is 
 

 CULTURE 
 
 IN 
 EDUCATION 
 
 By EDWIN W. FAY 
 
 ;/ 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS 
 
 PRINTED FOR DISTRIBUTION BY THE 
 ORGANIZATION FOR THE ENLARGE- 
 MENT BY THE STATE OF TEXAS OF ITS 
 INSTITUTIONS OF HIGHER EDUCATION 
 
 ON P.IKT, AU 
 
Organization for the Enlargement by the State of 
 Texas of Its Institutions of Higher Education 
 
 Endowed Under the Auspices of 
 Alumni Association of University of Texas. 
 
 Standing Committee 
 
 S. E. Mezes, Austin 
 Clarence Ousley, Fort Worth 
 E. B. Parker, Houston 
 R. L. Batts, Austin 
 
 M. Sansom, Fort Worth 
 George A. Robertson, Dallas 
 John "W. Hopkins, Galveston 
 F. C. Proctor, Beaumont 
 W. H. Purges, El Paso. 
 
 Advisory Committee 
 
 S. P. Brooks, Waco 
 Will C. Hogg, Houston 
 Frank Kell, Wichita Falls 
 C. LoMBARDi, Dallas 
 
 E. 0. LOVETT, H oust 071 
 
 Charles Schreiner, Kerrville 
 Ed. C. Lasater, Falfurrias 
 F. M. Bralley, Austin. 
 
 Educational Campaign Committee 
 
 F. M. Bralley, Austin 
 Charles Puryear, College Station 
 W. B. Bizzell, Denton 
 Office of R. B. Cousins, Canyon 
 
 F. M. Bralley, ^ E. Mezes, Austin 
 
 -r, ,■ CI _j Lee Clark, Austin 
 
 Executive Secretary. g p g^^^^^ -^^^^^ 
 
 April 1, 1912. 
 
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 \ 
 
 CULTURE IN EDUCATION. 
 
 BY EDWIN W. FAY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS. 
 
 "Labor to learn, 
 Lest naked fact or Mistress Keason thee confound." 
 
 The Organization for the Enlargement by the State of 
 Texas of Its In.stitutions of Higher Education has' done 
 me the honor to ask me to prepare an essay for the 
 High School pupils of Texas on The Cultural Value of Higher 
 Education. This honor is, in one sense, a task, for a scant fort- 
 night of time has been given me to think out what shall seem 
 to jue true and proper to say, and a great responsibility is 
 laid upon one who must try to set you to thinking aright on a 
 subject that will seem to you vague, but is of a vital importance 
 for the continuation and further development of culture, which 
 is civilization, in Texas. Is it not certain that you to whom 
 these words are addressed will have in your hands the control 
 and determination of cultural conditions in our State, and that 
 you will constitute in a scant twenty years the predominant 
 factor in our culture? This responsibility, young people of 
 Texas, is yours, though, and not mine. In twenty years you 
 will embody culture in Texas. Now in your youth you are to 
 receive it, and in your maturer years to embody, maintain and 
 foster it, when your teachers of today shall have been gathered 
 to their fathers. 
 
 You will pardon me if I speak to you quite directly as one of 
 your teachers. Indeed, I have no other right nor title to speak 
 to you at all, and if I speak plainly, as one who talks to a class 
 of maturing boys and girls, and try to make you realize by con- 
 crete examples what culture may mean to you, remember that I 
 have been teaching and talking with intermissions to your cou- 
 sins or brothers or sisters, even to the parents of some of you, 
 
 Labora 
 
 Discere. ne te res ipsa ac ratio ipsa refellat. — (Liicilius.) 
 
perhaps, for almost thirty years, and all the time bearing tes- 
 timony to my belief .in culture, and in its real value to you. 
 
