UNIVERSITY ATHLETICS 125 
 
 English and American pugilists; and which to-day collects 
 a crowd around two dogs fighting in the street? Is it not 
 that trait of our nature which leads to a personal squabble 
 between two legislators in the parliament of any civilized 
 country being cabled over the world with more promptness 
 than a debate on the most important subjects? Let us 
 not say that it is useless to contend against a trait so widely 
 diffused. In spite of its universality, we all admit, in our 
 sober moments, that the impulse is an ignoble one. We 
 prohibit prize-fighting by law. A modern gentleman would 
 be ashamed to join a crowd looking at a dog-fight. What- 
 ever the interest he might feel in the contest, his conscience 
 tells him that he can have no rational basis for a desire to 
 witness the scene. The older and wiser he grows the more 
 evident becomes the ignoble character of the impulse. We, 
 descendants of the Puritans, should esteem as a compliment 
 to our forebears rather, than a slur upon them, Macaulay's 
 borrowed apothegm "they opposed bear-baiting not be- 
 cause it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure 
 to the spectators." Their better nature clearly showed 
 them that, apart from the question of cruelty, it was an 
 unworthy trait of our nature which could find enjoyment 
 in the spectacle. The intercollegiate football game gives 
 an air of respectability to a spectacle which we should other- 
 wise regard as undignified. A contest between two teams 
 of professional football players would be as interesting to 
 witness as one between students. But the veneering of 
 respectability would then be wanting. 
 
 Probably the class of thinkers who, while admitting the 
 force of this argument, feel that it is useless to oppose the 
 spirit of the age may not be a small one. And yet, were 
 we to carry this idea to its extreme, we should do away 
 with one of the great functions of educational institutions
 
 126 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 which is to improve the spirit of the age. There is a wide 
 field between the policy of bringing the world at once up to 
 our standards, and leaving it entirely, to go its own way. 
 Universities and other academic institutions, being organ- 
 ized to correct what is evil in human impulses and promote 
 what is good, should not assume the position of even pas- 
 sive spectators of a movement which sets their own ideals 
 at naught. 
 
 It must be clearly understood that, in all we have said, 
 we keep in mind a comparison between two systems one 
 devoting itself, hi the German fashion, to the comparatively 
 uninteresting task of encouraging the healthy physical 
 development of all students, and the other to the promotion 
 of spectacular games. The difference between these two 
 motives is one that we are bound to recognize in the general 
 interest of morality. It is the difference between loving 
 excellence for its own sake and loving to excel others. It 
 is like the difference between self-respect as an object in 
 life and the desire to win the respect and applause of others. 
 But can we eliminate from the motives to physical train- 
 ing the desire to excel our fellows? In considering this 
 question, let us demur at the outset that a negative answer 
 would not mean that the present system must be supported. 
 We have already shown that the latter does not yield the 
 fruits we have a right to expect. We should therefore 
 abandon it, even if another way could not be found. But 
 we have only to study the facts of the case to show that 
 the better motive is not only worthy to prevail, but may 
 practically be made to prevail. We have only to substitute 
 the man himself as the standard of comparison, instead of 
 the fellow man. 
 
 There still stands in a corner of the Harvard University 
 grounds a small, low, old-fashioned brick building, offering
 
 UNIVERSITY ATHLETICS 127 
 
 in its proportions a striking contrast to the buildings of 
 to-day. It was the first gymnasium erected for the use of 
 Harvard students. In it those who aimed at increasing 
 the physical strength took as much pleasure in noting their 
 improvement every week as does the football player of 
 to-day in his contests. This continual gain, coupled with 
 the real pleasure of physical activity, which perhaps many 
 experienced there for the first time, was the sufficient motive 
 to gain the full measure of physical energy attainable by 
 the constitution of each individual student. We never 
 know how interesting the simplest exercise may be unless 
 we have had the experience. I never saw an outing more 
 enjoyed than that of a poor widow of a Tyrolese school- 
 master, who once arranged a picnic for a small party on 
 a slope of one of her native mountains. I could see nothing 
 in it but cooking and eating a meal out-of-doors instead of 
 in the house; but it gave her a pleasure and a distraction 
 which lightened her labors for days to come. In the light 
 of a modern athletic contest, the interest taken by the 
 students of forty years ago in their exercises may seem quite 
 childish. Who but a child could be amused, as students 
 then were, by seeing his fellows lean backward and walk 
 under a barrier slowly lowered day by day until it was 
 little more than knee-high ? The youth who was looking 
 forward to increasing the weight of his dumb-bells from 
 sixty to eighty pounds, who could walk to the end of a 
 vibrating spar without falling, and who was hoping soon 
 to be able to mount up the peg-studded pole while hang- 
 ing by his hands, were all interested by the sight of what 
 the others could do in these various lines. It cannot be 
 denied that all gained the greatest of the benefits that 
 come from physical exercise; and, if we would secure the 
 same advantage to our children, we can do it by inciting
 
 128 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 them to action on similar lines. Instead of each trying 
 to excel his fellows, which he knows is vain unless he is 
 one of the strongest of the class, each person must try to 
 be stronger to-day than he was yesterday. Even if we 
 cannot move every one by this motive, we shall certainly 
 move more than we do under our present system. 
 
 Let us temper a little our admiration for the manly 
 qualities displayed in an athletic contest, by recognizing 
 the confusion between cause and effect which we find in- 
 volved. Probably nearly all of our readers would share 
 with the writer the pleasure which he would feel in seeing 
 a son win a boat-race. But why? Because the winning 
 made him stronger? No, but because winning proved 
 him to be a strong man to begin with. Success was the 
 effect, not the cause, of strength. The same remark will 
 apply to the manly qualities displayed in an athletic game. 
 Psychologists will tell us that it is very doubtful whether 
 innate qualities can be improved in any great degree in 
 this way. But, apart from this, as we are now in a critical 
 mood, let us inquire whether the manly qualities at play 
 in a contest are really those which the world most needs 
 to-day and will need in the future. 
 
 It is a characteristic of human nature that the senti- 
 ments and ideas which we inherit from our ancestors may 
 continue through many generations after they have ceased 
 to be needed. It is of especial interest that such sentiments 
 are strongest in the boy, and tend to diminish with age. 
 In former times, cities, villages, nations, and empires were 
 so exposed to aggressions from their neighbors that not 
 only their prosperity, but even the lives of their people, 
 depended upon the prowess and courage of their fighting 
 population. Hence arose an admiration for these qualities, 
 which we may expect to continue, not only as long as war
 
 UNIVERSITY ATHLETICS 129 
 
 is permitted, but even after conditions are so improved that 
 no one will ever be obliged to place himself voluntarily 
 in danger for the benefit of his fellow men. Every well- 
 endowed boy of to-day admires the brave fighter as the 
 highest type of humanity and shows his budding patriotism 
 by delighting in the battles which our soldiers have won. 
 But, as he grows up, he is from time to time surprised to 
 find social regulations at seeming variance with his ideas. 
 He learns that the man who jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge, 
 or risks life and limb otherwise than in the performance 
 of the greatest public or private duty, instead of receiving 
 the reward of a hero is haled before the courts, to be dealt 
 with as an offender against the law. His traditional ideas of 
 the qualities essential in a soldier include readiness to take 
 offense and to engage in mortal combat with his personal 
 enemy. He is therefore surprised when he finds that duel- 
 ling is prohibited by the regulations governing modern 
 armies, and that the officer of to-day need not be quick 
 of temper to prove his courage. The writer was once told 
 by a distinguished officer of the past generation that it was 
 a disappointment to the average citizen when he first found 
 that the naval officer of our time was an educated gentle- 
 man, who did not interlard his conversation with sea slang. 
 As the boy grows to manhood, he finds that fear is strongest 
 in his boyhood and that physical courage is the rule and 
 not the exception among grown men. 
 
 In the same category with physical courage we may place 
 readiness to engage in personal combat. The boy who 
 possesses this quality has a decided advantage among his 
 fellows. But, as he grows older, he finds that the require- 
 ments of social life render it an undesirable quality among 
 grown men. The boy who is not ready to defend himself 
 is liable to be imposed upon by his fellows. But the grown
 
 130 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 man trusts for his protection to public opinion and to the 
 agents of the law; and, although the latter may not al- 
 ways be at hand when needed, it is not likely that an oc- 
 casion will ever arise during his life in which he will have 
 to maintain his rights in the manner employed by primi- 
 tive mankind. How much soever he would be pleased to 
 down a burglar, he might live through a score of lives with- 
 out once enjoying the opportunity. 
 
 If the argument here submitted is sound, the wisest 
 policy on the part of believers in physical training as a 
 basis of intellectual efficiency is to discourage and, if pos- 
 sible, abolish that special form of intercollegiate contests 
 which has assumed such striking proportions during the 
 past ten years. We should not lose sight of the fact that 
 the energy displayed in these contests is misdirected, and 
 that a wise adaptation of means to ends requires athletic 
 exercises to be a personal matter, in which each individual 
 shall be interested hi his own improvement rather than in 
 his ability to outdo his fellows.
 
 IX 
 
 PANEM ET CIRCENSES 1 
 
 RICHARD RICE, JR. 
 
 In one of the great American universities there used to 
 prevail a curious fashion, now abandoned, of heartening 
 the Varsity football team. Every afternoon during the 
 week or ten days before the chief contest, the whole student 
 body and a strong following of citizens marched in column 
 from the campus to attend practise. With flags and tro- 
 phies on high they paraded behind a brass band, encircled 
 the gridiron a number of times, and then spent two hours 
 on the bleachers glorying and cheering, while the evolutions 
 of the 'varsity continued. Moreover, these last exercises, 
 before the team went forth to victory or defeat, were only 
 the culmination of a season-long performance in which the 
 rest of the undergraduates appeared to have almost as 
 important a daily part as the players themselves. The 
 notion was generally encouraged that the team could do 
 nothing at practise without a crowd of vociferous admirers. 
 An undergraduate who failed to support this theory was 
 generally known as a "quitter"; and, indeed, if he wanted 
 to be thought a man of college spirit, the only obvious way 
 was to attend practise assiduously and talk about it copi- 
 ously and very little else from the first days of the sea- 
 son. The real state of the case can perhaps be judged by 
 
 1 Reprinted in part from an article in The Nation, through the courtesy 
 of The Nation, 
 
 131
 
 132 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 the fact that playing tennis or taking a country walk during 
 the Varsity practise hours was "the very worst form." 
 
 Then the university got a new president, and all this 
 changed. The new president was very popular; but he 
 played golf every afternoon himself, and believed that the 
 purpose of a university is intellect. He saw some connec- 
 tion between intellect and sport, very little between in- 
 tellect and bleachers. 
 
 Those who know American colleges throughout the land 
 have long realized that there are, in comparison to the 
 total number of students, few players of games. Especially 
 in the West sport is limited almost entirely to the so- 
 called representative teams, which represent the name of the 
 institution, but not an atmosphere of sportsmanship. At 
 the most these teams are products of the anxiety of students 
 to beat their rivals, and of an executive plan to achieve 
 in this way a necessary amount of publicity. They are 
 not products of intramural competition and of personal 
 interest in the playing of games. It appears as if the prowess 
 of the 'varsity team satisfied the athletic aspirations of 
 all the other students. 
 
 That such a condition is bad for the tone of a college not 
 everybody is ready to admit. There is an opinion that 
 because the purpose of the college is intellect and study, 
 then the more limited the athletic class the better for 
 the institution. But this is a judgment based on a mis- 
 conception of what athletics mean, a misconception fos- 
 tered by the wide-spread indifference of undergraduates to 
 the right sort of athletics. It is our general contention 
 here that an academic institution will be sounder intel-
 
 PANEM ET CIRCENSES 133 
 
 lectually if sport is prevalent or, at least, not limited to 
 the so-called " representative" few, the specialists. 
 
 This we believe to be true for two reasons. Sport within 
 the walls, popular athletic activity, offers a stimulating 
 variety of personal employment and interest, a zest for 
 living, and a means for clean physical health. Where 
 the playing of games is prevalent, the tone of the whole 
 student body is more alert, more vigorous and sane. This 
 is the obvious and positive reason. The other reason is 
 negative, and, though more difficult to grasp, is equally 
 in point. Where Varsity sport is not the outgrowth of 
 general athletic activity, or where it seems to absorb all 
 athletic enthusiasm without being productive of individual 
 sportsmanship in the rank and file of students, where it is 
 the advertisement instead of the real thing, it becomes 
 antagonistic to intellect and study, because it furnishes a 
 second-rate employment to the main body of students, 
 and a second-hand diversion. Vicarious athletics on the 
 bleachers, attending practise, "heeling the team," talking 
 athletics, breathing athletics, without some daily personal 
 realization of the matter, may well promote an aptitude 
 for mental inertia. Panem et circenses peanuts and ball 
 games ! Where the teams furnish the only games, sport 
 is merely a show. It lacks the chief effects of play. The 
 tone it lends to an institution is mainly the noise of a well- 
 drilled college yell. And it does little for the individual 
 student except that, when his team wins, his own chest 
 expansion is vicariously increased. 
 
 This latter reason is especially weighty because it de- 
 scribes the trouble not only with college athletics, but with 
 American athletics in general. It describes what is growing 
 to be our national outlook on sport, the grand-stand out- 
 look. This point of view, which college students ought
 
 134 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 not to assume but to correct, is the result of so profes- 
 sionalizing, or highly specializing, our chief games that 
 nobody but experts play them. The fact that this un- 
 doubtedly helps produce our great specialists, our winners 
 at Olympic games, is beside the present point. We may 
 have the greatest experts in the world; but as a nation 
 our interest is centred in these experts, not in the games. 
 We have become, even in our colleges, not sportsmen but 
 "fans." 
 
 Now, of course, there is plenty of room for the "fan," 
 and outside college days he is a humorous and commendable 
 institution. On sweltering afternoons in Pittsburgh or 
 Kansas City, it is entirely in keeping that he should take 
 his exercise in the shade of the grand-stand, and become, 
 by continual assistance there and by continual study of 
 the Sunday Supplement, a very great authority. But no- 
 body would dream of calling the "fan" a sportsman. He 
 is, on the contrary, only a "sport," which is a term, if 
 you will look it up in the dictionary, that means "an 
 anomaly, a divergence from the species." The "sport," 
 and especially the college "sport," is not the real thing. 
 Yet part of the perversion of our attitude toward athletics 
 comes, in this case, either from imagining that without 
 him there would be no sportsmanship at all, or if we 
 are especially obtuse from thinking that the "sport" or 
 the "fan" is himself the representative American athlete. 
 But the second case is so absurd that we already catch a 
 glimpse of the fallacy in the first. 
 
 When rightly understood, this fallacy reveals the fact, in- 
 timated before, that the grand-stand athlete is primarily not 
 the cause of our present evil situation, but rather a result. 
 He may, of course, become a positive reason for failure to 
 eradicate the cause, since he is so profitable. But the prime
 
 PANEM ET CIRCENSES 135 
 
 reason why we have not a greater number of sportsmen 
 in sport, why so few people themselves play games for the 
 fun of it, why the entertainment of the "fan," viz., high 
 specialization, is growing to be even in colleges the chief 
 consideration, is not the "fan's" fanaticism, but our na- 
 tional miscomprehension of the true spirit of play our 
 ignorance of how to keep games hi their playable form. 
 
 Think, for example, how we have improved the good 
 game of football till nobody but trained and armed spe- 
 cialists dare to play it. Englishmen had invented eminently 
 playable forms of this game, in which anybody with legs 
 and lungs might be expected to take part. Nearly every 
 English village and town, as well as the colleges, has its 
 teams for soccer and Rugby, and hundreds of Englishmen 
 are playing these two games every autumn afternoon, 
 where hundreds of Americans are only looking on. The 
 reason for this difference is not climate; it is a simpler 
 reason. We took these playable games of football and 
 reduced them, with more cleverness than foresight, to one 
 type of extreme difficulty and considerable danger. It is 
 a game that requires far more skill in leadership, in pre- 
 concerted plans and secret signals, in thorough training 
 and team-play, than any of the English games. It is, in 
 fact, a game that can be played with profit only by regularly 
 coached teams of men who enjoy constitutions that occur 
 in most families but once in several generations. It is not 
 a popular game; it is only a spectacular game. The people 
 do not play football in America. 
 
 Like Americans, in regard to most of our national sports, 
 we say: "Let George do it; we'll watch." But thus 
 specialized, with all eyes on him, George is no longer the 
 player of a game; he is a man burdened with a tremendous 
 duty, the duty of being a representative athlete. This duty
 
 136 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 has been well described by a Harvard rowing man. He 
 has put in black and white what most representative 
 athletes will admit as frankly in private conversation. 
 "The duty to get Yale beaten," says Mr. William James, 
 Jr., 1 "is just now reckoned to be the athlete's sole duty, 
 while his duty to his present and future self looms small 
 in the background, or vaguely in the middle distance. It 
 is hard lines for men who are unable to adapt themselves 
 to such a perspective, and who are made to feel ashamed 
 of this as a weakness. They bear indeed the 'athlete's 
 burden.' And there are too many such men men who 
 thoroughly dislike their work under the present extreme 
 conditions, moral as well as physical, and who do it only 
 from a vague feeling that it is 'up to them' to stake their 
 persons in the general obligation to organize victory. The 
 spirit that makes a man, when he has once undertaken a 
 thing, put it through to a finish and win out no matter 
 what it costs ... is an excellent maxim for business or 
 politics. . . . But such a maxim cannot be applied to 
 athletics. It means the death of athletics. Its place is in 
 the prize-ring or anywhere you please save in a branch of 
 activity which is essentially a recreation. The true amateur 
 athlete, the true sportsman, is one who takes up sport for 
 the fun of it and the love of it, and to whom success or 
 defeat is a secondary matter so long as the play is good." 
 Mr. James goes on to explain that rivalry is a vital element 
 of sport, but that the pleasure of doing a thing well need 
 not be spoiled by the disappointment of not doing so well 
 as the other man. "Pure rivalry is fighting, and the more 
 its part is magnified in sport the more sport takes on the 
 nature of a fight." 
 
 Do we prefer the fight to the sport ? We do, just so long 
 1 The Harvard Graduates' Magazine, December, 1903.
 
 PANEM ET CIRCENSES 137 
 
 as we are grand-stand athletes. Curiously enough, it is 
 by one of our fine sayings that we most clearly show this 
 temper: "The whole college," we say, "is back of the team." 
 In this phrase can be felt both the spirit of our students 
 and their miscomprehension of play. Being "back of the 
 team" does not mean supporting the team and its special 
 sport by general activity in that sport, which would furnish 
 resources in men for the future; it means being on the 
 bleachers at practise, and in a dozen other attitudes, all 
 non-athletic, exerting psychological influence, mental sug- 
 gestion, by talking and willing the team on to victory. 
 In this sort of enthusiasm, if there is something rather fine, 
 there is also something very futile. For while one can 
 rarely feel anything so seemingly powerful as this will of 
 a great university, as it grows during the weeks preceding 
 the final contests and asserts itself at last tensely and 
 thunderously across the field, while this undoubtedly has 
 its moral value, it is nevertheless not an expression of the 
 spirit of play. It does not arise out of personal experience 
 in the game. It is second-hand. It is largely mere 
 contagion. 
 
 What is true of football is in many colleges only less 
 true of our other representative and more playable game of 
 baseball; and, until a few years ago when the revival of 
 interest in tennis all over the land brought in a sport that 
 does not lend itself to vicarious enthusiasm, sport, outside 
 the "representative" teams, was a dead letter in many 
 of our institutions. 
 
 Tennis and golf, field and ice hockey, and some of the 
 minor sports, so called because they are not spectacular, 
 have in many places saved the spirit of play. And there 
 is just now a general movement in town and college for a 
 healthier physical life, for more outdoor activity without
 
 138 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 undue sacrifice of time. Country clubs, rowing clubs, open- 
 air gymnasiums, hockey fields, and other opportunities for 
 physical culture are increasing appropriately to the needs 
 and resources of many progressive communities where 
 the enjoyment of life has not been forgotten. But com- 
 pared with England we are still very backward. No col- 
 lege community in America has such economic facilities 
 for sport as the twenty-two colleges of Oxford, where (to 
 quote from a report), "each has its own boat-house on 
 the river for the use of its rowing men, its own athletic 
 field where are laid out a football field, a cricket field, a 
 dozen or more tennis-courts, and a club house with lockers 
 and baths." There are twenty-five hundred undergraduates 
 at Oxford, and, "it is safe to say," the report continues, 
 "that at least eighty per cent engage actively every day 
 in one or more branches of sport." x 
 
 There is no American college where the facilities are so 
 complete and arranged so economically in regard to prox- 
 imity and opportunity. At Harvard, where a larger pro- 
 portion of men regularly engage in some sport than at 
 any other very large institution, the proportion would not 
 be over one man in four. There are dozens of other in- 
 stitutions where it would not be over one in twenty, the 
 university facilities and the inclinations of the students 
 being about equally accountable in the matter. 
 
 n 
 
 A knowledge of such academic conditions, with a firm 
 belief in the value of regular sport, a knowledge that the 
 finest intellectual tone exists in the schools where the 
 
 1 L. C. Hull, in The American Oxonian, April, 1914: " Athletics at Oxford: 
 The New Rules."
 
 PANEM ET CIRCENSES 139 
 
 largest percentage of students are athletically active and 
 not in institutions where they just "come to work," a 
 belief that the body is ultimately as important as the 
 mind and that the mind is nearly always dependent on 
 the body, should lead to the means of improving, ere long, 
 the general status of college athletics. 
 
 The means are various, and, of course, largely determined 
 by local conditions. But they may be generally described 
 under two heads. Obviously there should be facilities for 
 a reasonable amount of daily sport facilities which cer- 
 tain colleges most strenuously concerned with their repre- 
 sentative teams have almost entirely neglected. Indeed 
 it is a curious reflection on the efficiency of educational 
 methods that tennis-courts adequate to a large university, 
 and handball and basket-ball areas, which can be in use 
 all winter, cost less than the housing of the smallest de- 
 partment and mean hi terms of mental efficiency far more, 
 yet are, as a rule, thought of last. Secondly, it seems as 
 if the time had come to offer some sort of official encourage- 
 ment to the general athletic prowess and physical culture 
 of individuals, and to honor with a distinction, analogous 
 to Phi Beta Kappa or Sigma Xi, the man who makes of 
 his body what the college curriculum strives to make of 
 his mind, a thing trained to be responsive and to work with 
 the smallest waste of energy. 
 
 For this purpose, it is interesting to note that there has 
 already been established in a number of universities and 
 colleges a society called Sigma Delta Psi, membership in 
 which is secured by passing a series of athletic tests that 
 involve all the chief elements of physical efficiency effort, 
 speed, endurance, co-ordination. The all-round athlete, ac- 
 cording to these tests, will be a man whose eyes, muscles, and 
 will are in excellent accord, a man capable of a great variety
 
 i 4 o COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 of physical actions which combine to a marked degree 
 strength, motor power, and skill. His physical condition 
 and ability may be the result of a slightly cultivated native 
 athletic gift, but, oftener, of thorough physical training. 
 
 This society and its purpose, being so obviously for the 
 encouragement of extensive rather than of intensive ath- 
 letics, deserve here some description. The twelve tests 
 for full standing in the society, decided on only after much 
 conferring among experts all over the country, are as 
 follows: zoo-yard run, 11% seconds; 2 20-yard low hurdles, 
 31 seconds; running high jump, 5 feet; running broad 
 jump, 17 feet; putting 1 6-pound shot, 30 feet for a man 
 weighing 160 pounds, and proportionately shorter distances 
 for men of lighter weight; pole vault, 8 feet 6 inches; 
 throwing baseball, 250 feet; punting football, 120 feet; 
 swim (for distance only), 100 yards; 2-mile run, 12 minutes 
 15 seconds; lo-mile walk, 2 hours 30 minutes; tumbling 
 (front handspring, front dive over 4-foot obstacle, hand- 
 stand maintained for 10 seconds). Full standing in the 
 society means the accomplishment, during the period of 
 matriculation, as undergraduate or graduate student, of all 
 these records, except that the man who has received the 
 Varsity letter in any sport (who is a full-fledged member 
 of one of the university teams), may substitute this letter 
 for any one requirement in the society except swimming. 
 There is a set of slightly lower records for junior standing. 
 
 At first glance these records for full standing may appear 
 extremely easy. Compared to the records of the specialists 
 they are not difficult. But to do them all, there's the 
 rub. Hundreds of people can throw a baseball two hun- 
 dred and fifty feet, swim one hundred yards, walk ten 
 miles in two hours and a half. These usually prove for 
 the aspirant the easiest tests. But now let him pick
 
 PANEM ET CIRCENSES 141 
 
 out any other three events, to complete half the total 
 number, and see how enormously the difficulty has in- 
 creased. If he is a runner, he will do the hundred yards 
 and the two-mile run, but can he do the low hurdles or 
 the broad jump, which should also be somewhat in his 
 line? The events most generally difficult are the low 
 hurdles, the broad jump, the pole vault, the two-mile 
 run, and the tumbling. For any student to accomplish 
 the whole list, whether he has a high degree of native 
 ability or not, will obviously require a considerable amount 
 and variety of training. Yet it is probable that a man of 
 first-rate physical and athletic ability should be able to 
 qualify in all the tests at the end of a single year if he so 
 desires; while any man of normal, sound physique might 
 expect to qualify, with a longer period of training, in the 
 junior standing. One hour a day, including dressing, is 
 said to be ample time to devote to the matter. 
 
 The society thus helps any student, whether or not he 
 foresees the possibility of admission to its ranks, to give 
 point and interest to his necessary daily exercise. It 
 helps to make a game out of what is often humdrum gym- 
 nasium work, to bring an amusing and not too strenuous 
 sort of competition into self-training. For there is strongly 
 in this whole idea one of the most useful elements in 
 all sport, the contest with oneself. It is the element 
 that makes golf so beneficial and so popular. Golf is 
 made up of competition and introspection. However self- 
 knowledge comes, it is undoubtedly useful; it is a satis- 
 faction to know clearly what are one's capabilities and 
 defects, where one stands among his fellows, and how to 
 improve in many specific directions. This knowledge is 
 here to be gained in interesting ways, by no means devoid 
 of a certain excitement; for, like the golfer, the student
 
 142 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 not only plays a game with himself and with the other 
 man, but with Bogey, in this case the all-round athlete. 
 
 The entrance of such influences into college life as I 
 have attempted to describe, with their emphasis on per- 
 sonal participation in sport, rather than on panem et 
 circenses, is bound to have a wholesome effect on student 
 life. Spare energies must go somewhere. We are not 
 wholly intellectual. At present the idols of undergraduate 
 ambition, the "activities" which Professor Gayley satir- 
 izes, and certain other dissipations, receive more than their 
 due. They are largely waste. They create no energy in 
 return, and intellect suffers. But with the entrance of 
 the spirit of sportsmanship into a university a great 
 storage of energy begins, and, besides this, a healthy 
 criticism of university ideals. The scholar feels it less an 
 honor to achieve learning at the expense of health, and 
 the athletic specialist, who has devoted himself to acquir- 
 ing fame in one line and who has, perhaps, like the studious 
 grind, injured his constitution, sees things in truer pro- 
 portion. The movement toward playing games and 
 toward extensive physical culture is but part of the new 
 reaction in college life from specialization toward unity, 
 proportion, and balance. The fundamental business of 
 the college is and always will be intellect, but the per- 
 sonal business of every student is to see to it that he has 
 a body which will serve intellect a business which the 
 college should facilitate and encourage, and on which it 
 might well place officially the seal of academic approval.
 
 X 
 
 IDOLS l 
 
 CHARLES MILLS GAYLEY. 
 Ephraim is joined to idols. Hosea 4 : 17 
 
 A World of Opportunity 
 
 The world was never better worth preparing for. The 
 panorama unrolled before the mind was never more 
 gorgeous: a new renaissance revealing reaches unimagined; 
 prophesying splendor unimaginable; unveiling mysteries of 
 time and space and natural law and human potency. 
 
 Archaeology uncovers with a spade the world of Ariadne 
 and of Minos, of Agamemnon and of Priam. Where 
 Jason launched the Argo, paintings are unearthed that 
 antedate Apelles. Mummied crocodiles disgorge their 
 papyri: and we read the administrative record of the 
 Ptolemies. Bacchylides breaks the silence of centuries; 
 himself Menander mounts the stage, and in no borrowed 
 Roman sock; and Aristotle reappears to shed fresh light 
 upon the constitution of the Athenians. 
 
 History, availing herself of cognate sciences, deciphers 
 documents and conditions anew; and the vision of the 
 past is reinterpreted in terms of social and economic 
 actuality. Emigrations and conquests become a modern 
 tale of commerce and industrial stress. Caesar and Agrip- 
 
 1 From "Idols of Education," in part a commencement address delivered 
 at the University of Michigan in 1909, as a valedictory to President James 
 B. Angell, then retiring after thirty-nine years of service. Reprinted 
 through the courtesy of Charles Mills Gayley and of Messrs. Doubleday, 
 Page and Company.
 
 144 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 pina, Cromwell and Marie Antoinette, are all to read 
 again; and the Bard of Venusia acquires a new and star- 
 tling modernity as the literary advance agent of a pluto- 
 cratic wine firm. As in a "glass prospective" literature is 
 viewed; and kaleidoscopic transformations of gest and 
 ballad, epic and drama, cross-sections of the crypt of 
 fiction, dazzle the eye of critic and philologist and poet. 
 
 With golden keys of psychology, history, and philology 
 the anthropologist unlocks the mind of primitive man. 
 The student of the holier things invades the Temple it- 
 self; and from day to day the sacramental doors swing 
 back on age-long galleries of worship. 
 
 Taking fresh heart of ethics, economics wears a new 
 and most seductive smile. No longer the minimizing of 
 material cost, but the maximizing of vital value, she re- 
 gards. She seeks the psychic income, the margin of leisure 
 for the soul, the margin of health for the body: the great- 
 est of national assets the true wealth of nations. To 
 the modern problems of social and political theory and of 
 jurisprudence, of municipal and national and colonial 
 administration, a similar fascination of beneficent discov- 
 ery attracts; and to that development of international 
 politics which aims at constitutional law rather than the 
 substantive private law of nations. 
 
 Geology multiplies her aeons, and astronomy her glit- 
 tering fields. "Hills peep o'er hills, and Alps on Alps" 
 of new discovered cause "arise." "The idea of the elec- 
 tron has broken the framework of the old physics to pieces, 
 has revived ancient atomistic hypotheses, and made of 
 them principles," and radio-activity "has opened to the 
 explorer a New America full of wealth yet unknown." 
 The science of the law of celestial movements has given 
 birth to the science of the substance of celestial bodies;
 
 IDOLS 145 
 
 and, with astrophysics, we study more narrowly than ever 
 our one star, and its outcasts, the planets. We wonder- 
 ingly contemplate the transport of matter from star to 
 star and from planet to planet, maybe, of life. 
 
 Geology has given birth to physiography. We pass 
 from inorganic to organic, and probe the interaction of 
 physical environment and animate nature. In evolu- 
 tionary science they are saying that new species leap into 
 being at a wave of the wand of mutation; and the war 
 between Mendelism and Darwinism wages. The knight- 
 hood of the Quest of Life enrolls in the order of psychic 
 mystery or the order of mechanism, and presses on. 
 Though neither win to the Grail, each wins nearer to its 
 law. By the delicate ministrations of surgery, life is pro- 
 longed. Immunization lifts ever higher her red cross. 
 
 Engineering advances, agriculture advances, commerce 
 expands. We compass the earth, we swim the seas, we 
 ride the air. Our voices pierce the intervals of space, and 
 our thoughts the unplumbed waves of ether. And from 
 her watch-tower scrutinizing all science, pure and applied, 
 history and art, mechanism and spirit, teleology, evolu- 
 tion the science of sciences, Divine Philosophy rounds 
 out her calm survey. Never more tempting, more vital, 
 the problem than that which she faces now; the problem 
 of the fundamental character of personality. "In the 
 light of all this evolution or mutation, what is God?" 
 she asks. "Is he, too, but a cosmic process in which we 
 assist; or an eternal standard of perfection against which 
 we measure ourselves and in terms of which we strive?" 
 
 An Indifferent Generation 
 
 The world of learning was never better worth prepar- 
 ing for. Why is it, then, that from every university in
 
 146 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 the land, and from every serious journal, there goes up 
 the cry, "Our young people were never more indifferent." 
 
 How many nights a week does the student spend in 
 pursuits non-academic; how great a proportion of his 
 days? What with so-called "college activities," by which 
 he must prove his allegiance to the university, and social 
 functions by which he must recreate his jaded soul, no 
 margin is left for the one and only college activity which 
 is study. Class meetings, business meetings, committee 
 meetings, editorial meetings, football rallies, baseball 
 rallies, pyjama rallies, vicarious athletics on the bleachers, 
 garrulous athletics in the dining-room and parlor and on 
 the porch, rehearsals of the glee club, rehearsals of the 
 mandolin club and of the banjo, rehearsals for dramatics 
 (a word to stand the hair on end), college dances and class 
 banquets, fraternity dances and suppers, preparations for 
 the dances and banquets, more committees for the prepa- 
 rations; a running up and down the campus for ephemeral 
 items for ephemeral articles in ephemeral papers, a solicit- 
 ing of advertisements, a running up and down for subscrip- 
 tions to the dances and the dinners, and the papers and 
 the clubs; a running up and down in college politics, 
 making tickets, pulling wires, adjusting combinations, 
 canvassing for votes canvassing the girls for votes, 
 spending hours at sorority houses for votes spending 
 hours at sorority houses for sentiment; talking rubbish 
 unceasingly, thinking rubbish, revamping rubbish rub- 
 bish about high jinks, rubbish about low, rubbish about 
 rallies, rubbish about pseudo-civic honor, rubbish about 
 girls; what margin of leisure is left for the one activity 
 of the college, which is study? 
 
 In Oxford and Cambridge, than which no universities 
 have turned out finer, cleaner, more manly, more highly
 
 IDOLS 147 
 
 cultivated, and more practically trained scholars, states- 
 men, empire builders, or more generous enthusiasts for 
 general athletics and clean sport in Oxford and Cam- 
 bridge the purpose is study, and the honors are paid to the 
 scholar. There are no undergraduate newspapers, no 
 class meetings, no college politics, no football rallies, no 
 business managers, no claques for organized applause, no 
 yell leaders, no dances, no social functions of the mass. 
 Social intercourse during term between the sexes is strictly 
 forbidden; and it is a matter of college loyalty to live up 
 to the rule. Of non-academic activities there are but two 
 athletics and conversation. They are not a function 
 but a recreation; nor are they limited to specialists whose 
 reputation is professed. Young Oxonians, in general, 
 lead a serene and undistracted, but rich and wholesome 
 life. They cultivate athletics because each is an active 
 devotee of some form of sport. And conversation in 
 junior commons, in the informal clubs, in study or in 
 tutor's room it is an education, a passion, an art. 
 
 The Bandar-log 
 
 A foreigner, attending, in an American university, an 
 assembly of student speakers, will be justified in con- 
 cluding that the university exists for nothing but so-called 
 "student activities." The real purpose of the university 
 will not be mentioned, for usually our undergraduates 
 live two lives distinct; one utterly non-academic. The 
 non-academic is for them the real; the scholarly an en- 
 croachment. The student who regards the scholarly as 
 paramount is deficient in "allegiance to his university." 
 
 Athletics, meanwhile, which should play a necessary 
 part in the physical, and therefore spiritual, development 
 of all students, are relegated to ten per cent of the stu-
 
 i 4 8 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 dents. The rest assist on the bleachers. The ninety 
 per cent are killing two birds with one stone. They are 
 taking second-hand exercise; and, by their grotesque and 
 infantile applause, they are displaying what they call 
 their "loyalty." 
 
 Those noctes ccenceque deum of history and poetry and 
 philosophical discourse, to the memory of which the older 
 generation reverts with rapture, have faded in this light 
 of common day. In the hurry of mundane pursuit the 
 student rarely halts to read, rarely to consider; rarely to 
 discuss the concerns of the larger life. 
 
 President Schurman has recently said that there has 
 been no decline of scholarship in the people's universities; 
 but only in the older institutions of the East, to which 
 rich parents send their sons with the view to the advan- 
 tages of social position; and that in the people's univer- 
 sities the social standing of students has never cut so 
 much figure as scholarship. The assurance is comfortable; 
 but it obscures the issue. If by "social standing" the 
 president of Cornell means position in the coteries of 
 wealth, fashion, conviviality, it may be that "social stand- 
 ing" bulks larger in the older university than in the uni- 
 versity of the state. But the fact is that, in student 
 esteem, East and West, social standing means no such 
 thing: it means the position achieved by prominence in 
 non-academic or "campus" activities. And in student 
 esteem such prominence cuts a far more important figure 
 than that of either wealth or scholarship. Such promi- 
 nence has been gaining ground for fifteen years. So long 
 as the social pressure of the university is toward mun- 
 dane pursuits, it will be vain to expect the student to 
 achieve distinction in that for which the university stands. 
 
 This false standard of prominence, with its feigned
 
 IDOLS 149 
 
 allegiance to the interests of the university, has produced 
 that class of student which, adapting from the Jungle 
 Book, I call the "Bandar-log." 
 
 Mowgli had never seen an Indian city before, and though this 
 was almost a heap of ruins it seemed very wonderful and splen- 
 did. Some king had built it long ago on a little hill. . . . The 
 Bandar-logs called the place their city, and pretended to despise 
 the jungle people because they lived in the forest. And yet they 
 never knew what the buildings were made for nor how to use them. 
 They would sit in circles in the hall of the King's council-chamber 
 and scratch for fleas and pretend to be men; or they would run in 
 and out of the roofless houses and collect pieces of plaster and 
 old bricks in the corner and forget where they had hidden them, 
 and fight and cry in scuffling crowds, and then break off to play 
 up and down the terraces of the King's garden, where they would 
 shake the rose-trees and the oranges in sport to see the fruit and 
 flowers fall. They explored all the passages and dark tunnels in 
 the palace, and the hundreds of little dark rooms, but they never 
 remembered what they had seen and what they had not, and so 
 drifted about in ones and twos or crowds, telling one another that 
 they were doing as men did or shouting "there are none in the 
 jungle so wise and good and clever and strong and gentle as the 
 Bandar-log." Then they would tire and seek the treetop, hoping 
 the jungle people would notice them . . . and then they joined 
 hands and danced about and sang their foolish songs. "They 
 have no law," said Mowgli to himself, "no hunting call and no 
 leaders." . . . And he could not help laughing when they cried, 
 "we are great, we are free, we are wonderful ... we all say so, 
 and so it must be true . . . you shall carry our words back to the 
 jungle people that they may notice us in future." 
 
 The Bandar-log is with us. Busy to no purpose, imi- 
 tative, aimless; boastful but unreliant; inquisitive but 
 quickly losing his interest; fitful, inconsequential, plati- 
 tudinous, forgetful; noisy, sudden, ineffectual. The Ban- 
 dar-log must go. 
 
 Because it is the spirit of the American university to 
 prove the things that are new, to hold fast that which is
 
 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 good; to face abuses boldly and to reform them; because 
 I am the son of an American university, and have grown 
 in her teaching, and in my observation of many univer- 
 sities and many schools, to regard the evil as transitory 
 and abuses as remediable, I have ventured in this essay 
 to set down simply, and with a frankness that I trust 
 may not be misconstrued, some of the vagaries of our 
 educational system at the present time, and some of the 
 reasons for their existence. For I am sure that in the rec- 
 ognition of the cause is to be found the means of cure. 
 
 The Man of Argos 
 
 Another class also of students makes, though uncon- 
 sciously, for the wane of general scholarship the class 
 of the prematurely vocational. It is not futile, like that 
 of the Bandar-log, but earnest, and with a definite end in 
 view. Still, unwisely guided to immature choice and 
 hasty study of a profession, it not only misses the liberal 
 equipment necessary for the ultimate mastery of life, but 
 indirectly diverts the general scope of education from its 
 true ideals. 
 
 The spirit of the Renaissance, says a modern historian 
 of poetry, is portrayed in a picture by Moretto. It is of a 
 young Venetian noble. "The face is that of one in the 
 full prime of life and of great physical strength; very 
 handsome, heavy and yet tremulously sensitive, the large 
 eyes gazing at some thing unseen, and seeming to dream 
 of vastness. On his bonnet is a golden plaque with three 
 words of Greek inscribed on it lov \iav 7ro0w "Oh, but 
 I am consumed with excess of desire." 
 
 If this be the motto of the Renaissance, what shall we 
 say is the motto of to-day? Not lov \iav TTO&U; no creed 
 of vague insatiable yearning, but rather the Trdvra avrixa
 
 IDOLS 151 
 
 iroOo) the lust for immediate and universal possession: 
 as who should cry, 
 
 "I want no little here below, 
 I want it all, and quick." 
 
 In one of his odes, Pindar, lauding the older times when 
 the Muse had not yet learned to work for hire, breaks off 
 "but now she biddeth us observe the saying of the Man of 
 Argos, 'Money maketh man' " xprj/jLaTa, xpij/jiar avijp. 
 If not money, then sudden success that is the criterion 
 of the Man of Argos to-day. 
 
 The Bandar-log and the Argive retard the advance of 
 scholarship in the university; and not the university alone 
 is responsible for their presence, but the elementary school 
 as well. 
 
 [NOTE. There follow here two sections treating of the lax conditions 
 in our secondary schools consequent on the overwhelming demand for 
 education. This "advance of democracy," a splendid sign itself, creates 
 new ideals, but it also sets up certain idols in the university.] 
 
 Idols of the Tribe 
 
 Roger Bacon, long ago, and after him, Francis, in their 
 quest of truth, perceived that there were four grounds of 
 human error. Of these the first is "the false appearances 
 that are imposed upon us by the general nature of the 
 mind" of man. The mind is always prone to accept the 
 affirmative or active as proof rather than the negative; 
 so that if you hit the mark a few times you forget the many 
 that you missed it. You worship Neptune for the numer- 
 ous pictures in his temple of those that escaped shipwreck, 
 but you omit to ask: "Where are the pictures of those 
 that were drowned?" And because you are mentally 
 equipped to seek uniformity, you ascribe to "Nature a 
 greater equality and uniformity than is, in truth." In
 
 152 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 this refractory mind of man "the beams of things" do not 
 "reflect according to their true incidence"; hence our 
 fundamental superstitions, fallacies which Francis Bacon 
 calls the Idols, or delusions, of the Race, or Tribe. 
 
 In matters of education the dearest delusion of our 
 Tribe to-day is that the university should reflect the public. 
 This is the idol of the Popular Voice. Once the university 
 is joined to this idol, it is joined to all the idols of that 
 Pantheon. It accepts the fallacy that our sons and 
 daughters are equally gifted and zealous, and hence that 
 each must profit by the higher education. This is the 
 idol of Inevitable Grace; that is, of grace innate and ir- 
 resistible by which every youth is predestinated to intel- 
 lectual life, "without any foresight of faith or good works, 
 or perseverance in either of them, or any other thing in 
 the creature, as conditions or causes moving him there- 
 unto," or anything in the tutor. No Calvinistic favor 
 this, by which some are chosen while others are ordained to 
 ignorance and sloth; but a favor not contemplated in the 
 Westminster Confession, by which all are elect and all, 
 in due season, effectually called to learning, and quick- 
 ened and renewed by the Spirit of Zeal, and so enabled 
 to answer this call and embrace the Grace offered and 
 conveyed in it. The university is then joined to the idol 
 of Numbers. And of these worships the shibboleth is 
 "mediocrity": for to raise the standard of university re- 
 quirement is to discriminate between candidates, and to 
 doubt Inevitable Grace; while to decrease the bloated 
 registration is a sacrilege which Numbers will avenge with 
 curtailment of prosperity. And the ritual march is by 
 lock-step: for tests, competition, and awards are alien to 
 the American spirit thus misrepresented save athletic 
 competition: that is a divine exception.
 
 IDOLS 153 
 
 The university is next joined to the idol of Quick Re- 
 turns. It accepts the fallacy of utilitarian purpose; and 
 hence, that a profession must be chosen prematurely and 
 immaturely entered; and hence that studies are not for 
 discipline or intrinsic worth, but from the primary school 
 to the Ph.D., for purely vocational value; and hence that 
 every incipient vocation from making toy boats and paper 
 mats to making tariffs and balloons must find its place in 
 every school and in every grade for every man or woman 
 child. And since the man or woman child may find per- 
 chance a vocation in the liberal arts, the child must be- 
 stride both horses, though with the usual aerial result. 
 
 And our students they worship the idol of Incidental 
 Issues: the fallacy that the aim of the university is deliber- 
 ately to make character. As if character were worth 
 anything without mind, and were any other, as President 
 Wilson has wisely said, than the by-product of duty 
 performed; or that the duty of the student were any 
 other than to study. They accept the fallacy that the 
 gauge of studentship is popularity, and that popularity 
 during academic years is to be won by hasty achievement 
 and the babbling strenuous life, by allegiance to a per- 
 verted image of the Alma Mater, by gregariousness, by 
 playing at citizenship. Of this popularity the outward 
 and visible index is mundane prominence and the lightly 
 proffered laurel of the campus. 
 
 I said that the dearest delusion of the Tribe was that 
 the university should reflect the public. But this delusion 
 requires also that our universities be continually figuring in 
 the public eye. So far as such activity is necessary to the 
 building up of schools, and to the education of a community 
 to an understanding of the ideals and the needs of higher
 
 154 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 education, it is not only legitimate but laudable. But 
 when, under the name of university extension, our uni- 
 versities undertake the higher education of the periphery, 
 in dilettantism or methods of research, they run the risk 
 of university attenuation and simulation. When, not 
 dispassionately, they figure in public issues, they lay 
 themselves open to the charge of partisanship. Time was 
 when academic etiquette forbade the university professor 
 to participate in political contests. Now there are who 
 dare to inject the university into prejudiced affairs; even 
 into criminal cases pending in the courts. They have 
 joined themselves to the idol of Parade. 
 
 To this same false policy of figuring in the public eye 
 our universities bow when they sanction amphitheatrical 
 spectacles, at some of which money enough passes hands 
 to build a battleship. Football is a most desirable recrea- 
 tion, and a moral and physical discipline of value to every 
 able-bodied boy. Nay, more, athletics, physical sport, and 
 emulation are necessary to spiritual health. Even excess 
 in them is better, it has often been said, than that moral 
 evil should abound. But is the alternative necessary? 
 Must we have either gladiators or degenerates? Need 
 athletics be professionalized, be specialized? Do special- 
 ized athletics benefit the morals of the ninety and nine 
 who don't play? Do they not rather spoil sport, detract 
 from time and tendency to exercise for oneself? Do 
 they not substitute hysteria for muscular development? 
 Football is a noble game; but it is with disgust that one 
 views its degeneration from an exhilarating pastime for 
 all into a profession of the few, a source of newspaper 
 notoriety, a cause of extravagance, orgiastic self-abandon- 
 ment, and educational shipwreck. This comes of bowing 
 to the idol of Parade.
 
 IDOLS 155 
 
 The university should not adopt the idols of the com- 
 munity. It should set the ideals. The American uni- 
 versity is, and ever must be, democratic. It offers edu- 
 cation to all who can profit by it. But education itself 
 is aristocratic of the best and for the best. The educated 
 are those who, having striven, are the chosen few. 
 
 Idols of the Academic Market-Place 
 
 Bewildered by the advance of democracy, educators 
 not only have accepted fallacies of the Tribe, but have at- 
 tempted to justify their acceptance by further fallacies of 
 their own based some upon a juggling with words, others 
 upon the authority of some Pundit (living or dead), others 
 upon individual ignorance and conceit. These are, re- 
 spectively, what Bacon has called the idols of the Market- 
 place, the idols of the Lecture-room or Theatre, the idols 
 of the Cave. 
 
