370 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXIX. No. 740 



ing the most characteristic and expansive 

 epoch of his life. Despite conditions ex- 

 tremely unfavorable to decisive choice, 

 statistics, roughly compiled for me, seem 

 to indicate that perhaps seventy-five per 

 cent, of the members of the first-year law 

 classes at Columbia and Harvard knew 

 while in college that they would study law 

 afterwards. This would, I think, justify 

 the college in the very definite procedure 

 that I have advocated. In the case of the 

 engineer, the college even now requires an 

 early decision, followed by continuous 

 hard work ; it is difficult to see why either 

 the decision or the hard work should be 

 restricted to prospective engineers. 



In the last event, supposing that no bent 

 is revealed — and it seems to me absurd to 

 treat the matter as if every schoolboy has 

 some biologically grounded fitness for some 

 one particular calling— I am inclined to 

 believe that it is wasteful and demoraliz- 

 ing to encourage dispersion by the unregu- 

 lated opportunity to modify, retract and 

 get lost. The college would do better to 

 treat the vagrant with the wholesome rigor 

 that society employs without compunction 

 in the case of the working boy who, in de- 

 fault of a distinct gift or bent, is arbi- 

 trarily apprenticed at sixteen. Would it 

 be better if he were maintained as a para- 

 site until such time as he really concluded 

 at his leisure whether he preferred to be a 

 carpenter or a mason 1 



Several causes have combined to pro- 

 long the chaotic condition of the college. 

 In the first place, college administrators 

 have been terrorized or hypnotized by the 

 term culture. For a long while it was 

 identified with a perfunctory knowledge 

 of Latin and Greek grammar and a few 

 books of Caesar, Xenophon, and perhaps 

 Virgil, and was sharply antithetic to any- 

 thing that could possibly be of any use. 

 This is mere rubbish. There is possible a 

 liberal or cultural or philosophic treat- 



ment of a man's primary practical con- 

 cern; and the college which does not oc- 

 cupy itself with such interests in just that 

 spirit has lost an important reason for 

 existence. All these antitheses between 

 vocation and culture, science and culture, 

 business and culture, have got to be re- 

 solved by a breadth of treatment which ab- 

 sorbs both. Treated in a vital human 

 spirit, every, interest of human faculty is 

 culture. The classics maybe— and usually 

 are— sterilized so as largely to lose their 

 culture- value ; and science may be human- 

 ized and thus gain it. 



An equally disastrous bogey has been 

 freedom. "We are forbidden to adjust the 

 college to existing social conditions through 

 definite organization, subject to revision as 

 society develops, on the ground that the 

 boy can be disciplined to freedom only 

 through freedom. This absolutely nega- 

 tive conception of liberty, having been 

 thoroughly discredited in politics, eco- 

 nomics, philosophy, has trekked over into 

 the educational field, after having been 

 shown the door everywhere else. Now in 

 education, as in economics, liberty inter- 

 preted as the absence of organization is of 

 provisional service only in relatively brief 

 periods following the abolition of purely 

 arbitrary restrictions. Under such condi- 

 tions, it allows repressed, ignored, un- 

 known tendencies to disclose themselves; 

 it permits the real factors in a situation to 

 be ascertained, to the end that, once known, 

 they may within limits be controlled in 

 reference to deliberate design. Our real 

 freedom is thus enhanced, not destroyed. 

 We triumph over limitation only by sub- 

 mitting to it. Mr. Santayana says : 



The only artists who can show great originality- 

 are those trained in distinct and established 

 schools. It is only in recent times that discov- 

 eries in science have been frequent, because nat- 

 ural science until lately possessed no settled 

 method, and no considerable fund of acquired 

 truths. So too in political society, statesman- 