 We can hardly get to the heart of our subject without first 
 asking what culture is, and the question is so sweeping that it 
 takes my breath away. So before we begin to define or describe 
 culture permit me, in accord with my habits as a teacher and 
 student of grammar, to begin, as I often do, not with the simple 
 word, culture, but with the compound word, agriculture. What 
 is agriculture to you, young people of Texas, as an experience? 
 To a Louisiana boy of my intimate acquaintance it used to 
 mean either sticking the holes, or pouring water into the holes 
 when the sweet potatoes were planted every spring, and once 
 it meant a whole dollar (only think!), earned by picking two 
 hundred pounds of cotton in a town neighbor's field. Of late 
 years it has meant no very successful attempt to get lettuce 
 and spinach from a small garden patch. We see that working 
 the ground and reaping its fruits is one thing meant by ag- 
 riculture. That is the practice of agriculture. But next, there 
 is the study of agriculture as they pursue it over at the Agricul- 
 tural and Mechanical College, and their object there is to add 
 science, to add theory, to practice and so to increase the yield 
 of the farm and the efficiency of the farmer. Shall I tell you 
 what I think of their power of service to you and me ? Then let 
 me put it in a quotation which, the comparison aside, ex- 
 presses iny whole thought : ' ' And he gave it for his opinion,^ 
 that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of 
 grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew be- 
 fore, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential 
 service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put 
 together" (Swift, Voyage to Brohdingnag, II, vii) . 
 
 The practice of agriculture is of all times ; the science of ag- 
 riculture is engaged in promoting its future development as 
 well as its present prosperity; but there is still another aspect to 
 regard, and that is the past of agriculture. All of you know 
 the wonderful difference in civilization and culture between 
 Sir Walter Raleigh and his companions on the one hand and 
 King Powhatan and Pocahontas on the other. There may have 
 been many points of superiority in the Indians, and they cer- 
 tainly knew some things, like the ceremony of the peaceful 
 
— 5— 
 
 pipe, unknown to the English gentleman, but the bulk of ad- 
 vantage, had they ever met, would have been on his side. His 
 stock of knowledge, his range of ideas, his fields of enjoyment, 
 were far the wider. History had taught him, poetry had in- 
 spired him, music and art had thrilled him more. And why? 
 Largely because, perhaps as long as fifty thousand years be- 
 fore, man on the continent of Europe had begun to cultivate 
 some of the cereals. This was for centuries upon centuries but 
 a fitful cultivation, doubtless, like the fitful cultivation of a 
 little transient garden-stuff and roasting-ears by the Indians, 
 but for at least as far back as three thousand years the people 
 to which Sir Walter Raleigh belonged by intellectual descent — 
 I refer to the Greeks of the Homeric poems — had ceased to live 
 as huntsmen, nomads with no abiding city, and settled down 
 on permanent fields from whose produce they lived from year 
 to year; and agriculture, by giving them an assured supply of 
 food, had brought them leisure for observali^on and study, 
 which are the indispensable means to culture. Thus, in a very 
 real sense, the culture of Sir Walter Raleigh depended on the 
 agriculture of the races preceding him, but it also depended 
 on their mining and metallurgy, their spinning and weaving, 
 their trading and commerce over land and over sea. 
 
 But you will be wondering what all this has to do with cul- 
 ture and with us? Well, I want you to realize that the culture 
 we enjoy and represent is the fruit of all our past as a race, 
 that it has depended on material elements, such as are fur- 
 nished by the crops, the mines, the factories, the things that 
 the ships and railways bring to us and carry away from us. 
 How these things belong to culture, let us not stop now further 
 to enquire in detail, and I am sure that it was expected of me 
 to draw a sharp dividing line between the practical, utilitarian 
 elements of life and the cultural. Believe me, those who draw 
 such dividing lines are separating the inseparable. They re- 
 mind me of the heirs of a certain rich man I once kncAV, who 
 divided up his library .among themselves so that each heir re- 
 ceived two volumes of Grote and Gibbon and Maeaulay and 
 the rest, but none received a whole set ! You wouldn 't get a 
 half-yard of cloth by raveling out all the cross threads from a 
 whole yard, you wouldn't have any cloth left at all. How in- 
 
— 6— 
 
 finitely more complex in the weaving is man than a piece of 
 cloth, and to educate him to perform only one service in the 
 world is sadly to belittle his chances of larger growth. So I 
 would not have you believe that a practical, to the exclusion of 
 a cultural education, or a cultural education without regard for 
 the practical, is desirable for any one of you, much less for 
 large classes of our people. The old classical fable, employed 
 also by St. Paul, of the debate of the members, the hands and 
 head, the heart and stomach, and all the rest, as to which was 
 the most important organ of man, will here come into your 
 minds, perhaps, and, of course, the conclusion was that the 
 members were so mutually dependent, each in its own func- 
 tions, that the man was a whole and all his members essential to 
 his well being. A headless man were scarce better suited to 
 the right scheme of things than a cultureless education. 
 
