Mabch 12, 1909] 



SCIENCE 



405 



viction, which is that of the old fashioned 

 mariners generally. But what is true of 

 sailors is in various degrees true of other 

 callings. Good engineers can weU be made 

 by a training that begins in boyhood, and 

 that certainly ought to include undergrad- 

 uate training as well as graduate training. 

 And yet I am sure that an engineer ought, 

 amongst other things, to be as cultivated 

 a man as he can be made, and so I am sure 

 that, in his imdergraduate days he ought 

 to have an opportunity for various sorts 

 of cultivation that you and I would agree 

 in calling collegiate. Future teachers, 

 future social workers and clergymen, 

 coming civil servants or colonial officials, 

 embryo scientific investigators of all sorts 

 — all these need, during their undergradu- 

 ate years, training such that nobody can 

 rationally distinguish between that por- 

 tion of this training which is professional 

 in nature and that portion of it which is 

 apt to add to their general cultivation. Is 

 training in the use of good English a pro- 

 fessional study? I know many workers 

 in various professions— contributors, let 

 us say to scientific journals — who would 

 be much better men in their own profes- 

 sion, because decidedly clearer in their 

 wits, in ease they had been better trained 

 as school boys and as undergraduates in 

 the accurate use of plain English. Yet 

 what study could be mentioned that is a 

 more typical instance of a so-called cul- 

 ture-study? 



I insist then that one can not in any gen- 

 eral way distinguish between the educa- 

 tional offices of technical and professional 

 studies on the one hand, and the studies pro- 

 diietive of cultivation upon the other. I 

 myself, for instance, ought to teach logic so 

 as to make it professionally useful to fu- 

 ture engineers and to future clergymen 

 alike, and to any cultivated man as well, 

 in case he can be induced to be for a while 

 reflective. If I can not do so, that is my 



defect as a teacher of logic. It is useless 

 to condemn me to the vague task of simply 

 so teaching logic as to exert a cultivating 

 influence over people who have no trade 

 and who have not yet chosen a profession. 

 As a teacher of logic I ought to be required 

 to appeal to anybody who chooses to try 

 the value of my personal appeal to him, 

 whether he is a professional student or a 

 technician, a graduate or an undergraduate. 

 In a college then, we ought to offer the 

 youth such learning and such training as 

 may prove to be useful in fitting men of 

 their age for the life that they are going 

 to lead, in so far as that is indeed a life 

 which involves intellectual training at all, 

 and in so far as they are youth who are 

 mentally and morally fit to be taught dur- 

 ing those years of their life. The unfit, 

 the stubbornly unwilling, the unworthy, 

 we must reject or dismiss. But whosoever 

 will may come, if only the secondary 

 schools have made him fit for a grade of 

 training which experience shows to be in 

 general adapted to reasonably normal folk 

 at his age. And when we get him we ought 

 to make him work as hard as is good for 

 him, and not a whit harder than is good 

 for him, at whatever study will best fit 

 him for his life, whether that proves to be 

 a technical or a so-called professional 

 study or not. Of course we must try to 

 add to his technique general cultivation, 

 of the richest sort that we can get him to 

 assimilate. "We can best succeed in that 

 if we teachers keep together ourselves, and 

 unite in one institution the work of very 

 various sorts of scientific and of learned 

 men. Hence, while we shall indeed dif- 

 ferentiate more and more our professional 

 and technical schools and modes of train- 

 ing, we college teachers do ill if we un- 

 necessarily separate ourselves and our 

 work from close touch with those of our 

 colleagues whose tasks are more technical 

 and professional than are our own. Only 