 Idols of the Market-place are fallacies proceeding from 
 the misconception of words. Since we educators are an 
 imitative race, many of these misconceptions have been 
 fostered or confirmed by the influence of some great name, 
 Rousseau, or Froebel, or Jacotot, or another; that is to 
 say, by authority. Consequently, the idols of the Market- 
 place are sometimes also idols of the Theatre, which is to 
 say, of the Lecture-room, or master by whose words we 
 swear. 
 
 "He that will write well in any tongue must follow this 
 counsel of Aristotle, to speak as the common people speak, 
 but think as wise men think." From disregard of such 
 counsel, many of our academic fallacies concerning educa- 
 tion have arisen. We are involved in questions and dif- 
 ferences because we have followed the false appearances
 
 156 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 of words, instead of setting down in the beginning the 
 definitions in which as wise men we may concur. In 
 what definition of education is it possible that wise men 
 may concur? All will agree that education is a process: 
 not that of play, nor yet of work, but of artistic activity. 
 Play meanders pleasantly toward an external end of no 
 significance. Work drives straight for an end beyond, that 
 is pleasant because of its worth. The process of Art has 
 an end but not beyond. Its end is in itself; and it is 
 pleasurable in its activity because its true activity is a 
 result. From play the artistic process differs because its 
 end is significant; from work it differs because its end is 
 in its activity, and because its activity possesses the plea- 
 sure of worth. It is like religion: a process continually 
 begun, and in its incompleteness complete. Its ideal is 
 incapable of temporal fulfilment, but still, in each moment 
 of development, it is spiritually perfect. 
 
 Education, then, is an art the art of the individual 
 realizing himself as a member of a society whose taber- 
 nacle is here, but whose home is a house not built with 
 hands. Education is the process of knowing the best, 
 enjoying the best, producing the best in knowledge, con- 
 duct, and the arts. Realization, expression of self, physical, 
 intellectual, social, emotional, is its means and end. It 
 implies faith in a moral order and continuing process, of 
 which it is itself an integral and active part. 
 
 It is remarkable with what persistency the race of edu- 
 cators has indulged extremes. There has been accorded 
 from time to time an apostle of the golden mean. But 
 his disciples have ever proceeded to the ulterior limit: 
 Among the ancients to the pole of self-culture or to the 
 pole of uncultured service; in the Dark Ages to the ideal of 
 the cloister or the ideal of the castle, to joyless learning
 
 IDOLS 157 
 
 or to feudal, and feminine, approval; in the Middle Ages 
 to the bigotry of the obscurantist or the allurement of the 
 material; in the Renaissance to contempt of the ancients 
 or to neo-paganism to theological quibbles or to Cas- 
 tiglione, to the bonfire of vanities or the carnal songs of 
 Lorenzo; in the Reformation, to compulsory discipline or 
 the apotheosis of natural freedom; in the succeeding age 
 to pedantry or deportment. Still later appear Rousseau 
 and the philanthropists with the "return to nature," the 
 worship of individuality, the methods of coddling and 
 play; and then Jacotot and the equal fitness of all for 
 higher education, the exaggeration of inductive methods, 
 the chimerical equivalence of studies. And now has ar- 
 rived the subordination of the art to pure profit, or vaude- 
 ville, or seminars for sucklings. 
 
 Always the fallacy of the extreme ! If education is not 
 for the fit it must be for imbeciles; if not for culture, for 
 Mammon; if not for knowledge, for power; if not of in- 
 cunabula, of turbines and limericks; if not by the cat-o'- 
 nine-tails, by gum-drops. Why the mean of a Plato or a 
 Quintilian could not obtain the sanity of Melanchthon 
 or Erasmus, of Sturm or Comenius, of Milton or the Port 
 Royal, of Pestalozzi, Friedrich Wolf, or Thomas Arnold, 
 Heaven only knows, which in its unscrutable purpose has 
 permitted the race of educators, following the devices of 
 their own heart, to go astray after idols. 
 
 To know, to feel, to do aright and best, each and all 
 in all and each of the fields of human activity, that is the 
 art of education. 
 
 If we exaggerate one of these functions to the neglect 
 of the rest, our education is no longer an ideal but an idol. 
 If, forgetting that education is an art, we try to make of
 
 158 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 it a pleasant meandering, we set up the idol of Play. If, 
 forgetting that the activity of Art is of intrinsic value 
 and delight, we glorify the empty means and merit of 
 drudgery, then we have erected the idol of Pedantry: 
 we beat the air for discipline, shuffle in and out of corners 
 the straw of arid learning, and choke ourselves with the 
 dust of our own sweeping. If we fix our eyes on the cash, 
 we bow to the tribal idol of Quick Returns. If we forget 
 that, as an art, there is for education a progressive ideal 
 and a law of progress, too, we bow to the idol of Caprice. 
 We fall not only into the fallacies already enumerated 
 but into the fallacy of the equivalence of studies, the 
 fallacy of shifting, the fallacy of dissipation. In Art each 
 factor is in relation to the rest, and all to the whole: we 
 proceed fatuously upon the assumption that the part is 
 the whole; and therefore each part equal to each; and 
 therefore one study as good as any other. In Art the 
 means, which is the end, is relative, progressive: we as- 
 sume comfortably that studies are independent of each 
 other, that we can take any in any order, pass an examina- 
 tion and have done. In Art the end, which is the means, 
 is absolute and self -referred and ideal: we figure that, 
 by dissipating our energies, we shall happen to hit, here 
 and now, the ideal. Disregarding the progressive unity 
 of education we bow to Caprice. 
 
 The idols of the academic market-place to-day are 
 Caprice and Quick Returns and Play, and, in unexpected 
 corners, Pedantry, against which in reaction these three 
 were set up. Of these, Quick Returns was borrowed 
 from the tribe; and not alone, for of this subvention are 
 other tribal gods too numerous to rehearse specially 
 Numbers and Inevitable Grace and Incidental Issues and 
 Parade. To one or other of these false worships are due
 
 IDOLS 159 
 
 the wane of scholarship, the utilitarian tendency, the 
 excrescence of non-academic activities, the neglected dis- 
 cipline in our education at the present time. 
 
 [NOTE. "The blame," Professor Gayley continues, "is by no means 
 wholly to be laid at the door of the university. It attaches, also, to our 
 system of elementary education." The book discusses other idols of educa- 
 tion, and then goes on to propose remedies. " Some of the remedies have 
 already been implied. Others, knowing that it is not the better part of 
 valor, I shall venture to suggest. Having heard that Ephraim was joined 
 to his idols, I have not let him alone. I have committed the indiscretion 
 of writing a book about him a Zoar of a book, to be sure; but then, I 
 have laid myself open. If now, in addition, I write of ideals, what will 
 Ephraim call them?" Part of the answer to this question is, as Professor 
 Gayley says, already in our minds. His complete discussion of it could be 
 read with great interest by all college men and women.]
 
 XI 
 
 AN ADDRESS TO FRESHMEN 1 
 
 WILLIAM DE WITT HYDE 
 
 A graduate of Christ Church College, Oxford, recently 
 remarked to me: "One can have such a good time at 
 Oxford, that it's a great waste of opportunity to work." 
 The humor of this remark, however, was turned to pathos 
 when his wife told me sadly that: "An Oxford training does 
 not fit a man for anything. There is absolutely nothing 
 my husband can do"; and then I learned that the only 
 thing this thirty-year-old husband and father had ever 
 done was to hold a sinecure political office, which he lost 
 when the Conservative party went out of power; and the 
 only thing he ever expected to do was to loaf about summer 
 resorts in summer, and winter resorts in winter, until his 
 father should die and leave him the estate. Fortunately, 
 American society does not tolerate in its sons so worthless 
 a career; yet the philosophy of college life which was behind 
 that worthlessness, translated into such phrases as "Don't 
 let your studies interfere with your college life," and "C 
 is a gentleman's grade," is coming to prevail in certain 
 academic circles in America. 
 
 Put your studies first; and that for three reasons: First, 
 you will have a better time in college. Hard work is a 
 necessary background for the enjoyment of everything else. 
 
 1 Delivered to the incoming class at Bowdoin College in 1908. Reprinted 
 through the courtesy of William De Witt Hyde and of The Independent. 
 
 1 60
 
 AN ADDRESS TO FRESHMEN 161 
 
 Second, after the first three months you will stand better 
 with your fellows. At first there will appear to be cheaper 
 roads to distinction, but their cheapness is soon found out. 
 Scholarship alone will not give you the highest standing 
 with your fellows; but you will not get their highest re- 
 spect without showing that you can do well something that 
 is intellectually difficult. Third, your future career depends 
 upon it. On a little card, five by eight inches, every grade 
 you get is recorded. Four or eight years hence, when you 
 are looking for business or professional openings, that 
 record will, to some extent, determine your start in life. 
 But you are making a more permanent record than that 
 upon the card; you are writing in the nerve-cells and films 
 of your brain habits of accuracy, thoroughness, order, 
 power, or their opposites; and twenty, thirty, forty years 
 hence that record will make or mar your success in what- 
 ever you undertake. 
 
 Make up your minds, then, to take a rank of A in some 
 subject, at least B in pretty nearly everything, and nothing 
 lower than C in anything. If you ask why I place such 
 stress upon these letters let me tell you what they mean. 
 
 A means that you have grasped a subject; thought about 
 it; reacted upon it; made it your own; so that you can give 
 it out again with the stamp of your individual insight 
 upon it. 
 
 B means that you have taken it in, and can give it out 
 again in the same form in which it came to you. In de- 
 tails, what you say and write sounds like what the A man 
 says and writes; but the words come from the book or the 
 teacher, not from you. No B man can ever make a scholar; 
 he will be a receiver rather than a giver, a creature rather 
 than a creator, to the end of his days. 
 
 C means the same as B, only that your second-hand
 
 i6 2 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 information is partial and fragmentary, rather than com- 
 plete. 
 
 D means that you have been exposed to a subject often 
 enough and long enough to leave on the plate of your 
 memory a few faint traces, which the charity of the ex- 
 aminer is able to identify. Poor and pitiful as such an 
 exhibition is, we allow a limited number of D's to count 
 toward a degree. 
 
 E means total failure. Two E's bring a letter to your 
 parents, stating that if the college were to allow you to 
 remain longer, under the impression that you are getting 
 an education, it would be receiving money under false 
 pretenses. 
 
 Please keep these definitions in mind, and send a copy 
 to your parents for reference when the reports come home. 
 
 Whatever you do, do not try to cheat in examinations 
 or written work. If you succeed, you write fraud, fraud, 
 fraud, all over your diploma; and if you get caught there 
 will be no diploma for you. 
 
 Your own interest and taste are so much more impor- 
 tant factors than any cut-and-dried scheme of symmetrical 
 development, that we leave you free to choose your studies. 
 At the same time, the subjects open to choice are so limited 
 by conflict of hours, and the requirement of a major and 
 minors, that you can hardly miss the two essentials of wise 
 choice; the consecutive, prolonged, concentrated pursuit 
 of one or two main subjects, and some slight acquaintance 
 with each of the three great human interests language 
 and literature, mathematics and science, and history, 
 economics, and philosophy. 
 
 Having put study first, college life is a close second. 
 College is a world artificially created for the express pur- 
 pose of your development and enjoyment. You little
 
 AN ADDRESS TO FRESHMEN 163 
 
 dream how rich and varied it is. I was myself surprised 
 in looking over the record of the last senior class to find 
 that the members of that class won four hundred and 
 sixty-seven kinds of connection and distinction, of sufficient 
 importance to be printed in the official records of college 
 achievement. On the other hand, I was a little disap- 
 pointed to find that one hundred and forty-two of these 
 distinctions were taken by five men, showing that the law, 
 "to him that hath shall be given," applies in college as 
 well as out of it. Some colleges, like Wellesley, have at- 
 tempted to limit the number of these non-academic points 
 an individual student may win. 
 
 Aim to win some of these distinctions, but not too many. 
 Concentrate on a few for which you care most. Do you 
 ask what they are? 
 
 There are eight fraternities, each with its own chapter 
 house and its committees for the control of its own affairs; 
 twelve sectional clubs, covering most of the geographical 
 divisions from which students come; a Christian Associ- 
 ation, of which a majority of the students, and a much 
 larger majority of the best fellows among them, are mem- 
 bers, and which every one of you ought to join who wants 
 help and support in living the life you know you ought to 
 live, and is willing to give help and support to others in 
 living the Christian life in college. There is the Deutscher 
 Verein, the Rumania, the History Club, the Good Gov- 
 ernment Club, the Chemical Club, devoted to their special 
 subjects; the Ibis, which represents the combination of 
 high scholarship and good fellowship, and whose members, 
 together with the undergraduate members of Phi Beta 
 Kappa, are ex-officio members of the Faculty Club, a 
 literary club composed of members of the faculty and 
 their families.
 
 164 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 There is the Interfraternity Council; the Athletic Coun- 
 cil; the Debating Council; there is the Glee Club; the 
 Mandolin Club; the Chapel Choir; the College Band; the 
 Dramatic Club; the Press Club; the Republican Club; the 
 Democratic Club. We have three papers the Quill for 
 literature, the Orient for college news, the Bugle for college 
 records and college humor. 
 
 Besides, there are public functions with their manage- 
 ment and their subjects; rallies, banquets, assemblies, Ivy 
 Day, Class Day, college teas, fraternity house parties. 
 
 Last, but not least, come athletics baseball, football, 
 track, tennis, hockey, fencing, gymnastics, cross-country 
 running, with first and second teams, captains, managers, 
 and assistant managers. 
 
 With all these positions open to you in these four years, 
 every one of you ought to find opportunity for association 
 with your fellows in congenial pursuits, and training in 
 leadership and responsibility in the conduct of affairs. 
 
 As I said at the outset, taken apart from study these 
 things are trivial, and absorption in them amounts to little 
 more than mental dissipation; but taken in their proper 
 relation to study, which is your main purpose here, the 
 social experience and capacity for leadership they give 
 are so valuable that if you take no responsible and effec- 
 tive part in them, you miss the pleasantest, and in some 
 respects the most profitable, part of what the college offers 
 you. 
 
 I suppose I ought to say a word about college tempta- 
 tions, though the man who enters heartily into his studies 
 and these college activities will not be much troubled by 
 them. That is the case with nine-tenths of the men who 
 come here. But in every class there is a weaker five or ten 
 per cent, and I suppose this class of 1912 is no exception.
 
 AN ADDRESS TO FRESHMEN 165 
 
 I suppose there are half a dozen of you who are already 
 addicted to vicious practises, and half a dozen more weak 
 fellows, who are only waiting for some one to show them 
 the ways before they fall into them. I do not know yet 
 who you are; but within three months everybody here will 
 know. Then we shall first do our best to change your 
 plans; and if that fails, we shall promptly ask you to with- 
 draw. You all know what these temptations are: they are 
 the temptations of youth everywhere smoking, drinking, 
 gambling, and licentiousness. 
 
 To begin with the least serious. There is nothing in- 
 trinsically evil in the inhalation and exhalation of smoke. 
 Among mature men, some are seriously injured by it; 
 some apparently suffer little harm. Almost all youth of 
 your age are seriously injured by it. 
 
 In the first place, it weakens your heart and makes 
 your nerves unsteady. In the second place, it destroys 
 your power of mental concentration and makes you 
 scatter-brained. These evils are generally recognized. 
 The most serious consequence is not so well understood. 
 The habitual smoker tends to become content with him- 
 self as he is; he ceases to wrestle earnestly with moral and 
 spiritual problems; falls out of the struggle to be con- 
 tinually rising to heights hitherto unattained. For the 
 man who has attained his moral growth (if such there are) 
 it is not so serious; but for the youth of eighteen or twenty 
 it means arrested spiritual development, and an easy- 
 going compromise instead of the more strenuous ideals. 
 As you go up in a college class, the proportion of smokers 
 falls; as you go down, it rises. While the college does not 
 make smoking directly a subject of discipline, it is no mere 
 coincidence that nineteen out of every twenty students 
 whom we send away for either low scholarship or bad con-
 
 i66 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 duct are inveterate smokers. If you train for an athletic 
 team, you have to stop smoking while training; if you are 
 in the most earnest training for life, you will leave it off 
 altogether. 
 
 Drinking, however excusable a consolation for hard- 
 worked men of meagre mental and social resources, is in- 
 excusable in young men with such a wealth of physical, 
 intellectual, and social stimulus about them as college life 
 affords. All the fraternities, of their own accord, exclude 
 it from their chapter houses. Any student who injures 
 himself or others by this abuse is liable to be requested to 
 leave college in consequence. 
 
 Gambling is so utterly inconsistent with the purpose 
 for which you come here, and, when once started, spreads 
 so insidiously, that we always remove a student from col- 
 lege as soon as we discover that he is addicted to the 
 practise. 
 
 Licentiousness involves such a hardening of the heart of 
 the offender, such an antisocial attitude toward its vic- 
 tims, and brings such scandal on the institution, that 
 "notorious and evil livers" in this respect are quietly, but 
 firmly, removed at the end of an early year or term. 
 
 In dealing with these offenses, we hold no legal trial; we 
 offer no formal proof of specific acts; we do not always 
 succeed in convincing either students or parents of the 
 justice of our action. In a little community like this, 
 where everybody is intensely interested in everybody 
 else, we know with absolute certainty; and, while we can- 
 not always make public the nature and source of our knowl- 
 edge, we act upon that knowledge. If this seems arbi- 
 trary, if any one of you does not wish to take his chance 
 of summary dismissal, without formal proof of specific 
 charges, on any of these grounds, he would do well to with-
 
 AN ADDRESS TO FRESHMEN 167 
 
 draw voluntarily at the outset. This is our way of dealing 
 with these matters, and you have fair warning in advance. 
 Such is college work; college life; college temptation. 
 A million dollars in buildings and equipment; another 
 million of endowment; the services of a score of trained, 
 devoted teachers; the fellowship of hundreds of alumni, 
 fellow students and younger brothers who will follow in 
 the years to come; the name and fame, the traditions and 
 influence of this ancient seat of learning; the rich and 
 varied physical, intellectual, and social life among your- 
 selves; all are freely yours on the single condition that you 
 use them for your own good, and to the harm of no one else.
 
 XII 
 
 JOHN HENRY NEWMAN 
 I 
 
 It were well if the English, like the Greek language, 
 possessed some definite word to express, simply and gen- 
 erally, intellectual proficiency or perfection, such as 
 " health," as used with reference to the animal frame, and 
 "virtue," with reference to our moral nature. I am not 
 able to find such a term; talent, ability, genius, belong 
 distinctly to the raw material, which is the subject-matter, 
 not to that excellence which is the result of exercise and 
 training. When we turn, indeed, to the particular kinds 
 of intellectual perfection, words are forthcoming for our 
 purpose, as, for instance, judgment, taste, and skill; yet 
 even these belong, for the most part, to powers or habits 
 bearing upon practise or upon art, and not to any per- 
 fect condition of the intellect, considered in itself. Wis- 
 dom, again, is certainly a more comprehensive word 
 than any other, but it has a direct relation to conduct, 
 and to human life. Knowledge, indeed, and science 
 express purely intellectual ideas, but still not a state 
 or quality of the intellect; for knowledge, in its ordinary 
 sense, is but one of its circumstances, denoting a posses- 
 sion or a habit; and science has been appropriated to 
 
 1 From The Idea of a University, part I, discourse VI. 
 1 68
 
 KNOWLEDGE AND LEARNING 169 
 
 the subject-matter of the intellect, instead of belonging 
 in English, as it ought to do, to the intellect itself. The 
 consequence is that, on an occasion like this, many words 
 are necessary, in order, first, to bring out and convey 
 what surely is no difficult idea in itself, that of the 
 cultivation of the intellect as an end; next, in order to 
 recommend what surely is no unreasonable object; and 
 lastly, to describe and make the mind realize the particular 
 perfection in which that object consists. Every one knows 
 practically what are the constituents of health or of virtue, 
 and every one recognizes health and virtue as ends to be 
 pursued; it is otherwise with intellectual excellence, and 
 this must be my excuse if I seem to any one to be be- 
 stowing a good deal of labor on a preliminary matter. 
 
 In default of a recognized term, I have called the per- 
 fection or virtue of the intellect by the name of philos- 
 ophy, philosophical knowledge, enlargement of mind, 
 or illumination; terms which are not uncommonly given 
 to it by writers of this day: but, whatever name we be- 
 stow on it, it is, I believe, as a matter of history, the 
 business of a university to make this intellectual culture 
 its direct scope, or to employ itself in the education of 
 the intellect, just as the work of a hospital lies in heal- 
 ing the sick or wounded, of a riding or fencing school 
 or of a gymnasium in exercising the limbs, of an alms- 
 house in aiding and solacing the old, of an orphanage 
 in protecting innocence, of a penitentiary in restoring 
 the guilty. I say, a university, taken in its bare idea, 
 and before we view it as an instrument of the church, 
 has this object and this mission; it contemplates neither 
 moral impression nor mechanical production; it professes 
 to exercise the mind neither in art nor in duty; its func- 
 tion is intellectual culture; here it may leave its scholars,
 
 170 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 and it has done its work when it has done as much as this. 
 It educates the intellect to reason well in all matters, to 
 reach out toward truth, and to grasp it. 
 
 II 
 
 This, I said in my foregoing discourse, was the object 
 of a university, viewed in itself, and apart from the Cath- 
 olic Church, or from the state, or from any other power 
 which may use it; and I illustrated this in various ways. 
 I said that the intellect must have an excellence of its 
 own, for there was nothing which had not its specific 
 good; that the word "educate" would not be used of in- 
 tellectual culture, as it is used, had not the intellect had 
 an end of its own; that, had it not such an end, there 
 would be no meaning in calling certain intellectual exer- 
 cises "liberal," in contrast with "useful," as is commonly 
 done; that the very notion of a philosophical temper 
 implied it, for it threw us back upon research and sys- 
 tem as ends in themselves, distinct from effects and works 
 of any kind; that a philosophical scheme of knowledge, or 
 system of sciences, could not, from the nature of the case, 
 issue in any one definite art or pursuit as its end; and 
 that, on the other hand, the discovery and contemplation 
 of truth, to which research and systematizing led, were 
 surely sufficient ends, though nothing beyond them were 
 added, and that they had ever been accounted sufficient 
 by mankind. 
 
 Here, then, I take up the subject; and, having deter- 
 mined that the cultivation of the intellect is an end distinct 
 and sufficient in itself, and that, so far as words go, it 
 is an enlargement or illumination, I proceed to inquire 
 what this mental breadth, or power, or light, or philoso-
 
 KNOWLEDGE AND LEARNING 171 
 
 phy consists in. A hospital heals a broken limb or cures 
 a fever: what does an institution effect which professes 
 the health, not of the body, not of the soul, but of the 
 intellect? What is this good, which in former times, as 
 well as our own, has been found worth the notice, the ap- 
 propriation, of the Catholic Church? 
 
 I have then to investigate, in the discourses which 
 follow, those qualities and characteristics of the intellect 
 in which its cultivation issues or rather consists; and, 
 with a view of assisting myself in this undertaking, I 
 shall recur to certain questions which have already been 
 touched upon. These questions are three, viz.: the re- 
 lation of intellectual culture, first, to mere knowledge; 
 secondly, to professional knowledge; and thirdly, to re- 
 ligious knowledge. In other words, are acquirements and 
 attainments the scope of a university education? or expert- 
 ness in particular arts and pursuits? or moral and religious 
 proficiency? or something besides these three? These 
 questions I shall examine in succession, with the purpose 
 I have mentioned; and I hope to be excused if in this 
 anxious undertaking I am led to repeat what, either in 
 these discourses or elsewhere, I have already put upon 
 paper. And first, of Mere Knowledge, or learning, and its 
 connection with intellectual illumination or philosophy. 
 
 Ill 
 
 I suppose the primd facie view which the public at 
 large would take of a university, considering it as a place 
 of education, is nothing more or less than a place for 
 acquiring a great deal of knowledge on a great many 
 subjects. Memory is one of the first developed of the 
 mental faculties; a boy's business when he goes to school
 
 172 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 is to learn, that is, to store up things in his memory. For 
 some years his intellect is little more than an instrument 
 for taking in facts, or a receptacle for storing them; he 
 welcomes them as fast as they come to him; he lives on 
 what is without; he has his eyes ever about him; he has a 
 lively susceptibility of impressions; he imbibes informa- 
 tion of every kind; and little does he make his own in a 
 true sense of the word, living rather upon his neighbors 
 all around him. He has opinions, religious, political, and 
 literary, and, for a boy, is very positive in them and sure 
 about them; but he gets them from his schoolfellows, or 
 his masters, or his parents, as the case may be. Such as 
 he is in his other relations, such also is he in his school 
 exercises; his mind is observant, sharp, ready, retentive, 
 he is almost passive in the acquisition of knowledge. I 
 say this in no disparagement of the idea of a clever boy. 
 Geography, chronology, history, language, natural his- 
 tory, he heaps up the matter of these studies as treasures 
 for a future day. It is the seven years of plenty with him : 
 he gathers in by handfuls, like the Egyptians, without 
 counting; and though, as time goes on, there is exercise 
 for his argumentative powers in the elements of mathe- 
 matics, and for his taste in the poets and orators, still, 
 while at school, or at least till quite the last years of his 
 time, he acquires, and little more; and when he is leaving 
 for the university he is mainly the creature of foreign in- 
 fluences and circumstances, and made up of accidents, 
 homogeneous or not, as the case may be. Moreover, the 
 moral habits, which are a boy's praise, encourage and as- 
 sist this result; that is, diligence, assiduity, regularity, 
 dispatch, persevering application; for these are the direct 
 conditions of acquisition, and naturally lead to it. Ac- 
 quirements, again, are emphatically producible, and at a
 
 KNOWLEDGE AND LEARNING 173 
 
 moment; they are a something to show, both for master 
 and scholar; an audience, even though ignorant them- 
 selves of the subjects of an examination, can comprehend 
 when questions are answered and when they are not. 
 Here again is a reason why mental culture is in the minds 
 of men identified with the acquisition of knowledge. 
 
 The same notion possesses the public mind, when it 
 passes on from the thought of a school to that of a uni- 
 versity: and with the best of reasons so far as this, that 
 there is no true culture without acquirements, and that 
 philosophy presupposes knowledge. It requires a great 
 deal of reading, or a wide range of information, to war- 
 rant us in putting forth our opinions on any serious sub- 
 ject; and without such learning the most original mind 
 may be able indeed to dazzle, to amuse, to refute, to per- 
 plex, but not to come to any useful result or any trust- 
 worthy conclusion. There are, indeed, persons who profess 
 a different view of the matter, and even act upon it. 
 Every now and then you will find a person of vigorous 
 or fertile mind, who relies upon his own resources, despises 
 all former authors, and gives the world, with the utmost 
 fearlessness, his views upon religion, or history, or any 
 other popular subject. And his works may sell for a while; 
 he may get a name in his day; but this will be all. His 
 readers are sure to find in the long run that his doctrines 
 are mere theories, and not the expression of facts, that they 
 are chaff instead of bread, and then his popularity drops as 
 suddenly as it rose. 
 
 Knowledge, then, is the indispensable condition of ex- 
 pansion of mind and the instrument of attaining to it; 
 this cannot be denied, it is ever to be insisted on; I begin 
 with it as a first principle; however, the very truth of 
 it carries men too far, and confirms to them the notion
 
 174 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 that it is the whole of the matter. A narrow mind is 
 thought to be that which contains little knowledge; and 
 an enlarged mind, that which holds a great deal; and 
 what seems to put the matter beyond dispute is the fact 
 of the great number of studies which are pursued in a 
 university, by its very profession. Lectures are given on 
 every kind of subject; examinations are held; prizes 
 awarded. There are moral, metaphysical, physical pro- 
 fessors; professors of languages, of history, of mathe- 
 matics, of experimental science. Lists of questions are 
 published, wonderful for their range and depth, variety 
 and difficulty; treatises are written, which carry upon their 
 very face the evidence of extensive reading or multifarious 
 information; what, then, is wanting for mental culture to 
 a person of large reading and scientific attainments ? What 
 is grasp of mind but acquirement ? Where shall philosoph- 
 ical repose be found but in the consciousness and en- 
 joyment of large intellectual possessions? 
 
 And yet this notion is, I conceive, a mistake, and my 
 present business is to show that it is one, and that the end 
 of a liberal education is not mere knowledge, or knowl- 
 edge considered in its matter; and I shall best attain my 
 object by actually setting down some cases, which will 
 be generally granted to be instances of the process of en- 
 lightenment or enlargement of mind, and others which 
 are not; and thus, by the comparison, you will be able 
 to judge for yourselves, gentlemen, whether knowledge, 
 that is, acquirement, is after all the real principle of the 
 enlargement, or whether that principle is not rather some- 
 thing beyond it.
 
 KNOWLEDGE AND LEARNING 175 
 
 IV 
 
 For instance, 1 let a person, whose experience has hith- 
 erto been confined to the more calm and unpretending 
 scenery of these islands, whether here or in England, go 
 for the first time into parts where physical nature puts 
 on her wilder and more awful forms, whether at home or 
 abroad, as into mountainous districts; or let one, who 
 has ever lived in a quiet village, go for the first time to a 
 great metropolis then I suppose he will have a sensation 
 which perhaps he never had before. He has a feeling not 
 in addition or increase of former feelings, but of some- 
 thing different in its nature. He will perhaps be borne 
 forward, and find for a time that he has lost his bearings. 
 He has made a certain progress, and he has a consciousness 
 of mental enlargement; he does not stand where he did, he 
 has a new centre, and a range of thoughts to which he was 
 before a stranger. 
 
 Again, the view of the heavens which the telescope 
 opens upon us, if allowed to fill and possess the mind, 
 may almost whirl it round and make it dizzy. It brings 
 in a flood of ideas, and is rightly called an intellectual 
 enlargement, whatever is meant by the term. 
 
 And so again, the sight of beasts of prey and other 
 foreign animals, their strangeness, the originality (if I 
 may use the term) of their forms and gestures and habits 
 and their variety and independence of each other, throw 
 us out of ourselves into another creation, and as if under 
 another Creator, if I may so express the temptation which 
 may come on the mind. We seem to have new faculties, 
 
 J The pages which follow are taken almost verbatim from the author's 
 1 4th (Oxford) University Sermon, which, at the time of writing this dis- 
 course, he did not expect ever to reprint.
 
 176 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 or a new exercise for our faculties, by this addition to 
 our knowledge; like a prisoner, who, having been accus- 
 tomed to wear manacles or fetters, suddenly finds his arms 
 and legs free. 
 
 Hence physical science generally, in all its departments, 
 as bringing before us the exuberant riches and resources, 
 yet the orderly course, of the universe, elevates and excites 
 the student, and at first, I may say, almost takes away his 
 breath, while in time it exercises a tranquillizing influence 
 upon him. 
 
 Again, the study of history is said to enlarge and en- 
 lighten the mind, and why? Because, as I conceive, it 
 gives it a power of judging of passing events, and of all 
 events, and a conscious superiority over them, which 
 before it did not possess. 
 
 And in like manner, what is called seeing the world, 
 entering into active life, going into society, travelling, 
 gaining acquaintance with the various classes of the 
 community, coming into contact with the principles and 
 modes of thought of various parties, interests, and races, 
 their views, aims, habits and manners, their religious 
 creeds and forms of worship gaining experience how 
 various yet how alike men are, how low-minded, how 
 bad, how opposed, yet how confident in their opinions; 
 all this exerts a perceptible influence upon the mind, 
 which it is impossible to mistake, be it good or be it bad, 
 and is popularly called its enlargement. 
 
 And then again, the first time the mind comes across 
 the arguments and speculations of unbelievers, and feels 
 what a novel light they cast upon what he has hitherto 
 accounted sacred; and still more, if it gives in to them 
 and embraces them, and throws off as so much prejudice 
 what it has hitherto held, and, as if waking from a dream,
 
 KNOWLEDGE AND LEARNING 177 
 
 begins to realize to its imagination that there is now no 
 such thing as law and the transgression of law, that sin 
 is a phantom and punishment a bugbear, that it is free 
 to sin, free to enjoy the world and the flesh; and still further, 
 when it does enjoy them, and reflects that it may think 
 and hold just what it will, that "the world is all before it 
 where to choose," and what system to build up as its 
 own private persuasion; when this torrent of wilful thoughts 
 rushes over and inundates it, who will deny that the fruit 
 of the tree of knowledge, or what the mind takes for 
 knowledge, has made it one of the gods, with a sense of 
 expansion and elevation an intoxication in reality, still, 
 so far as the subjective state of the mind goes, an illumina- 
 tion? Hence the fanaticism of individuals or nations 
 who suddenly cast off their Maker. Their eyes are opened; 
 and, like the judgment-stricken king in the tragedy, they 
 see two suns and a magic universe, out of which they 
 look back upon their former state of faith and innocence 
 with a sort of contempt and indignation, as if they were 
 then but fools and the dupes of imposture. 
 
 On the other hand, religion has its own enlargement, 
 and an enlargement, not of tumult, but of peace. It is 
 often remarked of uneducated persons, who have hitherto 
 thought little of the unseen world, that, on their turning 
 to God, looking into themselves, regulating their hearts, 
 reforming their conduct, and meditating on death and 
 judgment, heaven and hell, they seem to become, in 
 point of intellect, different beings from what they were. 
 Before, they took things as they came, and thought no 
 more of one thing than another. But now every event 
 has a meaning; they have their own estimate of whatever 
 happens to them; they are mindful of times and seasons, 
 and compare the present with the past; and the world,
 
 1 78 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 no longer dull, monotonous, unprofitable, and hopeless, 
 is a various and complicated drama, with parts and an 
 object, and an awful moral. 
 
 Now from these instances, to which many more might 
 be added, it is plain, first, that the communication of 
 knowledge certainly is either a condition or the means 
 of that sense of enlargement or enlightenment, of which 
 at this day we hear so much in certain quarters: this 
 cannot be denied; but next, it is equally plain that such 
 communication is not the whole of the process. The 
 enlargement consists, not merely in the passive reception 
 into the mind of a number of ideas hitherto unknown to 
 it, but in the mind's energetic and simultaneous action 
 upon and toward and among those new ideas, which are 
 rushing in upon it. It is the action of a formative power, 
 reducing to order and meaning the matter of our acquire- 
 ments; it is a making the objects of our knowledge sub- 
 jectively our own, or, to use a familiar word, it is a di- 
 gestion of what we receive, into the substance of our 
 previous state of thought; and without this no enlarge- 
 ment is said to follow. There is no enlargement, unless 
 there be a comparison of ideas one with another, as they 
 come before the mind, and a systematizing of them. We 
 feel our minds to be growing and expanding then, when 
 we not only learn, but refer what we learn to what we know 
 already. It is not the mere addition to our knowledge 
 that is the illumination; but the locomotion, the move- 
 ment onward, of that mental centre to which both what 
 we know and what we are learning, the accumulating mass 
 of our acquirements, gravitates. And therefore a truly
 
 KNOWLEDGE AND LEARNING 179 
 
 great intellect, and recognized to be such by the common 
 opinion of mankind, such as the intellect of Aristotle, or 
 of St. Thomas, or of Newton, or of Goethe (I purposely 
 take instances within and without the Catholic pale, 
 when I would speak of the intellect as such), is one which 
 takes a connected view of old and new, past and present, 
 far and near, and which has an insight into the influence 
 of all these one on another; without which there is no whole, 
 and no centre. It possesses the knowledge, not only of 
 things, but also of their mutual and true relations; knowl- 
 edge, not merely considered as acquirement, but as phi- 
 losophy. 
 
 Accordingly, when this analytical, distributive, har- 
 monizing process is away, the mind experiences no en- 
 largement, and is not reckoned as enlightened or com- 
 prehensive, whatever it may add to its knowledge//For 
 instance, a great memory, as I have already said, does not 
 make a philosopher, any more than a dictionary can be 
 called a grammar. //There are men who embrace in their 
 minds a vast mul{&flude of ideas, but with little sensibility 
 about their real relations toward each other. These may 
 be antiquarians, annalists, naturalists; they may be 
 learned in the law; they may be versed in statistics; they 
 are most useful in their own place; I should shrink from 
 speaking disrespectfully of them; still, there is nothing in 
 such attainments to guarantee the absence of narrowness 
 of mind. If they are nothing more than well-read men, 
 or men of information, they have not what specially de- 
 serves the name of culture of mind, or fulfils the type of 
 liberal education. 
 
 In like manner, we sometimes fall in with persons who 
 have seen much of the world, and of the men who, in 
 their day, have played a conspicuous part in it, but who
 
 i8o COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 generalize nothing, and have no observation, in the true 
 sense of the word. They abound in information in detail, 
 curious and entertaining, about men and things; and, 
 having lived under the influence of no very clear or settled 
 principles, religious or political, they speak of every one 
 and every' thing only as so many phenomena, which are 
 complete in themselves and lead to nothing, not dis- 
 cussing them, or teaching any truth, or instructing the 
 hearer, but simply talking. No one would say that these 
 persons, well informed as they are, had attained to any 
 great culture of intellect or to philosophy. 
 
 The case is the same still more strikingly where the 
 persons in question are beyond dispute men of inferior 
 powers and deficient education. Perhaps they have 
 been much in foreign countries, and they receive, in a 
 passive, otiose, unfruitful way, the various facts which are 
 forced upon them there. Seafaring men, for example, 
 range from one end of the earth to the other; but the 
 multiplicity of external objects, which they have encoun- 
 tered, forms no symmetrical and consistent picture upon 
 their imagination; they see the tapestry of human life, 
 as it were, on the wrong side, and it tells no story. They 
 sleep, and they rise up, and they find themselves, now in 
 Europe, now in Asia; they see visions of great cities and 
 wild regions; they are in the marts of commerce, or amid 
 the islands of the South; they gaze on Pompey's Pillar, 
 or on the Andes; and nothing which meets them carries 
 them forward or backward, to any idea beyond itself. 
 Nothing has a drift or relation; nothing has a history or 
 a promise. Everything stands by itself, and comes and 
 goes in its turn, like the shifting scenes of a show, which 
 leave the spectator where he was. Perhaps you are near 
 such a man on a particular occasion, and expect him to
 
 KNOWLEDGE AND LEARNING 181 
 
 be shocked or perplexed at something which occurs; 
 but one thing is much the same to him as another, or, if 
 he is perplexed, it is as not knowing what to say, whether 
 it is right to admire, or to ridicule, or to disapprove, 
 while conscious that some expression of opinion is ex- 
 pected from him; for in fact he has no standard of judg- 
 ment at all, and no landmarks to guide him to a conclusion. 
 Such is mere acquisition, and, I repeat, no one would 
 dream of calling it philosophy. 
 
 VI 
 
 Instances, such as these, confirm, by the contrast, the 
 conclusion I have already drawn from those which pre- 
 ceded themy/That only is true enlargement of mind 
 which is the power of viewing many things at once as 
 one whole, of referring them severally to their true place 
 in the universal system, of understanding their respective 
 values, and determining their mutual dependence /Thus 
 is that form of universal knowledge, of which I have on 
 a former occasion spoken, set up in the individual intel- 
 lect, and constitutes its perfection. Possessed of this 
 real illumination, the mind never views any part of the 
 extended subject-matter of knowledge without recollect- 
 ing that it is but a part, or without the associations which 
 spring from this recollection. It makes everything in 
 some sort lead to everything else; it would communicate 
 the image of the whole to every separate portion, till that 
 whole becomes in imagination like a spirit, everywhere 
 pervading and penetrating its component parts, and giving 
 them one definite meaning. Just as our bodily organs, 
 when mentioned, recall their function in the body, as the 
 word "creation" suggests the Creator, and "subjects" a
 
 i8 2 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 sovereign, so, in the mind of the philosopher, as we are 
 abstractedly conceiving of him, the elements of the phys- 
 ical and moral world, sciences, arts, pursuits, ranks, offices, 
 events, opinions, individualities, are all viewed as one, with 
 correlative functions, and as gradually by successive com- 
 binations converging, one and all, to the true centre. 
 
 To have even a portion of this illuminative reason and 
 true philosophy is the highest state to which nature can 
 aspire in the way of intellect; it puts the mind above 
 the influences of chance and necessity, above anxiety, 
 suspense, unsettlement, and superstition, which is the lot 
 of the many. Men, whose minds are possessed with 
 some one object, take exaggerated views of its importance, 
 are feverish in the pursuit of it, make it the measure of 
 things which are utterly foreign to it, and are startled 
 and despond if it happens to fail them. They are ever 
 in alarm or in transport. Those, on the other hand, who 
 have no object or principle whatever to hold by, lose their 
 way, every step they take. They are thrown out, and do 
 not know what to think or say, at every fresh juncture; 
 they have no view of persons, or occurrences, or facts, 
 which come suddenly upon them, and they hang upon the 
 opinion of others, for want of internal resources. But the 
 intellect, which has been disciplined to the perfection of 
 its powers, which knows, and thinks while it knows, which 
 has learned to leaven the dense mass of facts and events 
 with the elastic force of reason, such an intellect cannot 
 be partial, cannot be exclusive, cannot be impetuous, can- 
 not be at a loss, cannot but be patient, collected, and 
 majestically calm, because it discerns the end in every be- 
 ginning, the origin in every end, the law in every inter- 
 ruption, the limit in each delay; because it ever knows 
 where it stands, and how its path lies from one point to
 
 KNOWLEDGE AND LEARNING 183 
 
 another. It is the rerpdyuvos of the Peripatetic, and has 
 the "nil admirari" of the Stoic, 
 
 "Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, 
 Atque metus omnes, et inexorabile fatum 
 Subjecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari." 
 
 There are men who, when in difficulties, originate at the 
 moment vast ideas or dazzling projects; who, under the 
 influence of excitement, are able to cast a light, almost 
 as if from inspiration, on a subject or course of action 
 which comes before them; who have a sudden presence of 
 mind equal to any emergency, rising with the occasion, 
 and an undaunted magnanimous bearing, and an energy 
 and keenness which is but made intense by opposition. 
 This is genius, this is heroism; it is the exhibition of a 
 natural gift, which no culture can teach, at which no 
 [institution can aim; here, on the contrary, we are con- 
 \cerned, not with mere nature, but with training and 
 teaching. That perfection of the intellect, which is the 
 result of education, and its beau ideal, to be imparted 
 to individuals in their respective measures, is the clear, 
 calm, accurate vision and comprehension of all things, 
 as far as the finite mind can embrace them, each in its 
 place, and with its own characteristics upon it. It is 
 almost prophetic from its knowledge of history; it is 
 almost heart-searching from its knowledge of human 
 nature; it has almost supernatural charity from its free- 
 dom from littleness and prejudice; it has almost the re- 
 pose of faith, -because nothing can startle it; it has almost 
 the beauty and harmony of heavenly contemplation, so 
 intimate is it with the eternal order of things and the 
 music of the spheres.
 
 184 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 VII 
 
 And now, if I may take for granted that the true and 
 adequate end of intellectual training and of a university 
 is not learning or acquirement, but rather, is thought 
 or reason exercised upon knowledge, or what may be 
 called philosophy, I shall be in a position to explain the 
 various mistakes which at the present day beset the sub- 
 ject of university education. 
 
 I say, then, if we would improve the intellect, first of 
 all, we must ascend; we cannot gain real knowledge on 
 a level; we must generalize, we must reduce to method, 
 we must have a grasp of principles, and group and shape 
 our acquisitions by means of them. It matters not 
 whether our field of operation be wide or limited; in every 
 case, to command it, is to mount above it. Who has 
 not felt the irritation of mind and impatience created by 
 a deep, rich country, visited for the first time, with winding 
 lanes, and high hedges, and green steeps, and tangled 
 woods, and everything smiling indeed, but in a maze? 
 The same feeling comes upon us in a strange city, when we 
 have no map of its streets. Hence you hear of practised 
 travellers, when they first come into a place, mounting 
 some high hill or church tower, by way of reconnoitring 
 its neighborhood. In like manner, you must be above 
 your knowledge, not under it, or it will oppress you; and 
 the more you have of it, the greater will be the load. The 
 learning of a Salmasius or a Burman, unless you are its 
 master, will be your tyrant. "Imperat aut servit"; if 
 you can wield it with a strong arm, it is a great weapon; 
 
 otherwise, 
 
 "Vis consili expers 
 Mole ruit sui."
 
