The Humanities

IT was with something of the spirit of true prophecy that Herbert Spencer proclaimed in his work on Education the approaching triumph of science over art and literature. Science, he said, was to reign supreme, and was no longer to be the “household drudge ” who had “been kept in the background that her haughty sisters might flaunt their fripperies in the eyes of the world.” The tables indeed have been turned so completely that art and literature have not only ceased to be “haughty,” but have often been content to become the humble handmaids of science. It is to this eagerness of the artistic imagination to don the livery of science that we already owe the “experimental" novel. A Harvard Commencement speaker last June promised us that we are soon to have poetry that shall be less “human” and more “biological.” While awaiting these biological bards of the future, we may at least deal scientifically with the poets of the past if we are to trust the title of a recently published Laboratory Method for the study of poetry. Many of us nowadays would seem to be convinced with the French naturalist, that if happiness exists anywhere it will be found at the bottom of a crucible. Renan regretted in his old age that he had spent his life on so unprofitable a subject as the history of Christianity instead of the physical sciences. For the proper study of mankind is not man, but chemistry; or perhaps our modern attitude might be more correctly defined as an attempt to study man by the methods of physics and chemistry. We have invented laboratory sociology, and live in a nightmare of statistics. Language interests us, not for the absolute human values it expresses, but only in so far as it is a collection of facts and relates itself to nature. With the invasion of this hard literalness the humanities themselves have ceased to be humane. I was once told as convincing proof of the merit of a certain classical scholar that he had twenty thousand references in his card catalogue.

The humanism of the Renaissance was a protest against the excesses of the ascetic. Now that science aspires to be all in all, somewhat after the fashion of theology in the Middle Ages, the man who would maintain the humane balance of his faculties must utter a similar protest against the excesses of the analyst in whom a “literal obedience to facts has extinguished every spark of that light by which man is truly man.” In its mediæval extreme, the human spirit strove to isolate itself entirely from outer nature in a dream of the supernatural; it now tends to the other extreme, and strives to identify itself entirely with the world of phenomena. The spread of this scientific positivism with its assimilation of man to nature has had especially striking results in education. Some of our higher institutions of learning are in a fair way to become what a certain eminent scholar thought universities should be, “great scientific workshops.” The rare survivors of the elder generation of humanists must have a curious feeling of loneliness and isolation.

The time has perhaps come, not so much to react against this nineteenthcentury naturalism, as to define and complete it, and especially to insist on its keeping within proper bounds. The nature-cult is in danger of being pushed too far, not only in its scientific but in its sentimental form. The benefits and blessings that Herbert Spencer promises us from the scientific analysis of nature are only to be matched by those that Wordsworth promises from sentimental communion with nature.

The sentimental and the scientific worship of nature, however far apart they may be at some other points, have much in common when viewed in relation to our present subject — their effect on college education. The former working up into the college from the kindergarten, and the latter working downward from the graduate school, seem likely between them to leave very little of the humane ideal. The results are sometimes curious when the two tendencies actually meet. I once overheard a group of undergraduates in search of “soft ” courses discussing whether they should elect a certain course in Old Egyptian. The exaggerations of Wordsworth and Herbert Spencer may have served a purpose in overcoming a counter-excess of tradition and conventionalism. But now the nature-cult itself is degenerating into a kind of cant. The lover of clear thinking cannot allow to pass unchallenged many of the phrases that the votaries of the Goddess Natura have come to utter so glibly, such phrases, for instance, as “obedience to nature ” and “natural methods.” The word nature — covering as it does both the human world and the world of phenomena — has been a source of intellectual confusion almost from the dawn of Greek philosophy to the present day. To borrow an example from French literature, it is equally in the name of “nature ” that La Fontaine humanizes his animals, and that Zola bestializes his men. By juggling with the twofold meaning of the word, Renan arrived only a few years ago at his famous dictum that “nature does not care for chastity.”