 It is a matter of surprise that our school authorities have not 
 realized that, instead of encouraging a war between the prac- 
 tical and cultural in education, pitting the one against the 
 other, they should rather try to effect a synthesis, a compact, 
 betv/een these two utilities. My own practical suggestion is 
 this, that the schools of Texas should stand open during all the 
 long summer vacation for manual training and domestic sci- 
 ence. By proper organization into sections every pupil, even 
 those engaged in regular work, might have one or at most two 
 consecutive hours several times a week for these summer courses 
 in the practical things. Thus a fruitful opportunity to get 
 the practical subjects would be open to every pupil, and he 
 would learn to fulfil his part in the doing of the world, while 
 from his literary and scientific training in the rest of the year 
 his opportunity would come to fit himself to join the thinking 
 forces that alone, in any real sense, make our old world move on. 
 
 Again, what do we mean by culture ? In one sense the culture 
 of the whole man. As agriculture is the intelligent working of 
 the fields to produce a crop for the use of that social creature, 
 man, so culture is the working of the mind to produce a profit 
 in the man himself for society. Your teachers are the laborers, 
 and you are his field. His task is to guide and help you in the 
 development of your minds for the good of — ^yourselves, yes, but 
 even more for the good of society. Do not belittle him and your- 
 
— 7— 
 
 selves by supposing that your high school work is not the work 
 of culture, intended to produce the fruits of culture. Kindness 
 and tenderness, starting long before in little acts of politeness, 
 belong to the sweetest fruits of culture, and these should begin 
 even to ripen in your characters long ere the high school period 
 is past. What finer training in democracy, what better safe- 
 guard against foolish pride of class, than the equal rights and 
 privileges of all in the public schools ? 
 
 But there are different and larger aspects from which we 
 may regard culture. Matthew Arnold, in the oft-quoted phrase 
 from Culture and Anarchy, defined culture as "a study of per- 
 fection," and declared the pursuit of perfection to be "the pur- 
 suit of sweetness and light," thus adapting to his own use 
 Swift's "winged words" — for so the Greeks described the happy 
 phrase that flew from lip to lip of man — touching "the two 
 noblest of things, which are sweetness and light;" but I am 
 going to ask you now to consider culture as the sense of pro- ^ 
 priety, the sense of proportion, produced in a reasonable soul 
 as the fruit of observation and study. Between these definitions 
 there is no conflict, but Arnold's definition very beautifully 
 looks at culture as a becoming, a daily growth of a grace in us 
 as individuals, and the definition I have ventured to propose 
 suggests rather the taking of stock on a day of the culture one 
 has acquired. Woe for the man who, after taking stock, ceases 
 to go on in the pursuit of perfection. 
 
 You will recognize, I think, that neither of these definitions 
 altogether accords with the daily use of the word culture. In^ 
 our everyday use we mean by culture chiefly a certain knowl- ; 
 edge and appreciation of literature as displayed in our social/ 
 intercourse, and when we apply the word cultured to a man 
 we further imply that he has some breeding, or at least toler- 
 able manners, and dresses neatly. To wear proper clothes and 
 to exhibit good manners are the all but indispensable marks of 
 culture, and in including these elements in their conception of 
 this term, the public conforms to our definition of culture as the 
 sense of propriety produced in a reasonable soul as the fruit 
 of observation and study. 
 
 But no matter what a word ought to mean, it must and does 
 mean what people mean by it. How far are people right, then, 
 
in the feeling that literary appreciation exhibited in the ability 
 to talk about books constitutes a predominant part in culture? 
 In a historical sense they are absolutely right. The ability to, 
 talk intelligently about books has passed as the mark of culture 
 for over two thousand years. Only the other day the author 
 of that popular novel, Queed, in order to show the lack of breed- 
 ing in a man trying to make his way into a cultured society, 
 made him talk about Byron's — instead of Bryant's — Thanatop- 
 sis. Time out of mind this sort of literary blunder has been 
 jeered at in novels and on the stage. The novelist Petronius, 
 one of the courtiers of Nero, made a butt of a man who blun- 
 dered and blundered in his talk about Homer, and Socrates used 
 to confound the vain and pretentious by making them realize 
 that they did not know the meaning of the fine words that they 
 rolled from their tongues. "Without trying to go further back, 
 let us say that ever since the time of Socrates (450 B. C.) the 
 verdict of uncultured has been pronounced upon a man be- 
 cause of mispronunciations, bad grammar, the misuse of words, 
 and the lack of appreciative acquaintance with some good liter- 
 ature. 
 