 KNOWLEDGE AND LEARNING 185 
 
 You will be overwhelmed, like Tarpeia, by the heavy 
 wealth which you have exacted from tributary generations. 
 Instances abound; there are authors who are as point- 
 less as they are inexhaustible in their literary resources. 
 They measure knowledge by bulk, as it lies in the rude 
 block, without symmetry, without design. How many 
 commentators are there on the classics, how many on 
 Holy Scripture, from whom we rise up, wondering at the 
 learning which has passed before us, and wondering why 
 it passed ! How many writers are there of ecclesiastical 
 history, such as Mosheim or Du Pin, who, breaking up 
 their subject into details, destroy its life, and defraud us 
 of the whole by their anxiety about the parts! The 
 sermons, again, of the English divines in the seventeenth 
 century, how often are they mere repertories of miscel- 
 laneous and officious learning ! Of course Catholics also 
 may read without thinking; and, in their case, equally as 
 with Protestants, it holds good, that such knowledge is 
 unworthy of the name, knowledge which they have not 
 thought through, and thought out. Such readers are 
 only possessed by their knowledge, not possessed of it; 
 nay, in matter of fact they are often even carried away by 
 it, without any volition of their own. Recollect, the 
 memory can tyrannize as well as the imagination. De- 
 rangement, I believe, has been considered as a loss of con- 
 trol over the sequence of ideas. The mind, once set in 
 motion, is henceforth deprived of the power of initiation, 
 and becomes the victim of a train of associations, one 
 thought suggesting another, in the way of cause and 
 effect, as if by a mechanical process, or some physical 
 necessity. No one, who has had experience of men of 
 studious habits, but must recognize the existence of a 
 parallel phenomenon in the case of those who have over-
 
 i86 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 stimulated the memory. In such persons reason acts al- 
 most as feebly and as impotently as in the madman; once 
 fairly started on any subject whatever, they have no 
 power of self-control; they passively endure the succession 
 of impulses which are evolved out of the original exciting 
 cause; they are passed on from one idea to another and 
 go steadily forward, plodding along one line of thought 
 in spite of the amplest concessions of the hearer, or wan- 
 dering from it in endless digression in spite of his remon- 
 strances. Now, if, as is very certain, no one would envy 
 the madman the glow and originality of his conceptions, 
 why must we extol the cultivation of that intellect, which is 
 the prey, not indeed of barren fancies but of barren facts, 
 of random intrusions from without, though not of morbid 
 imaginations from within? And in thus speaking, I am 
 not denying that a strong and ready memory is in itself 
 a real treasure; I am not disparaging a well-stored mind, 
 though it be nothing besides, provided it be sober, any 
 more than I would despise a bookseller's shop: it is of 
 great value to others, even when not so to the owner. 
 Nor am I banishing, far from it, the possessors of deep 
 and multifarious learning from my ideal university; they 
 adorn it in the eyes of men; I do but say that they consti- 
 tute no type of the results at which it aims; that it is no 
 great gain to the intellect to have enlarged the memory 
 at the expense of faculties which are indisputably higher. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Nor indeed am I supposing that there is any great 
 danger, at least in this day, of overeducation; the danger 
 is on the other side. I will tell you, gentlemen, what has 
 been the practical error of the last twenty years, not to
 
 KNOWLEDGE AND LEARNING 187 
 
 load the memory of the student with a mass of undigested 
 knowledge, but to force upon him so much that he has 
 rejected all. It has been the error of distracting and 
 enfeebling the mind by an unmeaning profusion of sub- 
 jects; of implying that a smattering in a dozen branches 
 of study is not shallowness, which it really is, but en- 
 largement, which it is not; of considering an acquaintance 
 with the learned names of things and persons, and the 
 possession of clever duodecimos, and attendance on elo- 
 quent lecturers, and membership with scientific institu- 
 tions, and the sight of the experiments of a platform and 
 the specimens of a museum, that all this was not dissipa- 
 tion of mind, but progress. All things now are to be 
 learned at once, not first one thing, then another, not one 
 well, but many badly. Learning is to be without exer- 
 tion, without attention, without toil; without grounding, 
 without advance, without finishing. There is to be nothing 
 individual in it; and this, forsooth, is the wonder of the 
 age. What the steam-engine does with matter, the print- 
 ing-press is to do with mind; it is to act mechanically, 
 and the population is to be passively, almost unconsciously 
 enlightened, by the mere multiplication and dissemination 
 of volumes. Whether it be the schoolboy, or the school- 
 girl, or the youth at college, or the mechanic in the town, 
 or the politician in the senate, all have been the victims 
 in one way or other of this most preposterous and per- 
 nicious of delusions. Wise men have lifted up their voices 
 in vain; and at length, lest their own institutions should 
 be outshone and should disappear in the folly of the hour, 
 they have been obliged, as far as they could with a good 
 conscience, to humor a spirit which they could not with- 
 stand, and make temporizing concessions at which they 
 could not but inwardly smile.
 
 i88 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 It must not be supposed that, because I so speak, there- 
 fore I have some sort of fear of the education of the peo- 
 ple: on the contrary, the more education they have, the 
 better, so that it is really education. Nor am I an enemy 
 to the cheap publication of scientific and literary works, 
 which is now in vogue: on the contrary, I consider it a 
 great advantage, convenience, and gain; that is, to those 
 to whom education has given a capacity for using them. 
 Further, I consider such innocent recreations as science 
 and literature are able to furnish will be a very fit occu- 
 pation of the thoughts and the leisure of young persons, 
 and may be made the means of keeping them from bad 
 employments and bad companions. Moreover, as to that 
 superficial acquaintance with chemistry, and geology, and 
 astronomy, and political economy, and modern history, 
 and biography, and other branches of knowledge, which 
 periodical literature and occasional lectures and scientific 
 institutions diffuse through the community, I think it 
 a graceful accomplishment, and a suitable, nay, in this 
 day a necessary accomplishment, in the case of educated 
 men. Nor, lastly, am I disparaging or discouraging the 
 thorough acquisition of any one of these studies, or deny- 
 ing that, as far as it goes, such thorough acquisition is 
 a real education of the mind. All I say is, call things by 
 their right names, and do not confuse together ideas 
 which are essentially different. A thorough knowledge of 
 one science and a superficial acquaintance with many, 
 are not the same thing; a smattering of a hundred things 
 or a memory for detail is not a philosophical or com- 
 prehensive view. /Recreations are not education; accom- 
 plishments are not education, f Bo not say, the people 
 must be educated, when, after all, you only mean amused, 
 refreshed, soothed, put into good spirits and good humor,
 
 KNOWLEDGE AND LEARNING 189 
 
 or kept from vicious excesses. I do not say that such 
 amusements, such occupations of mind, are not a great 
 gain; but they are not education. You may as well call 
 drawing and fencing education, as a general knowledge of 
 botany or conchology. Stuffing birds or playing stringed 
 instruments is an elegant pastime, and a resource to the 
 idle, but it is .not education; it does not form or cultivate 
 the intellect. //Education is a high word; it is the prepara- 
 tion for knowledge, and it is the imparting of knowledge 
 in proportion to that preparation. We require intellec- 
 tual eyes to know withal, as bodily eyes for sight. We 
 need both objects and organs intellectual; we cannot 
 gain them without setting about it; we cannot gain them 
 in our sleep, or by haphazard. The best telescope does 
 not dispense with eyes; the printing-press or the lecture- 
 room will assist us greatly, but we must be true to our- 
 selves; we must be parties in the work. A university is, 
 according to the usual designation, an Alma Mater, know- 
 ing her children one by one, not a foundry, or a mint, or a 
 treadmill. 
 
 IX 
 
 I protest to you, gentlemen, that if I had to choose 
 between a so-called university, which dispensed with 
 residence and tutorial superintendence, and gave its 
 degrees to any person who passed an examination in a 
 wide range of subjects, and a university which had no 
 professors or examinations at all, but merely brought a 
 number of young men together for three or four years, 
 and then sent them away as the University of Oxford is 
 said to have done some sixty years since; if I were asked 
 which of these two methods was the better discipline of
 
 i 9 o COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 the intellect, mind, I do not say which is morally the 
 better, for it is plain that compulsory study must be a 
 good and idleness an intolerable mischief, but if I must 
 determine which of the two courses was the more success- 
 ful in training, moulding, enlarging the mind, which 
 sent out men the more fitted for their secular duties, 
 which produced better public men, men of the world, 
 men whose names would descend to posterity, I have no 
 hesitation in giving the preference to that university 
 which did nothing, over that which exacted of its members 
 an acquaintance with every science under the sun. And, 
 paradox as this may seem, still if results be the test of 
 systems, the influence of the public schools and colleges 
 of England, in the course of the last century, at least will 
 bear out one side of the contrast as I have drawn it: What 
 would come, on the other hand, of the ideal systems of 
 education which have fascinated the imagination of this 
 age, could they ever take effect, and whether they would 
 not produce a generation frivolous, narrow-minded, and 
 resourceless, intellectually considered, is a fair subject for 
 debate; but so far is certain, that the universities and 
 scholastic establishments, to which I refer, and which did 
 little more than bring together first boys and then youths 
 in large numbers, these institutions, with miserable de- 
 formities on the side of morals, with a hollow profession 
 of Christianity and a heathen code of ethics, I say, at 
 least they can boast of a succession of heroes and states- 
 men, of literary men and philosophers, of men conspicuous 
 for great natural virtues, for habits of business, for knowl- 
 edge of life, for practical judgment, for cultivated tastes, 
 for accomplishments, who have made England what it is, 
 able to subdue the earth, able to domineer over Catholics. 
 How is this to be explained? I suppose as follows:
 
 KNOWLEDGE AND LEARNING 191 
 
 When a multitude of young men, keen, open-hearted, 
 sympathetic, and observant, as young men are, come 
 together and freely mix with each other, they are sure 
 to learn one from another, even if there be no one to 
 teach them; the conversation of all is a series of lectures 
 to each, and they gain for themselves new ideas and views, 
 fresh matter of thought, and distinct principles for judg- 
 ing and acting, day by day. An infant has to learn the 
 meaning of the information which its senses convey to it, 
 and this seems to be its employment. It fancies all that 
 the eye presents to it to be close to it, till it actually learns 
 the contrary, and thus by practise does it ascertain the 
 relations and uses of those first elements of knowledge 
 which are necessary for its animal existence. A parallel 
 teaching is necessary for our social being, and it is secured 
 by a large school or a college; and this effect may be fairly 
 called in its own department an enlargement of mind. 
 It is seeing the world on a small field with little trouble; 
 for the pupils or students come from very different places, 
 and with widely different notions, and there is much to 
 generalize, much to adjust, much to eliminate, there are 
 interrelations to be defined, and conventional rules to be 
 established, in the process, by which the whole assemblage 
 is moulded together, and gains one tone and one character. 
 Let it be clearly understood, I repeat it, that I am not 
 taking into account moral or religious considerations; I 
 am but saying that that youthful community will con- 
 stitute a whole, it will embody a specific idea, it will rep- 
 resent a doctrine, it will administer a code of conduct, 
 and it will furnish principles of thought and action. It 
 will give birth to a living teaching, which in course of 
 time will take the shape of a self-perpetuating tradition, 
 or a genius loci, as it is sometimes called; which haunts
 
 i 9 2 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 the home where it has been born, and which imbues and 
 forms, more or less, and one by one, every individual 
 who is successively brought under its shadow. Thus it 
 is that, independent of direct instruction on the part of 
 superiors, there is a sort of self-education in the academic 
 institutions of Protestant England; a characteristic tone 
 of thought, a recognized standard of judgment is found 
 in them, which, as developed in the individual who is 
 submitted to it, becomes a twofold source of strength to 
 him, both from the distinct stamp it impresses on his 
 mind, and from the bond of union which it creates be- 
 tween him and others, effects which are shared by the 
 authorities of the place, for they themselves have been 
 educated in it, and at all times are exposed to the influ- 
 ence of its ethical atmosphere. Here, then, is a real teach- 
 ing, whatever be its standards and principles, true or 
 false; and it at least tends toward cultivation of the in- 
 tellect; it at least recognizes that knowledge is something 
 more than a sort of passive reception of scraps and de- 
 tails; it is a something, and it does a something, which 
 never will issue from the most strenuous efforts of a set 
 of teachers, with no mutual sympathies and no inter- 
 communion, of a set of examiners with no opinions which 
 they dare profess, and with no common principles, who 
 are teaching or questioning a set of youths who do not 
 know them, and do not know each other, on a large num- 
 ber of subjects, different in kind, and connected by no 
 wide philosophy, three times a week, or three times a 
 year, or once in three years, in chill lecture-rooms or on a 
 pompous anniversary.
 
 KNOWLEDGE AND LEARNING 193 
 
 Nay, self-education in any shape, in the most restricted 
 sense, is preferable to a system of teaching which, pro- 
 fessing so much, really does so little for the mind. Shut 
 your college gates against the votary of knowledge, throw 
 him back upon the searchings and the efforts of his own 
 mind; he will gain by being spared an entrance into your 
 Babel. Few indeed there are who can dispense with the 
 stimulus and support of instructors, or will do anything 
 at all, if left to themselves. And fewer still (though such 
 great minds are to be found) who will not, from such un- 
 assisted attempts, contract a self-reliance and a self-es- 
 teem, which are not only moral evils, but serious hindrances 
 to the attainment of truth. And next to none, perhaps, 
 or none, who will not be reminded from time to time of 
 the disadvantage under which they lie, by their imper- 
 fect grounding, by the breaks, deficiencies, and irregular- 
 ities of their knowledge, by the eccentricity of opinion and 
 the confusion of principle which they exhibit. They will 
 be too often ignorant of what every one knows and takes 
 for granted, of that multitude of small truths which fall 
 upon the mind like dust, impalpable and ever accumulat- 
 ing; they may be unable to converse, they may argue per- 
 versely, they may pride themselves on their worst para- 
 doxes or their grossest truisms, they may be full of their 
 own mode of viewing things, unwilling to be put out of 
 their way, slow to enter into the minds of others; but, 
 with these and whatever other liabilities upon their heads, 
 they are likely to have more thought, more mind, more 
 philosophy, more true enlargement, than those earnest 
 but ill-used persons who are forced to load their minds
 
 194 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 with a score of subjects against an examination, who 
 have too much on their hands to indulge themselves in 
 thinking or investigation, who devour premise and con- 
 clusion together with indiscriminate greediness, who 
 hold whole sciences on faith, and commit demonstrations 
 to memory, and who too often, as might be expected, 
 when their period of education is passed, throw up all 
 they have learned in disgust, having gained nothing really 
 by their anxious labors except, perhaps, the habit of ap- 
 plication. 
 
 Yet such is the better specimen of the fruit of that 
 ambitious system which has of late years been making 
 way among us: for its result on ordinary minds, and on 
 the common run of students, is less satisfactory still; 
 they leave their place of education simply dissipated and 
 relaxed by the multiplicity of subjects, which they have 
 never really mastered, and so shallow as not even to know 
 their shallowness. How much better, I say, is it for the 
 active and thoughtful intellect, where such is to be found, 
 to eschew the college and the university altogether, than 
 to submit to a drudgery so ignoble, a mockery so con- 
 tumelious ! How much more profitable for the independ- 
 ent mind, after the mere rudiments of education, to range 
 through a library at random, taking down books as they 
 meet him, and pursuing the trains of thought which his 
 mother wit suggests! How much healthier to wander 
 into the fields, and there with the exiled Prince to find 
 "tongues in the trees, books in the running brooks!" 
 How much more genuine an education is that of the poor 
 boy in the poem 1 a poem, whether in conception or in 
 
 1 Crabbe's Tales of the Hall. This poem, let me say, I read on its first 
 publication, above thirty years ago, with extreme delight, and have never 
 lost my love of it; and on taking it up lately, found I was even more touched
 
 KNOWLEDGE AND LEARNING 195 
 
 execution, one of the most touching in our language 
 who, not in the wide world, but ranging day by day around 
 his widowed mother's home, "a dexterous gleaner" in a 
 narrow field, and with only such slender outfit 
 
 "as the village school and books a few 
 Supplied," 
 
 contrived from the beach, and the quay, and the fisher's 
 boat, and the inn's fireside, and the tradesman's shop, 
 and the shepherd's walk, and the smuggler's hut, and 
 the mossy moor, and the screaming gulls, and the rest- 
 less waves, to fashion for himself a philosophy and a poetry 
 of his own ! 
 
 But, in a large subject, I am exceeding my necessary 
 limits. Gentlemen, I must conclude abruptly; and post- 
 pone any summing up of my argument, should that be 
 necessary, to another day. 
 
 by it than heretofore. A work which can please in youth and age seems 
 to fulfil (in logical language) the accidental definition of a classic. (A 
 further course of twenty years has passed, and I bear the same witness in 
 favor of this poem.)
 
 XIII 
 THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM 
 
 RICHARD RICE, JR. 
 
 President Eliot declared that a faithful reading of the 
 books on his Five-Foot Shelf will give any man the es- 
 sentials of a liberal education. This statement has made 
 a great many people ask rather sceptically what these 
 essentials really are. Is it possible in the infinite variety 
 of modem life to speak of the essentials of education ? Are 
 not liberally educated men and women produced by ex- 
 perience and training the most diverse ? Can we then say 
 with assurance that liberal education is something made 
 either of the information and ideas to be gleaned from the 
 great books or of the culture to be absorbed from a society 
 which the great books help create and which they rep- 
 resent? Even combining these two aspects of the matter, 
 can we assert that the qualities typical of liberally educated 
 men and women are chiefly the result of college training ? 
 
 These are questions as interesting as they are old; but 
 they hardly go to the centre of the matter. In the 
 first place, as between society and books, or, let us say, 
 between college life and the college curriculum, there is 
 no true comparison for prior importance. Books are 
 human, and men are largely bookish. They are long since 
 part and parcel of each other; and whether a man feels 
 his education to be furthered more by an essay or a dinner- 
 party, by lectures in biology or the friendship of the pro- 
 
 196
 
 THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM 197 
 
 fessor, are purely academic questions. In the second place, 
 the obvious fact that liberally educated men and women 
 are being produced in our modern society, just as they 
 always have been, by a great variety of means, in no wise 
 invalidates the statement that a study of the chief minds, 
 and of the representative manners of thinking about the 
 world we live in, is a method of securing liberal culture. 
 
 Culture of intellect, illuminative reason, as Newman 
 has said, comes not from packing the brain with detail, 
 but from comparing ideas one with another. The guide 
 to wisdom is studying the great facts and interests of life 
 in different modes of thought, with a view to seeing life 
 from several sides. And since such books as President 
 Eliot refers to on his five-foot shelf are nearly all by very 
 great men, and since they treat of the great interests of 
 life in the different modes of thought science, poetry, 
 and philosophy his statement regarding those books has 
 all the authority that human civilization can give it. 
 Such writings are the long inheritance of society. For 
 a man who perceives their significance, a comparison is 
 inevitable, not only of book with book, but of his personal 
 experience with the experience they depict; and this, of 
 course, leads to comparison with the experience of his 
 friends. Hence, may we not here further describe liberal 
 culture as the assimilation of ideas by the individual in 
 such social form as makes him wish to re-express them 
 for himself? Is not this the opportunity which experience 
 in life and the criticism of the great records of experience 
 have to offer? 
 
 It is also the opportunity, therefore, which the curric- 
 ulum of a liberal college endeavors to offer. For this pro- 
 gramme is conceived from the idea that a training in the 
 representative modes of thought is the essential thing in
 
 198 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 education, and that this training should be had in a some- 
 what more personal way than is possible with books alone, 
 and in a form more concentrated and ideally comprehen- 
 sible than is the case in the life of any one man. An un- 
 derstanding of the real nature of this programme, the 
 rigidity and the scope of its demands, and especially the 
 modes of thought which it emphasizes, is then the purpose 
 of this essay. 
 
 When the freshman enters college, with its variety of 
 courses, he may have little notion why he, with certain 
 tastes and abilities, must select almost the same set of 
 representative studies as everybody else. Perhaps he does 
 not understand why they are representative. Indeed, this 
 is one of the things that often continue to puzzle him 
 through the four years of a classical course, and some- 
 times there is very little illumination to be had on the 
 matter from anybody concerned. Why should a man of 
 strong practical bent, who knows what he wants to do in 
 life, be made to choose courses quite outside the range of 
 his serious tastes? With the ultimate intention of being a 
 doctor, why should he devote a good deal of time for three 
 or four years to such subjects as advanced mathematics, 
 literature, and philosophy, to principles of calculus he may 
 never learn to apply, to poetry he will probably forget, to 
 logic he but faintly understands? To such questions he 
 may not find many lucid answers forthcoming. Yet it is 
 really important that he should be lucidly answered. A 
 great deal of futility and evil can result from befogging 
 his mind with conventionalities. 
 
 His father, who has come to the decision to send him to 
 college, is often no more specific than to say that college, 
 in spite of a lot of nonsense about the classics and a good 
 deal of mere scientific lumber, is probably "a good thing."
 
 THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM 199 
 
 His instructors themselves rarely seem to have thought 
 the matter out in clear terms, and may feel at so hopeless 
 a disadvantage when discussing the raison d'etre of re- 
 quirements in liberal arts with a man who has not already 
 had their brand of education and does not understand their 
 "background," that they conclude either by patronizing 
 him or by doubting their own convictions. To say that 
 the courses he is taking in Latin, Greek, mediaeval history, 
 blind fishes, dynamics, Emanuel Kant, and Egyptian 
 architecture are for the purpose of training the mind is 
 not felt nowadays to be a specific answer. Unquestion- 
 ably these studies train the mind, unquestionably they are 
 part of a liberal education; but what the inquisitive fresh- 
 man wants to know is why these subjects have to be 
 taught him, and not some others in which he could clearly 
 see both ideal value as training and practical utility. In 
 all these years, he wonders, why haven't we learned to 
 kill the two birds with one stone? If the instructor ex- 
 plains, in a fashion quite out of date, that subjects taught 
 for specific utility invite scientific treatment to such an 
 extent that their ideal value as mental training is lessened, 
 that seems no answer at all. The practical freshman will 
 not see it that way. 
 
 What is lacking in all conventional answers to the 
 charge of impracticality hi the liberal-arts course is a clear 
 idea of the purpose for which the course prepares. This 
 purpose is to think about life's problems roundly and not 
 flatly, to do what Matthew Arnold called seeing life steadily 
 and seeing it whole. How much is summed up in such 
 phrases that we dismiss with the uttering of them ! 
 
 The essential purpose of liberal training is to train, not in 
 one way, but in many ways of thinking about a fact or of 
 applying an idea. It is to train in all the modes of thought
 
 200 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 necessary to solve practical problems, though of these modes 
 only one is nominally " the practical." This is not a para- 
 dox. The modes of thought are science, poetry, and philos- 
 ophy. The problems of life are complex, and require more 
 than one kind of thinking for their happy solution. Obvi- 
 ously they require thorough, orderly investigation of the 
 facts, or practical, scientific thinking; also they often re- 
 quire, just as urgently, personal, imaginative, and emotional 
 interest, or poetic thinking; and especially does any impor- 
 tant matter require the light of an ultimate moral prin- 
 ciple, or philosophic thinking. 
 
 In order to see what this means in a common problem, 
 let us take the case of the hard-headed father of our fresh- 
 man. How did he come to send the boy to college at all? 
 Let us press him for an answer. A narrow sort of prac- 
 ticality might have led him to invest the two or three 
 thousand dollars which college costs, and put his son into 
 a good business. A broader practicality tells him he may 
 get more back another way. He has statistics at his elbow 
 which show that, other things being equal, the college 
 man gets on better in business than his lay brother. A 
 number of calculations of ways and means prove to him 
 that the matter is feasible, and that he has a right to 
 consult his feelings. Now, he has wanted his son to have 
 the associations of college life, the friends, the memories, 
 and that peculiar something which seems to come as a 
 result. Being a practical man he won't use so vague a 
 word as culture; but whatever it is that one gets from the 
 contemplation of Latin and Greek poems and blind fishes, 
 which makes life a little more fun, a little more vivid, 
 which lets one in behind the scenes and yet only makes 
 the illusion more interesting, he wishes to buy, at the 
 rate of two or three thousand dollars, before putting his
 
 THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM 201 
 
 son back on the farm or into a profession. This, moreover, 
 is not all his reason. It isn't just for the sentiment of the 
 thing that he is doing it, or just to make his son happy, or 
 because he wants to get him into good society, or because 
 he believes that all this will pay him back in the end even 
 though the boy doesn't learn any definite job at college. 
 There is something else in his mind, just as there is some- 
 thing else to be put into the back of a young man's head 
 besides what will push him forward. As he has figured 
 it out, there are going to be some hard problems to solve 
 in this country, harder, perhaps, than any heretofore; 
 and if there are thousands of men on every hand who 
 have had the same sort of general training in thought, 
 there will be more chance of their agreeing and working 
 out a wise solution than if they had always been intent 
 on their own private affairs. So whether college is prac- 
 tical or not as far as a man's personal success is concerned, 
 there is a sort of public generosity about it four years 
 spent, not just on what will help him earn his own bread 
 and butter, but on the humanities, the common-stock 
 sense of the race. If he is a wise man, it will be this 
 principle, or one of like nature, that will become the de- 
 ciding factor in the situation. If he is principally a gener- 
 ous and sympathetic man, he will decide the matter more 
 largely from sentiment. If he is a thoroughly practical 
 man, and little else, he will decide it as he would decide a 
 matter of business, by some guess at profit and loss. But 
 who would decide such a question solely from one point 
 of view, or in one mode of thought? The chances are 
 that the decision is arrived at from many points of view, 
 that it is a well-rounded, mature judgment, which thor- 
 oughly expresses the father's character. 
 Any problem may demand and bring into play such a
 
 202 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 combination of faculties, and the infinite variety of life's 
 problems makes it advisable that the mind should be trained 
 theoretically or ideally in preparation for all of them, as 
 well as practically for the few that can be foreseen. For 
 the world, which we like to call the practical world, as if 
 we thoroughly understood it, often turns out to be a fan- 
 tastic melodrama or an inexplicable puzzle if viewed only 
 from one standpoint. Therefore, the different modes of 
 thought, science, poetry, philosophy, do not represent 
 arbitrary processes in the mind of man, but rather man's 
 effort to make his character correspond more closely to 
 the variety and complexity of life that surrounds him. 
 
 Thus the purpose of the college course begins to be more 
 evident. Its curriculum is intended to fit practically, 
 imaginatively, and morally the changing conditions of 
 life. Its seeming rigidity, its idealism, is based on a 
 knowledge of the drift of those conditions. The demands 
 which the curriculum makes and the limits which it places 
 on the choice of studies mean that the student shall first 
 of all be trained to think dexterously and variously, that 
 he shall not devote himself to one kind of thinking about a 
 few similar matters. Specialization and professional train- 
 ing, the liberal college believes, should, when possible, 
 come later, for the very reason that specialization and pro- 
 fessional training, when not mere imitation of a method, 
 involve thinking complexly and originally to the highest 
 degree. 
 
 If there is enough in this answer to warrant giving it a 
 further hearing, let us next try to perceive the real sig- 
 nificance of thinking liberally and complexly, or what the 
 three modes of thought really mean. 
 
 Very few people, the practical man will be the first to 
 remind us, enjoy or comprehend equally scientific, poetic,
 
 THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM 203 
 
 and philosophic thought. Every one has his character- 
 istic bent of mind. One man is practical and systematic, 
 sticking closely to the immediate facts; another is vividly 
 imaginative and emotional, living farther in expectancy 
 and in recollection than that other man; a third is theo- 
 retical and abstractly far-sighted, avoiding, perhaps, the 
 faults of the first man, but failing to secure the pleasures 
 of the second. If each of these men could choose his own 
 world, where his characteristic bent of mind would, so to 
 speak, lie flattest, he might never need to employ any but 
 his favorite or "natural" habit of thought. But there 
 are few people so narrowly situated. There are few people 
 who do not have constantly to employ a combination of 
 these three modes, who do not have to be in thought and 
 action at once practical and imaginative, closely accurate 
 and abstractly far-sighted, theoretic and vivid. 
 
 Now, it is the art of being thus temperamentally versa- 
 tile which prevents narrow-mindedness. The people we 
 call narrow-minded are simply those who fail to think 
 somewhat in all these combined ways. The narrow-minded 
 scientific person will see things only in an external and 
 impersonal light. He decides life's problems by natural 
 law, by mechanical justice, and makes, as we say, cold, 
 practical calculations. The narrow-minded poetic person 
 can see things only in a personal and emotional light. 
 He understands only when he can feel; hence, if he is rarely 
 insincere, he may often be unjust. The narrow-minded 
 philosophic person and though these terms seem to 
 contradict each other at the start, one may venture to 
 conclude is he who prefers to overlook real and immedi- 
 ate contingencies in order to see without embarrassment 
 theoretic or ideal relationships. He is apt to be a fanatic: 
 he is sometimes mistaken for a man of genius. None of
 
 204 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 these limited persons in the face of life's problems is ever 
 very successful, happy, or socially valuable. 
 
 The college curriculum can be conceived as an organized 
 attempt to correct a certain native tendency in every one 
 of us to some form of the narrow mind, and also as an 
 organized attempt to help us find and follow our bent, 
 which we all must follow, but not with our eyes too close 
 together. It is, then, a preparation not in actual experi- 
 ences and problems of life so much as in principles of 
 thinking that must be understood by one who solves those 
 problems with ultimate profit to himself and to his fel- 
 lows. And just here is the chief part of our answer to the 
 practical man. Actual experiences and problems, entail- 
 ing, as a rule, immediate necessity for judgment, tend to 
 make us think only in the vein where our chief facility 
 runs; and the man equipped only with a technical educa- 
 tion will frequently mistake this facility of judgment for 
 wisdom, and fail to take advantage of larger issues than 
 those involved by immediate necessity. He has too often 
 formed habits of imitation instead of far-reaching methods 
 of thought. College is a time for strengthening ourselves 
 in such a way that we shall expand many faculties, instead 
 of sharpening but one, in the tests of practical necessity. 
 
 Obviously it is not technical skill itself that produces 
 one-sidedness. But without some sort of liberal outlook 
 on life, technical skill is not always of real benefit to a 
 man; and, indeed, it sometimes appears to the short- 
 sighted to be the ironical means of enslaving him. For 
 facility at some minor trick has often prevented a man 
 from rising at will beyond it. Does not Mr. Debs, the 
 socialist, call attention constantly to the folly of narrow 
 vocational training for those who are not to control the 
 machinery of their craft? Lack of ownership in this case
 
 THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM 205 
 
 is similar, in ultimate effect, to a lack of capabilities. 
 One-sidedness comes not from a man's positive capabilities 
 in one direction, but from his lack of them in any other. 
 More than this, it is only in the most imitative and slender 
 techniques that there is real danger of one-sidedness 
 through too complete devotion. Supremacy in most 
 specialties is reached from broad foundations, and means 
 inevitably a fairly broad outlook. Yet it remains true 
 that in all technical skill there is both a bondage and a 
 freedom, the relation oi which describes the character 
 and the culture of the craftsman what is one man's 
 bondage being often another man's freedom. 
 
 The liberal curriculum furnishes to every student a 
 criticism of his narrow-mindedness. It makes an attempt 
 to show him how to be rid of his natural encumbrances, 
 and how to utilize the valuable elements that remain. It 
 furnishes him with a specially balanced experience from 
 which he may learn to recognize his real mind, his whole 
 mind, through a comparison of his facilities in the various 
 modes of thought. This is why a student in the liberal 
 college of arts and sciences takes a course in zoology, 
 spends half a year reading Goethe's Faust, and at the 
 same time follows the reasoning of a philosopher like 
 Herbert Spencer. For one great purpose of the curriculum 
 is to have him see the same principles of life from quite 
 different angles; and, in the case just cited, merely to per- 
 ceive that they are the same principles is the kind of cure 
 for the narrow mind which shows supremely the sound- 
 ness of traditional education. 
 
 Here is a man who from his freshman year follows easily 
 the literal reasoning of mathematics or political science, 
 and the arbitrary reasoning of grammar or chemistry; yet 
 he needs much practise, as he says, before he can follow
 
 206 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 thought that continues by means of suggestion, emotion, 
 rhythm, and symbol, hi a poem. He can see plainly the 
 perspective of a figure hi conic sections, and yet he fails 
 to be impressed by the perfect proportions of a great 
 statue. All through his college course he prefers science 
 in any of its systems to poetry in any of its forms. He 
 thereby discovers and tests practically his bent. He would 
 make a great mistake not to follow this clew, not to become, 
 let us say, an engineer. Yet the curriculum, because it 
 is a liberal plan of study, insists on a training in each phase 
 of thought, the imaginative as well as the literal; and the 
 engineer will some day understand, not alone theoretically 
 but practically, while trying to solve a problem that is as 
 much a problem of human wills as it is a problem for his 
 technique, that science is not the only practical part of 
 learning. 
 
 The true cure for one-sidedness, and the most impor- 
 tant force that all through life, and especially in youth, 
 makes for liberal culture, is not, however, discovered out- 
 side ourselves. It grows normally from within. It is 
 curiosity, not opportunity, that primarily counts. They 
 are, of course, counterparts, these two; they foster each 
 other. But man is originally an adventurer, and his world 
 of opportunity, whatever it may be, is largely an extension 
 of his own spirit. Variety is the spice of life, but curiosity 
 is the spice of learning. It is the curiosity of students that 
 in great measure produces variety in the modern curriculum. 
 Curiosity is the typical college virtue. It covers the 
 largest number of college faults. Nobody has any busi- 
 ness in college who is not forearmed with at least a fair 
 share of it. And by curiosity we mean the desire and 
 the energy to know something of the variety of life. There 
 are, however, two kinds of curiosity, and they distinguish
 
 THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM 207 
 
 college students rather sharply one from another: curiosity 
 as to facts, and curiosity that extends to modes of thought 
 about facts curiosity, that is, about men's minds. 
 
 Look at the curriculum of a modern college and you will 
 see exactly what this means. Here is one group of pro- 
 fessors, grown old in their specialty, making it their chief 
 aim to persuade the student of the importance of the 
 scientific attitude toward nature. They keep him think- 
 ing, let us say, about rocks and mountains geologically, or 
 about the starry universe astronomically, and rarely vary 
 their point of view from the scientific. Another group is 
 intent on showing him nature as it appears in the eye and 
 mind of artists, on contemplating rocks and mountains, 
 not for evidences of thrust in the earth's cooling surface, 
 but as poetic images of a heightened mental state or of a 
 moral purpose. From being an external fact, the uni- 
 verse here becomes a sensation. With a third group the 
 student is asked to assume quite a new, and, as it at first 
 may appear to him, a rather unnatural attitude toward 
 nature. The philosophers ask him how he knows that 
 mountains and rocks exist at all, externally and sensa- 
 tionally, how he knows that they are not pure concep- 
 tions of the mind. The student has suddenly to examine 
 the character of his knowledge from a totally new angle. 
 He sees much in the character of science and of art, in 
 the relationship of the geologist's mountain to the poet's 
 mountain, that he never dreamed of with the poet or saw 
 clearly with the geologist. And if at first this may not 
 have appeared a very useful exercise, now it is out of this 
 defined relationship that the philosopher goes on to derive 
 a theory of life and of the whole universe which is both 
 science and poetry, which is true to fact and not illogical 
 in fancy, which gives a new and far-reaching reason for
 
 208 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 further scientific and for further poetic investigation, and 
 which serves to idealize the final mysteries that neither 
 science nor poetry can solve. The liberal curriculum in 
 science, poetry, and philosophy, when intelligently pre- 
 scribed and devotedly followed, can be the means of stimu- 
 lating the curiosity of youth, of collecting and synthesizing 
 its experiences, of rendering valuable, in the end, its en- 
 thusiasm, doubts, and disillusionments. Its purpose is the 
 unity and maturity of the mind. "There is no enlarge- 
 ment," says Cardinal Newman, "unless there be a compari- 
 son of ideas one with another, as they come before the 
 mind, and a systematizing of them. We feel our minds to 
 be growing and expanding then, when we not only learn, 
 but refer what we learn to what we know already." This 
 is education; this is the discovery of the world and of 
 ourselves. 
 
 But we come to college for special as well as liberal 
 reasons. How does liberal education bring us to the prac- 
 tical consideration in this whole matter our knowledge 
 of our own special abilities and the choice of a career? 
 How does the curriculum effect that? 
 
 The answer is already implied. It is an obvious corol- 
 lary to the chief proposition, that, in learning to think in 
 each mode and in combinations of modes about facts and 
 ideas, we learn to perceive, as a matter of course, what sort 
 of facts and ideas can be more naturally, more vividly, 
 more thoroughly comprehended in one mode than in an- 
 other according to their intrinsic nature and to the pur- 
 poses of the thinker. It is a necessary part of this gen- 
 eral exercise that one all the time, consciously and un- 
 consciously, trains himself according to his natural bent. 
 In the liberal college, it is true, he must do it ideally. But 
 to go about the discovery of a natural bent by studying in
 
 THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM 209 
 
 succession a series of professions and crafts before a man 
 has many whisperings of what is within him, before his 
 general and ideal knowledge has been enlarged, is usually 
 a wasteful performance. It is a forcing process that rarely 
 secures the maturest result. It is as apt to lead to a 
 temporary bending as to discovery or development of the 
 true bent. It is a method that counts for its success on 
 the good-humored adaptability of human nature rather 
 than on its originality. The liberal method is, on the other 
 hand, more apt to be truly economic and far-sighted. If 
 a 'man understands the essential character of the courses 
 he has taken in college as types of thinking, whether or 
 not they point directly toward some profession or craft, 
 if he can differentiate his interest and ability in each type, 
 he has already the surest indication of his tastes and the 
 most practical advice about his future. 
 
 To illustrate this specifically is difficult for the reason 
 that the temperament of the individual student must play 
 the chief part in our calculations, and Jones and Smith, 
 who seem to be men of similar tastes and abilities, arid 
 who have chosen precisely the same college courses, become 
 of their own choice, and after a great deal of effort, one a 
 doctor and the other a lawyer. But for the sake of de- 
 scribing the estimate which college makes of temperament, 
 let us suppose that Smith has cared most for courses that 
 open an unending problem, like calculus, which has lured 
 him from year to year through mazes of algebra to mo- 
 mentary applications, only to suggest again new vistas 
 of abstraction. If this is the kind of thing Smith likes 
 best, the chances are, other things being equal, that he 
 should take up some profession where there are problems 
 that may continue more or less romantically through life. 
 Medicine and surgery offer many such problems. If, then,
 
 210 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 Smith has found the courses in anatomy and biology also 
 to his taste he will be fairly safe in becoming a doctor; 
 if he has not he might become an engineer, whose prob- 
 lems nowadays are surely as long as any man's. Suppos- 
 ing again that Jones, whose character and energies are to 
 be estimated by this purely hypothetical method, has done 
 the following things. He has read The Life of Sir Walter 
 Scott and has been far more interested in the technicalities 
 of Scott's financial status than in any other phase of that 
 absorbing book; also he has read Browning, but without 
 great admiration till he reached the story of The Ring 
 and the Book; and he has studied general European his- 
 tory with interest, but knew, as soon as he began a course 
 in English constitutional history and dipped into Stubbs's 
 original documents, that he had "got somewhere" at last. 
 Even from such slight evidence Jones would be fairly safe 
 in trying the law or a highly systematized business. 
 
 But you must not work it out too narrowly, for one of 
 the virtues of the liberal curriculum is that it rarely binds 
 a man to some preconceived specific notion of his destiny. 
 The initial strictness of its demands is ultimately the very 
 thing that makes possible the flexibility and range of the 
 student's choice. College graduates, more than any 
 other class of men, do what they wish, not because of su- 
 perior social position but because of their emancipating 
 knowledge of the field of opportunity and of themselves. 
 
 That such a type of knowledge results from the liberal 
 curriculum in greater degree than from a curriculum 
 chiefly vocational and technical in character, need not 
 lead us into a futile comparison with the professional 
 schools. They have their own definite and unassailable 
 purposes. They do not require defense or even explana- 
 tion. What is necessary to keep in mind is the grave re-
 
 THE COLLEGE CURRICULUM 211 
 
 sponsibility that rests on those who have the arrangement 
 of the liberal curriculum in their hands. In the constant 
 and somewhat radical revision necessary to make it ac- 
 cord with modern life and our era of radical progress, 
 there is no need, because of the existence of technical 
 schools on every hand, of forgetting what the central idea 
 in the liberal curriculum has meant. No new quality and 
 no other meaning can safely take the place of that.
 
 XIV 
 
 LOSING ONE'S RELIGION: A STUDENT 
 EXPERIENCE l 
 
 HENRY THOMAS COLESTOCK 
 
 There is one word that some of us who look back on 
 our college life wish had been spoken to us in the midst 
 of our college course; for, lacking this word of explanation, 
 we have had to learn ab initio, in the severe school of 
 personal experience, one of the lessons worked out by 
 the race through centuries of conflict. Not infrequently 
 has it happened, in working out this problem for ourselves, 
 that the process, compressing into a few months or years 
 the anxiety, the anguish, of a racial experience, brings to 
 the individual moments and days never to be forgotten. 
 But not all learn the lesson when left to themselves, and 
 this is an irreparable injury to the individual; for failure 
 means indifference or even hostility to the most helpful 
 things in life. I refer to the process of adjustment between 
 religious faith and a growing knowledge. 
 
 In the experience of the race this problem of adjust- 
 ment between religious faith and a growing knowledge is 
 one of the great problems of every period characterized 
 by intellectual progress. Nor is it difficult to understand 
 the reason for this age-long conflict between faith and 
 knowledge. The explanation is a psychological one. 
 
 Religious faith being one of the dearest and most sacred 
 
 1 Reprinted through the courtesy of Henry Thomas Colestock and of 
 The Outlook. 
 
 212
 
 LOSING ONE'S RELIGION 213 
 
 possessions of mankind, it is natural to transfer to our 
 explanations of faith the sacredness of faith itself. Fail- 
 ing to make this distinction between religious faith, which 
 is a life of fellowship with God, and the explanations of 
 this fellowship, which necessarily must vary according to 
 the temperament and the enlightenment of the individual, 
 the problem of adjustment between religious faith and the 
 growing knowledge of the age has at times absorbed the 
 attention and the strength of nations. 
 
 The same problem of adjustment between faith and 
 knowledge confronts the student. He comes to college with 
 certain religious ideas and beliefs, and in the progress of 
 his studies finds an antagonism between his religious be- 
 liefs and his growing knowledge. At first he puts aside as 
 false whatever does not accord with his religious opinions. 
 Students have been known to go through college rejecting 
 every position in science or philosophy which did not har- 
 monize with their inherited religious beliefs. This, how- 
 ever, is not true of many students. On the other hand, the 
 reasonableness of the conclusions of science and of philoso- 
 phy wins the assent of the student even against his will. 
 But it seems impossible for him to accept these conclusions 
 and retain his religious beliefs which he thinks of as his 
 religion. He may fight for a time the rising tide of new 
 ideas, but sooner or later he finds resistance useless. He 
 awakens to the fact that these new ideas, hostile to his re- 
 ligion though they be, as it appears to him, are possessing 
 him. 
 
 Now ensues one of the tragic struggles of his life. As 
 the new ideas possess him, they undermine certain religious 
 beliefs which he holds on to with terrible earnestness for a 
 while, only to find at last that these beliefs do not mean to 
 him what they once did. Few individuals who have
 
 2i 4 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 passed through the heartrending experience of losing their 
 religion can ever forget that experience. Some, after a 
 very trying and painful struggle, learn that religious faith 
 and religious opinions are two very different things; others 
 never learn this lesson, and, having lost their early religious 
 opinions, think they have lost their religion and easily 
 drift into an indifference toward the duties and claims of 
 the religious life. When approached, such persons will 
 tell you, in moments of confidence, that religious matters 
 do not mean anything to them now they had to give all 
 that up in college. 
 
 It is possible, of course, to lose one's religion in college; 
 to degenerate in character, to become immoral and irre- 
 ligious; as it is possible to become dissolute anywhere. 
 But I have not at present such a class of individuals in 
 mind; but rather those whose characters have not de- 
 generated, but whose religious opinions no longer mean to 
 them what they once did, and who think consequently 
 that they have lost their religion. 
 
 The word which some of us wish had been spoken to us 
 who have passed through one phase or another of this 
 struggle of adjustment between faith and knowledge is 
 this: Religious faith is a life of fellowship with God; re- 
 ligion is the living of one's life in view of this fellowship; 
 religious beliefs are explanations of this life of fellowship 
 with God, and it is reasonable to expect that these ex- 
 planations will vary according to our intellectual progress, 
 being different with the same individual in different stages 
 of his development; and differing also in the thought of 
 different persons owing to training and temperament. 
 
 With this distinction between religious faith and religious 
 beliefs firmly grasped, the student need not feel that he is 
 losing his religion when he is being compelled to give up
 
 LOSING ONE'S RELIGION 215 
 
 some of his early, inadequate religious conceptions. Rather 
 he will welcome all new ideas which enable him to explain 
 this fellowship and to understand more fully its meaning. 
 With this distinction between religious faith and the ex- 
 planations of faith kept in mind, the student can fearlessly 
 investigate any subject in science or history or philosophy 
 without disturbing his religion, for he thinks of religion as 
 a life in fellowship with God; but as new light dawns he 
 may be compelled to reinterpret all of the soul's relations 
 with God. His explanations of faith change; his faith 
 abides, grows, develops.
 
 XV 
 
 THE RELIGION OF A COLLEGE STUDENT 1 
 
 FRANCIS G. PEABODY 
 
 We have heard many appeals to the college student 
 concerning his duty to the Christian church. He should 
 be, it is urged, a more constant attendant at its worship; 
 he should commit himself more openly to its cause; he 
 should guard himself against the infidelity and indecision 
 which attack him with such strategy under the conditions 
 of college life. May it not be of advantage, however, to 
 consider this relation from the opposite point of view? 
 May it not be instructive to inquire what the Christian 
 church must provide in order to meet the needs of an edu- 
 cated young man, and what the college student demands 
 that the church shall teach and illustrate? What has a 
 young man the right to demand as a condition of his loyalty 
 and devotion? What is there which the Christian church 
 must learn concerning the character and ideals of a normal, 
 educated, modern youth before it can hope to lead the 
 heart of such a youth to an unconstrained obedience? 
 What is the religion of a college student? 
 
 There are, of course, certain limitations to such an in- 
 quiry. We must assume on both sides open-mindedness, 
 teachableness, seriousness, and good faith. We cannot 
 take into account either a foolish student or a foolish 
 
 1 Reprinted through the courtesy of Francis G. Peabody and of The 
 Forum. 
 
 216
 
 THE RELIGION OF A STUDENT 217 
 
 church. There are, on the one hand, some youths of the 
 college age whom no conceivable adaptation of religious 
 teaching can hope to reach. They are self-absorbed, 
 self-conscious, self-satisfied, self-conceited. There is little 
 that the church can do for them but to pray that, as they 
 grow older, they may grow more humble, and, therefore, 
 more teachable. On the other hand, there are some 
 methods of religious activity which cannot reasonably 
 anticipate the co-operation of educated men. Here and 
 there an imaginative young person may be won by emo- 
 tional appeals or ecclesiastical picturesqueness; but the 
 normal type of thoughtful youth demands of the church 
 soberness, intellectual satisfaction, and verifiable claims. 
 We must dismiss from consideration both the unreasoning 
 youth and the unreasonable church. We set before our- 
 selves, on the one hand, an alert, open-minded, well-trained 
 youth, looking out with eager eyes into the mystery of the 
 universe; and, on the other hand, a thoughtful, candid, 
 sensible church, resting its claim not on tradition or passion, 
 but on its perception and maintenance of verifiable truth. 
 How shall these two factors of modern life the chief 
 factors of its future stability the life of thoughtful youth 
 and the truth of the Christian religion, come to know and 
 help each other; and what are the traits of Christian teach- 
 ing which must be unmistakably recognized before it can 
 commend itself to the young student of the modern world ? 
 To these questions it must be answered, that the religion 
 of a college student is marked, first of all, by a passion for 
 reality. No effort of the church is more mistaken than 
 the attempt to win the loyalty of intelligent young people 
 by multiplying the accessories or incidentals of the religious 
 life its ecclesiastical forms, its emotional ecstasies, its 
 elaborateness of organization, its opportunities of socia-
 
 218 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 bility. The modern college student, while in many re- 
 spects very immature, is extraordinarily alert in his dis- 
 cernment of anything which seems to him of the nature of 
 indirectness or unreality. He has a passion for reality. 
 The first demand he makes of his companions or his teachers 
 is the demand for sincerity, straightforwardness, and sim- 
 plicity. He is not likely to be won to the Christian life 
 by any external persuasion, laboriously planned "to draw 
 in young people," and to make religion seem companion- 
 able and pleasant. These incidental activities of the 
 church have their unquestionable usefulness as expressions 
 of Christian sentiment and service, but they are misap- 
 plied when converted into decoys. They are corollaries 
 of religious experience, not preliminaries of it; they are 
 what one wants to do when he is a Christian, but not 
 what makes a thoughtful man believe in Christ. The 
 modern young man sees these things just as they are. 
 Indeed, he is inclined to be on his guard against their 
 strategy. He will nibble at the bait, but he will not take 
 the hook. He will consume the refreshments of the 
 church, he will serve on its committees, he will enjoy its 
 aesthetic effects, but he still withholds himself from the 
 personal consecration which these were designed to induce. 
 He will accept no substitute for reality. He wants the 
 best. He is not old enough to be diffident or circuitous in 
 his desires; he does not linger in the outer courts of truth; 
 he marches straight into the Holy of Holies, and lifts the 
 veil from the central mystery. Thus the church often 
 fails of its mission to the student, because it imagines him 
 to be frivolous and indifferent, when in reality he is tre- 
 mendously in earnest and passionately sincere. 
 