It is a disquieting fact that Rousseau, the man whose influence is everywhere in the new education, was remarkable for nothing so much as his inability to distinguish between nature and human nature. He counts among his disciples all those who, like him, trust to the goodness of “nature,” and so tend to identify the ideal needs of the individual with his temperamental leaning; who exalt instinct and idiosyncrasy; who, in their endeavor to satisfy the variety of temperaments, would push the principle of election almost down to the nursery, and devise, if possible, a separate system of education for every individual. For we are living in a privileged age, when not only every man, as Dr. Donne sang, but every child

Our educators, in their anxiety not to thwart native aptitudes, encourage the individual in an inbreeding of his own temperament which, beginning in the kindergarten, is carried upward through the college by the elective system, and receives its final consecration in his specialty. We are all invited to abound in our own sense, and to fall in the direction in which we lean. Have we escaped from the pedantry of authority and prescription which was the bane of the old education, only to lapse into the pedantry of individualism ? One is sometimes tempted to acquiesce in Luther’s comparison of mankind to a drunken peasant on horseback, who, if propped up on one side, slips over on the other. What would seem desirable at present is not so much a Tory reaction toward the old ideal as a sense of measure to save us from an opposite excess, — from being entirely “disconnected,” as Burke has expressed it, “into the dust and powder of individuality.” The need of discipline and community of ideal enters into human nature no less than the craving for a free play of one’s individual faculties. This need the old curriculum, with all its faults, did something to satisfy. According to Dean Briggs, discipline is often left in the new education to athletics; and athletics also meet in part the need for fellowship and communion. However much members of the same college may be split up in their intellectual interests by different electives, they can at least commune in an intercollegiate football game. Yet there should likewise be a place for some less elemental form of communion ; so many of the very forces in the modern world that make for material union would seem at the same time to tend toward spiritual isolation. In this as in other respects we are at the furthest remove from mediæval Europe when men were separated by almost insuperable obstacles in time and space, but were knit together by a common ideal. When it comes to the deeper things of life, the members of a modern college faculty sometimes strike one, in Emersonian phrase, as a collection of “infinitely repellent particles.” The mere fact that men once read the same books at college was no slight bond of fellowship. Two men who have taken the same course in Sophocles have at least a fund of common memories and allusions; whereas if one of them elect a course in Ibsen instead of Sophocles, they will not only have different memories, but, so far as they are touched by the spirit of their authors, different ideals. Only a pure radical can imagine that it is an unmixed gain for education to be so centrifugal, or that the outer and mechanical devices that are being multiplied to bring men together can take the place of this deeper understanding.

The sentimental naturalist would claim the right to elect Ibsen instead of Sophocles simply because he finds Ibsen more “interesting; ” he thus obscures the idea of liberal culture by denying that some subjects are more humane than others in virtue of their intrinsic quality, and quite apart from individual tastes and preferences. The scientific naturalist arrives at the same result by his tendency to apply only quantitative tests and to translate everything into terms of power. President Eliot remarks significantly that the old distinction between the degrees of Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science “ is fading away, and may soon disappear altogether, for the reason that the object in view with candidates for both degrees is fundamentally the same, namely, — training for power. ” Our colleges are very much taken up at present with the three years’ scheme, but what a small matter this is, after all, compared with the change in the degree itself from a qualitative basis to a quantitative and dynamic one! If some of our educational radicals have their way, the A. B. degree will mean merely that a man has expended a certain number of units of intellectual energy on a list of elective studies that may range from boiler-making to Bulgarian ; the degree will simply serve to measure the amount and intensity of one’s intellectual current and the resistance overcome; it will become, in short, a question of intellectual volts and ampères and ohms. Here again what is wanted is not a hard and fast hierarchy of studies, but a sense of measure that will save us from the opposite extreme, from the democratic absurdity of asserting that all studies are and by right should be free and equal. The rank of studies will finally be determined, not by the number of intellectual foot pounds they involve, but by the nearness or remoteness of their relation to that essential nature of man, the boundaries of which by no means coincide with the boundaries of physical nature: —

