226 MICHIGAN STATE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 



opportunity, in and through those activities, of living his life 

 fully and effectively and abundantly. Such education proceeds 

 upon the recognition that no hypertrophy of mind or body is as 

 good as plain health, that plain health is the best medicine for 

 all disease, and that the normal exercise of plain life is the straight 

 path to plain health. Such education will therefore address 

 itself perforce to the real doings and exercises of real life, and its 

 definition will be : The guided practice of life, to the end that 

 men may live. 



If now, in terms of the higher learning, all this should prove 

 to mean that applied science is after all the true science, what 

 does it matter ? For the deeds and worth of men, the social test 

 is and always will be the final test, and the uses and needs of 

 man in society will in the long run form the safest guide to the 

 truth we should seek, and for that matter presumably to the 

 truth we can hope to find. 



So much from the side of the individual, but more from the 

 side of the community; for all this means that education, which 

 once made teaching, preaching, healing, and litigating the 

 sacred four, is now laying its hand upon one after another of the 

 activities of daily human lif e to dignify and uplift them, to relate 

 them to reason and truth, and rescue them from sordid slavery 

 to superstition, ignorance, and the rule of thumb, to the end 

 that we shall call nothing, which involves a human use, common 

 or unclean. 



Small matter indeed, this school for farmer boys at Lansing 

 in 1857; a weird undertaking, though, and audacious, not pre- 

 scribed in the books, unapproved of the elders ; but behold, the 

 stone which the builders rejected, it has become the head of the 

 corner ! 