 And suppose, on the other hand, that the church meets 
 this candid creature just where he is, and, instead of offer-
 
 THE RELIGION OF A STUDENT 219 
 
 ing him accessories and incidentals as adapted to his 
 frivolous mind, presents to him, with unadorned and 
 sober reasonableness, the realities of religion. What dis- 
 covery is the church then likely to make ? It may discover, 
 to its own surprise, and often to the surprise of the youth 
 himself, an unanticipated susceptibility in him to religious 
 reality, and a singular freshness and vitality of religious 
 experience. A great many people imagine that the years 
 from seventeen to twenty-two are not likely to be years of 
 natural piety. The world, it is urged, is just making its 
 appeal to the flesh and to the mind with overmastering 
 power, while the experience of life has not yet created for 
 itself a stable religion. Fifteen years ago it was deter- 
 mined in Harvard University that religion should be no 
 longer regarded as a part of academic discipline, but should 
 be offered to youth as a privilege and an opportunity. 
 It was then argued by at least one learned person that the 
 system was sure to fail because, by the very conditions of 
 their growth, young men were unsusceptible to religion. 
 They had outgrown, he urged, the religion of their child- 
 hood, and had not yet grown into the religion of their 
 maturity; so that a plan which rested on faith in the in- 
 herent religiousness of young men was doomed to disap- 
 pointment. If, however, the voluntary system of religion 
 applied to university life has proved anything in these 
 fifteen years, it has proved the essentially religious nature 
 of the normal, educated young man of America. To 
 offer religion not as an obligation of college life, but as its 
 supreme privilege, was an act of faith in young men. It 
 assumed that when religion was honestly and intelligently 
 presented to the mind of youth it would receive a reverent 
 and responsive recognition. 
 The issue of this undertaking has serious lessons for the
 
 220 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 Christian church. It disposes altogether of the meagre 
 expectation with which the life of youth is frequently 
 regarded. I have heard a preacher, addressing a college 
 audience, announce that just as childhood was so assailed 
 by infantile diseases and mishaps that it was surprising to 
 see any child grow up, so youth was assailed by so many 
 sins that it was surprising to see any young man grow up 
 unstained. There is no rational basis for this enervating 
 scepticism. The fact is that it is natural for a young 
 man to be good, just as it is natural for a child to grow up. 
 A much wiser word was spoken by one of my colleagues, 
 who, having been asked to address an audience on the temp- 
 tations of the college life, said that he should devote 
 himself chiefly to its temptations to excellence. A col- 
 lege boy, that is to say, is not, as many suppose, a pe- 
 culiarly misguided and essentially light-minded person. 
 He is, on the contrary, set in conditions which tempt to 
 excellence and is peculiarly responsive to every sincere 
 appeal to his higher life. Behind the mask of light- 
 mindedness or self-assertion which he assumes, his interior 
 life is wrestling with fundamental problems, as Jacob 
 wrestled with the angel and would not let it go until it 
 blessed him. "Your young men," said the prophet, 
 with deep insight into the nature of youth, "shall see 
 visions." They are our natural idealists. The shades 
 of the prison-house of common life have not yet closed 
 about their sense of the romantic, the heroic, the noble. 
 
 To this susceptibility of youth the church, if it is wise, 
 must address its teaching. It must believe in a young man, 
 even when he does not believe in himself. It must attempt 
 no adaptation of truth to immaturity or indifference. It 
 must assume that a young man, even though he disguises 
 the fact by every subterfuge of modesty or mock defiance.
 
 THE RELIGION OF A STUDENT 221 
 
 is a creature of spiritual vision, and that his secret desire 
 is to have that vision interpreted and prolonged When 
 Jesus met the young men whom he wanted for his dis- 
 ciples, his first relation with them was one of absolute, 
 and apparently unjustified, confidence. He believed in 
 them and in their spiritual responsiveness. He disclosed 
 to them the secrets of their own hearts. He dismissed 
 accessories and revealed realities. He did not cheapen 
 religion or make small demands. He bade these men 
 leave all and follow him. He took for granted that their 
 nature called for the religion he had to offer, and he gave 
 it to them without qualification or fear. The young men 
 for whom the accidental aspects of religion were thus 
 stripped away and its heart laid bare, leaped to meet this 
 revelation of reality. "We have found the Messiah," 
 they told each other. They had been believed in even 
 before they believed in themselves, and that which the new 
 sense of reality disclosed to them as real, they at last in 
 reality became. 
 
 Such is the first aspect of the religion of the student 
 its demand for reality. To reach the heart of an educated 
 young man the message of the church must be unequiv- 
 ocal, uncomplicated, genuine, masculine, direct, real. 
 This, however, is but a part of a second quality in the re- 
 ligion of educated youth. The teaching of the church to 
 which such a mind will listen must be, still further, con- 
 sistent with truth as discerned elsewhere. It must in- 
 volve no partition of life between thinking and believing. 
 It must be, that is to say, a rational religion. The re- 
 ligion of a college student is one expression of his rational 
 life. To say this is not to say that religion must be stripped 
 of its mystery or reduced to the level of a natural science 
 in order to commend itself to educated youth. On the
 
 222 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 contrary, the tendencies of the higher education lead in 
 precisely the opposite direction. They lead to the con- 
 viction that all truth, whether approached by the way 
 of science, philosophy, art, or religion, opens before a 
 serious student into a world of mystery, a sense of the 
 unattained, a spacious region of idealism, where one 
 enters with reverence and awe. Instead of demanding 
 that religion shall be reduced to the level of other knowl- 
 edge, it will appear to such a student more reasonable to 
 demand that all forms of knowledge shall be lifted into the 
 realm of faith, mystery, and idealism. It is, however, 
 quite another matter to discover in the teaching of religion 
 any fundamental inconsistency with the spirit of research 
 and the method of proof which the student elsewhere 
 candidly accepts; and we may be sure that it is this sense 
 of inconsistency which is the chief source of any reaction 
 from religious influence now to be observed among edu- 
 cated young men. 
 
 Under the voluntary system of religion at Harvard 
 University we have established a meeting-place, known as 
 "The Preacher's Room," where the minister conducting 
 morning prayers spends some hours each day in free and 
 unconstrained intimacy with such students as may seek 
 him. This room has witnessed many frank confessions 
 of religious difficulty and denial, and as each member of 
 our staff of preachers recalls his experiences at the uni- 
 versity he testifies that the most fruitful hours of his 
 service have been those of confidential conference in the 
 privacy of The Preacher's Room. But if one were further 
 called to describe those instances of religious bewilderment 
 and helplessness which have seemed to him in his official 
 duty most pathetic and most superfluous, he would not 
 hesitate to admit that they were the by no means infre-
 
 THE RELIGION OF A STUDENT 223 
 
 quent cases of young men who have been brought up in a 
 conception of religion which becomes untenable under 
 the conditions of university life. A restricted denomina- 
 tionalism, a backward-looking ecclesiasticism, an ignorant 
 defiance of biblical criticism, and, no less emphatically, an 
 intolerant and supercilious liberalism these habits of 
 mind become simply impossible when a young man finds 
 himself thrown into a world of wide learning, religious 
 liberty, and intellectual hospitality. Then ensues, for 
 many a young mind, a pathetic and even tragic period of 
 spiritual hesitation and reconstruction. The young man 
 wanders through dry places, seeking rest and finding none; 
 and it is quite impossible for his mind to say: "I will re- 
 turn unto my house from whence I came out." Mean- 
 time his loving parents and his anxious pastor observe with 
 trembling his defection from the old ways, deplore the in- 
 fluence of the university upon religious faith, and pray for a 
 restoration of belief which is as contrary to nature as the 
 restoration of the oak to the acorn from which it grew. 
 
 Now, in all this touching experience, where is the gravest 
 blame to be laid? It must, no doubt, be confessed that 
 among the conditions of college life there are some which 
 tend to encourage in a young man a certain pertness and 
 priggishness of mind which make the old ways of faith 
 seem old-fashioned and primitive. Indeed, it seems to 
 some young men that any way of faith is superfluous to a 
 thorough man of the world, such as the average sopho- 
 more ought to be. But these cheerful young persons, 
 for whom the past has no lessons and the future no visions, 
 and for whom the new ideal of self-culture has for the mo- 
 ment suppressed the earlier ideals of self-sacrifice or serv- 
 ice, are not a type of student life which need be taken 
 seriously. They are the lookers-on of the academic world,
 
 224 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 the dilettante and amateur minds in a community of 
 scholars. The strenuous game of real learning goes on; 
 and these patrons of the strife sit, as it were, along the 
 side lines and wear the college colors, but do not partici- 
 pate in the training or the conflict or the victory. We 
 are thinking of that much more significant body of youth 
 who are in deadly earnest with their thought, and who 
 find it an essential of their intellectual peace to attain 
 some sense of unity hi their conception of the world. 
 For this type of college youth the most conscientious, 
 most thoughtful, most precious the blame for incon- 
 sistency between the new learning and the inherited faith 
 lies, for the most part, not with the college, but with the 
 church. There was once a time when these young minds 
 could be secluded by solicitous parents and anxious pastors 
 from most of the signs of change in modern thought. They 
 could be prohibited from approaching great tracts of 
 literature; they could be hidden in the cloistered life of a 
 strictly guarded college; their learning could be insured 
 to be in safe conformity with a predetermined creed. 
 There is now no corner of the intellectual world where 
 this seclusion is possible. Out of the most unexpected 
 sources a novel, a poem, a newspaper issues the con- 
 tagion of modern thought; and, in an instant, the life 
 that has been shut in and has seemed secure is hopelessly 
 affected. 
 
 And how does the young man, touched with the modern 
 spirit, come to regard the faith which he is thus forced to 
 reject? Sometimes he regards it with a sense of pathos, 
 as an early love soon lost; sometimes with a deep indigna- 
 tion, as the source of scepticism and denial. For one 
 educated youth who is alienated from religion by the per- 
 suasions of science, philosophy, or art, ten, we may be sure,
 
 THE RELIGION OF A STUDENT 225 
 
 are thus affected by the irrational or impracticable teach- 
 ing of religion. It is not an inherent issue between learn- 
 ing and faith which forces them out of the church in which 
 they were born; it is an unscientific and reactionary theory 
 of faith. It is not the college which must renew its con- 
 formity to the church; it is the church which must open 
 its eyes to the marvellous expansion of intellectual horizon 
 which lies before the mind of every college student to-day. 
 There is another aspect of the same experience. This 
 process of intellectual growth is often accompanied, not 
 by a reaction from religion, but by a new appreciation of 
 its reasonableness. In a degree which few who represent 
 the church have as yet realized, the expansion of the 
 sphere of truth is at the same time an enlargement and 
 enrichment of religious confidence. There is going on, 
 within the college, often without the knowledge of the 
 church, a restoration of religious faith through the influence 
 of intellectual liberty. I have seen more than one student 
 come to college in a mood of complete antagonism to his 
 earlier faith, and then I have seen that same youth in 
 four years graduate from college, and with a passionate 
 consecration give himself to the calling of the Christian 
 ministry which he had so lately thought superfluous and 
 outgrown. It was the simple consequence of his discovery 
 that the religious life is not in conflict with the interests 
 and aims of a university, but is precisely that ideal of con- 
 duct and service toward which the spirit of a university 
 logically leads. "I beseech you, brethren," says the 
 Apostle who knew most about the relation of philosophy 
 to faith, "that ye present ... a reasonable service." It 
 is a charge which the Christian church still needs to hear. 
 The service of the church which is to meet the religion of 
 a college student must be a reasonable service, consistent
 
 226 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 with all reverent truth-seeking, open to the light, hos- 
 pitable to progress, rational, teachable, free. The church 
 which sets itself against the currents of reasonable thought, 
 and has for great words like evolution, higher criticism, 
 morality, beauty, law, only an undiscerning sneer, is in 
 reality not the defender of the faith, but a positive con- 
 tributor to the infidelity of the present age. The church 
 which asks no loyalty that is not rational, no service of 
 the heart that is not an offering of the mind, comes with its 
 refreshing message to many a bewildered young mind, and 
 is met by a renewed dedication to a reasonable service. 
 
 So far, however, I have described the religion of a col- 
 lege student as it appears in every thoughtful age. There 
 remains one aspect of the religious life which is peculiarly 
 characteristic of a college student in our own generation, 
 and of which the church in its relation to the young must 
 take fresh account. Protestant teaching, from the time 
 of Luther, has laid special emphasis on the Pauline dis- 
 tinction between faith and works. It is not a man's per- 
 formance, either of moral obligations or ritual observances, 
 that justifies him in the sight of God. He must offer 
 that total consecration of the heart, that conversion of 
 the nature, which makes him find his life in God. This 
 teaching was a necessary protest against the externalism 
 and ecclesiastical practises which had been for centuries 
 regarded by many as of the essence of the religious life. 
 "We are justified by faith"; "the just shall live by faith" 
 these great words give to religion a profounder, more 
 spiritual, and more personal significance as a relation be- 
 tween the individual soul and the living God. 
 
 But suppose that this touch of the life of God is felt by 
 the soul of man, and that the soul desires to express its 
 religious life what is to be its channel of utterance?
 
 THE RELIGION OF A STUDENT 227 
 
 The history of Protestantism for the most part answers: 
 ''The organ of religious expression is the tongue. When 
 the life is moved by the Holy Ghost, it is led to speak 
 as the spirit gives it utterance. It tells rejoicingly of its 
 new birth; it confesses Christ before its fellows; it preaches 
 to others the message which has brought it hope and 
 peace." Here is the basis of a large part of the organiza- 
 tion of the Protestant churches their meetings for free 
 expression of prayer; their association for religious utter- 
 ance; their test of faith through spoken confession. It 
 is obvious that this channel of expression is legitimate 
 and often inevitable. The fulness of religious emotion 
 which descends from God to man leaps out of many lives 
 into forms of speech, as naturally as the water which de- 
 scends from the high hills leaps out from its conduit into 
 the air. 
 
 What the present age, however, is teaching us, as the 
 world was never taught before, is that another and equally 
 legitimate channel of expression is open to the life of faith. 
 It is the language of works. We have come in these 
 days to a time devoted in an unprecedented degree to the 
 spirit of philanthropy. It is the age of social service. 
 No life can yield itself to the current of the time without 
 being swept into its movement of passionate fraternity 
 and social justice. But what is the attitude of the Chris- 
 tian church to this modern phenomenon of social service? 
 It is quite true that the church is one of the most active 
 agents of this philanthropic renaissance. The sense of 
 social responsibility is manifested by the prodigious in- 
 crease of parish charities, parish organizations, institu- 
 tional churches, and general benevolence. The church, 
 however, has failed adequately to recognize the legitimate 
 place of action as a trustworthy witness of faith. To do
 
 228 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 for others has seemed to the tradition of the church a 
 superadded and secondary effect of religion, not one of 
 its essential and original factors. First, one is to be re- 
 ligious; and then, as a consequence or ornament of his 
 religion, he is to concern himself with the better ordering 
 of the human world. 
 
 A much deeper relation between faith and works is in- 
 dicated by those solemn words in which Jesus sums up, as 
 he says, "the whole law and the prophets." There is, 
 he teaches, a kinship of nature between the love of God 
 and the love of man. The second commandment is like 
 the first. Both are parts of a complete religion. When 
 a modern life, that is to say, is moved by the spirit of 
 philanthropy, that impulse is not something which the 
 church may stand apart from and commend as of another 
 sphere. It is, in fact, one legitimate expression of the 
 religious life; uttering itself not by the tongue, but by 
 the hand, as though there had been heard the great word 
 of the Apostle: "If a man love not his brother whom he 
 hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?" 
 In other words, the church has permitted this modern 
 movement of philanthropy to proceed as though it were 
 not an essential part of the Christian life, when in reality 
 this whole vast enterprise is the way in which the modern 
 world is actually uttering that faith in the possible redemp- 
 tion of mankind, to accomplish which the church of Jesus 
 Christ was expressly designed and inspired. I stood one 
 day in the house of a women's settlement, set in the most 
 squalid conditions of the life of a city and purifying the 
 neighborhood with its unassuming devotion, and a minister 
 of the Christian church who was present looked about 
 him and said: "This is a very beautiful and noble work, 
 but I wish there were more of Christ in it." How could
 
 THE RELIGION OF A STUDENT 229 
 
 there, one felt like asking, be more of Christ than was 
 already there? Would technical confession or oral ex- 
 pression add any significance to such a work in his eyes 
 who said: "Not every one that sayeth to me, Lord, Lord, 
 but he that doeth the will of my Father"? Was there 
 ever, indeed, a work more full of Christ? Might not 
 Jesus, if he should come again on earth, pass without 
 notice many a splendid structure reared in his name, and, 
 seeking out these servants of the broken-hearted and the 
 bruised of the world, say to them: "Inasmuch as ye have 
 done it unto one of these least, ye have done it unto me"? 
 Why is the church not far-sighted enough to claim for 
 herself what is justly her own? She clings to the test of 
 faith by a single form of expression, when in fact the spirit 
 of God is manifesting itself at the present time by another 
 way of expression. And so it comes to pass that the most 
 immediate problem for the church is to find a place within 
 her religious experience for the new manifestation of self- 
 effacing philanthropy, and to claim the age of social 
 service as at heart an age of faith. 
 
 Now, at precisely this point, where the first expression 
 of the spirit of God takes the form of the service of man, 
 the Christian church meets the religion of the college 
 student. The normal type of a serious-minded young 
 man at the present time does not talk much about religion. 
 Sometimes this reserve proceeds from self-consciousness 
 and ought to be overcome, but quite as often it proceeds 
 from modesty and ought to be reverenced. At any rate, 
 such is the college student a person disinclined to much 
 profession of piety, and not easy to shape into the earlier 
 type of expressed discipleship. Yet, at the same time, this 
 young man is extraordinarily responsive to the new call 
 for human service. I suppose that never in the history
 
 230 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 of education were so many young men and young women 
 in our colleges profoundly stirred by a sense of social 
 responsibility and a passion for social justice. The first 
 serious question which the college student asks is not 
 "Can I be saved? Do I believe?" but "What can I do 
 for others? What can I do for those less fortunate than 
 I ? " No one can live in a community of these young lives 
 without perceiving a quality of self-sacrificing altruism so 
 beautiful and so eager that it is akin to the emotions which 
 in other days brought in a revival of religion. 
 
 What is the duty of the church to a mood like this? 
 The duty of the church or rather the privilege of the 
 church is to recognize that this is a revival of religion; 
 that in this generous movement of human sympathy 
 there is a legitimate and acceptable witness of the life of 
 God in the soul of the modern world. It may not be that 
 form of evidence which other times have regarded as valid; 
 it may, perhaps, not be the most direct way of religious 
 expression; but none the less it happens to be the way 
 through which the Holy Spirit is at the present time di- 
 recting the emotional life of youth to natural utterance. 
 "I am not very religious," said one frank youth to me one 
 day, "but I should like to do a little to make of Harvard 
 College something more than a winter watering-place." 
 But was not that youth religious? Was it not the spirit 
 of God which was stirring his young heart? What, in- 
 deed, is the final object of religion if it is not to include 
 the making of that better world which he in his dream 
 desired to see? In this quality of the religion of a college 
 student the church must believe. It must take him as he 
 is, and let him testify by conduct if he will not testify by 
 words. If the student might be assured that the religion 
 which the church represents is a practical, working, min-
 
 THE RELIGION OF A STUDENT 231 
 
 istering faith; if he could see that the mission of the church 
 was not the saving of a few fortunate souls from a wrecked 
 and drifting world, but the bringing of the world itself, 
 like a still seaworthy vessel, with its whole cargo of hopes 
 and fears, safe to its port; if he could believe that in the 
 summons of the time to unselfish service he was in reality 
 hearing the call of the living God; then he would see 
 in the church not, as he is often inclined to see, an ob- 
 stinate defender of impossible opinions, or a hothouse 
 for exotic piety, or a cold-storage warehouse to preserve 
 traditions which would perish in the open air, but the 
 natural expression of organized righteousness, the body of 
 those who are sanctified for others' sakes, and to such a 
 church he would offer his honest and practical loyalty. 
 
 These are the tests to which the church must submit 
 if it would meet the religion of a college student the 
 tests of reality, reasonableness, and practical service. A 
 religion without reality formal, external, technical, ob- 
 scurantist; a religion without reasonableness omniscient, 
 dogmatic, timid; a religion which does not greet the spirit 
 of practical service as the spirit of Christ a religion of 
 such a kind may win the loyalty of emotional or theolog- 
 ical or ecclesiastical minds, but it is not acceptable to the 
 normal type of educated American youth. Such natures 
 demand first a genuine, then a rational, and then a prac- 
 tical religion, and they are held to the Christian church 
 by no bond of sentiment or tradition which will prevent 
 their seeking a more religious life elsewhere. And what 
 is this but a wholesome challenge to the church of Christ 
 to renew its vitality at the sources of its real power? The 
 intellectual issues of the present time are too real to be 
 met by artificiality and too rational to be interpreted by 
 traditionalism; the practical philanthropy of the present
 
 232 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 time is too absorbing and persuasive to be subordinated 
 or ignored. It is a time for the church to dismiss all 
 affectations and all assumptions of authority, and to give 
 itself to the reality of rational religion and to the practical 
 redemption of an unsanctified world. This return to sim- 
 plicity and service will be at the same time a recognition 
 of the religion of a college student and a renewal of the re- 
 ligion of Jesus Christ.
 
 XVI 
 
 INAUGURAL ADDRESS 1 
 
 ALEXANDER MEIKLEJOHN 
 
 In the discussions concerning college education there is 
 one voice which is all too seldom raised and all too often 
 disregarded. It is the voice of the teacher and the scholar, 
 of the member of the college faculty. It is my purpose 
 to devote this address to a consideration of the ideals of 
 the teacher, of the problems of instruction as they present 
 themselves to the men who are giving the instruction. 
 And I do this not because I believe that just now the 
 teachers are wiser than others who are dealing with the 
 same questions, but rather as an expression of a definite 
 conviction with regard to the place of the teacher in our 
 educational scheme. It is, I believe, the function of the 
 teacher to stand before his pupils and before the commu- 
 nity at large as the intellectual leader of his time. If he 
 is not able to take this leadership, he is not worthy of 
 his calling. If the leadership is taken from him and given 
 to others, then the very foundations of the scheme of in- 
 struction are shaken. He who in matters of teaching must 
 be led by others is not the one to lead the imitative under- 
 graduate, not the one to inspire the confidence and loy- 
 alty and discipleship on which all true teaching depends. 
 If there are others who can do these things better than 
 the college teacher of to-day, then we must bring them 
 
 1 Reprinted through the courtesy of Alexander Meiklejohn and of The 
 Anthers t Graduates' Quarterly. 
 
 233
 
 234 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 within the college walls. But if the teacher is to be deemed 
 worthy of his task, then he must be recognized as the 
 teacher of us all, and we must listen to his words as he 
 speaks of the matters intrusted to his charge. 
 
 In the consideration of the educational creed of the 
 teacher I will try to give, first, a brief statement of his 
 belief; second, a defense of it against other views of the 
 function of the college; third, an interpretation of its 
 meaning and significance; fourth, a criticism of what seem 
 to me misunderstandings of their own meaning prevalent 
 among the teachers of our day; and, finally, a suggestion 
 of certain changes in policy which must follow if the be- 
 lief of the teacher is clearly understood and applied in 
 our educational procedure. 
 
 First, then, What do our teachers believe to be the aim 
 of college instruction? Wherever their opinions and con- 
 victions find expression there is one contention which is 
 always in the foreground, namely, that to be liberal a col- 
 lege must be essentially intellectual. It is a place, the 
 teachers tell us, in which a boy, forgetting all things else, 
 may set forth on the enterprise of learning. It is a time 
 when a young man may come to awareness of the think- 
 ing of his people, may perceive what knowledge is and 
 has been and is to be. Whatever light-hearted under- 
 graduates may say, whatever the opinions of solicitous par- 
 ents, of ambitious friends, of employers in search of work- 
 men, of leaders in church or state or business, whatever 
 may be the beliefs and desires and demands of outsiders, 
 the teacher within the college, knowing his mission as 
 no one else can know it, proclaims that mission to be the
 
 INAUGURAL ADDRESS 235 
 
 leading of his pupil into the life intellectual. The college 
 is primarily not a place of the body, nor of the feelings, 
 nor even of the will; it is, first of all, a place of the mind. 
 
 II 
 
 Against this intellectual interpretation of the college our 
 teachers find two sets of hostile forces constantly at work. 
 Outside the walls there are the practical demands of a 
 busy commercial and social scheme; within the college 
 there are the trivial and sentimental and irrational mis- 
 understandings of its own friends. Upon each of these 
 our college teachers are wont to descend as Samson upon 
 the Philistines, and when they have had their will, there 
 is little left for another to accomplish. 
 
 As against the immediate practical demands from with- 
 out, the issue is clear and decisive. College teachers know 
 that the world must have trained workmen, skilled opera- 
 tives, clever buyers and sellers, efficient directors, resource- 
 ful manufacturers, able lawyers, ministers, physicians, and 
 teachers. But it is equally true that, in order to do its 
 own work, the liberal college must leave the special and 
 technical training for these trades and professions to be 
 done in other schools and by other methods. In a word, 
 the liberal college does not pretend to give all the kinds 
 of teaching which a young man of college age may prof- 
 itably receive; it does not even claim to give all the kinds 
 of intellectual training which are worth giving. It is com- 
 mitted to intellectual training of the liberal type, what- 
 ever that may mean, and to that mission it must be faith- 
 ful. One may safely say, then, on behalf of our college 
 teachers, that their instruction is intended to be radically 
 different from that given in the technical school or even
 
 236 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 in the professional school. Both these institutions are 
 practical in a sense which the college, as an intellectual 
 institution, is not. In the technical school the pupil is 
 taught how to do some one of the mechanical operations 
 which contribute to human welfare. He is trained to 
 print, to weave, to farm, to build; and for the most part 
 he is trained to do these things by practise rather than 
 by theory. His possession when he leaves the school is 
 not a stock of ideas, of scientific principles, but a measure 
 of skill, a collection of rules of thumb. His primary func- 
 tion as a tradesman is not to understand but to do, and 
 in doing what is needed he is following directions which 
 have first been thought out by others and are now prac- 
 tised by him. The technical school intends to furnish 
 training which, in the sense in which we use the term, is 
 not intellectual but practical. 
 
 In a corresponding way the work of the professional 
 school differs from that of the liberal college. In the teach- 
 ing of engineering, medicine, or law we are or may be 
 beyond the realm of mere skill and within the realm of 
 ideas and principles. But the selection and the relating 
 of these ideas is dominated by an immediate practical in- 
 terest which cuts them off from the intellectual point of 
 view of the scholar. If an undergraduate should take 
 away from his studies of chemistry, biology, and psychol- 
 ogy only those parts which have immediate practical ap- 
 plication in the field of medicine, the college teachers would 
 feel that they had failed to give to the boy the kind of 
 instruction demanded of a college. It is not their purpose 
 to furnish applied knowledge in this sense. They are not 
 willing to cut up their sciences into segments and to allow 
 the student to select those segments which may be of serv- 
 ice in the practise of an art or a profession. In one way
 
 INAUGURAL ADDRESS 237 
 
 or another the teacher feels a kinship with the scientist 
 and the scholar which forbids him to submit to this dom- 
 ination of his instruction by the demands of an immedi- 
 ate practical interest. Whatever it may mean, he intends 
 to hold the intellectual point of view and to keep his stu- 
 dents with him if he can. In response, then, to demands 
 for technical and professional training our college teachers 
 tell us that such training may be obtained in other schools; 
 it is not to be had in a college of liberal culture. 
 
 In the conflict with the forces within the college our 
 teachers find themselves fighting essentially the same bat- 
 tle as against the foes without. In a hundred different 
 ways the friends of the college students, graduates, trus- 
 tees, and even colleagues: seem to them so to misunder- 
 stand its mission as to minimize or to falsify its intellec- 
 tual ideals. The college is a good place for making friends; 
 it gives excellent experience in getting on with men; it has 
 exceptional advantages as an athletic club; it is a rela- 
 tively safe place for a boy when he first leaves home; on 
 the whole it may improve a student's manners; it gives 
 acquaintance with lofty ideals of character, preaches the 
 doctrine of social service, exalts the virtues and duties of 
 citizenship. All these conceptions seem to the teacher to 
 hide or to obscure the fact that the college is fundamen- 
 tally a place of the mind, a time for thinking, an oppor- 
 tunity for knowing. And perhaps in proportion to their 
 own loftiness of purpose and motive they are the more 
 dangerous as tending all the more powerfully to replace 
 or to nullify the underlying principle upon which they all 
 depend. Here again, when misconception clears away, one 
 can have no doubt that the battle of the teacher is a right- 
 eous one. It is well that a boy should have four good 
 years of athletic sport, playing his own games and watch-
 
 238 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 ing the games of his fellows; it is well that his manners 
 should be improved; it is worth while to make good 
 friends; it is very desirable to develop the power of un- 
 derstanding and working with other men; it is surely 
 good to grow in strength and purity of character, in de- 
 votion to the interests of society, in readiness to meet the 
 obligations and opportunities of citizenship. If any one of 
 these be lacking from the fruits of a college course we may 
 well complain of the harvest. And yet is it not true that 
 by sheer pressure of these, by the driving and pulling of 
 the social forces within and without the college, the mind 
 of the student is constantly torn from its chief concern? 
 Do not our social and practical interests distract our boys 
 from the intellectual achievements which should dominate 
 their imagination and command their zeal ? I believe that 
 one may take it as the deliberate judgment of the teachers 
 of our colleges to-day that the function of the college is 
 constantly misunderstood, and that it is subjected to de- 
 mands which, however friendly in intent, are yet destruc- 
 tive of its intellectual efficiency and success. 
 
 Ill 
 
 But now that the contention of the teacher has been 
 stated and reaffirmed against objections, it is time to ask: 
 What does it mean? And how can it be justified? By 
 what might does a company of scholars invite young men 
 to spend with them four years of discipleship ? Do they, 
 in their insistence upon the intellectual quality of their 
 ideal, intend to give an education which is avowedly un- 
 practical? If so, how shall they justify then: invitation, 
 which may perhaps divert young men from other interests 
 and other companionships which are valuable to them-
 
 INAUGURAL ADDRESS 239 
 
 selves and to their fellows ? In a word, what is the under- 
 lying motive of the teacher, what is there in the intellec- 
 tual interests and activities which seems to him to warrant 
 their domination over the training and instruction of 
 young men during the college years? 
 
 It is no fair answer to this question to summon us to 
 faith in intellectual ideals, to demand of us that we live 
 the life of the mind with confidence in the virtues of in- 
 telligence, that we love knowledge and because of our 
 passion follow after it. Most of us are already eager to 
 accept intellectual ideals, but our very devotion to them 
 forbids that we accept them blindly. I have often been 
 struck by the inner contradictoriness of the demand that 
 we have faith in intelligence. It seems to mean, as it is 
 so commonly made to mean, that we must unintelligently 
 follow intelligence, that we must ignorantly pursue knowl- 
 edge, that we must question everything except the busi- 
 ness of asking questions, that we think about everything 
 except the use of thinking itself. As Mr. F. H. Bradley 
 would say, the dictum, "Have faith in intelligence," is so 
 true that it constantly threatens to become false. Our 
 very conviction of its truth compels us to scrutinize and 
 test it to the end. 
 
 How, then, shall we justify the faith of the teacher? 
 What reason can we give for our exaltation of intellectual 
 training and activity? To this question two answers are 
 possible. First, knowledge and thinking are good in them- 
 selves. Secondly, they help us in the attainment of other 
 values in life which without them would be impossible. 
 Both these answers may be given and are given by col- 
 lege teachers. Within them must be found whatever can 
 be said by way of explanation and justification of the 
 work of the liberal college.
 
 2 4 o COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 The first answer receives just now far less of recogni- 
 tion than it can rightly claim. When the man of the 
 world is told that a boy is to be trained in thinking just 
 because of the joys and satisfactions of thinking itself, just 
 in order that he may go on thinking as long as he lives, 
 the man of the world has been heard to scoff and to ridi- 
 cule the idle dreaming of scholarly men. But if thinking 
 is not a good thing in itself, if intellectual activity is not 
 worth while for its own sake, will the man of the world 
 tell us what is? There are those among us who find so 
 much satisfaction in the countless trivial and vulgar amuse- 
 ments of a crude people that they have no time for the 
 joys of the mind. There are those who are so closely 
 shut up within a little round of petty pleasures that they 
 have never dreamed of the fun of reading and conversing 
 and investigating and reflecting. And of these one can 
 only say that the difference is one of taste, and that their 
 tastes seem to be relatively dull and stupid. Surely it is 
 one function of the liberal college to save boys from that 
 stupidity, to give them an appetite for the pleasures of 
 thinking, to make them sensitive to the joys of apprecia- 
 tion and understanding, to show them how sweet and 
 captivating and wholesome are the games of the mind. 
 At the time when the play element is still dominant it is 
 worth while to acquaint boys with the sport of facing and 
 solving problems. Apart from some of the experiences of 
 friendship and sympathy, I doubt if there are any human 
 interests so permanently satisfying, so fine and splendid 
 in themselves, as are those of intellectual activity. To give 
 our boys that zest, that delight in things intellectual, to 
 give them an appreciation of a kind of life which is well 
 worth living, to make them men of intellectual culture 
 that certainly is one part of the work of any liberal 
 college.
 
 INAUGURAL ADDRESS 241 
 
 On the other hand, the creation of culture as so defined 
 can never constitute the full achievement of the college. 
 It is essential to awaken the impulses of inquiry, of ex- 
 periment, of investigation, of reflection, the instinctive 
 cravings of the mind. But no liberal college can be con- 
 tent with this. The impulse to thinking must be ques- 
 tioned and rationalized as must every other instinctive 
 response. It is well to think, but what shall we think 
 about? Are there any lines of investigation and reflec- 
 tion more valuable than others, and, if so, how is their 
 value to be tested? Or again, if the impulse for think- 
 ing comes into conflict with other desires and cravings, 
 how is the opposition to be solved? It has sometimes 
 been suggested that our man of intellectual culture may 
 be found, like Nero, fiddling with words while all the world 
 about him is aflame. And the point of the suggestion is 
 not that fiddling is a bad and worthless pastime, but 
 rather that it is inopportune on such an occasion, that 
 the man who does it is out of touch with his situation, 
 that his fiddling does not fit his facts. In a word, men 
 know with regard to thinking, as with regard to every 
 other content of human experience, that it cannot be val- 
 ued merely in terms of itself. It must be measured in 
 terms of its relation to other contents and to human ex- 
 perience as a whole. Thinking is good in itself, but what 
 does it cost of other things; what does it bring of other 
 values? Place it amid all the varied contents of our in- 
 dividual and social experience, measure it in terms of 
 what it implies, fix it by means of its relations, and then 
 you will know its worth not simply in itself but in that 
 deeper sense which comes when human desires are ration- 
 alized and human lives are known hi their entirety, as 
 well as they can be known by those who are engaged in 
 living them.
 
 242 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 In this consideration we find the second answer of the 
 teacher to the demand for justification of the work of the 
 college. Knowledge is good, he tells us, not only in itself, 
 but in its enrichment and enhancement of the other values 
 of our experience. In the deepest and fullest sense of the 
 words, knowledge pays. This statement rests upon the 
 classification of human actions into two groups, those of 
 the instinctive type and those of the intellectual type. 
 By far the greater part of our human acts are carried on 
 without any clear idea of what we are going to do or how 
 we are going to do it. For the most part our responses 
 to our situations are the immediate responses of feeling, 
 of perception, of custom, of tradition. But slowly and 
 painfully, as the mind has developed, action after action 
 has been translated from the feeling to the ideational type; 
 in wider and wider fields men have become aware of their 
 own modes of action, more and more they have come to 
 understanding, to knowledge of themselves and of their 
 needs. And the principle underlying all our educational 
 procedure is that, on the whole, actions become more suc- 
 cessful as they pass from the sphere of feeling to that of 
 understanding. Our educational belief is that in the long 
 run, if men know what they are going to do and how they 
 are going to do it, and what is the nature of the situation 
 with which they are dealing, their response to that situa- 
 tion will be better adjusted and more beneficial than are 
 the responses of the feeling type in like situations. 
 
 It is all too obvious that there are limits to the va- 
 lidity of this principle. If men are to investigate, to con- 
 sider, to decide, then action must be delayed and we must 
 pay the penalty of waiting. If men are to endeavor to 
 understand and know their situations, then we must be 
 prepared to see them make mistakes in their thinking, lose
 
 INAUGURAL ADDRESS 243 
 
 their certainty of touch, wander off into pitfalls and illu- 
 sions and fallacies of thought, and in consequence secure 
 for the time results far lower in value than those of the 
 instinctive response which they seek to replace. The de- 
 lays and mistakes and uncertainties of our thinking are a 
 heavy price to pay, but it is the conviction of the teacher 
 that the price is as nothing when compared with the goods 
 which it buys. You may point out to him the loss when 
 old methods of procedure give way before the criticism of 
 understanding, you may remind him of the pain and suf- 
 fering when old habits of thought and action are replaced, 
 you may reprove him for all the blunders of the past; but 
 in spite of it all he knows, and you know, that in human 
 lives taken separately and in human life as a whole men's 
 greatest lack is the lack of understanding, their greatest 
 hope to know themselves and the world in which they 
 live. 
 
 Within the limits of this general educational principle 
 the place of the liberal college may easily be fixed. In 
 the technical school pupils are prepared for a specific work 
 and are kept for the most part on the plane of perceptual 
 action, doing work which others understand. In the pro- 
 fessional school, students are properly within the realm of 
 ideas and principles, but they are still limited to a specific 
 human interest with which alone their understanding is 
 concerned. But the college is called liberal as against 
 both of these because the instruction is dominated by no 
 special interest, is limited to no single human task, but is 
 intended to take human activity as a whole, to under- 
 stand human endeavors not in their isolation but in their 
 relations to one another and to the total experience which 
 we call the life of our people. And just as we believe 
 that the building of ships has become more successful as
 
 244 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 men have come to a knowledge of the principles involved 
 in their construction; just as the practise of medicine has 
 become more successful as we have come to a knowledge 
 of the human body, of the conditions within it and the 
 influences without; just so the teacher in the liberal col- 
 lege believes that life as a total enterprise, life as it pre- 
 sents itself to each one of us in his career as an individual, 
 human living, will be more successful in so far as men 
 come to understand it and to know it as they attempt to 
 carry it on. To give boys an intellectual grasp on human 
 experience this it seems to me is the teacher's concep- 
 tion of the chief function of the liberal college. 
 
 May I call attention to the fact that this second answer 
 of the teacher defines the aim of the college as avowedly 
 and frankly practical ? Knowledge is to be sought chiefly 
 for the sake of its contribution to the other activities of 
 human living. But, on the other hand, it is as definitely 
 declared that in method the college is fully and unreserv- 
 edly intellectual. If we can see that these two demands 
 are not in conflict, but that they stand together in the 
 harmonious relation of means and ends, of instrument and 
 achievement, of method and result, we may escape many 
 a needless conflict and keep our educational policy in sin- 
 gleness of aim and action. To do this we must show that 
 the college is intellectual, not as opposed to practical inter- 
 ests and purposes, but as opposed to unpractical and un- 
 wise methods of work. The issue is not between practical 
 and intellectual aims but between the immediate and the 
 remote aim, between the hasty and the measured proce- 
 dure, between the demand for results at once and the 
 willingness to wait for the best results. The intellectual 
 road to success is longer and more roundabout than any 
 other, but they who are strong and willing for the climb-
 
 INAUGURAL ADDRESS 245 
 
 ing are brought to higher levels of achievement than they 
 could possibly have attained had they gone straight forward 
 in the pathway of quick returns. If this were not true the 
 liberal college would have no proper place in our life at 
 all. In so far as it is true the college has a right to claim 
 the best of our young men to give them its preparation 
 for the living they are to do. 
 
 IV 
 
 But now that we have attempted to interpret the in- 
 tellectual mission of the college, it may be fair to ask: 
 "Are the teachers and scholars of our day always faithful 
 to that mission? Do their statements and their practise 
 always ring in accord with the principle which has been 
 stated?" It seems to me that at two points they are 
 constantly off the key, constantly at variance with the 
 reasons by which alone their teaching can be justified. 
 
 In the first place, it often appears as if our teachers and 
 scholars were deliberately in league to mystify and befog 
 the popular mind regarding this practical value of intel- 
 lectual work. They seem not to wish too much said about 
 the results and benefits. Their desire is to keep aloft the 
 intellectual banner, to proclaim the intellectual gospel, to 
 demand of student and public alike adherence to the faith. 
 And in general when they are questioned as to results 
 they give little satisfaction except to those who are al- 
 ready pledged to unwavering confidence in their ipse dixits. 
 And largely as a result of this attitude the American 
 people seem to me to have little understanding of the in- 
 tellectual work of the college. Our citizens and patrons 
 can see the value of games and physical exercises; they 
 readily perceive the importance of the social give and take
 
 246 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 of a college democracy; they can appreciate the value of 
 studies which prepare a young man for his profession and 
 so anticipate or replace the professional school; they can 
 even believe that if a boy is kept at some sort of thinking 
 for four years his mind may become more acute, more sys- 
 tematic, more accurate, and hence more useful than it was 
 before. But as for the content of a college course, as for 
 the value of knowledge, what a boy gains by knowing 
 Greek or economics, philosophy or literature, history or 
 biology, except as they are regarded as having professional 
 usefulness, I think our friends are in the dark and are 
 likely to remain so until we turn on the light. When our 
 teachers say, as they sometimes do say, that the effect of 
 knowledge upon the character and life of the student must 
 always be for the college an accident, a circumstance which 
 has no essential connection with its real aim or function, 
 then it seems to me that our educational policy is wholly 
 out of joint. If there be no essential connection between 
 instruction and life, then there is no reason for giving in- 
 struction except in so far as it is pleasant in itself, and we 
 have no educational policy at all. As against this hesi- 
 tancy, this absence of a conviction, we men of the col- 
 lege should declare in clear and unmistakable terms our 
 creed the creed that knowledge is justified by its results. 
 We should say to our people so plainly that they cannot 
 misunderstand: "Give us your boys, give us the means 
 we need, and we will so train and inform the minds of 
 those boys that their own lives and the lives of the men 
 about them shall be more successful than they could be 
 without our training. Give us our chance and we will 
 show your boys what human living is, for we are convinced 
 that they can live better in knowledge than they can in 
 ignorance."
 
 INAUGURAL ADDRESS 247 
 
 There is a second wandering from the faith which is so 
 common among investigators that it may fairly be called 
 the "fallacy of the scholar." It is the belief that all knowl- 
 edge is so good that all parts of knowledge are equally 
 good. Ask many of our scholars and teachers what sub- 
 jects a boy should study in order that he may gain insight 
 for human living, and they will say: "It makes no differ- 
 ence in what department of knowledge he studies; let 
 him go into Sanscrit or bacteriology, into mathematics or 
 history; if only he goes where men are actually dealing 
 with intellectual problems, and if only he learns how to 
 deal with problems himself, the aim of education is achieved, 
 he has entered into intellectual activity." This point of 
 view, running through all the varieties of the elective sys- 
 tem, seems to me hopelessly at variance with any sound 
 educational doctrine. It represents the scholar of the day 
 at his worst both as a thinker and as a teacher. In so 
 far as it dominates a group of college teachers it seems to 
 me to render them unfit to determine and to administer a 
 college curriculum. It is an announcement that they have 
 no guiding principles in their educational practise, no prin- 
 ciples of selection in their arrangement of studies, no gen- 
 uine grasp on the relationship between knowledge and life. 
 It is the concerted statement of a group of men each of 
 whom is lost within the limits of his own special studies, 
 and who as a group seem not to realize the organic re- 
 lationships between them nor the common task which 
 should bind them together. 
 
 In bringing this second criticism against our scholars I 
 am not urging that the principle of election of college 
 studies should be entirely discontinued. But I should like 
 to inquire by what right and within what limits it is jus- 
 tified. The most familiar argument in its favor is that if
 
 248 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 a student is allowed to choose along the lines of his own 
 intellectual or professional interest he will have enthusiasm, 
 the eagerness which comes with the following of one's own 
 bent. Now just so far as this result is achieved, just so 
 far as the quality of scholarship is unproved, the proce- 
 dure is good, and we may follow it if we do not thereby 
 lose other results more valuable than our gain. But if 
 the special interest comes into conflict with more funda- 
 mental ones, if what the student prefers is opposed to 
 what he ought to prefer, then we of the college cannot 
 leave the choice with him. We must say to him frankly: 
 "If you do not care for liberal training you had better go 
 elsewhere; we have a special and definite task assigned us 
 which demands that we keep free from the domination of 
 special or professional pursuits. So long as we are faith- 
 ful to that task we cannot give you what you ask." 
 
 In my opinion, however, the fundamental motive of the 
 elective system is not the one which has been mentioned. 
 In the last resort our teachers allow students to choose 
 their own studies, not in order to appeal to intellectual or 
 to professional interest, but because they themselves have 
 no choice of their own in which they believe with suffi- 
 cient intensity to impose it upon their pupils. And this 
 lack of a dominating educational policy is in turn an ex- 
 pression of an intellectual attitude, a point of view, which 
 marks the scholars of our tune. In a word, it seems to 
 me that our willingness to allow students to wander about 
 in the college curriculum is one of the most characteristic 
 expressions of a certain intellectual agnosticism, a kind of 
 intellectual bankruptcy, into which, in spite of all our 
 wealth of information, the spirit of the time has fallen. 
 Let me explain my meaning. 
 
 The old classical curriculum was founded by men who
 
 INAUGURAL ADDRESS 249 
 
 had a theory of the world and of human life. They had 
 taken all the available content of human knowledge and 
 had wrought it together into a coherent whole. What 
 they knew was, as judged by our standards, very little 
 in amount. But upon that little content they had ex- 
 pended all the infinite pains of understanding and inter- 
 pretation. They had taken the separate judgments of 
 science, philosophy, history, and the arts, and had so 
 welded them together, so established their relationships 
 with one another, so freed them from contradictions and 
 ambiguities that, so far as might be in their day and gen- 
 eration, human life as a whole and the world about us 
 were known, were understood, were rationalized. They 
 had a knowledge of human experience by which they 
 could live and which they could teach to others engaged 
 in the activities of living. 
 
 But with the invention of methods of scientific investi- 
 gation and discovery there came pouring into the mind 
 of Europe great masses of intellectual material, astron- 
 omy, physics, chemistry. This content for a time it could 
 not understand, could not relate to what it already knew. 
 The old boundary-lines did not enclose the new fields; the 
 old explanations and interpretations would not fit the new 
 facts. Knowledge had not grown, it had simply been en- 
 larged, and the two masses of content, the old and the 
 new, stood facing each other with no common ground of 
 understanding. Here was the intellectual task of the great 
 leaders of the early modern thought of Europe: to re- 
 establish the unity of knowledge, to discover the relation- 
 ships between these apparently hostile bodies of judgments, 
 to know the world again, but with all the added richness 
 of the new insights and the new information. This was 
 the work of Leibnitz and Spinoza, of Kant and Hegel, and
 
 250 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 those who labored with them. And in a very consider- 
 able measure the task had been accomplished, order had 
 been restored. But again with the inrush of the newer 
 discoveries, first in the field of biology and then later in 
 the world of human relationships, the difficulties have 
 returned, multiplied a thousandfold. Every day sees a 
 new field of facts opened up, a new method of investiga- 
 tion invented, a new department of knowledge established. 
 And in the rush of it all these new sciences come merely 
 as additions, not to be understood but simply numbered, 
 not to be interpreted but simply listed in the great col- 
 lection of separate fields of knowledge. If you will ex- 
 amine the work of any scientist within one of these fields, 
 you will find him ordering, systematizing, reducing to 
 principles in a word, knowing every fact in terms of its 
 relation to every other fact and to the whole field within 
 which it falls. But at the same time these separate sci- 
 ences, these separate groups of judgment, are left stand- 
 ing side by side with no intelligible connections, no estab- 
 lishment of relationships, no interpretation in the sense in 
 which we insist upon it with each of the fields taken by 
 itself. Is it not the characteristic statement of a scholar 
 of our time to say: "I do not know what may be the ulti- 
 mate significance of these facts and these principles; all 
 that I know is that if you will follow my methods within 
 my field you will find the facts coming into order, the 
 principles coming into simple and coherent arrangement. 
 With any problems apart from this order and this arrange- 
 ment I have intellectually no concern." 
 