The future will perhaps arrive at a classification of studies as more or less humane. However desirable this humane revival may be, we should not hope to bring it about mechanically by proposing some brand-new scheme of educational reform. For this would be to fall into the great error of the age, and attempt to create the spirit by means and appliances instead of taking as our very point of departure the doctrine that man is greater than machinery. The hope for the humane spirit is not in the munificence of millionaires, but in a deeper and more earnest reflection on the part of individuals. Emerson’s address on the American Scholar is a plea for a humanism that shall rest on pure intuition ; the only drawback to Emerson’s programme is that he assumes genius in his scholar, and genius of a rare kind at that. On the other hand, a humanism so purely traditional as that of Oxford and the English universities has, along with elements of great strength, certain obvious weaknesses. Perhaps the chief of these is that it seems, to the superficial observer at least, to have forgotten real for conventional values, — the making of a man for the making of a gentleman. Herbert Spencer writes of this English education: “As the Orinoco Indian puts on his paint before leaving his hut, . . . so, a boy’s drilling in Latin and Greek is insisted on, not because of their intrinsic value, but that he may have the ‘education of a gentleman.’ ” All that may be affirmed with certainty is that if the humane ideal appear at all in the future, it must in the very nature of things be more a matter of individual insight and less a matter of tradition than heretofore. Our age has seen a weakening of every form of traditional authority that has some analogy with what took place in the Greece of Pericles. One may perhaps say without pushing the analogy too far, that we are confronted with the same alternative: either to attain to the true individualism of Socrates, the first of the humanists as he has been called, or else to fall away into the intellectual and moral impressionism of the sophists. Unpleasant signs of this impressionism have already appeared in our national theatre and newspaper press, in our literary criticism and popular novel. Are we to be impressionists in education also? The firmness of the American’s faith in the blessings of education is only equaled by the vagueness of his ideas as to the kind of education to which these blessings are annexed. It is hard to consider our prodigious educational activity — the laboratories and committees and conventions and endowments — without being reminded at times of the words of Sir Joshua Reynolds : “ A provision of endless apparatus, a bustle of infinite inquiry and research, may be employed to evade and shuffle off real labor — the real labor of thinking.”

Changes may very well be made in the mere form of the A. B. degree, provided we are careful to retain its humane aspiration. But through lack of clear thinking we seem likely to forget the true function of the college as opposed to the graduate school on the one hand and the preparatory school on the other. This slighting of the college is also due in part to German influences. Some of our educational theorists would be willing to unite the upper part of the college course with the graduate school and surrender the first year or two of it to the preparatory school, thus arriving at a division similar to the German gymnasium and university. This division is logical if we believe with Professor Münsterberg that there are but two kinds of scholars, “receptive ” and “ productive ” scholars, — those who discover knowledge, and those who “distribute” it; and if we also agree with him in thinking that we need give “the boy of nineteen nothing different in principle from what the boy of nine receives.” But the youth of nineteen does differ from the boy of nine in one important particular, — he has become more capable of reflection. This change from the receptive to the reflective and assimilative attitude of mind is everything from the humane point of view, and contains in fact the justification of the college. Professor Münsterberg stigmatizes our college scholarship not only as “receptive, ” but as “passive ” and “feminine ” (though, to be sure, this bad state of affairs has been somewhat mended of late by the happy influence of Germany). But this is simply to overlook that humane endeavor which it is the special purpose of the college to foster — that effort of reflection, virile above all others, to coördinate the scattered elements of knowledge, and relate them not only to the intellect but to the will and character; that subtle alchemy by which mere learning is transmuted into culture. The task of assimilating what is best in the past and present, and adapting it to one’s own use and the use of others, so far from lacking in originality, calls for something akin to creation. Professor Münsterberg regards the relation between the productive scholar and the college teacher as about that between an artist like Sargent and a photographer. He goes on to say that “the purely imitative thinker may make a most excellent teacher. Any one who has a personality, a forcible way of presentation, and an average intellect will be able to be a fine teacher of any subject at six weeks’ notice.”

This German notion of knowledge as something that is dumped down on one mind and then “ distributed ” in the same mechanical fashion to other minds is precisely what we need to guard against. The ambition of the true college teacher is not to “ distribute ” knowledge to his students, not “to lodge it with them, ” as Montaigne says, “but to marry it to them and make it a part of their very minds and souls.” We shall have paid a heavy price for all the strengwissenschaftliche Methode we have acquired from Germany if it makes us incapable of distinguishing between mere erudition and true scholarship.