 If no definition of a word or of an ideal is valid that does 
 not reckon with the common and ordinary use of the word, the 
 common and ordinary conception of the ideal, does the definition 
 of culture that I have offered include the common and ordinary 
 acceptation of that term? "What, in short, is the demand we 
 make upon the cultured in their social intercourse save insist- 
 ence upon the exhibition of the sense of propriety in their dress, 
 their manners and their conversation — laying an especial em- 
 phasis in conversation on the element of literary appreciation? 
 Other subjects of cultured conversation are music, art, and even 
 science, but these are rather special topics, not demanded of 
 all, but esteemed as an added grace in some. 
 
 Can we justify the inclusion of literary appreciation in the 
 ordinary acceptation of the term culture, or is it a mere inheri- 
 tance of the ages? I think we can justify it if we but reflect 
 that culture is a social product, that speech is our means of 
 social intercourse^which should make us wish to have our gram- 
 mar neat and fine — and that recorded speech, after selection has- 
 
— 9— 
 
 done its work of choosing the good and refusing the bad, is 
 literature. 
 
 In the last few decades a sort of quarrel has arisen against 
 the insistence on literature as an indispensable element in 
 culture, and the scientists have put up science for first place. 
 An ivory ruler on my desk (unless it is ''scientific" celluloid) 
 quotes Agassiz as saying, "Study nature, not books." I bow 
 in honor to the great Agassiz, but if this sentence, presented all 
 out of its context, be taken literally, it is rank foolishness. 
 Rather say, "Study nature out of doors and study nature in 
 books;" and, above all, remember that books, that literature, 
 are a natural work of man, nature's dominant production. Of 
 Agassiz himself it might be most truthfully said, "He studied 
 nature to write books, ' ' and future students of nature would be 
 very foolish to restudy, out of doors, those questions of natural 
 history that Agassiz studied and settled, instead of learning at 
 second hand from Agassiz what he learned direct from nature, 
 saving time enough thereby to go on with new nature study in 
 and out of doors. 
 
 "When I speak of scientists I have in mind friends of my own 
 whom I highly esteem, and science, too, however dense my ig- 
 norance of it, I esteem highly, but I cannot understand the solic- 
 itude of my friends to extort an admission that science is cul- 
 ture, any more than I could understand the demand of an ear of 
 wheat, for all its utility and structural beauty, to be ranked as 
 a flower. Science is a utility, doubtless the greatest utility 
 now active for the advance of mankind, but ought science jto 
 take the place of literary appreciation as a touchstone of cul- 
 ture? Ought talk about science to take the place now held in 
 the social intercourse of the cultured by talk about literature? 
 Ought a general or particular knowledge of science to replace 
 in the cultured their general and particular knowledge of lit- 
 erature ? Suppose I say to you that talk about science is not as 
 universally appropriate in society as talk about literature ? Sup- 
 pose I say that science is much more useful to society than lit- 
 erature ? Do I confuse you ? Do you not realize that there is no 
 contradiction here, since the word society means entirely dif- 
 ferent things in each of these assertions? M^hat is literature? 
 Well, for our present purpose, it is a comment on life, and 
 
—10— 
 
 literary appreciation, literary comment, is far and away the 
 most suitable general interest upon which society can have its 
 say. Sooner or later literature embodies all the great scientific 
 truths capable of being understood by persons not technically 
 trained in the various branches of science. The theory of evolu- 
 tion, with its special aspects of heredity and natural selection, 
 adaptation to environment and survival of the fittest ; the law 
 of gravitation and the theories of planetary formation; Men- 
 deleeff's law of the serial proportionality of the chemical ele- 
 ments; Mendel's law of the proportion of the maternal, paternal 
 and remoter inheritances in (plant and) animal descent — these 
 and the like generalizations of science become matters of general 
 interest after they become matters of general knowledge. In 
 all such things the cultured man must interest himself, but this 
 general knowledge of his is vague and not precise, it is an 
 estimate and not a count, and neither the methods nor the ex- 
 actitudes of science are likely ever to form a staple in the con- 
 versation of the cultured. 
 