 It has become an axiom with us that the genuine stu- 
 dent labors within his own field. And if the student ven- 
 tures forth to examine the relations of his field to the 
 surrounding country he very easily becomes a popularizer,
 
 INAUGURAL ADDRESS 251 
 
 a litterateur, a speculator, and, worst of all, unscientific. 
 Now I do not object to a man's minding his own intellec- 
 tual business if he chooses to do so, but when a man minds 
 his own business because he does not know any other 
 business, because he has no knowledge whatever of the 
 relationships which justify his business and make it worth 
 while, then I think one may say that though such a man 
 minds his own affairs he does not know them, he does not 
 understand them. Such a man, from the point of view 
 of the demands of a liberal education, differs in no essen- 
 tial respect from the tradesman who does not understand 
 his trade or the professional man who merely practises his 
 profession. Just as truly as they, he is shut up within a 
 special interest; just as truly as they, he is making no 
 intellectual attempt to understand his experience in its 
 unity. And the pity of it is that more and more the 
 chairs in our colleges are occupied by men who have only 
 this special interest, this specialized information, and it is 
 through them that we attempt to give our boys a liberal 
 education, which the teachers themselves have not achieved. 
 I should not like to be misunderstood in making this 
 railing accusation against our teachers and our time. If 
 I say that our knowledge is at present a collection of scat- 
 tered observations about the world rather than an under- 
 standing of it, fairness compels the admission that the 
 failure is due to the inherent difficulties of the situation 
 and to the novelty of the problems presented. If I cry 
 out against the agnosticism of our people it is not as one 
 who has escaped from it, nor as one who would point the 
 way back to the older synthesis, but simply as one who 
 believes that the time has come for a reconstruction, for 
 a new synthesis. We have had time enough now to get 
 some notion of our bearings, shocks enough to get over
 
 252 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 our nervousness and discomfiture when a new one comes 
 along. It is the opportunity and the obligation of this 
 generation to think through the content of our knowing 
 once again, to understand it, so far as we can. And in 
 such a battle as this, surely it is the part of the college to 
 take the lead. Here is the mission of the college teacher 
 as of no other member of our common life. Surely he 
 should stand before his pupils and before all of us as a 
 man who has achieved some understanding of this human 
 situation of ours, but, more than that, as one who is eager 
 for the conflict with the powers of darkness and who can 
 lead his pupils in enthusiastic devotion to the common 
 cause of enlightenment. 
 
 V 
 
 And now, finally, after these attacks upon the policies 
 which other men have derived from their love of knowl- 
 edge, may I suggest two matters of policy which seem to 
 me to follow from the definition of education which we 
 have taken? The first concerns the content of the college 
 course; the second has to do with the method of its pres- 
 entation to the undergraduate. 
 
 We have said that the system of free election is natural 
 for those to whom knowledge is simply a number of sep- 
 arate departments. It is equally true that just in so far 
 as knowledge attains unity, just so far as the relations of 
 the various departments are perceived, freedom of elec- 
 tion by the student must be limited. For it at once 
 appears that on the one side there are vast ranges of infor- 
 mation which have virtually no significance for the pur- 
 poses of a liberal education, while on the other hand there 
 are certain elements so fundamental and vital that with- 
 out any one of them a liberal education is impossible.
 
 INAUGURAL ADDRESS 253 
 
 I should like to indicate certain parts of human knowl- 
 edge which seem to me so essential that no principle of 
 election should ever be allowed to drive them out of the 
 course of any college student. 
 
 First, a student should become acquainted with the fun- 
 damental motives and purposes and beliefs which, clearly 
 or unclearly recognized, underlie all human experience and 
 bind it together. He must perceive the moral strivings, 
 the intellectual endeavors, the aesthetic experiences of his 
 race, and closely linked with these, determining and de- 
 termined by them, the beliefs about the world which have 
 appeared in our systems of religion. To investigate this 
 field, to bring it to such clearness of formulation as may 
 be possible, is the task of philosophy an essential ele- 
 ment in any liberal education. Secondly, as in human 
 living, our motives, purposes, and beliefs have found ex- 
 pression in institutions those concerted modes of proce- 
 dure by which we work together a student should be 
 made acquainted with these. He should see and appre- 
 ciate what is intended, what accomplished, and what left 
 undone by such institutions as property, the courts, the 
 family, the church, the mill. To know these as contribut- 
 ing and failing to contribute to human welfare is the work 
 of our social or humanistic sciences, into which a boy must 
 go on his way through the liberal college. Thirdly, in 
 order to understand the motives and the institutions of 
 human life one must know the conditions which surround 
 it, the stage on which the game is played. To give this 
 information is the business of astronomy, geology, physics, 
 chemistry, biology, and the other descriptive sciences. 
 These a boy must know, so far as they are significant and 
 relevant to his purpose. Fourthly, as all three of these 
 factors, the motives, the institutions, the natural processes,
 
 254 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 have sprung from the past and have come to be what 
 they are by change upon change in the process of time, the 
 student of human life must try to learn the sequence of 
 events from which the present has come. The develop- 
 ment of human thought and attitude, the development of 
 human institutions, the development of the world and of 
 the beings about us all these must be known, as throw- 
 ing light upon present problems, present instrumentali- 
 ties, present opportunities in the life of human endeavor. 
 And in addition to these four studies which render human 
 experience in terms of abstract ideas, a liberal education 
 must take account of those concrete representations of life 
 which are given in the arts, and especially in the art of 
 literature. It is well that a boy should be acquainted 
 with his world not simply as expressed by the principles of 
 knowledge, but also as depicted by the artist with all the 
 vividness and definiteness which are possible in the por- 
 trayal of individual beings in individual relationships. 
 These five elements, then, a young man must take from a 
 college of liberal training: the contributions of philosophy, 
 of humanistic science, of natural science, of history, and 
 of literature. So far as knowledge is concerned, these at 
 least he should have, welded together in some kind of in- 
 terpretation of his own experience and of the world in 
 which he lives. 
 
 My second suggestion is that our college curriculum 
 should be so arranged and our instruction so devised that 
 its vital connection with the living of men should be ob- 
 vious even to an undergraduate. A little while ago I 
 heard one of the most prominent citizens of this country 
 speaking of his college days, and he said: "I remember 
 so vividly those few occasions on which the professor 
 would put aside the books and talk like a real man about
 
 INAUGURAL ADDRESS 255 
 
 real things." Oh, the bitterness of those words to the 
 teacher ! Our books are not dealing with the real things, 
 and for the most part we are not real men either, but 
 just old fogies and bookworms. And to be perfectly frank 
 about the whole matter, I believe that in large measure 
 our pupils are indifferent to their studies simply because 
 they do not see that these are important. 
 
 Now if we really have a vital course of study to present 
 I believe that this difficulty can in large measure be over- 
 come. It is possible to make a freshman realize the need 
 of translating his experience from the forms of feeling to 
 those of ideas. He can and he ought to be shown that 
 now, his days of mere tutelage being over, it is time for 
 him to face the problems of his people, to begin to think 
 about those problems for himself, to learn what other 
 men have learned and thought before him in a word, to 
 get himself ready to take his place among those who are 
 responsible for the guidance of our common life by ideas 
 and principles and purposes. If this could be done, I 
 think we should get from the reality-loving American boy 
 something like an intellectual enthusiasm, something of the 
 spirit that comes when he plays a game that seems to 
 him really worth playing. But I do not believe that this 
 result can be achieved without a radical reversal of the 
 arrangement of the college curriculum. I should like to 
 see every freshman at once plunged into the problems of 
 philosophy, into the difficulties and perplexities about our 
 institutions, into the scientific accounts of the world es- 
 pecially as they bear on human life, into the portrayals 
 of human experience which are given by the masters of 
 literature. If this were done by proper teaching, it seems 
 to me the boy's college course would at once take on sig- 
 nificance for him; he would understand what he is about;
 
 256 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 and though he would be a sadly puzzled boy at the end 
 of the first year, he would still have before him three 
 good years of study, of investigation, of reflection, and of 
 discipleship, in which to achieve, so far as may be, the 
 task to which he has been set. Let him once feel the 
 problems of the present, and his historical studies will 
 become significant; let him know what other men have 
 discovered and thought about his problems, and he will 
 be ready to deal with them himself. But in any case, the 
 whole college course will be unified and dominated by a 
 single interest, a single purpose that of so understand- 
 ing human life as to be ready and equipped for the prac- 
 tise of it. And this would mean for the college, not an- 
 other seeking of the way of quick returns, but rather an 
 escape from aimless wanderings in the mere bypaths of 
 knowledge, a resolute climbing on the highroad to a 
 unified grasp upon human experience. 
 
 I have taken so much of your time this morning that 
 an apology seems due for the things I have omitted to 
 mention. I have said nothing of the organization of the 
 college, nothing of the social life of the students, nothing 
 of the relations with the alumni, nothing of the needs and 
 qualifications of the teachers, and even within the con- 
 sideration of the course of study, nothing of the value of 
 specialization or of the disciplinary subjects or of the 
 training in language and expression. And I have put 
 these aside deliberately, for the sake of a cause which is 
 greater than any of them a cause which lies at the very 
 heart of the liberal college. It is the cause of making 
 clear to the American people the mission of the teacher, 
 of convincing them of the value of knowledge: not the 
 specialized knowledge which contributes to immediate prac- 
 tical aims, but the unified understanding which is Insight.
 
 XVII 
 
 THE STRENUOUS LIFE 1 
 
 THEODORE ROOSEVELT 
 
 In speaking to you, men of the greatest city of the 
 West, men of the State which gave to the country Lin- 
 coln and Grant, men who pre-eminently and distinctly 
 embody all that is most American in the American char- 
 acter, I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, 
 but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and 
 effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form 
 of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere 
 easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from 
 danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out 
 of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph. 
 
 A life of slothful ease, a life of that peace which springs 
 merely from lack either of desire or of power to strive 
 after great things, is as little worthy of a nation as of 
 an individual. I ask only that what every self-respecting 
 American demands from himself and from his sons shall 
 be demanded of the American nation as a whole. Who 
 among you would teach your boys that ease, that peace 
 is to be the first consideration in their eyes to be the 
 ultimate goal after which they strive? You men of Chi- 
 cago have made this city great, you men of Illinois have 
 
 1 A speech before the Hamilton Club, Chicago, April 10, 1899. Re- 
 printed from the volume entitled The Strenuous Life, Essays and Addresses, 
 through the courtesy of Colonel Theodore Roosevelt and of The Century 
 Company. 
 
 2S7
 
 258 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 done your share, and more than your share, in making 
 America great, because you neither preach nor practise 
 such a doctrine. You work yourselves, and you bring up 
 your sons to work. If you are rich and are worth your 
 salt, you will teach your sons that, though they may have 
 leisure, it is not to be spent in idleness; for wisely used 
 leisure merely means that those who possess it, being free 
 from the necessity of working for their livelihood, are all 
 the more bound to carry on some kind of non-remuner- 
 ative work in science, in letters, in art, in exploration, in 
 historical research work of the type we most need in 
 this country, the successful carrying out of which reflects 
 most honor upon the nation. We do not admire the man 
 of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies vic- 
 torious effort; the man who never wrongs his neighbor, 
 who is prompt to help a friend, but who has those virile 
 qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life. 
 It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to 
 succeed. In this h'fe we get nothing save by effort. Free- 
 dom from effort in the present merely means that there 
 has been stored up effort in the past. A man can be freed 
 from the necessity of work only by the fact that he or 
 his fathers before him have worked to good purpose. If 
 the freedom thus purchased is used aright, and the man 
 still does actual work, though of a different kind, whether 
 as a writer or a general, whether in the field of politics or 
 in the field of exploration and adventure, he shows he de- 
 serves his good fortune. But if he treats this period of 
 freedom from the need of actual labor as a period, not 
 of preparation, but of mere enjoyment, even though per- 
 haps not of vicious enjoyment, he shows that he is simply 
 a cumberer of the earth's surface, and he surely unfits 
 himself to hold his own with his fellows if the need to do
 
 THE STRENUOUS LIFE 259 
 
 so should again arise. A mere life of ease is not in the 
 end a very satisfactory life, and, above all, it is a life 
 which ultimately unfits those who follow it for serious 
 work in the world. 
 
 In the last analysis a healthy state can exist only when 
 the men and women who make it up lead clean, vigor- 
 ous, healthy lives; when the children are so trained that 
 they shall endeavor, not to shirk difficulties, but to over- 
 come them; not to seek ease, but to know how to wrest 
 triumph from toil and risk. The man must be glad to 
 do a man's work, to dare and endure and to labor; to 
 keep himself, and to keep those dependent upon him. 
 The woman must be the housewife, the helpmeet of the 
 home maker, the wise and fearless mother of many healthy 
 children. In one of Daudet's powerful and melancholy 
 books he speaks of "the fear of maternity, the haunting 
 terror of the young wife of the present day." When 
 such words can be truthfully written of a nation, that 
 nation is rotten to the heart's core. When men fear work 
 or fear righteous war, when women fear motherhood, they 
 tremble on the brink of doom; and well it is that they 
 should vanish from the earth, where they are fit subjects 
 for the scorn of all men and women who are themselves 
 strong and brave and high-minded. 
 
 As it is with the individual, so it is with the nation. 
 It is a base untruth to say that happy is the nation that 
 has no history. Thrice happy is the nation that has a 
 glorious history. Far better it is to dare mighty things, 
 to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by fail- 
 ure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither 
 enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the 
 gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat. If in 
 1 86 1 the men who loved the Union had believed that
 
 260 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 peace was the end of all things, and war and strife the 
 worst of all things, and had acted up to their belief, we 
 would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives; we 
 would have saved hundreds of millions of dollars. More- 
 over, besides saving all the blood and treasure we then 
 lavished, we would have prevented the heart-break of 
 many women, the dissolution of many homes, and we would 
 have spared the country those months of gloom and 
 shame when it seemed as if our armies marched only 
 to defeat. We could have avoided all this suffering sim- 
 ply by shrinking from strife. And if we had thus avoided 
 it, we would have shown that we were weaklings, and 
 that we were unfit to stand among the great nations of 
 the earth. Thank God for the iron in the blood of our 
 fathers, the men who upheld the wisdom of Lincoln and 
 bore sword or rifle in the armies of Grant ! Let us, the 
 children of the men who proved themselves equal to the 
 mighty days, let us, the children of the men who carried 
 the great Civil War to a triumphant conclusion, praise the 
 God of our fathers that the ignoble counsels of peace were 
 rejected; that the suffering and loss, the blackness of sor- 
 row and despair, were unflinchingly faced, and the years 
 of strife endured; for hi the end the slave was freed, the 
 Union restored, and the mighty American republic placed 
 once more as a helmeted queen among nations. 
 
 We of this generation do not have to face a task such 
 as that our fathers faced, but we have our tasks, and woe 
 to us if we fail to perform them ! We cannot, if we would, 
 play the part of China, and be content to rot by inches 
 in ignoble ease within our borders, taking no interest in 
 what goes on beyond them, sunk in a scrambling com- 
 mercialism; heedless of the higher life, the life of aspira- 
 tion, of toil and risk, busying ourselves only with the
 
 THE STRENUOUS LIFE 261 
 
 wants of our bodies for the day, until suddenly we should 
 find, beyond a shadow of question, what China has al- 
 ready found, that in this world the nation that has trained 
 itself to a career of unwarlike and isolated ease is bound, 
 in the end, to go down before other nations which have 
 not lost the manly and adventurous qualities. If we are 
 to be a really great people, we must strive in good faith 
 to play a great part in the world. We cannot avoid meet- 
 ing great issues. All that we can determine for ourselves 
 is whether we shall meet them well or ill. In 1898 we 
 could not help being brought face to face with the prob- 
 lem of war with Spain. All we could decide was whether 
 we should shrink like cowards from the contest, or enter 
 into it as beseemed a brave and high-spirited people; and, 
 once in, whether failure or success should crown our ban- 
 ners. So it is now. We cannot avoid the responsibili- 
 ties that confront us in Hawaii, Cuba, Porto Rico, and 
 the Philippines. All we can decide is whether we shall 
 meet them in a way that will redound to the national 
 credit, or whether we shall make of our dealings with 
 these new problems a dark and shameful page in our his- 
 tory. To refuse to deal with them at all merely amounts 
 to dealing with them badly. We have a given problem 
 to solve. If we undertake the solution, there is, of course, 
 always danger that we may not solve it aright; but to 
 refuse to undertake the solution simply renders it certain 
 that we cannot possibly solve it aright. The timid man, 
 the lazy man the man who distrusts his country, the 
 overcivilized man, who has lost the great fighting, mas- 
 terful virtues, the ignorant man, and the man of dull 
 mind, whose soul is incapable of feeling the mighty lift 
 that thrills "stern men with empires in their brains" 
 all these, of course, shrink from seeing the nation under-
 
 262 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 take its new duties; shrink from seeing us build a navy 
 and an army adequate to our needs; shrink from seeing 
 us do our share of the world's work, by bringing order 
 out of chaos in the great, fair tropic islands from which 
 the valor of our soldiers and sailors has driven the Span- 
 ish flag. These are the men who fear the strenuous life, 
 who fear the only national life which is really worth lead- 
 ing. They believe in that cloistered life which saps the 
 hardy virtues in a nation, as it saps them in the indi- 
 vidual; or else they are wedded to that base spirit of gain 
 and greed which recognizes in commercialism the be-all 
 and end-all of national life, instead of realizing that, 
 though an indispensable element, it is, after all, but one 
 of the many elements that go to make up true national 
 greatness. No country can long endure if its founda- 
 tions are not laid deep in the material prosperity which 
 comes from thrift, from business energy and enterprise, 
 from hard, unsparing effort in the fields of industrial ac- 
 tivity; but neither was any nation ever yet truly great 
 if it relied upon material prosperity alone. All honor must 
 be paid to the architects of our material prosperity, to 
 the great captains of industry who have built our facto- 
 ries and our railroads, to the strong men who toil for wealth 
 with brain or hand; for great is the debt of the nation to 
 these and their kind. But our debt is yet greater to the 
 men whose highest type is to be found in a statesman like 
 Lincoln, a soldier like Grant. They showed by their lives 
 that they recognized the law of work, the law of strife; 
 they toiled to win a competence for themselves and those 
 dependent upon them; but they recognized that there were 
 yet other and even loftier duties duties to the nation 
 and duties to the race. 
 We cannot sit huddled within our own borders and
 
 THE STRENUOUS LIFE 263 
 
 avow ourselves merely an assemblage of well-to-do huck- 
 sters who care nothing for what happens beyond. Such 
 a policy would defeat even its own end; for as the na- 
 tions grow to have ever wider and wider interests, and 
 are brought into closer and closer contact, if we are to 
 hold our own in the struggle for naval and commercial 
 supremacy, we must build up our power without our own 
 borders. We must build the isthmian canal, and we must 
 grasp the points of vantage which will enable us to have 
 our say in deciding the destiny of the oceans of the East 
 and the West. 
 
 So much for the commercial side. From the standpoint 
 of international honor the argument is even stronger. The 
 guns that thundered off Manila and Santiago left us echoes 
 of glory, but they also left us a legacy of duty. If we 
 drove out a mediaeval tyranny only to make room for 
 savage anarchy, we had better not have begun the task 
 at all. It is worse than idle to say that we have no duty 
 to perform, and can leave to their fates the islands we 
 have conquered. Such a course would be the course of 
 infamy. It would be followed at once by utter chaos in 
 the wretched islands themselves. Some stronger, manlier 
 power would have to step in and do the work, and we 
 would have shown ourselves weaklings, unable to carry 
 to successful completion the labors that great and high- 
 spirited nations are eager to undertake. 
 
 The work must be done; we cannot escape our respon- 
 sibility; and if we are worth our salt, we shall be glad of 
 the chance to do the work glad of the chance to show 
 ourselves equal to one of the great tasks set modern civ- 
 ilization. But let us not deceive ourselves as to the im- 
 portance of the task. Let us not be misled by vainglory 
 into underestimating the strain it will put on our powers.
 
 264 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 Above all, let us, as we value our own self-respect, face 
 the responsibilities with proper seriousness, courage, and 
 high resolve. We must demand the highest order of in- 
 tegrity and ability in our public men who are to grapple 
 with these new problems. We must hold to a rigid ac- 
 countability those public servants who show unfaithful- 
 ness to the interests of the nation or inability to rise to 
 the high level of the new demands upon our strength and 
 our resources. 
 
 Of course we must remember not to judge any public 
 servant by any one act, and especially should we beware 
 of attacking the men who are merely the occasions and 
 not the causes of disaster. Let me illustrate what I mean 
 by the army and the navy. If twenty years ago we had 
 gone to war, we should have found the navy as absolutely 
 unprepared as the army. At that time our ships could 
 not have encountered with success the fleets of Spain any 
 more than nowadays we can put untrained soldiers, no 
 matter how brave, who are armed with archaic black- 
 powder weapons, against well-drilled regulars armed with 
 the highest type of modern repeating rifle. But in the 
 early eighties the attention of the nation became directed 
 to our naval needs. Congress most wisely made a series 
 of appropriations to build up a new navy, and under a 
 succession of able and patriotic secretaries, of both polit- 
 ical parties, the navy was gradually built up, until its 
 material became equal to its splendid personnel, with the 
 result that in the summer of 1898 it leaped to its proper 
 place as one of the most brilliant and formidable fighting 
 navies in the entire world. We rightly pay all honor to 
 the men controlling the navy at the time it won these great 
 deeds, honor to Secretary Long and Admiral Dewey, to 
 the captains who handled the ships in action, to the dar-
 
 THE STRENUOUS LIFE 265 
 
 ing lieutenants who braved death in the smaller craft, and 
 to the heads of bureaus at Washington who saw that the 
 ships were so commanded, so armed, so equipped, so well 
 engined, as to insure the best results. But let us also 
 keep ever in mind that all of this would not have availed 
 if it had not been for the wisdom of the men who during 
 the preceding fifteen years had built up the navy. Keep 
 in mind the secretaries of the navy during those years; 
 keep in mind the senators and congressmen who by their 
 votes gave the money necessary to build and to armor 
 the ships, to construct the great guns, and to tram the 
 crews; remember also those who actually did build the 
 ships, the armor, and the guns; and remember the ad- 
 mirals and captains who handled battleship, cruiser, and 
 torpedo-boat on the high seas, alone and in squadrons, 
 developing the seamanship, the gunnery, and the power 
 of acting together, which their successors utilized so glo- 
 riously at Manila and off Santiago. And, gentlemen, re- 
 member the converse, too. Remember that justice has 
 two sides. Be just to those who built up the navy, and, 
 for the sake of the future of the country, keep in mind 
 those who opposed its building up. Read the Congres- 
 sional Record. Find out the senators and congressmen who 
 opposed the grants for building the new ships; who op- 
 posed the purchase of armor, without which the ships were 
 worthless; who opposed any adequate maintenance for the 
 Navy Department and strove to cut down the number of 
 men necessary to man our fleets. The men who did these 
 things were one and all working to bring disaster on the 
 country. They have no share in the glory of Manila, in 
 the honor of Santiago. They have no cause to feel proud 
 of the valor of our sea-captains, of the renown of our flag. 
 Their motives may or may not have been good, but their
 
 266 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 acts were heavily fraught with evil. They did ill for the 
 national honor, and we won in spite of their sinister op- 
 position. 
 
 Now, apply all this to our public men of to-day. Our 
 army has never been built up as it should be built up. I 
 shall not discuss with an audience like this the puerile 
 suggestion that a nation of seventy millions of freemen is 
 in danger of losing its liberties from the existence of an 
 army of one hundred thousand men, three-fourths of whom 
 will be employed in certain foreign islands, in certain coast 
 fortresses, and on Indian reservations. No man of good 
 sense and stout heart can take such a proposition seriously. 
 If we are such weaklings as the proposition implies, then 
 we are unworthy of freedom in any event. To no body 
 of men in the United States is the country so much in- 
 debted as to the splendid officers and enlisted men of the 
 regular army and navy. There is no body from which 
 the country has less to fear, and none of which it should 
 be prouder, none which it should be more anxious to 
 upbuild. 
 
 Our army needs complete reorganization not merely 
 enlarging and the reorganization can only come as the 
 result of legislation. A proper general staff should be es- 
 tablished, and the positions of ordnance, commissary, and 
 quartermaster officers should be filled by detail from the 
 line. Above all, the army must be given the chance to 
 exercise in large bodies. Never again should we see, as 
 we saw in the Spanish War, major-generals in command 
 of divisions who had never before commanded three com- 
 panies together in the field. Yet, incredible to relate, 
 Congress has shown a queer inability to learn some of 
 the lessons of the war. There were large bodies of men 
 in both branches who opposed the declaration of war, who
 
 THE STRENUOUS LIFE 267 
 
 opposed the ratification of peace, who opposed the up- 
 building of the army, and who even opposed the purchase 
 of armor at a reasonable price for the battleships and 
 cruisers, thereby putting an absolute stop to the building 
 of any new fighting-ships for the navy. If, during the 
 years to come, any disaster should befall our arms, afloat 
 or ashore, and thereby any shame come to the United 
 States, remember that the blame will lie upon the men 
 whose names appear upon the roll-calls of Congress on 
 the wrong side of these great questions. On them will 
 lie the burden of any loss of our soldiers and sailors, of 
 any dishonor to the flag; and upon you and the people 
 of this country will lie the blame if you do not repudiate, 
 in no unmistakable way, what these men have done. The 
 blame will not rest upon the untrained commander of un- 
 tried troops, upon the civil officers of a department the 
 organization of which has been left utterly inadequate, or 
 upon the admiral with an insufficient number of ships; but 
 upon the public men who have so lamentably failed in 
 forethought as to refuse to remedy these evils long in ad- 
 vance, and upon the nation that stands behind those 
 public men. 
 
 So, at the present hour, no small share of the respon- 
 sibility for the blood shed in the Philippines, the blood 
 of our brothers, and the blood of their wild and ignorant 
 foes, lies at the thresholds of those who so long delayed 
 the adoption of the treaty of peace, and of those who, 
 by their worse than foolish words, deliberately invited a 
 savage people to plunge into a war fraught with sure dis- 
 aster for them a war, too, in which our own brave men 
 who follow the flag must pay with their blood for the 
 silly, mock humanitarianism of the prattlers who sit at 
 home in peace.
 
 268 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 The army and the navy are the sword and the shield 
 which this nation must carry if she is to do her duty among 
 the nations of the earth if she is not to stand merely as 
 the China of the western hemisphere. Our proper con- 
 duct toward the tropic islands we have wrested from 
 Spain is merely the form which our duty has taken at 
 the moment. Of course we are bound to handle the af- 
 fairs of our own household well. We must see that there 
 is civic honesty, civic cleanliness, civic good sense in our 
 home administration of city, State, and nation. We must 
 strive for honesty in office, for honesty toward the credi- 
 tors of the nation and of the individual; for the widest 
 freedom of individual initiative where possible, and for the 
 wisest control of individual initiative where it is hostile to 
 the welfare of the many. But because we set our own 
 household in order we are not thereby excused from play- 
 ing our part in the great affairs of the world. A man's 
 first duty is to his own home, but he is not thereby ex- 
 cused from doing his duty to the State; for if he fails in 
 this second duty it is under the penalty of ceasing to be 
 a freeman. In the same way, while a nation's first duty 
 is within its own borders, it is not thereby absolved from 
 facing its duties in the world as a whole; and if it refuses 
 to do so, it merely forfeits its right to struggle for a place 
 among the peoples that shape the destiny of mankind. 
 
 In the West Indies and the Philippines alike we are 
 confronted by most difficult problems. It is cowardly to 
 shrink from solving them in the proper way; for solved 
 they must be, if not by us, then by some stronger and 
 more manful race. If we are too weak, too selfish, or too 
 foolish to solve them, some bolder and abler people must 
 undertake the solution. Personally, I am far too firm a 
 believer hi the greatness of my country and the power of
 
 THE STRENUOUS LIFE 269 
 
 my countrymen to admit for one moment that we shall 
 ever be driven to the ignoble alternative. 
 
 The problems are different for the different islands. 
 Porto Rico is not large enough to stand alone. We must 
 govern it wisely and well, primarily in the interest of its 
 own people. Cuba is, in my judgment, entitled ultimately 
 to settle for itself whether it shall be an independent 
 State or an integral portion of the mightiest of republics. 
 But until order and stable liberty are secured, we must 
 remain in the island to insure them; and infinite tact, 
 judgment, moderation, and courage must be shown by 
 our military and civil representatives in keeping the is- 
 land pacified, in relentlessly stamping out brigandage, in 
 protecting all alike, and yet in showing proper recogni- 
 tion to the men who have fought for Cuban liberty. The 
 Philippines offer a yet graver problem. Their population 
 includes half-caste and native Christians, warlike Moslems, 
 and wild pagans. Many of their people are utterly unfit 
 for self-government, and show no signs of becoming fit. 
 Others may in time become fit, but at present can only 
 take part in self-government under a wise supervision, at 
 once firm and beneficent. We have driven Spanish tyr- 
 anny from the islands. If we now let it be replaced by 
 savage anarchy, our work has been for harm and not for 
 good. I have scant patience with those who fear to under- 
 take the task of governing the Philippines, and who openly 
 avow that they do fear to undertake it, or that they shrink 
 from it because of the expense and trouble; but I have 
 even scanter patience with those who make a pretense of 
 humanitarianism to hide and cover their timidity, and who 
 cant about "liberty" and the "consent of the governed" 
 in order to excuse themselves for their unwillingness to 
 play the part of men. Their doctrines, if carried out,
 
 270 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 would make it incumbent upon us to leave the Apaches 
 of Arizona to work out their own salvation, and to de- 
 cline to interfere in a single Indian reservation. Their 
 doctrines condemn your forefathers and mine for ever 
 having settled in these United States. 
 
 England's rule in India and Egypt has been of great 
 benefit to England, for it has trained up generations of 
 men accustomed to look at the larger and loftier side of 
 public life. It has been of even greater benefit to India 
 and Egypt. And finally, and most of all, it has advanced 
 the cause of civilization. So, if we do our duty aright 
 in the Philippines, we will add to that national renown 
 which is the- highest and finest part of national life, will 
 greatly benefit the people of the Philippine Islands, and, 
 above all, we will play our part well in the great work 
 of uplifting mankind. But to do this work, keep ever in 
 mind that we must show in a very high degree the quali- 
 ties of courage, of honesty, and of good judgment. Re- 
 sistance must be stamped out. The first and all-impor- 
 tant work to be done is to establish the supremacy of our 
 flag. We must put down armed resistance before we can 
 accomplish anything else, and there should be no parley- 
 ing, no faltering, in dealing with our foe. As for those 
 in our own country who encourage the foe, we can afford 
 contemptuously to disregard them; but it must be re- 
 membered that their utterances are not saved from being 
 treasonable merely by the fact that they are despicable. 
 
 When once we have put down armed resistance, when 
 once our rule is acknowledged, then an even more difficult 
 task will begin, for then we must see to it that the islands 
 are administered with absolute honesty and with good 
 judgment. If we let the public service of the islands be 
 turned into the prey of the spoils politician, we shall have
 
 THE STRENUOUS LIFE 271 
 
 begun to tread the path which Spain trod to her own 
 destruction. We must send out there only good and able 
 men, chosen for their fitness, and not because of their par- 
 tisan service, and these men must not only administer 
 impartial justice to the natives and serve their own gov- 
 ernment with honesty and fidelity, but must show the 
 utmost tact and firmness, remembering that, with such 
 people as those with whom we are to deal, weakness is 
 the greatest of crimes, and that next to weakness comes 
 lack of consideration for their principles and prejudices. 
 
 I preach to you, then, my countrymen, that our coun- 
 try calls not for the life of ease but for the life of strenu- 
 ous endeavor. The twentieth century looms before us 
 big with the fate of many nations. If we stand idly by, 
 if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace, 
 if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win 
 at hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold 
 dear, then the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us 
 by, and will win for themselves the domination of the 
 world. Let us therefore boldly face the life of strife, 
 resolute to do our duty well and manfully; resolute to 
 uphold righteousness by deed and by word; resolute to 
 be both honest and brave, to serve high ideals, yet to 
 use practical methods. Above all, let us shrink from no 
 strife, moral or physical, within or without the nation, 
 provided we are certain that the strife is justified, for it 
 is only through strife, through hard and dangerous en- 
 deavor, that we shall ultimately win the goal of true 
 national greatness.
 
 XVIII 
 AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 1 
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 "BOSWELL: We grow weary when idle. 
 
 "JOHNSON: That is, sir, because others being busy, we want com- 
 pany; but if we were idle, there would be no growing weary ; we should 
 all entertain one another." 
 
 Just now, when every one is bound, under pain of a 
 decree in absence convicting them of /^^-respectability, 
 to enter on some lucrative profession, and labor therein 
 with something not far short of enthusiasm, a cry from 
 the opposite party who are content when they have enough, 
 and like to look on and enjoy in the meanwhile, savors 
 a little of bravado and gasconade. And yet this should 
 not be. Idleness so called, which does not consist in 
 doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized 
 in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as 
 good a right to state its position as industry itself. It 
 is admitted that the presence of people who refuse to 
 enter in the great handicap race for sixpenny pieces is 
 at once an insult and a disenchantment for those who 
 do. A fine fellow (as we see so many) takes his determi- 
 nation, votes for the sixpences, and, in the emphatic Ameri- 
 canism, "goes for" them. And while such an one is 
 ploughing distressfully up the road, it is not hard to under- 
 stand his resentment, when he perceives cool persons in the 
 
 1 Reprinted from Virginibus Puerisque. 
 272
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 273 
 
 meadows by the wayside, lying with a handkerchief over 
 their ears and a glass at their elbow. Alexander is touched 
 in a very delicate place by the disregard of Diogenes. 
 Where was the glory of having taken Rome for these tu- 
 multuous barbarians who poured into the Senate house 
 and found the Fathers sitting silent and unmoved by 
 their success? It is a sore thing to have labored along 
 and scaled the arduous hilltops, and, when all is done, find 
 humanity indifferent to your achievement. Hence physi- 
 cists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a su- 
 perficial toleration for those who know little of stocks; 
 literary persons despise the unlettered; and people of all 
 pursuits combine to disparage those who have none. 
 
 But, though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is 
 not the greatest. You could not be put in prison for 
 speaking against industry, but you can be sent to Coven- 
 try for speaking like a fool. The greatest difficulty with 
 most subjects is to do them well; therefore, please to 
 remember this is an apology. It is certain that much 
 may be judiciously argued in favor of diligence; only 
 there is something to be said against it, and that is what, 
 on the present occasion, I have to say. To state one 
 argument is not necessarily to be deaf to all others, and 
 that a man has written a book of travels in Montenegro 
 is no reason why he should never have been to Richmond. 
 
 It is surely beyond a doubt that people should be a good 
 deal idle in youth. For though here and there a Lord 
 Macaulay may escape from school honors with all his wits 
 about him, most boys pay so dear for their medals that 
 they never afterward have a shot in their locker, and 
 begin the world bankrupt. And the same holds true dur- 
 ing all the time a lad is educating himself, or suffering 
 others to educate him. It must have been a very fool-
 
 274 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 ish old gentleman who addressed Johnson at Oxford in 
 these words: "Young man, ply your book diligently now, 
 and acquire a stock of knowledge; for when years come 
 upon you, you will find that poring upon books will be 
 but an irksome task." The old gentleman seems to have 
 been unaware that many other things besides reading grow 
 irksome, and not a few become impossible, by the time a 
 man has to use spectacles and cannot walk without a 
 stick. Books are good enough in their own way, but 
 they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life. It seems 
 a pity to sit, like the Lady of Shalott, peering into a mir- 
 ror, with your back turned on all the bustle and glamour 
 of reality. And if a man reads very hard, as the old anec- 
 dote reminds us, he will have little time for thoughts. 
 
 If you look back on your own education, I am sure it 
 will not be the full, vivid, instructive hours of truantry 
 that you regret; you would rather cancel some lack-lustre 
 periods between sleep and waking in the class. For my 
 own part, I have attended a good many lectures in my 
 time. I still remember that the spinning of a top is a 
 case of Kinetic Stability. I still remember that Emphy- 
 teusis is not a disease, nor Stillicide a crime. But though 
 I would not willingly part with such scraps of science, I 
 do not set the same store by them as by certain other 
 odds and ends that I came by in the open street while 
 I was playing truant. This is not the moment to dilate 
 on that mighty place of education, which was the favor- 
 ite school of Dickens and of Balzac, and turns out yearly 
 many inglorious masters in the Science of the Aspects of 
 Life. Suffice it to say this: if a lad does not learn in the 
 streets, it is because he has no faculty of learning. Nor 
 is the truant always in the streets, for, if he prefers, he 
 may go out by the gardened suburbs into the country.
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 275 
 
 He may pitch on some tuft of lilacs over a burn, and 
 smoke innumerable pipes to the tune of the water on the 
 stones. A bird will sing in the thicket. And there he 
 may fall into a vein of kindly thought, and see things 
 in a new perspective. Why, if this be not education, 
 what is? We may conceive Mr. Worldly Wiseman ac- 
 costing such an one, and the conversation that should 
 thereupon ensue: 
 
 "How now, young fellow, what dost thou here?" 
 
 "Truly, sir, I take mine ease." 
 
 "Is not this the hour of the class? and shouldst thou 
 not be plying thy Book with diligence, to the end thou 
 mayest obtain knowledge?" 
 
 "Nay, but thus also I follow after Learning, by your 
 leave." 
 
 "Learning, quotha! After what fashion, I pray thee? 
 Is it mathematics?" 
 
 "No, to be sure." 
 
 "Is it metaphysics?" 
 
 "Nor that." 
 
 "Is it some language?" 
 
 "Nay, it is no language." 
 
 "Is it a trade?" 
 
 "Nor a trade neither." 
 
 "Why, then, what is't?" 
 
 "Indeed, sir, as a time may soon come for me to go 
 upon Pilgrimage, I am desirous to note what is commonly 
 done by persons in my case, and where are the ugliest 
 Sloughs and Thickets on the Road; as also, what man- 
 ner of Staff is of the best service. Moreover, I lie here, 
 by this water, to learn by root-of-heart a lesson which 
 my master teaches me to call Peace, or Contentment." 
 
 Hereupon Mr. Worldly Wiseman was much commoved
 
 276 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 with passion, and shaking his cane with a very threatful 
 countenance, broke forth upon this wise: "Learning, 
 quotha !" said he; "I would have all such rogues scourged 
 by the Hangman!" 
 
 And so he would go his way, ruffling out his cravat 
 with a crackle of starch, like a turkey when it spread its 
 feathers. 
 
 Now this, of Mr. Wiseman's, is the common opinion. 
 A fact is not called a fact, but a piece of gossip, if it does 
 not fall into one of your scholastic categories. An inquiry 
 must be in some acknowledged direction, with a name to 
 go by; or else you are not inquiring at all, only lounging; 
 and the workhouse is too good for you. It is supposed 
 that all knowledge is at the bottom of a well or the far 
 end of a telescope. Sainte-Beuve, as he grew older, came 
 to regard all experience as a single great book, in which 
 to study for a few years ere we go hence; and it seemed 
 all one to him whether you should read in chapter XX, 
 which is the differential calculus, or in chapter XXXIX, 
 which is hearing the band play in the gardens. As a 
 matter of fact, an intelligent person, looking out of his 
 eyes and hearkening in his ears, with a smile on his face 
 all the time, will get more true education than many 
 another in a life of heroic vigils. There is certainly some 
 chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits 
 of formal and laborious science; but it is all round about 
 you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire 
 the warm and palpitating facts of life. While others are 
 filling their memory with a lumber of words, one-half of 
 which they will forget before the week be out, your tru- 
 ant may learn some really useful art: to play the fiddle, 
 to know a good cigar, or to speak with ease and oppor- 
 tunity to all varieties of men. Many who have " plied
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 277 
 
 their book diligently," and know all about some one 
 branch or another of accepted lore, come out of the study 
 with an ancient and owl-like demeanor, and prove dry, 
 stockish, and dyspeptic in all the better and brighter 
 parts of life. Many make a large fortune, who remain 
 underbred and pathetically stupid to the last. And mean- 
 time there goes the idler, who began life along with them 
 by your leave, a different picture. He has had time 
 to take care of his health and his spirits; he has been a 
 great deal in the open air, which is the most salutary of 
 all things for both body and mind; and if he has never 
 read the great Book in very recondite places, he has dipped 
 into it and skimmed it over to excellent purpose. Might 
 not the student afford some Hebrew roots, and the busi- 
 ness man some of his half-crowns, for a share of the idler's 
 knowledge of life at large, and Art of Living? Nay, and 
 the idler has another and more important quality than 
 these. I mean his wisdom. He who has much looked on 
 at the childish satisfaction of other people in their hob- 
 bies will regard his own with only a very ironical indul- 
 gence. He will not be heard among the dogmatists. He 
 will have a great and cool allowance for all sorts of people 
 and opinions. If he finds no out-of-the-way truths, he 
 will identify himself with no very burning falsehood. His 
 way takes him along a by-road, not much frequented, but 
 very even and pleasant, which is called Commonplace Lane, 
 and leads to the Belvedere of Common Sense. Thence he 
 shall command an agreeable, if no very noble prospect; 
 and while others behold the East and West, the Devil and 
 the Sunrise, he will be contentedly aware of a sort of morn- 
 ing hour upon all sublunary things, with an army of shad- 
 ows running speedily and in many different directions into 
 the great daylight of Eternity. The shadows and the gen-
 
 278 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 erations, the shrill doctors and the plangent wars, go by 
 into ultimate silence and emptiness; but underneath all 
 this, a man may see, out of the Belvedere windows, much 
 green and peaceful landscape; many firelit parlors; good 
 people laughing, drinking, and making love as they did 
 before the Flood or the French Revolution; and the old 
 shepherd telling his tale under the hawthorn. 
 
 Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or 
 market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty 
 for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense 
 of personal identity. There is a sort of dead-alive, hack- 
 neyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living 
 except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. 
 Bring these fellows into the country, or set them aboard 
 ship, and you will see how they pine for their desk or 
 their study. They have no curiosity; they cannot give 
 themselves over to random provocations; they do not take 
 pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; 
 and, unless Necessity lays about them with a stick, they 
 will even stand still. It is no good speaking to such folk: 
 they cannot be idle, their nature is not generous enough; 
 and they pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are 
 not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mill. When 
 they do not require to go to the office, when they are not 
 hungry and have no mind to drink, the whole breathing 
 world is a blank to them. If they have to wait an hour 
 or so for a train, they fall into a stupid trance with their 
 eyes open. To see them, you would suppose there was 
 nothing to look at and no one to speak with; you would 
 imagine they were paralyzed or alienated; and yet very 
 possibly they are hard workers in their own way, and 
 have good eyesight for a flaw in a deed or a turn of the 
 market. They have been to school and college, but all
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 279 
 
 the time they had their eye on the medal; they have 
 gone about in the world and mixed with clever people, 
 but all the time they were thinking of their own affairs. 
 As if a man's soul were not too small to begin with, they 
 have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of all work 
 and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless 
 attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, 
 and not one thought to rub against another, while they 
 wait for the train. Before he was breeched, he might 
 have clambered on the boxes; when he was twenty he 
 would have stared at the girls; but now the pipe is smoked 
 out, the snuff-box empty, and my gentleman sits bolt up- 
 right upon a bench, with lamentable eyes. This does not 
 appeal to me as being Success in Life. 
 
 But it is not only the person himself who suffers from 
 his busy habits, but his wife and children, his friends and 
 relations, and down to the very people he sits with in a 
 railway carriage or an omnibus. Perpetual devotion to 
 what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by 
 perpetual neglect of many other things. And it is not by 
 any means certain that a man's business is the most im- 
 portant thing he has to do. To an impartial estimate it 
 will seem clear that many of the wisest, most virtuous, 
 and most beneficent parts that are to be played upon the 
 Theatre of Life are filled by gratuitous performers, and 
 pass, among the world at large, as phases of idleness. For 
 in that Theatre, not only the walking gentlemen, singing 
 chambermaids, and dih'gent fiddlers in the orchestra, but 
 those who look on and clap their hands from the benches, 
 do really play a part and fulfil important offices toward 
 the general result. You are no doubt very dependent on 
 the care of your lawyer and stockbroker, of the guards and 
 signalmen who convey you rapidly from place to place,
 
 280 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 and the policemen who walk the streets for your protec- 
 tion; but is there not a thought of gratitude in your 
 heart for certain other benefactors who set you smiling 
 when they fall in your way, or season your dinner with 
 good company? Colonel Newcome helped to lose his 
 friend's money; Fred Bayham had an ugly trick of bor- 
 rowing shirts; and yet they were better people to fall 
 among than Mr. Barnes. And though Falstaff was neither 
 sober nor very honest, I think I could name one or two 
 long-faced Barabbases whom the world could better have 
 done without. Hazlitt mentions that he was more sen- 
 sible of obligation to Northcote, who had never done him 
 anything he could call a service, than to his whole circle 
 of ostentatious friends; for he thought a good companion 
 emphatically the greatest benefactor. I know there are 
 people in the world who cannot feel grateful unless the 
 favor has been done them at the cost of pain and diffi- 
 culty. But this is a churlish disposition. A man may 
 send you six sheets of letter-paper covered with the most 
 entertaining gossip, or you may pass half an hour pleas- 
 antly, perhaps profitably, over an article of his; do you 
 think the service would be greater if he had made the 
 manuscript in his heart's blood, like a compact with the 
 devil? Do you really fancy you should be more beholden 
 to your correspondent if he had been damning you all 
 the while for your importunity ? Pleasures are more bene- 
 ficial than duties because, like the quality of mercy, they 
 are not strained, and they are twice blest. There must 
 always be two to a kiss, and there may be a score in a 
 jest; but wherever there is an element of sacrifice, the 
 favor is conferred with pain, and, among generous people, 
 received with confusion. There is no duty we so much 
 underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy,
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 281 
 
 we sow anonymous benefits upon the world, which remain 
 unknown even to ourselves, or, when they are disclosed, 
 surprise nobody so much as the benefactor. The other 
 day, a ragged, barefoot boy ran down the street after a 
 marble with so jolly an air that he set every one he passed 
 into a good humor; one of these persons, who had been 
 delivered from more than usually black thoughts, stopped 
 the little fellow and gave him some money with this re- 
 mark: "You see what sometimes comes of looking pleased." 
 If he had looked pleased before, he had now to look both 
 pleased and mystified. For my part, I justify this en- 
 couragement of smiling rather than tearful children; I do 
 not wish to pay for tears anywhere but upon the stage; 
 but I am prepared to deal largely in the opposite commod- 
 ity. A happy man or woman is a better thing to find 
 than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus 
 of good-will; and their entrance into a room is as though 
 another candle had been lighted. We need not care 
 whether they could prove the forty-seventh proposition; 
 they do a better thing than that they practically demon- 
 strate the great Theorem of the Livableness of Life. Con- 
 sequently, if a person cannot be happy without remaining 
 idle, idle he should remain. It is a revolutionary pre- 
 cept; but, thanks to hunger and the workhouse, one not 
 easily to be abused; and within practical limits, it is one 
 of the most incontestable truths in the whole Body of 
 Morality. Look at one of your industrious fellows for a 
 moment, I beseech you. He sows hurry and reaps indi- 
 gestion; he puts a vast deal of activity out to interest 
 and receives a large measure of nervous derangement in 
 return. Either he absents himself entirely from all fellow- 
 ship, and lives a recluse in a garret, with carpet slippers 
 and a leaden ink-pot; or he comes among people swiftly
 
 282 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 and bitterly, in a contraction of his whole nervous system, 
 to discharge some temper before he returns to work. I 
 do not care how much or how well he works, this fellow 
 is an evil feature in other people's lives. They would be 
 happier if he were dead. They could easier do without 
 his services in the Circumlocution Office than they can 
 tolerate his fractious spirits. He poisons life at the well- 
 head. It is better to be beggared out of hand by a scape- 
 grace nephew than daily hag-ridden by a peevish uncle. 
 
