October 28, 1910] 



SCIENCE 



515 



of learning in the hope that when you 

 reach the summit you will be able to think 

 for yourself; think for yourself while you 

 are climbing. 



In studying the lives of your great men 

 you will find certain of them were veritable 

 storehouses of facts, but Darwin, the great- 

 est of them all in the last century, de- 

 pended largely upon his inveterate and 

 voluminous powers of note-taking. Thus 

 you may pray for the daily bread of real 

 mental growth, for the future paradise is a 

 state of mind and not a state of memory. 

 The line of thought is the line of greatest 

 resistance; the line of memory is the line 

 of least resistance; in itself it is purely 

 imitative, like the gold or silver electro- 

 plating process which lends a superficial 

 coating of brilliancy or polish to what may 

 be a shallow mind. 



The case is deliberately overstated to 

 give it emphasis. 



True, the accumulated knowledge of 

 what has been thought and said serves as 

 the gravity law which will keep you from 

 flying off at a tangent. But no warning 

 signals are needed, there is not the least 

 danger that constructive thinking will 

 drive you away from learning, it will much 

 more surely drive you to it, with a deeply 

 intensified reverence for your intellectual 

 forebears; in fact, the eldest offspring of 

 centrifugal education is that keen and 

 fresh appetite for knowledge which springs 

 only from trj'ing to add your own mite to 

 it. How your JIaxwell, Hertz, Rontg.en, 

 Curie, with their world-invigorating dis- 

 coveries among the laws of radiant matter 

 begin to soar in your estimation when you 

 yourself wrest one single new fact from 

 the reluctant world of atoms? How your 

 modern poets, Maeterlinck and Rostand, 

 take on the air of inspiration when you 

 would add a line of prose verse to what 

 they are delving for in this mysterious hu- 



man faculty of oui-s. Regard Voltaire at 

 the age of ten in "St. LouLs Le Grand," 

 the Eton of Prance, already producing 

 bad verses, but with a passionate voracity 

 for poetry and the drama. Regard the 

 j'outhful Huxley returning from his voy- 

 age of the Rattlesnake and laying out for 

 himself a ten years' course in search of 

 pure information. 



This route of your own to opinions, ideas, 

 and the discovery of new facts or prin- 

 ciples brings you back again to Huxley as 

 the man who always had something of his 

 own to say and labored to say it in such a 

 way as to force people to listen to him. 

 His wondrous style did not come easily 

 to him; he himself told me it cost him 

 years of effort, and I consider his advice 

 about style far wiser than that of Herbert 

 Spencer. Why forego pleasures, turn 

 your back on the world, the flesh, and the 

 devil, and devote your life to erudition, 

 observation, and the pen if you remain 

 unimpi'essive, if you can not get an audi- 

 ence, if no one cares to read what you 

 write? This moral is one of the first that 

 Huxley has impressed upon you, namely, 

 write to be read; if necessary "stoop to 

 conquer," employ all your arts and wiles 

 to get an audience in science, in literature, 

 in the arts, in politics. Get an audience 

 you must, otherwise you will be a cipher 

 instead of a force. 



Pursuant of the constructive design the 

 measure of the teacher's success is the de- 

 gree in which ideas come not from him, but 

 from his pupils. A brilliant address may 

 produce a temporary emotion of admira- 

 tion, a dry lecture may produce a perma- 

 nent productive impulse in the hearers. 

 One may compare some who are popularly 

 known as gifted teachers to expert swim- 

 mers who sit on the bank and talk inspir- 

 ingly on analyses of strokes: the centri- 

 fugal teacher takes the pupils into the 