 Undoubtedly conversation furnishes the widest field for the 
 display and exercise of culture, and conversation is the finest 
 flower of social life. Let us institute a contrast between the 
 telephone and Mrs. Wiggs of the Cahhage Patch as topics of 
 conversation in society, the one scientific, the other literary. 
 The utility of the telephone might call for a few commonplace 
 remarks, but the science behind it, the laws of electricity and 
 of acoustics, the conductivity of the wires, the vibrations of the 
 diaphragm — society will never learn enough science to talk about 
 these things. How will society talk about Mrs. Wiggs of the 
 Callage Patch? Chiefly, and only for the year or two of its 
 vogue, by asking, "have you read it?" and, "how did you like 
 it?" and by answering, "it's perfectly lovely," or, "it's very 
 sweet ' ' — which is not very discerning talk on the part of society, 
 but then society is not, never has been, very discerning (alas!). 
 But to some this tale of a Christmas reconciliation of lovers ac- 
 cidentally brought about by the kind and cheerful Mrs. Wiggs, 
 whom one, or was it both, of the lovers had befriended, might 
 suggest other literature of kindness, and so the conversation 
 would pass on to Dickens' Christmas stories, and suggest, in the 
 delightful desultory way of conversation, a thousand thoughts 
 
—11— 
 
 of kindness and sympathy, and how if we cast that bread upon 
 the waters it is promised that it shall return to us after many 
 days. But the great fear is that in American society, before 
 our hearts warmed up, some loud-voiced man would break in 
 with a well-worn joke about some Mrs. Biggs of his acquaintance 
 who was a mother-in-law, and the company would go off into a 
 guffaw in recognition of our national gift of anecdote-mongering 
 by conversational monopolists which has made many senators 
 and other statesmen, but, joining hands with pink teas and yel- 
 low receptions, has done its worst to ruin the gentlest, finest 
 art, conversation. 
 
 I would not have you regard me as wishing myself to insist 
 on the preponderance of literary topics in the conversation of 
 the cultured. I am but telling you that society actually recog- 
 nizes literary topics as the chief staple of the talk of the cultured. 
 This has gone on for centuries and as, all the while, literature 
 has grown and grown, you may well ask how is a mere human 
 lad in the days of his schooling to get a large enough insight 
 into literature to qualify him for cultured conversation. Not by 
 trying to scratch all the wide garden of literature with a curry- 
 comb, but by digging a few deep holes in certain of the garden 
 plots. You will have help here from the school. Each year of 
 your high school life a certain number of the best English books 
 is given you to read. They are chosen because they are the 
 best; because they are the masterpieces in their departments of 
 literature. Try and master them, or some of them. They are 
 the English classics. Above all, try to acquire an appreciation 
 of poetic form and poetic thought. Believe me, if you would in- 
 form your reasonable souls with the best thought of the ages, 
 with the prdfoundest application of principles to conduct, the 
 highest appreciation of the beautiful and the good, study the 
 poets, for they will show you how 
 
 He most lives 
 Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best. 
 
 (Philip James Bailey's Festus.) 
 
 And read as widely as you can before you are twenty. It is 
 hard to find time for it afterward. But choose your reading 
 
—12— 
 
 well, and choice should mean for most of you the acceptance 
 of the choice of others. What the qualified choose are. the 
 classics, whether they call them The Hundred Best Books or 
 The Five-foot Shelf. Such lists, prepared for each separate de- 
 partment of literature as history, epic, drama, oratory, the 
 Greeks severally called the canon. In literature study the canon, 
 the masterpieces. This will qualify you to take your part in the 
 conversation of the cultured. Such canons I wish we might 
 even formally adopt for ourselves, to save to society a common 
 field of culture, and to prevent society from an undue appre- 
 ciation of the transient "best-sellers," including such fleeting 
 bits of somewhat oversweetened sentiment as Mrs. Wiggs. Real- 
 ize that in the canon age would have the advantage over youth, 
 the old that has won the approval of the ages over the new. 
 Conceivably Rostand, the author of Cyrano de Bergerac, might 
 write as good a play as Shakespeare, but centuries must pass 
 ere a Cyrano de Bergerac can rank in the canon with King Lear. 
 This is the advantage that the classics, and I do not hesitate to 
 include the Greek and Latin classics, must enjoy over contem- 
 porary literature in vogue for today. "We must read the classics 
 if we would acquire taste, which is judgment, in literature. 
 
