METAMORPHOSES IN EDUCATION. 751 



world a cosmopolitan who feels the Englishman or the German 

 or the Russian to be his neighbor as much as the man who lives 

 across the way and if there can be a higher one still, it is that 

 one who, if physical boundaries allowed, could traverse space 

 and find comradeship and attractive society in Mars or the 

 milky way. 



Environment is mental as well as physical, and it too has a 

 natural history, and in a given individual the limits of his possi- 

 bilities are determined for him and not by him. This has been 

 the result of stable institutions in the past upon successive gener- 

 ations, and is exemplified in the history of every people that has 

 been subject to them. From this one may learn either that stable 

 institutions are not desirable, or rather they are to be dreaded 

 and fought against, or else that such stable institutions as history 

 can show are not adapted to humanity if mankind is to have any 

 worthy future. During the two or three centuries embracing the 

 best days of ancient Greece, as looked at from this distance, not 

 only was she troubled with hostility from without and with jealou- 

 sies within, but nearly every individual, from the greatest to the 

 least of them, was addicted to the grossest immoralities, which 

 we have been and are still taught were not only scandalous and 

 not to be tolerated, but that they are fatal to the existence of 

 society, and so must not be tolerated. Yet Greece was not killed 

 by its bad habits. 



Since the time of the revival of learning, all those people that 

 were subject to it sought for other influences than those of their 

 own time and nationality to react upon them. Each one had a 

 ha rharian for a neighbor, but in the literature of Greece and Rome 

 they had illustrious examples of men molded in other ways and 

 by different methods, and these became in a measure the ideals 

 toward which mankind should strive. The proper study of man- 

 kind was man, but the man studied should be a worthy one. The 

 Catholic bishop declared that all the saints were dead. Inquire 

 in any neighborhood for the wise man, and you will be told that 

 he lives in another town. The ancient glory that could be read 

 about was available for those who aspired for knowledge, arid it 

 soon came about that Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, Cicero 

 and Demosthenes, Horace and Lucretius, Xenophon, Herodotus, 

 and the rest became the teachers of western Europe. For most 

 students and teachers it still holds true that a well-edited man, 

 though he has been dead a thousand years, is preferable to an 

 unedited living man, however eminent he may be. It is a great 

 saving of time and of the risk of oversight to the schoolmaster to 

 have the beauties, the grace, the appositeness, the truth, in an 

 author's works pointed out by another. Until men can get along 

 without models it is well that they choose good ones. Phidias, 



