40 EDUCATION 



should make him wiser and better. His increasing knowledge should 

 become the basis of larger and nobler life. Each new truth he comes 

 to understand should teach him respect for all truth. As he gains 

 deeper insight into science, literature, and art his reverence and ad- 

 miration for the mind of man should grow profounder and more 

 real. The triumphs and sufferings of^heroes and saints should give 

 him higher aims and nobler ambitions. 



Whatever, in a word, be the subject of his study, the end and 

 result should be increase of moral worth, improvement of character. 

 As he will make little progress unless he be a lover of knowledge, 

 knowledge will render him poor service unless he be a lover of virtue. 



But he cannot be a true lover of virtue unless he believes and feels 

 that to be virtuous is the greatest possible good of man, whatever 

 may be his temporal environment. " The end of a liberal education," 

 says Plato, " should be to enchant the soul of children, while it is yet 

 tender und innocent, with the frequent repetition of beautiful maxims. 

 And to embrace them all in a single one, let us say to them that the 

 life which is the most just is also the most happy in the judgment 

 of God; and not only shall we speak truth, but what we say will enter 

 more easily than aught else into the minds of those whom it is im- 

 portant that we should persuade." 



" The insight," says Dr. Harris, " that God is a free person and 

 essentially righteous and gracious is the arrival of man at absolute 

 knowledge. For so soon as one discovers that absolute being must 

 be self-active or personal and that to be absolute person it must be 

 just and gracious, he has arrived at the highest possible insight 

 a knowing which must at the same time be true objectively." 



Since ideas of education are ideas of life, they neither emerge nor 

 become effective as isolated thoughts or fragmentary theories, but 

 they spring from a world-view and are involved in philosophic 

 systems which are spiritual or material, theistic or pantheistic, 

 Christian or pagan, secular or religious. Since education is for life, 

 notions of life determine its processes and methods. What kind of 

 man is the highest? What kind of effort is most worthy of encourage- 

 ment? What is each one's first and most urgent business? Is the 

 individual a means, or an end, or both? Shall the chief stress be laid 

 on the present or on the future? Does man exist for this world alone 

 or is it his duty to look beyond and labor to fit himself for the diviner 

 existence to which faith, hope, and love point? Is the true ideal 

 that of pleasure, or that of virtue and power? These are questions 

 which whoever is interested in education must strive to answer if he 

 wishes to go deeper than its devices and technicalities and to gain 

 insight into the fundamental truth that human values are moral 

 values, and that success or failure is not a matter of profit and loss, 

 but of inner growth or decay. 