 And what, in God's name, is all this pother about? 
 For what cause do they embitter their own and other 
 people's lives ? That a man should publish three or thirty 
 articles a year, that he should finish or not finish his great 
 allegorical picture, are questions of little interest to the 
 world. The ranks of life are full; and, although a thou- 
 sand fall, there are always some to go into the breach. 
 When they told Joan of Arc she should be at home mind- 
 ing women's work, she answered there were plenty to 
 spin and wash. And so even with your own rare gifts ! 
 When nature is "so careless of the single life," why should 
 we coddle ourselves into the fancy that our own is of 
 exceptional importance? Suppose Shakespeare had been 
 knocked on the head some dark night in Sir Thomas 
 Lucy's preserves, the world would have wagged on better 
 or worse, the pitcher gone to the well, the scythe to the 
 corn, and the student to his book; and no one been any 
 the wiser of the loss. There are not many works extant, 
 if you look the alternative all over, which are worth the 
 price of a pound of tobacco to a man of limited means. 
 This is a sobering reflection for the proudest of our earthly 
 vanities. Even a tobacconist may, upon consideration, 
 find no great cause for personal vainglory in the phrase; 
 for, although tobacco is an admirable sedative, the quali-
 
 AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS 283 
 
 ties necessary for retailing it are neither rare nor precious 
 in themselves. Alas and alas ! you may take it how you 
 will, but the services of no single individual are indispen- 
 sable. Atlas was just a gentleman with a protracted 
 nightmare ! And yet you see merchants who go and labor 
 themselves into a great fortune and thence into the bank- 
 ruptcy court; scribblers who keep scribbling at little ar- 
 ticles until their temper is a cross to all who come about 
 them, as though Pharaoh should set the Israelites to make 
 a pin instead of a pyramid; and fine young men who work 
 themselves into a decline, and are driven off hi a hearse 
 with white plumes upon it. Would you not suppose these 
 persons had been whispered, by the Master of the Cere- 
 monies, the promise of some momentous destiny; and that 
 this lukewarm bullet on which they play their farces was 
 the bull's-eye and centre point of all the universe? And 
 yet it is not so. The ends for which they give away their 
 priceless youth, for all they know, may be chimerical or 
 hurtful; the glory and riches they expect may never cbme, 
 or may find them indifferent; and they and the world 
 they inhabit are so inconsiderable that the mind freezes 
 at the thought.
 
 XIX 
 
 CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 1 
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 " You know my mother now and then argues very notably; always 
 very warmly at least. I happen often to differ from her; and we both 
 think so well of our own arguments, that we very seldom are so happy 
 as to convince one another. A pretty common case, I believe, in all 
 vehement debatings. She says, I am too witty; Anglice, too pert; 
 /, that she is too wise; that is to say, being likewise put into English, 
 not so young as she has been." 
 
 Miss HOWE to Miss HARLOWE, Clarissa (vol. ii, Letter xiii). 
 
 There is a strong feeling in favor of cowardly and pru- 
 dential proverbs. The sentiments of a man while he is 
 full of ardor and hope are to be received, it is supposed, 
 with some qualification. But when the same person has 
 ignominiously failed and begins to eat up his words, he 
 should be listened to like an oracle. Most of our pocket 
 wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to 
 discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally 
 console them in their mediocrity. And since mediocre 
 people constitute the bulk of humanity, this is no doubt 
 very properly so. But it does not follow that the one 
 sort of proposition is any less true than the other, or that 
 Icarus is not to be more praised, and perhaps more en- 
 vied, than Mr. Samuel Budgett, the Successful Merchant. 
 The one is dead, to be sure, while the other is still in his 
 counting-house counting out his money; and doubtless 
 this is a consideration. But we have, on the other hand, 
 
 1 Reprinted from Virginibus Puerisque. 
 284
 
 CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 285 
 
 some bold and magnanimous sayings common to high 
 races and natures, which set forth the advantage of the 
 losing side, and proclaim it better to be a dead lion than 
 a living dog. It is difficult to fancy how the mediocrities 
 reconcile such sayings with their proverbs. According to 
 the latter, every lad who goes to sea is an egregious ass; 
 never to forget your umbrella through a long life would 
 seem a higher and wiser flight of achievement than to go 
 smiling to the stake; and so long as you are a bit of a 
 coward and inflexible in money matters, you fulfil the 
 whole duty of man. 
 
 It is a still more difficult consideration for our average 
 men, that while all their teachers, from Solomon down to 
 Benjamin Franklin and the ungodly Binney, have incul- 
 cated the same ideal of manners, caution, and respect- 
 ability, those characters in history who have most notori- 
 ously flown in the face of such precepts are spoken of in 
 hyperbolical terms of praise, and honored with public 
 monuments in the streets of our commercial centres. This 
 is very bewildering to the moral sense. You have Joan 
 of Arc, who left a humble but honest and reputable live- 
 lihood under the eyes of her parents to go a-colonelling, in 
 the company of rowdy soldiers, against the enemies of 
 France ; surely a melancholy example for one's daughters ! 
 And then you have Columbus, who may have pioneered 
 America, but, when all is said, was a most imprudent 
 navigator. His life is not the kind of thing one would 
 like to put into the hands of young people; rather, one 
 would do one's utmost to keep it from their knowledge, 
 as a red flag of adventure and disintegrating influence in 
 life. The time would fail me if I were to recite all the 
 big names in history whose exploits are perfectly irrational 
 and even shocking to the business mind. The incongruity
 
 286 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 is speaking; and I imagine it must engender among the 
 mediocrities a very peculiar attitude toward the nobler 
 and showier sides of national life. They will read of the 
 Charge of Balaclava in much the same spirit as they as- 
 sist at a performance of the Lyons Mail. Persons of sub- 
 stance take in the Times and sit composedly in pit or 
 boxes according to the degree of their prosperity in busi- 
 ness. As for the generals who go galloping up and down 
 among bombshells in absurd cocked hats as for the ac- 
 tors who raddle their faces and demean themselves for 
 hire upon the stage they must belong, thank God ! to a 
 different order of beings, whom we watch as we watch 
 the clouds careering in the windy, bottomless inane, or 
 read about like characters in ancient and rather fabulous 
 annals. Our offspring would no more think of copying 
 their behavior, let us hope, than of doffing their clothes 
 and painting themselves blue in consequence of certain 
 admissions in the first chapter of their school history of 
 England. 
 
 Discredited as they are in practise, the cowardly prov- 
 erbs hold their own in theory; and it is another instance 
 of the same spirit, that the opinions of old men about 
 life have been accepted as final. All sorts of allowances 
 are made for the illusions of youth; and none, or almost 
 none, for the disenchantments of age. It is held to be a 
 good taunt, and somehow or other to clinch the question 
 logically, when an old gentleman waggles his head and says : 
 "Ah, so I thought when I was your age." It is not thought 
 an answer at all, if the young man retorts: "My venerable 
 sir, so I shall most probably think when I am yours." And 
 yet the one is as good as the other: pass for pass, tit for 
 tat, a Roland for an Oliver. 
 
 "Opinion in good men," says Milton, "is but knowledge
 
 CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 287 
 
 in the making." All opinions, properly so called, are 
 stages on the road to truth. It does not follow that a 
 man will travel any further; but if he has really consid- 
 ered the world and drawn a conclusion, he has travelled 
 as far. This does not apply to formulas got by rote, which 
 are stages on the road to nowhere but second childhood 
 and the grave. To have a catchword in your mouth is 
 not the same thing as to hold an opinion; still less is it 
 the same thing as to have made one for yourself. There 
 are too many of these catchwords in the world for people 
 to rap out upon you like an oath and by way of an argu- 
 ment. They have a currency as intellectual counters; 
 and many respectable persons pay their way with noth- 
 ing else. They seem to stand for vague bodies of theory 
 in the background. The imputed virtue of folios full of 
 knock-down arguments is supposed to reside in them, just 
 as some of the majesty of the British Empire dwells in 
 the constable's truncheon. They are used in pure super- 
 stition, as old clodhoppers spoil Latin by way of an exor- 
 cism. And yet they are vastly serviceable for checking 
 unprofitable discussion and stopping the mouths of babes 
 and sucklings. And when a young man comes to a cer- 
 tain stage of intellectual growth, the examination of these 
 counters forms a gymnastic at once amusing and fortify- 
 ing to the mind. 
 
 Because I have reached Paris, I am not ashamed of 
 having passed through Newhaven and Dieppe. They were 
 very good places to pass through, and I am none the less 
 at my destination. All my old opinions were only stages 
 on the way to the one I now hold, as itself is only a stage 
 on the way to something else. I am no more abashed 
 at having been a red-hot Socialist with a panacea of my 
 own than at having been a sucking infant. Doubtless the
 
 288 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 world is quite right in a million ways; but you have to 
 be kicked about a little to convince you of the fact. And 
 in the meanwhile you must do something, be something, 
 believe something. It is not possible to keep the mind 
 in a state of accurate balance and blank; and even if you 
 could do so, instead of coming ultimately to the right con- 
 clusion, you would be very apt to remain in a state of 
 balance and blank to perpetuity. Even in quite interme- 
 diate stages, a dash of enthusiasm is not a thing to be 
 ashamed of in the retrospect: if St. Paul had not been a 
 very zealous Pharisee, he would have been a colder Chris- 
 tian. For my part, I look back to the time when I was 
 a Socialist with something like regret. I have convinced 
 myself (for the moment) that we had better leave these 
 great changes to what we call great blind forces; their 
 blindness being so much more perspicacious than the little, 
 peering, partial eyesight of men. I seem to see that my 
 own scheme would not answer; and all the other schemes 
 I ever heard propounded would depress some elements of 
 goodness just as much as they encouraged others. Now 
 I know that in thus turning Conservative with years, I 
 am going through the normal cycle of change and travel- 
 ling in the common orbit of men's opinions. I submit to 
 this, as I would submit to gout or gray hair, as a concomi- 
 tant of growing age or else of failing animal heat; but I 
 do not acknowledge that it is necessarily a change for the 
 better I dare say it is deplorably for the worse. I have 
 no choice in the business, and can no more resist this 
 tendency of my mind than I could prevent my body from 
 beginning to totter and decay. If I am spared (as the 
 phrase runs) I shall doubtless outlive some troublesome 
 desires; but I am in no hurry about that; nor, when the 
 time comes, shall I plume myself on the immunity. Just
 
 CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 289 
 
 in the same way, I do not greatly pride myself on having 
 outlived my belief in the fairy-tales of Socialism. Old 
 people have faults of their own; they tend to become 
 cowardly, niggardly, and suspicious. Whether from the 
 growth of experience or the decline of animal heat, I see 
 that age leads to these and certain other faults; and it 
 follows, of course, that while in one sense I hope I am 
 journeying toward the truth, in another I am indubitably 
 posting toward these forms and sources of error. 
 
 As we go catching and catching at this or that corner 
 of knowledge, now getting a foresight of generous possi- 
 bilities, now chilled with a glimpse of prudence, we may 
 compare the headlong course of our years to a swift tor- 
 rent in which a man is carried away; now he is dashed 
 against a bowlder, now he grapples for a moment to a 
 trailing spray; at the end, he is hurled out and over- 
 whelmed in a dark and bottomless ocean. We have no 
 more than glimpses and touches; we are torn away from 
 our theories; we are spun round and round and shown 
 this or the other view of life, until only fools or knaves 
 can hold to their opinions. We take a sight at a condi- 
 tion in life, and say we have studied it; our most elabo- 
 rate view is no more than an impression. If we had breath- 
 ing space, we should take the occasion to modify and 
 adjust; but at this breakneck hurry we are no sooner boys 
 than we are adult, no sooner hi love than married or 
 jilted, no sooner one age than we begin to be another, 
 and no sooner in the fulness of our manhood than we begin 
 to decline toward the grave. It is in vain to seek for 
 consistency or expect clear and stable views in a medium 
 so perturbed and fleeting. This is no cabinet science, in 
 which things are tested to a scruple; we theorize with a 
 pistol to our head; we are confronted with a new set of
 
 2 9 o COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 conditions on which we have not only to pass a judg- 
 ment, but to take action, before the hour is at an end. 
 And we cannot even regard ourselves as a constant; in 
 this flux of things, our identity itself seems in a perpetual 
 variation; and not infrequently we find our own disguise 
 the strangest in the masquerade. In the course of time, 
 we grow to love things we hated and hate things we loved. 
 Milton is not so dull as he once was, nor perhaps Ains- 
 worth so amusing. It is decidedly harder to climb trees, 
 and not nearly so hard to sit still. There is no use pre- 
 tending; even the thrice royal game of hide-and-seek has 
 somehow lost in zest. All our attributes are modified or 
 changed, and it will be a poor account of us if our views 
 do not modify and change in a proportion. To hold the 
 same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been 
 stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a 
 prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and 
 none the wiser. It is as if a ship captain should sail to 
 India from the Port of London; and having brought a 
 chart of the Thames on deck at his first setting out, should 
 obstinately use no other for the whole voyage. 
 
 And mark you, it would be no less foolish to begin at 
 Gravesend with a chart of the Red Sea. Si Jeunesse 
 savait, si Vieillesse pouvait, is a very pretty sentiment, 
 but not necessarily right. In five cases out of ten, it is 
 not so much that the young people do not know, as that 
 they do not choose. There is something irreverent in the 
 speculation, but perhaps the want of power has more to 
 do with the wise resolutions of age than we are always 
 willing to admit. It would be an instructive experiment 
 to make an old man young again and leave him all his 
 savoir. I scarcely think he would put his money in the 
 Savings Bank after all; I doubt if he would be such an
 
 CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 291 
 
 admirable son as we are led to expect; and as for his 
 conduct in love, I believe firmly he would out-Herod 
 Herod, and put the whole of his new compeers to the 
 blush. Prudence is a wooden Juggernaut, before whom 
 Benjamin Franklin walks with the portly air of a high 
 priest, and after whom dances many a successful mer- 
 chant in the character of Atys. But it is not a deity to 
 cultivate in youth. If a man lives to any considerable 
 age, it cannot be denied that he laments his imprudences, 
 but I notice he often laments his youth a deal more bit- 
 terly and with a more genuine intonation. 
 
 It is customary to say that age should be considered, 
 because it comes last. It seems just as much to the point, 
 that youth comes first. And the scale fairly kicks the 
 beam, if you go on to add that age, in a majority of cases, 
 never comes at all. Disease and accident make short work 
 of even the most prosperous persons; death costs nothing, 
 and the expense of a headstone is an inconsiderable trifle 
 to the happy heir. To be suddenly snuffed out in the 
 middle of ambitious schemes is tragical enough at best; 
 but when a man has been grudging himself his own life 
 in the meanwhile, and saving up everything for the fes- 
 tival that was never to be, it becomes that hysterically 
 moving sort of tragedy which lies on the confines of farce. 
 The victim is dead and he has cunningly overreached 
 himself: a combination of calamities none the less absurd 
 for being grim. To husband a favorite claret until the 
 batch turns sour is not at all an artful stroke of policy; 
 and how much more with a whole cellar a whole bodily 
 existence! People may lay down their lives with cheer- 
 fulness in the sure expectation of a blessed immortality; 
 but that is a different affair from giving up youth with 
 all its admirable pleasures, in the hope of a better quality
 
 292 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 of gruel in a more than problematical, nay, more than 
 improbable, old age. We should not compliment a hun- 
 gry man, who should refuse a whole dinner and reserve 
 all his appetite for the dessert, before he knew whether 
 there was to be any dessert or not. If there be such a 
 thing as imprudence in the world, we surely have it here. 
 We sail in leaky bottoms and on great and perilous waters; 
 and to take a cue from the dolorous old naval ballad, we 
 have heard the mermaidens singing, and know that we 
 shall never see dry land any more. Old and young, we 
 are all on our last cruise. If there is a fill of tobacco 
 among the crew, for God's sake pass it round, and let us 
 have a pipe before we go ! 
 
 Indeed, by the report of our elders, this nervous prep- 
 aration for old age is only trouble thrown away. We 
 fall on guard, and after all it is a friend who comes to 
 meet us. After the sun is down and the west faded, the 
 heavens begin to fill with shining stars. So, as we grow 
 old, a sort of equable jog-trot of feeling is substituted for 
 the violent ups and downs of passion and disgust; the 
 same influence that restrains our hopes, quiets our appre- 
 hensions; if the pleasures are less intense, the troubles 
 are milder and more tolerable; and, in a word, this period 
 for which we are asked to hoard up everything as for a 
 time of famine, is, in its own right, the richest, easiest, 
 and happiest of life. Nay, by managing its own work and 
 following its own happy inspiration, youth is doing the 
 best it can to endow the leisure of age. A full, busy 
 youth is your only prelude to a self-contained and inde- 
 pendent age; and the muff inevitably develops into the 
 bore. There are not many Dr. Johnsons to set forth 
 upon their first romantic voyage at sixty-four. If we wish 
 to scale Mont Blanc or visit a thieves' kitchen in the East
 
 CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 293 
 
 End, to go down in a diving-dress or up in a balloon, we 
 must be about it while we are still young. It will not do 
 to delay until we are clogged with prudence and limping 
 with rheumatism, and people begin to ask us: "What 
 does Gravity out of bed ? " Youth is the time to go flash- 
 ing from one end of the world to the other both in mind 
 and body; to try the manners of different nations; to 
 hear the chimes at midnight; to see sunrise in town and 
 country; to be converted at a revival; to circumnavigate 
 the metaphysics, write halting verses, run a mile to see a 
 fire, and wait all day long in the theatre to applaud Her- 
 nani. There is some meaning in the old theory about 
 wild oats; and a man who has not had his green-sickness, 
 and got done with it for good, is as little to be depended 
 on as an unvaccinated infant. "It is extraordinary," says 
 Lord Beaconsfield, one of the brightest and best preserved 
 of youths up to the date of his last novel, 1 "it is extraor- 
 dinary how hourly and how violently change the feelings 
 of an inexperienced young man." And this mobility is a 
 special talent intrusted to his care; a sort of indestruc- 
 tible virginity; a magic armor, with which he can pass 
 unhurt through great dangers and come unbedaubed out 
 of the miriest passages. Let him voyage, speculate, see 
 all that he can, do all that he may; his soul has as many 
 lives as a cat, he will live in all weathers, and never be 
 a halfpenny the worse. Those who go to the devil in 
 youth, with anything like a fair chance, were probably 
 little worth saving from the first; they must have been 
 feeble fellows creatures made of putty and pack-thread, 
 without steel or fire, anger or true joyfulness in their 
 composition; we may sympathize with their parents, but 
 there is not much cause to go into mourning for themselves; 
 
 1 Lothair.
 
 2 9 4 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 for, to be quite honest, the weak brother is the worst of 
 mankind. 
 
 When the old man waggles his head and says, "Ah, so 
 I thought when I was your age," he has proved the youth's 
 case. Doubtless, whether from growth of experience or 
 decline of animal heat, he thinks so no longer; but he 
 thought so while he was young; and all men have thought 
 so while they were young, since there was dew in the 
 morning or hawthorn in May; and here is another young 
 man adding his vote to those of previous generations and 
 riveting another link to the chain of testimony. It is as 
 natural and as right for a young man to be imprudent 
 and exaggerated, to live in swoops and circles, and beat 
 about his cage like any other wild thing newly captured, 
 as it is for old men to turn gray, or mothers to love their 
 offspring, or heroes to die for something worthier than 
 their lives. 
 
 By way of an apologue for the aged, when they feel 
 more than usually tempted to offer their advice, let me 
 recommend the following little tale. A child who had 
 been remarkably fond of toys (and in particular of lead 
 soldiers) found himself growing to the level of acknowl- 
 edged boyhood without any abatement of this childish 
 taste. He was thirteen; already he had been taunted for 
 dallying overlong about the play box; he had to blush if 
 he was found among his lead soldiers; the shades of the 
 prison-house were closing about him with a vengeance. 
 There is nothing more difficult than to put the thoughts 
 of children into the language of their elders; but this is 
 the effect of his meditations at this juncture: "Plainly," 
 he said, "I must give up my playthings, in the meanwhile, 
 since I am not in a position to secure myself against idle 
 jeers. At the same time, I am sure that playthings are
 
 CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 295 
 
 the very pick of life; all people give them up out of the 
 same pusillanimous respect for those who are a little older; 
 and if they do not return to them as soon as they can, 
 it is only because they grow stupid and forget. I shall 
 be wiser; I shall conform for a little to the ways of their 
 foolish world; but so soon as I have made enough money, 
 I shall retire and shut myself up among my playthings 
 until the day I die." Nay, as he was passing in the train 
 along the Esterel Mountains between Cannes and Frejus, 
 he remarked a pretty house in an orange garden at the 
 angle of a bay, and decided that this should be his Happy 
 Valley. Astrea Redux; childhood was to come again! 
 The idea has an air of simple nobility to me, not unworthy 
 of Cincinnatus. And yet, as the reader has probably an- 
 ticipated, it is never likely to be carried into effect. There 
 was a worm in the bud, a fatal error in the premises. Child- 
 hood must pass away, and then youth, as surely as age 
 approaches. The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, 
 and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances. 
 To love playthings well as a child, to lead an adventurous 
 and honorable youth, and to settle, when the time arrives, 
 into a green and smiling age, is to be a good artist in life 
 and deserve well of yourself and your neighbor. 
 
 You need repent none of your youthful vagaries. They 
 may have been over the score on one side, just as those 
 of age are probably over the score on the other. But they 
 had a point; they not only befitted your age and expressed 
 its attitude and passions, but they had a relation to what 
 was outside of you, and implied criticisms on the existing 
 state of things, which you need not allow to have been 
 undeserved, because you now see that they were partial. 
 All error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of stating 
 that the current truth is incomplete. The follies of youth
 
 296 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 have a basis in sound reason, just as much as the embar- 
 rassing questions put by babes and sucklings. Their most 
 antisocial acts indicate the defects of our society. When 
 the torrent sweeps the man against a bowlder, you must 
 expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if 
 the scream is sometimes a theory. Shelley, chafing at the 
 Church of England, discovered the cure of all evils in 
 universal atheism. Generous lads, irritated at the injus- 
 tices of society, see nothing for it but the abolishment of 
 everything and Kingdom Come of anarchy. Shelley was 
 a young fool; so are these cock-sparrow revolutionaries. 
 But it is better to be a fool than to be dead. It is better 
 to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be en- 
 tirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and 
 take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity. Some 
 people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on 
 through the world, like smiling images pushed from be- 
 hind. For God's sake give me the young man who has 
 brains enough to make a fool of himself ! As for the 
 others, the irony of facts shall take it out of their hands, 
 and make fools of them in downright earnest, ere the 
 farce be over. There shall be such a mopping and a mow- 
 ing at the last day, and such blushing and confusion of 
 countenance for all those who have been wise in their own 
 esteem, and have not learnt the rough lessons that youth 
 hands on to age. If we are indeed here to perfect and 
 complete our own natures, and grow larger, stronger, and 
 more sympathetic against some nobler career in the future, 
 we had all best bestir ourselves to the utmost while we 
 have the time. To equip a dull, respectable person with 
 wings would be but to make a parody of an angel. 
 
 In short, if youth is not quite right in its opinions, 
 there is a strong probability that age is not much more
 
 CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH 297 
 
 so. Undying hope is co-ruler of the human bosom with 
 infallible credulity. A man finds he has been wrong at 
 every preceding stage of his career, only to deduce the 
 astonishing conclusion that he is at last entirely right. 
 Mankind, after centuries of failure, are still upon the eve 
 of a thoroughly constitutional millennium. Since we have 
 explored the maze so long without result, it follows, for 
 poor human reason, that we cannot have to explore much 
 longer; close by must be the centre, with a champagne 
 luncheon and a piece of ornamental water. How if there 
 were no centre at all, but just one alley after another, and 
 the whole world a labyrinth without end or issue? 
 
 I overheard the other day a scrap of conversation, which 
 I take the liberty to reproduce. "What I advance is 
 true," said one. "But not the whole truth," answered 
 the other. "Sir," returned the first (and it seemed to 
 me there was a smack of Dr. Johnson in the speech), "Sir, 
 there is no such thing as the whole truth !" Indeed, there 
 is nothing so evident in life as that there are two sides 
 to a question. History is one long illustration. The forces 
 of nature are engaged, day by day, in cudgelling it into 
 our backward intelligences. We never pause for a mo- 
 ment's consideration, but we admit it as an axiom. An 
 enthusiast sways humanity exactly by disregarding this 
 great truth, and dinning it into our ears that this or that 
 question has only one possible solution; and your enthu- 
 siast is a fine florid fellow, dominates things for a while 
 and shakes the world out of a doze; but when once he is 
 gone, an army of quiet and uninfluential people set to 
 work to remind us of the other side and demolish the 
 generous imposture. While Calvin is putting everybody 
 exactly right in his Institutes, and hot-headed Knox is 
 thundering in the pulpit, Montaigne is already looking at
 
 298 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 the other side in his library in Perigord, and predicting 
 that they will find as much to quarrel about in the Bible 
 as they had found already in the church. Age may have 
 one side, but assuredly youth has the other. There is 
 nothing more certain than that both are right, except 
 perhaps that both are wrong. Let them agree to differ; 
 for who knows but what agreeing to differ may not be a 
 form of agreement rather than a form of difference! 
 
 I suppose it is written that any one who sets up for a 
 bit of a philosopher must contradict himself to his very 
 face. For here have I fairly talked myself into thinking 
 that we have the whole thing before us at last; that 
 there is no answer to the mystery, except that there are 
 as many as you please; that there is no centre to the 
 maze because, like the famous sphere, its centre is every- 
 where; and that agreeing to differ with every ceremony 
 of politeness is the only "one undisturbed song of pure 
 consent" to which we are ever likely to lend our musical 
 voices.
 
 XX 
 
 THINKING FOR YOURSELF 1 
 
 The president of Magdalen, when giving away the 
 prizes at Magdalen College School the other day, said 
 that, whereas our public schools teach boys to act for 
 themselves, they do not so well teach them to think for 
 themselves. The distinction here is a very clear one, but 
 it is often overlooked in England. We are apt to assume 
 that a man who can act for himself in an emergency must 
 be able also to think for himself; and yet that very man, 
 who is never perturbed by a sudden danger, may in the 
 quiet processes of his mind be constantly overawed by 
 platitude. It is the combination of boldness in thought 
 and in action that makes a great man, and great men 
 are rare because that combination is so rare. Without 
 contemplative energy, energy in action has no cumulative 
 power; it avails for each particular emergency, but for 
 that alone. The man of action, who is nothing more, 
 rises to the occasion when he has to do anything out of 
 the common; but when he has done it he sinks back into 
 commonplace, and his mind rests there contented as if 
 there were nothing of importance in life except sudden 
 action. We all know that men of original thought are 
 often quite unfitted for action; indeed, the dreamy phi- 
 losopher is a byword for his want of practical ability, and 
 
 1 Reprinted from The Times (London), October 28, 1913, through the 
 courtesy of the editors. 
 
 299
 
 300 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 people wonder that a man who can think so vigorously 
 should act so feebly. We are not aware that the man of 
 action often fails just as much in thought, only because 
 we admire him so much that we do not notice his defects. 
 
 We admire the man who thinks for himself very much 
 less, but that is partly because we are apt not to recognize 
 him when we meet him. There are many people who go 
 about saying that they think for themselves, but this 
 generally means that they think for other people. They 
 will make rules for the conduct of the whole world; they 
 will tell us of a number of things that we ought to do and 
 which we should do if our natures were different; they 
 have theories about every conceivable matter which is out- 
 side their own experience, but when it comes to learning 
 from their own experience they are no better at it than 
 the rest of us. And yet to think for yourself is to learn 
 from your own experience; it is not to hold a number 
 of views which are different from those of most men. 
 The popular views on most subjects may be wrong, but 
 to assume that is not to think for yourself; it is merely 
 to accept a general theory because it is amusing, or be- 
 cause it annoys, or because it gives you a pleasant sense 
 of superiority. Indeed, it is one of the disadvantages of 
 thinking for yourself that you cannot accept opinions 
 either because they are popular or unpopular. There is 
 a delight in thinking for yourself, but you win it by a 
 kind of asceticism in thought. You must refrain from 
 embracing a theory because it is pretty; indeed, you must 
 be as shy of theories as an eremite is of women, for only 
 by that restraint will your mind get vigor enough to recog- 
 nize a true theory, as a holy eremite could recognize an 
 angel at first sight. 
 
 Thus it follows that to teach boys to think for them-
 
 THINKING FOR YOURSELF 301 
 
 selves is something very different from teaching them to 
 be clever. It is not even to teach them to question every- 
 thing, for those who question everything are like jesting 
 Pilate they do not stay for an answer. We must all ac- 
 cept a great many common opinions on trust, especially 
 when we are young. But though we may accept them 
 so far as to act on them, it is important that we should 
 distinguish between them and the opinions that are really 
 our own, and education can teach us to make this distinc- 
 tion without turning us into cranks or prigs. Its common 
 defect, if it is old-fashioned, is that it neglects opinions 
 altogether, and, if it is new-fashioned, that it teaches them 
 as if they were facts. Its proper function is to teach the 
 right method of acquiring them, to make it clear that no 
 one can have opinions of his own on every subject under 
 the sun; but that it is the business of man, as a thinking 
 creature, to draw conclusions from his own experience. It 
 is only by doing this that we can be useful in thought as 
 well as action and add to the world's stock of wisdom. 
 And every one can add something of his own to that if 
 he will be content to think for himself and about matters 
 within his own experience, for no two men are the same 
 either in themselves or in their circumstances; and life is 
 a voyage of discovery for all, in spite, or rather because, 
 of the accumulated knowledge of the past.
 
 XXI 
 
 THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE 1 
 
 H. G. WELLS 
 
 It will lead into my subject most conveniently to con- 
 trast and separate two divergent types of mind, types 
 which are to be distinguished chiefly by their attitude 
 toward time, and more particularly by the relative im- 
 portance they attach and the relative amount of thought 
 they give to the future. 
 
 The first of these two types of mind, and it is, I think, 
 the predominant type, the type of the majority of living 
 people, is that which seems scarcely to think of the future 
 at all, which regards it as a sort of blank non-existence 
 upon which the advancing present will presently write 
 events. The second type, which is, I think, a more mod- 
 ern and much less abundant type of mind, thinks con- 
 stantly and by preference of things to come, and of pres- 
 ent things mainly in relation to the results that must 
 arise from them. The former type of mind, when one 
 gets it in its purity, is retrospective in habit, and it in- 
 terprets the things of the present, and gives value to this 
 and denies it to that, entirely with relation to the past. 
 The latter type of mind is constructive in habit, it inter- 
 prets the things of the present and gives value to this or 
 that, entirely in relation to things designed or foreseen. 
 
 1 A discourse delivered at the Royal Institution. Reprinted through 
 the courtesy of H. G. Wells and of B. W. Huebsch. 
 
 302
 
 THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE 303 
 
 While from that former point of view our life is simply 
 to reap the consequences of the past, from this our life 
 is to prepare the future. The former type one might 
 speak of as the legal or submissive type of mind, because 
 the business, the practise, and the training of a lawyer 
 dispose him toward it; he of all men must constantly 
 refer to the law made, the right established, the precedent 
 set, and consistently ignore or condemn the thing that is 
 only seeking to establish itself. The latter type of mind 
 I might for contrast call the legislative, creative, organiz- 
 ing, or masterful type, because it is perpetually attacking 
 and altering the established order of things, perpetually 
 falling away from respect for what the past has given 
 us. It sees the world as one great workshop, and the 
 present is no more than material for the future, for the 
 thing that is yet destined to be. It is in the active mood 
 of thought, while the former is in the passive; it is the 
 mind of youth, it is the mind more manifest among the 
 western nations, while the former is the mind of age, the 
 mind of the oriental. 
 
 Things have been, says the legal mind, and so we are 
 here. The creative mind says we are here because things 
 have yet to be. 
 
 Now I do not wish to suggest that the great mass of 
 people belong to either of these two types. Indeed, I 
 speak of them as two distinct and distinguishable types 
 mainly for convenience and in order to accentuate their 
 distinction. There are probably very few people who 
 brood constantly upon the past without any thought of 
 the future at all, and there are probably scarcely any who 
 live and think consistently in relation to the future. The 
 great mass of people occupy an intermediate position be- 
 tween these extremes, they pass daily and hourly from the
 
 304 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 passive mood to the active, they see this thing in relation 
 to its associations and that thing in relation to its conse- 
 quences, and they do not even suspect that they are using 
 two distinct methods in their minds. 
 
 But for all that they are distinct methods, the method 
 of reference to the past and the method of reference to the 
 future, and their mingling in many of our minds no more 
 abolishes their difference than the existence of piebald 
 horses proves that white is black. 
 
 I believe that it is not sufficiently recognized just how 
 different in their consequences these two methods are, and 
 just where their difference and where the failure to appre- 
 ciate their difference takes one. This present time is a 
 period of quite extraordinary uncertainty and indecision 
 upon endless questions moral questions, aesthetic ques- 
 tions, religious and political questions upon which we 
 should all of us be happier to feel assured and settled; 
 and a very large amount of this floating uncertainty about 
 these important matters is due to the fact that with most 
 of us these two insufficiently distinguished ways of look- 
 ing at things are not only present together, but in actual 
 conflict in our minds, in unsuspected conflict; we pass 
 from one to the other heedlessly without any clear recog- 
 nition of the fundamental difference in conclusions that 
 exists between the two, and we do this with disastrous 
 results to our confidence and to our consistency in deal- 
 ing with all sorts of things. 
 
 But before pointing out how divergent these two types 
 or habits of mind really are, it is necessary to meet a pos- 
 sible objection to what has been said. I may put that 
 objection in this form: Is not this distinction between a 
 type of mind that thinks of the past and a type of mind 
 that thinks of the future a sort of hair-splitting, almost
 
 THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE 305 
 
 like distinguishing between people who have left hands 
 and people who have right? Everybody believes that the 
 present is entirely determined by the past, you say; but 
 then everybody believes also that the present determines 
 the future. Are we simply separating and contrasting 
 two sides of everybody's opinion? To which one replies 
 that we are not discussing what we know and believe 
 about the relations of past, present, and future, or of the 
 relation of cause and effect to each other in time. We 
 all know the present depends for its causes on the past, 
 and the future depends for its causes upon the present. 
 But this discussion concerns the way in which we ap- 
 proach things upon this common ground of knowledge 
 and belief. We may all know there is an east and a 
 west, but if some of us always approach and look at things 
 from the west, if some of us always approach and look at 
 things from the east, and if others again wander about 
 with a pretty disregard of direction, looking at things as 
 chance determines, some of us will get to a westward 
 conclusion of this journey, and some of us will get to an 
 eastward conclusion, and some of us will get to no definite 
 conclusion at all about all sorts of important matters. And 
 yet those who are travelling east, and those who are trav- 
 elling west, and those who are wandering haphazard, may 
 be all upon the same ground of belief and statement and 
 amid the same assembly of proven facts. Precisely the 
 same thing, divergence of result, will happen if you al- 
 ways approach things from the point of view of their 
 causes, or if you approach them always with a view to 
 their probable effects. And in several very important 
 groups of human affairs it is possible to show quite clearly 
 just how widely apart the two methods, pursued each 
 in its purity, take those who follow them.
 
 306 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 I suppose that three hundred years ago all people who 
 thought at all about moral questions, about questions of 
 right and wrong, deduced their rules of conduct absolutely 
 and unreservedly from the past, from some dogmatic in- 
 junction, some finally settled decree. The great mass of 
 people do so to-day. It is written, they say. "Thou 
 shalt not steal," for example that is the sole, complete, 
 sufficient reason why you should not steal, and even 
 to-day there is a strong aversion to admit that there is 
 any relation between the actual consequences of acts and 
 the imperatives of right and wrong. Our lives are to 
 reap the fruits of determinate things, and it is still a fun- 
 damental presumption of the established morality that 
 one must do right though the heavens fall. But there 
 are people coming into this world who would refuse to 
 call it right if it brought the heavens about our heads, 
 however authoritative its sources and sanctions, and this 
 new disposition is, I believe, a growing one. I suppose 
 in all ages people in a timid, hesitating, guilty way have 
 tempered the austerity of a dogmatic moral code by small 
 infractions to secure obviously kindly ends, but it was, I 
 am told, the Jesuits who first deliberately sought to qual- 
 ify the moral interpretation of acts by a consideration of 
 their results. To-day there are few people who have not 
 more or less clearly discovered the future as a more or 
 less important factor in moral considerations. To-day 
 there is a certain small proportion of people who frankly 
 regard morality as a means to an end, as an overriding 
 of immediate and personal considerations out of regard to 
 something to be attained in the future, and who break 
 away altogether from the idea of a code dogmatically 
 established forever. 
 
 Most of us are not so definite as that, but most of us
 
 THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE 307 
 
 are deeply tinged with the spirit of compromise between 
 the past and the future; we profess an unbounded alle- 
 giance to the prescriptions of the past, and we practise a 
 general observance of its injunctions, but we qualify to 
 a vague, variable extent with considerations of expedi- 
 ency. We hold, for example, that we must respect our 
 promises. But suppose we find unexpectedly that for one 
 of us to keep a promise, which has been sealed and sworn 
 in the most sacred fashion, must lead to the great suffer- 
 ing of some other human being must lead, in fact, to 
 practical evil? Would a man do right or wrong if he 
 broke such a promise? The practical decision most mod- 
 ern people would make would be to break the promise. 
 Most would say that they did evil to avoid a greater 
 evil. But suppose it was not such very great suffering 
 we were going to inflict, but only some suffering? And 
 suppose it was a rather important promise? With most 
 of us it would then come to be a matter of weighing the 
 promise, the thing of the past, against this unexpected 
 bad consequence, the thing of the future. And the smaller 
 the overplus of evil consequences the more most of us 
 would vacillate. But neither of the two types of mind 
 we are contrasting would vacillate at all. The legal type 
 of mind would obey the past unhesitatingly, the creative 
 would unhesitatingly sacrifice it to the future. The legal 
 mind would say, "they who break the law at any point 
 break it altogether," while the creative mind would say, 
 "let the dead past bury its dead." 
 
 It is convenient to take my illustration from the sphere 
 of promises, but it is in the realm of sexual morality that 
 the two methods are most acutely in conflict. 
 
 And I would like to suggest that until you have defi- 
 nitely determined either to obey the real or imaginary im-
 
 308 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 peratives of the past, or to set yourself toward the de- 
 mands of some ideal of the future, until you have made 
 up your mind to adhere to one or other of these two types 
 of mental action in these matters, you are not even within 
 hope of a sustained consistency in the thought that under- 
 lies your acts, that in every issue of principle that comes 
 upon you, you will be entirely at the mercy of the intel- 
 lectual mood that happens to be ascendant at that par- 
 ticular moment in your mind. 
 
 In the sphere of public affairs also these two ways of 
 looking at things work out into equally divergent and in- 
 compatible consequences. The legal mind insists upon 
 treaties, constitutions, legitimacies, and charters; the legis- 
 lative incessantly assails these. Whenever some period of 
 stress sets in, some great conflict between institutions and 
 the forces in things, there comes a sorting out of these 
 two types of mind. The legal mind becomes glorified 
 and transfigured in the form of hopeless loyalty, the 
 creative mind inspires revolutions and reconstructions. 
 And particularly is this difference of attitude accentuated 
 in the disputes that arise out of wars. In most modern 
 wars there is no doubt quite traceable on one side or the 
 other a distinct creative idea, a distinct regard for some 
 future consequence; but the main dispute even hi most 
 modern wars and the sole dispute in most mediaeval wars 
 will be found to be a reference, not to the future, but to 
 the past; to turn upon a question of fact and right. The 
 wars of Plantagenet and Lancastrian England with France, 
 for example, were based entirely upon a dummy claim, 
 supported by obscure legal arguments, upon the crown of 
 France. And the arguments that centred about the late 
 war in South Africa ignored any ideal of a great united 
 South African state almost entirely, and quibbled this
 
 THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE 309 
 
 way and that about who began the fighting and what was 
 or was not written in some obscure revision of a treaty a 
 score of years ago. Yet beneath the legal issues the broad 
 creative idea has been apparent in the public mind during 
 this war. It will be found more or less definitely formu- 
 lated beneath almost all the great wars of the past cen- 
 tury, and a comparison of the wars of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury with the wars of the Middle Ages will show, I think, 
 that in this field also there has been a discovery of the 
 future, an increasing disposition to shift the reference and 
 values from things accomplished to things to come. 
 
 Yet though foresight creeps into our politics and a ref- 
 erence to consequence into our morality, it is still the 
 past that dominates our lives. But why? Why are we 
 so bound to it? It is into the future we go; to-morrow is 
 the eventful thing for us. There lies all that remains to 
 be felt by us and our children and all those that are dear 
 to us. Yet we marshal and order men into classes entirely 
 with regard to the past; we draw shame and honor out 
 of the past; against the rights of property, the vested in- 
 terests, the agreements and establishments of the past the 
 future has no rights. Literature is for the most part his- 
 tory or history at one remove, and what is culture but a 
 mould of interpretation into which new things are thrust, 
 a collection of standards, a sort of bed of King Og, to 
 which all new expressions must be lopped or stretched? 
 Our conveniences, like our thoughts, are all retrospective. 
 We travel on roads so narrow that they suffocate our 
 traffic; we live in uncomfortable, inconvenient, life- wasting 
 houses out of a love of familiar shapes and familiar cus- 
 toms and a dread of strangeness; all our public affairs are 
 cramped by local boundaries impossibly restricted and 
 small. Our clothing, our habits of speech, our spelling,
 
 310 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 our weights and measures, our coinage, our religious and 
 political theories, all witness to the binding power of the 
 past upon our minds. Yet we do not serve the past as 
 the Chinese have done. There are degrees. We do not 
 worship our ancestors or prescribe a rigid local costume; 
 we dare to enlarge our stock of knowledge, and we qualify 
 the classics with occasional adventures into original thought. 
 Compared with the Chinese we are distinctly aware of the 
 future. But compared with what we might be, the past 
 is all our world. 
 
 The reason why the retrospective habit, the legal habit, 
 is so dominant, and always has been so predominant, is 
 of course a perfectly obvious one. We follow a funda- 
 mental human principle and take what we can get. All 
 people believe the past is certain, denned, and knowable, 
 and only a few people believe that it is possible to know 
 anything about the future. Man has acquired the habit 
 of going to the past because it was the line of least resist- 
 ance for his mind. While a certain variable portion of 
 the past is serviceable matter for knowledge in the case 
 of every one, the future is, to a mind without an imagina- 
 tion trained in scientific habits of thought, non-existent. 
 All our minds are made of memories. In our memories 
 each of us has something that without any special training 
 whatever will go back into the past and grip firmly and 
 convincingly all sorts of workable facts, sometimes more 
 convincingly than firmly. But the imagination, unless it 
 is strengthened by a very sound training in the laws of 
 causation, wanders like a lost child in the blankness of 
 things to come and returns empty. 
 
 Many people believe, therefore, that there can be no 
 sort of certainty about the future. You can know ho 
 more about the future, I was recently assured by a friend,
 
 THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE 311 
 
 than you can know which way a kitten will jump next. 
 And to all who hold that view, who regard the future as 
 a perpetual source of convulsive surprises, as an impene- 
 trable, incurable, perpetual blankness, it is right and rea- 
 sonable to derive such values as it is necessary to attach 
 to things from the events that have certainly happened 
 with regard to them. It is our ignorance of the future 
 and our persuasion that that ignorance is absolutely in- 
 curable that alone gives the past its enormous predomi- 
 nance in our thoughts. But through the ages, the long 
 unbroken succession of fortune-tellers and they flourish 
 still witnesses to the perpetually smouldering feeling that 
 after all there may be a better sort of knowledge, a more 
 serviceable sort of knowledge than that we now possess. 
 
 On the whole, there is something sympathetic for the 
 dupe of the fortune-teller in the spirit of modern science; 
 it is one of the persuasions that come into one's mind, as 
 one assimilates the broad conception of science, that the 
 adequacy of causation is universal; that in absolute fact 
 if not in that little bubble of relative fact which consti- 
 tutes the individual life in absolute fact the future is just 
 as fixed and determinate, just as settled and inevitable, 
 just as possible a matter of knowledge as the past. Our 
 personal memory gives us an impression of the superior 
 reality and trustworthiness of things in the past, as of 
 things that have finally committed themselves and said 
 their say, but the more clearly we master the leading con- 
 ceptions of science the better we understand that this 
 impression is one of the results of the peculiar conditions 
 of our lives, and not an absolute truth. The man of sci- 
 ence comes to believe at last that the events of the year 
 A. D. 4000 are as fixed, settled, and unchangeable as the 
 events of the year 1600. Only about the latter he has
 
 3 i2 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 some material for belief and about the former practically 
 none. 
 
 And the question arises how far this absolute ignorance 
 of the future is a fixed and necessary condition of human 
 life, and how far some application of intellectual methods 
 may not attenuate, even if it does not absolutely set aside, 
 the veil between ourselves and things to come. And I 
 am venturing to suggest to you that along certain lines 
 and with certain qualifications and limitations a working 
 knowledge of things in the future is a possible and prac- 
 ticable thing. And in order to support this suggestion I 
 would call your attention to certain facts about our knowl- 
 edge of the past, and more particularly I would insist 
 upon this, that about the past our range of absolute cer- 
 tainty is very limited indeed. About the past I would 
 suggest we are inclined to overestimate our certainty, just 
 as I think we are inclined to underestimate the certainties 
 of the future. And such a knowledge of the past as we 
 have is not all of the same sort or derived from the same 
 sources. 
 
 Let us consider just what an educated man of to-day 
 knows of the past. First of all he has the realest of all 
 knowledge the knowledge of his own personal experiences, 
 his memory. Uneducated people believe their memories 
 absolutely, and most educated people believe them with 
 a few reservations. Some of us take up a critical attitude 
 even toward our own memories; we know that they not 
 only sometimes drop things out, but that sometimes a 
 sort of dreaming or a strong suggestion will put things 
 in. But for all that, memory remains vivid and real as 
 no other knowledge can be, and to have seen and heard 
 and felt is to be nearest to absolute conviction. Yet our 
 memory of direct impressions is only the smallest part of
 
 THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE 313 
 
 what we know. Outside that bright area comes knowl- 
 edge of a different order the knowledge brought to us by 
 other people. Outside our immediate personal memory 
 there comes this wider area of facts or quasi- facts told 
 us by more or less trustworthy people, told us by word 
 of mouth or by the written word of living and of dead 
 writers. This is the past of report, rumor, tradition, and 
 history the second sort of knowledge of the past. The 
 nearer knowledge of this sort is abundant and clear and 
 detailed, remoter it becomes vaguer, still more remotely 
 in time and space it dies down to brief, imperfect inscrip- 
 tions and enigmatical traditions, and at last dies away, 
 so far as the records and traditions of humanity go, into 
 a doubt and darkness as blank, just as blank, as futurity. 
 And now let me remind you that this second zone of 
 knowledge outside the bright area of what we have felt 
 and witnessed and handled for ourselves this zone of 
 hearsay and history and tradition completed the whole 
 knowledge of the past that was accessible to Shakespeare, 
 for example. To these limits man's knowledge of the 
 past was absolutely confined, save for some inklings and 
 guesses, save for some small, almost negligible beginnings, 
 until the nineteenth century began. Besides the correct 
 knowledge in this scheme of hearsay and history a man 
 had a certain amount of legend and error that rounded 
 off the picture in a very satisfactory and misleading way, 
 according to Bishop Ussher, just exactly 4004 years B. C. 
 And that was man's universal history that was his all 
 until the scientific epoch began. And beyond those 
 limits ? Well, I suppose the educated man of the six- 
 teenth century was as certain of the non-existence of 
 anything before the creation of the world as he was, and 
 as most of us are still, of the practical non-existence of
 
 314 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 the future, or at any rate he was as satisfied of the im- 
 possibility of knowledge in the one direction as in the 
 other. 
 
