NOVEMBKE 7, 1902.J 



SCIENCE. 



725 



pr.fparation for the specific and definite 

 tasks he is to perform in the world and 

 that general enlargement of spirit and re- 

 lease of powers which he shall need if his 

 task is not to crush and belittle him. When 

 we insist that a certain general education 

 shall precede all special training which is 

 not merely mechanic in its scope and pur- 

 pose, we mean simply that evei-y mind needs 

 for its highest serviceability a certain pre- 

 liminary orientation, that it may get its 

 bearings and release its perceptions for a 

 wide and catholic view. "VVe must deal in 

 college with the spirits of men, not with 

 their fortunes. Here, in history and phi- 

 losophy and literature and science, are the 

 experiences of the world summed up. 

 These are but so many names which we 

 give to the records of what men have done 

 and thought and comprehended. If we be 

 not pedants, if we be able to get at the 

 spirit of the matter, we shall extract from 

 them the edification and enlightenment as 

 of those who have gone the long journey of 

 experience with the race. 



There are two ways of preparing a 

 young man for his life work. One is to 

 give him the skill and special knowledge 

 which shall make a good tool, an excellent 

 bread-winning tool, of him ; and for thou- 

 sands of young men that way must be fol- 

 lowed. It is a good way. It is honorable, 

 it is indispensable. But it is not for the 

 college, and it never can be. The college 

 should seek to make the men whom it re- 

 ceives something more than excellent ser- 

 vants of a trade or skilled practitioners of a 

 profession. It should give them elasticity of 

 faculty and breadth of vision, so that they 

 shall have a surplus of mind to expend, 

 not upon their profession only, for its lib- 

 eralization and enlargement, but also upon 

 the broader interests which lie about them, 

 in the spheres in which they are to be, not 

 bread-winners merely, but citizens as well, 

 and in their own hearts, where they are to 



grow to the stature of real nobility. It is 

 this free capital of mind the world most 

 stands in need of— this free capital that 

 awaits investment in undertakings, spirit- 

 ual as well as material, which advance the 

 race and help all men to a better life. 



And are we to do this great thing by the 

 old discipline of Greek, Latin, mathematics 

 and English? The day has gone by when 

 that is possible. The circle of liberal stud- 

 ies is too much enlarged, the area of gen- 

 eral learning is too much extended, to make 

 it any longer possible to make these few 

 things stand for all. Science has opened 

 a new world of learning, as great as the 

 old. The influence of science has broad- 

 ened and transformed old themes of study 

 and created new, and all the boundaries of 

 knowledge are altered. In the days of our 

 grandfathers all learning was literary, was 

 of the book ; the phenomena of nature were 

 brought together under the general terms 

 of an encyclopedic natural philosophy. 

 Now the quiet rooms where once a few 

 students sat agaze before a long table at 

 which, with a little apparatus before him, 

 a lecturer discoursed of the laws of matter 

 and of force are replaced by great laborato- 

 ries, physical, chemical, biological, in which 

 the pupil's own direct observation and ex- 

 periment take the place of the conning of 

 mere theory and generalization, and men 

 handle the immediate stuff of which nature 

 is made. Museums of natural history, of 

 geology, of paleontology, stretch themselves 

 amidst our lecture rooms, for demonstra- 

 tion of what we say of the life and struc- 

 ture of the globe. The telescope, the spec- 

 troscope, not the text-book merely, are our 

 means of teaching the laws and movements 

 of the sky. An age of science has trans- 

 muted speculation into knowledge and 

 doubled the dominion of the mind. Heav- 

 ens and earth swing together in a new 

 universe of knowledge. And so it is im- 

 possible that the old discipline should stand 



