October 28, 1910] 



SCIENCE 



577 



Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal 

 fraction of a product, produce it in God's 

 name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee: 

 out with it, then." 



Now note that whereas there are these 

 six senses and powers of mind which sub- 

 serve the seventh, namely, the power of 

 constructive thinking, and whereas the 

 giving out of ideas is the object to be at- 

 tained, only one power figures prominently 

 in our modern system of college and school 

 education, namely, the learning of facts 

 and the memory thereof. It is no exag- 

 geration to say that this makes up 95 per 

 cent, of modern education. Who are the 

 meteors of school and college days? For 

 the most part those with precocious or 

 well-trained memories. Why do so many 

 of these meteors flash out of existence at 

 graduation? The answer is simple if you 

 accept my conception of education. 

 Whereas it takes six powers to make a lib- 

 erally educated man or woman, and seven 

 to make a productive man or woman, only 

 one power has been cultivated assiduously 

 in the "centripetal" education; whereas 

 there are two great gateways of knowledge, 

 learning and observation, only one has 

 been continuously passed through ; -whereas 

 there are two universal standards of truth 

 and beauty, only truth has constantly 

 been held up to you, and that in precept 

 rather than in practise. For nothing is 

 surer than this, that the sense of truth 

 must come as a daily personal experience 

 in the life of the student through testing 

 values for himself, as it does in the life of 

 the scientist, the artist, the physician, the 

 engineer, the merchant. Note that whereas 

 you are powerless unless you can bj^ the 

 metabolism of logic make the sum of ac- 

 quired and observed knowledge you own, 

 that kind of work-a-day efficient logic has 

 never been forced upon you and you are 

 daily, perhaps hourly, guilty of the non 



sequitur, the post hoc non ergo propter hoc, 

 the undistributed middle, and all those 

 innocent sins against truth which come 

 through the illogical mind. 



"That man," says Huxley, "has had a 

 liberal education . . . whose intellect is a 

 clear, cold, logic engine, with all its parts 

 of equal strength, and in smooth working 

 order; ready, like a steam engine, to be 

 turned to any kind of work, and spin the 

 gossamers as well as forge the anchors of 

 the mind." 



Note that whereas you are a useless 

 member of society unless you can give 

 forth something of what you know and 

 feel in writing, speaking, or design, your 

 expressive powers may have been atro- 

 phied through insufficient use. In brief, 

 you may have shunned individual opinion, 

 observation, logic, expression, because 

 they are each and every one on the lines of 

 greatest resistance. And your teachers 

 not only allowed you, but actually en- 

 coviraged and rewarded you, for following 

 the lines of least resistance in the accurate 

 reproduction, in examination papers and 

 marking systems, of their ideas and those 

 you found in books. 



May you, therefore, write down these 

 seven words and read them over every 

 morning: Truth, beauty, learning, obser- 

 vation, logic, expression, production. In 

 the wondrous old quilt work of inherited 

 or ancestral predispositions which make 

 your being you may be gifted with all 

 these seven powers in equal and well-bal- 

 anced degree; if you are so blessed you 

 have a great career before you. If, as is 

 more likely, you have in full measure only 

 a part of each, or some in large measure, 

 some in small, keep on the daily examina- 

 tion of your chart as giving you the 

 canons of a liberal education and of a 

 productive mind. 



Kemember that as regards the somewhat 