 We are now come to a point where we may define the cul- 
 tured man somewhat more briefly than heretofore, taking still 
 some account of culture in the wider sense, but still more ac- 
 count of ' 'culture ' ' as commonly understood : the cultured man 
 Ms the exponent of propriety in conversation — but you must un- 
 derstand conversation, in its wider and more nearly original 
 sense, of all the various aspects of social intercourse. To put 
 it concretely and categorically, as a teacher to his pupils, you 
 will exhibit culture, young people, by going suitably dressed, 
 by having good manners and sincere, and by fitting yourselves 
 to take part in conversation about the choicer matters of gen- 
 eral interest. 
 
 As future members of society you will ask yourselves how 
 the individual is to fit himself into the organism of society as 
 one of its myriad elements. You may think of society as a 
 mighty engine of untold parts, bolts and rods, pistons and valves, 
 cranks and eccentrics, and a thousand more. What each little 
 crank in the engine has to do is keep in motion, revolving in its 
 
—13— 
 
 own marked path. What each of you has to do is the work 
 that lies immediately to his hand. Here you have the widest 
 play for individualism. Your immediate work, young people, is 
 to perform the round of school duties in a fine spirit, realizing 
 that they are your preparation for the next stage in life. And, 
 to take up for once a moral aspect of culture, you will count 
 among your school duties submission to authority, and will real- 
 ize that it is better for you silently to suffer a possible injus- 
 tice at the hands of some teacher than to encourage in your 
 parents and other school children's parents resistance to disci- 
 pline. Has not all the experience of the world shown that resist- 
 ance to discipline, often the resistance to unjust discipline, even, 
 on the part of the grown-ups, has been the ruination of youthful 
 character, as well as of the character of the schools? Believe 
 me, it is well to remember how Jesus, who came into the world 
 to save us from our natural instincts, expressly warned us to 
 resist not -evil. 
 
 In acquiring a fitness for your part in cultured society, above 
 all you will particularly resist not grammer, which is the science 
 of the word. By the study of words your sense of propriety in 
 speech will be made such that never again will a large or a small 
 church in Texas have chiselled on its corner-stone The Blank 
 Avenue Church nee The Blank Street Church ; and in the days 
 of your maturity the society -'editresses" will know that Mrs. 
 John Smith was not nee Miss Belle Jones, but was nee [a little 
 girl baby whose father's name was] Jones. It will come to be 
 understood in your day, too, that it is not manners to talk 
 of Reverend Jones, but rather to speak of him as The Reverend 
 Mr. Jones, or The Reverend John Jones, or The Reverend Dr. 
 Jones, as the circumstances may admit. 
 
 I have dwelt too long, perhaps, on the current conception of 
 culture as propriety in dress, manners and conversation, with 
 very slight indications here and there of how you may study 
 these proprieties at school, and now I want to hurry on to the 
 special turn to be given to your cultural education in case you go 
 to college or University, but I must pause a moment to warn you 
 that with our characteristic American impropriety in the use 
 of words we have degraded the name University so that a true 
 definition based on the greater number of usages would be some- 
 
—14— 
 
 thing like this: "University, often in America, a pretentious 
 poor college." 
 
 When you leave the high school for college you should feel 
 that you are advancing further toward the goal of culture, gain- 
 ing further equipment for service, for doing your work in the 
 world, taking part in the world's work. But you must feel the 
 need of equipment for service whether you go to college or not. 
 A high school graduate has already enjoyed a good deal of cul- 
 ture, enough to enable him to go forward, not so fast, perhaps, 
 but yet to go forward on the path of culture, without a teacher. 
 
