594 THE HUMAN BODY. 



leaving the rest to lie fallow until, at last, he almost loses 

 the power of using them at all. The fierceness of the battle 

 of life nowadays especially tends to produce such lopsided 

 mental developments; how often does one meet the business. 

 man, so absorbed in money-getting that he has lost all 

 power of appreciating any but the lower sensual pleasures; 

 the intellectual joys of art, science, and literature have no 

 charm for him; he is a mere money-making machine. One, 

 also, not unfrequently meets the scientific man with no 

 appreciation of art or literature; and literary men utterly in- 

 capable of sympathy with science. A good collegiate 

 education in early life, on a broad basis of mathematics, 

 languages, and the natural sciences, is a great security against 

 such imperfect mental growth; one danger in American 

 life is the tendency to put lads in a technical college, or to 

 start them in business before they have attained any broad 

 general education. Another danger, no doubt, is the oppo- 

 site one of making the training too broad; a man who knows 

 one or two literatures fairly well, and who has mastered the 

 elements of mathematics and of one of the observational or 

 experimental sciences, is likely to have a better and more 

 utilizable brain than he who has a smattering of half a 

 dozen languages and a confused idea of all the " ologies." 

 The habits of mental slovenliness, the illogical thinking, 

 and the incapacity to know when a thing really is mastered 

 and understood, which one so often finds as the results of 

 such an education, are far worse than the narrowness apt 

 to follow the opposite error, which is often associated 

 with the power of accurate logical thought. Those who 

 are deprived of the advantages of a general collegiate educa- 

 tion may now, more easily than at any previous period, 

 cultivate mental breadth by reading some of the many 

 excellent general reviews and magazines, and the readable 

 but exact popular expositions now available on nearly all 

 subjects, which are such a feature of our age. Associating, 

 out of working hours, with those whose special pursuits aie 

 different from our own is almost necessary to those who 

 would avoid such an asymmetrical development as almost 

 amounts to intellectual deformity. 



