giving out of ideas is the object to be attained, Only one power figures prominently in our modern system of college and school education, namely, the learning of facts and the memory thereof. It is no exaggeration to say that this makes up 95% of modern education. Who are the meteors of school and college days? For the most part those with precocious or well trained memories. Why do so many of these meteors flash out of existence at graduation? The answer is simple if you accept my conception of education. Whereas it takes six powers to make a liberally educated man or woman, and seven to make a productive man or woman, only one power has been cultivated assiduously in the 'centripetal' education; whereas there are two great gateways of knowledge, learning and observation, only one has been continuously passed through; whereas there are two universal standards of truth and beauty, only truth has constantly been held up to you, and that in precept rather than in practice. For nothing is surer than this, that the sense of truth must come as a daily personal experience in the life of the student through testing values for himself, as it does in the life of the scientist, the artist, the physician, the engineer, the merchant. Note that whereas you are powerless unless you can by the metabolism of logic make the sum of acquired and observed knowledge your own, that kind of work-a-day efficient logic has never been forced upon you and you are daily, perhaps hourly, guilty of the non sequitur, the post hoc non ergo propter hoc, the undistributed middle, and all those innocent sins against truth which come through the illogical mind. "That man," says Huxley, "has had a liberal education . . . whose intellect is a clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order; ready, like a steam engine, to be turned to any kind of work, and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind." Note that whereas you are a useless member of society unless you can give forth something of what you know and feel in writing, speaking, or design, your expressive powers may have been atrophied through insufficient use. In brief, you may have shunned individual opinion, observation, logic, expression, because they are each and every one on the lines of greatest resistance. And your teachers not only allowed you but actually encouraged and rewarded you for following the lines of least resistance in the accurate reproduction, in examination papers and marking systems, of their ideas and those you found in books. May you, therefore, write down these seven words and read them over every morning: Truth, Beauty, Learning, Observation, Logic, Expression, Production. In the wondrous old quilt work of inherited, or ancestral predispositions which make your being you may be gifted with all these seven powers in equal and well balanced degree; if you are so blessed you have a great career before you. If, as is more ikely, you have in full measure only a part of each, or some in large measure, some in small, keep on the daily examination of your chart as giving you the canons of a liberal education and of a productive mind. Remember that as regards the somewhat overworked word 'service' every addition in every conceivable department of human activity which is constructive of society is service; that the spirit of science is to transfer something of value from the unknown into the realm of the known, and is, therefore, identical with the spirit of literature; that the moral test of every advance is whether or not it is constructive, for whatever is constructive is moral. I would not for a moment take advantage of the present opportunity to discourage the study of human nature and of the humanities, but for what is called the best opening for a constructive career give me Nature. The ground for my preference is that human nature is an exhaustible fountain of research; Homer understood it well; Solomon fathomed it; Shakespeare divined it, both normal and abnormal; the modernists have been squeezing out the last drops of abnormality. Nature, studied since Aristotle's time, is still full to the brim; no perceptible falling of its tides is evident from any point at which it is attacked, from nebulæ to protoplasm, it is always wholesome, refreshing, and invigorating. Of the two most creative literary artists of our time, Maeterlinck, jaded with human abnormality, comes back to the bee and the flowers and the 'blue bird,' with a delicious renewal of youth, while Rostand turns to the barnyard. |