Granting, then, that the receptive attitude of mind must largely prevail in the lower schools, and that the productive scholar should have full scope in the graduate school, the college, if it is to have any reason at all for existing separately, must stand, not for the advancement but the assimilation of learning, and for the perpetuation of culture. This distinction is fairly obvious, and one would be almost ashamed to recall it, did it not seem to be overlooked by some of the men who are doing the most to mould American education. President Harper, for example, in his address on the future of the small college, proposes that some of these colleges be reduced to the rank of high schools, that others be made into “junior colleges ” (in due subordination to the larger institutions, and taking the student only to the end of the sophomore year), and that others justify their existence by cultivating specialties. The great universities, for their part, are to be brought into closer relations with one another so as to form a sort of educational trust. Now, President Harper is evidently right in thinking that the small colleges are too numerous, and that no one would be the loser if some of them were reduced to the rank of high schools. Yet he scarcely makes mention in all his scheme of what should be the real aim of the small college that survives, namely, to teach a limited number of standard subjects vivified and informed by the spirit of liberal culture. From whatever side we approach them, these new theories are a menace to the small college. Thus the assumption that a student is ready for unlimited election immediately on completing his preparatory course puts at a manifest disadvantage all save a very few institutions. For only a few institutions have the material resources that will permit them to convert themselves into educational Abbeys of Theleme and write over their portals the inviting legend: Study what you like. The best of the small colleges will render a service to American education if they decide to make a sturdy defense of the humane tradition instead of trying to rival the great universities in displaying a full line of educational novelties. In the latter case, they may become third-rate and badly equipped scientific schools, and so reënact the fable of the frog that tried to swell itself to the size of the ox.

The small colleges will be fortunate if, like the Virgilian farmers, they appreciate their own advantages; if they do not fall into the naturalistic fallacy of confusing growth in the human sense with mere expansion; if they do not allow themselves to be overawed by size and quantity, or hypnotized by numbers. Even though the whole world seem bent on living the quantitative life, the college should remember that its business is to make of its graduates men of quality in the real and not the conventional meaning of the term. In this way it will do its share toward creating that aristocracy of character and intelligence that is needed in a community like ours to take the place of an aristocracy of birth, and to counteract the tendency toward an aristocracy of money. A great deal is said nowadays about the democratic spirit that should pervade our colleges. This is true if it means that the college should be in profound sympathy with what is best in democracy. It is false if it means, as it often does, that the college should level down and suit itself to the point of view of the average individual. Some of the arguments advanced in favor of a three years’ course imply that we can afford to lower the standard of the degree, provided we thereby put it within reach of a larger number of students. But from the standpoint of the college one thoroughly cultivated person should be more to the purpose than a hundred persons who are only partially cultivated. The final test of democracy, as Tocqueville has said, will be its power to produce and encourage the superior individual. Because the claims of the average man have been slighted in times past, does it therefore follow that we must now slight the claims of the superior man? We cannot help thinking once more of Luther’s comparison. The college can only gain by close and sympathetic contact with the graduate school on the one hand, and the lower schools on the other, provided it does not forget that its function is different from either. The lower schools should make abundant provision for the education of the average citizen, and the graduate school should offer ample opportunity for specialization and advanced study; the prevailing spirit of the college, however, should be neither humanitarian nor scientific, — though these elements may be largely represented, — but humane and, in the right sense of the word, aristocratic.

In thus sketching out an ideal it costs nothing, as a French writer remarks, to make it complete and pretentious. One reason why we are likely to fall so far short of our ideal in practice is the difficulty, as things now are, of finding the right kind of college teacher. Professor Münsterberg praises his German teachers because they never aspired to be more than enthusiastic specialists, and he adds that “ no one ought to teach in a college who has not taken his doctor’s degree.” This opinion is also held by many Americans, and hence the fetish worship of the doctor’s degree on the part of certain college presidents. But one may shine as a productive scholar, and yet have little or nothing of that humane insight and deeper reflection that can alone give meaning to all subjects, and is especially appropriate in a college teacher. The work that leads to the doctor’s degree is a constant temptation to sacrifice one’s growth as a man to one’s growth as a specialist. We must be men before being entomologists. The old humanism was keenly alive to the loss of mental balance that may come from knowing any one subject too well. It was perhaps with some sense of the dangers of specialization that the ancient flute-player replied to King Philip who wished to argue a point of music with him : “God forbid that your majesty should know as much about these things as I do.” This fear of a lopsided specialism was finally conventionalized into a polite prejudice. “Perfect good - breeding, ” says Dr. Johnson, “consists in having no particular mark of any profession, but a general elegance of manners.” England is perhaps the only country in which something of this ideal of the elegant amateur— “l’honnête homme qui ne se pique de rien ” — has survived to our own day. Compared with the Germans, the English still are, as some one recently called them, a nation of amateurs. However, they have had reason to learn of late that a “general elegance of manners ” can no longer take the place of the closest attention to technical details. A revulsion of feeling has followed, and one might imagine from the tone of some recent English articles that the writers would like to see Oxford converted into a polytechnic school. The whole problem is a most difficult one: the very conditions of modern life require us nearly all to be experts and specialists, and this makes it the more necessary that we should be on our guard against that maiming and mutilation of the mind that come from overabsorption in one subject. Every one remembers the passage in which Darwin confesses with noble frankness that his humane appreciation of art and poetry had been impaired by a one-sided devotion to science.