 But modern science that is to say, the relentless, sys- 
 tematic criticism of phenomena has in the past hundred 
 years absolutely destroyed the conception of a finitely dis- 
 tant beginning of things; has abolished such limits to 
 the past as a dated creation set, and added an enormous 
 vista to that limited sixteenth-century outlook. And 
 what I would insist upon is that this further knowledge 
 is a new kind of knowledge, obtained in a new kind of 
 way. We know to-day, quite as confidently and in many 
 respects more intimately than we know Sargon or Zenobia 
 or Caractacus, the form and the habits of creatures that 
 no living being has ever met, that no human eye has ever 
 regarded, and the character of scenery that no man has 
 ever seen or can ever possibly see; we picture to our- 
 selves the labyrinthodon raising his clumsy head above the 
 water of the carboniferous swamps in which he lived, and 
 we figure the pterodactyls, those great bird lizards, flap- 
 ping their way athwart the forests of the Mesozoic Age 
 with exactly the same certainty as that with which we 
 picture the rhinoceros or the vulture. I doubt no more 
 about the facts in this farther picture than I do about 
 those in the nearest. I believe in the megatherium which 
 I have never seen as confidently as I believe in the hippo- 
 potamus that has engulfed buns from my hand. A vast 
 amount of detail in that farther picture is now fixed and 
 finite for all time. And a countless number of investi- 
 gators are persistently and confidently enlarging, ampli- 
 fying, correcting, and pushing further and further back 
 the boundaries of this greater past this prehuman past 
 that the scientific criticism of existing phenomena has
 
 THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE 315 
 
 discovered and restored and brought for the first time 
 into the world of human thought. We have become pos- 
 sessed of a new and once unsuspected history of the world 
 of which all the history that was known, for example, to 
 Doctor Johnson is only the brief concluding chapter; and 
 even that concluding chapter has been greatly enlarged 
 and corrected by the exploring archaeologists working 
 strictly upon the lines of the new method that is to say, 
 the comparison and criticism of suggestive facts. 
 
 I want particularly to insist upon this, that ail this 
 outer past this non-historical past is the product of a 
 new and keener habit of inquiry, and no sort of revela- 
 tion. It is simply due to a new and more critical way 
 of looking at things. Our knowledge of the geological 
 past, clear and definite as it has become, is of a different 
 and lower order than the knowledge of our memory, and 
 yet of a quite practicable and trustworthy order a knowl- 
 edge good enough to go upon; and if one were to speak 
 of the private memory as the personal past, of the next 
 wider area of knowledge as the traditional or historical 
 past, then one might call all that great and inspiring back- 
 ground of remoter geological time the inductive past. 
 
 And this great discovery of the inductive past was got 
 by the discussion and rediscussion and effective criticism 
 of a number of existing facts, odd-shaped lumps of stone, 
 streaks and bandings in quarries and cliffs, anatomical and 
 developmental detail that had always been about in the 
 world, that had been lying at the feet of mankind so long 
 as mankind had existed, but that no one had ever dreamed 
 before could supply any information at all, much more 
 reveal such astounding and enlightening vistas. Looked 
 at in a new way, they became sources of dazzling and 
 penetrating light. The remoter past lit up and became
 
 3i6 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 a picture. Considered as effects, compared and criticised, 
 they yielded a clairvoyant vision of the history of inter- 
 minable years. 
 
 And now, if it has been possible for men by picking out 
 a number of suggestive and significant looking things in 
 the present, by comparing them, criticising them, and dis- 
 cussing them, with a perpetual insistence upon "Why?" 
 without any guiding tradition, and indeed in the teeth of 
 established beliefs, to construct this amazing search-light 
 of inference into the remoter past, is it really, after all, 
 such an extravagant and hopeless thing to suggest that, 
 by seeking for operating causes instead of for fossils, and 
 by criticising them as persistently and thoroughly as the 
 geological record has been criticised, it may be possible 
 to throw a search-light of inference forward instead of 
 backward, and to attain to a knowledge of coming things 
 as clear, as universally convincing, and infinitely more 
 important to mankind than the clear vision of the past 
 that geology has opened to us during the nineteenth 
 century ? 
 
 Let us grant that anything to correspond with the 
 memory, anything having the same relation to the future 
 that memory has to the past, is out of the question. We 
 cannot imagine, of course, that we can ever know any 
 personal future to correspond with our personal past, or 
 any traditional future to correspond with our traditional 
 past; but the possibility of an inductive future to corre- 
 spond with that great inductive past of geology and 
 archaeology is an altogether different thing. 
 
 I must confess that I believe quite firmly that an in- 
 ductive knowledge of a great number of things in the 
 future is becoming a human possibility. I believe that 
 the time is drawing near when it will be possible to sug-
 
 THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE 317 
 
 gest a systematic exploration of the future. And you 
 must not judge the practicability of this enterprise by the 
 failures of the past. So far nothing has been attempted, 
 so far no first-class mind has ever focussed itself upon 
 these issues; but suppose the laws of social and political 
 development, for example, were given as many brains, 
 were given as much attention, criticism, and discussion 
 as we have given to the laws of chemical combination 
 during the last fifty years, what might we not expect? 
 
 To the popular mind of to-day there is something very 
 difficult in such a suggestion, soberly made. But here, in 
 this institution (the Royal Institution of London) which 
 has watched for a whole century over the splendid ado- 
 lescence of science, and where the spirit of science is surely 
 understood, you will know that as a matter of fact prophecy 
 has always been inseparably associated with the idea of 
 scientific research. 
 
 The popular idea of scientific investigation is a vehe- 
 ment, aimless collection of little facts, collected as a bower- 
 bird collects shells and pebbles, in methodical little rows, 
 and out of this process, in some manner unknown to the 
 popular mind, certain conjuring tricks the celebrated 
 "wonders of science" in a sort of accidental way emerge. 
 The popular conception of all discovery is accident. But 
 you will know that the essential thing in the scientific 
 process is not the collection of facts, but the analysis of 
 facts. Facts are the raw material and not the substance 
 of science. It is analysis that has given us all ordered 
 knowledge, and you know that the aim and the test and 
 the justification of the scientific process is not a market- 
 able conjuring trick, but prophecy. Until a scientific 
 theory yields confident forecasts you know it is unsound 
 and tentative; it is mere theorizing, as evanescent as art
 
 3 i8 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 talk or the phantoms politicians talk about. The splen- 
 did body of gravitational astronomy, for example, estab- 
 lishes itself upon the certain forecast of stellar movements, 
 and you would absolutely refuse to believe its amazing 
 assertions if it were not for these same unerring forecasts. 
 The whole body of medical science aims, and claims the 
 ability, to diagnose. Meteorology constantly and persist- 
 ently aims at prophecy, and it will never stand in a place 
 of honor until it can certainly foretell. The chemist fore- 
 casts elements before he meets them it is very properly 
 his boast and the splendid manner in which the mind of 
 Clerk Maxwell reached in front of all experiments and 
 foretold those things that Marconi has materialized is 
 familiar to us all. 
 
 All applied mathematics resolves into computation to 
 foretell things which otherwise can only be determined by 
 trial. Even in so unscientific a science as economics there 
 have been forecasts. And if I am right in saying that 
 science aims at prophecy, and if the specialist in each 
 science is in fact doing his best now to prophesy within 
 the limits of his field, what is there to stand in the way 
 of our building up this growing body of forecast into an 
 ordered picture of the future that will be just as certain, 
 just as strictly science, and perhaps just as detailed as the 
 picture that has been built up within the last hundred 
 years of the geological past? Well, so far and until we 
 bring the prophecy down to the affairs of man and his 
 children, it is just as possible to carry induction forward 
 as back; it is just as simple and sure to work out the 
 changing orbit of the earth in the future until the tidal 
 drag hauls one unchanging face at last toward the sun as 
 it is to work back to its blazing and molten past. Until 
 man comes in, the inductive future is as real and convinc-
 
 THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE 319 
 
 ing as the inductive past. But inorganic forces are the 
 smaller part and the minor interest in this concern. Di- 
 rectly man becomes a factor the nature of the problem 
 changes, and our whole present interest centres on the 
 question whether man is, indeed, individually and collec- 
 tively incalculable, a new element which entirely alters 
 the nature of our inquiry and stamps it at once as vain 
 and hopeless, or whether his presence complicates, but 
 does not alter, the essential nature of the induction. How 
 far may we hope to get trustworthy inductions about the 
 future of man ? 
 
 Well, I think, on the whole, we are inclined to under- 
 rate our chance of certainties in the future, just as I think 
 we are inclined to be too credulous about the historical 
 past. The vividness of our personal memories, which are 
 the very essence of reality to us, throws a glamour of con- 
 viction over tradition and past inductions. But the per- 
 sonal future must in the very nature of things be hidden 
 from us so long as time endures, and this black ignorance 
 at our very feet this black shadow that corresponds to the 
 brightness of our memories behind us throws a glamour 
 of uncertainty and unreality over all the future. We are 
 continually surprising ourselves by our own will or want 
 of will; the individualities about us are continually pro- 
 ducing the unexpected, and it is very natural to reason 
 that as we can never be precisely sure before the time 
 comes what we are going to do and feel, and if we can 
 never count with absolute certainty upon the acts and 
 happenings even of our most intimate friends, how much 
 the more impossible is it to anticipate the behavior in 
 any direction of states and communities. 
 
 In reply to which I would advance the suggestion that 
 an increase in the number of human beings considered
 
 320 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 may positively simplify the case instead of complicating 
 it; that as the individuals increase in number they begin 
 to average out. Let me illustrate this point by a com- 
 parison. Angular pit-sand has grains of the most varied 
 shapes. Examined microscopically, you will find all sorts 
 of angles and outlines and variations. Before you look 
 you can say of no particular grain what its outline will 
 be. And if you shoot a load of such sand from a cart you 
 cannot foretell with any certainty where any particular 
 grain will be in the heap that you make; but you can tell 
 you can tell pretty definitely the form of the heap as 
 a whole. And further, if you pass that sand through a 
 series of shoots and finally drop it some distance to the 
 ground, you will be able to foretell that grains of a cer- 
 tain sort of form and size will for the most part be found 
 in one part of the heap and grains of another sort of form 
 and size will be found in another part of the heap. In 
 such a case, you see, the thing as a whole may be simpler 
 than its component parts, and this I submit is also the 
 case in many human affairs. So that because the indi- 
 vidual future eludes us completely that is no reason why 
 we should not aspire to, and discover and use, safe and 
 serviceable generalizations upon countless important issues 
 in the human destiny. 
 
 But there is a very grave and important-looking differ- 
 ence between a load of sand and a multitude of human 
 beings, and this I must face and examine. Our thoughts 
 and wills and emotions are contagious. An exceptional 
 sort of sand grain, a sand grain that was exceptionally 
 big and heavy, for example, exerts no influence worth con- 
 sidering upon any other of the sand grains in the load. 
 They will fall and roll and heap themselves just the same 
 whether that exceptional grain is with them or not; but
 
 THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE 321 
 
 an exceptional man comes into the world, a Caesar or a 
 Napoleon or a Peter the Hermit, and he appears to per- 
 suade and convince and compel and take entire possession 
 of the sand heap I mean the community and to twist 
 and alter its destinies to an almost unlimited extent. And 
 if this is indeed the case, it reduces our project of an in- 
 ductive knowledge of the future to very small limits. To 
 hope to foretell the birth and coming of men of exceptional 
 force and genius is to hope incredibly, and if, indeed, such 
 exceptional men do as much as they seem to do in warp- 
 ing the path of humanity, our utmost prophetic limit in 
 human affairs is a conditional sort of prophecy. If people 
 do so and so, we can say, then such and such results will 
 follow, and we must admit that that is our limit. 
 
 But everybody does not believe in the importance of 
 the leading man. There are those who will say that the 
 whole world is different by reason of Napoleon. There 
 are those who will say that the world of to-day would 
 be very much as it is now if Napoleon had never been 
 born. Other men would have arisen to make Napoleon's 
 conquests and codify the law, redistribute the worn-out 
 boundaries of Europe, and achieve all those changes which 
 we so readily ascribe to Napoleon's will alone. There are 
 those who believe entirely in the individual man and those 
 who believe entirely in the forces behind the individual 
 man, and for my own part I must confess myself a rather 
 extreme case of the latter kind. I must confess I believe 
 that if by some juggling with space and time Julius Caesar, 
 Napoleon, Edward IV, William the Conqueror, Lord Rose- 
 bery, and Robert Burns had all been changed at birth it 
 would not have produced any serious dislocation of the 
 course of destiny. I believe that these great men of ours 
 are no more than images and symbols and instruments
 
 322 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 taken, as it were, haphazard by the incessant and con- 
 sistent forces behind them; they are the pen-nibs Fate has 
 used for her writing, the diamonds upon the drill that 
 pierces through the rock. And the more one inclines to 
 this trust in forces the more one will believe in the pos- 
 sibility of a reasoned inductive view of the future that 
 will serve us in politics, in morals, in social contrivances, 
 and in a thousand spacious ways. And even those who 
 take the most extreme and personal and melodramatic 
 view of the ways of human destiny, who see life as a tissue 
 of fairy godmother births and accidental meetings and 
 promises and jealousies, will, I suppose, admit there comes 
 a limit to these things that at last personality dies away 
 and the greater forces come to their own. The great 
 man, however great he be, cannot set back the whole 
 scheme of things; what he does in right and reason will 
 remain, and what he does against the greater creative 
 forces will perish. We cannot foresee him; let us grant 
 that. His personal difference, the splendor of his effect, 
 his dramatic arrangement of events will be his own in 
 other words, we cannot estimate for accidents and accel- 
 erations and delays; but if only we throw our web of 
 generalization wide enough, if only we spin our rope of 
 induction strong enough, the final result of the great man, 
 his ultimate surviving consequences, will come within 
 our net. 
 
 Such, then, is the sort of knowledge of the future that 
 I believe is attainable and worth attaining. I believe 
 that the deliberate direction of historical study and of 
 economic and social study toward the future and an in- 
 creasing reference, a deliberate and courageous reference, 
 to the future in moral and religious discussion, would be 
 enormously stimulating and enormously profitable to our
 
 THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE 323 
 
 intellectual life. I have done my best to suggest to you 
 that such an enterprise is now a serious and practicable 
 undertaking. But at the risk of repetition I would call 
 your attention to the essential difference that must always 
 hold between our attainable knowledge of the future and 
 our existing knowledge of the past. The portion of the 
 past that is brightest and most real to each of us is the 
 individual past the personal memory. The portion of 
 the future that must remain darkest and least accessible 
 is the individual future. Scientific prophecy will not be 
 fortune-telling, whatever else it may be. Those excellent 
 people who cast horoscopes, those illegal fashionable palm- 
 reading ladies who abound so much to-day, in whom no- 
 body is so foolish as to believe, and to whom everybody 
 is foolish enough to go, need fear no competition from the 
 scientific prophets. The knowledge of the future we may 
 hope to gain will be general and not individual; it will be 
 no sort of knowledge that will either hamper us in the ex- 
 ercise of our individual free will or relieve us of our personal 
 responsibility. 
 
 And now, how far is it possible at the present time to 
 speculate on the particular outline the future will assume 
 when it is investigated in this way? 
 
 It is interesting, before we answer that question, to 
 take into account the speculations of a certain sect and 
 culture of people who already, before the middle of last 
 century, had set their faces toward the future as the jus- 
 tifying explanation of the present. These were the posi- 
 tivists, whose position is still most eloquently maintained 
 and displayed by Mr. Frederic Harrison, in spite of the 
 great expansion of the human outlook that has occurred 
 since Comte. 
 
 If you read Mr. Harrison, and if you are also, as I pre-
 
 3 2 4 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 sume your presence here indicates, saturated with that 
 new wine of more spacious knowledge that has been given 
 the world during the last fifty years, you will have been 
 greatly impressed by the peculiar limitations of the posi- 
 tivist conception of the future. So far as I can gather, 
 Comte was, for all practical purposes, totally ignorant of 
 that remoter past outside the past that is known to us 
 by history; or if he was not totally ignorant of its exis- 
 tence, he was, and conscientiously remained, ignorant of 
 its relevancy to the history of humanity. In the narrow 
 and limited past he recognized men had always been like 
 the men of to-day; in the future he could not imagine 
 that they would be anything more than men like the men 
 of to-day. He perceived, as we all perceive, that the old 
 social order was breaking up, and after a richly suggestive 
 and incomplete analysis of the forces that were breaking 
 it up he set himself to plan a new static social order to 
 replace it. If you will read Comte, or, what is much 
 easier and pleasanter, if you will read Mr. Frederic Har- 
 rison, you will find this conception constantly apparent 
 that there was once a stable condition of society with 
 humanity, so to speak, sitting down in an orderly and 
 respectable manner; that humanity has been stirred up 
 and is on the move, and that finally it will sit down again 
 on a higher plane, and for good and all, cultured and 
 happy, in the reorganized positivist state. And since he 
 could see nothing beyond man in the future, there, in that 
 millennial fashion, Comte had to end. Since he could im- 
 agine nothing higher than man, he had to assert that 
 humanity, and particularly the future of humanity, was 
 the highest of all conceivable things. 
 
 All that was perfectly comprehensible in a thinker of 
 the first half of the nineteenth century. But we of the 
 early twentieth, and particularly that growing majority
 
 THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE 325 
 
 of us who have been born since the Origin of Species was 
 written, have no excuse for any such limited vision. Our 
 imaginations have been trained upon a past in which the 
 past that Comte knew is scarcely more than the conclud- 
 ing moment. We perceive that man, and all the world 
 of men, is no more than the present phase of a develop- 
 ment so great and splendid that beside this vision epics 
 jingle like nursery-rhymes, and all the exploits of human- 
 ity shrivel to the proportion of castles in the sand. We 
 look back through countless millions of years and see the 
 will to live struggling out of the intertidal slime, struggling 
 from shape to shape and from power to power, crawling 
 and then walking confidently upon the land, struggling 
 generation after generation to master the air, creeping 
 down into the darkness of the deep; we see it turn upon 
 itself in rage and hunger and reshape itself anew; we 
 watch it draw nearer and more akin to us, expanding, 
 elaborating itself, pursuing its relentless, inconceivable 
 purpose, until at last it reaches us and its being beats 
 through our brains and arteries, throbs and thunders in 
 our battleships, roars through our cities, sings in our 
 music, and flowers in our art. And when, from that retro- 
 spect, we turn again toward the future, surely any thought 
 of finality, any millennial settlement of cultured persons, 
 has vanished from our minds. 
 
 This fact that man is not final is the great unmanage- 
 able, disturbing fact that arises upon us in the scientific 
 discovery of the future, and to my mind, at any rate, the 
 question what is to come after man is the most persist- 
 ently fascinating and the most insoluble question in the 
 whole world. 
 
 Of course we have no answer. Such imaginations as 
 we have refuse to rise to the task. 
 
 But for the nearer future, while man is still man, there
 
 326 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 are a few general statements that seem to grow more 
 certain. It seems to be pretty generally believed to-day 
 that our dense populations are in the opening phase of a 
 process of diffusion and aeration. It seems pretty inevi- 
 table also that at least the mass of white population in 
 the world will be forced some way up the scale of educa- 
 tion and personal efficiency in the next two or three dec- 
 ades. It is not difficult to collect reasons for supposing 
 and such reasons have been collected that in the near 
 future, in a couple of hundred years, as one rash optimist 
 has written, or in a thousand or so, humanity will be 
 definitely and conscientiously organizing itself as a great 
 world state a great world state that will purge from 
 itself much that is mean, much that is bestial, and much 
 that makes for individual dulness and dreariness, gray- 
 ness and wretchedness in the world of to-day; and al- 
 though we know that there is nothing final in that world 
 state, although we see it only as something to be reached 
 and passed, although we are sure there will be no such 
 sitting down to restore and perfect a culture as the posi- 
 tivists foretell, yet few people can persuade themselves to 
 see anything beyond that except in the vaguest and most 
 general terms. That world state of more vivid, beautiful, 
 and eventful people is, so to speak, on the brow of the 
 hill, and we cannot see over, though some of us can im- 
 agine great uplands beyond, and something, something 
 that glitters elusively, taking first one form and then 
 another, through the haze. We can see no detail, we 
 can see nothing definable, and it is simply, I know, the 
 sanguine necessity of our minds that makes us believe 
 those uplands of the future are still more gracious and 
 splendid than we can either hope or imagine. But of 
 things that can be demonstrated we have none.
 
 THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE 327 
 
 Yet I suppose most of us entertain certain necessary 
 persuasions, without which a moral life in this world is 
 neither a reasonable nor a possible thing. All this paper 
 is built finally upon certain negative beliefs that are in- 
 capable of scientific establishment. Our lives and powers 
 are limited, our scope in space and time is limited, and 
 it is not unreasonable that for fundamental beliefs we 
 must go outside the sphere of reason and set our feet upon 
 faith. Implicit in all such speculations as this is a very 
 definite and quite arbitrary belief, and that belief is that 
 neither humanity nor in truth any individual human being 
 is living its life in vain. And it is entirely by an act of 
 faith that we must rule out of our forecasts certain possi- 
 bilities, certain things that one may consider improbable 
 and against the chances, but that no one upon scientific 
 grounds can call impossible. 
 
 One must admit that it is impossible to show why 
 certain things should not utterly destroy and end the 
 entire human race and story, why night should not pres- 
 ently come down and make all our dreams and efforts 
 vain. It is conceivable, for example, that some great 
 unexpected mass of matter should presently rush upon 
 us out of space, whirl sun and planets aside like dead 
 leaves before the breeze, and collide with and utterly 
 destroy every spark of life upon this earth. So far as 
 positive human knowledge goes, this is a conceivably pos- 
 sible thing. There is nothing in science to show why 
 such a thing should not be. It is conceivable, too, that 
 some pestilence may presently appear, some new disease, 
 that will destroy, not ten or fifteen or twenty per cent 
 of the earth's inhabitants as pestilences have done in the 
 past, but one hundred per cent; and so end our race. 
 No one, speaking from scientific grounds alone, can say:
 
 328 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 ''That cannot be." And no one can dispute that some 
 great disease of the atmosphere, some trailing cometary 
 poison, some great emanation of vapor from the interior 
 of the earth, such as Mr. Shiel has made a brilliant use 
 of in his Purple Cloud, is consistent with every demon- 
 strated fact in the world. There may arise new ani- 
 mals to prey upon us by land and sea, and there may 
 come some drug or a wrecking madness into the minds 
 of men. And, finally, there is the reasonable certainty 
 that this sun of ours must radiate itself toward extinction; 
 that, at least, must happen; it will grow cooler and cooler, 
 and its planets will rotate ever more sluggishly until some 
 day this earth of ours, tideless and slow-moving, will be 
 dead and frozen, and all that has lived upon it will be 
 frozen out and done with. There surely man must end. 
 That of all such nightmares is the most insistently con- 
 vincing. 
 
 And yet one doesn't believe it. 
 
 At least I do not. And I do not believe in these things 
 because I have come to believe in certain other things 
 in the coherency and purpose in the world and in the 
 greatness of human destiny. Worlds may freeze and suns 
 may perish, but there stirs something within us now that 
 can never die again. 
 
 Do not misunderstand me when I speak of the great- 
 ness of human destiny. 
 
 If I may speak quite openly to you, I will confess that, 
 considered as a final product, I do not think very much 
 of myself or (saving your presence) my fellow creatures. 
 I do not think I could possibly join in the worship of 
 humanity with any gravity or sincerity. Think of it! 
 Think of the positive facts. There are surely moods for 
 all of us when one can feel Swift's amazement that such
 
 THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE 329 
 
 a being should deal in pride. There are moods when one 
 can join in the laughter of Democritus; and they would 
 come oftener were not the spectacle of human littleness 
 so abundantly shot with pain. But it is not only with 
 pain that the world is shot it is shot with promise. Small 
 as our vanity and carnality make us, there has been a 
 day of still smaller things. It is the long ascent of the 
 past that gives the lie to our despair. We know now 
 that all the blood and passion of our life were represented 
 in the Carboniferous time by something something, per- 
 haps, cold-blooded and with a clammy skin, that lurked 
 between air and water, and fled before the giant amphibia 
 of those days. 
 
 For all the folly, blindness, and pain of our lives, we 
 have come some way from that. And the distance we 
 have travelled gives us some earnest of the way we have 
 yet to go. 
 
 Why should things cease at man? Why should not 
 this rising curve rise yet more steeply and swiftly ? There 
 are many things to suggest that we are now in a phase 
 of rapid and unprecedented development. The conditions 
 under which men live are changing with an ever-increasing 
 rapidity, and, so far as our knowledge goes, no sort of 
 creatures have ever lived under changing conditions with- 
 out undergoing the profoundest changes themselves. In 
 the past century there was more change in the conditions 
 of human life than there had been in the previous thou- 
 sand years. A hundred years ago inventors and inves- 
 tigators were rare, scattered men, and now invention and 
 inquiry are the work of an unorganized army. This cen- 
 tury will see changes that will dwarf those of the nine- 
 teenth century, as those of the nineteenth dwarf those of 
 the eighteenth. One can see no sign anywhere that this
 
 330 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 rush of change will be over presently, that the positivist 
 dream of a social reconstruction and of a new static cul- 
 ture phase will ever be realized. Human society never has 
 been quite static, and it will presently cease to attempt 
 to be static. Everything seems pointing to the belief that 
 we are entering upon a progress that will go on, with an 
 ever-widening and ever more confident stride, forever. 
 The reorganization of society that is going on now be- 
 neath the traditional appearance of things is a kinetic 
 reorganization. We are getting into marching order. We 
 have struck our camp forever and we are out upon the 
 roads. 
 
 We are in the beginning of the greatest change that 
 humanity has ever undergone. There is no shock, no 
 epoch-making incident but then there is no shock at a 
 cloudy daybreak. At no point can we say: "Here it com- 
 mences, now; last minute was night and this is morning." 
 But insensibly we are in the day. If we care to look, we 
 can foresee growing knowledge, growing order, and pres- 
 ently a deliberate improvement of the blood and char- 
 acter of the race. And what we can see and imagine 
 gives us a measure and gives us faith for what surpasses 
 the imagination. 
 
 It is possible to believe that all the past is but the be- 
 ginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been 
 is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe 
 that all that the human mind has ever accomplished is 
 but the dream before the awakening. We cannot see, 
 there is no need for us to see, what this world will be like 
 when the day has fully come. We are creatures of the 
 twilight. But it is out of our race and lineage that minds 
 will spring, that will reach back to us in our littleness to 
 know us better than we know ourselves, and that will
 
 THE DISCOVERY OF THE FUTURE 331 
 
 reach forward fearlessly to comprehend this future that 
 defeats our eyes. 
 
 All this world is heavy with the promise of greater 
 things, and a day will come, one day in the unending 
 succession of days, when beings, beings who are now latent 
 in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon 
 this earth as one stands upon a footstool, and shall laugh 
 and reach out their hands amid the stars.
 
 XXII 
 
 THE GREAT ANALYSIS 
 
 What is wrong with the world is its vastness. That is 
 what hinders us from reducing the chaos of human affairs 
 to a rational order. In relation to the solar system the 
 earth is small; in relation to the universe, infinitesimal; 
 but in relation to the mind of man it is bewilderingly 
 huge and complicated. No human intellect has hitherto 
 been able to conceive in any detail a rational world-order, 
 for no human intellect has had the power of grasping a 
 thousandth part of the factors in the problem. There 
 have been Utopias in plenty, both hi literature and in 
 political experiment: but a Utopia is precisely a world- 
 order in which the data of the problem are ignored. 
 
 The purpose of the present essay is to inquire whether 
 the human mind must forever remain inadequate to the 
 effort required to bring cosmos out of chaos whether the 
 time has not come (or is not approaching) when a world- 
 order may be projected on the basis of a competent knowl- 
 edge or forecast of all the factors. I suggest that a new 
 instrument of precision lies ready to our hands, needing 
 only an organizing genius, with a selected staff of assis- 
 tants, to make effective use of it on a sufficiently com- 
 
 1 Reprinted from The Great Analysis, a Plea for a Rational World Order, 
 published by Charles Scribner's Sons. 
 
 332
 
 THE GREAT ANALYSIS 333 
 
 prehensive scale. It is no recondite or unfamiliar instru- 
 ment: we employ it very frequently, in every-day affairs. 
 But it is somewhat difficult to handle, even on a small 
 scale; and to apply it to the problem of world-order is a 
 task, no doubt, for a giant brain. My humble design, in 
 the meantime, is to give, mayhap, a little twist in the 
 right direction to one or other of the giant intellects which 
 are possibly, and even probably, ripening around us. 
 
 What do we mean when we speak of world-order? The 
 actual thing is so unrecorded in history, so remote from 
 practical experience, that many people find it hard to 
 grasp even the bare concept. I propose, then, to illus- 
 trate the concept on a greatly reduced and simplified 
 scale. 
 
 n 
 
 Most of us have heard of Sir George Darwin's specu- 
 lation that the moon consists of matter which, at some 
 indefinitely remote period, flew off at a tangent from the 
 earth, leaving a gap now occupied by the Pacific Ocean. 
 Well, let us suppose that, one fine day, the county of 
 York were in like manner to break loose from its moor- 
 ings and drift away into space, until it reached a point 
 at which the balance of forces, rounding it as on a turn- 
 ing-lathe, set it rotating, a second satellite, between the 
 moon and the earth. Let us suppose that its climatic 
 conditions remained practically unaltered, and that it took 
 its minerals along with it, and a due allowance of sea. 
 Let us suppose, moreover, that the disruption from the 
 earth produced no instant or startling change in the mental 
 constitution of its inhabitants. We may also assume, 
 what would probably be the fact, that the population, 
 at the moment of severance, was fairly representative of
 
 334 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 the English people as a whole of its virtues and vices, 
 its ideals and prejudices, its talents and its limitations. 
 And one thing more we must postulate namely, that the 
 libraries and laboratories of the errant region contained 
 all that was necessary to place its people fully abreast of 
 modern science, research, and speculation. 
 
 Yorkshire/ then, with its three and a half million in- 
 habitants its peers and merchant princes, its squirearchy 
 and its clergy, its soldiers, its sailors, its fishermen, its 
 villa residents, living on their dividends, its shopkeepers 
 and its artisans, its workers in factories and foundries 
 and mines, its unskilled laborers, its ploughmen and shep- 
 herds, the tramps on its country roads, and the grimy social 
 sediment of its slums this fragment of what we call 
 European civilization would (by hypothesis) be swinging 
 through space, a self-contained planeticule, cut off from 
 all communication with the rest of the universe. In proc- 
 ess of time, indeed, it might learn to exchange signals 
 with its parent earth; but we assume that any transit of 
 material objects, animate or inanimate, between our globe 
 and its new satellite is forever out of the question. 
 
 What would ensue? As this is not a Utopian romance, 
 I make no attempt to prophesy in detail. There would 
 be a period, no doubt, of great confusion and suffering. 
 Most of the luxuries of the rich, many of the necessaries 
 or quasi-necessaries of the poor, would be suddenly cut 
 off. There could be no replenishing of whatever stock 
 happened to be in hand of wine, tobacco, rubber, petrol, 
 
 1 One of the smaller among the United States would equally well serve 
 the purpose of this illustration. We might take the State of Massachusetts, 
 for example larger in area than Yorkshire, somewhat smaller in popula- 
 tion. The main difference would lie in the fact that the population of Mas- 
 sachusetts would not be so homogeneous as that of Yorkshire, so that cer- 
 tain race problems might have to be encountered.
 
 THE GREAT ANALYSIS 335 
 
 tea, coffee, cocoa, sugar, 1 oranges, lemons, bananas. Man- 
 ufacturers would be cut off from almost all their markets. 
 Famine could be avoided, if at all, only by the most drastic 
 measures. Possibly the organizing talents of the county 
 (let us continue to call it so) might get together, take com- 
 mand, as born leaders, of the police and military forces, 
 seize all food-supplies, and dole out siege-rations, until the 
 food-producing resources of the territory could be devel- 
 oped in proportion to the new claims upon them. Pos- 
 sibly, on the other hand, the organizers might convince 
 themselves that the county was essentially overpopulated, 
 in relation to its inherent resources (even under intensive 
 cultivation), and might decide that to fight against the 
 ultimately inevitable famine would only be to prolong the 
 agony, widen the area of suffering, and postpone the even- 
 tual reorganization of life. 2 In one way or another at any 
 rate whether by the elimination of the unfittest, or by 
 the prompt and skilful utilization of natural resources, 
 or, more probably, by both processes some sort of bal- 
 ance would sooner or later be established between food 
 and population; and, the transitional state of siege being 
 over, Yorkshiremen might calmly and at leisure set about 
 the reconstruction of their polity. How would it proceed ? 
 
 Ill 
 
 Evidently a resolute effort would be made to set up 
 anew the hierarchy of British society the great land- 
 owner, the capitalist, the small landholder, the dividend- 
 drawer (rentier, in French), the tradesman, the artisan, 
 
 I Until beet-culture could be established on a large enough scale. 
 
 I 1 make no attempt at a definite estimate of the food resources of York- 
 shire, for the details of the period of transition are wholly inessential to my 
 argument.
 
 336 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 the operative, the peasant. But this providential grada- 
 tion, and the assumptions on which it rests, would have 
 received a rude shock in the days of the disruption. Per- 
 haps, if the " governing classes" had been wise in their 
 generation, they might, instantly on the occurrence of the 
 catastrophe, have organized a highly bribed army, and de- 
 liberately set about the protection of their privileges, at 
 whatever cost of famine and slaughter the circumstances 
 might entail. Had this endeavor succeeded, the resultant 
 polity would have been a military oligarchy, ruling over 
 a practically enslaved proletariat. But it is very doubtful 
 whether, in these days of sentimental humanitarianism, 
 the privileged classes would have stood together with suf- 
 ficient unanimity to make the attempt successful, or would 
 have found among the non-privileged classes a sufficient 
 number of mercenaries who could be bribed to do their 
 dirty work. It is much more probable that whatever au- 
 thorities came into power on the morrow of the disrup- 
 tion would act nominally, and (according to their lights) 
 sincerely, in the interests of the whole community, and 
 would be pretty loyally supported in so doing by the priv- 
 ileged classes. This is the state of things I have assumed 
 above; and, this granted, it would be extremely difficult 
 for society to settle down, after the period of stress was 
 over, into its old pyramidal structure, with the territorial 
 duke at its apex, and the hind and the casual laborer at 
 its base. 
 
 Think of all the forces that would oppose themselves 
 to a restoration of "the classes and the masses," and of 
 the old concepts of the rights of property on which rests 
 the scheme of social subordination ! 
 
 The great principle that "a man can do what he likes 
 with his own," suspended during the months or years of
 
 THE GREAT ANALYSIS 337 
 
 what may be called provisional (and provisioning) gov- 
 ernment, could never again resume its full authority. 
 Landowners would have had to submit their land to the 
 uses of the community, not cultivating it, or withholding 
 it from cultivation, as they pleased, but employing it so 
 as to produce, in due proportions, the greatest amount of 
 the necessaries of life. The provisional ministry of agri- 
 culture would have ordained that so much land should lie 
 in pasture for the due supply of meat, milk, leather, and 
 wool, so much land should be devoted to cereals, so much 
 to root-crops, so much to fibres (hemp and flax) in order 
 to repair, so far as possible, the disappearance of cotton 
 and silk and none at all, that could be made productive, 
 to non-productive uses. During the period of stress, the 
 products of this communal agriculture would pass into 
 the communal stores, thence to be distributed on what- 
 ever principle the government might determine no doubt 
 a confessedly temporary and provisional principle. But 
 when the time of stress was past, can it be supposed that 
 the landlord would simply resume his right of demand- 
 ing a tribute for the mere access to certain portions of 
 his land, in order that he might, at his leisure, devote 
 certain other portions to unproductive, and partly de- 
 structive, purposes of sport and recreation? Assuredly it 
 is not to be supposed. Remember that the masks and 
 disguises that hide the realities of territorial privilege 
 would now be stripped off. Men driven off the land 
 could not emigrate, for there would be no place to emi- 
 grate to. They could not herd into the cities, to scratch 
 a precarious subsistence as parasites of the bloated host 
 of machines; for mechanical industry, now ministering, 
 with restricted raw material, to the definite demands of 
 a county, instead of the indefinite demand of the world,
 
 338 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 would very soon shrink to such proportions as to make 
 the amount of labor required accurately measurable and 
 fairly stable. The margins and safety-valves, in short, 
 which in some degree relax the pressure of "the landed 
 interest" upon the body politic, would then have disap- 
 peared, and the real meaning of private property in land 
 would, so to speak, be visible to the naked eye. 
 
 Consider, too, that the influences which now conspire 
 with and bolster up "the landed interest" would then 
 have lost much, if not all, of their power. Capital, al- 
 most swept out of existence in the catastrophe, could not 
 possibly recover a tithe of its volume or its prestige. Cut 
 off from his world-wide market, the manufacturer would 
 be unable to amass huge wealth, to adopt a princely style 
 of living as natural and proper to his class, and to claim 
 the lion's share of the product of labor as the just reward 
 of his grandfather's or great-grandfather's "abstinence 
 from consumption," and of his own business insight and 
 organizing capacity. No longer hoping himself to take his 
 place among the "landed" aristocracy, he would view the 
 claims of that aristocracy with a dispassionately critical 
 eye. No longer able to pretend, either to himself or to 
 society, that the management of his business demanded 
 Napoleonic genius, he would be the more readily content 
 with a reasonable reward for such capacity and energy 
 as it did actually require. No longer subject to the temp- 
 tations of unlimited display and luxury, he would be the 
 less likely to grudge labor the opportunity of a decent 
 human existence. 
 
 Again, let us remember that the great dividend-drawing 
 class, that bulwark of Things-As-They-Are, would practi- 
 cally have ceased to exist. This is the class which, by 
 dint of small abstinences and pettifogging parsimonies, has
 
 THE GREAT ANALYSIS 339 
 
 earned the right to exploit indefinitely the labor of the 
 world. It is the giant expansion of enterprise the weav- 
 ing all over the earth of a network of railways, steamship 
 lines, telegraph cables, and so forth which has enabled 
 this class, in initially rich and thrifty countries, to grow 
 so enormously. But the villadom of Yorkshire would 
 now be cut off from its sources of supply. Its Fortuna- 
 tus's purse would be snatched from its grasp; and within 
 the county, now isled in space, there would be no room 
 for such a rapid expansion of enterprise as would provide 
 profitable investment for new savings, even supposing sav- 
 ing to be possible. This whole class, therefore, would find 
 itself willy-nilly transferred from the camp of Capital into 
 that of Labor, and its influence, if it came to a question 
 either of voting or of fighting, would go against the re- 
 establishment of a monopoly in land. Further, the men- 
 tion of fighting reminds us that privilege would no longer 
 be protected by a standing army. We have put aside 
 as highly improbable the hypothesis that the privileged 
 few would have the presence of mind to intrench them- 
 selves from the outset behind a force of lavishly bribed 
 mercenaries; and if once they let slip that opportunity 
 if once they admitted the idea of organization with a single 
 view to the general weal they could find no plausible 
 excuse for the maintenance or revival of the military pro- 
 fession. The armies of to-day are maintained primarily 
 and ostensibly to guard against foreign aggression; but 
 their equally real though not commonly avowed function 
 is to support the police in enforcing the rights of property. 
 In our insulated county, far from the madding crowd of 
 jealous nations and hostile races, there would be no pos- 
 sibility of foreign aggression, and consequently no excuse 
 for maintaining an army or navy. We need not specu-
 
 340 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 late as to how far the removal of these burdens would 
 go toward the restoration of economic prosperity; for that 
 is not the present point. The point is that the privileged 
 classes could scarcely come to the county government, or- 
 ganized for the general welfare, and say: "Your measures 
 are threatening our privileges: we demand that you shall 
 withdraw from productive employment so-and-so many 
 thousand men, who shall protect us, by aid of blood and 
 iron if necessary, against your encroachments upon our 
 ancestral rights." Such a demand would be too para- 
 doxical for consideration. Moreover, foreign aggression, 
 as a factor in the problem of state, being once for all 
 cancelled, the common plea for an endowed aristocracy, 
 that it gives its best blood for the defense of the country, 
 would thereby fall to the ground. All those partly real, 
 but mainly fallacious, arguments for Things-As-They-Are, 
 drawn from the unstable and threatening aspect of in- 
 ternational relations, would lose whatever force they pos- 
 sess. The disruption would have cleaned the slate of 
 these, as of so many other, prejudices, sophisms, hypoc- 
 risies, illusions. 
 
 A clean slate ! That is what the organizing intelligence 
 of the county would start from in its work of reconstruc- 
 tion. I am conscious that in the foregoing speculations 
 I have now and then suffered my own prejudices to antic- 
 ipate, by implication, the reconstructive work. I have 
 spoken as if the slate would not be clean, but inscribed 
 with certain foregone ideas and principles. This has been, 
 I believe, inevitable; but it has in some degree obscured 
 the true purport of my argument. Let me, then, repeat 
 and insist that I do not set up for a sociological prophet, 
 and do not take my stand on the plausibility of any de- 
 tail in my forecast. What I have sought to do is simply
 
 THE GREAT ANALYSIS 341 
 
 (for purposes that will presently appear) to stimulate the 
 reader's imagination of a segregated community, limited 
 in size, provided with all the mental resources, and most 
 of the material equipment, of modern science, and up- 
 rooted, by a great convulsion, not only from its geograph- 
 ical environments, but from all sorts of prejudices, tradi- 
 tions, and habitual forms of thought. I beg the reader 
 to conceive such a community recovering from its first 
 bewilderment and disarray, and settling down, on the 
 assumption, as nearly as possible, of the "clean slate," 
 to the reordering of its polity. What might we reasonably 
 expect to be the process of that reordering? 
 
 IV 
 
 We need not pause to speculate upon the composition 
 of the Organizing Body, or the method of its appointment. 
 It would either be a very small Committee, or (more prob- 
 ably, perhaps) a Dictator with certain councillors or as- 
 sessors. At any rate, we assume that some group of men 
 (and women?) capable, not merely of voting "ay" or 
 "no" on a cut-and-dried proposition, but of sustained 
 and accurate collective thinking, is intrusted with the 
 task of planning the new order of things, with a view to 
 what we may vaguely describe for the present as the 
 Common Weal. 
 
 What would be the determining feature of their posi- 
 tion, as compared with that of any of the Constituent 
 Assemblies of history, whether in Philadelphia, in Paris, 
 or elsewhere? Surely this: that they would be confronted 
 with a task of manageable magnitude. They would have 
 an entire and perfect globule to deal with, instead of a 
 segment of a globe. From the polity of this globule, many
 
 342 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 of the most perplexing factors of globe-politics would (by 
 hypothesis) be eliminated. There would be no disparities 
 of race or color; no (real or imaginary) superiority of one 
 complexion over another; no tribal antipathies to be reck- 
 oned with; no "backward" peoples to be brought into 
 line. There would be no differences of languages to im- 
 pede understanding, and create misunderstanding, between 
 parish and parish, between Riding and Riding. There 
 would be no ancestral feuds, no historical jealousies of 
 any importance, between one region and another. There 
 would be no artificial barriers between region and region, 
 making it seem that the gain of one must be the other's 
 loss, and that the only way to enrich yourself is to im- 
 poverish your neighbor. As there would be no possibil- 
 ity of aggression from without, there would be no burden 
 of armaments, and no military caste whose prospects of 
 honor and advancement lay in the fomenting of bellicose 
 feeling. There would be no great differences of climate, 
 begetting such differences of temperament and character 
 as could not possibly be reduced to a common measure. 
 There would be differences of religion, no doubt, but none 
 so aggressive as to imperil the great principle of "live and 
 let live." 
 
 The problem, in short, would be neither interracial, nor 
 international, nor military, nor religious: it would be 
 simply social and economic. Which means that, funda- 
 mentally, it would be a problem of economics alone, but 
 of economics viewed, not as the science of wealth, but as 
 the science of well-being. 
 
 Now it would not be overwhelmingly difficult it would 
 demand no superhuman brain to co-ordinate in one sur- 
 vey all the elements of the situation. The material ele- 
 ments would be pretty easily summed up. There would
 
 THE GREAT ANALYSIS 343 
 
 be a territory of so many thousand acres, divisible into 
 various grades of fertility, and suited in such-and-such 
 proportions for the cultivation of such-and-such products. 
 The actual fertility could be increased by known methods 
 of intensive cultivation to such-and-such a degree in such- 
 and-such a time: further improvements in agriculture and 
 stock-breeding might be vaguely anticipated but must not, 
 for the moment, be counted on. The ascertained mineral 
 resources of the county would be sufficient for so-and-so 
 many years at such-and-such a rate of consumption. Spe- 
 cialists would have to be consulted as to the likelihood 
 that further stores awaited discovery, or that science would 
 provide substitutes for coal before the known veins were 
 exhausted; and policy would have to be guided by what 
 seemed "the better opinion" on these points. An almost 
 complete census could be taken, in fact, of the potentiali- 
 ties of the county, in regard both to those forms of wealth 
 which reproduce themselves and to those which do not; 
 and the further problem would be to regulate their pro- 
 duction and distribution in accordance with the best in- 
 terests of the community. 
 
 But this would leave the crux of the problem untouched: 
 What are the best interests of the community? What is 
 meant by the phrase used vaguely and provisionally above : 
 the Common Weal? Here the Constituent Body would 
 have to embark on a psychological inquiry, and that in 
 two branches: First, what would be fundamentally and 
 ultimately the highest good of the community? Second, 
 what instalment of that highest good was practicably pos- 
 sible, and could be rendered acceptable, to the existing 
 generation ? 
 
 The inquirers would doubtless be met on the threshold 
 by the plausible phrase, "the greatest good of the greatest
 
 344 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 number," and would fall to analyzing it. Should they 
 take it as meaning that the ideal of statecraft should be 
 to foster, upon a given territory, "the greatest quantity 
 of human life that it could be made to support in fair 
 material comfort"? Or should it rather be held to imply 
 "the greatest quantity of human life compatible with the 
 highest physical and spiritual development of the indi- 
 vidual"? 
 
 On the former assumption, their course would at first, 
 at any rate, be comparatively clear. The problem would 
 simply be to utilize to the utmost the food-and-warmth- 
 producing potentialities of the county, making the most 
 of every cultivable rood, sacrificing nothing to beauty, and 
 no more to recreation than was absolutely necessary in 
 the interests of health. Agriculture and manufactures 
 would be so organized that every able-bodied person, by 
 a short day of labor, could support himself or herself, with 
 a certain number of youthful and aged dependants, on 
 something like the present scale of middle-class decency 
 and comfort. Education would be strictly utilitarian ; and 
 while science would be treated with some liberality, art 
 would decline to the level of the cinematograph, the col- 
 ored supplement, and the novelette. Existing treasures 
 of painting and sculpture would be gathered in Museums 
 (such, perhaps, as Castle Howard or Wentworth Wood- 
 house), but they would probably be little frequented. A 
 smug, unidea'd prosperity, in a world as nearly as pos- 
 sible divested of hope and fear and ambition, would be 
 the goal of statecraft. When once the routine of life was 
 established, the chief difficulty would be to maintain the 
 just balance between population and subsistence; for the 
 people of such a lubberland would probably show a con- 
 stant tendency to breed beyond the margin fixed by the 
 established standard of comfort.
 
