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I

GENERAL PURPOSE OF THE COURSE

A

SEARCHING test of what educa

tion has done for a man is given by the question: "Has he gained a sense of the real and permanent values of the different parts of life, as distinct from their apparent magnitude at the moment ?"

This sense is not common, nor easily acquired. Most men judge the size of things by their nearness or remoteness. A single maple tree in the foreground blots out a hundred miles of distant landscape from their minds as well as their eyes. The man who is occupied with the pursuit of money or political office or scientific research tends to think everything small which does not visibly contribute to money-getting, or political influence, or

scientific discovery. There is much in the current teaching of the day which tends to increase this danger. We are prone to disparage philosophic methods of study as compared with practical ones; to urge the student to develop his special interests and capacities rather than to widen his intellectual horizon; to count the man as best educated who can best do his own small fraction of the world's work.

With this view I have little sympathy. He who is content to be a specialist and nothing more, however long and well he may have been trained, cannot properly be said to have been educated. This term is by rights reserved for him who has acquired a broad outlook on life as a whole; who has worked out ideas of his own as to the relation between our own selves, the visible universe about us, and the invisible principle that rules it. Ideas of his own, I say. A man cannot take his

philosophy at second hand, as a set of ready-made principles based on the study and experience of others. If he tries to do this he gets a creed, not a philosophy. "What you have inherited from your fathers," says Goethe, "you must earn for yourself before you can call it yours."

You will find plenty of people inside the churches and outside of them who are anxious to impose their philosophy upon you and your fellow men in the form of a creed. But the tendency of all such creeds is to become mere formulas. No creed or philosophy when thus imposed from outside is of much use to a growing man or a growing society in solving the problems which each change of circumstances necessarily brings. In order to be able to do this men must have brought the propositions of their creed into vital connection with their own experience of life.

There are two things that a man must

woo and win for himself: his bride and his philosophy. Mr. Huxley is said to have expressed the wish that he had some friend whose judgment he could trust to whom he could delegate the work of examining the claims of the Christian church upon a man's allegiance. He was anxious to know what should be his attitude toward that institution, and he was too busy with his work as a biologist to find the time for examination of the evidence. It will be remembered that Captain Miles Standish for somewhat similar reasons actually delegated to his friend John Alden the work of getting him a bride, he being too busy with the defense of the colony to have time for anything else. As matters fell out, however, Miles Standish was compelled to leave his bride to John Alden; and I suspect that if Huxley had really tried his experiment he would have ended by leaving his religion to his friend.

Some people acquire their philosophic views by actual contact with life itself; by meeting men of various types and temperaments and thus learning to look at the world's problems from different angles of vision. Others get the same result from books; they study the classics of literature. and history and science, and find which things have proved large at all times. instead of simply looking large for the moment. The college student has an opportunity of combining both these methods; and I count it one of the greatest privileges of college life to use this opportunity. In after years the man who goes into active business is cut off from contact with the past; the man who does not go into active business is cut off from contact with the present. To the college student more than to any one else it is given to feel the inspiration of old ideas and traditions and at the same time to discuss them

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