We should at least insist that the college teacher of ancient or modern literature be something more than a mere specialist. To regard a man as qualified for a college position in these subjects simply because he has investigated some minute point of linguistics or literary history — this, to speak plainly, is preposterous. If we are told that this is a necessary test of his originality and mastery of method, we should reply that as much originality is needed for assimilation as for production, far more, indeed, than enters into the mechanical compilations so often accepted for doctors’ theses in this country and Germany. This outcry about originality is simply the scientific form of that pedantry of individualism, so rampant at the present hour, which, in its sentimental form, leads as we have seen to an exaggerated respect for temperament and idiosyncrasy. One of the surest ways of being original nowadays, since that is what we are all straining after so anxiously, would be simply to become a well-read man (in the old-fashioned sense of the term), to have a thorough knowledge and imaginative appreciation of what is really worth while in the literature of the past. The candidate for the doctor’s degree thinks he can afford to neglect this general reading and reflection in the interests of his own private bit of original research. This pedantic straining after originality is especially flagrant in subjects like the classics, where, more than elsewhere, research should be subordinated to humane assimilation. What are we to think of the classical student who sets out to write his thesis on the ancient horse-bridle or the Roman door-knob before he has read widely, much less assimilated, the masterpieces of Greece and Rome ? Unfortunately, this depreciation of assimilative and reflective scholarship falls in with what is most superficial in our national temperament, — our disregard for age and experience in the race or the individual, our small esteem for the “ancient and permanent sense of mankind ” as embodied in tradition, our prejudice in favor of young men and new ideas. In our attitude toward age and tradition, some of us seem bent on going as far in one direction as the Chinese have gone in the other. Youth has already come to be one of the virtues chiefly appreciated in a minister of the gospel! Tocqueville remarks that the contempt for antiquity is one of the chief dangers of a democracy, and adds with true insight that the study of the classics therefore has special value for a democratic community. In point of fact, the classical teacher could attempt no higher task than this imaginative interpretation of the past to the present. It is to be accounted one of the chief disasters to our higher culture that our classical teachers as a body have fallen so far short of this task, that they have come instead so entirely under the influence of the narrowest school of German philology, the school of Lachmann and Gottfried Hermann. The throng of scholiasts and commentators whom Voltaire saw pressing about the outer gates of the Temple of Taste now occupy the sanctuary. The only hope for the future of classical studies is in a quite radical change of direction and, first of all, in an escape from their present isolation. For instance, a better test than the doctor’s degree of a man’s fitness to teach classics in the average college would be an examination designed to show the extent and thoroughness of his reading in the classical language and his power to relate this knowledge to modern life and literature. This foundation once laid, the research instinct might develop naturally in those who have a turn for research, instead of being developed, as it is now, in all alike under artificial pressure. But it is hardly probable that our classical teachers will welcome any such suggestion. For, unlike the old humanists as they may be in most other respects, they still retain something of their pride and exclusiveness ; they are still careful to remind us by their attitude that Latin and Greek are litterœ humaniores, however little they do to make good the claim to this proud distinction. They may be compared to a man who inherits a great name and estate, the possession of which he does not sufficiently justify by his personal achievement.