 How will your college education differ from your high school 
 education ? Not so much the first year or two, and yet the whole 
 difference will be sharp. In the high school the task is chiefly 
 to leiarn the things whose certainty is beyond doubt, things 
 about which there is little room for difference of opinion; in a 
 word, facts, or supposed facts. As your education goes on facts 
 will still hold a preponderant part, but theory, which is the in- 
 terpretation of the facts and their adjustment to other facts in 
 the great cosmic order, will play an ever larger and larger part. 
 In the discussions of theory into which you will be taken at 
 college you will have occasion to develop your sense of propriety 
 in forming judgments, in placing estimates upon matters of con- 
 troversy. There, even though your greatest profit may still 
 arise from the study of facts, you will come into contact with 
 those whose position as specialists may inform you anew with 
 the spirit of culture. There you will find teachers filled with 
 enthusiasm for truth, the new truth that completes the old, and 
 the truth shall set you free. Alas, we are all born into this 
 world as slaves, slaves to remote ancestral tendencies, to savage 
 and animal tempers and desires, to the ignorant prejudices and 
 crass beliefs that cast Galileo into prison, gave Socrates the 
 poisoned cup of hemlock, lifted up Jesus to the cross. From 
 this enslavement only the truth shall set us free, and it is the 
 province of the specialist scholar to find for himself, and then 
 for us, the truth. Because there are now and again silly special- 
 ists who never have caught the vision of truth, there have been 
 silly college presidents to dec/y specialists, and to cry up — ama- 
 teurs, I suppose. But it is from the' tuition of men who are dis- 
 interested seekers after truth, not engaged in promoting special 
 
—15— 
 
 privileges and furthering special interests, investigators, it may- 
 be, nay, it must be, of only some little crank or piston in the great 
 machine of the cosmos, that we are to catch the spirit of truth- 
 seekers. Only such men will show us that principles are of 
 more account than men, that society, which is the whole, has a 
 greater claim upon us than ourselves, who are but a part. Such 
 men will perhaps convince us that after satisfying the primal 
 needs of food, clothing and shelter for our bodies our next du- 
 ties are to society ; that the habit of thinking justly and feeling 
 nobly, those choice and high fruits of culture, not only mean 
 more for society, but actually bring more of enjoyment to our- 
 selves than absorption in money-getting or "boosting prosper- 
 ity." Yet the higher good does not exclude the lower good. The 
 attainment of knowledge and its transmutation into culture, 
 which is the refined fruit of knowledge in our reasonable souls, 
 will not exclude, nay it must not exclude, a due regard for the 
 practical. See that you do not let the practical, the merely 
 utilitarian, warp your souls away from the pursuit of the true 
 and the beautiful and the good, which is, and nothing else is, 
 culture. 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 (A note on culture prepared at my request by one of my pu- 
 pils, Mr. Richard Harrison:) 
 
 CULTUBE. 
 
 To give one culture is to develop, by any legitimate means, 
 the best that is in him. To accomplish this, all inherent ten- 
 dencies that oppose the development of these qualities should be 
 assiduously inhibited, and all liability to the a'cquirement of 
 habits not conducive to the proper development of them should 
 be forestalled. The process will of necessity involve rigorous, 
 as well as tender treatment. Let me illustrate by my father's 
 work in his orchard. He delights in growing ^arge, symmetrical, 
 well-colored, deliciously flavored ^aches. He does this by 
 proper attention to plowing, pruiling, spraying — in fact, by any 
 treatment, severe or tender, that will give him the best devel- 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
 -16- 
 
 019 598 467 % 
 
 oped fruit. To give a child — and this includes grown-ups^the 
 right kind of "culture," is to act on the same principle. With 
 him a ''healthy body is necessary to a sound mind" and an 
 amiable disposition; hence it should have proper exercise, and 
 proper protection from noxious disease. For the mind, or in- 
 tellect, to be strong, it needs rigorous discipline ; discipline, how- 
 ever, that will stimulate to search for learning (humanitas) for 
 learning's sake. Finially, strength from a social and moral 
 standpoint comes from contact with one's fellows. Here, again, 
 it is necessary for the pleasant and unpleasant experiences to have 
 their proportionate sway; the pleasant gives the exhiliaration 
 that buoys up, and keeps one filled with wholesome inspiration ; 
 the unpleasant broadens one's sympathy, makes him more tol- 
 erant, and rids him of selfishness. It is thus, it seems to me, 
 that true "culture" is attained. 
 
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