The Days of a Man 



Patch- 

 work 



Value of 

 Greek 



To these "patchwork" arrangements I had con- 

 sistently objected; every college course should have 

 some one line of work as a backbone. As Agassiz 

 used to say, "the mind is made strong by the 

 thorough possession of something." It was the chief 

 merit of the classical course that it had backbone, 

 but its central axis of culture was by no means 

 adapted to all kinds of brain stuff. Intellect feeds 

 on what it digests; insistence on the same train- 



o 



ing for all is violence to "the democracy of the 

 intellect." 



For some kinds of students the classical course 

 was well adapted. Unfortunately, however, it was 

 often conducted in such a way as to give point to 

 the argument I have occasionally heard in England, 

 that "teachers incompetent to handle the modern 

 branches do well enough in Latin." 



In urging the claims of science, I had no desire 

 to supplant Latin or Greek, but simply to give 

 every one the right to choose in accordance with 

 his own powers and tastes. A goodly number of 

 young people do not take to Latin literature, - 

 from it they draw no intellectual nourishment, 

 and by confining college work to the classics, faculties 

 had deprived many engineers, naturalists, business 

 men, and even some historians of university train- 

 ing. The value of Greek to those whom Emerson 

 calls "Greek-minded men" I would not question. 

 As Thoreau observed, "Those who talk of forgetting 

 Greek are those who never knew it." And I regret 

 not knowing more Greek myself, not so much for 

 the sake of its noble literature, perhaps, as for the 

 language, its fine, sonorous syllables having taken 

 such a large part in word framing. But I am strongly 



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