The teaching of the classics will gain fresh interest and vitality by being brought into close contact with mediæval and modern literature; we should hasten to add that the teaching of modern languages will gain immensely in depth and seriousness by being brought into close contact with the classics. Neither condition is fulfilled at present. The lack of classical teachers with an adequate foreground and of modern language teachers with an adequate background is one of the chief obstacles to a revival of humane standards. Yet nothing could be more unprofitable under existing conditions than the continuance in any form of the old quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns. “I prefer the philosophy of Montaigne, ” says Charles Francis Adams in his address on the College Fetish, “to what seem to me the platitudes of Cicero.” As though it were possible to have a full understanding of Montaigne without a knowledge of the “ platitudes ” of Cicero, and the whole of Latin literature into the bargain! The teacher of French especially, if he would avoid superficiality, needs to be steadied and ballasted by a thorough classical training. It is so much easier to interest a class in Rostand than in Racine that he is in constant danger of falling into a cheap contemporaneousness. A French instructor in an Eastern college told me that as a result of long teaching of his subject he had come to know the Trois Mousquetaires better than any other work in all literature; and the Trois Mousquetaires is a masterpiece compared to other texts that have appeared, texts whose literary insignificance is often equaled only by the badness of the editing. The commercialism of the great publishers works hand in hand here with the impressionism of modern language teachers, so that the undergraduate of to-day sometimes has the privilege of reading a novel of Georges Ohnet where a generation ago he would have read Plato.

Those who have faith in either ancient or modern languages as instruments of culture should lose no time in healing their minor differences if they hope to make head against their common enemies, — the pure utilitarians and scientific radicals. Herbert Spencer, who may be taken as the type of these latter, holds that scientific analysis is a prime necessity of life, whereas art and literature are only forms of “play,” the mere entertainment of most of our idle moments. And he concludes in regard to these subjects : “As they occupy the leisure part of life, so should they occupy the leisure part of education.” That this doctrine which reduces art and literature to a sort of dilettanteism should find favor with pure naturalists is not surprising. The case is more serious when it is also accepted, often unconsciously perhaps, by those who are working in what should be the field of literature. Many of the students of linguistics who have intrenched themselves in our college faculties are ready to grant a place to literature as an occasional relaxation from the more serious and strenuous labors of philological analysis. Only a man must not be too interested in literature under penalty of being thought a dilettante. A young philologist once said to me of one of his colleagues: “He is almost a dilettante — he reads Dante and Shakespeare. ” It is perhaps the Spencerian view of art that accounts also for a curious predilection I have often noticed in philologists for vaudeville performances and light summer fiction. Certain teachers of literature, it must be confessed,— especially teachers of English, — seem to have a similar conception of their rôle, and aspire to be nothing more than graceful purveyors of æsthetic solace, and arbiters of the rhetorical niceties of speech. The philologist and the dilettante are equally far from feeling and making others feel that true art and literature stand in vital relation to human nature as a whole, that they are not, as Spencer’s theory implies, mere refined modes of enjoyment, mere titillations of the æsthetic sensibility. Some tradition of this deep import of humane letters for the higher uses of man was maintained, along with other knowledge of value, in the old college curriculum. Now that this humane tradition is weakening, the individual, left to his own resources, must seek a substitute for it in humane reflection.

In other words, — and this brings us once more to the central point of our discussion, — even if we sacrifice the letter of the old Bachelor of Arts degree, we should strive to preserve its spirit. This spirit is threatened at present in manifold ways, — by the upward push of utilitarianism and kindergarten methods, by the downward push of professionalism and specialization, by the almost irresistible pressure of commercial and industrial influences. If we sacrifice both the letter and the spirit of the degree, we should at least do so deliberately, and not be betrayed through mere carelessness into some educational scheme that does not distinguish sufficiently between man and an electric dynamo. The time is above all one for careful thinking and accurate definition. Money and enthusiasm, excellent as these things are, will not take the place of vigorous personal reflection. This, it is to be feared, will prove unwelcome doctrine to the ears of an age that hopes to accomplish its main ends by the appointment of committees, and has developed, in lieu of real communion among men, nearly every form of gregariousness. Professor Münsterberg thinks that our highest ambition should be to rival Germany in productive scholarship. To this end he would have us establish a number of twenty-five-thousand-dollar professorships, and appoint to them our most meritorious investigators and masters of scientific method; in addition he would have us heap on these chosen heroes of research every manner of honor and-distinction. But he will seriously mislead us if he persuades us that productive scholarship is our chief educational problem. Important as this is, we must insist that a far more important problem just now is to determine the real meaning and value of the A. B. degree. However, we should be grateful to Professor Münsterberg for one thing: in dealing with these fundamentals of education, he is refreshingly free from that indolent and impressionistic habit of mind that so often marks our own manner of treating them. He does us a service in forcing us to search more carefully into our own ideas if only in order to oppose him. Almost any opinion that has been thoroughly thought out is better than a mush of impressionism. For, as Bacon has said, truth is more likely to be helped forward by error than by confusion.

Irving Babbitt.