49 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Now turn to a more cosmic conception. For one moment let us 

 isolate a man. Place him naked and alone in the midst of Nature, 

 in the open sunshine. Clothe him with health and beauty. En- 

 dow him with a clear mind, a warm heart, a keen love of perfec- 

 tion. Make him self-poised, resolute, independent. Then bring 

 him into relation with his fellows. Have him share in all the 

 wholesome activities of life. Let him taste of labor and joy. Let 

 him be a son, a brother, a friend, a lover, a husband, a father, a 

 citizen, a worker, an idler, a thinker, an artist. Let him feel. Let 

 him philosophize. This is to taste life in its entirety. Great 

 God, how few of us do it ! How slight we are ! How partial \ 

 And what a tragedy that, in the name of education, we should go 

 on working for fragments instead of for the completed whole! 

 And this figure of the complete man is the figure that modern 

 education has in mind. An impossible figure, you may say. Yet 

 less impossible the more you and I believe in it. Such a figure is 

 not the ideal of the economists, with their extreme division of 

 labor and their strong belief in the economic trinity of production, 

 distribution, and consumption, but it is a figure which appeals to 

 those men who, like myself, believe in what I may call the sci- 

 entific humanism. As I see the matter, we want to turn boys 

 toward this ideal of full living, to make them en rapport with the 

 universe and with man, to bring them out of their smaller into 

 their larger self, to change them from a less evolved into a more 

 evolved existence. We want to create in them a discontent with 

 partial, secondary, minor ends. We want to turn their faces 

 toward the major end. To do this is to magnify the human spirit 

 that spirit in whose essential sanity I so profoundly believe. 

 And so I define education as the unfolding and perfecting of the 

 human spirit. 



I do not know whether my readers agree to this answer of 

 mine as to what we want to do. I hope that they do agree to it, 

 for to believe less would seem to me to make out life meaner and 

 cheaper than it is. This ideal is but a restatement of the old 

 ideal of the earnest pagan world. To see things as they are is the 

 mission of culture. To adjust one's life to this clear perception of 

 things is to gain the power and perfection that come through cul- 

 ture. But our modern complex world has not taken this motive 

 in its simplicity. It has modified it so that now it reads : To see 

 some things as they are, and notably those things which have to 

 do with material convenience and progress. This is not life in its 

 entirety. It is life weak on the human, emotional, artistic side, 

 life weak on the side that can least afford to be weak. We are 

 waking up to this fact. We are waking up to a feeling that mod- 

 ern school life is rather juiceless. On many sides I see a hopeful 

 discontent a discontent which is to be the prologue to that intel- 