 THE GREAT ANALYSIS 345 
 
 If, on the other hand, the Organizing Body adopted 
 the second interpretation of "the greatest good of the 
 greatest number," and sought their ideal in intensity of 
 human experience rather than mere quantity of human 
 life, their task would be very much more complex and 
 difficult. It would be one, not of more scientific adjust- 
 ment of mouths to means, but rather of artistic social 
 construction, always based, of course, on scientific recog- 
 nition of material and psychological facts. It would be 
 manifest from the outset that no dead level of equality 
 should be aimed at. No man should have the right to 
 claim tribute from another for access to his fair share in 
 the reproductive powers of nature, or should be enabled 
 to make a "corner" of private ownership in mineral 
 wealth. But equal economic opportunity does not imply 
 equality of social service, or of reward. There would be 
 a clearly marked gradation in the dignity and worth of 
 human employments, proportioned to the rarity of the 
 endowment, and the arduousness of the preparation, de- 
 manded for them. It would be difficult, no doubt, to 
 measure the worth to the community of artistic products: 
 there would always be lively discussions and heart-burn- 
 ings on the subject, to diversify life: but some workable 
 method would assuredly suggest itself when the need arose. 
 At any rate, life-supporting space would be freely sacri- 
 ficed to life-ennobling space: visible beauty and adequate 
 elbow-room would take high rank among the necessaries 
 of existence; and the reward of exceptional service to the 
 commonweal would be found, not in the means to indulge 
 in ostentatious and senseless luxury, but in the right to 
 lead a life of exceptional spaciousness and dignity, among 
 exceptionally beautiful surroundings. There would always, 
 or at any rate for many generations, be a majority of 
 mediocrity in the state a populace content with com-
 
 346 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 mon employment, and its common reward in the shape 
 of ordinary comfort and pastime. Whether there would 
 ever come a levelling-up, which would bring all to some 
 sort of equality on the heights, is a subject for remote 
 speculation; but there would be no need for a levelling- 
 down, which should bring all to a flat stagnation in the 
 depths. There would be room for ambition, room for 
 achievement, room for renown. Men do not in their 
 hearts believe in, or desire, equality. They love to look 
 up and admire: so much so that, in the absence of what 
 is fine and noble, they will admire what is tawdry and 
 base. They do not desire to live like mites in a cheese. 
 When once they can all live like human beings, they will 
 be not only content, but happy, that the master-spirits 
 among them should move in loftier regions, like the demi- 
 gods of old. 
 
 And in such a polity as this, where elbow-room was 
 recognized as one of the indispensable conditions of the 
 seemliness of life, the population question would probably 
 give no trouble. How far eugenics would be a matter of 
 state regulation, and how far it would be left to the growth 
 of enlightened sentiment, I do not attempt to conjecture. 
 
 Again I have suffered my own prejudices and precon- 
 ceptions to peep through rather obtrusively. But again 
 I beg the reader to remember that they are not the essen- 
 tial stuff of my argument. My forecast of the probable 
 trend of thought in the Organizing Body may be extremely 
 shallow and unconvincing. That does not matter. My 
 purpose was not to persuade the reader how could I? 
 that the Organizers would arrive at such-and-such results,
 
 THE GREAT ANALYSIS 347 
 
 but simply to indicate, in broad outline, the topics of 
 their deliberations. What I am endeavoring to show is 
 that, in an absolutely isolated community of the size of 
 Yorkshire, it would be possible, not only to think out in 
 detail the problems of the commonweal, but to place the 
 solutions convincingly before the intelligence of the people, 
 so that all should take conscious and understanding part 
 in whatever experiments of social organization were de- 
 cided upon. The organization should, of course, be con- 
 fessedly experimental. It would be absurd to suggest that 
 any human intellect or intellects could think out a sys- 
 tem perfect in all its parts, that could be made to func- 
 tion smoothly from the very outset, like a well-oiled 
 machine. Such a system, indeed, would be manifestly im- 
 perfect if it purported to be rigid and to possess no elas- 
 ticity. There would be room for a thousand afterthoughts 
 and readjustments. No one can absolutely foresee how 
 the human character will react to untried conditions. But 
 it would be well within the power of the Organizers to 
 foresee and prepare for all probable eventualities, and even 
 to adjust matters so that the readjustment necessitated 
 by an unforeseen eventuality might be effected without 
 throwing the system, as a whole, out of gear. "Politics" 
 would thus mean rational experimenting in the light in- 
 stead of wrangling over the next leap in the dark. The 
 conditions of any given experiment would be clearly de- 
 nned, its results accurately measured and appraised. 
 Where there was no conflict of class interests, and no 
 suspicion that one party or group was trying to overreach 
 another, experiments could be carried out with a single 
 eye to the commonweal, and a dissenting minority could 
 register its protest without turbulence, claiming to have 
 the issue tried over again, under certain conditions, and
 
 348 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 after a certain time. The state would be a measurable, 
 manageable entity, like a joint-stock company governed 
 by an energetic, clear-headed, far-sighted Board of Di- 
 rectors. The principle of what is known in America as 
 Scientific Management would be recognized in all depart- 
 ments the principle that, while there are many wrong, 
 wasteful, rule-of-thumb ways of doing a thing, there is 
 only one economical, elegant, right way, and it is always 
 worth while, by patient experiment, to ascertain and mas- 
 ter that process. The whole community would be con- 
 sciously knit together in a league for the commonweal; 
 and though debates would arise as to the true nature of 
 the commonweal in this case and in that, the ever-present 
 sense of solidarity of interest would divest them of acri- 
 mony, malice, and destructive passion. 
 
 In this globule and microcosm, in short, the human 
 intellect would be able to grasp, master, control, and 
 mould all the manifold constituents of human environ- 
 ment, character, and destiny. Man's mind would view 
 in man's terrestrial lot a great and complex, but not an 
 utterly overwhelming, problem. The intellect would ap- 
 proach its task with the confidence of a sculptor who sees 
 before him a mighty mass of clay, yet not so huge as to 
 appall and paralyze his energies. Already he divines in 
 the vague the form, the symmetry, to be evolved from 
 it; and, as he settles to his toil, his nerves thrill with 
 the joy of plastic energy. He knows the immutable laws 
 of his material; and, under those laws, he knows that 
 he can impress on this rude and formless mass the con- 
 tours and proportions of organic life and beauty. 
 
 [The essay now returns from the illustration-in-little to the world, from 
 the imaginary globule with its manageable problem to the real globe with 
 its unmanageable problem. But recognizing " that it is only a difference of
 
 THE GREAT ANALYSIS 349 
 
 scale, not any difference of essence, that distinguishes the real from the 
 imaginary problem," the thinker perceives that the imaginary problem 
 forms a most practical analysis of some of the real troubles of the world, 
 troubles which neither partisan statesmanship, nor political wars, nor 
 racial supremacy will ever settle. Has not the time come for inaugurating 
 other methods?] 
 
 What is wrong with the world is its vastness. But is 
 there no hope that we may ever reach out and grapple 
 with this immensity? Has not the time come, or is it 
 not at hand, for a Great Analysis and co-ordination of the 
 factors of the world-problem? Is it inconceivable that 
 some encyclopaedic brain (with lesser intelligences work- 
 ing under its inspiration and control) should one day dis- 
 entangle and master all the welter of terrestrial resources 
 and potentialities, as we have supposed the Organizing 
 Body to master and manipulate the resources and poten- 
 tialities of our insulated Yorkshire? 
 
 I do not for a moment mean to imply that the estab- 
 lishment of an ordered world-state would immediately or 
 very quickly follow the Great Analysis, and the theoretic 
 forecast of a world-order. No amount of taking-thought 
 will make the planet other than unwieldy and hard to 
 manipulate. Even with modern methods of diffusion, 
 thought-waves spread but slowly, and action lags still 
 farther behind. I am far from suggesting that the most 
 titanic intellect could, in a decade or a generation, remake 
 world-polity, as Mutsuhito has remade the polity of Japan. 
 The effect of the Great Analysis would not be revolution- 
 ary. But it would enable statesmen and nations to look 
 far ahead, instead of groping along hi the tangle of af- 
 fairs. It would teach them to think in terms of centuries, 
 instead of, at most, in terms of one or two decades. At 
 present the world is like a motor-car without headlights, 
 feeling its way by night along a road beset with snags and
 
 350 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 sloughs. The Great Analysis would throw a mighty beam 
 far into the future, enabling progress to forge ahead with 
 a new speed, a new purposefulness, and a new security 
 from quagmires, blind alleys, and precipices. 
 
 [NOTE. The author, though writing two or three years before the great 
 European war, sees very clearly that among the factors, eliminated in the 
 case of a planetary Yorkshire, which enormously complicate the affairs of 
 the real world climate, race, religion, nationality, commercial rivalry, and 
 war war is by far the most important. The following section, on the re- 
 lation of the Great Analysis to war, contains a brief but fundamental 
 philosophy to which no makeshift settlements and treaties should blind 
 us.] 
 
 VI 
 
 There remain three factors in the world-problem which 
 were absent from our illustration-in-little, but are enor- 
 mously potent in the planetary scale. They are Nation- 
 ality, Commercial Rivalry, and War. 
 
 They not only may, but must, be considered together: 
 for the one includes the other, like a nest of Chinese boxes. 
 Out of Nationality springs Commercial Rivalry, and out 
 of Commercial Rivalry, War. For Commercial Rivalry it 
 might be better, perhaps, to substitute a more general 
 term say, Economic Interest. Thus corrected, the above 
 statement is almost literally exact. Nationality is the 
 great bar to a consolidation of Economic Interests, and 
 scarcely any motive is nowadays strong enough to lead 
 to war, unless Economic Interest (real or imaginary) comes 
 in to reinforce it. 
 
 What, then, in this all-important domain, would be the 
 work of the Great Analysis? The answer is ludicrously 
 obvious: to analyze the idea of Nationality, the idea of 
 Economic Interest. Such analyses, it may be said, al- 
 ready exist in plenty, and lead to the most conflicting re-
 
 THE GREAT ANALYSIS 351 
 
 suits. Yes: but which of them has been undertaken on 
 the basis of exact measurements, under the rubrics pro- 
 vided by a complete world-survey, and with sufficient 
 mental detachment from the very objects to be analyzed 
 Nationality and Economic Interest? In our illustra- 
 tive Yorkshire, the great advantage of the Organizing 
 Body lay in the fact that the disruption had uprooted 
 all sorts of prejudices, traditions, and habitual forms of 
 thought, or, in other words, had cleaned the mental slate 
 of the community. The very first step toward the Great 
 Analysis would be for those engaged in it to undertake, 
 in their own persons, a similar cleaning of the mental 
 slate. This could not be effected without prayer and 
 fasting without an intense and heroic effort. But co- 
 operation and mutual criticism would help, each investi- 
 gator taking the beam out of his brother's eye, and hav- 
 ing the mote, in turn, removed from his own. Let it not 
 be objected that such an extirpation of prejudice would 
 mean the ignoring of one of the decisive factors in the 
 problem. A man may cast aside his own prejudice with- 
 out forgetting or underrating its continued hold upon his 
 neighbor's mind. And, the object of the whole endeavor 
 being to place the human intelligence at a point of view 
 from which it should see planetary affairs in a wider and 
 juster perspective, how should our analysts hope to lead 
 others to that point of view, without having first attained 
 it themselves? 
 
 Can it be doubted that there is ample room, not to 
 say urgent necessity, for what Nietzsche would have called 
 a revaluing of political and economic values, and a re- 
 education of our principalities and powers (individual or 
 collective) in the light of that "tariff-revision"? Who 
 has hitherto applied, in any systematic and comprehen-
 
 352 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 sive way, the one true standard of appraisement: to wit, 
 human worth and well-being? We have constantly for- 
 gotten the end in our clinging to temporary and make- 
 shift means, which we have come almost to deify, as or- 
 dinances handed down from heaven. Many of us even 
 deny and deride the end, while we are prepared to vin- 
 dicate with fury our vested interest in the means, as they 
 take shape in this or that institution which has long sur- 
 vived any utility it may ever have possessed. 
 
 What is the general characteristic of the political thought 
 which shapes what are called the practical politics of the 
 world, at any rate in the international domain? Is it not 
 an amazing short-sightedness, amounting in most cases to 
 absolute inability to look more than a few years ahead? 
 The great statesman is not he who gazes far into the 
 future, but who sees clearly and estimates at their effec- 
 tive (as distinct from then* ideal) worth the conflicting 
 forces of the present. It is scarcely too much to say 
 that the future, in any large sense of the word, does not 
 exist for the political mind. The future at which the 
 most far-sighted aims is only a slightly reformed pres- 
 ent ("re-formed," sometimes, in a retrograde sense) which 
 is to be, as Euclid says, produced to infinity. Mankind 
 is always to be animated by the same stupidities and 
 cupidities, the same traditions and superstitions. The 
 idea that the future must be something immeasurably 
 vaster, and may be something immeasurably wiser, than 
 this groping, elbowing, snarling present of ours, has never 
 dawned upon the political mind; much less the idea of 
 fixing the view on a saner, nobler, not too distant future, 
 and going forth to meet it. The typical diplomatist- 
 politician lives from hand to mouth, on a set of ideas so 
 old that it is high time they went to the public analyst,
 
 THE GREAT ANALYSIS 353 
 
 who should report as to whether they are still fit for human 
 food. 
 
 These remarks apply mainly to international politics; 
 of national politics it is possible, in some cases, to draw 
 a less gloomy picture. Even a small measure of social 
 justice or expediency may possibly be only an instalment 
 of a larger scheme, present to the statesman's mind, but 
 not yet ripe for disclosure. Perhaps it is not altogether 
 too optimistic to imagine that the larger scheme may in 
 some cases be based on a philosophic realization of the 
 one thing needful the enhancement of the worth of 
 human life. But in international politics who can trace 
 the faintest glimmer of any such conception? Statesmen 
 may, perhaps, think a few years or a few decades ahead; 
 but their schemes are inspired by sheer national egoism 
 and ambition, expressing itself in high-sounding ready- 
 made phrases, the true import of which they have never 
 sought to penetrate. To call this egoism "national" is, 
 indeed, to flatter it. In nine cases out of ten it is essen- 
 tially class-egoism or party-egoism, which has given no 
 real thought though it may pay perfunctory and hypo- 
 critical lip-homage to the good of the nation as a whole. 
 It is appalling to picture the condition of the minds 
 the fifteen or twenty brains, under as many helmets or 
 shakos or ministerial cocked-hats in which the immedi- 
 ate destinies of Europe are at this moment shaping them- 
 selves. Some of these men, no doubt, are thoroughly 
 well-meaning, and sincerely bent on doing as little harm 
 as possible. But is there one to whom we can look with 
 the faintest gleam of hope for a world-shaping, world- 
 redeeming thought? Is there one who has shown any 
 sense of the new conditions of planetary life, the vast 
 new issues opening out before the human race? Is there
 
 354 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 one whom we can believe to have thought out, sincerely 
 and competently, the meaning of the phrases on which 
 his foreign policy is based? Is there one from whom we 
 could with any confidence expect an original and enlight- 
 ened view of his own country's interests, let alone any 
 wider outlook? Is there one, to sum up, who has given 
 proof of a mental caliber at all commensurate with his 
 power and his responsibility? If such an one there be, 
 he is certainly not among the active, aggressive "makers 
 of history," but among the comparatively passive groups 
 whose part it is to look on and try to prevent the worst 
 sort of mischief. 
 
 We must not, however, be too hard on our purblind 
 principalities and powers. It is not their fault that they 
 have been born into a world too vast and complex for 
 their rational apprehension. It is just here that the Great 
 Analysis must come to the rescue; and the very point of 
 my argument is that it must be a huge co-operative effort, 
 even if it be organized by one supreme intelligence. It 
 would be fantastic to look for that intelligence among 
 the Crowned Heads of Europe. 
 
 VII 
 
 Perhaps the best order for investigation to pursue would 
 be to start with the innermost of the Chinese boxes, and 
 work back from an analysis of the economics of war, to 
 the larger subject of economic interest in general, and the 
 still larger subject of nationality and the price we pay for 
 it. Who gains by war? Putting aside altogether its hor- 
 rors and agonies assuming, for the sake of argument, 
 that it is carried on by insentient puppets, like a game 
 of chess is the profit of even a successful war sufficiently 
 large and sufficiently distributed to make it worth the
 
 THE GREAT ANALYSIS 355 
 
 expense and toil of previous preparation, and the still 
 greater expense and toil of guarding and securing what- 
 ever advantage has been gained? I am far from taking 
 it for granted that the answer to this question would nec- 
 essarily be a sweeping negative; but it would surely ap- 
 pear that, in these days of fabulously expensive arma- 
 ment and apparatus, and ever more intricate financial 
 interrelations, the possible advantages of war to any class 
 of any community were becoming increasingly dubious. 
 The Franco- German War is commonly cited as one from 
 which the victor reaped huge and conspicuous gains. The 
 Franco- German War, be it noted, took place nearly half 
 a century ago; but, even so, I should very much like to 
 see a searching analysis of its vaunted profits. It is true 
 that the conditions were exceptionally favorable to profit- 
 making. The war was short, the collapse of the enemy 
 complete, the territorial acquisition large, the indemnity 
 enormous. But was the territorial acquisition a true gain 
 to any human being? Is it fair to attribute the indus- 
 trial growth and expansion of Germany wholly, or in any 
 determining measure, to the influence of the war? How 
 many times over has the indemnity been absorbed by 
 the direct and indirect expense involved in guarding the 
 spoils? And is the account yet closed? Even if the bal- 
 ance stands to-day somewhat to the credit side, may there 
 not be huge sums of compound interest to be paid in the 
 future for those months of inebriating triumph? As one 
 walks the streets of Berlin, and sees at every corner some 
 bronze colossus sending up its silent shout of "Victory!" 
 to the inscrutable heavens, one wonders how the German 
 "philolog" of to-day expounds to his students the myth 
 of Nemesis. 
 
 And these doubts and hesitations, be it noted, merely 
 concern the question of gross profits as recorded in col-
 
 356 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 umns of statistics. The Great Analysis would be a fu- 
 tility indeed if it took statistics at their face value, and 
 did not translate them into terms of human well-being. 
 The results of the investigation would probably be still 
 more dubious when the distribution of the profits came 
 to be considered, and their influence upon the actual worth 
 of human life. I am not assuming (as some people do) 
 that the dreamy, idealistic, provincial, ante-bellum Ger- 
 man was a happier or a better man than the hustling, 
 aggressive, cosmopolitan German of to-day. The idealist, 
 in so far as he existed at all, was probably doomed to go 
 under in the mere march of human affairs, war or no 
 war. What I do suggest is that investigation might pos- 
 sibly show that, for the mass of the German people, the 
 stress and strain of life had increased out of all propor- 
 tion to any increase in its interest, pleasure, or comfort 
 in short, in either its spiritual or its animal satisfactions. 
 It would not improbably be found that the French mil- 
 liards, in so far as they reached the pockets of the Ger- 
 man people at all, went to swell the tide of luxury and 
 vulgar ostentation, not to relieve the burdens, or dignify 
 the lives, of the masses. They may have helped to make 
 of Berlin a flaunting, swaggering, champagne-bibbing Eu- 
 ropean capital, in place of the unpretentious Residenz of 
 old; but have they enhanced the general worth of life 
 for the bulk of the German nation? The efficiency which 
 one so often admires, not without envy, in Germany, is 
 no product of the war: rather, the war was a product of 
 the efficiency. As for the rapid growth of population, we 
 must think twice before we accept that as a proof of gen- 
 eral well-being. It is often the most miserable household 
 that is the most prolific. 
 I would be understood as suggesting the heads of a
 
 THE GREAT ANALYSIS 357 
 
 possible analysis, not forestalling its results. It is quite 
 probable that in this particular instance an exception- 
 ally favorable one for the believers in the benefits of war 
 a good case could be made out for an ultimate balance 
 of profit. Still more probably might it be demonstrated 
 that, with an unscrupulous mock-Napoleon seated on the 
 throne of France, war was, for Germany, the less of two 
 evils. This argument may sometimes be advanced with 
 speciousness, and possibly with justice, while the world- 
 will remains at sixes and sevens, and the world-conscience, 
 though perhaps moving in the womb of time, is certainly 
 as yet unborn. But that only brings home to us the 
 urgent necessity for a systematic effort to harmonize the 
 distracted will by proposing to it a largely conceived, ra- 
 tional design, and at the same time to expedite the birth 
 of a collective conscience. It is a monstrous and intol- 
 erable thought that civilization may at any moment be 
 hurled half-way back to barbarism by some scheming ad- 
 venturer, some superstitious madman, or simply a pom- 
 pous, well-meaning busybody. There is a great deal of 
 common sense in the world, if only it could be organized 
 to the rational end. But while we are wholly in doubt 
 as to whither we are going, it is no wonder if we quarrel 
 as to how we are to get there, and are never secure against 
 the baneful influence of crazes, hallucinations, sophistries, 
 catchwords, and that tribal vanity which, under the 
 name of patriotism, works far more insidious mischief 
 than personal conceit. 
 
 VIII 
 
 One thing, however, I do venture to prophesy namely, 
 that the study of all international problems, with that of 
 war at their head, will be found to lead back to the one
 
 358 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 great problem neither national nor international, but fun- 
 damental of the distribution of wealth. I am even 
 tempted to lay down an axiom, to this effect: "When 
 the profits of war (if any) are distributed with a reason- 
 able approach to justice, no one will any longer want to 
 make war." In other words, the profits of war and that 
 term, of course, includes " armed peace," with its ever- 
 recurring games of bluff in pursuit of some economic ad- 
 vantage the profits of war go to widen the gap between 
 the " haves" and "have nots." They may give room for 
 an increase in the numbers of the proletariat; they do 
 not better its condition. 
 
 We are back, then, at our starting-point. We find, 
 after reviewing the main factors of complication, that 
 the fundamental problem of the Great Analysis is pre- 
 cisely that which confronted the Organizers of our hypo- 
 thetical Yorkshire the establishment of a reasonable 
 equilibrium between the resources of the planet and the 
 drafts upon them, between Commodities and Consump- 
 tion, or, in the most general terms, between Nature and 
 Human Life. It is evident, if we only think of it, that 
 such an equilibrium can and must be established, unless 
 the history of the world is to be one long series of oscilla- 
 tions between nascent order and devouring chaos. Hith- 
 erto, as above indicated, the necessary data for the equa- 
 tion have been unattainable. We simply did not know 
 the world we lived in. Now that we possess, or are in 
 a fair way of attaining, an adequate knowledge of the 
 data, we cannot too soon set about working out the equa- 
 tion in the first place on paper. The sooner we see our 
 way (however roughly outlined) to a rational world-order, 
 the more chance is there of preventing a catastrophic 
 swing of the pendulum.
 
 XXIII 
 THE UNITY OF HUMAN NATURE 1 
 
 JOHN JAY CHAPMAN 
 
 If one could stand on the edge of the moon and look 
 down through a couple of thousand years on human poli- 
 tics, it would be apparent that everything that happened 
 on the earth was directly dependent on everything else 
 that happened there. Whether the Italian peasant shall 
 eat salt with his bread depends upon Bismarck. Whether 
 the prison system of Russia shall be improved depends 
 upon the ministry of Great Britain. If Lord Beaconsfield 
 is in power, there is no leisure in Russia for domestic re- 
 form. The lash is everywhere lifted in a security fur- 
 nished by the concurrence of all the influences upon the 
 globe that favor coercion. In like manner, the good 
 things that happen are each the product of all extant 
 conditions. Constitutional government in England quali- 
 fies the whole of western Europe. Our slaves were not set 
 free without the assistance of every liberal mind in Eu- 
 rope; and the thoughts which we think in our closet af- 
 fect the fate of the Boer in South Africa. That Tolstoi 
 is to-day living unmolested upon his farm instead of serv- 
 ing in a Siberian mine, that Dreyfus is alive and not dead, 
 
 1 An address delivered before the graduating class at Hobart College in 
 1900. Reprinted from Learning and Other Essays, through the courtesy of 
 John Jay Chapman and of Messrs. Moffat, Yard and Company. 
 
 359
 
 360 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 is due directly to the people in this audience and to others 
 like them scattered over Europe and America. 
 
 The effect of enlightenment on tyranny is not merely 
 to make the tyrant afraid to be cruel; it makes him not 
 want to be cruel. It makes him see what cruelty is. And 
 reciprocally the effect of cruelty on enlightenment is to 
 make that enlightenment grow dim. It prevents men 
 from seeing what cruelty is. 
 
 The Czar of Russia cannot get rid of your influence, nor 
 you of his. Every ukase he signs makes allowance for 
 you, and, on the other hand, the whole philosophy of 
 your life is tinged by him. You believe that the abuses 
 under the Russian Government are inscrutably different 
 from and worse than our own; whereas both sets of atroc- 
 ities are identical in principle, and are more alike in fact, 
 in taste and smell and substance, than your prejudice is 
 willing to admit. The existence of Russia narrows Amer- 
 ica's philosophy, and misconduct by a European power may 
 be seen reflected in the moral tone of your clergyman on 
 the following day. More Americans have abandoned their 
 faith in free government since England began to play the 
 tyrant in South Africa than there were colonists in the 
 country in 1776. 
 
 Europe is all one family, and speaks, one might say, 
 the same language. The life that has been transplanted 
 to North America during the last three centuries is Eu- 
 ropean life. From your position on the moon you would 
 not be able to understand what the supposed differences 
 were between European and American things, that the 
 Americans make so much fuss over. You would say: "I 
 see only one people, splashed over different continents. 
 The problems they talk about, the houses they live in, 
 the clothes they wear, seem much alike. Their educa-
 
 THE UNITY OF HUMAN NATURE 361 
 
 tion and catchwords are identical. They are the children 
 of the Classics, of Christianity, and of the Revival of 
 Learning. They are homogeneous, and they are growing 
 more homogeneous." 
 
 The subtle influences that modern nations exert over 
 one another illustrate the unity of life on the globe. But 
 if we turn to ancient history we find in its bare outlines 
 staggering proof of the interdependence of nations. The 
 Greeks were wiped out. They could not escape their con- 
 temporaries any more than we can escape the existence 
 of the Malays. Israel could not escape Assyria, nor As- 
 syria Persia, nor Persia Macedonia, nor Macedonia Rome, 
 nor Rome the Goths. Life is not a boarding-school where 
 a bad boy can be dismissed for the benefit of the rest. 
 He remains. He must be dealt with. He is as much 
 here as we are ourselves. The whole of Europe and Asia 
 and South America and every Malay and every China- 
 man, Hindoo, Tartar, and Tagal of such is our civili- 
 zation. 
 
 Let us for the moment put aside every dictate of relig- 
 ion and political philosophy. Let us discard all preju- 
 dice and all love. Let us regard nothing except facts. 
 Does not the coldest conclusion of science announce the 
 fact that the world is peopled, and that every individual 
 of that population has an influence as certain and far 
 more discoverable than the influence of the weight of his 
 body upon the solar system? 
 
 A Chinaman lands in San Francisco. The Constitu- 
 tion of the United States begins to rock and tremble. 
 What shall we do with him? The deepest minds of the 
 past must be ransacked to the bottom to find an answer. 
 Every one of seventy million Americans must pass through 
 a throe of thought that leaves him a modified man. The
 
 362 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 same thing is true when the American lands in China. 
 These creatures have thus begun to think of each other. 
 It is unimaginable that they should not hereafter inces- 
 santly and never-endingly continue to think of each other. 
 And out of their thoughts grows the destiny of mankind. 
 
 We have an inherited and stupid notion that the East 
 does not change. If Japan goes through a transforma- 
 tion scene under our eyes, we still hold to our prejudice 
 as to the immutability of the Chinese. If our own people 
 and the European nations seem to be meeting and surg- 
 ing and reappearing in unaccustomed roles every ten years, 
 till modern history looks like a fancy ball, we still go on 
 muttering some old ignorant shibboleth about East and 
 West, Magna Charta, the Indian Mutiny, and Mahomet. 
 The chances are that England will be dead-letter, and 
 Russia progressive, before we have done talking. Of a 
 truth, when we consider the rapidity of visible change 
 and the amplitude of time for there is plenty of time 
 we need not despair of progress. 
 
 The true starting-point for the world's progress will 
 never be reached by any nation as a whole. It exists 
 and has been reached in the past as it will in the future 
 by individuals scattered here and there in every nation. 
 It is reached by those minds which insist on seeing con- 
 ditions as they are, and which cannot confine their thoughts 
 to their own kitchen, or to their own creed, or to their 
 own nation. You will think I have in mind poets 
 and philosophers, for these men take humanity as their 
 subject, and deal in the general stuff of human nature. 
 But the narrow spirit in which they often do this cuts 
 down their influence to parish limits. I mean rather those 
 men who in private life act out their thoughts and feelings 
 as to the unity of human life; those same thoughts which
 
 THE UNITY OF HUMAN NATURE 363 
 
 the poets and philosophers have expressed in their plays, 
 their sayings, and their visions. There have always been 
 men who in their daily life have fulfilled those intima- 
 tions and instincts which, if reduced to a statement, re- 
 ceive the names of poetry and religion. These men are 
 the cart-horses of progress; they devote their lives to 
 doing things which can only be justified or explained by 
 the highest philosophy. They proceed as if all men were 
 their brothers. These practical philanthropists go plod- 
 ding on through each century and leave the bones of 
 their character mingled with the soil of their civilization. 
 
 See how large the labors of such men look when seen 
 in historic perspective. They have changed the world's 
 public opinion. They have moulded the world's institu- 
 tions into forms expressive of then- will. I ask your at- 
 tention to one of their achievements. We have one prov- 
 ince of conduct in which the visions of the poets have 
 been reduced to practise yes, erected into a department 
 of government through the labors of the philanthropists. 
 They have established the hospital and the reformatory; 
 and these visible bastions of philosophy hold now a more 
 unchallenged place in our civilization than the Sermon 
 on the Mount on which they comment. 
 
 The truth which the philanthropists of all ages have 
 felt is that the human family was a unit; and this truth, 
 being as deep as human nature, can be expressed in every 
 philosophy even in the inverted utilitarianism now in 
 vogue. The problem of how to treat insane people and 
 criminals has been solved to this extent, that every one 
 agrees that nothing must be done to them which injures 
 the survivors. That is the reason we do not kill them. 
 It is unpleasant to have them about, and this unpleas- 
 antness can be cured only by our devotion to them. We
 
 364 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 must either help the wretched or we ourselves become 
 degenerate. They have thus become a positive means of 
 civilizing the modern world; for the instinct of self-preser- 
 vation has led men to deal with this problem in the only 
 practical way. 
 
 Put a Chinaman into your hospital and he will be cared 
 for. You may lie awake at night drawing up reasons for 
 doing something different with this disgusting Chinaman 
 who, somehow, is in the world and is thrown into your 
 care, your hospital, your thought but the machinery of 
 your own being is so constructed that if you take any 
 other course with him than that which you take with 
 your own people, your institution will instantly lose its 
 meaning; you would not have the face to beg money for 
 its continuance in the following year. The logic of this, 
 which, if you like, is the logic of self-protection under the 
 illusion of self-sacrifice, is the logic which is at the bot- 
 tom of all human progress. I dislike to express this idea 
 in its meanest form; but I know there are some professors 
 of political economy here, and I wish to be understood. 
 The utility of hospitals is not to cure the sick. It is to 
 teach mercy. The veneration for hospitals is not ac- 
 corded to them because they cure the sick, but because 
 they stand for love and responsibility. 
 
 The appeal of physical suffering makes the strongest 
 attack on our common humanity. Even zealots and sec- 
 taries are touched. The practise and custom of this kind 
 of mercy have therefore become established, while other 
 kinds of mercy which require more imagination are still 
 in their infancy. But at the bottom of every fight for 
 principle you will find the same sentiment of mercy. If 
 you take a slate and pencil and follow out the precise 
 reasons and consequences of the thing, you will always
 
 THE UNITY OF HUMAN NATURE 365 
 
 find that a practical and effective love for mankind is 
 working out a practical self-sacrifice. The average man 
 cannot do the sum, he does not follow the reasoning, but 
 he knows the answer. The deed strikes into his soul with 
 a mathematical impact, and he responds like a tuning- 
 fork when its note is struck. 
 
 Every one knows that self-sacrifice is a virtue. The 
 child takes his nourishment from the tale of heroism as 
 naturally as he takes milk. He feels that the deed was 
 done for his sake. He adopts it: it is his own. The na- 
 tions have always stolen their myths from one another, 
 and claimed each other's heroes. It has required all the 
 world's heroes to make the world's ears sensitive to new 
 statements, illustrations, and applications of the logic of 
 progress. Yet their work has been so well done that all 
 of us respond to the old truths in however new a form. 
 Not France alone but all modern society owes a debt of 
 gratitude to Zola for his rescue of Dreyfus. The whole 
 world would have been degraded and set back, the whole 
 world made less decent and habitable, but for those few 
 Frenchmen who took their stand against corruption. 
 
 Now the future of civil society upon the earth depends 
 upon the application to international politics of this fa- 
 miliar idea, which we see prefigured in our mythology and 
 monumentalized in our hospitals the principle that what 
 is done for one is done for all. When you say a thing is 
 " right," you appeal to mankind. What you mean is that 
 every one is at stake. Your attack upon wrong amounts 
 to saying that some one has been left out in the calcula- 
 tion. Both at home and abroad you are always pleading 
 for mercy, and the plea gains such a wide response that 
 some tyranny begins to totter, and its engines are turned 
 upon you to get you to stop. This outcry against you is
 
 3 66 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 the measure of your effectiveness. If you imitate Zola 
 and attack some nuisance in this town to-morrow, you 
 will bring on every symptom and have every experience 
 of the Dreyfus affair. The cost is the same, for cold 
 looks are worse than imprisonment. The emancipation 
 of the reformer is the same, for if a man can resist the 
 influences of his townsfolk, if he can cut free from the 
 tyranny of neighborhood gossip, the world has no terrors 
 for him; there is no second inquisition. The public in- 
 fluence is the same, for every citizen of that town can 
 thereafter look a town officer in the face with more self- 
 respect. But not to townsmen, nor to neighboring towns, 
 nor to Parisians is this force confined. It goes out in all 
 directions, continuously. The man is in communication 
 with the world. This impulse of communication with all 
 men is at the bottom of every ambition. The injustice, 
 cruelty, oppression in the world are all different forms of 
 the same non-conductor, that prevents utterances, that 
 stops messages, that strikes dumb the speaker and deafens 
 the listener. You will find that it makes no difference 
 whether the non-conductor be a selfish oligarchy, a mili- 
 tary autocracy, or a commercial ring. The voice of hu- 
 manity is stifled by corruption: and corruption is only 
 an evil because it stifles men. 
 
 Try to raise a voice that shall be heard from here to 
 Albany and watch what it is that comes forward to shut 
 off the sound. It is not a German sergeant, nor a Rus- 
 sian officer of the precinct. It is a note from a friend of 
 your father's offering you a place in his office. This is 
 your warning from the secret police. Why, if any of you 
 young gentlemen have a mind to make himself heard a 
 mile off, you must make a bonfire of your reputations 
 and a close enemy of most men who wish you well.
 
 THE UNITY OF HUMAN NATURE 367 
 
 And what will you get in return? Well, if I must, for 
 the benefit of the economist, charge you with some selfish 
 gain, I will say that you get the satisfaction of having 
 been heard, and that this is the whole possible scope of 
 human ambition. 
 
 When I was asked to make this address I wondered 
 what I had to say to you boys who are graduating. And 
 I think I have one thing to say. If you wish to be useful, 
 never take a course that will silence you. Refuse to learn 
 anything that you cannot proclaim. Refuse to accept 
 anything that implies collusion, whether it be a clerk- 
 ship or a curacy, a legal fee or a post in a university. 
 Retain the power of speech, no matter what other power 
 you lose. If you can, take this course, and in so far as 
 you take it you will bless this country. In so far as you 
 depart from this course you become dampers, mutes, and 
 hooded executioners. As for your own private character, 
 it will be preserved by such a course. Crime you cannot 
 commit, for crime gags you. Collusion with any abuse 
 gags you. As a practical matter a mere failure to speak 
 out upon occasions where no opinion is asked or expected 
 of you, and when the utterance of an uncalled-for suspi- 
 cion is odious, will often hold you to a concurrence in pal- 
 pable iniquity. It will bind and gag you and lay you 
 dumb and in shackles like the veriest serf in Russia. I 
 give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but 
 speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, 
 be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. 
 
 The choice of Hercules was made when Hercules was 
 a lad. It cannot be made late in life. It will perhaps 
 come for each one of you within the next eighteen months. 
 I have seen ten years of young men who rush out into 
 the world with their messages, and when they find how
 
 368 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 deaf the world is they think they must save their strength 
 and wait. They believe that after a while they will be 
 able to get up on some little eminence from which they 
 can make themselves heard. "In a few years," reasons 
 one of them, "I shall have gained a standing, and then 
 I will use my power for good." Next year comes and 
 with it a strange discovery. The man has lost his hori- 
 zon of thought. His ambition has evaporated; he has 
 nothing to say. The great occasion that was to have let 
 him loose on society was some little occasion that nobody 
 saw, some moment in which he decided to obtain a stand- 
 ing. The great battle of a lifetime has been fought and 
 lost over a silent scruple. But for this, the man might, 
 within a few years, have spoken to the nation with the 
 voice of an archangel. What was he waiting for? Did 
 he think that the laws of nature were to be changed for 
 him? Did he think that a "notice of trial" would be 
 served on him? Or that some spirit would stand at his 
 elbow and say: "Now's your time"? The time of trial 
 is always. Now is the appointed time. And the com- 
 pensation for beginning at once is that your voice carries 
 at once. You do not need a standing. It would not 
 help you. Within less time than you can see it, you will 
 have been heard. The air is filled with sounding-boards 
 and the echoes are flying. It is ten to one that you have 
 but to lift your voice to be heard in California, and that 
 from where you stand. A bold plunge will teach you 
 that the visions of the unity of human nature which the 
 poets have sung were not the fictions of their imagina- 
 tion, but a record of what they saw. Deal with the 
 world, and you will discover their reality. Speak to the 
 world, and you will hear their echo. 
 
 Social and business prominence look like advantages,
 
 THE UNITY OF HUMAN NATURE 369 
 
 and so they are if you want money. But if you want 
 moral influence you may bless God you have not got 
 them. They are the payment with which the world sub- 
 sidizes men to keep quiet, and there is no subtlety or cun- 
 ning by which you can get them without paying hi silence. 
 This is the great law of humanity, that has existed since 
 history began, and will last while man lasts evil, selfish- 
 ness, and silence are one thing. 
 
 The world is learning, largely through American experi- 
 ence, that freedom in the form of government is no guar- 
 antee against abuse, tyranny, cruelty, and greed. The 
 old sufferings, the old passions, are in full blast among 
 us. What, then, are the advantages of self-government? 
 The chief advantage is that self-government enables a man 
 in his youth, in his own town, within the radius of his 
 first public interests, to fight the important battle of his 
 life while his powers are at their strongest, and the powers 
 of oppression are at their weakest. If a man acquires the 
 power of speech here, if he says what he means now, if 
 he makes his point and dominates his surroundings at 
 once, his voice will, as a matter of fact, be heard instantly 
 in a very wide radius. And so he walks up into a new 
 sphere and begins to accomplish greater things. He does 
 this through the very force of his insistence on the im- 
 portance of small things. The reason for his graduation 
 is not far to seek. A man cannot reach the hearts of his 
 townsfolks without using the whole apparatus of the 
 world of thought. He cannot tell or act the truth in 
 his own town without enlisting every power for truth, and 
 setting in vibration the cords that knit that town into the 
 world's history. He is forced to find and strike the same 
 note which he would use on some great occasion when speak- 
 ing for all mankind. A man who has won a town-fight is
 
 370 COLLEGE AND THE FUTURE 
 
 a veteran, and our country to-day is full of these young 
 men. To-morrow their force will show in national pol- 
 itics, and in that moment the fate of the Malay, the food 
 of the Russian prisoner, the civilization of South Africa, 
 and the future of Japan will be seen to have been in issue. 
 These world problems are now being settled in the contest 
 over the town-pump in a western village. I think it likely 
 that the next thirty years will reveal the recuperative 
 power of American institutions. One of you young men 
 may easily become a reform President, and be carried into 
 office and held in office by the force of that private opinion 
 which is now being sown broadcast throughout the coun- 
 try by just such men as yourselves. You will concede the 
 utility of such a President. Yet it would not be the man 
 but the masses behind him that did his work. 
 
 Democracy thus lets character loose upon society and 
 shows us that in the realm of natural law there is nothing 
 either small or great: and this is the chief value of de- 
 mocracy. In America the young man meets the struggle 
 between good and evil in the easiest form in which it was 
 ever laid before men. The cruelties of interest and of 
 custom have with us no artificial assistance from caste, 
 creed, race prejudice. Our frame of government is drawn 
 in close accordance with the laws of nature. By our docu- 
 ments we are dedicated to mankind; and hence it is that 
 we can so easily feel the pulse of the world and lay our 
 hand on the living organism of humanity.
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 FOR REFERENCE 
 
 CHAPTERS I, II. LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 Aydelotte, Frank: College English, "Writing and Thinking." 
 
 Bennett, Arnold: Literary Taste and How to Form It; How to Be- 
 come an Author; The Truth about an Author; Journalism for 
 Women; The Author's Craft. 
 
 Goethe, J. W. : Maxims in Prose ; Conversations with Eckermann. 
 
 Jonson, Ben: Timber or Discoveries. 
 
 Joubert, J.: Pensees, translated by Katharine Lyttleton. 
 
 Raleigh, Sir Walter: Style. 
 
 Stevenson, R. L.: Memories and Portraits, "A College Magazine"; 
 Essays of Travel and in the Art of Writing. 
 
 Symonds, J. A.: Essays Speculative and Suggestive, "Is Music the 
 Type or Measure of All Art?" 
 
 Thackeray, W. M.: Roundabout Papers, "De Finibus." 
 
 Trollope, A.: Autobiography, especially chapters II, XII, and XIV. 
 
 CHAPTERS III, IV. WHAT Is COLLEGE LIKE? 
 
 Corbin, J.: An American at Oxford; Which College for the Boy? 
 
 Crawford, Marion: Greifenstein, chapters VI to IX "Life at a 
 German University." 
 
 Fitch, G.: At Good Old Siwash. 
 
 Flandreau, C. M.: The Diary of a Freshman; Harvard Episodes. 
 
 Gibbon, Edward: Memoirs, the section on Gibbon's life at Oxford. 
 
 Hill, G. B.: Harvard College, by an Oxonian. 
 
 Hughes, T. : Tom Brown at Oxford. 
 
 Johnson, Owen: Stover at Yale. 
 
 Lange, A.: Oxford. 
 
 Wallis, W. D.: " The Oxford System versus Our Own: " The Ameri- 
 can Oxonian, January, 1915 (2:5), reprinted from The Peda- 
 gogical Seminary, June, 1912. 
 37i
 
 372 APPENDIX 
 
 CHAPTERS V, VI, VII. WHAT Is COLLEGE FOR? 
 
 Briggs, Le Baron R.: College Life: Girls and Education. 
 Emerson, R. W.: Representative Men, "The Uses of Great Men." 
 Huxley, T. H. : Science and Education, "A Liberal Education and 
 
 Where to Find It." 
 
 Newman, J. H.: The Idea of a University, discourses V and VII. 
 Wilson, Woodrow: The Spirit of Learning. (Reprinted from The 
 
 Harvard Graduates' Magazine in Essays for College Men.) 
 Wister, Owen: Philosophy, 4. 
 
 CHAPTERS VIII, IX. COLLEGE ATHLETICS 
 
 Aydelotte, Frank : " Spectators and Sport," Indiana University 
 
 Alumni Quarterly, April, 1915 (2 :m). 
 Corbin, J.: An American at Oxford, pp. 255-271. 
 Derby, R. A.: "The True Object of Organized Athletics," Outlook, 
 
 October 5, 1907 (87 : 254). 
 Stewart, C. A.: "Athletics and the College," Atlantic Monthly, 
 
 February, 1914 (113 : 153). 
 
 CHAPTERS X, XI, XII, XIII. COLLEGE INTERESTS AND 
 ACTIVITIES 
 
 Arnold, Matthew: Discourses in America, "Literature and Sci- 
 ence." 
 
 Caird, John: The Study of Art. 
 
 Eliot, C. W.: Present College Questions. 
 
 Huxley, T. H.: Science and Education, sections VI, VII. 
 
 Hyde, W. D.: The College Man and the College Woman. 
 
 Rice, Richard, Jr.: "The Educational Value of Co-education," 
 Independent, December 5, 1912 (73 : 1304). 
 
 Ruskin, John: The Crown of Wild Olive, "Traffic." 
 
 Stevenson, R. L.: "On the Choice of a Profession," Scribner's 
 Magazine, January, 1915 (57 : 66). 
 
 CHAPTERS XIV, XV. WHAT Is RELIGION? 
 
 Drummond, Henry: The Greatest Thing in the World; The Natural 
 
 Law in the Spiritual World. 
 Emerson, R. W.: English Traits, "Religion."
 
 APPENDIX 373 
 
 Fiske, John: The Destiny of Man; The Idea of God as Affected by 
 Modern Knowledge ; Through Nature to God. 
 
 James, W.: Human Immortality. 
 
 Myers, F. W. H.: Science and a Future Life. 
 
 Santayana, George: Poetry and Religion, "Understanding, Imag- 
 ination, and Mysticism." 
 
 Swift, J.: The Tale of a Tub. 
 
 The Message of the College to the Church, a course of Sunday eve- 
 ning addresses in Lent, 1901, delivered in the Old South Church, 
 Boston. 
 
 CHAPTERS XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX. THE PURPOSE OF LIFE 
 
 Benson, A. C.: From a College Window, "Habits." 
 
 Bryant, W. C.: "Thanatopsis." 
 
 Emerson, R. W. : Representative Men, "Napoleon"; Essays (first 
 series), "Self-Reliance," "Intellect." 
 
 Hyde, W. D.: Self -Measurement. 
 
 James, W.: The Will to Believe, first two essays. 
 
 Johnson, Samuel: Rasselas. 
 
 Roosevelt, Theodore: The Strenuous Life, "Civic Helpfulness," 
 "Character and Success," "Brotherhood and the Heroic Vir- 
 tues " ; A utobiography. 
 
 Stevenson, R. L.: Virginibus Puerisque, "El Dorado," "The Eng- 
 lish Admirals," "Acs Triplex," "Child's Play." 
 
 Tennyson, A.: "Locksley Hall," "Maud." 
 
 Vanderlip, F. A.: Business and Education. 
 
 Wordsworth, W.: "The Character of the Happy Warrior." 
 
 CHAPTERS XXI, XXII, XXIII. A PLACE IN THE WORLD 
 
 Bagehot, W.: Physics and Politics, "The Use of Conflict." "The 
 
 Age of Discussion." 
 
 Bennett, Arnold: The Author's Craft, "Seeing Life." 
 Burke, Edmund: Thoughts on the Present Discontents; Letter to the 
 
 Sheriffs of Bristol; Reflections on the Revolution in France, the 
 
 section on " Conservative Reform." 
 James, W. : The Moral Equivalent of War. 
 Murray, G. : Is War Necessary ? 
 Spencer, Herbert: "Progress: Its Law and Cause," Westminster 
 
 Review, April, 1857. 
 Wallas, Graham: The Great Society, Introduction, etc.; Human
 
 374 APPENDIX 
 
 Nature in Politics, Part II, "Official Thought," "Nationality 
 and Humanity." 
 
 Wells, H. G.: Mankind in the Making, "The Cultivation of the 
 Imagination"; First and Last Things, especially Book II; 
 Anticipations, "The Larger Synthesis," "Faith, Morals, and 
 Public Policy in the Twentieth Century."
 
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